Global sea-level fluctuations, depositional environments, and life on Earth | Clastic Detritus
Global sea-level fluctuations, depositional environments, and life on Earth
I try not to recycle press releases without reading the paper first, but I wanted to point to what looks like an interesting new paper in Nature about the tempo of extinctions and its relationship to global changes in sea level throughout Earth history.
I think the press release is preceding the publication of the paper because I can’t seem to find it … I’ll update this post with a link when it comes out, presumably later today or tomorrow.
Here are a few tidbits from the press release:
The abrupt external causes of mass extinctions, such as impacts, certainly deserve the attention they receive from the mainstream press and general public. These infrequent yet important events changed the course of Earth history and evolution in dramatic ways. But, it is nice to see a paper that discusses how the tectonic and surface processes of the Earth have influenced the course of life.
Arnold I. Miller, a palaeobiologist and professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, says the new study [by Shanan Peters] is striking because it establishes a clear relationship between the tempo of mass extinction events and changes in sea level and sediment: ‘Over the years, researchers have become fairly dismissive of the idea that marine mass extinctions like the great extinction of the Late Permian might be linked to sea-level declines, even though these declines are known to have occurred many times throughout the history of life. The clear relationship this study documents will motivate many to rethink their previous views.’
I saw Shanan Peters give a talk about two years ago about some of this work. That particular talk summarized research he was doing with a huge database of stratigraphic sections. Putting together the time and place of depositional environments over large swaths of Earth history is how we produce paleogeographic maps depicting to what extent and long continents have been flooded by oceans.
In other words, sea level goes down, the shallow sea, which we know from the modern world is teeming with life, recedes and species perish.
This does not mean that external events didn’t cause mass extinctions – they certainly did. The point being that understanding the causes of mass extinctions doesn’t require invoking an external event.
from → evolution, fossil, paleogeography, paleontology, shallow-marine, stratigraphy
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