Annual Report 2012 of the Paleogene Deep-Water Benthic Foraminifera Working Group.

The WG organized the 9th International Workshop on Agglutinated Foraminifera (IWAF-9), which was held at Zaragoza University (Spain) on September 3rd-7th 2012. More than 55 scientists attended the workshop, and 56 contributions were presented either as oral or as poster presentations. During the post-conference field trip, we had a chance to visit superb Paleogene outcrops along the Basque coast, including 3 GSSPs (for the bases of the Selandian, Thanetian and Lutetian).
The WG has continued to do research on the benthic foraminiferal turnover across the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary (e.g., Alegret, Thomas and Lohmann, 2012, PNAS, 109, nº 3, 728-732). In contrast to the widely accepted long-term collapse of oceanic primary productivity, benthic foraminifera (and organic biomarkers) suggest that the oceans may have been relatively eutrophic, supporting plankton blooms while oceanic productivity in terms of biomass but not in terms of diversity recovered rapidly, like proposed for terrestrial productivity.
In addition to investigating the significance of the Glomospira acme associated with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (Arreguín, Alegret and Ortiz, Journal of Foraminiferal Research, in press), much progress is being done on the study of deep-sea benthic foraminifera across Eocene hyperthermals. Gabriela Arreguín (Univ. Zaragoza) has just started her Ph.D thesis on this subject, and an early Lutetian carbon-cycle perturbation, possibly associated with a hyperthermal event, has been discovered (Payros et al., 2012, Paleoceanography, vol. 27, PA2213).

Report by Secretary: Laia Alegret, Spain.