Ocean Life on the Brink: Quantifying the Collapse of Shallow Marine Ecosystems during the Permo-Triassic Crisis

濒临边缘的海洋生物：量化二叠纪-三叠纪危机期间浅海生态系统的崩溃

• 批准号: 437964999
• 负责人: Dr. William Foster, Ph.D.
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: School of Earth and Environment
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Independent Junior Research Groups
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/437964999?language=en
• 关键词: Ocean; Life; Brink; Quantifying; Collapse

Understanding how marine life responds to climate warming is attracting considerable attention from scientists, policy makers, and the general public, as it has implications for the evolution of life and the threat of a modern-day biodiversity crisis. The Permo-Triassic climate crisis, which occurred 252 million years ago, is a period of climate warming at similar rates to current trends and witnessed a mass extinction, which provides an analogue for understanding the current climate and biodiversity crises. A large suite of environmental changes associated with the Permo-Triassic crisis have been invoked as the cause of the end-Permian mass extinction. Yet, those changes have not been directly linked with the fossil record, and their role in the extinctions is heavily debated. Our comprehension of what specific factors best explain the mass extinction, therefore, remains equivocal.To constrain which factors best explain the extinctions during the Permo-Triassic crisis and changes in community structure, this Emmy Noether Research Group will be interdisciplinary specialising in palaeoecology, geochemistry and data science. This includes generating lipid biomarker, iron speciation, oxygen isotope, and boron isotope records that will serve as independent proxies for environmental conditions (including changes in redox conditions, temperature, pH, primary productivity, and more). These records will be collected alongside diversity, community, and ecological data as records of marine ecosystem changes associated with the mass extinction. The research group will also, for the first time, integrate the direct changes in geochemical proxies, and fossil data using multivariate statistics to reveal significant relationships between the different datasets. This new, interdisciplinary, multivariate approach is essential if we want to improve our understanding on the relative importance of different environmental controls on the collapse of marine ecosystems, which can otherwise not be achieved when focusing on just one or two variables. For this proposal to be successful, new high-resolution geochemical and palaeoecological data is required and will be collected from China, Svalbard, Turkey, and Italy. These locations were identified as the best places for this project, as my preliminary work revealed exceptional preservation of fossils and geochemical proxies. These locations were also chosen because they represent a range of habitats, water depths, regions and latitudes that will give a greater insight into the dynamics of the Permo-Triassic crisis. This novel approach will provide a foundation for Earth scientists to quantitatively investigate abiotic-biotic interactions and improve our understanding of how marine life responds to climate crises. This might influence the fate of marine communities in the future, and the research group’s findings will inform future governance of the world's oceans, as we look to prevent a contemporary mass extinction.

了解海洋生物如何应对气候变暖引起了科学家，政策制定者和公众的极大关注，因为它对生命的进化和现代生物多样性危机的威胁具有影响。二叠纪-三叠纪气候危机发生在2.52亿年前，是一个气候变暖的时期，其速度与目前的趋势相似，并目睹了大规模灭绝，这为理解当前的气候和生物多样性危机提供了一个类比。与二叠纪-三叠纪危机相关的一系列环境变化被认为是二叠纪末大灭绝的原因。然而，这些变化与化石记录没有直接联系，它们在进化中的作用也存在很大争议。因此，我们对哪些特定因素最能解释大灭绝的理解仍然模棱两可。为了限制哪些因素最能解释二叠纪-三叠纪危机期间的灭绝和群落结构的变化，这个埃米诺特研究小组将是跨学科的，专门从事古生态学，地球化学和数据科学。这包括生成脂质生物标志物，铁形态，氧同位素和硼同位素记录，这些记录将作为环境条件的独立代理（包括氧化还原条件，温度，pH值，初级生产力等的变化）。这些记录将与生物多样性、群落和生态数据一起收集，作为与大规模灭绝相关的海洋生态系统变化的记录。该研究小组还将首次整合地球化学代理的直接变化，并使用多元统计数据来揭示不同数据集之间的重要关系。如果我们想更好地理解不同环境控制对海洋生态系统崩溃的相对重要性，这种新的跨学科多变量方法是必不可少的，否则只关注一两个变量是无法实现的。为使这一建议获得成功，需要从中国、斯瓦尔巴特群岛、土耳其和意大利收集新的高分辨率地球化学和古生态数据。这些地点被确定为该项目的最佳地点，因为我的初步工作显示了化石和地球化学代理的特殊保存。选择这些地点也是因为它们代表了一系列栖息地，水深，区域和纬度，这将使人们更深入地了解二叠纪-三叠纪危机的动态。这种新方法将为地球科学家定量研究非生物-生物相互作用提供基础，并提高我们对海洋生物如何应对气候危机的理解。这可能会影响未来海洋群落的命运，研究小组的研究结果将为未来世界海洋的治理提供信息，因为我们希望防止当代的大规模灭绝。