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

了解海洋生物对气候变暖的反应引起了科学家、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重要意义。二叠纪-三叠纪气候危机发生在2.52亿年前，是一个与当前趋势相似的气候变暖时期，并见证了大规模物种灭绝，这为理解当前的气候和生物多样性危机提供了一个类似的例子。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，这些变化并没有与化石记录直接联系起来，它们在物种灭绝中的作用也备受争议。因此，我们对哪些具体因素最能解释大灭绝的理解仍然模棱两可。为了确定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，埃米·诺特研究小组将跨学科地专攻古生态学、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（包括氧化还原条件、温度、pH、初级生产力等的变化）的独立代理。这些记录将与多样性、群落和生态数据一起收集，作为与大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。如果我们想提高我们对不同环境控制对海洋生态系统崩溃的相对重要性的理解，这种新的、跨学科的、多变量的方法是必不可少的，否则只关注一两个变量是无法实现的。为了使这一建议获得成功，需要新的高分辨率地球化学和古生态数据，这些数据将从中国、斯瓦尔巴群岛、土耳其和意大利收集。这些地点被确定为这个项目的最佳地点，因为我的初步工作揭示了化石和地球化学代用物的特殊保存。之所以选择这些地点，还因为它们代表了一系列的栖息地、水深、地区和纬度，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，研究小组的发现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。

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.