Rapid recovery of life at ground zero of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction

Christopher Lowery (1) , Timothy Bralower (2) , Jeremy Owens , Francisco Rodríguez-Tovar , Heather Jones (2) , Jan Smit (3) , Michael Whalen (4) , Phillipe Claeys , Kenneth Farley (5) , Sean Gulick , Joanna Morgan , Sophie Green , Elise Chenot (6) , Gail Christeson (1) , Charles Cockell (7) , Marco Coolen , Ludovic Ferrière (8) , Catalina Gebhardt (9) , Kazuhisa Goto (10) , David Kring , Johanna Lofi (11) , Rubén Ocampo-Torres (12) , Ligia Perez-Cruz (13) , Annemarie Pickersgill (14) , Michael Poelchau (15) , Auriol Rae (16) , Cornelia Rasmussen (17) , Mario Rebolledo-Vieyra (18) , Ulrich Riller (19) , Honami Sato (20) , Sonia Tikoo (21) , Naotaka Tomioka (22) , Jaime Urrutia-Fucugauchi (13) , Johan Vellekoop , Axel Wittmann (23) , Long Xiao , Kosei Yamaguchi , William Zylberman (24)

1 IG - Institute of Geophysics [Austin]
2 Penn State Department of Geosciences
3 FALW - Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences [Amsterdam]
4 Department of Geosciences
5 Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences [Pasadena]
6 BGS - Biogéosciences [UMR 6282]
7 PSSRI - Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute [Milton Keynes]
8 NHM - Natural History Museum [Vienna]
9 AWI - Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung = Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research = Institut Alfred-Wegener pour la recherche polaire et marine
10 International Research Institute of Disaster Science
11 Géosciences Montpellier
12 ICPEES - Institut de chimie et procédés pour l'énergie, l'environnement et la santé
13 Instituto de Geofísica
14 School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
15 Geology
16 Department of Earth Science and Technology [Imperial College London]
17 Department of Geology and Geophysics
18 Unidad de Ciencias del Agua
19 Institut für Geologie
20 JAMSTEC - Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology
21 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences [Piscataway]
22 Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research
23 Physical Sciences
24 CPSX - Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration [London, ON]

The Cretaceous/Palaeogene mass extinction eradicated 76% of species on Earth. It was caused by the impact of an asteroid on the Yucatán carbonate platform in the southern Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, forming the Chicxulub impact crater. After the mass extinction, the recovery of the global marine ecosystem—measured as primary productivity—was geographically heterogeneous; export production in the Gulf of Mexico and North Atlantic–western Tethys was slower than in most other regions, taking 300 thousand years (kyr) to return to levels similar to those of the Late Cretaceous period. Delayed recovery of marine productivity closer to the crater implies an impact-related environmental control, such as toxic metal poisoning, on recovery times. If no such geographic pattern exists, the best explanation for the observed heterogeneity is a combination of ecological factors—trophic interactions, species incumbency and competitive exclusion by opportunists—and ‘chance’. The question of whether the post-impact recovery of marine productivity was delayed closer to the crater has a bearing on the predictability of future patterns of recovery in anthropogenically perturbed ecosystems. If there is a relationship between the distance from the impact and the recovery of marine productivity, we would expect recovery rates to be slowest in the crater itself. Here we present a record of foraminifera, calcareous nannoplankton, trace fossils and elemental abundance data from within the Chicxulub crater, dated to approximately the first 200 kyr of the Palaeocene. We show that life reappeared in the basin just years after the impact and a high-productivity ecosystem was established within 30 kyr, which indicates that proximity to the impact did not delay recovery and that there was therefore no impact-related environmental control on recovery. Ecological processes probably controlled the recovery of productivity after the Cretaceous/Palaeogene mass extinction and are therefore likely to be important for the response of the ocean ecosystem to other rapid extinction events.

Domaines: Planète et Univers [physics]; Paléontologie

Christopher Lowery, Timothy Bralower, Jeremy Owens, Francisco Rodríguez-Tovar, Heather Jones, et al.. Rapid recovery of life at ground zero of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Nature, 2018, 558 (7709), pp.288 - 291. ⟨10.1038/s41586-018-0163-6⟩. ⟨hal-01849424⟩