Diverse and full of sea life, the Earth’s Devonian era—taking place more than 370 million years ago—saw the emergence of the first seed-bearing plants, which spread as large forests across the continents of Gondwana and Laurussia.
A recently published study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment led by researchers at IUPUI now posits that both factors played a role—and draws attention to the environmental tipping points the planet faces today.
The study is co-authored by School of Science at IUPUI faculty Gabriel Filippelli and William Gilhooly III. The lead author is Matthew Smart, an assistant professor of oceanography at the U.S. Naval Academy who was a graduate student in Filippelli’s lab at the time of the study.
The work is the first to unify two competing Late Devonian extinction theories into a comprehensive cause-and-effect scenario. Essentially, the group concluded that both events—mass volcanism and deoxygenation caused by mass extinction during Late Devonian era”>land plants flushing excess nutrients into oceans—needed to occur for the mass extinction to take place.
“The key to resolving this puzzle was identifying and integrating the timing and magnitude of the geochemical signals we determined using a sophisticated global model,” Filippelli said. “This modeling effort revealed that the magnitude of nutrient events we were seeing based on the geochemical records could drive substantial marine extinction events, but the duration of the events required both factors—tree root evolution and volcanism—to sustain the marine conditions that were toxic to organisms.”
2023-12-07 03:41:03
Post from phys.org