Researchers Find Fossil Traces of Ghosts in the Ocean

Researcher said to have found a trace fossil ghosts in the ocean. The discovery became a record of the history of ancient life surviving from hell on earth.

Reported by Live Science, ghost tracks of tiny plankton-like creatures called nanofossils have been found haunting prehistoric ocean sediments. Though these organisms are thought to have become extinct centuries ago.

The results of the study revealed that these organisms survive in acidic oceans caused by climate change. Researchers say it could provide clues as to how modern creatures have survived rising ocean temperatures.

Nannofossils are the remains of marine plankton called coccolithophores (cox-oh-LITH’-oh-fours)which is included in the class Prymnesiophyceae and it still exists today at the bottom of the food floor in the ocean.

Each of these single-celled organisms such as algae measures less than 0.001 inches (30 micrometers), and is surrounded by a hard layer of geometric calcium scales, according to the Faculty of Geosciences at the University of Bremen in Germany. Its size is so small that it is almost imperceptible to make it called a ghost.

The results of the study, which was published in the Journal of Science on May 19, said that these nanofossils were very abundant.

“There are way more nannofossils than other types of fossils. That means we can really be statistically strong, because we see so many of them,” Paul Bown, a paleontologist at University College London, UK, and co-author of the new study , told Live Science.

When these tiny plankton die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, where their calcium shells slowly build up. Over time, piles of white mineral scales known as coccolithpressed together to form a lime wall.

“The white chalk cliffs are white because they are almost 100 percent nanofossil,” Bown said.

However, there is a point in the fossil record where coccolithophores suddenly disappeared, then returned mysteriously millions of years later. These points coincide with primordial ocean warming events, in which seawater became more acidic as it reacted with increased carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

When ocean pH drops during this event, it eats away at the calcium shell coccolithophoreslike vinegar can dissolve eggshells, according to research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Scientists once thought that most of the calcium-coated plankton species in these acidic seas perished en masse several times and were replaced by unshelled species, whose bodies decomposed into dark, muddy goop and then hardened into rock.

Despite their microscopic size, coccolithophores comes in a variety of stunning geometric shapes.

Co-author Sam Slater, a paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, previously concluded the same thing. But then Slater noticed something odd during his research for another study looking for traces of ancient pollen, while examining black sediment from warming events during the Jurassic period (201 million to 145 million years ago).

Under a microscope, Slater detected small geometric traces in the rock, and realized that these traces were shaped exactly like coccolithophores.

Intrigued by the discovery, the researchers then examined fossil sediments from other Jurassic sites around the world, as well as samples from two warming events during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago).

“And we find these traces, these ghost fossils, everywhere we look,” Bown said.

These results suggest that, contrary to previous studies, some coccolithophores survived catastrophic ocean acidification and warming deaths, even as other species went extinct. But the ocean’s low pH dissolved their shells and erased them from the fossil record.

According to the researchers, this information could help explain the current climate catastrophe. Climate disasters are eating away at calcium-rich coral reefs.

If coccolithophores able to adapt to warmer and more acidic conditions, this may be good news for modern creatures farther down the food chain.

(TTF/agt)

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