Geobiology, palaeontology, and evolution – Page 2

Deccan Trap sprung by bolide?

Published on October 15, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

It was 35 years back that father and son team Luis and Walter Alvarez upset a great many geoscientists by suggesting that a very thin layer of iridium-rich mud that contained glass spherules and shocked mineral grains was evidence for a large meteorite having struck Earth. They especially annoyed palaeontologists because of their claim that it occurred at the very top of the youngest Cretaceous and that the mud was spread far and wide in deep- and shallow-marine stratigraphic sequences and also in those of continental rocks. It marked the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras and, of course, the demise of the dinosaurs and a great many more, less ‘sexy’ beasts. Luis was a physicist, his son a proper geologist and their co-researchers were chemists. It can hardly be said that they stole anyone’s thunder since the issue of mass extinctions was quiescent, yet their discovery ranks with that of Alfred Wegener; another interloper into the closed-shop geoscientific community. They got the same cold-shoulder treatment, but massive popular acclaim as well, even from a minority of geologists who welcomed their having shaken up their colleagues, 15 years after the last ‘big thing’: plate tectonics. And then the actual site of the impact was found by geophysicists in a sedimentary basin in the Gulf of Mexico off the small town of Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula.

As they say, ‘the rest is history’ and a great many geoscientists didn’t just jump but pounced on this potential bandwagon. Central to this activity was the fact that, within error, the ages of the impact, the mass extinction and a vast pile of continental lavas in western India, the Deccan Traps, were more or less the same (around 66 Ma). Flood basalt events are just about as dramatic as mega-impacts because of their sheer scale, of the order of a million cubic kilometres; that they were exuded in a mere million years or so, but in only a few tens of stupendous lava flows; and they are far beyond the direct experience of humans, blurting out only every 30 Ma or so. This periodicity roughly tallies with mass extinctions, great and small, through the Mesozoic. There have been two large bands of enthusiasts engaged in the causality of the end-Mesozoic die-off – the extraterrestrials and the parochialists who favoured a more mundane, albeit cataclysmic snuffing-out. Mass extinctions in general have been repeatedly examined, and in recent years it has become clear that most of those since 250 Ma ago seem to be associated with basalt-flood events and are purely terrestrial in origin. As regards the event that ended the Mesozoic, it has proved difficult to resolve whether to point the finger at the Deccan Traps or the Chicxulub impact. Both might have severely damaged the biosphere in perhaps different ways, so a ‘double whammy’ has become a compromise solution.

The Western Ghat hills at Matheran in Maharash... — Deccan flood basalts forming the Western Ghats in Maharashtra, India (credit: Wikipedia)

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort from different quarters has gone into charting the progress of the Deccan volcanism. Some dating seemed at one stage to place the bulk of the volcanism significantly before the mass extinction and impact, others had them spot on and there were even signs of an hiatus in eruptions at the critical juncture. The problem was geochronological precision of the argon-argon method of radiometric dating that is most used for rocks of basaltic composition: many labs cannot do better than an uncertainty of 1%, which is ±0.7 Ma for ages around the end of the Mesozoic, not far short of the entire duration of these huge events. Some Deccan samples have now been dated to a standard of ±0.1 Ma by the Ar-Ar lab at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California-Berkeley (Renne, P.R. et al. 2010. State shift in Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, possibly induced by impact. Science, v. 350, p. 76-78). The results, between 65.5 to 66.5 Ma, nicely bracket the K/T (now K/Pg) boundary age of 66.04±0.04 Ma. It looks like the double whammy compromise is the hypothesis of choice. But there is more to mere dating.

Renne and colleagues plot the ages against their position in the volcanic stratigraphy of the Deccan Traps in two ways: against the estimated height from base in the pile and against the estimated volume of the erupted materials as it built up – the extent and thickness of successive flows varies quite a lot. The second plot provided a surprise. After the K/Pg event the mean rate of effusion – the limited number of individual flows capped by well-developed soils shows that the build-up was episodic – doubled from 0.4±0.2 to 0.9±0.3 km³yr^-1. Despite the much larger uncertainty in the extent and volume of individual lava Formations than that of their ages, this is clearly significant. Does it imply that the Chicxulub impact somehow affected the magma production from, the mantle plume beneath the Deccan? It had been suggested early in the debate that the antipodean position of the lava field relative to that of Chicxulub may indicate that the huge seismicity from the impact triggered the Deccan magma production. Few accepted that possibility when it first appeared. However, Renne and co. do think it deserves another look, at least at the possibility of some linked effect on the magmatism. Perhaps the magma chamber was somehow enlarged by increased global seismicity; other chambers could have been added; magma might have been ‘pumped’ out more efficiently, or a combination of such effects. The ‘plumbing’ of flood basalt piles is generally hidden, but huge dyke swarms in Precambrian times have been suggested as feeders to long-eroded flood basalts. Seismicity of the scale produced by asteroid impacts can do a lot of damage. The Chicxulub impactor at around 10 km diameter would have carried energy a million times greater than that of the largest thermonuclear bomb, equivalent to an earthquake of Magnitude 12.4 that would have been a thousand times more powerful than the largest recorded earthquake with tectonic causes. Extensional faulting sourced in this fashion in the Deccan area may have increased the pathways along which magma might blurt out.

Duncan, R. 2015. Deadly combination. Nature, v. 527, p. 172-173.

Evidence that Earth’s first mass extinction was caused by critters not catastrophe

Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions – were humans to blame?

Published on August 4, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

Australia and the Americas had an extremely diverse fauna of large beasts (giant wombats and kangeroos in Australia; elephants, bears, big cats, camelids, ground sloths etc in the Americas) until the last glaciation and the warming period that led into the Holocene interglacial. The majority of these megafauna species vanished suddenly during that recent period. To a lesser extent something similar happened in Eurasia, but nothing significant in Africa. Because the last glacial cycle also saw migration of efficient human hunter-gatherers to every other continent except Antarctica, many ecologists, palaeontologists and anthropologists saw a direct link between human predation and the mass extinction (see Earth-Pages of April 2012. Earlier humans had indeed spread far and wide in Eurasia before, and the crude hypothesis that the last arrivals in Australasia and the Americas devoured all the meatiest prey in three continents had some traction as a result: predation in Eurasia and Africa by earlier hominids would have made surviving prey congenitally wary of bipeds with spears. In Australia and the Americas the megafauna species would have been naive and confident in their sheer bulk, numbers, speed and, in some cases, ferocity. Other possibilities emerged, such as the introduction of viruses to which faunas had no immunity or as a result of climate change, but none of the three possibilities has gained incontrovertible proof. But the most popular, human connection has had severe knocks in the last couple of years. A fourth, that the extinctions stemmed from a comet impact proved to have little traction.

Since the amazing success of analysing the bulk DNA debris in sea water – environmental DNA or eDNA – to look at the local diversity of marine animals, the analytical and computing techniques that made it possible have been turned to ancient terrestrial materials: soils, permafrost and glacial ice. One of the first attempts revealed mammoth and pre-Columbian horse DNA surviving in Alaskan permafrost, thanks to the herds’ copious urination and dung spreading. Several articles in the 24 July 2015 issue of Science review ancient DNA advances, including eDNA from soils that chart changes in both fauna and flora over the last glacial cycle (Pennisi, E. 2015. Lost worlds found. Science, v. 349, p. 367-369). Combined with a variety of means of dating the material that yield the ancient eDNA, an interesting picture is emerging. The soil and permafrost samples potentially express ancient ecosystems in far more detail than would fossil animals or pollens, many of which are too similar to look at the species level and in any case are dominated by the most abundant plants rather than showing those critical in the food chain.

The first major success in palaeoecology of this kind came with a 50-author paper using eDNA ‘bar-coding’ of permafrost from 242 sites in Siberia and Alaska IWillerslev, E. and 49 others 2014. Fifty thousand years of Arctic vegetation and megafaunal diet. Nature, v. 506, p. 47-51. doi:10.1038/nature12921). Dividing the samples into 3 time spans – 50-25, 25-15 (last glacial maximum) and younger than 15 ka – the team found these major stages in the last glacial cycle mapped an ecological change from a dry tundra dominated by abundant herbaceous plants (forbs including abundant anemones and forget-me-not), to a markedly depleted Arctic steppe ecosystem then moist tundra with woody plants and grasses dominating. They also analysed the eDNA of dung and gut contents from ice-age megafauna, such as mammoths, bison and woolly rhinos, where these were found, which showed that forbs were the mainstay of their diet. Using bones of large mammals 6 member of the team also established the timing of extinctions in the last 56 ka (Cooper, A. et al. 2015. Abrupt warming events drove Late Pleistocene Holarctic megafaunal turnover. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4315), showing 31 regional extinction pulses linked to the rapid ups and downs of climate during Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles in the run-up to the last glacial maximum. By the end of the last glacial maximum, the megafauna were highly stressed by purely climatic and ecological factors. Human predation probably finished them off.

Climate Change Doomed the Mammoths

Hallucigenia gets a head

Published on July 7, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

The Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of the Canadian Rockies is one of those celebrated sediments that show extraordinary preservation of soft-bodied and easily disarticulated organisms and rich assemblages of fossils. Being one of the earliest known of such lagerstätten, many of the denizens of the ecosystem in which the shale originated were at first regarded as members of hitherto undiscovered and now vanished phyla, the basal branches of the ‘tree of life’. Some certainly looked pretty odd, such as Opabina with a feeding apparatus looking similar to the extension nozzle of a vacuum cleaner; but that is clearly some kind of arthropod. Others turned out to be astonishingly large, once it was realised that parts of their broken bodies had previously been taken to be different organisms, an example being Anomalocaris. But perhaps the oddest, certainly to palaeontologists, was Hallucigenia. However, there are plenty of even more weird and wonderful living creatures, such as the sea pig, although modern creatures are more easily pigeonholed, taxonomically speaking.

