Cenozoic Marine Diatom Biostratigraphy and Applications to Paleoclimatology and Paleoceanography

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Abstract
Diatoms, golden brown algae, are present in most aqueous environments. Within the marine environment marine diatoms occupy the photic zone and represent the lowest level of the marine food chain. Diatoms are either planktonic or benthic and possess an external siliceous skeleton or frustule, that is boxlike in structure. The size of diatom frustules ranges from less than 1 μm to more than 1,000 μm, but most frustules range in size from 10 to 100 μm. Diatoms are present in the geological record from at least the Cretaceous (Harwood and Nikolaev, this volume) and have numerous advantages for biostratigraphic correlation and paleoenvironmental reconstruction of marine sedimentary sequences. This chapter summarizes the current state of marine diatom biostratigraphy for the Cenozoic and provides examples of how marine diatoms are used in paleoenvironmental reconstructions. No attempt is made to illustrate the various diatom taxa discussed; the reader is referred to published references such as the syntheses of Fenner (1985) and Barron (1985).