Visual observations of the sea floor subduction line in the middle-america trench.

Four dives were made to the floor of the Middle-America Trench with the U.S. Navy's deep research submersible DSV Turtle. The area investigated is located between Costa Rica and the Cocos Ridge where the depth of the trench floor does not exceed the 2000-meter capability of the submersible. At the axis of the trench floor a series of steep northeast-facing scarps 10 to 20 meters high lie parallel to the trench axis. Here oceanic crust appears to have been carried down by near-vertical normal vaults of small displacement. Between these small scarps and the landward wall of the trench a narrow line of recent deformation interrupts a smooth apron. Unconsolidated sediments are thrust in sharply serrated piles and cut by sharp-edged chasms. This line of deformation is interpreted as the present sea floor trace of crustal subduction.

Cretaceous drowning of reefs on mid-pacific and Japanese guyots.

Reefs dredged on guyots of the Mid-Pacific Mountains and the Japanese Seamounts yield middle Cretaceous fossils, indicating that submergence killed off the fauna of the reefs sometime during the Albian-Cenomanian. Eustatic rise of sea level is probably responsible.

Jurassic sandstone from the tropical atlantic.

The oldest sediment yet sampled from the abyssal margins of South America, late Jurassic (or possibly very early Cretaceous) shallow-water, coarse-grained, calcareous sandstone containing palynomorphs and mollusk prisms, was recovered from a depth of 4400 meters on the seaward scarp of the Demerara Plateau. The sandstone was deposited in a shallow, late Jurassic epicontinental sea after the initial stages of rifting when the newly created Atlantic began to founder.

Geological history of the Western north pacific.

A considerable portion of the abyssal floor of the western North Pacific was already receiving pelagic sediment in late Jurassic time. Carbonate sediments were later replaced by abyssal clays as the basin deepened and bottom waters became more aggressive. The resulting facies boundary, which can be recognized on seismic profiles, is broadly transgressive; it ranges in age from mid-Cretaceous in the western Pacific to Oligocene in the central Pacific. Cherts are encountered at and below the major facies boundary and appear to have been formed by postdepositional processes.

Knoll and Sediment Drift near Hudson Canyon.

A parallel-bedded accumulation of sediments forms a low ridge on the upcurrent side of a partially moated knoll. These sediments were deposited beneath a southwestward-flowing current where it is locally decelerated by the obstructing knoll.

Opal phytoliths in a north atlantic dust fall.

Minute bodies (less than 80 microns) of isotropic silica, originally precipitated by terrestrial plants, are found together with freshwater diatoms in falls of dust over the ocean. Eolian transport from Africa can explain the occurrence of similar plant remains in deep-sea sediments of the equatorial Atlantic as far west as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Shaping of the continental rise by deep geostrophic contour currents.

Geostrophic contour-following bottom currents involved in the deep thermohaline circulation of the world ocean appear to be the principal agents which control the shape of the continental rise and other sediment bodies.