February 2009 Geology and GSA Today media ...( Boulder CO USA - GEOLOGY includes ...)

Boulder, CO, USA - GEOLOGY includes three papers about Mars; continuation of the "jelly sandwich" versus "crme brle" debate; support for the Snowball Earth hypothesis; what nine-million-year-old tooth enamel says about vegetation in an ancient sub-Himalayan ecosystem; anthropogenic lead in the Tyrrhenian Sea; evidence for a prehistoric South Pacific tsunami; a multicentennial megadrought in medieval Europe; and a newly discovered fossil turtle in the Canadian Arctic. GSA Today's science article proposes a new method for classifying Quaternary glacial deposits.

Highlights are provided below. Representatives of the media may obtain complementary copies of articles by contacting Christa Stratton at cstratton@geosociety.org. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GEOLOGY or GSA TODAY in articles published. Contact Christa Stratton for additional information or assistance.

Non-media requests for articles may be directed to GSA Sales and Service, gsaservice@geosociety.org.

Tropical sea temperatures in the high-latitude South Pacific during the Eocene
Christopher J. Hollis et al., GNS Science, P.O. Box 30368, Lower Hutt 5040, New Zealand. Pages 99-102.

Hollis et al. provide evidence for a tropical climate in the high-latitude southwest Pacific in Eocene time. The early Eocene, around 50 million years ago, has been long recognized as a time of pronounced global warming. In New Zealand, warm climate conditions were inferred for this time period from a wide range of fossil evidence but, until now, the degree of warmth was uncertain. Hollis et al. used three independent geochemical methods for extracting sea temperatures from the sedimentary rock record and determined that surface waters exceeded 30 degrees Celsius, and water at the sea floor hovered around 20 degre
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