According to new research from Florida State University, there was a decline in the Molybdenum element across the planet's oceans.
The decrease may have contributed to the mass extinction, in which up to 90% of species in the oceans died, and it suggests that much more organic carbon was buried in the extinction event than had been previously estimated. AGU Advances publishes the work.
Jeremy Owens is an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University. "Our findings help us understand how much carbon was cycling through the system, and it's much larger than previously thought, potentially on the scale of modern atmospheric and oceanic increases."
It was not clear how widespread the decrease was, how early it started or how long it lasted.
In order to answer those questions, the researchers analyzed rocks from three sites in Canada, which had been part of a massive ocean. The site was connected to the global ocean, which made it possible for the researchers to see conditions across the globe.
There are new estimates for the start and duration of the deoxygenation. The decrease preceded the start of the extinction and was much longer than scientists had thought.
The increase in organic carbon burial in the ocean may have been several times larger because of the decrease inMolybdenum. Estimates of carbon dioxide released from volcanic activity were used to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that would need to be balanced.
More and more carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth system, which could reduce marine trace metals such asMolybdenum that many organisms rely on for survival as the oceans lose oxygen and bury more organic carbon. The process of global conditions becoming more hospitable to life took hundreds of thousands of years.
The study sites have allowed us to take a deep look into how the chemistry of the global ocean changed over millions of years, which reconciles much of the current scientific debates that are focused on the local versus global aspects of this time interval.
The Reduced Marine Molybdenum Inventory Related to Enhanced Organic Carbon Burial and an Expansion of Reducing Environments in the Toarcian, AGU Advances was written by T. R. Them and his team. It was published on 10.1029/2022AV000671.
Journal information: AGU Advances
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