Late Cretaceous to Paleogene vegetation and terrestrial climate change of the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica

• Main Authors: Salzmann, Ulrich, Bohaty, Steve, Bowman, Vanessa, Bickert, Thorsten, Francis, Jane, Frederichs, Thomas, Gohl, Karsten, Hillenbrand, Claus-Dieter, Klages, Johann Philipp, Kuhn, Gerhard, Titschnack, Jürgen
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Amundsen Sea; West Antarctica; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/46580/; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.6138fc21-6fb3-42c5-bdaa-1a6ae629912d

The past vegetation and climate of West Antarctica and the evolution of its highly sensitive and dynamic ice sheet are poorly constrained by geological data. The few existing far-field data, and even fewer proximal records, indicate a major ice-sheet build-up in West Antarctica from the Oligocene to the Miocene, with partial or even complete ice-sheet collapses during warm Late Cenozoic intervals with near-modern atmospheric CO2-concentrations. Here we present first palynological results from the MeBo70 seabed drill cores collected in early 2017 from the Amundsen Sea shelf. The cores contain unconsolidated to highly consolidated sediments of Cretaceous to Holocene age. Preliminary analyses of pollen, spores and dinoflagellate cysts indicate that during the Cretaceous and early Paleogene the Amundsen Sea Embayment was covered by warm-temperate and temperate forests. The paper will focus on Turonian to Santonian (ca. 93-85 Ma) peat layers in the oldest sections of the cores, which contain micro- and macrofossils documenting the evolution of a highly diverse, conifer-rich swamp forest during the Late Cretaceous.