Five-hundred ten meters of Cretaceous sediments were drilled north of the Walvis escarpment in Hole 53OA during Leg 75. An immature stage of evolution for organic matter can be assigned to all the samples studied. Black shales are interbedded with red and green claystone in the bottom sedimentary unit, Unit 8, which is of Coniacian to late Albian age. The richest organic carbon contents and petroleum potentials occur in the black shales. Detrital organic matter is present throughout the various members of a sequence, mixed with largely oxidized organic matter in the gray and green claystone or marlstone members on both sides. Detrital organic matter also characterizes the black streaks observed in the claystones. Vertical discontinuities in organic matter distribution are assigned to slumping. Several types of black shales can be identified, according to their content of detrital organic matter, the more detrital black levels corresponding to the Albian-Cenomanian period. Cyclic variations of organic matter observed for a sequence can occur for a set of sequences and even for some consecutive sets of sequences. Climatic factors are proposed to account for the cyclic sedimentation and distribution of organic matter for every sequence that includes a black bed. 10° N 0° r 10° S 40 30° 20° 10 W 0°F igure 1. Location map of Leg 75 and Sites 530, 531, and 532. 10° E 30°p urpose three steps were followed during the study, according to three different scales. The first scale is a sequence some 40-cm thick, centered on an individual black bed 8-cm thick, with green claystones on both sides. The second corresponds to a bundle of five consecutive black-shale beds with interbedded green claystones beds along an interval 105-cm thick. The third applies to 35 other black beds or sequences selected from among a total of 260 black-shale beds detected within the 163 m of lithologic Unit 8 (Fig. 3). METHODS Organic carbon was determined in acid-treated samples with a Leco apparatus, except for the closely spaced sampling of Sections 101-1 and 101-2 (Table 1) along which 79 samples were collected over a 40-cm interval. The small size of these samples required a specific analytical procedure to be used. Organic carbon was analyzed in carbonaceous residue issuing from Rock-Eval analysis. The method is based on combustion in a constant oxygen flow at a temperature programmed from 250 to 600°C at a linear rate of 25°C/min. The CO 2 was measured by a nondispersive infrared detector. Because of the small size of the samples (about 30 mg), significant LECO analyses could not be performed so as to compare the two methods. Since data of 0.20 wt.% and less are questionable as a rule, their use and meaning are doubtful. Pyrolysis assays were performed for all 194 samples with a Rock-Eval (Espitalié et al., 1977). Three intervals were then resampled in the black-shale bed in Core 101 to collect 5 to 6 g of rock per sample. The three samples obtained were chloroform extracted. Then the extracts were fractionated. A quantitative detection for s...