Abstract. The Plio-Pleistocene is associated with many important climatic and paleoceanographic changes which have shaped the biotic and abiotic nature of the modern world. The closure of the Central American Seaway and the development and intensification of northern hemisphere icesheets had profound global impacts on the latitudinal and vertical structure of the oceans triggering the extinction and radiation of many marine groups. In particular, marine calcifying planktonic foraminifera, that are sensitive to water column structure, exhibited a series of extinctions as global temperatures fell. By analyzing high-resolution (~5 kyr) sedimentary records from the Eastern Equatorial Pacific Ocean, complimented with global records from the novel Triton dataset, we document the biotic changes in this microfossil group, within which three species displayed isochronous co-extinction, and species with cold-water affinity increase in dominance. We suggest that these changes are associated with the terminal stages of the closure of the Central American Seaway and mark the initiation of a world in which cold- and deep-dwelling species became increasingly more successful.
Abstract. The Pliocene-Recent is associated with many important climatic and
paleoceanographic changes, which have shaped the biotic and abiotic nature of
the modern world. The closure of the Central American Seaway and the
development and intensification of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets had
profound global impacts on the latitudinal and vertical structure of the
oceans, triggering the extinction and radiation of many marine groups. In
particular, marine calcifying planktonic foraminifera, which are highly
sensitive to water column structure, exhibited a series of extinctions as
global temperatures fell. By analyzing high-resolution (∼ 5 kyr) sedimentary records from the Eastern Equatorial Pacific Ocean,
complemented with global records from the novel Triton dataset, we document
the biotic changes in this microfossil group, within which three species
displayed isochronous co-extinction, and species with cold-water affinity
increased in dominance as meridional temperature gradients steepened. We
suggest that these changes were associated with the terminal stages of the
closure of the Central American Seaway, where following the sustained warmth
of the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, bipolar ice sheet expansion initiated a
world in which cold- and deep-dwelling species became increasingly more
successful. Such global-scale paleoecological and macroevolutionary
variations between the Pliocene and the modern icehouse climate would
suggest significant deviations from pre-industrial baselines within modern
and future marine plankton communities as anthropogenic climate forcing
continues.
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