paleogeography

Phanerozoic icehouse climates as the result of multiple solid-Earth cooling mechanisms

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The Phanerozoic climate has been interrupted by two long “icehouse” intervals, including the current icehouse of the last ~34 million years. While these cool intervals correspond to lower atmospheric CO2, it is unclear why CO2 levels fell, with hypotheses suggesting changes in CO2 degassing rates or modification of silicate weathering through changing continental lithology or paleogeography. Here, … Read more…

rgplates now part of GPlates software family

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rgplates has joined the GPlates family! rgplates allows the integration of tectonic calculations into the R software environment for statistical computing and graphics. Paleogeographic reconstructions in GPlates can be directly connected to a vast number of statistical libraries available in R, which is also the primary scripting language of the paleobiology community. The figure below … Read more…

Gondwana Research: Mapping paleoelevations along active continental margins with igneous geochemistry: A case study from South America

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Mountains and mountain ranges, often situated at convergent plate margins, play a pivotal role in many fields of the Earth, climate, and biological sciences. Reconstructing past episodes of mountain building from the geological rock record is one of the main challenges for unravelling the ancient physical geography of Earth’s surface. Established methods for quantifying past … Read more…

Scientific Reports: A geospatial platform for the tectonic interpretation of low‐temperature thermochronology Big Data

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Low‐temperature thermochronology is a powerful tool for constraining the thermal evolution of rocks and minerals in relation to a breadth of tectonic, geodynamic, landscape evolution, and natural resource formation processes through deep time. However, complexities inherent to these analytical techniques can make interpreting the significance of results challenging, requiring them to be placed in their … Read more…

Environmental stability on Earth allowed marine biodiversity to flourish

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Modern ocean biodiversity, which is at its highest level ever, was achieved through long-term stability of the location of so-called biodiversity hotspots, regions of especially high numbers of species, scientists have found. The findings, published in Nature, were reached through a pioneering model that reconstructs the diversity of marine animals from their origin – some … Read more…

Nature: Post-extinction recovery of the Phanerozoic oceans and biodiversity hotspots

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The fossil record of marine invertebrates has long fuelled the debate as to whether or not there are limits to global diversity in the sea. Ecological theory states that, as diversity grows and ecological niches are filled, the strengthening of biological interactions imposes limits on diversity. However, the extent to which biological interactions have constrained … Read more…

Modelling global precipitation since 250 million years ago

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We have developed a novel data-driven approach to reconstruct precipitation patterns through geological time, since the supercontinent Pangea was in existence. Our approach involves linking climate-sensitive sedimentary deposits such as coal, evaporites and glacial deposits to a global plate model, reconstructed paleo-elevation maps and high-resolution General Circulation Models via Bayesian machine learning. We model the … Read more…