POSSIBILITIES AND PROBLEMS IN CARRYING PALEOCENE POLLEN CORRELATIONS BEYOND THE SOUTHEAST TO OTHER PARTS OF THE U.S

The possibility of making fossil correlations between regions depends on a variety of factors, and these factors can be explored by comparing the Paleocene pollen assemblages from different parts of the U.S. with those from the Southeast (Mississippi, Alabama, northeastern Georgia, South Carolina). In the western Gulf Coast (Louisiana and Texas), upper Paleocene species are very like those of the Southeast. Little has been published about pollen biostratigraphy of the lower Paleocene of the western Gulf Coast, but lower Paleocene samples of unknown age from that region could probably be effectively correlated with sections in the Southeast. Good pollen correlations have been made for the upper Paleocene between the Southeast and Maryland-Virginia, but the lower Paleocene in the mid-Atlantic states is sparsely represented by strata. Paleocene pollen in Massachusetts is represented only by reworked specimens in Miocene sediments, but these specimens are sufficient to demonstrate that both lower and upper Paleocene strata were sources of sediment deposited in the Miocene ocean of that region. Wyoming has an excellent, complete Paleocene pollen record. Only 14 of the Paleocene pollen species in Wyoming are the same as in the Southeast, but some key pollen species are present in both regions. However, the range bases and range tops of these species do not appear to be closely synchronous between the two regions. Paleocene pollen floras of the North Slope of Alaska are more similar to those of Wyoming than to those of the Southeast, but at least in the upper Paleocene, some rough synchroneity of assemblages with those of the Southeast can be demonstrated. In summary: Pollen correlations with the Southeast are generally better in the upper Paleocene than in the lower Paleocene; some species critical for correlation are distributed over very large areas even if the different areas lay in different paleobiogeographical regions; and the pollen correlations obtained within the eastern part of the U.S. have a reasonably fine-scaled resolution.