Ancient sea water

Ancient Origin of the Modern Deep-Sea Fauna

The origin and possible antiquity of the spectacularly diverse modern deep-sea fauna has been debated since the beginning of deep-sea research in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent hypotheses, based on biogeographic patterns and molecular clock estimates, support a latest Mesozoic or early Cenozoic date for the origin of key groups of the present deep-sea fauna (echinoids, octopods). This relat...

Echoes of Ancient Cataclysms in the Baltic Sea

The observation that human societies are shaped by the natural environment appears in the earliest treatises on cultural diversity. Scholars have focused their attention on the ordinary conditions of the environment (weather patterns, topography, natural resources, and other enduring features) or on recurrent events in an area (earthquakes, floods, droughts, etc.), when trying to account for lo...

The Sea Lamprey Meiotic Map Resolves Ancient Vertebrate Genome Duplications

Gene and genome duplications serve as an important reservoir of material for the evolution of new biological functions. It is generally accepted that many genes present in vertebrate genomes owe their origin to two whole genome duplications that occurred deep in the ancestry of the vertebrate lineage. However, details regarding the timing and outcome of these duplications are not well resolved....

Archaeology. Ancient Alexandria emerges, by land and by sea.

The Younger Dryas and the Sea of Ancient Ice

We propose that prior to the Younger Dryas period, the Arctic Ocean supported extremely thick multi-year fast ice overlain by superimposed ice and firn. We re-introduce the historical term paleocrystic ice to describe this. The ice was independent of continental (glacier) ice and formed a massive floating body trapped within the almost closed Arctic Basin, when sea-level was lower during the la...