YALE - The murky world at the bottom of the oceans is now a little clearer, thanks to a new study that tracks the evolution of marine sediment layers across hundreds of millions of years.
It is a story of world-building on a grand, yet granular, scale, accomplished by a succession of marine animals that burrowed and tunneled their way through heat and cold, species expansions and mass die-offs. Scientists call the process bioturbation — the excavation and mixing of sediments and soils by burrowing animals, particularly for shelter and sustenance.
“Bioturbation is one of the most important forms of ecosystem engineering today, both in the oceans and on land,” said Lidya Tarhan, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.
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Kate Pippenger, a graduate student in Tarhan’s lab at Yale, is co-author of the study. Additional co-authors are Alison Cribb of the University of Southampton, Michelle Zill and David Bottjer of the University of Southern California, William Phelps of Riverside Community College, Mary Droser of the University of California-Riverside, and Matthew Clapham of the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The research was funded by Yale and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship.