Massive dissociation of gas hydrate during a Jurassic oceanic anoxic event
By S. Hesselbo, D. Gröcke, H. Jenkyns, C. Bjerrum, P. Farrimond, Helen S. Morgans Bell, O. Green. Nature, 2000
1,001 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In the Jurassic period, the Early Toarcian oceanic anoxic event (about 183 million years ago) is associated with exceptionally high rates of organic-carbon burial, high palaeotemperatures and significant mass extinction. Heavy carbon-isotope compositions in rocks and fossils of this age have been linked to the global burial of organic carbon, which is isotopically light. In contrast, examples of light carbon-isotope values from marine organic matter of Early Toarcian age have been explained principally in terms of localized upwelling of bottom water enriched in 12C versus 13 C (refs 1,2,5,6). Here, however, we report carbon-isotope analyses of fossil wood which demonstrate that isotopically light carbon dominated all the upper oceanic, biospheric and atmospheric carbon reservoirs, and that this occurred despite the enhanced burial of organic carbon. We propose that—as has been suggested for the Late Palaeocene thermal maximum, some 55 million years ago—the observed patterns were produced by voluminous and extremely rapid release of methane from gas hydrate contained in marine continental-margin sediments.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Environmental Chemistry, Mechanics of Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a4e17d3089c8336d07a55b84caf9be1bfbc14d5
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Citations in the corpus
- Potential impacts of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions on Mediterranean marine ecosystems and cetaceans (2008, background): “By increasing the atmospheric temperature by 4 to 8 degrees, and reducing the amount of oxygen, this phenomenon may have been responsible for the extinction of 80% of the oceanic fauna at that time (Hesselbo et al., 2000; Kennett et al., 2000).”
- How contact metamorphism can trigger global climate changes: Modeling gas generation around igneous sills in sedimentary basins (2010, background): “Pronounced negative carbon-isotope (d13C) excursions are identified from proxy data records covering these events, which can be explained by a release of 12C-enriched carbon gases to the atmosphere (e.g. Jenkyns, 1988; Dickens et al., 1995; Hesselbo et al., 2000).”
- Man and the Last Great Wilderness: Human Impact on the Deep Sea (2011, background): “However, the possibility of present large-scale methane releases caused by climate change [268,269] through mechanisms triggered by deepwater warming [270,271], mass wasting on continental slopes [272] and slumping of the sea floor with release of solid hydrates is still debated as a way of transfer”
- Cyclostratigraphy and its revolutionizing applications in the earth and planetary sciences (2013, background): “The developing focus on the oceanic anoxic events of the Early Jurassic has come to rely on the high-resolution astrochronology offered by cyclostratigraphy (e.g., the early Toarcian oceanic anoxic event; Jenkyns, 1988; Hesselbo et al., 2000, 2007; Kemp et al., 2005, 2011; Suan et al., 2008).”