The trouble with Hallucigenia was not so much its complexity – it was a fairly simple-looking beast – but that there were two choices as to which way up it lived; a feature that surprisingly led to a great deal of pondering that ended with the scientist who formally described it in 1977 making the wrong choice. That was eventually resolved fourteen years later, but the creature might also have inspired the Pushmi Pullyu in Hugh Lofting’s Dr Doolittle stories for children. Not that it resembled a unicorn-gazelle cross: far from it, for no-one could decide which its front was and which its backside, and even if it may have lain on its side. But Hallucigenia does demonstrate bilateral symmetry beautifully – it must have a front and back, and a top and bottom, even though which was which remained veiled in mystery – and so belongs to the dominant group of animals, imaginatively known as bilaterians.

The Burgess Shale lagerstätte seemingly was heaving with Hallucigenia so would-be taxonomists have had no shortage of specimens to ponder over in the 38 years since Simon Conway Morris made his dreadful mistake: of course, that was not of such enormity as Einstein’s ‘biggest blunder’ in the form of his cosmological constant, and Conway Morris quickly accepted his error when the beast was turned right-way-up in 1991. The problem is, exquisite as they are, Burgess Shale fossils are flattened and all that remains of mainly soft-bodied animals are delicate carbonaceous films, which need electron microscopy to unravel.

The latest reconstruction of Hallucigenia, by palaeontological illustrator Danielle Dufault (http://www.ddufault.com) — The latest reconstruction of Hallucigenia, by palaeontological illustrator Danielle Dufault

In 2015, Hallucigenia’s front end was definitely found and a great deal more besides by Canadian palaeontologists Martin Smith and Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto (Smith, M.R. & Caron J.-B. 2015. Hallucigenia’s head and the pharyngeal armature of early ecdysozoans. Nature, v. 523, p. 75-78). It has eyes, albeit rudimentary, and a throat, deep within which it has pointy teeth. Hallucigenia was a lobopod, whose living relatives lie within that large and diverse group the Ecdysozoa, which all have throat teeth and include the wondrous water bear (tardigrade) and the velvet- and penis worms (onychophores and priapulids, respectively) as well as lobsters, flies and woodlice. It may indeed have been close to the last common ancestor of all animals who moult their carapaces.

Flourishing life during a Snowball Earth period

Published on June 18, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

That glacial conditions were able to spread into tropical latitudes during the late Neoproterozoic, Cryogenian Period is now well established, as are the time spans of two such events. http://earth-pages.co.uk/2015/05/21/snowball-earth-events-pinned-down/ But what were the consequences for life that was evolving at the time? That something dramatic was occurring is signalled by a series of perturbations in the carbon-isotope composition of seawater. Its relative proportion of ¹³C to ¹²C (δ¹³C) fell sharply during the two main Snowball events and at other times between 850 to 550 Ma. Since ¹²C is taken up preferentially by living organisms, falls in δ¹³C are sometimes attributed to periods when life was unusually suppressed. It is certain that the ‘excursions’ indicate that some process(es) must have strongly affected the way that carbon was cycled in the natural world.

The further sea ice extended beyond landmasses during Snowball events the more it would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the liquid ocean and so photosynthesis would be severely challenged. Indeed, if ice covered the entire ocean surface – the extreme version of the hypothesis – each event must have come close to extinguishing life. An increasing amount of evidence, from climate- and oceanographic modelling and geological observation, suggests that a completely icebound Earth was unlikely. Nevertheless, such dramatic climate shifts would have distressed living processes to the extent that extinction rates were high and so was adaptive radiation of survivors to occupy whatever ecological niches remained or came into being: evolution was thereby speeded up. The roughly half-billion years of the Neoproterozoic hosted the emergence and development of multicellular organisms (metazoan eukaryotes) whose cells contained a nucleus and other bodies such as mitochondria and the chloroplasts of photosynthesisers. This hugely important stage of evolution burst forth shortly after – in a geological sense – the last Snowball event, during the Ediacaran and the Cambrian Explosion. But recent investigations by palaeontologists in glaciogenic rocks from China unearthed a rich diversity of fossil organisms that thrived during a Snowball event (Ye, Q. et al. 2015. The survival of benthic macroscopic phototrophs on a Neoproterozoic snowball Earth. Geology, v. 43, p. 507-510).

The Nantuo Formation in southern China contains glaciogenic sedimentary rocks ascribed to the later Marinoan glaciation (640 to 635 Ma). Unusually, the pebbly Nantuo glaciogenic rocks contain thin layers of siltstones and black shales. The fact that these layers are free of coarse fragments that floating ice may have dropped supports the idea that open water did exist close to glaciated landmasses in what is now southern China. Palaeomagnetic measurements show that the area was at mid-latitudes during the Marinoan event. The really surprising feature is that they contain abundant, easily visible fossils in the form of carbonaceous ribbons , disks, branching masses and some that dramatically resemble complex multi-limbed animals, though they are more likely to be part of an assemblage of algal remains. Whatever their biological affinities, the fossils clearly signify that life happily flourished beneath open water where photosynthesis provided a potential base to a food chain, though no incontrovertible animals occur among them.

See also: Corsetti, F.A. 2015. Live during Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth. Geology, v. 43, p. 559-560.

Fossils Explain How Life Coped During Snowball Earth

The dinosaur they could not kill: Brontosaurus is back

Published on April 20, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

It would be pretty safe to say that everyone has heard of Brontosaurus, but in the 1970s the genus vanished from the palaeobiology lexicon. The ‘Bone Wars’ of post-Civil War US palaeontology stemmed from the astonishing prices that dinosaur skeletons fetched. The frenzy of competition to fill museums unearthed hundreds of specimens, but the financial enthusiasm did not extend to painstaking anatomy. Finding a new genus meant further profit so a slapdash approach to taxonomy might pay well. So it did with the dinosaur family Diplodocidae for Othniel Marsh, one of the fossil marauders. He along with his main competitor, Edward Cope, was a wizard fossicker, but lacked incentive to properly describe what he unearthed. In 1877 Marsh published a brief note about a new genus that he called Apatosaurus, then hurried off to for more booty. Two years later he returned from the field with another monster reptile, and casually made a brief case for the ‘Thunder Lizard’, Brontosaurus. Unlike his usage of ‘Deceptive Lizard’ for Apatosaurus, the English translation of Brontosaurus caught the public imagination and lingers to this day as the archetype for a mighty yet gentle, extinct beast. Yet, professional palaeontologists were soon onto the lax ways of Marsh and Cope, and by 1903 deemed Brontosaurus to be taxonomically indistinguishable from Apatosaurus, and as far as science was concerned the ‘Thunder Lizard’ was no more.

Illustration of a Brontosaurus (nowadays calle... — Artist’s impression of a Brontosaurus . The idea that it was wholly or mostly aquatic is now considered outdated. (credit: Wikipedia)

But, the legacy of frenzied fossil collecting of a century or more ago is huge collections that never made it to display, which form rich pickings for latter-day palaeontologists with all kinds of anatomical tools now at their disposal: the stuff of almost endless graduate studies. Emanuel Tschopp of the New University of Lisbon with colleagues took up the challenge of the Diplodocidae by examining 49 named specimens and 32 from closely related specimens as controls, measuring up to 477 skeletal features (Tschopp, E. et al. 2015. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). PeerJ, v. 3, doi10.771/peerj.857). An unintended consequence was their discovery that 6 specimens of what had become Apatosaurus excelsus (formerly Marsh’s Brontosaurus) differed from all other members of its genus in 12 or more key characteristics. It seems to taxonomists a little unfair that Brontosaurus should not be resurrected, and that looks likely.

Had this been about almost any other group of fossils, with the exception perhaps of the ever-popular tyrannosaurs, the lengthy paper would have passed unnoticed except by specialist palaeontologists. In a little over a week the open-access publication had more than 17 thousand views and 3300 copies were downloaded.

See also: Balter, M. 2015. Bully for Brontosaurus. Science, v. 348, p. 168

Brontosaurus dino name is revived

Reconstructing the structure of ancient vegetation canopies

Published on January 25, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

One of the central measures used to describe modern ecosystems is the ratio of foliage area to that of the ground surface – the leaf area index (LAI) – which expresses the openness of vegetation canopies. A high LAI helps to retain moisture in the soil, partly by shading and cooling the surface to reduce evaporation and partly by stopping surface soil from being battered to a concrete-like consistency by heavy rain, which reduces the amount of water that can infiltrate. It is possible to estimate LAI across today’s entire land area using satellite image data but a proxy for palaeoecological LAI has remained hard to find.

The outer coating of leaves in well-shaded (high LAI) areas tends to have protective or pavement cells that are larger and have more complicated shapes than does that of leaves in more open canopies. The framework of leaf cells is silica-based and made up of structures known as phytoliths whose morphologies vary in much the same way as the cells that they support. So theoretically it is possible to use fossil phytoliths in terrestrial sediments to estimate LAI variations through time in local canopies, but first the approach needs a means of calibration from living ecosystems. The vegetation of Central American Costa Rica varies through the entire range of possible LAI values, which leads to varying amounts of sunlight available to the leaves of cover plants. Measuring the area and the degree of shape-complexity of phytoliths in modern soils there shows that each is positively correlated with LAI.

Putting this approach to use in the Cenozoic terrestrial sediments of Patagonia, US and Argentinean palaeoecologists aimed to examine how the evolution of the teeth of herbivorous mammals – a major feature in their speciation – linked to changes in vegetation structure (Dunn, R.E. et al. 2015. Linked canopy, climate and faunal change in the Cenozoic of Patagonia. Science, v. 347, p. 258-261). Using phytoliths they were able to show that in the Eocene the area was covered by dense, closed forest canopies that gradually became more open towards the end of the Eocene to be replaced by open forest and shrubland habitats in the Oligocene and Miocene, with a brief period of regreening. It was during the period of more open vegetation that tooth structure underwent the most change. Chances are that the vegetation shifts began in response to the onset of Antarctic glaciation at the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch and related climate change at the northern margin of the Southern Ocean. Changes in the herbivore teeth may have been in response to the increasing amount of dust adhering to leaves as canopies became more open and soil increasingly dried out.

