Workshop: “Deep-time Records of Mass Extinctions” by Elizabeth Sibert

Workshop: “Deep-time Records of Mass Extinctions”

 

By Elizabeth Sibert, Harvard Society of Fellows

Date: November 4th - 5th 2019

Time: From 10 to 13h

Room: Z/022 – Z/023

Mass Extinctions have shaped the evolutionary history of life on the planet. As humans continue to heavily modify the climate and environment, it seems more and more likely that we are in the beginning of a new mass extinction event, with consequences that will far outlast humanity’s time on the planet. In this two half-days workshop, we will explore the impact of mass extinction events on the history of life and the planet and their relation to climate change (day 1), and use this to investigate an event in the early Miocene, which appears to have a significant extinction in sharks, but without a known cause. During the first day, we will cover the definition of ‘mass extinction’, discuss the different extinction events that have occurred throughout the last 500 million years of Earth’s history. We will investigate drivers of extinction, particularly environmental drivers, and learn some statistical techniques for detecting extinction in the fossil record. The overall goal of Day 1 is to develop a sense of understanding of mass extinctions, and how they are studied, both from a biological and environmental perspective. On the second day, we will use these tools to investigate a time period in Earth’s history that may involve a significant, but poorly constrained extinction event, the Early Miocene. Workshop participants will each compile 1-2 biological or environmental records from this time period, with a goal of pulling together a broader picture of biological and environmental change during the interval. We will synthesize these records to determine what (if any) environmental and biological changes may have been occurring during this time period that may have precipitated an extinction event in predatory sharks. Throughout the workshop, effort will be made to connect the deep-time past to the modern, placing our anthropogenic impact on climate, species, and ecosystems, within the broader context of the history of life. Depending on the outcome of the compilation, this synthesis may form the basis of a review paper discussing the biological and environmental context for this poorly understood time in Earth’s history.

Dr. Elizabeth Sibert is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. She received her MS and PhD in biological oceanography from Scripps Intuition of Oceanography in 2013 and 2016 and her Bachelor's in Biology in 2011 from University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on the intersection of biological oceanography and paleobiology, using microfossil fish teeth and shark scales, alongside paleo-environmental proxies, to assess how marine ecosystems have responded to major global change events throughout Earth's history. She has spent much of her career working on deep time, exploring extinctions and events from the past 100 million years.