A team led by experts at Cardiff University has provided new evidence to explain why deep sea creatures were able to survive the catastrophic asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago…However, in a study published in the April issue of the journal Geology, a team led by researchers from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences provides strong evidence suggesting that some forms of algae and bacteria were actually living in the aftermath of the asteroid disaster, and that they acted as a constant, sinking, slow trickle of food for creatures living near the seafloor. The team were able to draw these conclusions by analysing new data from the chemical composition of the fossilised shells of sea surface and seafloor organisms from that period, taken from drilling cores from the ocean floor in the South Atlantic…Furthermore, the team were able to calculate that the food supply in the ocean was fully restored around 1.7m years after the asteroid strike, which is almost half the original estimates, showing that marine food chains bounced back quicker than originally thought.
- Heather S. Birch, Helen K. Coxall, Paul N. Pearson, Dick Kroon, Daniela N. Schmidt. Partial collapse of the marine carbon pump after the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Geology, 2016; 44 (4): 287 DOI:10.1130/G37581.1
