Upper Toarcian (Lower Jurassic) marine gastropods from the Cleveland Basin, England: systematics, palaeobiogeography and contribution to biotic recovery from the early Toarcian extinction event

Here we describe a new upper Toarcian (Lower Jurassic) marine gastropod fauna from rocks of the Cleveland Basin exposed on the North Yorkshire coast of England. The fossil assemblage consists of 16 species, of which three are new: Katosira ? bicarinata sp. nov., Turritelloidea stepheni sp. nov. and Striactaenonina elegans sp. nov. Four species are described in open nomenclature as Tricarilda ? sp., Jurilda sp., Cylindrobullina sp. and Cossmannina sp. The other species have previously been described: Coelodiscus minutus (Schübler in Zieten), Procerithium quadrilineatum (Römer), Pseudokatosira undulata (Benz in von Zieten), Palaeorissoina aff. acuminata (Gründel), Pietteia unicarinata (Hudleston), Globularia cf. canina (Hudleston), Striactaeonina cf. richterorum Schulbert & Nützel, Striactaenonina aff. tenuistriata (Hudleston) and Sulcoactaeon sedgvici (Phillips). Most of these species are the earliest records of their respective genera and show palaeobiogeographical connections with contemporary gastropod associations from other regions of Europe and South America. The taxonomic composition of the upper Toarcian Cleveland Basin gastropod assemblage differs substantially from the faunas of the upper Pliensbachian and lower Toarcian Tenuicostatum Zone, showing the strong effect of the early Toarcian mass extinction event on the marine gastropod communities in the basin. Only a few gastropod species are shared between the late Toarcian faunas and the much more diverse Aalenian gastropod faunas in the Cleveland Basin, suggesting that there was a facies control on gastropod occurrences at that time. This is also a potential explanation for the taxonomic differences between the late Toarcian gastropod faunas in the Cleveland Basin and those in France, and northern and southern Germany

Radiative transfer in lognormal multifractal clouds and analysis of cloud liquid water data

The study of radiative transfer in multifractal clouds is of great interest, an important application being to Global Climate Models. In this work we develop a formalism analogous to the multifractal singularity formalism for understanding photon scattering statistics in radiative transfer in multifractals, and test the results numerically on lognormal multifractals. Although the results are only exactly valid in the thick cloud limit, the approximation is found to be quite accurate down to optical thickness of $tau approx1$-10, so the results may be widely applicable. Furthermore we show the possibility of "renormalizing" the multifractal by replacing it with a near equivalent homogeneous medium but with a "renormalized" optical thickness $tau sp{1/(1+C sb1)}$ where C$sb1$ is the codimension of the mean singularity of the cloud. We argue that this approximation is likely to continue to be valid for multiple scattering, and is also compatible with recent results for diffusion on multifractals. Finally we analyze cloud liquid water content data and estimate the universal multifractal indices. We find that the scaling is respected over the whole range 5m-330km and that the cloud can in fact be reasonably described by a lognormal multifractal