Planktonic foraminiferal fauna associated with eastern Mediterranean Quaternary stagnations

Abstract

Bradley1 predicted, before any evidence from sediment coring in the Mediterranena Sea, that changing late Quaternary climatic conditions would result in periodic stagnations of the eastern basin and with them, accumulations of organic-rich sediments. Such organic-rich layers from the eastern Mediterranean were subsequently observed in sediment cores by Kullenberg2 and later named “sapropelitic layers”3. Since these initial observations, sapropels have been reported in most studies of Quaternary sediments from the Ionian Sea4–14. As a result, there is a great deal of information available concerning the chemical15–18 and sedimentological properties13–14, faunal characteristics19 and temporal9–11 and spatial10,12 distribution of late Quaternary sapropels. In the study reported here we have attempted to characterise the planktonic foraminiferal biogeography of such late Quaternary sapropels in terms of the modern distribution of foraminefara in the Mediterranean Sea.