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Coccolithophores pp 429–453Cite as

Why is the Land Green and the Ocean Red?

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Summary

Fossil evidence suggests that during the Paleozoic Era, green algae dominated eukaryotic phytoplankton taxa. One branch of this originally aquatic clade colonized terrestrial ecosystems to form what would become a green hegemony on land -with few exceptions, terrestrial plants are green. In contrast to land plants, contemporary oceanic phytoplankton are represented by relatively few species that are phylogenetically deeply branching. Since the Triassic Period, the major taxa of eukaryotic phytoplankton preserved in the fossil record have been dominated by organisms containing plastids derived from the “red”, chlorophyll c containing algal clade. The ocean became “red” sometime during the Triassic or early Jurassic periods. The evolutionary success of the red line in Mesozoic and younger oceans appears related to changing oceanic conditions. In this chapter, we briefly explore the evolutionary processes and ecological traits that potentially led to the success of the red line in the oceans.

Keywords

  • Black Shale
  • Plastid Genome
  • Early Jurassic
  • Calcareous Nannofossil
  • Secondary Endosymbiosis

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geological Sciences, Rutgers University, 71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08901, USA

    Paul G. Falkowski, Miriam E. Katz & Bas Van de Schootbrugge

  2. Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology Program, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, 71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08901, USA

    Paul G. Falkowski, Oscar Schofield & Bas Van de Schootbrugge

  3. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, USA

    Andrew H. Knoll

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  1. Paul G. Falkowski
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  2. Oscar Schofield
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  3. Miriam E. Katz
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  4. Bas Van de Schootbrugge
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  5. Andrew H. Knoll
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geological Institute, ETH-Zentrum, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Prof. Dr. Hans R. Thierstein

  2. Department of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD, London, UK

    Dr. Jeremy R. Young

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Falkowski, P.G., Schofield, O., Katz, M.E., Van de Schootbrugge, B., Knoll, A.H. (2004). Why is the Land Green and the Ocean Red?. In: Thierstein, H.R., Young, J.R. (eds) Coccolithophores. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-06278-4_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-06278-4_16

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