ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Decreasing Phanerozoic extinction intensity as a consequence of Earth surface oxygenation and metazoan ecophysiology.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Combined effects of photorespiration and fire strongly regulate atmospheric oxygen levels.Science advances · 2026Article
- Mid-Devonian ocean oxygenation enabled the expansion of animals into deeper-water habitats.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The evolution of Gaia(s).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Aquatic deoxygenation as a planetary boundary and key regulator of Earth system stability.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Review
- Late Cretaceous ammonoids show that drivers of diversification are regionally heterogeneous.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Phanerozoic co-evolution of ONational science review · 2024Article
- Unveiling the underlying drivers of Phanerozoic marine diversification.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Impact of global climate cooling on Ordovician marine biodiversity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Why the Early Paleozoic was intrinsically prone to marine extinction.Science advances · 2023Article
- Volcanic COScience advances · 2023Article
- Selectivity of mass extinctions: Patterns, processes, and future directions.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- Deep resilience: An evolutionary perspective on calcification in an age of ocean acidification.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Environmental drivers of the first major animal extinction across the Ediacaran White Sea-Nama transition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Continental flood basalts drive Phanerozoic extinctions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The decline in background extinction rates of marine animals through geologic time is an established but unexplained feature of the Phanerozoic fossil record. There is also growing consensus that the ocean and atmosphere did not become oxygenated to near-modern levels until the mid-Paleozoic, coinciding with the onset of generally lower extinction rates. Physiological theory provides us with a possible causal link between these two observations-predicting that the synergistic impacts of oxygen and temperature on aerobic respiration would have made marine animals more vulnerable to ocean warming events during periods of limited surface oxygenation. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that changes in surface oxygenation exerted a first-order control on extinction rates through the Phanerozoic using a combined Earth system and ecophysiological modeling approach. We find that although continental configuration, the efficiency of the biological carbon pump in the ocean, and initial climate state all impact the magnitude of modeled biodiversity loss across simulated warming events, atmospheric oxygen is the dominant predictor of extinction vulnerability, with metabolic habitat viability and global ecophysiotype extinction exhibiting inflection points around 40% of present atmospheric oxygen. Given this is the broad upper limit for estimates of early Paleozoic oxygen levels, our results are consistent with the relative frequency of high-magnitude extinction events (particularly those not included in the canonical big five mass extinctions) early in the Phanerozoic being a direct consequence of limited early Paleozoic oxygenation and temperature-dependent hypoxia responses.
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