PALEOCLIMATE AND PALEOENVIRONMENT CHANGES DURING THE LATE CRETACEOUS: PRIMARY SUMMARY OF THE RESULTS FROM A CONTINENTAL SCIENTIFIC DRILLING OF THE SK I BOREHOLE IN THE SONGLIAO BASIN, THE NORTHEAST CHINA

To obtain the global environmental and climatic records is going to be the aim of the international scientific drilling projects. As a paradigm of greenhouse climate in the geological history, the Cretaceous provides significant records of the global climate changes under the condition of greenhouse climate. But currently, the international scientific drilling programs on the Cretaceous have been focusing on marine sediments ; in contrast , no terrestrial records have been recovered by any scientific program. Newly completed SK I drilling located at the northern part of the Songliao Basin in the northeast China, which is the largest continental basin of the middle-latitude in the northern hemishphere during Cretaceous time and was covered by a long-lived deep lake, are supposed to be an important breakthrough in this domain. After more than one year effort , the drilling project has been finished , and 2485. 89 m of the cores have been obtained , with a high recovery ratio of 96. 46 % , and that is the longest and continuous the Late Cretaceous terrestrial core all over the world. Combined with upcoming results for the core , an integrated accomplishment could be made in ten profiles such as chemostratigraphy , geomicrobiology and so on. The age of the SK I is refined based on biostratigraphy, astronomical time, high-resolution magnetostratigraphic and SIMS U-Pb zircon analyses.It is an interval from Turonian across K/T boundary. The preliminary progress has been achieved on sedimentology , organic geochemistry, cyclostratigraphy , paleolimnology , geomicrobiology and reconstruction of pCO2 .All the cores are open for scientists all over the world next year, which have been preserved in professional storeroom in Beijing . The follow-up the SK II drilling program for the Early Cretaceous has also been selected as one of programs of ICDP ( International Continental Drilling Project, ICDP) .