Carbon isotopes in clastic rocks and the Neoproterozoic carbon cycle
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been proposed that isotopically light inorganic carbon precipitated diagenetically in clastic sediments can explain the large carbon isotopic excursions recorded in Neoproterozoic carbonates. To date, however, the data needed to test this hypothesis have been limited. Here we report the analysis of *ca*. 540 clastic sedimentary rocks, including shales, siltstones, sandstones and tillites, that span the second half of the Neoproterozoic Era. A diagenetic carbon isotopic overprint does indeed occur in many of the samples; however, when we include our analyses in a carbon isotope mass balance model, they produce only a small effect on mass balance model results. Thus, clastic sedimentary rocks were not a major sink for ^13^C-depleted carbonate during the Neoproterozoic Era. These results do, however, produce a more accurate carbon mass balance, pointing to a high proportion of total organic carbon burial, compared to total carbon burial, during the late Tonian, Cryogenian, and late Ediacaran Periods. This result suggests a vigorous release of oxygen to the atmosphere. The clastic carbonate record also offers a chemostratigraphic tool. For example, we observe an isotope trend in clastic-hosted carbonates of the Isaac Formation, Windermere Supergroup, that strongly resembles the Shuram-Wonoka isotope anomaly, allowing us to place this previously undated section in a temporal context. We also find isotope trends in the fossiliferous and radiometrically well-dated sedimentary rocks of the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, that may also reflect the Shuram-Wonoka anomaly. If correct, this constrains the timing of the Shuram event, suggesting that it began after 571 Ma and ended before 562 Ma, with the most extreme isotopic values lying well within those bounds.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
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