Oxygen rise in the tropical upper ocean during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
DOI10.5281/ZENODO.10620432Zenodo10620432MaRDI QIDQ6673538FDOQ6673538
Dataset published at Zenodo repository.
Ronja Schmitz, Ralf Schiebel, Simone Moretti, James Zachos, Roberta D'Onofrio, Alexandra Auderset, Lukas Gerber, Daniel Sigman, Philip Sexton, Ellen Thomas, Richard Norris, Alfredo Martínez-García, Gerald Haug, Curtis Deutsch, Valeria Luciani, Aradhna Tripati, Maria Rose Petrizzo
Publication date: 5 February 2024
The global ocean's oxygen (O2) inventory is declining in response to global warming, but the future of the low-oxygen tropics is uncertain. We present new evidence for tropical oxygenation during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a warming event that serves as a geologic analogue to anthropogenic warming. Foraminifera-bound nitrogen isotopes indicate that the tropical North Pacific oxygen-deficient zone contracted during the PETM. A concomitant increase in foraminifera size implies that oxygen availability rose in the shallow subsurface throughout the tropical North Pacific. These changes are consistent with ocean model simulations of warming, in which a decline in biological productivity allows tropical subsurface oxygen to rise even as global ocean oxygen declines. The tropical oxygen increase may have helped avoid a mass extinction during the PETM.
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