Harvard scientists discovered signs of possible ocean extinction

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The fossil record of foraminifera gives clues to the health of the oceans

For hundreds of millions of years, the oceans They have teemed with single-celled organisms called foraminifera, microscopic, hard-shelled creatures found at the base of the food chain. The fossil record of these organisms constitutes relevant material in relation to changes in the biodiversity world in the future, taking into account global warming.

Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminiferal fossils, which is among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers from the Harvard University found that environmental events that lead to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by imperceptible changes in the composition of a biological community, acting as an early warning signal.

The results were published in the prestigious journal Naturein a study led by Anshuman Swain, a young member of the Harvard Fellows Society, researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and affiliated with the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Satellite studies support Harvard research (Photo by Handout / RAMMB-CIRA/NOAA / AFP) /

A physicist by training who applies networks to biological and paleontological data, Swain teamed up with Adam Woodhouse of the University of Bristol to investigate the community structure of ancient marine plankton, which could serve as an early warning system for future extinctions of marine life. .

“Can we use the past to understand what could happen in the future, in the context of global change?” says Swain, who had already participated in a study on the formation of polar zones that have driven transformations in plankton communities. marine for the last 15 million years.

Scientists studied the composition of foraminiferal communities over millions of years. (Tanveer Badal/The New York Times)

“Our work offers a new answer to how biodiversity responds spatially to global climate changes, especially during periods of global warming, which are relevant to projections of future warming,” he added.

The experts used the Triton database, developed by Woodhouse, to see how the composition of foraminiferal communities has changed over millions of years, periods orders of magnitude longer than those normally studied at this scale.

They first focused on the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, the last major period of sustained high temperatures since the dinosaurs, similar to worst-case scenarios for global warming.

Satellite data, terrestrial and underwater observations, helped carry out the scientific study (Illustrative image Infobae)

As part of the publication we now report on, they found that before an extinction pulse 34 million years ago, marine communities became highly specialized everywhere except the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, implying that this microplankton migrated en masse to higher latitudes and away from the tropics.

This evidence indicates that collective-scale changes, such as those observed in these migratory patterns, are evident in the fossil record long before true extinctions and biodiversity losses occur.

According to Swain, the results of studies on foraminifera open avenues of research for other groups of organisms, including other forms of marine life, sharks and insects. These studies could trigger a revolution in an emerging field called paleoinformatics, that is, the use of large amounts of spatial and temporal data from fossil records to obtain new information about the evolution of our planet.

The results of the ocean research were published in the prestigious journal Nature (REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight/File Photo)

Therefore, researchers believe that it is important to invest in monitoring the structures of biological communities to predict future extinctions.

The scientists highlighted that the study has only been possible thanks to a long in situ study by the National Science Foundation aboard the JOIDES Resolution ship, which has been drilling in the global ocean for its research for 55 years. The project is scheduled to be completed this year.