Verneshots (huge volcanic gas blasts) ten years on

Published on January 15, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

One of the most daring hypotheses of modern geosciences: is that of the ‘Verneshot’ reported by Earth Pages in 2004. Jason Phipps Morgan and colleagues explored the possible consequences of a build-up of volatiles in plume-related magmas at the base of thick continental lithosphere beneath cratons, prior to the eruption of continental flood basalts. They suggested that pressure would eventually result in an explosive release at a lithospheric weak point, followed by collapse above the plume head that would propagate upwards, at hypersonic speeds. Modelling the forces involved, the authors of the novel idea considered that they would be sufficient to fling huge rock masses into orbit. Verneshots might neatly explain the circumstances around mass extinctions, such as their coincidence with continental flood basalt events; large impact structures, most likely at the antipode of the event; global debris layers containing shocked rock, melt spherules; unusual element suites and compounds (including fullerenes); and enough toxic gas to cause biological devastation.

Ten years on, Verneshots are back, again in the prestigious journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and this time among the co-authors are Morgan père et fils (W. Jason a founder of plate tectonics, and Jason P. who launched the idea). This time the yet-to-be –accepted hypothesis comes with evidence of an extremely unusual and fortuitous kind (Vannucchi, P. et al. 2015. Direct evidence of ancient shock metamorphism at the site of the 1908 Tunguska event. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 409, p. 168-174). The origin of the paper lies in an attempt to verify reports of shocked quartz in samples collected close to the centre of the 2000 km² devastation that resulted from what is now accepted to have been a comet or asteroid air-burst explosion in June 1908 in the Tunguska region of Siberia. Apart from a disputed 300 m crater in the area, the Tunguska Event left no long-lived sign: it ‘merely’ knocked over millions of trees. However, its epicenter lay in a 10 km depression ringed by hills, that has been suggested to be a volcanic centre associated with the end-Permian Siberian Traps.

Trees knocked down and burned over hundreds of square km by the 1908Tunguska Event (credit: Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik deceased) — Trees knocked down and burned over hundreds of square km by the 1908 Tunguska Event (credit: Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik deceased)

The reported shocked quartz locality turned out to associated with an isolated occurrence of quartz-rich sand and rounded clasts of quartzite that contains sedimentary structures. The occurrence is surrounded by basalts of the Siberian Traps, yet is situated topographically above them. The quartzite is thought to be Permian terrestrial sandstone that commonly underlies much of the remaining extent of Siberian Traps.

Quartzite clasts do indeed contain shocked quartz, together with pseudotachylite glass veinlets, quartz and feldspar crystal growth on sedimentary grains and silica-rich glassy spherules. These features are not uniquely diagnostic of shock metamorphism, but are oddly absent from the surrounding Siberian Traps nearby, which suggests that whatever formed them predated the final eruptive stages of the end-Permian large igneous province. Indeed it would be unlikely that airburst of some extraterrestrial bolide in 1908 could produce the metamorphic features of the quartzites without setting ablaze the trees that it felled. A second possibility, that the Tunguska Depression is a Permo-Triassic impact crater and the quartzites being part of an associated central uplift runs into the unlikely coincidence of lying less than 5 km from the 1908 epicentre.

A third hypothesis is that the Tunguska Depression is a massive diatreme associated with a Verneshot. Another odd association lies 8 km to the south of the epicentre, a carbonatite that is one of many, along with smaller pipe-like structures all possibly linked to magmatic gas escape. The Tunguska Event, a mighty puzzle in its own right, may perhaps be eclipsed. Will silence return as it did after the original Verneshot hypothesis was published? Quite possibly, but another quirk about the Siberian Traps was reported by Earth Pages in mid-2014. In a contribution to a link between this massive end-Permian volcanic effusion and the Permian-Triassic mass extinction it was noted that in the Chinese sedimentary repository of evidence for the extinction there is an isolated spike in the abundance of nickel that is almost certainly of volcanic origin, but only the one when repeated flood basalt events perhaps ought to have led to a series of nickel anomalies. One huge volcanic gas release as the Siberian Traps were building up?

Breathing spaces or toxic traps in the Archaean ocean

Published on July 31, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

The relationship between Earth’s complement of free oxygen and life seems to have begun in the Archaean, but it presented a series of paradoxes: produced by photosynthetic organisms oxygen would have been toxic to most other Archaean life forms; its presence drew an important micronutrient, dissolved iron-2, from sea water by precipitation of iron-3 oxides; though produced in seawater there is no evidence until about 2.4 Ga for its presence in the air. It has long been thought that the paradoxes may have been resolved by oxygen being produced in isolated patches, or ‘oases’ on the Archaean sea floor, where early blue-green bacteria evolved and thrived.

A stratigraphic clue to the former presence of such oxygen factories is itself quite convoluted. The precipitation of calcium carbonates and therefore the presence of limestones in sedimentary sequences are suppressed by dissolved iron-2: the presence of Fe²⁺ ions would favour the removal of bicarbonate ions from seawater by formation of ferrous carbonate that is less soluble than calcium carbonate. Canadian and US geochemists studied one of the thickest Archaean limestone sequences, dated at around 2.8 Ga, in the wonderfully named Wabigoon Subprovince of the Canadian Shield which is full of stromatolites, bulbous laminated masses probably formed from bacterial biofilms in shallow water (Riding, R. et al. 2014. Identification of an Archean marine oxygen oasis. Precambrian Research, v. 251, p. 232-237).

Limestones from the sequence that stable isotope analyses show to remain unaltered all have abnormally low cerium concentrations relative to the other rare-earth elements. Unaltered limestones from stromatolite-free, deep water limestones show no such negative Ce anomaly. Cerium is the only rare-earth element that has a possible 4+ valence state as well one with lower positive charge. So in the presence of oxygen cerium can form an insoluble oxide and thus be removed from solution. So cerium independently shows that the shallow water limestones formed in seawater that contained free oxygen. Nor was it an ephemeral condition, for the anomalies persist through half a kilometer of limestone.

The study shows that anomalous oxygenated patches existed on the Archaean sea floor, probably shallow-water basins or shelves isolated by the build up of stromatolite reef barriers. For most prokaryote cells they would have harboured toxic conditions, presenting them with severe chemical stress. Possibly these were the first places where oxygen defence measures evolved, that eventually led to more complex eukaryote cells that not only survive oxygen stress but thrive on its presence. That conjecture is unlikely to be fully proved, since the first undoubted fossils of eukaryote cells, known as acritarchs, occur in rocks that are more than 800 Ma years younger.

Oxygen oasis for early life found in ancient rock

Trapping Martian life forms

Published on July 21, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

No matter how optimistic exobiologists might be, the current approaches to discovering whether or not Mars once hosted life or, the longest shot of all, still does are almost literally hit or miss. First the various teams involved try to select a target area using remotely sensed data to see if rocks or regolith have interacted with water; generally from the presence or absence of clay minerals and /or sulfates that hydrous alteration produces on Earth. Since funding is limited the sites with such ingredients are narrowed down to the ‘best’ – in the case of NASA’s Curiosity rover to Gale Crater where a thick sequence of sediments shows occasional signs of clays and sulfates. But a potential site must also be logistically feasible with the least risk of loss to the lander. Even then, all that can be achieved in existing and planned mission is geochemical analysis of drilled and powdered samples. Curiosity’s ambition is limited to assessing whether the conditions for life were present. Isotopic analysis of any carbon content to check for mass fractionation that may have arisen from living processes is something for a future ESA mission.

Neither approach is likely to prove the existence now or in far-off times of Martian life, though scientists hope to whet the appetite of those holding the purse strings. Only return of rock samples stands any realistic chance of giving substance to the dreams of exobiologists. But what to collect? A random soil grab or drill core is highly unlikely to provide satisfaction one way or the other. Indeed only incontrovertible remains of some kind of cellular material can slake the yearning. Terrestrial materials might provide a guide to (probably) robotic collectors. Kathleen Benison and Francis Karmanocky of West Virginia University have followed this up by examining sulfates from one of the least hospitable places on Earth; the salt flats of the high Andes of Chile (Benison, K.C. & Karmanocky, F.J. 2014. Could microorganisms be preserved in Mars gypsum? Insights from terrestrial examples. Geology, v. 42, p. 615-618).

Evaporite minerals from Andean salars precipitated from extremely acidic and highly saline lake water originating from weathering of surrounding volcanoes. Oddly few researchers have sought cellular life trapped in crystals of salt or gypsum, the two most common minerals in the high-elevation salt pans. Fluid inclusions in sedimentary halite (NaCl) crystals from as far back as the Triassic are known to contain single-celled extremophile prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but gypsum is more likely to be found on Mars. Benison and Karmanocky document a variety of cellular material from Chilean gypsum that has been trapped in the solid mineral itself or in fluid inclusions. This is the most likely means of fossilisation of Martian life forms, if they ever existed. The salar gypsum contain cells that can be cultured and thereby revived since several species can remain dormant for long periods. The authors suggest that transparent cleavage fragments of Martian gypsum could be examined at up to 2000x magnification on future Mars landers. Finding convincing cells would see dancing in exobiology labs, and what if they should move…

A Most Earthly Mineral on Mars

Mass extinctions’ connections with volcanism: more support

Published on July 4, 2014 by zooks7771 Comment

Plot the times of peaks in the rates of extinction during the Mesozoic against those of flood basalt outpourings closest in time to the die-offs and a straight line can be plotted through the data. There is sufficiently low deviation between it and the points that any statistician would agree that the degree of fit is very good. Many geoscientists have used this empirical relationship to claim that all Mesozoic mass extinctions, including the three largest (end-Permian, end-Triassic and end-Cretaceous) were caused in some way by massive basaltic volcanism. The fact that the points are almost evenly spaced – roughly every 30 Ma, except for a few gaps – has suggested to some that there is some kind of rhythm connecting the two very different kinds of event.

