Spatiotemporal variability of ocean chemistry in the early Cambrian, South China

Abstract

Following the Ediacaran metazoan radiation, the “Cambrian Explosion” set up the major framework of todays’ animal phyla as well as modern marine ecosystem. Here, we present a preliminary investigation on the temporal and spatial (from shallow to deep waters) variations of the early Cambrian ocean chemistry in South China through analyzing a Fe-S-C systematic dataset integrated from literature. Our investigation indicates that the early Cambrian deep ocean in South China was still anoxic and Fe2+-enriched (i.e., ferruginous) although its surface was oxic, and in between a metastable euxinic (anoxic and sulfidic) water zone may have dynamically developed in anoxic shelf waters with an increasing weathering sulfate supply. Furthermore, accompanying marine transgression and regression cycles in the early Cambrian, such a “sandwich” structure in ocean redox chemistry demonstrates five evolutional stages, which can be well correlated to the spatiotemporal patterns of fossil records in South China. The good correlation between metazoan fossil occurrences and water chemistry in South China suggests that early animals possibly possessed ability to inhabit anoxic but generally not euxinic environments as free H2S was fatal to most eukaryotes. This view can well explain why those small shell fauna and sponges disappeared from shelf to slope areas where sulfidic Ni-Mo-rich shales were widely deposited. Thus, we conclude that the spatiotemporal variations of ocean chemistry and its biological effects probably played a key role in the phased animal radiations and “extinctions” in the early Cambrian.