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

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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.