Major extinctions and flood basalt events during the Mesozoic (credit: S Drury) — Major Mesozoic extinctions and flood basalt events (credit: S Drury)

Leaving aside that beguiling periodicity, the hypothesis of a flood-basalt – extinction link has a major weakness. The only likely intermediary is atmospheric, through its composition and/or climate; flood volcanism was probably not violent. Both probably settle down quickly in geological terms. Moreover, flood basalt volcanism is generally short-lived (a few Ma at most) and seems not to be continuous, unlike that at plate margins which is always going on at one or other place. The great basalt piles of Siberia, around the Central Atlantic margins and in Western India are made up of individual thick and extensive flows separated by fossil soils or boles. This suggests that magma blurted out only occasionally, and was separated by long periods of normality; say between 10 and 100 thousand years. Evidence for the duration of major accelerations, either from stratigraphy and palaeontology or from proxies such as peaks and troughs in the isotopic composition of carbon (e.g. EPN Ni life and mass extinction) is that they too occurred swiftly; in a matter of tens of thousand years. Most of the points on the flood-basalt – extinction plot are too imprecise in the time dimension to satisfy a definite relationship. Opinion has swung behind an instantaneous impact hypothesis for the K-P boundary event rather than one involving the Deccan Traps in India, simply because the best dating of the Deccan suggests extinction seems to have occurred when no flows were being erupted, while the thin impact-related layer in sediments the world over is exactly at the point dividing Cretaceous flora and fauna from those of the succeeding Palaeogene.

Yet no such link to an extraterrestrial factor is known to exist for any other major extinctions, so volcanism seems to be ‘the only game in town’ for the rest. Until basalt dating is universally more precise than it has been up to the present the case is ‘not proven’; but, in the manner of the Scottish criminal law, each is a ‘cold case’ which can be reopened. The previous article hardens the evidence for a volcanic driver behind the greatest known extinction at the end of the Permian Period. And in short-order, another of the Big Five seems to have been resolved in the same way. A flood basalt province covering a large area of west and north-west Australia (known as the Kalkarindji large igneous province)has long been known to be of roughly Cambrian age but does it tie in with the earliest Phanerozoic mass extinction at the Lower to Middle Cambrian boundary? New age data suggests that it does at the level of a few hundred thousand years (Jourdan, F. et al. 2014. High-precision dating of the Kalkarindji large igneous province, Australia, and synchrony with the Early-Middle Cambrian (Stage 4-5) extinction. Geology, v. 42, p. 543-546). The Kalkarindji basalts have high sulfur contents and are also associated with widespread breccias that suggest that some of the volcanism was sufficiently explosive to have blasted sulfur-oxygen gases into the stratosphere; a known means of causing rapid and massive climatic cooling as well as increasing oceanic acidity. The magma also passed through late Precambrian sedimentary basins which contain abundant organic-rich shales that later sourced extensive petroleum fields. Their thermal metamorphism could have vented massive amounts of CO₂ and methane to result in climatic warming. It may have been volcanically-driven climatic chaos that resulted in the demise of much of the earliest tangible marine fauna on Earth to create also a sudden fall in the oxygen content of the Cambrian ocean basins.

Nickel, life and the end-Permian extinction

Published on June 23, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

The greatest mass extinction of the Phanerozoic closed the Palaeozoic Era at the end of the Permian, with the loss of perhaps as much as 90% of eukaryote diversity on land and at sea. It was also over very quickly by geological standards, taking a mere 20 thousand years from about 252.18 Ma ago. There is no plausible evidence for an extraterrestrial cause, unlike that for the mass extinction that closed the Mesozoic Era and the age of dinosaurs. Almost all researchers blame one of the largest-ever magmatic events that spilled out the Siberian Traps either through direct means, such as climate change related to CO₂, sulfur oxides or atmospheric ash clouds produced by the flood volcanism or indirectly through combustion of coal in strata beneath the thick basalt pile. So far, no proposal has received universal acclaim. The latest proposal relies on two vital and apparently related geochemical observations in rocks around the age of the extinctions (Rothman, D.H. et al. 2014. Methanogenic burst in the end-Permian carbon cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States, v. 111, p. 5462-5467).

Siberian flood-basalt flows in Putorana, Taymyr Peninsula. (Credit: Paul Wignall; Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7364/fig_tab/477285a_F1.html)

In the run-up to the extinction carbon isotopes in marine Permian sediments from Meishan, China suggest a runaway growth in the amount of inorganic carbon (in carbonate) in the oceans. The C-isotope record from Meishan shows episodes of sudden major change (over ~20 ka) in both the inorganic and organic carbon parts of the oceanic carbon cycle. The timing of both ‘excursions’ from the long-term trend immediately follows a ‘spike’ in the concentration of the element nickel in the Meishan sediments. The Ni almost certainly was contributed by the massive outflow of basalt lavas in Siberia. So, what is the connection?

Some modern members of the prokaryote Archaea that decompose organic matter to produce methane have a metabolism that depends on Ni, one genus being Methanosarcina that converts acetate to methane by a process known as acetoclastic methanogenesis. Methanosarcina acquired this highly efficient metabolic pathway probably though a sideways gene transfer from Bacteria of the class Clostridia; a process now acknowledged as playing a major role in the evolution of many aspects of prokaryote biology, including resistance to drugs among pathogens. Molecular-clock studies of the Methanosarcina genome are consistent with this Archaea appearing at about the time of the Late Permian. A burst of nickel ‘fertilisation’ of the oceans may have resulted in huge production of atmospheric methane. Being a greenhouse gas much more powerful than CO₂, methane in such volumes would very rapidly have led to global warming. Before the Siberian Traps began to be erupted nickel would only have been sufficiently abundant to support this kind of methanogen around ocean-floor hydrothermal springs. Spread globally by eruption plumes, nickel throughout the oceans would have allowed Methanosarcina or its like to thrive everywhere with disastrous consequences. Other geochemical processes, such as the oxidation of methane in seawater, would have spread the influence of the biosphere-lithosphere ‘conspiracy’. Methane oxidation would have removed oxygen from the oceans to create anoxia that, in turn, would have encouraged other microorganisms that reduce sulfate ions to sulfide and thereby produce toxic hydrogen sulfide. That gas once in the atmosphere would have parlayed an oceanic ‘kill mechanism’’ into one fatal for land animals.

There is one aspect that puzzles me: the Siberian Traps probably involved many huge lava outpourings every 10 to 100 ka while the magma lasted, as did all other flood basalt events. Why then is the nickel from only such eruption preserved in the Meishan sediments, and if others are known from marine sediments is there evidence for other such methanogen ‘blooms’ in the oceans?

How the first metazoan mass extinction happened

Published on May 12, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

The end-Ordovician mass extinction was the first of five during the Phanerozoic, andthe first that involved multicelled organisms. It happened in two distinct phases that roughly coincided with an intense but short-lived glaciation at the South Pole, then situated within what is now the African continent. Unlike the other four, this biotic catastrophe seems unlinked to either a major impact structure or to an episode of flood volcanism.

seadiorama ordovician — Artist’s impression of an Ordovician shallow-sea community (credit: drtel)

In 2009 Earth Pages reported the curious occurrence in 470 Ma (Darriwilian Stage) Swedish limestones of a large number of altered chondritic meteorites, possible evidence that there may have been an extraterrestrial influence on extinction rates around that time. In support is evidence that the meteorite swarm coincided with megabreccias or olistostromes at what were then Southern Hemisphere continental margins: possible signs of a series of huge tsunamis. But in fact this odd coincidence occurred at a time when metazoan diversity was truly booming: the only known case of impacts possibly favouring life.

Number One of the Big Five mass extinctions occurred during the late-Ordovician Hirnantian stage (443-445 Ma) and has received much less attention than the later ones. So it is good see the balance being redressed by a review of evidence for it and for possible mechanisms (Harper, D.A.T et al. 2014. End Ordovician extinctions: A coincidence of causes. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 1294-1307). The first event of a double-whammy mainly affected free-swimming and planktonic organisms and those of shallow seas; near-surface dwellers such as graptolites and trilobites. The second, about a million years later, hit animals living at all depths in the sea. Between them, the two events removed about 85% of marines species – there were few if any terrestrial animals so this is close to the extinction level that closed the Palaeozoic at around 250 Ma.

No single process can be regarded as the ‘culprit’. However the two events are bracketed by an 80-100 m fall in sea level due to the southern hemisphere glaciation. That may have given rise to changes in ocean oxygen content and in the reduction of sulfur to hydrogen sulfide. Also climate-related may have been changes in the vertical, thermohaline circulation of the oceans, falling temperatures encouraging sinking of surface water to abyssal depths providing more oxygen to support life deep in the water column. Sea-level fall would have reduced the extent of shallow seas too. Those consequences would explain the early demise of shallow water, free swimming animals. Reversal of these trends as glaciation waned may have returned stagnancy and anoxia to deep water, thereby affecting life at all depths. The authors suggest generalized ‘tipping points’ towards which several global processes contributed.

What Triggers a Mass Extinction?

Oxygen, magnetic reversals and mass extinctions

Published on April 17, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

In April 2005 EPN reported evidence for a late Permian fall in atmospheric oxygen concentration to about 16% from its all-time high of 30% in the Carboniferous and earlier Permian.. This would have reduced the highest elevation on land where animals could live to about 2.7 km above sea level, compared with 4 to 5 today. Such an event would have placed a great deal of stress on terrestrial animal families. Moreover, it implies anoxic conditions in the oceans that would stress marine animals too. At the time, it seemed unlikely that declining oxygen was the main trigger for the end-Permian mass extinction as the decline would probably have been gradual; for instance by oxygen being locked into iron-3 compounds that give Permian and Triassic terrestrial sediments their unrelenting red coloration. By most accounts the greatest mass extinction of the Phanerozoic was extremely swift.

