The rise of biomineralisation and Reef Evolution

     Shallow marine carbonate systems account for a third of global carbonate production, and these are essentially biological sedimentary deposits of reefs and their associated platforms. As long-lived topographic structures, reefs record the response of biota to environmental change, and control sedimentation across shelf margins thereby influencing the evolution of carbonate depositional systems.

     Study in collaboration with colleagues from Russia, Mongolia, Germany, Canada, France and the USA of a wide variety of reefs has revealed hitherto unexpected levels of ecological complexity in ancient reefs proving former reconstructions to be inaccurate. Although some Palaeozoic reefs achieved rates of accretion similar to modern coral reefs, I have shown that the trophic structure and relative contributions of inorganic and organic carbonate were profoundly different: i) Palaeozoic reefs grew in the absence of the photosymbiosis which drives the calcification of modern scleractinian corals, ii) much of the preservable biodiversity was housed within cryptic communities, and iii) reef construction by relatively fragile organisms was made possible by the absence of biological destruction and rapid inorganic lithification.  Such detailed sedimentological and ecological analyses have confounded the long-held belief that ancient carbonate systems were produced by similar processes to Modern representatives: ancient carbonate platforms show unique characteristics that have no modern analogues, and as a result, responded in profoundly different ways to global change. I am extending the results of this research to construct models that describe the differing ways in which sediment transport operated across Palaeozoic constructional carbonate margins compared with modern examples.

Publications:

WOOD, R.A. 1999. Reef Evolution. Oxford University Press. 414pp.

ZHURAVLEV, A. Yu and WOOD, R.A. 2008. Eve of biomineralization: controls on carbonate mineralogy. Geology 36: 923-926.

ZHURAVLEV, A. Yu and WOOD, R.A. 2009. Controls on carbonate skeletal mineralogy: global CO2 evolution and mass extinctions. Geology 37: 1123-1126.

WOOD, R. Palaeoecology of early skeletal metazoans: insights into biomineralisation. Earth-Science Reviews 106, 184-190.