Late Paleozoic Ice Age DETELO: Integrating Paleontological, Sedimentological, and Geochemical Data to Investigate Faunal and Climate Change In Deep Time

The valuable deep time record of global change during the late Paleozoic ice age has increasingly been studied to constrain the timing of ice sheet development, the causal relationship between CO2 levels and global climate fluctuations, and the response of marine and terrestrial communities to climate change. Although the current state of knowledge is based primarily on biostratigraphic correlation of independent sedimentological, geochemical, or paleontological data sets, often from disparate geographic regions, those studies have revealed a close correspondence during the Early Permian among elevated CO2, warmer temperatures, and ice-free intervals in Gondwana. Comparison of quantitative paleoecological data from eastern Australia with those climate proxies has further shown that marine invertebrate communities underwent substantial restructuring during the Sakmarian-Kungurian interval of maximum climate warming. Similar ecosystem changes may also have occurred in other regions of Gondwana (although earlier than the shift in eastern Australia), but a global database of fossil occurrences does not show major changes in genus composition in other regions, such as the tropics. Thus, understanding the magnitude and geographic extent of biotic change during climate change is one of the most fundamental paleontological contributions from study of the late Paleozoic ice age, but requires additional Carboniferous and Permian data and better integration with geochemical and sedimentological proxies, collected together from the same horizons in a representative suite of stratigraphic sections. There is tentative evidence for rapid marine community destabilization during the Permian icehouse-greenhouse transition, but the mechanisms of community change and the resilience of ecosystems remain major unresolved questions. The significant results obtained from existing independent studies and the importance of diverse fields such as paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry, and climate modeling highlight the promise of a multidisciplinary late Paleozoic ice age DETELO for resolving those unanswered questions and elucidating the biotic response to global climate change.