Cretaceous research

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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).​​