Abstract
Our modern world has a tropical region that contains reefs, rain forests, and the highest biodiversity on the globe. From the hot tropics to the cold polar regions, a series of convection cells drive today’s atmospheric circulation. In the oceans, high-density water masses from the polar regions source the thermohaline, subsurface circulation of our modern seas. In stark contrast to today’s relatively cold, interglacial, “icehouse world” is the warm Cretaceous or “greenhouse world.” Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of the Cretaceous were two to ten times more than present-day levels (Berner, 1994), resulting in a world considerably warmer than today’s. But this warmth was not distributed evenly through the Cretaceous and across all latitudes, as noted by Huber et al. (1995) and more recently by Frakes (1999), who identified the Late Cretaceous, (early) Turonian stage as the warmest interval of the Cretaceous period.
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Johnson, C.C., Kauffman, E.G. (2001). Cretaceous Evolution of Reef Ecosystems. In: Stanley, G.D. (eds) The History and Sedimentology of Ancient Reef Systems. Topics in Geobiology, vol 17. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1219-6_9
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