Over the past several decades, oxygen minimum zones have rapidly expanded due to rising temperatures raising concerns about the impacts of future climate change. One way to better understand the drivers behind this expansion is to evaluate the links between climate and seawater deoxygenation in the past especially in times of geologically abrupt climate change such as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a well-characterized period of rapid warming~56 Ma. We have developed and applied the novel redox proxies of foraminiferal Cr isotopes (δ 53 Cr) and Ce anomalies (Ce/Ce*) to assess changes in paleoredox conditions arising from changes in oxygen availability. Both δ 53 Cr and Cr concentrations decrease notably over the PETM at intermediate to upper abyssal water depths, indicative of widespread reductions in dissolved oxygen concentrations. An apparent correlation between the sizes of δ 53 Cr and benthic δ 18 O excursions during the PETM suggests temperature is one of the main controlling factors of deoxygenation in the open ocean. Ocean Drilling Program Sites 1210 in the Pacific and 1263 in the Southeast Atlantic suggest that deoxygenation is associated with warming and circulation changes, as supported by Ce/Ce* data. Our geochemical data are supported by simulations from an intermediate complexity climate model (cGENIE), which show that during the PETM anoxia was mostly restricted to the Tethys Sea, while hypoxia was more widespread as a result of increasing atmospheric CO 2 (from 1 to 6 times preindustrial values).

The great anthropogenic alterations occurring to carbon availability in the oceans necessitate an understanding of the energy requirements of species and how changes in energy availability may impact biodiversity. The deep-sea floor is characterized naturally by extremely low availability of chemical energy and is particularly vulnerable to changes in carbon flux from surface waters. Because the energetic requirements of organisms impact nearly every aspect of their ecology and evolution, we hypothesize that species are adapted to specific levels of carbon availability and occupy a particular metabolic niche. We test this hypothesis in deep-sea, benthic invertebrates specifically examining how energetic demand, axes of the metabolic niche, and geographic range size vary over gradients of chemical energy availability. We find that benthic invertebrates with higher energetic expenditures, and ecologies associated with high energy demand, are located in areas with higher chemical energy availability. In addition, we find that range size and location of deep-sea, benthic species is determined by geographic patterns in chemical energy availability. Our findings indicate that species may be adapted to specific energy regimes, and the metabolic niche can potentially link scales from individuals to ecosystems as well as adaptation to patterns in biogeography and biodiversity.