From salt to sea, how does life recolonize a marine basin?

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During shipboard operations whilst sailing on IODP Expedition 398 in the Aegean Sea, a complete section of the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene was recovered. This interval marks the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis, the time when closure of the Gibraltar Strait may have caused much of the Mediterranean Sea to become drawn down and inhospitable to many aquatic organisms. Not only is this the first sediment core recovered from the Messinian Salinity Crisis since 1996, but it also the most complete record ever recovered in all 55 years of scientific ocean drilling. To investigate this interval, I propose to acquire funding from IODP to perform preliminary analyses at the University of Bristol. These sediments and the fossil remains they contain represent a unique opportunity to study the ecological response of marine communities within an ecosystem transitioning back to fully marine. The study has implications not only for understanding the potential effects of future climate change as marine environments become more hostile, but also for analogues of ancient Earth scenarios when marine ecosystems exhibited a significantly different chemical state to the modern ocean.