Diatoms in Arctic Shallow Seas Sediments

Abstract

The research on Arctic Ocean diatoms has more than a century-long history and yet the body of information on this group is rather scarce. The data pertain mostly to species composition and seasonal development of phytoplankton (Cleve, 1873; Gran, 1904; Usachev, 1935, 1946a, b; Kisselev, 1935, 1937; Bursa, 1963; Belyaeva, 1980; Hsiao, 1983), or sea ice flora of diatoms (Shirshov, 1936, 1937; Usachov, 1938; Meguro, Ito, and Fukushima, 1966, 1967; Homer and Alexander, 1972; Homer, 1976). Information on diatoms in Arctic Sea sediments is incomplete and generally inventorial, as only the species composition of the benthic flora is described without reference to their habitat. No data are available so far on thanatocenoses of diatoms in the sediments of the central abyssal parts of the Arctic Ocean, or in those of some shelf seas. In fact, it is only recently that species composition and the distributional patterns of their thanatocenoses in the Arctic have commenced. The data obtained indicate that the employment of this class of algae is very promising for solving questions of Cenozoic stratigraphy as well as the paleogeographic evolution of the Arctic region.