Anders Cronholm

Possible Late Pleistocene volcanic activity on Nightingale Island, South Atlantic Ocean, based on geoelectrical resistivity measurements, sediment corings and (14)C dating

Tristan da Cunha is a volcanic island group situated in the central South Atlantic. The oldest of these islands, Nightingale Island, has an age of about 18 Ma. In the interior of the island, there are several wetlands situated in topographic depressions. The ages of these basins have been unknown, and their genesis has been debated. Aiming towards the reconstruction of the geomorphological history of these basins, we conducted geoelectrical resistivity measurements to map the subsurface topography, extracted peat and sediment cores and dated the onset of sedimentation applying the radiocarbon method. The irregular shapes of the basins and the lack of clear erosional features indicate that they are not eruption craters and were not formed by erosion. Instead, we regard them as morphological depressions formed between ridges of trachytic lava flows and domes at a late stage of the formation of the volcanic edifice. The onset of sedimentation within these basins appears to have occurred between 24 and 37 ka with the highest situated wetland yielding the highest ages. These ages are very young compared to the timing of the main phase of the formation of the island, implying volcanic activity on the island during the Late Pleistocene.

Meteorite flux to Earth in the Early Cretaceous as reconstructed from sediment-dispersed extraterrestrial spinels

We show that Earth’s sedimentary strata can provide a record of the collisional evolution of the asteroid belt. From 1652 kg of pelagic Maiolica limestone of Berriasian–Hauterivian age from Italy, we recovered 108 extraterrestrial spinel grains (32–250 μm) representing relict minerals from coarse micrometeorites. Elemental and three oxygen isotope analyses were used to characterize the grains, providing a first-order estimate of the major types of asteroids delivering material at the time. Comparisons were made with meteorite-flux time “windows” in the Ordovician before and after the L-chondrite parent-body breakup. In the Early Cretaceous, ∼80% of the extraterrestrial spinels originated from ordinary chondrites. The ratios between the three groups of ordinary chondrites, H, L, LL, appear similar to the present, ∼1:1:0.2, but differ significantly from Ordovician ratios. We found no signs of a hypothesized Baptistina LL-chondrite breakup event. About 10% of the grains in the Maiolica originate from achondritic meteorite types that are very rare (<1%) on Earth today, but that were even more common in the Ordovician. Because most meteorite groups have lower spinel content than the ordinary chondrites, our data indicate that the latter did not dominate the flux during the Early Cretaceous to the same extent as today. Based on studies of three windows in deep time, we argue that there may have been a gradual long-term (a few hundred million years) turnover in the meteorite flux from dominance of achondrites in the early Phanerozoic to ordinary chondrites in the late Phanerozoic, interrupted by short-term (a few million years) meteorite cascades from single asteroid breakup events. (Less)