The intermingling of waters between the Indonesian passage and the equatorial Indian Ocean along with the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP) and Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) largely controls the oceanographic conditions in the eastern Indian Ocean (Tomczak & Godfrey 2001). The warm, less saline WPWP is formed by the westward-flowing North and South Equatorial Currents, which are driven by the trade winds blowing westwards in the equatorial zone (Tomczak & Godfrey 2001). The less saline tropical Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) water originates in the WPWP and enters the Indian Ocean as the westward-flowing South Java and South Equatorial Currents.

A part of the ITF starts flowing southwards along the western coast of Australia, around Cape Leeuwin and reaches as far as the Great this website Australian Bight as the Leeuwin Current (Cresswell and Golding, 1980 and Pearce, 1991). Beneath the Leeuwin Current, high salinity waters are carried northwards by the cold Western Australian Current (WAC). This current is part of the major

Southern Hemisphere subtropical gyre, moving anticlockwise in the Indian Ocean (Wells et al. 1994), which influences water masses to depths as great as 2000 m (Tchernia 1980). The region of Exmouth PD-166866 off western Australia is geographically and topographically identical to the other eastern boundary regions. Therefore, the trade wind blowing equatorwards off western Australia would be expected to cause coastal upwelling in this region (Smith 1992). However, the ocean off western Australia behaves quite unlike other eastern boundary regions. There is no regular, continuous Alanine-glyoxylate transaminase equatorward flow within 1000 km of the coast and no evidence of coastal upwelling. Coastal upwelling in this region is prevented or highly reduced by the warm, southward-flowing Leeuwin Current (LC), whose pressure gradient exceeds the off-shore Ekman transport (Smith 1992). However, there is strong indirect evidence for the development of zones of upwelling off the west coast of Australia during the glacial intervals (Wells et al. 1994). The examined ODP site is located in the region influenced by both the warm

LC and the cold WAC. Thus, the fluctuations in the strength of these currents also affect the benthic foraminiferal distribution in this region. The present study is based on 76 core samples from a 108.9 m thick section at ODP Site 762B in the eastern Indian Ocean. The core samples consist mainly of foraminifera-rich nannofossil ooze. Samples were wet sieved using > 149 μm Tyler sieves. After drying, a micro-splitter was used to separate a representative portion of the > 149 μm fraction estimated to contain about 300 specimens of benthic foraminifera. All the benthic foraminiferal specimens from the split samples were picked out and mounted on microfaunal assemblage slides for identification, counting and recording as percentages of the total assemblage.