The Late Cretaceous is marked by a worldwide catastrophe, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as many other terrestrial and marine organisms. The latest Cretaceous was also a time of major oceanic and climatic oscillations. Our research is focused on understanding the distribution of Late Cretaceous foraminiferal habitats, documenting their response to global climatic changes, and characterizing their taxonomy, phylogeny and the ecological strategies of individual species.



Over the past 15 years, our group has been engaged in an interdisciplinary research project on the Late Cretaceous high productivity belt of the tropical Southern Tethys. The upwelling belt of the Southern Tethys is one of the largest and long-lasting high productivity regimes in the in the Mesozoic World, and possibly in the Phanerozoic.This project is aimed at establishing the most detailed paleobiological and paleoceanographic reconstruction of the Levantine upwelling system by integrating high-resolution records of planktic and benthic foraminifera, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen stable isotopes and organic geochemistry. Our research initially focused on the Negev area and on the Shefela basin, the latter represents the most distal and among the largest basins in the Levant region.



In the last couple of years, we focused our investigation on a newly retrieved core from the Golan Heights that reveal an unexpected continues sedimentation of organic rich carbonates across the K-Pg boundary. Our geochemical and stratigraphic analyses show that primary productivity and the export of calcite exhibit stability across the KPg boundary These results either points to a remarkably rapid recovery (<10 kyr), or possibly an unbroken high productivity across the KPg boundary.  Present investigations on the Levantine high productivity sequence also include a focus on the phosphate deposits (collaboration with Aya Schneider-Mor, and Nadia Teutsch, GSI).​​


Publications

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Collaboraions​

Sarit Ashckenazi-Polivoda (Dead Sea & Arava Science Center)
Yoav Rosenberg (Geological Survey of Israel)
Alon Amrani (Hebrew University)
Nicolas Thibault (University of Copenhagen)