Mass mortality and its environmental and evolutionary consequences.

The latest Mesozoic and earliest Tertiary sediments at Deep Sea Drilling Project site 524 provide an amplified record of environmental and biostratographic changes at the end of Cretaceous. Closely spaced samples, representing time intervals as short as 10(2) or 10(3) years, were analyzed for their bulk carbonate and trace-metal compositions, and for oxygen and carbon isotopic compositions. The data indicate that at the end of Cretaceous, when a high proportion of the ocean's planktic organisms were eliminated, an associated reduction in productivity led to a partial transfer of dissolved carbon dioxide from the oceans to the atmosphere.

Development of the circum-antarctic current.

Deep-sea drilling in the Southern Ocean south of Australia and New Zealand shows that the Circum-Antarctic Current developed about 30 million years ago in the middle to late Oligocene when final separation occurred between Antarctica and the continental South Tasman Rise. Australia had commenced drifting northward from Antarctica 20 million years before this.