Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 41, Pages -Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101900118|1of8
Keywords
extinction; oxygen; ecophysiology; temperature-dependent hypoxia; Earth system evolution
Categories
Funding
- NSF [EAR-2121165, EAR-1922966]
- NASA Astrobiology Institute Early Career Collaboration Award
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant [838373]
- Stanford University
- Stanford Research Computing Center
- Marie Curie Actions (MSCA) [838373] Funding Source: Marie Curie Actions (MSCA)
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The decline in background extinction rates of marine animals through geologic time is linked to the synergistic impacts of oxygen and temperature on aerobic respiration, making marine animals more vulnerable to ocean warming events during periods of limited surface oxygenation. Physiological theory predicts that atmospheric oxygen is the dominant predictor of extinction vulnerability for marine animals.
The decline in background extinction rates of marine animals through geologic time is an established but unexplained feature of the Phanerozoic fossil record. There is also growing consensus that the ocean and atmosphere did not become oxygenated to nearmodern levels until the mid-Paleozoic, coinciding with the onset of generally lower extinction rates. Physiological theory provides us with a possible causal link between these two observations-predicting that the synergistic impacts of oxygen and temperature on aerobic respiration would have made marine animals more vulnerable to ocean warming events during periods of limited surface oxygenation. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that changes in surface oxygenation exerted a first-order control on extinction rates through the Phanerozoic using a combined Earth system and ecophysiological modeling approach. We find that although continental configuration, the efficiency of the biological carbon pump in the ocean, and initial climate state all impact the magnitude of modeled biodiversity loss across simulated warming events, atmospheric oxygen is the dominant predictor of extinction vulnerability, with metabolic habitat viability and global ecophysiotype extinction exhibiting inflection points around 40% of present atmospheric oxygen. Given this is the broad upper limit for estimates of early Paleozoic oxygen levels, our results are consistent with the relative frequency of high-magnitude extinction events (particularly those not included in the canonical big five mass extinctions) early in the Phanerozoic being a direct consequence of limited early Paleozoic oxygenation and temperature-dependent hypoxia responses.
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