About 94 million years ago, something happened that led to an unusually high amount of organic material being preserved in oceans around the world.
About 94 million years ago, something happened that led to an unusually high amount of organic material being preserved in oceans around the world.
The burial of this organic carbon – over about a half million years – pulled an enormous amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere and had a major impact on Earth’s climate.
The basic assumption has been that some combination of super-giant algae blooms and low levels of oxygen in the ocean allowed the organic carbon from these blooms to be preserved in sediments.
New research from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis shows that there is another process by which this carbon was preserved. Organic matter sulfurization — which previously had been thought to act over timescales of tens of thousands of years — can actually occur much faster, according to research published this week in the journal Nature Communications.
Read more at Washington University in St. Louis
Photo: A research project led by Morgan Reed Raven while she was a fellow in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University sheds new light on the process by which organic carbon was preserved.
Photo via Washington University in St. Louis
