[1] Here we present a high-resolution marine sediment record from the El Niño region off the coast of Peru spanning the last 20,000 years. Sea surface temperature, photosynthetic pigments, and a lithic proxy for El Niño flood events on the continent are used as paleo-El Niño-Southern Oscillation proxy data. The onset of stronger El Niño activity in Peru started around 17,000 calibrated years before the present, which is later than modeling experiments show but contemporaneous with the Heinrich event 1. Maximum El Niño activity occurred during the early and late Holocene, especially during the second and third millennium B.P. The recurrence period of very strong El Niño events is 60-80 years. El Niño events were weak before and during the beginning of the Younger Dryas, during the middle of the Holocene, and during medieval times. The strength of El Niño flood events during the last millennium has positive and negative relationships to global and Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions.

Plate tectonic reconstructions for the Cretaceous have assumed that the major continental blocks-Eurasia,

Along the Atlantic European continental margin, living cold-water coral reefs occur over a wide bathymetric and hydrographical range. Focusing on 2 regions, the Celtic and the Norwegian shelves, we found that cold-water coral reefs are limited to different intermediate water masses. Measurements of the physical and geological properties showed that parameters such as temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen content, current intensities, and different substrates vary widely without specifically impacting the distribution of living cold-water coral reefs. The habitat of living reefs within the NE Atlantic comprises a temperature-salinity field, with its lower boundary equivalent to the Intermediate Salinity Maximum (ISM). The ISM on the Celtic margin is represented by Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW), but is replaced by Atlantic Water (AW) on the Norwegian margin. The upper limit corresponds to water mass boundaries of Eastern North Atlantic Water / MOW on the Celtic margin and Norwegian Coastal Water / AW on the Norwegian margin. Our study shows that cold-water corals in the North Atlantic tolerate a wide range of environmental conditions. However, our data indicate that living cold-water coral reefs occur within the density envelope of sigma-theta (σ Θ ) = 27.35 to 27.65 kg m -3 , thus highlighting the importance of physical boundary conditions for cold-water coral growth and distribution.

The pseudocolonial coral Lophelia pertusa (Scleractinia, Caryophylliidae) is a eurybathic, stenothermal cosmopolitan cold-water species. It occurs in two color varieties, white and red. L. pertusa builds vast cold-water coral reefs along the continental margins, which are among the most diverse deep-sea habitats. Microbiology of L. pertusa has been in scientific focus for only a few years, but the question of whether the coral holds a host-specific bacterial community has not been finally answered. Bacteria on coral samples from the Trondheimsfjord (Norway) were characterized by the culture-independent 16S rRNA gene-based techniques terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism and sequence analysis. L. pertusa revealed a high microbial richness. Clone sequences were dominated by members of the Alpha-and Gammaproteobacteria. Other abundant taxa were Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Firmicutes, and Planctomycetes. The bacterial community of L. pertusa not only differed conspicuously from that of the environment but also varied with both the location and color variety of its host. Therefore, the microbial colonization cannot be termed "specific" sensu stricto. However, similarities to other coral-bacterium associations suggest the existence of "cold-water coral-specific" bacterial groups sensu lato. L. pertusa-associated bacteria appear to play a significant role in the nutrition of their host by degradation of sulfur compounds, cellulose, chitin, and end products of the coral's anaerobic metabolism. Some coral-associated microbes were regarded as opportunistic pathogens. Dominance of mixotrophic members of the Rhodobacteraceae in white L. pertusa could explain the wider dispersal of this phenotype by supplementary nutrition.

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