For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth’s history. Now, researchers from Florida State University have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans.
Their study, published today in the journal Geology, resolves a longstanding paleoclimate mystery, and raises urgent concerns about the ruinous fate that could befall our modern oceans if well-established trends of deoxygenation persist and accelerate.
Unlike other famous mass extinctions that can be tidily linked to discrete, apocalyptic calamities like meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, there was no known, spectacularly destructive event responsible for the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction.
“This makes it one of the few extinction events that is comparable to the large-scale declines in biodiversity currently happening today, and a valuable window into future climate scenarios,” said study co-author Seth Young, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science.
Scientists have long been aware of the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, as well as a related disruption in Earth’s carbon cycle during which the burial of enormous amounts of organic matter caused significant climate and environmental changes. But the link and timing between these two associated events — the extinction preceded the carbon cycle disruption by more than a hundred thousand years — remained stubbornly opaque.
“It’s never been clearly understood how this timing of events could be linked to a climate perturbation, or whether there was direct evidence linking widespread low-oxygen conditions to the extinction,” said FSU doctoral student Chelsie Bowman, who led the study.
To crack this difficult case, the team employed a pioneering research strategy.
Using advanced geochemical methods including thallium isotope, manganese concentration, and sulfur isotope measurements from important sites in Latvia and Sweden, the FSU scientists were able to reconstruct a timeline of ocean deoxygenation with relation to the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction and subsequent changes to the global carbon cycle.
The team’s new and surprising findings confirmed their original hypothesis that the extinction record might be driven by a decline of ocean oxygenation. Their multiproxy measurements established a clear connection between the steady creep of deoxygenated waters and the step-wise nature of the extinction event — its start in communities of deep-water organisms and eventual spread to shallow-water organisms.
Their investigations also revealed that the extinction was likely driven in part by the proliferation of sulfidic ocean conditions.
-Environmental News Network
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