BG6.1 is the combination of two related, and originally separately submitted, sessions. This joint session focusses not only on foraminifera, but will include presentations on other calcifyers as well. Below, the two original titles and details are listed.


Foraminifera as geochemical proxies

Fossil foraminifera are popular tools to reconstruct past marine environments. The success of their application in paleoceanographical studies is based on the correlation of environmental parameters (e.g. SST, salinity, pH) to assemblage compositions, marker species, morphological traits, calcitic trace elemental composition or stable isotopic fractionation. The currently employed calibrations are derived from field as well as culturing studies and a mechanistic understanding of trace element and isotope fractionations is starting to emerge from physiological studies on living foraminifera. Integrating the different approaches holds great potential for improving the accuracy, precision and scale of their paleoceanographic application.

This session aims to bring together the wide spectrum of current research on living foraminifera (benthic and planktic) and especially paleoceanographic applications, aiming to improve/validate existing proxies or explore new ones. We invite abstracts for poster- and oral presentations encompassing areas including analytical developments in elemental and isotopic determination, culturing designs, cell-physiological studies, field surveys and the paleoceanographic application of foraminifera.


Towards a process based understanding of Biomineralization

Biologically produced calcium-carbonates are among the most important sources of information for climate change studies but, surprisingly, no agreement exists about the crystallization mechanism of these widely used biological archives.
To understand trace element incorporation and stable isotope fractionation during biogenic mineral formation the complex interplay between ion transport from the environment to the site of calcification by means of cell physiological processes and subsequent crystal nucleation and growth in the presence of organic molecules has to be understood. This requires the united effort of scientists from different fields like cell physiology, mineralogy/crystallography, and analytical chemistry/physics. The scope of this session therefore is to represent research from different disciplines, which could help to understand biomineralization on a process based level.