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Science 16 April 1982:
Vol. 216. no. 4543, pp. 249 - 256
DOI: 10.1126/science.216.4543.249
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Articles

Mass Mortality and Its Environmental and Evolutionary Consequences

Kenneth J. Hsü 1, Q. He 1, Judith A. McKenzie 1, Helmut Weissert 1, Katharina Perch-Nielsen 1, Hedy Oberhänsli 1, Kerry Kelts 1, John LaBrecque 2, Lisa Tauxe 2, Urs Krähenbühl 3, Stephen F. Percival Jr. 4, Ramil Wright 5, Anne Marie Karpoff 6, Nikolai Petersen 7, Peter Tucker 8, Richard Z. Poore 9, Andrew M. Gombos 10, Kenneth Pisciotto 11, Max F. Carman Jr. 12, and Edward Schreiber 13

1 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
2 Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Palisades, New York 10964
3 University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
4 Mobil Exploration and Production Services, Inc., Dallas, Texas 75221
5 Florida State University, Tallahassee 32306
6 Geology Institute, Strasbourg, France
7 Munich University, Munich, West Germany
8 University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
9 U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California 94025
10 Exxon Production Research Company, Houston, Texas 77001
11 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California 92093
12 University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77004
13 City University of New York, Flushing 10021

The latest Mesozoic and earliest Tertiary sediments at Deep Sea Drilling Project site 524 provide an amplified record of environmental and biostratographic changes at the end of Cretaceous. Closely spaced samples, representing time intervals as short as 102 or 103 years, were analyzed for their bulk carbonate and trace-metal compositions, and for oxygen and carbon isotopic compositions. The data indicate that at the end of Cretaceous, when a high proportion of the ocean's planktic organisms were eliminated, an associated reduction in productivity led to a partial transfer of dissolved carbon dioxide from the oceans to the atmosphere. This resulted in a large increase of the atmospheric carbon dioxide during the next 50,000 years, which is believed to have caused a temperature rise revealed by the oxygen-isotope data. The lowermost Tertiary sediments at site 524 include fossils with Cretaceous affinities, which may include both reworked individuals and some forms that survived for a while after the catastrophe. Our data indicate that many of the Cretaceous pelagic organisms became extinct over a period of a few tens of thousands of years, and do not contradict the scenario of cometary impact as a cause of mass mortality in the oceans, as suggested by an iridium anomaly at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.


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