Molybdenum Isotope Constraints on the Origin of Vanadium Hyper-Enrichments in Ediacaran–Phanerozoic Marine Mudrocks
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vanadium is an important redox-sensitive trace metal for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Modern organic-rich sediments persistently contain sediment V enrichments <500 μg/g, but many ancient marine organic-rich mudrocks record enrichments >500 μg/g. Previous studies propose that ancient V enrichments of these magnitudes (“V hyper-enrichments”) were deposited from hyper-sulfidic bottom-waters with higher H2S levels (≥10 mM) than observed in modern euxinic basins. To test the importance of hyper-sulfidic conditions for generating V hyper-enrichments, we compare V concentrations with Mo isotope (δ98Mo) compositions from mudrock samples ranging in age from Ediacaran to Pleistocene. In the modern ocean, sediments deposited from strongly euxinic bottom waters ([H2S]aq > 11 μM) closely record global seawater δ98Mo because conversion of molybdate to tri- and tetra-thiomolybdate is quantitative. By contrast, large Mo isotope fractionations occur during Mo adsorption to Fe-Mn particulates or because of incomplete formation of the most sulfidic thiomolybdates in weakly euxinic settings ([H2S]aq < 11 μM), which both favor removal of lighter-mass Mo isotopes to sediments. We find multiple examples when mudrocks with V hyper-enrichments are associated with a wide range of δ98Mo for a single time interval, including values at or below oceanic input δ98Mo (0.3–0.7‰). This observation suggests significant isotopic offset from reasonable seawater values (typically ≥1.0‰). Thus, we conclude that hyper-sulfidic conditions were not responsible for many V hyper-enrichments in Ediacaran–Phanerozoic mudrocks. Instead, sediment V hyper-enrichments can be explained by high Fe-Mn particulate fluxes to weakly euxinic sediments or by moderately restricted euxinic settings with strongly euxinic ([H2S]aq > 11 μM but not necessarily > 10 mM) or weakly euxinic (with slow clastic sedimentation rates and high organic carbon fluxes) bottom waters where vigorous water exchange provides a continuous V supply from the open ocean.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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