The Neogene history of Amazonia is essential for understanding the evolution of the rainforest and associated fauna living in one of the most diverse places on Earth. A central question about our understanding of Amazonia remains unsolved: Did continental-scale marine flooding occur in western Amazonia during the Neogene? Miocene marine transgressions in the continental interior would have had a profound effect on the diversification and structuring of both terrestrial and aquatic Neotropical communities
The onset of the late Palaeozoic ice age about 340 million years ago has been attributed to a decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with expansion of land plants, as plants both enhance silicate rock weathering—which consumes CO2—and increase the storage of organic carbon on land. However, plant expansion and carbon uptake substantially predate glaciation
We suggest that immobilization of organic carbon in subduction zones and deep sequestration in the mantle facilitated the rise (~103–5 fold) and maintenance of atmospheric oxygen since the Palaeoproterozoic and is causally linked to the Great Oxidation Event. Our modelling shows that episodic recycling of organic carbon before the Great Oxidation Event may also explain occasional whiffs of atmospheric oxygen observed in the Archaean.
Special ‘nugget-producing’ bacteria may hold the key to more efficient processing of gold ore, mine tailings and recycled electronics, as well as aid in exploration for new deposits, University of Adelaide research has shown.
Now they have shown for the first time, just how long this biogeochemical cycle takes and they hope to make to it even faster in the future.
German-Canadian research team discovers new ore-forming process in ancient marine sedimentary basin
20 April 2017/Kiel. The Witwatersrand basin in South Africa hosts the largest known gold repository on Earth – but how was it formed? Scientists of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre of Ocean Research Kiel and Canadian research institutes were able to figure out how parts of the Earth’s largest gold deposits formed about three billion years ago. Crude oil and hot hydrothermal fluids played a major role. This study has been currently published in the journal “Precambrian Research“
New research suggests that inorganic chemicals can self-organize into complex structures that mimic primitive life on Earth.This complicates the identification of Earth’s earliest microfossils and redefines the search for life on other planets and moons.
All known Ediacaran skeletal biota produced either aragonite or high-Mg calcite: carbonate polymorphs interpreted to have been favoured by ambient seawater chemistry. Indeed all known Ediacaran skeletal taxa were immobile benthos found exclusively in shallow marine carbonate settings. Finally, we note that Ediacaran skeletal taxa are of diverse affinity, and some possessed a non-mineralized, organic, counterpart, as detailed below
The natural increase in solar luminosity — a very slow process unrelated to current climate warming — will cause the Earth’s temperatures to rise over the next few hundred million years. This will result in the complete evaporation of the oceans. The first three-dimensional climate model able to simulate the phenomenon predicts that liquid water will disappear on Earth in approximately one billion years, extending previous estimates by several hundred million years.
Jérémy Leconte, Francois Forget, Benjamin Charnay, Robin Wordsworth, Alizée Pottier. Increased insolation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth-like planets. Nature, 2013; 504 (7479): 268 DOI: 10.1038/nature12827
Using advanced modeling and simulation, seismic data generated by earthquakes, and one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a team of scientists is creating a detailed 3-D picture of Earth’s interior. Currently, the team is focused on imaging the entire globe from the surface to the core-mantle boundary, a depth of 1,800 miles.
An unprecedented 21 different types of dinosaur tracks have been identified on a 25-kilometer stretch of the Dampier Peninsula coastline dubbed ‘Australia’s Jurassic Park.’ A team of paleontologists has unveiled the most diverse assemblage of dinosaur tracks in the world in 127 to 140 million-year-old rocks in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia.
A team of academics led by the University of Leicester has responded to criticisms of the proposal to formalise a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene.
Geological critics of a formalised Anthropocene have alleged that the idea did not arise from geology; that there is simply not enough physical evidence for it as strata; that it is based more on the future than on the past; that it is more a part of human history than the immensely long history of the Earth; and that it is a political statement, rather than a scientific one.
Arsia Mons produced one new lava flow at its summit every 1 to 3 million years during the final peak of activity, about 50 million years ago. The last volcanic activity there ceased about 50 million years ago — around the time of Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, when large numbers of our planet’s plant and animal species (including dinosaurs) went extinct.
Journal Reference:Jacob A. Richardson, James A. Wilson, Charles B. Connor, Jacob E. Bleacher, Koji Kiyosugi. Recurrence rate and magma effusion rate for the latest volcanism on Arsia Mons, Mars. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2017; 458: 170 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2016.10.040
A new study suggests it was the power of the eyes and not the limbs that first led our aquatic ancestors to make the leap from water to land. The researchers discovered that eyes nearly tripled in size before — not after — the water-to-land transition. Crocodile-like animals saw easy meals on land and then evolved limbs that enabled them to get there, the researchers argue.
