UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change

Roberts, GG; Mannion, PD; (2019) Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change. Scientific Reports , 9 , Article 6116. 10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7. Green open access

[thumbnail of Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change.pdf]
Preview
Text
Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change.pdf - Published Version

Download (8MB) | Preview

Abstract

We examine how the history of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity relates to environmental change. Our focus is on North America, which has a relatively densely sampled history. By transforming time series into the time-frequency domain using wavelets, histories of biodiversity are shown to be similar to sea level, temperature and oceanic chemistry at multiple timescales. Fluctuations in sea level play an important role in driving Phanerozoic biodiversity at timescales >50 Myr, and during finite intervals at shorter periods. Subsampled and transformed marine genera time series reinforce the idea that Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinctions were geologically rapid, whereas the Ordovician-Silurian and Late Devonian ‘events’ were longer lived. High cross wavelet power indicates that biodiversity is most similar to environmental variables (sea level, plate fragmentation, δ18O, δ13C, δ34S and 87Sr/86Sr) at periods >200 Myr, when they are broadly in phase (i.e. no time lag). They are also similar at shorter periods for finite durations of time (e.g. during some mass extinctions). These results suggest that long timescale processes (e.g. plate kinematics) are the primary drivers of biodiversity, whilst processes with significant variability at shorter periods (e.g. glacio-eustasy, continental uplift and erosion, volcanism, asteroid impact) play a moderating role. Wavelet transforms are a useful approach for isolating information about times and frequencies of biological activity and commonalities with environmental variables.

Type: Article
Title: Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords: Evolution, Palaeoecology
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10071580
Downloads since deposit
52Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item