257 / 2025-04-15 22:42:17

Global cooling drives diversification and warming causes extinction among Carboniferous-Permian fusuline foraminifera

Fusuline, biodiversity, evolution, late Paleozoic ice age, global warming

Theme 3: Earth-Life Co-evolution Through Time > Session 3d: Biotic and Environmental Changes during the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age

The evolution of global biodiversity in deep time provides a unique lesson into how current global changes may influence future biodiversity evolution. Here we analyze global diversity patterns from a high-quality global dataset of fusuline foraminifera, one of the most diverse Carboniferous and through Permian marine fossil groups, at an average resolution of <45 thousand years (kyr). This interval includes major climate changes. Our results reveal that persistent, long-term icehouse conditions encouraged biodiversification. By contrast, climatic warming and associated episodic anoxia, especially under greenhouse conditions, seriously interrupted foraminifera macroevolution and led to major biodiversity loss. Analyses of million-year-scale cyclicity suggest species diversity changes were paced by long-term astronomical forcing, including ~1.0-1.2 Myr obliquity and ~2.1 Myr eccentricity cycles. Pearson correlation coefficients between species richness and multiple environmental proxies reveal that no single proxy shows significant correlation with the diversity pattern, but pCO₂, pO₂, δ¹³C_carb and ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr together account for 81.6% of the changes in biodiversity. This pattern is similar to late Cenozoic foraminifera biodiversity changes and suggests that recent rapid global warming related to anthropogenic CO₂ emissions is very likely a great threat to Earth’s current ecosystem.