MICROEUKARYOTES IN FERRUGINOUS (FE-RICH) MID-PROTEROZOIC OCEAN ANALOGUES (Invited Presentation)

The Proterozoic Eon has been epithetically referred to as the boring billion due to a perceived relative stasis in the evolution of Earth’s surface chemistry. At the same time, this boring interval in Earth’s geochemical history likely heralded the emergence and early diversification of Eukaryotic life. While highly controversial, new geochemical data is revealing previously undetected dynamics in atmospheric oxygen across the Proterozoic Eon. At the same time, emerging insight implies redox stratified oceans with a variably oxygenated surface waters overlying ferruginous deep waters. These stratified, ferruginous oceans set the ecological and biogeochemical landscape that shaped the evolution of early Eukaryotes and the nature of the Earth system that supported the rise of multi-cellular life. In this talk, we report on the ecology of microeukaryotes from modern ferruginous analogues to the Proterozoic oceans and we discuss implications for the ecology of microeukaryotic communities that likely populated the Mid-proterozoic oceans.