User:Jgross2atLSU/2nd Start-up Homework Page

Topic
Late Cretaceous bottom-water oxygen in the Western Interior Seaway affected by proximal and contemporaneous Caribbean large igneous province and Sevier Orogeny.

Three Wikipedia Links Directly Relating to My Topic
Page description: Overviews formation, geography, and paleoenvironmental setting of the Western Interior Seaway during Cretaceous Time.
 * Western Interior Seaway


 * Page suggestion: Add a link to the anoxic event(s) and well known formations from the region.


 * Written communication description: I like that it covered the whole history of the Western Interior Seaway delving into the fauna that live there, some of which are important in interpreting benthic oxygen settings. Some of the sentences seem to be too packed with material to make sense to the lay person. One tries to explain where water is coming from while explaining transgressive and regressive cycles and their temporal scales.


 * Visual communication description: The Western Interior Seaway graphics showing the margins of the seaway are very well done. In fact I have used a form of one of them in a talk. One additional figure they could add would be a cross-section showing the topography across the seaway as a result from crustal deformation due to plate collision. I think I want that figure so I do not have to make it myself.

Page description: Outlines what paleoenvironmental perturbations occurred to cause the Cenomanian-Turonian extinction and highlights the organisms affected by it.
 * Cenomanian-Turonian boundary event


 * Page suggestion: It does not mention Oceanic Anoxic Event II by name although that is what it's explaining. I suggest there are some links added to this page and more written about it.


 * Written communication description: This page is fine in its broad explanation of the cause of this event. There are a few loaded sentences that really need to be fleshed out in order for better understanding of the complicated paleoenvironmental setting at this time, which is the what this page is trying to get across.


 * Visual communication description: I like the layout of the written part. There could be an chart of the stages of the Late Cretaceous showing the boundary rather than an entire relative geological time scale with a small arrow indicating where the Cenomanian-Turonian Boundary is. If there was a figure tracing the d13Corganic curve across the Cenomanian-Turonian Boundary it would compliment their written descriptions very nicely.

Page description:Covers the current geographic and tectonic setting and the formation history of the Caribbean Plate.
 * Caribbean Plate


 * Page suggestion: The page is lacking a section on the global implications from forming plate: 1) Oceanic Anoxic Event II, 2) Isthmus of Panama allowing megafauna to emigrate to either of the Americas, and 3) the closing of the equatorial current and start of Earth's latitudinality.


 * Written communication description: This is the best written Wikipedia page of the three. There is good structure to each paragraph, topic sentence and all. Where it falls short is there is a claim at the end of a few paragraphs that seems out of place in that there could be so much more said about it, which would mean it would be deserving of its own paragraph. It is a floating topic sentence.


 * Visual communication description: Each of the figures match the text well in content and spacing. The page would feel less cluttered if a)they were combined (particularly the figure with just plate names, which could simply be added to another figure), and, less importantly, b) some of the figures were moved to the left margin.

Wikipedia Page Proposal
The purpose of my Wikipedia page will be to unify three different Wikipedia pages with one unique page covering the paleoenvironmental affects on seawater chemistry in the Western Interior Seaway resulting from tectonics of the Caribbean large igneous province and Sevier Orogeny. This will benefit a wide audience by linking the pages that I have highlighted in my reviews of the pages above by matching environmental perturbations brought about by tectonics with tectonics and anoxia particular to the Western Interior Seaway. I plan to structure the page starting with the three different events that occurred at the same time to cause anoxia in the Western Interior Seaway. I will then cover the different hypotheses that describes the anoxic character of the Western Interior Seaway including 1) better defining anoxia, 2) variations in oxygen content over space and time, 3) difference in oxygen between the Western Interior Seaway and the global ocean. That is how it will appeal to a specialist audience.

This is a topic that is well researched but has no page on Wikipedia. The question is what to call it.

The original figure I plan on developing will be a block diagram derived from a compilation of figures from published materials. Particular elements to the figure will include magma nutrient sourcing from aerial and aqueous sources, blooming effects of microorganisms (metabolic pathway), the margins of the Western Interior Seaway, and the overall motion of circulation in the seaway.