The possibility of extinctions being brought on by loss of oxygen from the air and ocean water has reappeared, though with suggestion of a very different means of achieving it (Wei, Y. and 10 others 2014. Oxygen escape from the Earth during geomagnetic reversals: Implications to mass extinction. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 394, p. 94-98). The nub of the issue proposed by the Chinese-German authors is the dissociation and ionization by solar radiation of O₂ molecules into O⁺ ions. If exposed to the solar wind, such ions could literally be ‘blown away’ into interplanetary space; an explanation for the lack of much in the way of any atmosphere on Mars today. Mars is prone to such ionic ablation because it now has a very weak magnetic field and may have been in that state for 3 billion years or more. Earth’s much larger magnetic field diverts the solar wind by acting as an electromagnetic buffer against much loss of gases, except free hydrogen and to a certain extent helium. But the geomagnetic field undergoes reversals, and while they are in progress, the field drops to very low levels exposing Earth to loss of oxygen as well as to dangerous levels of ionising radiation through unprotected exposure of the surface to the solar wind.

Field reversals and, presumably, short periods of very low geomagnetic field associated with them, varied in their frequency through time. For the past 80 Ma the reversal rate has been between 1 and 5 per million years. For much of the Cretaceous Period there were hardly any during a magnetic quiet episode or superchron. Earlier Mesozoic times were magnetically hectic, when reversals rose to rates as high as 7 per million years in the early Jurassic. This was preceded by another superchron that spanned the Permian and Late Carboniferous. Earlier geomagnetic data are haphazardly distributed through the stratigraphic column, so little can be said in the context of reversal-oxygen-extinction connections.

Wei et al. focus on the end-Triassic mass extinction which does indeed coincide, albeit roughly, with low geochemically modelled atmospheric oxygen levels (~15%). This anoxic episode extended almost to the end of the Jurassic, although that was a period of rapid faunal diversification following the extinction event. Yet it does fall in the longest period of rapid reversals of the Mesozoic. However, this is the only clear reversal-oxygen-extinction correlation, the Cenozoic bucking the prediction. In order to present a seemingly persuasive case for their idea, the authors assign mass extinctions not to very rapid events – of the order of hundreds of thousand years at most – which is well supported by both fossils and stratigraphy, but to ‘blocks’ of time of the order of tens of million years.

My own view is that quite possibly magnetic reversals can have adverse consequences for life, but as a once widely considered causal mechanism for mass extinction they have faded from the scene; unlikely to be resurrected by this study. There are plenty of more plausible and better supported mechanisms, such as impacts and flood-basalt outpourings. Yet several large igneous provinces do coincide with the end of geomagnetic superchrons, although that correlation may well be due to the associated mantle plumes marking drastic changes around the core-mantle boundary. According to Wei et al., the supposed 6^th mass extinction of the Neogene has a link to the general speeding up of geomagnetic reversals through the Cenozoic: not much has happened to either oxygen levels or biodiversity during the Neogene, and the predicted 6^th mass extinction has more to do with human activity than the solar wind.

Remote sensing for fossils

Published on April 15, 2014 by zooks7772 Comments

With the growing diversity of data from those parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that pass freely though Earth’s atmosphere, mainly acquired from orbit, an increasing number of attributes of the surface can be mapped remotely. The initial impetus to launch remote sensing satellites in the 1960’s and early 70’s had two strands: to monitor weather conditions and assess vegetation cover with the early metsats, such as TIROS-1, and the first Landsat platform that exploited green plants’ propensity for absorbing visible and largely reflecting near-infrared (NIR) radiation. With the incorporation in the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instruments of wavelength regions in which minerals show spectral diversity, in the reflected short-wave infrared (SWIR) and emitted thermal infrared (TIR), remote sensing became a viable and useful tool for geologists. It figures strongly in lithological mapping and also in the detection of minerals related to various kinds of alteration associated with metal mineralisation and the migration of hydrocarbon-related fluids. The more wavebands with narrower coverage of radiation wavelengths, the more likely are the subtle differences in mineral spectra able to be detected and mapped. Yet, apart from one experimental system (Hyperion aboard NASA’s EO-1 orbital platform) our home planet is not as well served by such hyperspectral systems as is Mars, blessed by two which have fuelled the on-going search for past habitable zones on the Red Planet.

The May 2014 issue of Scientific American includes an article on remote sensing that follows what to many might seem an odd direction: how to increase the chance of finding rich fossil deposits (Anemone, R.L. & Emerson, C.W. 2014. Fossil GPS. Scientific American, v. 310(5), p. 34-39). Apart from targeting a particular stratigraphic unit on a geological map, palaeontological collection has generally been a hit-or-miss affair depending on persistence and a keen eye, with quite a lot of luck. Once a productive locality turns up, such as the Cambrian Burgess shale, the dinosaur-rich Cretaceous sandstone of the Red Deer River badlands of southern Alberta in Canada and the hominin sites of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression, palaeontologists often look no further until its potential is exhausted. Robert Anemone and Charles Emerson felt, as may palaeobiologists do, that one fossil ‘hotspot’ is simply not enough, yet balked at the physical effort, time and frustration needed to find more by trekking through their area of interest, the vast Tertiary sedimentary basins of Wyoming, USA. They decided to try an easier tack: using the few known fossil localities as digital ‘training areas’ for a software interrogation of Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper data in the hope that fossiliferous spots might be subtly different in their optical properties from those that were barren.

The teeth and bones of early Eocene mammals that had drawn them to Wyoming turn up in sandstone beds of the basins. They are pretty distinctive elements of landscape, forming ridges of outcrop because of their relative resistance to erosion, yet for that very reason present a huge selection of possibilities. Being simple mineralogically they also presented a seemingly daunting uniformity. Anemone and Emerson decided on a purely statistical approach using the six visible, NIR and SWIR bands sensed by Landsat ETM, rather than a spectrally oriented strategy using more sophisticated ASTER data with 14 spectral bands. Their chosen algorithm was that based on an artificial neural network that the fossil rich sandstones would train to recognise patterns present in ETM data recorded over them. This purely empirical approach seems to have worked. Of 31 sites suggested by the algorithm 25 yielded abundant vertebrate fossils. Applied to another of Wyoming’s Tertiary basins it also ‘found’ the three most productive known mammal sites there. So, what is it about the fossil-rich sandstones that sets them apart from those that are more likely to be barren? The authors do not offer an explanation. Perhaps it has something to do with reducing conditions that would help preserve organic material better than would sandstones deposited in an oxidising environment. Iron minerals and thereby colour might be a key factor, oxidised sandstones are generally stained red to orange by Fe-3 oxides and hydroxides, whereas reduced sandstone facies may be grey because of iron in the form of sulfides

Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations

Update on giant fossil squirrel

Published on March 31, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

Eleven years on from his announcement in March 2003 of a giant member of the Family Sciuridae (squirrels) found in a lateritic lagerstätte in the Western Ghats of Karnataka State in India (see http://geocities.yahoo.com/pusiffli/squirrels.html – note: this site may no longer be extant) Professor Pandit U. Siffli of the emeritus faculty at the Sringeri Institute of Palaeontology has sent me further news of his investigations. The clay-filled pocket within the mottled zone has proved astonishingly fruitful now that Pandit Unmer has more free time following his retirement. He and his recently graduated colleague, Dr G.B. Harm, have unearthed several more exquisite specimens of Titanosciurus sringeriensis – long-standing readers will recall that the body cavity of the child-sized type specimen of T. sringeriensis contained bones of primitive hamsters, that no doubt the squirrel had consumed, confirming Siffli’s speculation that the creature was the only known member of the Sciuridae that was an obligate carnivore. This view stemmed originally from its formidable dentition.

Confirmation of this astounding revelation comes from two new lines of evidence discovered by Harm – the principle excavator since Siffli became encumbered by what he has described to me as his ‘blessed game leg’. In his letter he says, ‘young Grivas Bodili has informed me in a mood of solemn gaiety that there are burrows in the lagerstätte which contain complete skeletons of hamsters in a cowering posture. There are also abundant coprolites associated with one of the more corpulent specimens of T. sringeriensis that are a rich source of tiny hamster bones and one example of a partly digested avian flight feather’. The pair now have a paper in press (Harm, G.B. & Siffli, P.U. in press 2014. A large predatory sciurid from the Kudremukh laterites, Karnataka, India: evidence from a well-preserved rodent warren. Earth and Sanitary Appliance Letters, doi:11.3319/esal55164).
It seems likely that the early squirrels and hamsters borrowed into the laterite soon after intense tropical weathering has ceased due to climatic cooling associated with the onset of glaciation in Antarctica, probably in late-Eocene times. At that stage the upper laterite must have been soft enough for early mammals to dig into it. Subsequently the palaeosol became indurated as a result of regional desiccation, allowing exquisite preservation. Exact dating by the Ar-Ar method may soon be possible, given samples containing potassium-rich authigenic minerals. The search is now surely on for similar subterranean lagerstätten in the lateritic veneers covering vast tracts of the southern continents, whose formation probably came to a close at roughly the same time as did those of South India.

Artist's impression of the Sringeri carnivorous squirrel (credit: network54.com) — Artist’s impression of T. sringeriensis (credit: network54.com)

Prof Siffli tells me he would welcome communications from other sciurid and laterite researchers at pusiffli@gmail.com

The launch of modern life on Earth

Published on March 1, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

To set against five brief episodes of mass extinction – some would count the present as being the beginning of a sixth – is one short period when animals with hard parts appeared for the first time roughly simultaneously across the Earth. Not only was the Cambrian Explosion sudden and pervasive but almost all phyla, the basic morphological divisions of multicellular life, adopted inner or outer skeletons that could survive as fossils. Such an all-pervading evolutionary step has never been repeated, although there have been many bursts in living diversity. Apart from the origin of life and the emergence of its sexual model, the eukaryotes, nothing could be more important in palaeobiology than the events across the Cambrian-Precambrian boundary.

