Deep-Sea Ecosystems: Biogeography of Methane-Seep Faunas Through Time

Summary

Life in the deep-sea has fascinated both scientists and the public for centuries, yet many evolutionary and biogeographic questions remain controversial. The biogeography of the deep-sea today has a historical basis for which the fossil record provides the most direct evidence.

With this project I aim to provide the first survey and analysis of the biogeographic evolution of deep-sea metazoans through the last 50 million years of Earth’s history on a global scale. The deep-sea methane-seep fauna provides an excellent model system for this purpose:

1. It consists of characteristic taxa that can readily be identified;
2. These characteristic taxa are restricted to the deep sea and this restriction is known from the geologic past and even among now extinct taxa;
3. Seep faunas have a much higher fossilization potential than ‘ordinary’ deep-sea taxa due to the in situ carbonate precipitation at methane seeps.

Based on new material from three key areas and using novel analytical approaches, I will focus on four main questions:

• Was the Pacific Ocean the center of origin?
• Was the Atlantic Ocean colonized through the Isthmus of Panama?
• Which role did the former Tethys Ocean have in faunal dispersal?
• What were the effects of the Messinian salinity crisis?

This research is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR)

Project Participants at the Museum

Steffen Kiel (principal investigator)

Frida Hybertsen (PhD Student)

External Project Participants

CNR-ISMAR, Bologna, Italy