Sea-level constitutes a critical planetary boundary for geological processes and human life. Sea-level fluctuations during major greenhouse phases are still enigmatic and strongly discussed in terms of changing climate systems. The geological record of the Cretaceous greenhouse period provides a deep-time view on greenhouse-phase Earthsystem processes that facilitates a much better understanding of the causes and consequences of global, geologically short-term, sea-level changes. In particualr, Cretaceous hothouse periods can serve as a laboratory to better understand a near-future greenhouse Earth. This volume presents high-resolution sea-level records from globally distributed sedimentary archives of the Cretaceous involving a large group of scientists from the International Geoscience Programme IGCP 609. Marine to non-marine sedimentary successions were analysed for revised age constraints, the correlation of global palaeoclimate shifts and sea-level changes, tested for climate-driven cyclicities, and correlated within a high-resolution stratigraphic framework of the Geological Timescale. For hothouse periods, the hypothesis of significant global groundwater-related sea-level change, i.e. aquifer-eustasy as a major process, is reviewed and substantiated.

Magnetostratigraphy is best known as a technique that employs correlation among different stratigraphic sections using the magnetic directions defining geomagnetic polarity reversals as marker horizons. The ages of the polarity reversals provide common tie points among the sections, allowing accurate time correlation. Recently, studies of magnetic methods and the timing of geological processes have acquired a broader meaning, now referring to many types of magnetic measurements within a stratigraphic sequence. Many of these measurements provide correlation and age control not only for the older and younger boundaries of a polarity interval, but also within intervals. Thus, magnetostratigraphy no longer represents a dating tool based only on geomagnetic polarity reversals, but comprises a set of techniques that includes measurements of geomagnetic field parameters, environmental magnetism, rock-magnetic properties, radiometric dating and astronomically forced palaeoclimatic change recorded in sedimentary rocks, and key corrections to magnetic directions related to geodynamics, palaeocurrents, tectonics and diagenetic processes --

Isotopic studies combined with geochemical, lithological, mineralogical and palaeontological investigations have been widely used in reconstructing Cretaceous marine and continental environments. Furthermore stable and radiogenic isotope trends play an important role in the interpretation of the causes and consequences of biotic turnovers at stratigraphic boundaries as well as in global correlations.

The fifteen chapters included in this volume are concerned with the main issues in the Eastern Black sea and Caucasus regions of the Alpine–Tethyan orogenic realm, which are: (1) the changes in space and time of geodynamic processes responsible for the closure of the northern branch of the Neotethys Ocean and how these changes are related to the opening and inversion of back-arc basins; (2) the northwestern terminus of the Eastern Black sea rift; (3) timing and evolution of inverted and foreland basins; (4) the continuity of structures and their evolution in time between the Eastern Black Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Lesser Caucasus and those of the Taurides–Anatolides– Pontides belt and of NW Iran; and (5) Paratethys evolution since the Eocene in this belt. The papers included in this volume present new results obtained mostly by projects supported by the DARIUS programme.

Since the beginning of the last century, the lower Jurassic to mid-Miocene pelagic succession exposed along the valleys of the Umbria and Marche Apennines of Italy represented a fertile playground for generations of earth scientists. This GSA Special Paper provides a reappraisal of the geological and integrated stratigraphic research, which was carried out by scores of earth scientists in the gorges around the medieval city of Gubbio over the past fifty years. Following review chapters about pioneering sedimentologic, biostratigraphic, and magnetostratigraphic studies of the Gubbio sections, a series of papers presents new, original data addressing different stratigraphical, paleoenvironmental, and structural geological aspects of particular Cretaceous to Paleogene intervals, including the still much-debated K-Pg Boundary Event in the worldwide famous site of the Bottaccione Gorge, where the Alvarez theory of global mass extinction caused by a catastrophic extraterrestrial impact was born in 1980.