Revised Chronology for the Mio-Pliocene Successions of the Eastern Paratethys: Towards a Better Understanding of Paleoenvironmental Change

Paratethys is a large epicontinental sea, stretching from Germany to China at the beginning of the Oligocene (~34 Myr ago), that progressively retreated by a complex combination of basin infill, glacio-eustatic sea-level lowering and tectonic uplift to its present-day remnants: Black Sea, Caspian Sea and Aral Lake. Paratethys experienced major paleoenvironmental changes towards anoxic, hypersaline, and fresh water conditions. An accurate geological time scale (GTS) is crucial to understand the timing and rates of these change and to determine the underlying mechanisms. Geological time scales for the Paratethys region are notoriously controversial and encompass mainly regional stages, which are all defined on the basis of characteristic faunal assemblages (mainly mollusks and ostracods) endemic to the Paratethys Sea.

During the last decade, we have performed numerous integrated magneto-biostratigraphic studies on the Mio-Pliocene sedimentary successions of the Eastern Paratethys, which resulted in revised chronological frameworks for the Dacian, Black Sea and Caspian Sea basins. This allows high-resolution stratigraphic correlations between the individual Paratethys subbasins and with the Mediterranean successions and help to better understand the dramatic paleoenvironmental changes in the region, such as the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Rock magnetic analyses of the sedimentary sequences of the Paratethys indicate that greigite is the main magnetic carrier and that a range of magnetic properties cannot be explained by the presence of diagenetic greigite, but are instead consistent with those expected for a biogenetic (bacterial) origin.