Abstract
A striking feature of the marine fossil record is the variable intensity of extinction during superficially similar climate transitions. Here we combine climate models and species trait simulations to explore the degree to which differing palaeogeographic boundary conditions and differing magnitudes of cooling and glaciation can explain the relative intensity of marine extinction during greenhouse–icehouse transitions in the Late Ordovician and the Cenozoic. Simulations modelled the response of virtual species to cooling climate using a spatially explicit cellular automaton algorithm. We find that palaeogeography alone may be a contributing factor, as identical changes in meridional sea surface temperature gradients caused greater extinction in Late Ordovician simulations than in Cenozoic simulations. Differences in extinction from palaeogeography are significant, but by themselves are insufficient to explain observed differences in extinction intensity. However, when simulations included inferred changes in continental flooding and interval-specific models of sea surface temperature, predicted differences in relative extinction intensity were more consistent with observations from the fossil record. Our results support the hypothesis that intense extinction in the Late Ordovician is partially attributable to exceptionally rapid and severe cooling compared to Cenozoic events.
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Data availability
Data from simulations are provided as Supplementary Data.
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Simulation code is provided as Supplementary Software.
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Acknowledgements
We thank C. Myers, A. Townsend Peterson and J. Soberón for help with developing the initial simulation framework, from which simulations were launched. H.Q. was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (31772432). E.E.S. was supported by an EAR NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship and Leverhulme Grant #DGR01020. A.P., J.-B.L. and Y.D. thank the CEA/ CCRT for providing access to HPC resources of TGCC under allocation 2014-012212 made by GENCI. This is a contribution to IGCP Project-653, ‘The Onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event’. A.F. and D.J.L. acknowledge funding from NERC through NE/K014757/1, NE/I005722/1, NE/I005714/1 and (P.J.V. also) NE/P013805/1. D.J.L. and P.J.V. acknowledge funding through ERC grant ‘The Greenhouse Earth System’ (T-GRES, project reference 340923). A.F., A.T.K.-A., D.J.L. and P.J.V. are thankful for the use of the computational facilities of the Advanced Computing Research Centre, University of Bristol (http://www.bris.ac.uk/acrc) (Bluecrystal). S.F. acknowledges funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. This is PBDB publication no. 353. We thank all contributors to the PBDB, with special thanks to the top 10 for our data download: A. Hendy, W. Kiessling, P. Wagner, S. Holland, M. Uhen, B. Kröger, J. Alroy, A. Miller, M. Clapham and J. Sessa.
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E.E.S. and S.F. designed the study, collected the data and wrote the manuscript. A.F., A.P., A.T.K.-A., D.J.L., J.-B.L., P.V. and Y.D. contributed climate modelling data. E.E.S. and H.Q. performed analyses. All authors read and commented on the manuscript.
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Supplementary methods, Tables 1–5 and Figs. 1–18.
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Description of the simulation framework and code, and how to download and implement it on your own system.
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Species-level output on extinction status from the simulations.
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Saupe, E.E., Qiao, H., Donnadieu, Y. et al. Extinction intensity during Ordovician and Cenozoic glaciations explained by cooling and palaeogeography. Nat. Geosci. 13, 65–70 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0504-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0504-6
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