November GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY ...( Following are highlights from the ...)

Following are highlights from the November issue of GEOLOGY and a summary of the science article from the November issue of GSA TODAY, published by the Geological Society of America. Stories written regarding these articles are embargoed until November 1. We ask that you discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and that reference be made to GEOLOGY or GSA TODAY in stories published. Please contact Ann Cairns at GSA to request advance copies of articles and for additional information or assistance.

GEOLOGY

Novel paleoecology of a postextinction reef: Famennian (Late Devonian) of the Canning basin, northwestern Australia. Rachel Wood

Reefs are thought to be very sensitive to mass extinctions, recovering far more slowly than other types of communities. This paper shows that reefs can recover very quickly after such destructive events, using an example from a 350-million-year-old reef from Western Australia. Here, a totally new type of reef community appears almost immediately after the mass extinction event. This may have ramifications for the plight of modern coral reefs, which are currently under considerable threat as a result of local extinction due to society's activities.

Confocal microscopy of fluid inclusions reveals fluid-pressure histories of sediments and an unexpected origin of gas condensate. Andrew C. Aplin et al.

In the search for oil, determining how the pressure and composition of oil has changed through time is critical. The information we need to crack this problem is contained within fluid inclusions, micron scale pockets of paleofluids trapped in rock minerals. We report the results of a novel technique that finally allows this information to be tapped. The authors have exploited a biomedical technique, Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy, to produce three-dimensional images of the inclusions. These reveal the amounts of gas and oil in th
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Contact: Ann Cairns
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Geological Society of America
24-Oct-2000