Organic-carbon-rich sediments through the Phanerozoic: Processes, progress, and perspectives (SPECIAL ISSUE)

The stimulus for this Special Issue emerged from a very successful topical session presented at the European Geophysical Union Meeting in Vienna, Austria, in April 2007. The very well attended (80–100 people) session addressed recent research advances in “Organic-carbon rich sediment through time: Past present and future, ocean and climate feedback” that included a large number of excellent oral and poster presentations. This session was the continuation of a project started in 2000 that has already yielded two well-received special issues of Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. Both special issues present collections of contributions that deal with organic-carbon-rich marine sequences in different temporal windows, and both simultaneously emphasize new issues in research and reviews of existing concepts and models. The current volume forms a trilogy launched by the Special Issue “Paleoclimatic and Paleoceanographic Records in Mediterranean Sapropels and Mesozoic Black Shales” (Meyers and Negri, 2003) and continued by “Causes and Consequences of Marine Organic Carbon Burial Through Time” (Negri et al., 2006). These two volumes brought together the sapropel and black shale communities that had previously studied these organic-carbon-rich sequences separately. Moreover, their goal was to highlight the similarities and differences of these two kinds of interesting sediments, pointing to mergers of the knowledge acquired separately (e.g., Meyers, 2006).