ALBERT

Description: Since about 15 years a growing number of evidence is found in water depth up to more than 1000 m of the Arctic Ocean that grounding of ice has occurred in various places including the "Beringian" continental margin north of the present Chukchi and East-Siberian seas and the Lomonosov Ridge. These landforms include moraines, drumlinized features, glacigenic debris flows, till wedges, mega-scale glacial lineations (MSGL), and iceberg plough marks (Polyak et al. 2001, Niessen et al. 2013, Dove et al. 2014, Jakobsson et al. 2014). They suggest that thick ice has occurred not only on nearly all margins of the Arctic Ocean but also covered pelagic areas. In a recent paper, Jakobsson et al. (2016) present more evidence of ice-shelf groundings on bathymetric highs in the central Arctic Ocean, thereby revitalising an old modelling concept of a kilometre-thick ice shelf extending over the entire central Arctic Ocean (Hughes et al. 1977) now dated to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. Other (including our) studies, however, suggest that the pattern, and, in particular, the timing of these glaciations is more complex. Most recent discoveries on the Lomonosov Ridge have not only gained different information on Pleistocene glaciations but also allowed for the first time to reconstruct upper Miocene Arctic Ocean sea-ice and SST conditions. This became possible since submarine sliding (likely associated with ice grounding) led to removal of younger sediments from steep headwalls and thus exhumation of Miocene to early Quaternary sediments close to the seafloor, allowing the retrieval and analysis of such old sediments by gravity coring (Stein et al. 2016). Submarine glacial landforms from the western and central Arctic Ocean were discovered and investigated during the cruises of RV "Polarstern" in 2008 and 2014, and RV "Araon" in 2012 and 2015. Orientations of some of these landforms suggest that thick ice has flown north into the deep Arctic Ocean from the continental margin of the East Siberian Sea repeatedly (Niessen et al. 2013), thereby grounded on plateaus and seamounts of the Medeleev Ridge. In addition, hydro-acoustic data is presented from the Lomonosov Ridge (Siberian side to close to the North Pole), which support the hypothesis of widespread grounding of ice in the Arctic Ocean, of which the sources are still difficult to determine. The data suggest that thick ice-shelves could have developed from continental ice sheets on a nearly circum-arctic scale, which disintegrated into large icebergs during glacial terminations. On the slopes of the East Siberian Sea and/or on the Arlis Plateau, three northerly-directed ice advances occurred, which are dated by sediment cores using the chronology of brown layers (B1 to B7) as suggested by Stein et al. (2010). According to our age model, the latest advance is slightly older than B2 (MIS-3/4), which has been interpreted as MIS-6 by Jakobsson et al. (2016). A larger well-constrained glaciation has occurred during MIS-4, of which an ice shelf grounded to 900 m on the Arlis Plateau. In the western Arctic Ocean, the oldest datable ice advance has an intra-MIS-5 age. In our data, the chronology of older ice advances along the East Siberian margin are not well constrained but may extend back as far as MIS-16. In contrast, cores from the southern and central Lomonosov Ridge indicate that the youngest ice grounding there has occurred during MIS-6. This grounding was less intense than previous ice-shelf groundings in the area, of which the chronology remains speculative until longer cores become available. Along the Lomonosov Ridge, detailed bathymetric mapping between 81° and 84°N exhibit numerous amphitheatre-like slide scars, under which large amounts of Cenozoic sediments were remobilized into mass-wasting features on both the Makarov and Amundsen sides of the ridge. In areas shallower than 1000 metres, slide scars appear to be associated with streamlined glacial lineations, whereby some of the bedforms have been removed by sliding. It appears that at least some of the mass-wasting events have been triggered by moving and/or loading of grounded ice. Sub-bottom seismic profiling discovered at least three generations of debris-flow deposits near the ridge, which were generated by the slides. In places, the nearly randomly distributed slide scars and debris-flow deposits make it hard to interpret past ice-flow directions from landforms and re-deposited sediments. The pattern allows interpretation of both directions off East Siberia (e.g. Jakobsson et al. 2016) and off Eurasia (e.g. Polyak et al. 2001) towards the central Arctic Ocean. Underneath the slide scars escarpments of up to 400 m in height were formed. Near the southern end of the Lomonosov Ridge the last exhumation of old sediments has occurred during MIS-6. Some of the old sediments recovered in 2014 were studied in more detail (Stein et al., 2016). We can show for the first time that the mid/late Miocene central Arctic Ocean was relatively