The Strangelove Ocean
With the plankton gone, the sea stops pumping carbon downward and the surface and deep water read the same.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 500 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 200 thousand years
- Era
- Paleocene, Cenozoic
In the aftermath of the impact the calcareous nannoplankton and planktonic foraminifera that ran the ocean's biological pump are almost entirely wiped out. Without them, organic carbon stops being exported to the deep, and the carbon isotope difference between surface and bottom water — normally large, because life strips light carbon from the surface — collapses to nearly nothing. The condition is named for the film, a sea gone sterile from the top down. It takes hundreds of thousands of years for the gradient to return, and a few million for the full complexity of ocean ecosystems to rebuild.