The Middle Jurassic

• Main Author: John H. Callomon
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Svalbard
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.627.1446; http://www.geus.dk/publications/bull/nr1_p061-073.pdf

Middle Jurassic sediments occur in almost all parts of what is conventionally drawn as the present-day con-tinent of Europe – from Portugal to the Caucasus, Sicily to Svalbard, the Hebrides to the Petshora – but in the context of the present book, we shall confine ourselves essentially to western and northern Europe, broadly from the Alps to the Arctic (Fig. 1). The shelf-seas of the Barents Shelf and Svalbard, also still part of Europe today, are not included, but the eastern shores of Greenland are. The palaeolatitudes in the Middle Jurassic were about 15º lower than they are today, so that Europe straddled the temperate zones from the sub-tropical to the sub-arctic. This is fully reflected both in the litho-and biofacies of the sediments, ranging from the pre-dominantly warm-water carbonates in the south, with their immensely diverse fossil biotas, to the siliciclastics with their impoverished fossil assemblages in the north. Historically, western Europe, as the cradle of geo-logical science together with its superbly developed Jurassic successions, has given us a longstanding knowl-