Earth Systems Palaeobiology: using climate models to better understand the habitats of marine animals through geologic time

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Richard Stockey - University of Southampton
• Monday 22 January 2024, 18:00-19:00
• Harker 1, Department of Earth Sciences, Downing Street.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Lucas Measures.

As Earth warms due to anthropogenic emissions, the oceans are warming and losing oxygen, posing major threats to marine animal ecosystems. Earth has warmed and cooled many times before, and the geologic record hosts evidence for ocean deoxygenation and the extinction of marine animals linked to many of these ancient warming events. Notably, the impacts of warming on ocean environments and marine ecosystems appear to have varied considerably over the Phanerozoic, with some leading to catastrophic events and others having little-to-no observable impacts on ocean oxygenation and marine biodiversity. Studies that have tried to link warming and marine extinction at the global scale have been unable to identify unifying mechanistic principles that explain this variation in the magnitude of ocean deoxygenation and extinction across ancient climate perturbations, leaving a critical knowledge gap.

In my research, I apply climate models to address fundamental questions about how environmental change has impacted Earth’s ecosystems through time. By integrating models of ancient climates, oceans and ecosystems with more traditional fossil and geochemical data, we can move from simple correlations to a more mechanistic understanding of how environmental change impacted marine ecosystems through Earth history. We aim to provide a transformative new perspective on ancient environments by linking global-scale climate to the ocean-, ecosystem- and organism-scales that are critically important to ocean oxygenation and marine animal ecology. The power of Earth system models in simulating ecological responses to deep-time environmental change is only recently being explored, so there is lots of exciting research to get involved in!

This talk is part of the Sedgwick Club talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Harker 1, Department of Earth Sciences, Downing Street
• Department of Earth Sciences seminars
• Sedgwick Club talks

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.