Vanishing cycles under base change and the integral Hodge conjecture

In this paper we discuss an obstruction to the integral Hodge conjecture, which arises from certain behavior of vanishing cycles. This allows us to construct new counter-examples to the integral Hodge conjecture. One typical such counter-example is the product of a very general hypersurface of odd dimension and an Enriques surface. Our approach generalizes the degeneration argument of Benoist-Ottem.