Continental configuration controls ocean oxygenation during the Phanerozoic

Ocean oxygenation paced marine biodiversity changes at the geological time scale. It is widely admitted that changes in ocean dissolved oxygen concentrations reflect in turn changes in the atmospheric oxygen concentration. In contrast, a new study published today in Nature shows that continental rearrangement would have induced a decoupling between upper-ocean and deep-ocean oxygen concentrations and ultimately driven ocean oxygenation variations at the geological time scale.