CPD Climate of the Past Discussions CPD 1814-9359 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/cpd-8-1209-2012 "OAE 3" – a low- to mid-latitude Atlantic oceanic event during the Coniacian-Santonian Wagreich M. 1 Department of Geodynamics and Sedimentology, Center for Earth Sciences, University of Vienna, Austria 16 04 2012 8 2 1209 1227 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/8/1209/2012/cpd-8-1209-2012.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/8/1209/2012/cpd-8-1209-2012.pdf

The Coniacian-Santonian time interval is the inferred time of oceanic anoxic event 3 (OAE 3), the last of the Cretaceous OAEs. A detailed look on the temporal and spatial distribution of organic-rich deposits attributed to OAE 3 suggests that black shale occurrences are restricted to the equatorial to mid-latitudinal Atlantic and adjacent basins, shelves and epicontinental seas like parts of the Caribbean, the Maracaibo Basin and the Western Interior Basin, and are largely absent in the Tethys, the North Atlantic, the southern South Atlantic, and the Pacific. Here, oxic bottom waters prevailed as indicated by the widespread occurrence of red deep-marine CORBs (Cretaceous Oceanic Red Beds). Widespread CORB sedimentation started during the Turonian after Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE 2) except in the Atlantic realm where organic-rich strata continue up to the Santonian. The temporal distribution of black shales attributed to OAE 3 indicates that organic-rich strata do not define a single and distinct short-time event, but are distributed over a longer time span and occur in different basins during different times. This suggests intermittent and regional anoxic conditions from the Coniacian to the Santonian. A comparison of time-correlated high-resolution &delta;<sup>13</sup>C curves for this interval indicates several minor positive excursions of about 0.5 permil, probably as a result of massive organic carbon burial cycles in the Atlantic. Regional wind-induced upwelling and silled deep basins may have contributed to the development of anoxia during a global oxic time interval, thus highlighting the regional character of inferred OAE 3 as an Atlantic anoxic event (AAE).

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