Since the early days of stratigraphy, mass extinctions were noticed to coincide with major and global sea-level changes1,2 that significantly alter extinction patterns and time-series of geochemical proxies. In the case of the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction (PTBME), the system boundary itself has been initially placed during a global eustatic regression3, but was subsequently placed during a global transgression4 …
Shock finding : P-T mass extinction was due to an ice age, and not to warming
Department of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA
Temperatures have risen approximately a degree or so per century since the coldest part of the Little Ice Age ~500 years ago, but the rise has not been linear. Global temperatures have warmed and cooled many times in 25-35-year cycles, well before the atmospheric CO2 began to rise significantly.
Two episodes of global warming and two episodes of global cooling occurred during the 20th century (Fig. 1). Overall, temperatures during the century rose about the same as the rate of warming per century since the Little Ice Age 500 years ago.
Tiny filaments and tubes formed by bacteria that lived on iron were found encased in quartz layers in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB), Quebec, Canada.
The NSB contains some of the oldest sedimentary rocks known on Earth which likely formed part of an iron-rich deep-sea hydrothermal vent system that provided a habitat for Earth’s first life forms between 3,770 and 4,300 million years ago …
A study of tiny mineral ‘inclusions’ within diamonds from Botswana has shown that diamond crystals can take billions of years to grow. One diamond was found to contain silicate material that formed 2.3 billion years ago in its interior and a 250 million-year-old garnet crystal towards its outer rim, the largest age range ever detected in a single specimen. Analysis of the inclusions also suggests that the way that carbon is exchanged and deposited between the atmosphere, biosphere, oceans and geosphere may have changed significantly over the past 2.5 billion years.
S. Timmerman, J.M. Koornneef, I.L. Chinn, G.R. Davies. Dated eclogitic diamond growth zones reveal variable recycling of crustal carbon through time. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2017; 463: 178 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2017.02.001
Les principales hypothèses avancées vont des extra-terrestres à l'effondrement du pergélisol, sous l'action du réchauffement climatique, en passant par une nouvelle chute de météorite.
Savez-vous combien y a-t-il de continents sur Terre ? 5 ou 6 ? Alors que la question divise encore certaines personnes, un nouveau continent caché en partie sous l'océan Pacifique vient d'être confirmé par une équipe de scientifiques après des dizaines d'années de recherche. Le 7e continent : Zealandia est maintenant officiellement reconnu.
Source : notre-planete.info, http://www.notre-planete.info/actualites/4586-nombre-continents-Terre-Zealandia
by David Middleton, petroleum geologist/geophysicist, February 18, 2017
As the biomass is buried more deeply in the sedimentary column, increasing pressure compacts it, increasing temperature cooks it and over time, the hydrocarbons slowly migrate toward the surface because they are less dense than connate/formation water. The kerogen first cooks to heavy oil, then light oil, then wet thermogenic gas, then thermogenic light gas, then high temperature methane…
Pervasive upper mantle melting beneath the western US, Earth and Planetary Science Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2016.12.041
New research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters describes how scientists have used the world’s largest array of seismic sensors to map a deep-Earth area of melting carbon covering 1.8 million square kilometres. Situated under the Western US, 350km beneath the Earth’s surface, the discovered melting region challenges accepted understanding of how much carbon the Earth contains – much more than previously understood …
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-scientists-uncover-huge-reservoir-carbon.html#jCp
‘Hyperthermals’ are intervals of rapid, pronounced global warming known from six episodes within the Palaeocene and Eocene epochs (~65–34million years (Myr) ago)1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. The most extreme hyperthermal was the ~170 thousand year (kyr) interval2 of 5–7°C global warming3 during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 56Myr ago). The PETM is widely attributed to massive release of greenhouse gases from buried sedimentary carbon reservoirs1, 3, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, and other, comparatively modest, hyperthermals have also been linked to the release of sedimentary carbon3, 6, 11, 16, 17
Oxygen was a poisonous element to the dominant life on the planet at the time, anaerobic bacteria. In the primordial waters, oxygen molecules would normally be absorbed by decomposing organisms or would bind with iron in the water to create rust, so oxygen did not have time to accumulate. We can see in the geological record that 2.3 billion years ago, there was a highly unusual amount of rust being deposited on the ocean floor. We know based on this evidence that there was a huge spike of oxygen in ocean at this time. It is thought that Cyanobacteria werw producing so much oxygen that it reached complete global saturation. With this, oxygen began to leave the waters and accumulate in the atmosphere, which would have profound effects on the planet.
Earth’s magnetic field is unstable. Not only does it vary in intensity, but from time to time it flips, with the poles reversing sign. Much of this behaviour remains a mystery, but a combination of geomagnetic observations with theoretical studies has been providing enlightenment.