This eminent event has been marked by most of the latest issue of the journal Gondwana Research (volume 25, Issue 3 for April 2014)in a 20-paper series called Beyond the Cambrian Explosion: from galaxy to genome (summarized by Isozaki, Y., Degan, S.., aruyama,, S.. & Santosh, M. 2014. Beyond the Cambrian Explosion: from galaxy to genome. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 881-883). Of course, these phenomenal events have been at issue since the 19^th century when the division of geological time began to be based on the appearance and vanishing of well preserved and easily distinguished fossils in the stratigraphic column. On this basis roughly the last ninth of the Earth’s history was split on palaeontological grounds into the 3 Eras, 11 Periods, and a great many of the briefer Epochs and Ages that constitute the Phanerozoic. Time that preceded the Cambrian explosion was for a long while somewhat murky mainly because of a lack of means of subdivision and the greater structural and metamorphic damage that had been done to the rocks that had accumulated over 4 billion years since the planet accreted. Detail emerged slowly by increasingly concerted study of the Precambrian, helped since the 1930s by the ability to assign numerical ages to rocks. Signs of life in sediments that had originally been termed the Azoic (Greek for ‘without life’) gradually turned up as far back as 3.5 Ga, but much attention focused on the 400 Ma immediately preceding the start of the Cambrian period once abundant trace fossils had been found in the Ediacaran Hills of South Australia that had been preceded by repeated worldwide glacial epochs. The Ediacaran and Cryogenian Periods (635-541 and 850-635 Ma respectively) of the Neoproterozoic figure prominently in 9 of the papers to investigate or review the ‘back story’ from which the crucial event in the history of life emerged. Six have a mainly Cambrian focus on newly discovered fossils, especially from a sedimentary sequence in southern China that preserves delicate fossils in great detail: the Chengjian Lagerstätte. Others cover geochemical evidence for changes in marine conditions from the Cryogenian to Cambrian and reviews of theories for what triggered the great faunal change.

Since the hard parts that allow fossils to linger are based on calcium-rich compounds, mainly carbonates and phosphates that bind the organic materials in bones and shells, it is important to check for some change in the Ca content of ocean water over the time covered by the discourse. In fact there are signs from Ca-isotopes in carbonates that this did change. A team of Japanese and Chinese geochemists drilled through an almost unbroken sequence of Ediacaran to Lower Cambrian sediments near the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtse River and analysed for ⁴⁴Ca and ⁴²Ca (Sawaki, Y. et al. 2014. The anomalous Ca cycle in the Ediacaran ocean: Evidence from Ca isotopes preserved in carbonates in the Three Gorges area, South China. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 1070-1089) calibrated to time by U-Pb dating of volcanic ash layers in the sequence (Okada, Y. et al. 2014. New chronological constraints for Cryogenian to Cambrian rocks in the Three Gorges, Weng’an and Chengjiang areas, South China. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 1027-1044). They found that there were significant changes in the ratio between the two isotopes. The isotopic ratio underwent a rapid decrease, an equally abrupt increase then a decrease around the start of the Cambrian, which coincided with a major upward ‘spike’ and then a broad increase in the ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr isotope ratio in the Lower Cambrian. The authors ascribe this to an increasing Ca ion concentration in sea water through the Ediacaran and a major perturbation just before the Cambrian Explosion, which happens to coincide with Sr-isotope evidence for a major influx of isotopically old material derived from erosion of the continental crust. As discussed in Origin of the arms race (May 2012) perhaps the appearance of animals’ hard parts did indeed result from initial secretions of calcium compounds outside cells to protect them from excess calcium’s toxic effects and were then commandeered for protective armour or offensive tools of predation.

"SNOWBALL EARTH" - 640 million years ago — Artists impression of a Snowball Earth event 640 Ma ago (credit: guano via Flickr)

Is there is a link between the Cambrian Explosion and the preceding Snowball Earth episodes of the Cryogenian with their associated roller coaster excursions in carbon isotopes? Xingliang Zhang and colleagues at Northwest University in Xian, China (Zhang, X. et al. 2014. Triggers for the Cambrian explosion: Hypotheses and problems. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 896-909) propose that fluctuating Cryogenian environmental conditions conspiring with massive nutrient influxes to the oceans and boosts in oxygenation of sea water through the Ediacaran set the scene for early Cambrian biological events. The nutrient boost may have been through increased transfer o f water from mantle to the surface linked to the start of subduction of wet lithosphere and expulsion of fluids from it as a result of the geotherm cooling through a threshold around 600 Ma (Maruyama, S. et al. 2014. Initiation of leaking Earth: An ultimate trigger of the Cambrian explosion. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 910-944). Alternatively the nutrient flux may have arisen by increased erosion as a result of plume-driven uplift (Santosh, M. et al. 2014. The Cambrian Explosion: Plume-driven birth of the second ecosystem on Earth. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 945-965).

A bolder approach, reflected in the title of the Special Issue, seeks an interstellar trigger (Kataoka, R. et al. 2014. The Nebula Winter: The united view of the snowball Earth, mass extinctions, and explosive evolution in the late Neoproterozoic and Cambrian periods. Gondwana Research, v. 25, p. 1153-1163). This looks to encounters between the Solar System and dust clouds or supernova remnants as it orbited the galactic centre: a view that surfaces occasionally in several other contexts. Such chance events may have been climatically and biologically catastrophic: a sort of nebular winter, far more pervasive than the once postulated nuclear winter of a 3^rd World War. That is perhaps going a little too far beyond the constraints of evidence, for there should be isotopic and other geochemical signs that such an event took place. It also raises yet the issue that life on Earth is and always has been unique in the galaxy and perhaps the known universe due to a concatenation of diverse chance events, without structure in time or order, which pushed living processes to outcomes whose probabilities of repetition are infinitesimally small.

Massive trove of Canadian fossils gives near-unprecedented glimpse of Cambrian explosion

Plate tectonics and the Cambrian Explosion

Published on January 27, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

A rough-and-ready way of assessing the rate at which silicic magmatic activity has varied through time is to separate out grains of zircon that have accumulated in sedimentary rocks of different ages. Zircon is readily datable using the U-Pb method, if you have access to mass spectrometry. While some of the zircons will date from much older continental crust that was exposed while the sediments originated, sometimes there are grains that formed only a few million years before the sediments accumulated. Those are likely to have crystallized from silica-rich volcanic rocks above subduction zones where ocean-floor has been driven beneath continental crust; i.e. at continental volcanic arcs. Such young zircons therefore help assess the tectonic conditions close to sedimentary basins. The potential of detrital zircon geochronology was first suggested to me by Dr M.V.N. Murthy of the Geological Survey of India in 1978, long before anyone could aspire to mass zircon dating. M.V.N. had by then amassed kilograms of zircon grains from every imaginable source in India, and may have been the first geologist to realise their potential. It has become a lot quicker and cheaper in the last two decades, thanks to methods of dating single zircon grains both precisely and accurately and M.V.N.’s prescient suggestion has been borne out globally.

Results for the late Precambrian to early Palaeozoic have recently been compiled (McKenzie, N.R. et al. 2014. Plate tectonic influences on Neoproterozoic-early Paleozoic climate and animal evolution. Geology, online publication doi:10.1130/G34962.1). One of the striking correlations is between the abundance of ‘young’ zircons relative to Cambrian sedimentary deposition and the pace of diversification of animal faunas during the Cambrian. During the Cambrian Period there may have been far more continental-margin arc volcanism than in the preceding late Neoproterozoic or later in the early Palaeozoic. That would match with evidence for the Cambrian atmosphere having reached the greatest CO₂ concentration of Phanerozoic times and the fact that the Gondwana supercontinent (comprising the present southern continents plus India) was assembled at that time by collision of several Precambrian continental masses. Global temperatures must have been rising.

The rapid emergence of all the major animal groups by the middle Cambrian – the Cambrian Explosion – took place during and despite climatic warming. Environmental stress, perhaps increased calcium and bicarbonate ions in sea water as a result of acid conditions, may have forced animals to develop means of getting both ions out of their cells to form carbonate skeletons: the Cambrian Explosion really marks the first appearance of shelly faunas and a good chance of fossilisation. Yet at the peak of volcanically-induced warming faunal diversity, especially of reef-building animals, fell-off dramatically to create what some palaeobiologsts have termed the Cambrian ‘dead interval’. Marine life really took-off in a big way during the Ordovician while temperatures were falling globally; so much so that the close of the Ordovician was marked by the first major glaciation focused on Gondwana. The zircon record indicates that continental-arc volcanism also declined during the Ordovician, and maybe the Cambrian silicic volcanics were chemically weathered during that Period to remove carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere, along with renewed reef building to bury carbonate fossils.

Volcanic mayhem drove major burst of evolution

Land almost colonized during the Cambrian Explosion

Published on January 20, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

One of the major shale-gas source strata in the eastern USA, the Middle Cambrian Conasauga Shale, formed in a shallow inland sea. Consequently the sedimentology of the lowest Palaeozoic Era of the region and the strange structures affecting it during deformation that formed the Appalachian Mountains have become a focus of intense tectonic and stratigraphic interest – economic potential generally helps fund academic research at a time when money for pure science is short. This has extended into the deepest part of the Cambrian lying unconformably just above the crystalline Precambrian basement. The Lower Cambrian of the Appalachians marks the earliest stage of rifting that flooded former dry land and comprises the multicoloured mudstones, siltstones and sandstones of the Rome Formation. Though only sparsely fossiliferous, the Rome formation contains archetypical trilobites of the genus Olenellus, typical of the Lower Cambrian and used to correlate sedimentary rocks of this age far and wide. They occur far across the North Atlantic in coeval rocks of the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, but not in those a mere couple of hundred kilometres to the south in Wales. This faunal disparity forms a major line of evidence that the olenelid fauna occupied one side of a once major ocean – Iapetus – another different bunch of early trilobites being characteristic of its opposite flank. The almost hemispherical extent of similar faunas was long regarded as an indication that they inhabited open ocean water. In fact, their wide distribution is as much due to juvenile arthropods being planktonic, while adults may have occupied all sorts of marine environments. It now turns out that Olenellus lived in very shallow water (Mángano, M.G. et al. 2014. Trilobites in early Cambrian tidal flats and the landward expansion of the Cambrian explosion. Geology, online pre-publication doi:10.1130/G34980.1).

