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Precambrian supercontinents, glaciations, atmospheric oxygenation, metazoan evolution and an impact that may have changed the second half of Earth history

2012· article· en· 182 citations· W2128548777 on OpenAlex· 10.1016/j.gsf.2012.07.003

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian affiliationAn author listed a Canadian institution. This is the only route the usual frame has.

Full frame distilled prediction

Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

Candidate categories
none
Consensus categories
none
Domain
Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
Study design
Candidate signal: ObservationalConsensus signal: Observational
Genre
Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score
0.033
Threshold uncertainty score
0.994
Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated · codex-gemma-dda1882f352a

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.231
Teacher spread
0.208 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

In more than 4 Ga of geological evolution, the Earth has twice gone through extreme climatic perturbations, when extensive glaciations occurred, together with alternating warm periods which were accompanied by atmospheric oxygenation. The younger of these two episodes of climatic oscillation preceded the Cambrian “explosion” of metazoan life forms, but similar extreme climatic conditions existed between about 2.4 and 2.2 Ga. Over long time periods, changing solar luminosity and mantle temperatures have played important roles in regulating Earth's climate but both periods of climatic upheaval are associated with supercontinents. Enhanced weathering on the orogenically and thermally buoyed supercontinents would have stripped CO2 from the atmosphere, initiating a cooling trend that resulted in continental glaciation. Ice cover prevented weathering so that CO2 built up once more, causing collapse of the ice sheets and ushering in a warm climatic episode. This negative feedback loop provides a plausible explanation for multiple glaciations of the Early and Late Proterozoic, and their intimate association with sedimentary rocks formed in warm climates. Between each glacial cycle nutrients were flushed into world oceans, stimulating photosynthetic activity and causing oxygenation of the atmosphere. Accommodation for many ancient glacial deposits was provided by rifting but escape from the climatic cycle was predicated on break-up of the supercontinent, when flooded continental margins had a moderating influence on weathering. The geochemistry of Neoproterozoic cap carbonates carries a strong hydrothermal signal, suggesting that they precipitated from deep sea waters, overturned and spilled onto continental shelves at the termination of glaciations. Paleoproterozoic (Huronian) carbonates of the Espanola Formation were probably formed as a result of ponding and evaporation in a hydrothermally influenced, restricted rift setting. Why did metazoan evolution not take off after the Great Oxidation Event of the Paleoproterozoic? The answer may lie in the huge scar left by the ∼2023 Ma Vredefort impact in South Africa, and in the worldwide organic carbon-rich deposits of the Shunga Event, attesting to the near-extirpation of life and possible radical alteration of the course of Earth history.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Geoscience Frontiers
Topic
Paleontology and Stratigraphy of Fossils
Field
Earth and Planetary Sciences
Canadian institutions
Western University
Funders
not available
Keywords
GeologySnowball EarthSupercontinentGlacial periodPrecambrianWeatheringPaleontologyProterozoicIce ageEarth scienceSedimentary rockGeologic recordRodiniaInterglacialGlobal coolingOceanographyClimate changeRiftCraton
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes