Abstract
AbstractThe impact of global climate events on local ecosystems can vary spatially. Understanding this potential heterogeneity can illuminate which environments will be most impacted and the proximal drivers of ecosystem responses. Cenomanian–Turonian marine deposits of the Western Interior Seaway (WIS) record paleoceanographic changes associated with the Greenhorn transgression and the onset of Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE2). They provide an ideal setting to study basin-wide paleoecological responses during a global perturbation. Here, we integrate benthic foraminiferal assemblages from before, during, and after OAE2 via multivariate ordination analysis to examine spatial patterns in faunal responses across the western United States on a common scale and to interrogate a previously defined faunal marker commonly used for basin-wide correlation, the Benthonic Zone (BZ). We identify oxygenation and organic matter quality as primary and secondary controls of faunal variation across the 10 stratigraphic records and use this variation to infer paleoenvironmental changes. Stratigraphic trends reveal, in contrast to previous studies, deoxygenation at the onset of OAE2. They also reveal temporal patterns in oxygenation and productivity consistent with the gradual northward migration of a southern water mass into the WIS. This spatial heterogeneity hinders the use of the BZ as a temporal marker, because assemblages change in response to diachronous environmental change, and thus timing of the BZ with respect to OAE2 is not consistent across the basin. Our study demonstrates that regional processes can overshadow ecosystem responses to global events and underscores the importance of considering how changes in the position of water masses impact the expression of global biogeochemical perturbations.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Paleontology,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,Ecology,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Reference104 articles.
1. Neritic ecosystem response to Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 in the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, USA
2. Biotic Interactions in Benthic Foraminifera
3. Marine Os isotopic evidence for multiple volcanic episodes during Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event 1b
4. Stratigraphic and environmental control on marine benthic community change through the early Toarcian extinction event (Iberian Range, Spain)
5. Oksanen, J. , Blanchet, F. G. , Friendly, M. , Kindt, R. , Legendre, P. , McGlinn, D. , Minchin, P. R. , 2017. Vegan: community ecology package, R package version 2.4-4. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=vegan, accessed 1 September 2021.
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献