Environmental Signatures Preserved In Extremely Shallow-Water Benthic Foraminifera From Oman, Arabian Sea

Nearshore coastal areas are subject to harsh conditions, being shaped by continuous wave action and exposed to turbulence, erosion, and dynamic processes of sediment reworking. Situated at the interface between land and water, the environmental signatures preserved in microfossil assemblages from coastal environments are often prone to taphonomic alterations, which potentially bias the fossil record and compromise accurate reconstructions. The preservation and composition of microfossil assemblages, however, is of highest importance for paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic reconstructions.

We have analyzed benthic foraminiferal assemblages from a suite of extremely shallow-water habitats along the Dhofar coastline (Oman) to assess their value for paleoenvironmental reconstructions and inferences. Foraminiferal assemblages from these extremely shallow and turbulent water habitats face hostile conditions to their existence and preservation, where the formation of dead assemblages is the result of postmortem processes, among which out-of-habitat transport and the destruction and disintegration of tests are most significant. We examined habitat-specific samples from extreme shallow-water areas to: (1) illustrate and document the species richness and preservation status of foraminiferal assemblages, (2) assess whether the foraminiferal biotas preserve sufficient environmental information to be useful for paleoenvironmental inferences, and (3) provide novel insight into the diversity and composition of benthic foraminifera along the varied habitats of the southern Oman coast. Our analyses show that extremely shallow foraminiferal assemblages from the southern coast of Oman retain the environmental signatures of their habitats despite intense environmental processes, making them useful for paleoenvironmental studies. Features of these signatures are recorded in the structural composition, species richness, dominance, and diversity indices of foraminiferal communities, in addition to numerical abundances of shell preservation groups.