Ordovician black shales of the Mount Hare Formation, Road River Group (approximately 465 million years old) rise above conglomerates of the Aberdeen Member. The dangerous rapids of Aberdeen Canyon (Nan Zhak Nadhàdlaii), created by the Peel River cutting through the resistant conglomerates, appear at bottom left. Credit: Erik Sperling
Phys.org has a story about ocean conditions in the early to mid Paleozoic Era. Using a newly discovered contiguous geologic record of the Paleozoic Era discovered in Canada's Yukon, research, detailed in a recent paper in Science Advances, shows that the low oxygen ocean conditions of the Paleozoic lasted into the Devonian period, which is much longer than previously thought. The research was aided by the newly discovered geologic sequence, which extends from the upper Cambrian to the mid Devonian, which makes it the longest known contiguous Paleozoic sequence.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada's Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid.
A trove of fossils and rock layers formed on that ancient ocean floor have now been unearthed by an international team of scientists along the banks of the Peel River a few hundred miles south of the Arctic's Beaufort Sea. The discovery reveals oxygen changes at the seafloor across nearly 120 million years of the early Paleozoic era, a time that fostered the most rapid development and diversification of complex, multi-cellular life in Earth's history.
"It's unheard of to have that much of Earth's history in one place," said Stanford University geological scientist Erik Sperling, lead author of a July 7 study detailing the team's findings in Science Advances. Most rock formations from the Paleozoic Era have been broken up by tectonic forces or eroded over time. "There's nowhere else in the world that I know of where you can study that long a record of Earth history, where there's basically no change in things like water depth or basin type."
Oxygen was scarce in the deep water of this and other oceans at the dawn of the Paleozoic, roughly 541 million years ago. It stayed scarce until the Devonian, roughly 405 million years ago, when, in a geological blink—no more than a few million years—oxygen likely rocketed to levels close to those in modern oceans and the diversity of life on Earth exploded. Big, predatory fish appeared. Primitive ferns and conifers marched across continents previously ruled by bacteria and algae. Dragonflies took flight. And all of this after nearly four billion years of Earth's landscapes being virtually barren.
Scientists have long debated what might have caused the dramatic shift from a low oxygen world to a more oxygenated one that could support a diverse web of animal life. But until now, it has been difficult to pin down the timing of global oxygenation or the long-term, background state of the world's oceans and atmosphere during the era that witnessed both the so-called Cambrian explosion of life and the first of Earth's "Big Five" mass extinctions, about 445 million years ago at the end of the Ordovician.