Gabriela Mángano of the University of Saskatchewan and colleagues from Argentina and the US found that the Rome Formation is full of sedimentary structures typical of modern intertidal zones. Tidal-flat strata are full of suncracks but are also criss-crossed by tracks made by substantial arthropods, only fossil olenellid trilobites being big enough to have made them while feeding , maybe on microbial mats formed on the mudflats or on worms that burrowed the muds. Clearly these animals were literally only a few steps away from colonising the land very shortly after abundant, sturdy animal life appeared in the Cambrian Explosion. Currently the dominant hypothesis for permanent entry of animals onto land is that the colonizers first adapted to fresh- or brackish water habitats. Yet, apparently, there was little to stop a direct invasion from the sea.

Greening the Earth, Devonian forest fires and a mass extinction

Published on November 28, 2013 by zooks7772 Comments

Land plants begin to appear in the fossil record as early as the late Ordovician (~450 Ma), show signs of diversification during the Silurian and by the end of the Devonian Period most of the basic features of plants are apparent. During the Carboniferous Period terrestrial biomass became so high as to cause a fall in atmospheric carbon dioxide, triggering the longest period of glaciation of the Phanerozoic, and such a boost to oxygen in the air (to over 30%) that insects, huge by modern standards, were able to thrive and the risk of conflagration was perhaps at its highest in Earth’s history. Yet surprisingly, the first signs of massive forest fires appear in the Devonian when vegetation was nowhere near so widespread and luxuriant as it became in the Carboniferous (Kaiho, K. et al. 2013. A forest fire and soil erosion event during the Late Devonian mass extinction. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 392, p. 272-280). Moreover, Devonian oxygen levels were well below those of the present atmosphere and CO₂ was more than 10 times even the post-industrial concentration (387 parts per million in 2013). Such atmospheric chemistry would probably have suppressed burning.

Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University in Japan and colleagues from Japan, the US and Belgium analysed organic molecules in Belgian marine sediments from the time of the late-Devonian mass extinction (around the Frasnian-Famennian boundary at 372 Ma). A range of compounds produced by hydrocarbon combustion show marked ‘spikes’ at the F-F boundary. The thin bed that marks the extinction boundary also shows sudden increase then decrease in δ¹³C and total organic carbon, indicative of increase burial of organic material and a likely increase in atmospheric oxygen levels. Another biomarker that is a proxy for soil erosion follows the other biogeochemical markers, perhaps signifying less of a binding effect on soil by plant colonisation: a likely consequence of large widlfires. Unlike the biomarkers, magnetic susceptibility of the boundary sediments is lower than in earlier and later sediments. This is ascribed to a decreased supply of detrital sediment to the Belgian marine Devonian basin, probably as a result of markedly decreased rainfall around the time of the late-Devonian mass extinction. But the magnetic data from 3 metres either side of the boundary also reveal the influence of the 20, 40, 100 and 405 ka Milankovich cycles.

This set of environmentally-related data encourages the authors to suggest a novel, if not entirely plausible, mechanism for mass extinction related to astronomically modulated dry-moist climate changes that repeatedly killed off vegetation so that dry woody matter could accumulate en masse during the Frasnian while atmospheric oxygen levels were too low for combustion. A mass burial of organic carbon at the end of that Age then boosted oxygen levels above the burning threshold to create widespread conflagration once the wood pile was set ablaze. Makes a change from continental flood basalts and extraterrestrial impacts… Yet it was about this time that vertebrates took it upon themselves to avail themselves of the new ecological niche provided by vegetation to haul themselves onto land.

Earth’s first major glacial epochs

Published on November 27, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

The global glaciations of the Neoproterozoic that reached low latitudes – the so-called ‘Snowball Earth’ events have dominated accounts of ancient glaciations since the start of the 21^st century. Yet they are not the oldest examples of large-scale effects of continental ice sheets. Distinctive tillites or diamictites that contain large clasts of diverse, exotic rocks occur in sedimentary sequences of Archaean and Palaeoproterozoic age.

Diamictite from the Palaoproterozoic Gowganda Formation in Ontario Canada (credit: Candian Sedimentology Research Group) — Diamictite from the Palaeoproterozoic Gowganda Formation in Ontario Canada (credit: Canadian Sedimentology Research Group)

This item can be read in full at Earth-logs in the Palaeoclimatology archive for 2013

Could volcanism have spread organisms?

Published on November 7, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

Recently there have been worrying accounts about pathogens, for instance the viruses that cause foot and mouth disease in livestock, flu in humans and other animals and the sheep disease bluetongue carried by tiny midges, being transported for thousands of kilometres in dust storms. They raise the question of whether or not in the past organisms small enough to be carried by winds in aerosol suspension might have helped colonise regions distant from where they evolved.

Studies of volcanic ash thought to have been transported at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere from a 25 thousand-year old major volcanic eruption on the North Island of New Zealand add volcanic activity to violent meteorological phenomena as a possible means of transport (Van Eaton, A.R. et al. 2013. High-flying diatoms: Widespread dispersal of microorganisms in an explosive volcanic eruption. Geology, v. 41, p. 1187-1190). Ash from as far as 850 km from the volcano turns out to incorporate abundant remains of diatoms – species of algae that secrete distinctively intricate skeletons made from silica. The volcano, Taupo, erupted from beneath a lake bed, explaining the diatoms’ origin from lake muds and the water column itself. Even details of the organisms’ soft parts and pigmentation are preserved in the ash, suggesting that at least some of them might have been transported alive. Astonishingly, the New Zealand authors’ counts of organic material in the ash suggest that as much as 0.6 km³ of diatom remains were dispersed during the eruption.

English: Circle of diatoms on a slide — Assorted species of diatoms on a microscope slide (credit: Wikipedia)

Violent sub-aqueous eruptions can entrain liquid water as spray as well as water vapour and glassy magma shards, carrying the mixture into the stratosphere, far above wind belts in the lower atmosphere. At such altitudes transport can spread fine aerosols through an entire hemisphere because they remain in suspension for long periods.

Different species of diatom live in subtly different environments, so that their relative proportions and presence or absence in ash provide a ‘fingerprint’ for the volcano responsible. So the discovery by the team from the Victoria University of Wellington (a ‘first’) presents a new tool for identifying the source of ash layers in the volcanic record that came from other volcanoes associated with caldera lakes – common for those capable of launching huge volumes of material aloft, such as Toba that erupted in Sumatra at around 74 ka and may have influenced the first modern human migrants from Africa. But could minute organisms survive both the volcanic heat and blast and a traverse through the dry stratosphere to result in colonisation? If that were possible it would have significant implications for the spread of early life forms during the far more volcanically active Hadean and Archaean Eons of Earth’s history.

Commenting on the article, Jennifer Pike of Cardiff University, UK (Pike, J. 2013. Of volcanoes and diatoms. Geology, v. 41, p. 1199-2000) surmises that diatoms might survive drying out in the stratosphere, provided they were in the form of spores encased in silica. Such spores were not found in the Taupo ash, but who is to say that they will not be discovered in other ancient volcanic ash layers? Spores are extremely durable and other micro-organisms than diatoms produce them and have done in the past.

Super-Eruption Launched Algae Army Into the Sky (livescience.com)

An early oxygenated atmosphere

Published on October 9, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The Earth’s earliest atmosphere undoubtedly had a chemistry dominated by carbon dioxide and nitrogen, together with transient water vapour, outgassed from volcanoes giving pervasive reducing conditions at the surface and in the oceans. Until the last couple of decades the only clear evidence of a switch to oxidising conditions and presumably significant atmospheric oxygen was direct, mineralogical evidence. The most obvious signs are ancient, reddened soils formed when soluble Fe²⁺ lost electrons to molecular oxygen to form the distinct red, orange and brown oxides and hydroxides of insoluble Fe³⁺that impart a deep staining in even small quantities. Others include the disappearance from river-transported sediments of clearly transported grains of metal sulfides and uranium oxide that remain stable under reducing conditions but quickly break down in the presence of oxygen.

Widespread observations in Precambrian sediments, eventually linked with reliable radiometric ages, strongly suggested a fundamental environmental change at around 2.3 billion years ago: the Great Oxidation Event. A few such signs emerge from somewhat older rocks back to 2.7 Ga, but only the 2.3 Ga event created a permanent feature of our home world; at first toxic to many of the prokaryote life forms of earlier times but eventually a prime condition for the rise of the Eukarya and eventually metazoan animals. Isotopic analysis of sulfur from Precambrian sediments also gave hints of a more complex but much debated transition because of the way S-isotopes fractionate under different environmental conditions. Now other indirect, isotopic approaches to redox conditions have become feasible, with a surprising result: powerful evidence that about 3 billion years ago there was appreciable atmospheric oxygen (Crowe, S.A. et al. 2013. Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago. Nature, v. 501, p. 535-538).

The Danish-South African-German-Canadian group relied on a fractionation process among the isotopes of chromium, which can exist in several oxidation states. When minerals that contain Cr³⁺ are weathered under oxidising conditions to release soluble Cr⁶⁺ the loss in solution preferentially removes the ⁵³Cr isotope from residual soil. If the isotope enters groundwater with reducing conditions to precipitate some Cr³⁺-rich material yet more ⁵³Cr remains in solution. Eventually such enriched water may enter the oceans, where along with iron and other transition-group metal ions chromium can end up in banded iron formations (BIFs) to preserve isotopic evidence for oxidising conditions along it route from land to sea.

