Goddéris, Y, Donnadieu, Y and Mills, BJW orcid.org/0000-0002-9141-0931 (2023) What Models Tell Us About the Evolution of Carbon Sources and Sinks over the Phanerozoic. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 51. pp. 471-492. ISSN 0084-6597
Abstract
The current rapid increase in atmospheric CO2, linked to the massive use of fossil fuels, will have major consequences for our climate and for living organisms. To understand what is happening today, it is informative to look at the past. The evolution of the carbon cycle, coupled with that of the past climate system and the other coupled elemental cycles, is explored in the field, in the laboratory, and with the help of numerical modeling. The objective of numerical modeling is to be able to provide a quantification of the processes at work on our planet. Of course, we must remain aware that a numerical model, however complex, will never include all the relevant processes, impacts, and consequences because nature is complex and not all the processes are known. This makes models uncertain. We are still at the beginning of the exploration of the deep-time Earth. In the present contribution, we review some crucial events in coupled Earth-climate-biosphere evolution over the past 540 million years, focusing on the models that have been developed and what their results suggest. For most of these events, the causes are complex and we are not able to conclusively pinpoint all causal relationships and feedbacks in the Earth system. This remains a largely open scientific field.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Copyright © 2023 by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information. |
Keywords: | carbon cycle, climate, deep time, weathering, modeling |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Earth Surface Science Institute (ESSI) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Mar 2023 16:11 |
Last Modified: | 21 Jul 2023 15:11 |
Published Version: | https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Annual Reviews |
Identification Number: | 10.1146/annurev-earth-032320-092701 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:196786 |