warm (4-7°C) and ice-free during summer, but sea ice occurred during spring and autumn/winter. A comparison of our biomarker proxy data with Miocene climate simulations seems to favour relatively high late Miocene atmospheric CO2 concentrations. References Dove, D., Polyak, L. & Coakley, B., 2014. Widespread, multi-source glacial erosion on the Chukchi margin, Arctic Ocean. Quat. Sci. Rev. 92, 112–122 Hughes, T. J., Denton, G. H. & Grosswald, M. G., 1977. Was there a late-Würm Arctic ice sheet? Nature, 266, 596–602 Jakobsson, M. et al., 2014. Arctic Ocean glacial history. Quat. Sci. Rev. 92, 40-67 Jakobsson, M., et al., 2016. Evidence for an ice shelf covering the central Arctic Ocean during the penultimate glaciation. Nat. Comm., 7, 10365, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10365, 1-10 Niessen, F. et al., 2013. Repeated Pleistocene glaciation of the East Siberian continental margin. Nat. Geosci. 6, 842–846 Polyak, L., Edwards, M. H., Coakley, B. J. & Jakobsson, M., 2001. Ice shelves in the Pleistocene Arctic Ocean inferred from glaciogenic deep-sea bedforms. Nature 410, 453–459 Stein, R., Matthiessen, J., Niessen, F., Krylov, A., Nam, S., Bazhenova, E., 2010. Towards a better (litho-) stratigraphy and reconstruction of Quaternary paleoenvironment in the Amerasian Basin (Arctic Ocean), Polarforschung, 79 (2), 97-121 Stein, R., K. Fahl, Schreck, M., Knorr, G., Niessen, F., Forwick, M., Gebhardt, C., Jensen, L., Kaminski, M., Kopf, A., Matthiessen, J., Jokat, W., and Lohmann, G., 2016. Evidence for ice-free summers in the late Miocene central Arctic Ocean. Nature Communications 7:11148, doi:10.1038/ncomms11148.

Description: Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution December 1987

Description: Cenozoic (predominantly Paleogene) "flysch-type" agglutinated foraminiferal assemblages and their modern analogs in the North Atlantic and adjacent areas have been studied to provide an overview of their spatial and temporal distribution and utility for paleoenvironmental analysis. Over 200 species of agglutinated foraminifera have been recognized in Paleogene sediments from North Atlantic and Tethyan basins. This unified taxonomic data base enables the first general synthesis of biostratigraphic, paleobiogeographic and paleobathymetric patterns in flysch-type agglutinated assemblages from upper Cretaceous to Neogene sediments in the North Atlantic. The majority of taxa are cosmopolitan, but latitudinal, temporal and depth-related trends in diversity and species composition are observed among flysch-type assemblages. Modern deep-sea agglutinated foraminiferal faunas provide an analog to fossil flysch-type assemblages and serve as models for paleoecologic studies. Core-top samples from the Panama Basin, Gulf of Mexico and Nova Scotian continental rise were examined in order to determine the habitats of modern species of agglutinated foraminifera. The ecology of modern taxa provides constraints on the paleoenvironmental significance of fossil agglutinated assemblages in the North Atlantic, and their utility for paleoceanography. Towards this end, spade core samples from a 3912 m deep station in the Panama Basin were studied to determine abundance and microhabitat partitioning among living agglutinated foraminiferal populations and the preservation of dead assemblages. The genera Dendrophrya, Cribrostomoides and Ammodiscus have epifaunal habitats and the genus Reophax is predominantly infaunal. Species of Reophax are probably responsible for fine reticulate burrows observed in xradiographs. An experiment using recolonization trays in the Panama Basin was designed to identify opportunistic species of benthic foraminifera, and to assess the rate at which a population can colonize an abiotic substrate. The most successful colonizer at this site is Reophax, while Dendrophrya displays the lowest capability for dispersal. After nine months the abundance of living individuals in sediment trays was one-tenth to one-third that of background abundance, but the faunal diversity did not differ greatly from control samples. Recolonization by benthic foraminifera is more rapid than among macrofaunal invertebrates. Modern agglutinated assemblages from the Louisiana continental slope were examined to determine changes in species composition associated with hydrocarOrganic- bon seeps. rich substrates are characterized by a decrease in astrorhizids and an increase in trochamminids and textulariids. Highly organicenriched substrates with chemosynthetic macrofauna are dominated by Trochammina glabra and Glomospira charoides. The biostratigraphy of fossil agglutinated foraminifera in the North Atlantic is based on detailed analysis of 670 samples from 14 wells and one outcrop section, and examination of additional picked faunal slides from industry wells. Local biostratigraphic schemes are established for Trinidad, Northern Spain, the Labrador Sea, Baffin Bay, and the Norwegian-Greenland Sea. These schemes are compared with existing biostratigraphic frameworks