Impact Resilience: Ecological Recovery of a Carbonate Factory in the Wake of the Late Devonian Impact Event

Abstract

Conformable limestone deposits bracketing the Alamo breccia (Late Devonian, Nevada) provide a robust dataset for comparisons of depositional environments and marine communities before and after a significant meteor impact. Rank abundances of more than 3000 faunal identifications from 158 sampling localities cluster in three major faunal groups that are arranged in an onshore-offshore lithofacies gradient. Comparison of faunal clusters before and after the impact show little to no dissimilarity. The recovery of marine invertebrate communities following the Alamo impact event was geologically instantaneous. Broad geographic ranges of the fauna may have contributed to ecological resilience. From a geologic perspective, marine communities appear to rebound quickly and fully following meteor impacts, leaving impact-related extinctions as outliers that correspond only to the largest impacts.