0000000000049589
AUTHOR
Matthew G. Powell
Timing and selectivity of the Late Mississippian mass extinction of brachiopod genera from the Central Appalachian Basin
The seventh largest mass extinction of the Phanerozoic Era occurred in the Late Mississippian and coincided with the onset of the late Paleozoic ice age. Analyses of brachiopod genera from Mississippian strata of the Central Appalachian Basin reveal that the regional expression of the mass extinction occurred after the development of high-amplitude glacioeustasy by several million years and occurred instead during low-latitude cooling and the expansion of glaciation near the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian boundary. The Late Mississippian mass extinction was even more severe for genera in the Central Appalachian Basin than global metrics would predict; in addition to the genera of this basin th…
Tropical marine climate during the late Paleozoic ice age using trace element analyses of brachiopods
Abstract The late Paleozoic ice age can be considered an important analogue to the modern ice age, but comparisons between the two time intervals have been hampered by the difficulty of resolving climatic changes that occur over short (e.g., seasonal) time scales in the Paleozoic record. As a first step toward overcoming these limitations, this study employed Mg/Ca trace element ratios sampled across the growth bands of six specimens of the brachiopod Composita to assess differences in tropical marine mean temperature and seasonality in Visean and Moscovian time. These time intervals bracket the onset of the late Paleozoic ice age, which occurred in mid-Serpukhovian time, and thus provide a…