from the Labrador Margin, the North Sea, and the Polish Carpathians. A number of species show utility for biostratigraphy in the North Atlantic. Lineages which contain stratigraphically useful species include the Haplophragmoides cf. glabra - Reticulophragmium group, Hormosina, and Karreriella. Significant faunal turnovers are observed at the Paleocene/Eocene, Ypresian/ Lutetian and Eocene/Oligocene boundaries. A reduction in diversity occurs at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary in all bathyal sections studied, and agglutinated forminifera disappear entirely from abyssal low-latitude DSDP sites. In the Gibraltar Arch, the Labrador Sea and the Norwegian-Greenland Sea, the Ypresian/Lutetian boundary is characterized by a Glomospira-facies. This is attributed to a rise in the lysocline associated with increased paleoproductivity and the NP14 sealevel lowstand. The Eocene/Oligocene boundary is delimited by another major turnover and the last occurrence of a number of important taxa. At Site 647, where recovery across the Eocene/Oligocene boundary was continuous, the change from an Eocene agglutinated assemblage to a predominantly calcareous assemblage in the early Oligocene took place gradually, over a period of about 4 m.y. The rate of change of the faunal turnover accelerated near the boundary. This faunal turnover is attributed to changes in the preservation of agglutinated foraminifera, since delicate species disappeared first. Increasingly poorer preservation of agglutinated foraminifera in the late Eocene to earliest Oligocene reflected the first appearance of cool, nutrient-poor deep water in the southern Labrador Sea. The approximately coeval disappearance of agglutinated assemblages along the Labrador Margin was caused by a regional trend from slope to shelf environments, accentuated by the "mid"-Oligocene sealevel lowstand. Paleobiogeographic patterns in flysch-type foraminifera were examined in the Paleogene of the North Atlantic. In the early Paleogene, general decrease in diversity is observed from low to high latitudes and from the continental slope to the deep ocean basins. The diversity of these microfossils declines in most studied sections throughout the Paleogene. The last common occurrence (LCO) of flysch-type foraminifera in the North Atlantic exhibits a pattern of diachrony with latitude and depth. Extinctions occurred first at abyssal depths and at low latitudes. Agglutinated assemblages disappeared from the northern Atlantic region in the early Oligocene. However, the deep Norwegian-Greenland Sea served as a refuge for many species, and agglutinated assemblages persisted there until the early Pliocene. The LCO of flysch-type foraminifera may have been related to the transition from a warm, sluggish deep sea environment to a cooler, more oxygenated, thermohaline-driven deep circulation pattern caused by bipolar cooling. The paleobathymetry of Paleogene agglutinated assemblages in the North Atlantic differs from Cretaceous patterns. Shallow-water assemblages of Paleogene age contain robust astrorhizids, loftusiids and coarse lituolids, whereas deep assemblages possess delicate tubular forms, ammodiscids, and smooth lituolids. At low latitudes, upper bathyal assemblages contain abundant calcareous ataxophragmiids. Paleocene paleobathymetric patterns in the North Atlantic compare well with patterns observed in the Carpathian troughs. The utility of agglutinated foraminifera in paleoceanography is illustrated by a study of the paleocommunity structure of fossil assemblages in ODP Hole 646B on the Eirik Ridge (Labrador Sea). The synecology of benthic foraminifera in Hole 646B places constraints on the history of Denmark Straits Overflow Water over that site. Below seismic horizon "R3", a Miocene assemblage contains smooth agglutinated species with abundant Nuttalides umbonifera, indicating corrosive bottom water and tranquil conditions. A coarse agglutinated assemblage with "NADW-type" calcareous benthics is observed above the seismic horizon. This faunal turnover at horizon "R3" reflects the onset (or renewal) of significant Denmark Straits overflow at -7.5 Ma. Agglutinated species disappear between reflector "R2", and the base of the sediment drift, indicating a change in deep-water properties associated with the re-opening of the Mediterranean. The onset of drift sedimentation at the Eirik Ridge is dated at -4.5 Ma. Drift formation ceased at -2.5 Ma, concomitant with the appearance of ice-rafted sediments.

Description: Financial support for this study was provided through grants from the Ocean Drilling Program, the Texas A&M Research Foundation/US Scientific Program (1892-B05), the National Science Foundation through grants OCE-8217586 to J.F. Grassle and OCE 82-17413 to R.B. Whitlatch, the Geological Society of America (86-3599), the WHOI Education Office, and the Margaret M. Patterson Memorial Scholarship Fund. The Dean's Office of the Jagiellonian University provided support during my work with the Grzybowski Collection.