Effects of Past Global Change on Life (1995)

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TERMINAL PALEOCENE MASS EXTINCTION IN THE DEEP SEA: ASSOCIATION WITH GLOBAL WARMING 105 salinity. This in turn, would have contributed to a decrease in the production of Antarctic deep waters to the world ocean, thus reinforcing the dominance of warm saline deep waters (Figure 5.5). A number of broad implications are suggested as a result of these discoveries. The extinction resulted from changes entirely within the Earth's environmental system, in the apparent absence of any extraterrestrial influences. Mass extinctions can be produced by large changes in the ocean. Such changes can occur very quickly under certain conditions. Mass extinction can be restricted to certain parts of the Earth's ecosystem and be effectively decoupled from other parts of the biosphere. In the case of the terminal Paleocene mass extinction, there was almost total decoupling between the deep and shallow marine ecosystems. Despite significant rapid warming in shallow and deep environments the mass extinction was limited to the deep-sea. At particular times in the geologic past, broad sectors of the Earth's environmental system, such as the global ocean, were susceptible to major reorganizations on short time scales. Brief (102 to 103 yr), intense paleoenvironmental events can have large effects on the course of biotic evolution. At the end of the Paleocene, global climate change crossed a critical threshold, causing instability and mass extinction in the deep-sea. The potential for the early Paleogene ocean to shift between high and middle-latitude dominated deep water production resulted from low vertical and meridional temperature gradients and multiple major sources of deep waters. Later in the Cenozoic, meridional and vertical temperature gradients strengthened, leading to decreased opportunities for such drastic switches in deep water sources. 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