Late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental changes in the Aegean Sea: interrelations and interactions between North and South Aegean Sea.

Abstract

The present study describes

Suborbital Hydrological Variability Inferred From Coupled Benthic and Planktic Foraminiferal‐Based Proxies in the Southeastern Mediterranean During the Last 19 ka

“…Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology recorded in the Aegean and Adriatic Seas (e.g., Casford et al, 2003;De Rijk et al, 1999;Giamali et al, 2019;Incarbona et al, 2019;Kontakiotis et al, 2016;Marino et al, 2009;Rohling, Mayewski, et al, 2002;Siani et al, 2010Siani et al, , 2013Triantaphyllou et al, 2009Triantaphyllou et al, , 2016. Several studies proposed that the 8.2-ka interruption during S1 formation is due to a more pronounced Siberian high-pressure system (e.g., Pross et al, 2009;Rohling, Mayewski, et al, 2002;Schmiedl et al, 2010), combined with a southward migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone weakening the monsoon systems (e.g., Fleitmann et al, 2007;Triantaphyllou et al, 2009).…”

Eco-biostratigraphic advances in late Quaternary geochronology and palaeoclimate: the marginal Gulf of Mexico analogue

“…The quan ti ta tive dis tri bu tion of plank tonic foraminifera from the LGM to the pres ent dis plays a suc ces sion of microfaunal as sem blages (biozones) char ac ter iz ing the pro gres sively chang ing sur face wa ter en vi ron ment. In such mar ginal bas ins, the suc ces sive fau nal zones can be in di cated as ecozones, because the ma jor ity of the spe cies are sen si tive in di ca tors of past en vi ron men tal changes with am pli fied sig nals (Drinia and Antonarakou, 2003;Antonarakou et al, 2007Antonarakou et al, , 2018Antonarakou et al, , 2019Drinia et al, 2007Drinia et al, , 2008Drinia et al, , 2016Kontakiotis, 2012Kontakiotis, , 2016Kontakiotis et al, 2013Kontakiotis et al, , 2016aKontakiotis et al, , b, 2017Fenton et al, 2016;Karakitsios et al, 2017a, b). The eco log i cal di ver gence between the spe cies (Hemleben et al, 1989;Rohling et al, 1993), even be tween dif fer ent morphotypes of the same spe cies (Antonarakou et al, 2015;Kontakiotis et al, 2017), de ter mined by dif fer ent con trol ling fac tors (e.g., depth hab i tats, growth op timum/stressed con di tions, pro duc tiv ity, strat i fi ca tion, near-/offshore-con di tions), in com bi na tion with their dif fer ent test morpho logies (e.g., re lated to shell shape and size, thick ness, in ner po ros ity and pore sur face dis tri bu tion; Morard et al, 2009;Kontakiotis et al, 2017), con trol di rectly their dis tri bu tion pat tern and re flect the re gional cli mate vari abil ity (Marcott et al, 2013).…”

“…In the last half-cen tury, con sid er able in ter est has de vel oped re gard ing the role of the (sub)trop i cal oceans in cli mate change, and in par tic u lar, oce anic sub-bas ins and mar ginal seas that are of ten more re spon sive to palaeoceanographic and palaeoclimatic changes than to broader global ocean bas ins, be cause of their smaller size and par tial iso la tion (Ma rino et al, 2009;Kontakiotis et al, 2013;Kontakiotis, 2016). As an ex am ple, the trop i cal West ern Hemi sphere Warm Pool (WHWP), which encom passes the Ca rib bean Sea and the Gulf of Mex ico (GoM), is an im por tant heat and mois ture source for cli mate in the North At lan tic re gion (Wang and Enfield, 2001), and there fore acts as a key reg u la tor of sub po lar North At lan tic ocean og ra phy and cli mate in Eu rope.…”

“…In this re spect, no ta ble con tri bu tions are re quired from micropaleontological, biogeochemical, and sedimentological stud ies. In par tic u lar, mor pho log i cal and compositional changes in the plank tonic foraminiferal as sem blages re corded in ma rine sed i ments and/or the wa ter col umn pro vide de tailed infor ma tion on the phys i cal and chem i cal prop er ties of the surround ing wa ter masses and their re la tion ships with cli ma tic vari abil ity (Renaud and Schmidt, 2003;Schmidt et al, 2004a, b;Spear et al, 2011b;Kontakiotis et al, 2011Kontakiotis et al, , 2013Kontakiotis et al, , 2016aThirumalai et al, 2014;Antonarakou et al, 2015;Jonkers et al, 2015;Kontakiotis, 2016;Arellano-Torres and Machain-Castillo, 2017;Reynolds et al, 2018;Wil son et al, 2018). For in stance, it has been sug gested that plank tonic foraminifera al ter their shape and size, which de ter mine their weight and their over all den sity in di rect re sponse to changes in wa ter den sity and viscos ity to re tain or mod ify their hy dro dy namic be hav iour ac cordingly (Caromel et al, 2014;Zarkogiannis et al, 2019a, b).…”

Key Environmental Factors Controlling Planktonic Foraminiferal and Pteropod Community’s Response to Late Quaternary Hydroclimate Changes in the South Aegean Sea (Eastern Mediterranean)

“…Environmental changes related to the different water column and/or sediment characteristics can be recorded virtually instantaneously in paleoceanographic proxy data, such as stable isotope and other geochemical ratios [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], and micro-fossil abundances, such as planktonic foraminifera and pteropods [15,17,28,[32][33][34][35][36]. This makes them extremely valuable for both stratigraphic correlations and paleoenvironmental/paleoclimate reconstructions [15,23,28,29,32,35,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Their significance in the study of modern and past marine ecosystems in the eastern Mediterranean Sea is well underlined [20,31,[46][47][48][49][50][51].…”