Revision of the Messinian-Early Zanclean Sediments from ODP Hole 953C (Canary Island Archipelago, North-Eastern Atlantic): Biostratigraphy, Cyclostratigraphy, and Astronomical Tuning
A quantitative study was performed on calcareous plankton of the Messinian-early Zanclean succession recovered at ODP Leg 157 Hole 953C (Canary Island Archipelago, North-Eastern Atlantic). This revision allowed to recognize some events typically recorded in the Mediterranean region, highlighting affinities between the Mediterranean and North Atlantic Ocean, in the considered time interval. The presence of such events in an open-ocean succession provides the possibility to substantially improve the biostratigraphic resolution and supplies useful correlation tools between the Mediterranean and oceanic areas. Moreover, to unravel cyclical patterns of deposition and given that the investigated succession shows no evident lithological pattern, cyclostratigraphic analyses have been based on abundance fluctuations of Globigerinoides-Orbulina group, neogloboquadrinids, and warm-water versus cool-water species ratio. As a result, forty-three precession-controlled cycles have been recognized spanning from 6.457？Ma to 4.799？Ma. 1. Introduction The Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC), affecting the Mediterranean area during the latest Miocene, has been the focus of numerous studies (e.g., [1–18]). It is considered as one of the catastrophic oceanographic events that occurred in the last 20 million years [5, 8, 19]. It was caused by the temporary isolation of the Mediterranean basin from the Atlantic Ocean, due to a combination of tectonic and climatic factors (e.g., [19–21]). According to numerous authors, the onset of the MSC was synchronous over the entire Mediterranean basin and its end corresponded to the catastrophic flooding of marine waters from the Atlantic Ocean (e.g., [19, 20, 22–34]). The sedimentary expression of this flooding is recorded everywhere, both in land sections and in the deep sea cores, showing that the transition from continental to marine environment across Miocene-Pliocene boundary was (i) typified by continuous sedimentation; (ii) geologically instantaneous; (iii) synchronous throughout the Mediterranean basin. However, the problem of the exact timing and origin of the Pliocene flooding of the Mediterranean is not yet completely understood, and the evidence is not irrefutable. Some authors support the early Pliocene flooding of the Mediterranean (e.g., [7, 8, 35]), while others support a late Messinian re-flooding (e.g., [6, 36–41]). Indeed, during the salinity crisis, environmental conditions within the Mediterranean excluded most marine microfossil groups, which are traditionally used for biostratigraphic correlation. To understand the
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