Abstract
Abstract. Deep-sea benthic foraminifera provide important markers of environmental conditions in the deep-ocean basins where their assemblage composition and test chemistry are influenced by ambient physical and chemical conditions in bottom-water masses. However, all foraminiferal studies must be underpinned by robust taxonomic approaches. Although many parts of the world's oceans have been examined, over a range of geological timescales, the Neogene benthic foraminifera from the southern Indian Ocean have only been recorded from a few isolated sites. In this study, we have examined 97 samples from Neogene sediments recovered from three ODP sites in the southern Indian Ocean (Sites 752, Broken Ridge; 1139, Kerguelan Plateau; 1168, west Tasmania). These data cover a range of palaeolatitudes and water depths during the Miocene. More than 200 species of benthic foraminifera were recorded at each site and, despite their geographic and bathymetric separation, the most abundant taxa were similar at all three sites. Many of these species range from late Oligocene to early Pliocene demonstrating relatively little faunal turnover of the most abundant taxa during the key palaeoclimatic shifts of the Miocene. We illustrate and document the occurrence of the 52 most abundant species (i.e. those with >1 % abundance) encountered across the three study sites.
Highlights
The Neogene can be informally subdivided into an early warm interval and late cool interval (Flower and Kennett, 1993)
Cooling following the MMCO culminated at ∼ 13–14 Ma in major growth of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)
The main aim of this work is to provide a taxonomic and stratigraphic reference for the most common Miocene benthic foraminifera encountered in the southern Indian Ocean, supported by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images
Summary
The Neogene can be informally subdivided into an early warm interval and late cool interval (Flower and Kennett, 1993). Further cooling coincided with increasing intensification of Antarctic deep-water formation and growth of the AIS and Greenland ice sheet (Flower and Kennett, 1993, 1994, 1995). The last global extinction of benthic foraminifera (∼ 20 % of deep-sea genera) occurred in the late Pliocene–mid-Pleistocene (Hayward et al, 2012) and is variously attributed to increasing ocean productivity and intensification of low-oxygen zones and changes in the food type and supply, due to the expansion of the Antarctic and later Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and global cooling (Hermoyian and Owen, 2001; Gupta et al, 2004; Smart et al, 2007)
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