EGU2020-3456, updated on 12 Jun 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-3456
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Cenozoic plankton diversity dynamics and the impact of macroevolution on the marine carbon cycle.

Johan Renaudie1, David Lazarus1, Sarah Trubovitz2, Volkan Özen1, Gabrielle Rodrigues de Faria1, Gayane Asatryan1, and Paula Noble2
Johan Renaudie et al.
  • 1Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany (johan.renaudie@mfn-berlin.de)
  • 2University of Nevada, Reno, USA.

The marine biological carbon pump is one of the most important mechanism to extract carbon from the atmosphere and export it to the deep-sea and the sediments, and thus take it out from the cycle for millions of years. Today, marine planktonic diatoms are the main element of that pump; however at the beginning of the Cenozoic they were too rare and not diverse enough to have much geochemical significance. Calcareous nannofossils and foraminifera on the other hand were already important components of the carbonate carbon pump; however they also contribute to the alkalinity pump which on shorter timescales have an adverse effect on carbon sequestration. In addition, heterotrophic, amoeboid protists, in particular polycystine radiolarians, are also known to contribute significantly to the carbon export to the deep-sea due to their role in forming rapidly sinking particles of aggregated organic material. We present new diversity reconstructions using the Neptune database (NSB) and case studies focussed on the Late Neogene and the Eocene-Oligocene transition using newly collected full-fauna/flora diversity data. We will then show how the diversity and abundance history of these groups changed throughout the Cenozoic, what the role of climate/oceanographic changes and competition on their evolution was, and, in the end, what consequences their evolution had on the marine carbon cycle.

How to cite: Renaudie, J., Lazarus, D., Trubovitz, S., Özen, V., Rodrigues de Faria, G., Asatryan, G., and Noble, P.: Cenozoic plankton diversity dynamics and the impact of macroevolution on the marine carbon cycle., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-3456, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-3456, 2020.

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