Climate change and extinctions: lessons from the marine fossil record

The oceans are being transformed as temperature, pH, and oxygen content all change at rates unprecedented in the recent geological past. That rapid pace of environmental change may place marine organisms at risk of extinction, but predicting vulnerability to climate change stressors remains a challenge. Although rates of change far exceed recent baselines, similar events of rapid climate change have occurred repeatedly in Earth’s deep time past. As a result, the fossil record is ideally suited for testing hypothesized effects of climate change on the marine biosphere over evolutionary timescales and at global scales. For example, are more active organisms less vulnerable to climate change stressors? Does the importance of activity levels extend beyond invertebrates? Can direct physiological stresses from temperature be disentangled from indirect effects arising from altered biological interactions? Extinction patterns in the fossil record help constrain the mechanisms through which climate change disrupts the biosphere and provide clues that reveal, at a broad scale, the groups that may be especially vulnerable during the coming decades.

Speaker: Matt Clapham, UC Santa Cruz