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Extinction intensity during Ordovician and Cenozoic glaciations explained by cooling and palaeogeography

Nature Geoscience volume 13, pages 65–70 (2020)Cite this article

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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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Figure 1: Per-cell proportional extinction for each greenhouse–icehouse transition.
Figure 2: Schematic of dispersal and extinction in the simulation.
Figure 3: Proportional extinction results from the simulations.
Figure 4: Proportional extinction on north–south coastlines compared to east–west coastlines and ‘islands’.

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Data availability

Data from simulations are provided as Supplementary Data.

Code availability

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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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Erin E. Saupe, Huijie Qiao, Seth Finnegan.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Erin E. Saupe

  2. Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

    Huijie Qiao

  3. Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, IRD, INRA, Collège de France, CEREGE, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Yannick Donnadieu & Alexandre Pohl

  4. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Clifton, Bristol, UK

    Alexander Farnsworth, Alan T. Kennedy-Asser, Daniel J. Lunt & Paul Valdes

  5. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Jean-Baptiste Ladant

  6. Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Alexandre Pohl

  7. Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Seth Finnegan

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Contributions

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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Correspondence to Erin E. Saupe.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary methods, Tables 1–5 and Figs. 1–18.

Supplementary Software 1

Description of the simulation framework and code, and how to download and implement it on your own system.

Supplementary Data 1

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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