Quaternary laminar calcretes with bee nests: evidences of small-scale climatic fluctuations, Eastern Canary Islands, Spain

Airborne dust accumulation and soil development in the North-East sector of Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain)

“…; Sa´nchez, 1975). The formation of these carbonate horizons in arid and semiarid soils may be related to weathering of the volcanic substrate (Alonso-Zarza and Silva, 2002;Jahn et al, 1985;Treadwell-Steitz and Mc Fadden, 2000); accumulation and alteration of particles from marine carbonate deposits in some coastal soils (Naiman et al, 2000); and dust accumulation and its alteration (Capo and Chadwick, 1999;Hamidi et al, 2001;Kleber, 2000;Sa´nchez, 1975). All these potential of carbonate sources could be applied to soils on Gran Canaria.…”

Climatic cycles inferred from the aminostratigraphy and aminochronology of Quaternary dunes and palaeosols from the eastern islands of the Canary Archipelago

“…2) and vertebrates, some of them extinct (Michaux et al, 1991;Boye et al, 1992;Castillo et al, 1996), as well as abundant ichnofossils (Fig. 2), mainly produced by hymenopters (Ellis and EllisAdam, 1993;Edwards and Meco, 2000; Alonso-Zarza and Silva, 2002) and coleopters (Genise and Edwards, 2003). High degrees of species diversity and endemicity (Yanes et al, 2004) characterise the land snail assemblages.…”

Micromorphology and formation of pedogenic ooids in calcic soils and petrocalcic horizons

“…Alternatively, entirely concentric ooids have also been interpreted as at least partly biological by invoking respiration by cyanobacteria or root mats (Verrecchia et al, 1995), or perhaps respiration associated with the decomposition of organic matter (Francis et al, 2012a). The presence of organic films may also help foster ooid genesis (e.g., Alonso-Zarza and Silva, 2002). Finally, rolling of ooids via bioturbation is also suggested as a possible influence on their morphology, affecting the orientation of clays in external laminae, or leading to the presence of detrital grains in outer laminae (AlonsoZarza and Silva, 2002).…”

“…Features including calcispheres (Monger and Adams, 1996), Microcodium (Klappa, 1978;Monger et al, 1991), ooliths or pisoliths (e.g., Bachman and Machette, 1977), and spherulites (Verrecchia et al, 1995;Durand et al, 2010) are also common in calcic soils, but they are morphologically and genetically distinct from the concretionary carbonate structures. Use of many distinct terms, especially across the 2 mm size threshold, can be viewed as arbitrary outside of sedimentology, and researchers must sometimes define or explicitly simplify their own use of existing terms for clarity (e.g., see Chafetz and Butler, 1980;Alonso-Zarza and Silva, 2002). Generally, such pedofeatures are collectively called nucleic nodules or concentric nodules under conventional terminology (e.g., Stoops, 2003).…”

“…Occurrence and genesis of pedogenic ooids and pisoids Durand et al (2010) summarized the micromorphology, interpretations, and terminology of concretionary pedofeatures in calcic soils; a detailed review therefore exceeds the scope of this paper. Further, ooids and pisoids have long been recognized and described in calcic and/or petrocalcic soils or paleosols in India (Khadkikar et al, 2000), the United States (Reeves, 1976;Bachman and Machette, 1977;Hay and Wiggins, 1980;Reheis, 1988;House et al, 2010;and others), Saudi Arabia (Reeves, 1976), Spain (Esteban, 1976;Reeves, 1976;Calvet and Julià, 1983;Alonso-Zarza and Silva, 2002), South Africa (Francis et al, 2012a), Turkey (Kaplan et al, 2013), and other locations around the world. It is also worth noting that some of the described pisoids in these studies could simply be cross-sectional views of clast pendants.…”