The team analysed both a palaeosol and a BIF unit from a stratigraphic sequence in the Achaean of NE South Africa that is between 2980 and 2924 Ma old. A substantial proportion of the palaeosol is depleted in ⁵³Cr whereas the lower part of the slightly younger BIF is significantly enriched. Changes in the concentration of redox sensitive elements, such as chromium itself, uranium and iron, in the two lithologies helps confirm the isotopic evidence for a major ~3 Ga oxidation event. It is possible to use the data to estimate what the atmospheric oxygen content might have been at that time: not enough to breathe, but significant at between 6 x 10^-5 to 3 x 10^-3 the atmospheric level at present. Oxygen can be produced abiogenically through irradiation of water vapour in the atmosphere as well as by organic photosynthesis. However, the first route seems incapable of yield more than a billionth of present atmospheric concentrations, so the spotlight inevitably falls on a ‘much deep history’ of the action of blue-green bacteria (cyanobacteria) than hitherto suspected.

Ancient soils provide early whiff of oxygen – BBC News (topbreakingnews.info)
Signs of oxygen in 3-billion-year-old soil (arstechnica.com)

Pushing back DNA sequencing: a Spanish cave bear

Published on September 25, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

At the time, only 3 years ago, publication of the first full Neanderthal genome seemed miraculous. Yet the apparent magic proved repeatable, including for an obscure but distinct group of extinct humans – the Denisovans – known only from their DNA in a single pinkie bone. These advances astonished the world by showing that anatomically modern humans were capable of interbreeding with both groups; and did so that many people now living outside of Africa carry the genetic evidence. But the samples analysed for DNA were little more than 40 thousand years old. Older fossils of extinct animals have given up their genetic features, such as the wooly mammoth and a horse about 700 ka old, but only from samples frozen into permafrost at high northern latitudes.

The degradation of DNA over time seemed destined to limit palaeo-genetics, even when slowed down by natural freezing. The degradation breaks down any surviving genetic material into shorter and shorter fragments of the DNA molecule, ultimately to its atoms being recombined in new molecules of totally unrelated compounds through the chemical processes of fossilisation. Reassembling the fragments correctly becomes increasingly difficult the smaller they are. Few outside of a highly skilled specialists were optimistic of breaking the 100 ka barrier, even using frozen fossils. Unsurprisingly, having had such dramatic successes, the specialists continue to ride their luck and their ingenuity.

Excavations at the site of Gran Dolina, in Ata... — Excavations at Gran Dolina, in Atapuerca, Spain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The cave complex of the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain, whose sediments range in age from almost a million years ago to recent times, contain rich accumulations of human remains, including the pre-Neanderthal Homo heidelbergensis and H. antecessor dating back to more than 800 ka. If ever there was a magnet for archaeo-geneticists Atapuerca is definitely one. Moreover, physical anthropologists seem never to stop disputing their interpretations. Jesse Dabney of the now famous Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and co-workers from Britain, New Zealand, Spain and Australia are now beginning to report results. The first are from a cave bear (probably Ursos deningeri) known to be older than 300 ka (Dabney, J. and 10 others 2013. Complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a Middle Pleistocene cave bear reconstructed from ultrashort DNA fragments in one of its foreleg bones. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 110, doi/10.1073/pnas.1314445110). The bear’s mitochondrial DNA was pieced together from fragments as small as 50 base pairs, and shows its ancestry to bears (U. spelaeus) from the later Pleistocene that became extinct at about 28 ka.

It may be only a matter of time before human DNA emerges from the rich Atapuerca fossil hoard; indeed the authors strongly hint that they are working on that now.

Researchers reconstruct mitochondrial genome of Middle Pleistocene cave bear (phys.org)
It’s Barely There – 300,000 Year Old DNA (genedork.wordpress.com)

Africa-Europe exchange of faunas in the Late Miocene

Published on July 15, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The extremely hazardous seaway through the Straits of Gibraltar and the waterless deserts of the Levant presented considerable barriers to natural exchange of animal groups between Africa and Eurasia throughout the period of hominin evolution known from the African Pliocene and Pleistocene record. These barriers were breached by hominins only occasionally. Through most of the Miocene and back to the Mesozoic Era Iberia and what is now Morocco were separated by a wide seaway preventing faunal exchange. That Betic Seaway eventually closed with the tectonic collision of the two sides to form the modern Betic Cordillera in southern Spain towards the end of the Miocene. This left parts of the Mediterranean to evaporate during what is known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis, which reached completion at 5.59 Ma. Yet this Europe-Africa connection was short-lived, being breached by what is regarded as one of the most dramatic events in Cenozoic history: the Zanclean Flood. At 5.33 Ma the Atlantic burst through what is now the Straits of Gibraltar to refill the Mediterranean Basin within a period between a few months and two years. The flooding began as a vast system of rapids some 1 km high with an estimated flow a thousand times that of the modern Amazon.

During the existence of the Europe-Africa land bridge it was possible for animals to move between north-west Africa and western Europe. Evidence that such an exchange did take place comes from a number of Late Miocene localities in southern Spain and North Africa. The first recorded migrants into Spain were African gerbils, then evidence mounted for larger animals, including hippos and early camels moving into Europe and a reverse migration of rabbits and mice. One of the Spanish sites (Gibert, L. et al. 2013. Evidence for an African-Iberian mammal dispersal during the pre-evaporitic Messinian. Geology, v. 41, p. 691-694) has allowed precise magnetostratigraphic dates to be put on the migrations. The Spanish-US team suggests conditions ripe for migration were in three distinct phases: around 6.3 Ma when hippos managed to swim to Europe; around 6.2 Ma which saw European small mammals making the journey south and camels moving to Europe; in a 300 ka window of opportunity from 5.6 to 5.3 Ma for African mice to make the journey into Europe. Several distinct episodes probably reflect some ups and downs of sea level related to glacial retreats and advances in Antarctica.

One implication of the short-lived Messinian land bridge is that it may have been followed by primates, though evidence has yet to be found. A particularly interesting genus, suggested by some as a possible common ancestor for hominins and chimpanzees, is Oreopithecus a bipedal ape recorded from the Miocene of Italy

End-Triassic mass extinction link to CAMP: It’s official?

Published on June 10, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

Mass extinctions and smaller but significant die-offs in the marine and terrestrial domains have been linked in the geoscientific imagination with many things: asteroid impacts; gamma-ray bursts from distant supernovae; belches of methane from the sea floor; emissions of hydrogen sulfide gas from seawater itself during ocean anoxia events; sea-level changes and more. The most intriguing, since it suggests a causal link between the core-mantle boundary and the biosphere, is the influence of flood basalt events and the gases, both greenhouse and toxic, that they undoubtedly released.

The famous K-T extinction (now K-Pg since the Palaeogene became the Period following the Cretaceous rather than the Tertiary) has swayed back and forth between the Chicxulub impact in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and the flood basalts of the Deccan Traps in western India as likely mechanisms, Chicxulub currently being in pole position. The equally devastating event at the close of the Triassic (at 201 Ma) that presaged the rise of the dinosaurs has had a similar external versus internal causality controversy, both the Rochechouarte crater and the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province being candidates.

Rochechouarte, however, was nowhere near as energetic an event as the Chicxulub impact. The problem is, as with all events for which the weight of evidence points to very short time scales – of the order of tens to hundreds of thousand years, is the dating of candidate causes. Rochechouarte happened at 201±2 Ma: it may or may not have coincided with faunal change. Yet timing of the CAMP flood basalts has hitherto been even more coarsely tagged. This imprecision is not unconnected with the choice of radiometric dating methods, the ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar approach being ‘easy’ and hence popular, but limited in its precision and accuracy. The ‘gold standard’ is zircon U-Pb geochronology that depends on the far greater reluctance of the host mineral to lose either parent or daughter isotopes compared with the feldspars, micas and amphiboles used in many other methods. Zircon still in its igneous parent is crucial: it is so durable that vastly older zircons are often found in sediments. Yet basalts contain few zircons.

Zircon geochronology has now emerged from the CAMP flood basalts of eastern Canada, the Atlantic seaboard of the US and that of Morocco, which has a precision of around 30 ka, one to two orders of magnitude better than other methods (Blackburn, T.J. and 8 others 2013. Zircon U-Pb geochronology links the end-Triassic extinction with the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. Science, v. 340, p. 941-945). The extinction is defined most readily by a sudden change in fossil pollen and spores, possibly within less than 10 ka, as well as extinction of Triassic marine fauna and large numbers of terrestrial reptile and amphibian taxa followed by diversification of early Jurassic dinosaurs. The oldest CAMP basalts are from Morocco immediately above spores of clearly Triassic age; i.e. before the extinction, whereas the basalt flows in Canada and the eastern US (a mere 3 to 13 ka younger)are above the turnover. So, the start of the CAMP flood volcanism brackets the extinction.

But did CAMP cause, indeed could it have caused the extinction? Blackburn and colleagues cannot be certain. A negative carbon-isotope spike associated with the extinction is estimated to have required almost a million km³ of magma to have been erupted almost instantaneously to inject excess CO₂ into the atmosphere. The dating suggests four major pulses of eruption in the areas studied spread over around 600 ka, the last three being associated with biological diversification and recovery in the earliest Jurassic. In fact the research seems merely to suggest strongly that flood volcanism accompanied the extinction, but leaves its causing the death toll still an open question.

The CAMP events marked the beginning of Pangaea’s break-up and the formation of Tethys separating Eurasia and North America from the old Gondwana continental mass. That tropical seaway became the site of massive production of marine carbonates, presumably to draw down any carbon dioxide excess in the atmosphere.

The Top 5 Extinctions (danniteboul.wordpress.com)
What really happens in a flood basalt eruption
(Geological Society of London blog)

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