Stratigraphy, paleoceanography, and evolution of Cretaceous Pacific guyots; relics from a greenhouse Earth

Abstract

Many guyots in the north Pacific are built of drowned Cretaceous shallow-water carbonates that rest on edifice basalt. Dating of these limestones, using strontium- and carbon-isotope stratigraphy, illustrates a number of events in the evolution of these carbonate platforms: local deposition of marine black shales during the early Aptian oceanic anoxic event; synchronous development of oolitic deposits during the Aptian; and drowning at different times during the Cretaceous (and Tertiary). Dating the youngest levels of these platform carbonate shows that the shallow-water systems drowned sequentially in the order in which plate-tectonic movement transported them into low latitudes south of the Equator (paleolati- tude 0°-10° south). The chemistry of peri-equatorial waters, rich in upwelled nutrients and carbon dioxide, may have been a contributory factor to the suppression of carbonate precipitation on these platforms. However, oceanic anoxic events, thought to reflect high nutrient availability and increased produc- tivity of planktonic organic-walled and siliceous microfossils, did not occasion platform drowning. Neither is there any evidence that relative sealevel changes were the primary cause of platform drowning, which is consistent with the established resilience of shallow-water carbonate systems when influenced by such phenomena. Comparisons with paleotemperature data show that platform drowning took place closer to the Equator during cooler intervals, such as the early Albian and Maastrichtian, and farther south of the Equator during warmer periods such as Albian-Cenomanian boundary time and the mid-Eocene. Initiation of one carbon- ate platform relatively close to the Equator, at paleolatitudes more northerly than those where others drowned, took place during the cool early mid-Aptian. These correlations are in accord with an interpretation that excess warmth in shallow peri-equatorial waters proved inimical for many carbonate-secreting organisms living on the platforms, allowing subsidence or eustatic sealevel rise to outpace sedimentation and guyots to form. A parallel may be drawn with the recent phenomenon of coral and foraminiferal bleaching, whereby photosynthetic sym- bionts succumb to prolonged high temperatures (G30°C) and the host organism dies. The fact that most Cretaceous guyots reside in the north Pacific may not be solely related to the age-distribution pattern of ocean floor but to their having run the gauntlet of a difficult and dangerous passage across the Equator. North Pacific guyots are relics from the Cretaceous (and Eocene) ''greenhouse'' Earth.