Photic-zone euxinia had a major role in the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary mass extinction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marine anoxia is widely proposed as a kill mechanism for the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary mass extinction commonly linked to the end-Devonian Hangenberg Crisis (~359.3 Ma), but the exact connections between primary drivers, marine redox conditions, and biotic turnover are not well constrained. Mercury concentrations and isotopes from multiple sections in South China and western Canada show no significant signature of enhanced volcanism during the end-Devonian Hangenberg Crisis. Rather, the distinct negative shifts of Δ199Hg coupled with positive shifts of δ202Hg across the end-Devonian Hangenberg Crisis provide compelling evidence for development of photic zone euxinia, as supported by covariant pyrite framboid data and Ce/Ce* values of carbonate. The photic zone euxinia was likely driven by increased nutrient delivery given its coincidence with carbon isotopic perturbations and enhanced weathering immediately before the end-Devonian Hangenberg Crisis. Our data highlight the possibility that photic zone euxinia played a pivotal role in the extinction of marine biota during the end-Devonian Hangenberg Crisis by limiting the habitable space and by increased hydrogen sulfide toxicity, especially for organisms living in shallow water. Photic-zone euxinia which was the most important ecosystemic stressor during the Devonian-Carboniferous mass extinction, in contrast to volcanic activity which played a limited role, according to comparison of geochemical proxies from basins in south China and western Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".