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Volume 9
Page 23
November 19-20, 2018 Paris, France
6
th
Global summit on Climate Change
Climate Change Summit 2018
Journal of Earth Science & Climate Change | ISSN : 2157-7617
Sergei Petrovskii, J Earth Sci Clim Change 2018, Volume:9
DOI: 10.4172/2157-7617-C5-050
Climate change can lead to global anoxia and mass extinctions by
disrupting oxygen production in oceans
A
lot have been said about negative consequences of the global warming. However,
the worst kind of catastrophe that could affect most of the living being on Earth
may have been overlooked. We consider the effect of global warming on the coupled
plankton-oxygen dynamics in the ocean. The net oxygen production by phytoplankton
is known to depend on the water temperature and hence can be disrupted by warming.
We address this issue theoretically by considering a family of novel mathematical
models of the plankton-oxygen system. We show that sustainable oxygen production
by phytoplankton is only possible if the net oxygen production rate is within a certain
intermediate range (i.e. not too low and not too high). This appears to be in agreement
with some available field data. We show that a sufficiently large increase in the water
temperature is likely to push the system out of the safe range, which may result in a
global oxygen depletion, which would likely result in mass mortality of animals and
humans. We then discuss the temporal scale at which the oxygen depletion can occur
and show that this catastrophe can be especially dangerous because it can be preceded
by long periods of apparently stable, “safe” dynamics, which then experiences a fast
transition to extinction. We also show that a similar type of ecological catastrophe may
have happened in the past, in particular resulting in some of the mass extinction events
in Earth paleo-history.
Biography
Sergei Petrovskii graduated as a Theoretical Physicist in 1983 from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He got
his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from the same institution in 1990. He worked as a case
sensitive in Shirshov Institute of Oceanology (Moscow) in 1991-2006. He moved to the UK and got a faculty position
in the University of Leicester in 2006. From 2012, he holds a post of a chair in Applied Mathematics. He published
four books and more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Ecological Complexity
(Elsevier) and on the case sansitive of two other journals. He is also the Founder and Scientific Coordinator of the
MPDE conference series (Models in Population Dynamics and Ecology).
sp237@le.ac.ukSergei Petrovskii
University of Leicester, UK