Oxygen is a prerequisite for all large and motile animals. It is a puzzling paradox that fossils of benthic animals are often found in black shales with geochemical evidence for deposition in marine environments with anoxic and sulfidic bottom waters. It is debated whether the geochemical proxies are unreliable, affected by diagenesis, or whether the fossils are transported from afar or perhaps were not benthic. Here, we improved the stratigraphic resolution of marine anoxia records 100–1000 fold using core-scanning X-Ray Fluorescence and established a centennial resolution record of oxygen availability at the seafloor in an epicontinental sea that existed ~501–494 million years ago. The study reveals that anoxic bottom-water conditions, often with toxic hydrogen sulfide present, were interrupted by brief oxygenation events of 600–3000 years duration, corresponding to 1–5 mm stratigraphic thickness. Fossil shells occur in some of these oxygenated intervals suggesting that animals invaded when conditions permitted an aerobic life style at the seafloor. Although the fauna evidently comprised opportunistic species adapted to low oxygen environments, these findings reconcile a long-standing debate between paleontologists and geochemists, and shows the potential of ultra-high resolution analyses for reconstructing redox conditions in past oceans.

The early Eocene (c. 56 - 48 million years ago) experienced some of the highest global temperatures in Earth’s history since the Mesozoic, with no polar ice. Reports of contradictory ice-rafted erratics and cold water glendonites in the higher latitudes have been largely dismissed due to ambiguity of the significance of these purported cold-climate indicators. Here we apply clumped isotope paleothermometry to a traditionally qualitative abiotic proxy, glendonite calcite, to generate quantitative temperature estimates for northern mid-latitude bottom waters. Our data show that the glendonites of the Danish Basin formed in waters below 5 °C, at water depths of <300 m. Such near-freezing temperatures have not previously been reconstructed from proxy data for anywhere on the early Eocene Earth, and these data therefore suggest that regionalised cool episodes punctuated the background warmth of the early Eocene, likely linked to eruptive phases of the North Atlantic Igneous Province.

Understanding the Earth’s climate system during past periods of high atmospheric CO2 is crucial for forecasting climate change under anthropogenically-elevated CO2. The Mesozoic Era is believed to have coincided with a long-term Greenhouse climate, and many of our temperature reconstructions come from stable isotopes of marine biotic calcite, in particular from belemnites, an extinct group of molluscs with carbonate hard-parts. Yet, temperatures reconstructed from the oxygen isotope composition of belemnites are consistently colder than those derived from other temperature proxies, leading to large uncertainties around Mesozoic sea temperatures. Here we apply clumped isotope palaeothermometry to two distinct carbonate phases from exceptionally well-preserved belemnites in order to constrain their living habitat, and improve temperature reconstructions based on stable oxygen isotopes. We show that belemnites precipitated both aragonite and calcite in warm, open ocean surface waters, and demonstrate how previous low estimates of belemnite calcification temperatures has led to widespread underestimation of Mesozoic sea temperatures by ca. 12 °C, raising estimates of some of the lowest temperature estimates for the Jurassic period to values which approach modern mid-latitude sea surface temperatures. Our findings enable accurate recalculation of global Mesozoic belemnite temperatures, and will thus improve our understanding of Greenhouse climate dynamics.

The Early Jurassic Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE) with its associated carbon-isotope excursion (CIE) was possibly one of the most pronounced periods of widespread oxygen deficiency in the Mesozoic ocean. The event has been extensively studied in order to understand the processes triggering the environmental perturbations and the extreme oxygen depletion in many marine basins. However, comparatively little focus has been placed on the end of the positive CIE and the stratigraphic coherent end of anoxiceuxinic conditions. In the present study, we constrain the stratigraphic extent of anoxic-euxinic conditions and define the termination of the positive CIE in the Swabo-Franconian Basin covering the Lower Toarcian strata using carbon-isotope ratios, organic matter pyrolysis and redox-sensitive element concentrations of outcrop samples from the Aubach section. Bulk organic carbon-isotope values, corrected for changes in type of organic matter using the Hydrogen Index (HI), suggest that the amplitude of the negative CIE in organic matter is as little as 3.3-3.5 ‰, in contrast to 4.5 ‰ change in δ 13 C carb in the same section. Enrichment in redox-sensitive proxies (V/Al and DOP-T) and %TOC suggest that environmental perturbations associated with the T-OAE continued until the upper falciferum Zone in the Aubach section. This indicates that anoxic-euxinic conditions terminated in the same stratigraphic interval in which δ 13 C values return to steady, light values at ~-28 ‰ (termination of positive CIE). This synchronism in the return to normal marine conditions is also observed in the southern Paris Basin, but not in the Cleveland Basin.

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