Imperial College London
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DrGarethRoberts

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Senior Lecturer
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 7363gareth.roberts

 
 
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Location

 

2.50Royal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Roberts:2019:10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7,
author = {Roberts, G and Mannion, P},
doi = {10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7},
journal = {Scientific Reports},
title = {Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7},
volume = {9},
year = {2019}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - We examine how the history of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity relates to environmental change. Our focus is on North America, which has a relatively densely sampled history. By transforming time series into the time-frequency domain using wavelets, histories of biodiversity are shown to be similar to sea level, temperature and oceanic chemistry at multiple timescales. Fluctuations in sea level play an important role in driving Phanerozoic biodiversity at timescales >50 Myr, and during finite intervals at shorter periods. Subsampled and transformed marine genera time series reinforce the idea that Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinctions were geologically rapid, whereas the Ordovician-Silurian and Late Devonian ‘events’ were longer lived. High cross wavelet power indicates that biodiversity is most similar to environmental variables (sea level, plate fragmentation, δ18O, δ13C, δ34S and 87Sr/86Sr) at periods >200 Myr, when they are broadly in phase (i.e. no time lag). They are also similar at shorter periods for finite durations of time (e.g. during some mass extinctions). These results suggest that long timescale processes (e.g. plate kinematics) are the primary drivers of biodiversity, whilst processes with significant variability at shorter periods (e.g. glacio-eustasy, continental uplift and erosion, volcanism, asteroid impact) play a moderating role. Wavelet transforms are a useful approach for isolating information about times and frequencies of biological activity and commonalities with environmental variables.
AU  - Roberts,G
AU  - Mannion,P
DO  - 10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7
PY  - 2019///
SN  - 2045-2322
TI  - Timing and periodicity of Phanerozoic marine biodiversity and environmental change
T2  - Scientific Reports
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42538-7
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/70051
VL  - 9
ER  -
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