Sosdian, S. & Rosenthal, Y. Deep-sea temperature and ice volume changes across the Pliocene-Pleistocene climate transitions.
They avoided complications involved in calibrating Antarctic or deep-sea temperature data to global mean temperature, by instead using CO2 reconstructions to compare with sea-level reconstructions.
To his surprise, Earth's orbital eccentricity, deep-sea temperature, and atmospheric carbon dioxide all varied in step, on the same 100,000-year cycle.
Shaped like a lens, the vast rotating plume was 20 kilometers across, 600 meters thick, and about 0.25 degrees Celsius warmer than the ambient deep-sea temperature of 2 degrees.
The vent community was dominated by hard substrate generalists that also lived on bare basalt at ambient deep-sea temperature in the axial summit trough (AST generalists).
The AST of the midocean ridge at 9°50'N EPR region houses two fundamentally different ecosystems: (i) the large, continuous basalt which is only scarcely populated by macrofauna with stable, ambient deep-sea temperature and chemistry.
By including samples from bare basalt with ambient deep-sea temperature and lack of vent fluid emissions in our study, we can estimate the degree of endemicity of vent meiofauna in this region and discuss underlying ecological and evolutionary processes.
In addition, there are habitats with no visible fauna such as the high temperature (up to 400°C) areas of bare sulfide chimneys and bare basalt habitats with no direct influence of hydrothermal fluid emissions and ambient deep-sea temperature [7].
Since shallow-water fauna are adapted to relatively warm conditions currently dominating the upper oceans except at high latitudes, the low temperatures prevalent in the deep sea are considered to limit invasion by such fauna (deep-sea temperature is typically between 4 and −1°C; Gage & Tyler, 1991).
Rights & permissionsfor article Sea-level and deep-sea-temperature variability over the past 5.3 million years.
