NEOEARTH · Whole Earth Systems During Neoproterozoic Animal Evolution
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-03-08 → 2023-04-04
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Whole Earth Systems During Neoproterozoic Animal Evolution
This project looked at linking the physical rocky Earth with the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere. This was done with a particular focus on the time that complex life first evolved (the Ediacaran period, about 570 million years ago) and then analysing how and why the environment changes from this time to present-day when intelligent life evolved. While such questions have always been burning on inquisitive minds and been subject to numerous studies (and will continue to be so), we decided to approach the problem from a different direction. My approach was to build a ‘bottom-up’ view of the world, reconstructing the palaeogeographic (i.e. where are the mountain ranges and ocean basins) and palaeotectonic (i.e. where are the subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges) framework of the planet. Because these parameters control the main cooling and warming mechanisms of Earth’s climate, they regulate the temperature and surface conditions. By approaching the problem in this way we were able to concretely link the planet’s evolution, from rocky exterior, to climate, oceans, plants and mountains and life. In addition to building the framework, the project also put together an open-source and freely available tool to help link all the different building blocks together. This is the pySCION model (a fully pythonic version of the SCION climate-biogeochemical model), a forward carbon-cycle model operating on 10–100 million year timescales. pySCION uses global maps of different palaeotectonic features, such as mountain ranges, locations of continents and oceans, temperature and runoff to estimate Earth's surface conditions (weathering, temperature, pCO2 etc.). Thus, this model connects the individual work packages of the project into a coherent way to visualise and test Earth’s evolving climate and surface environments. This work directly touches on many fundamental questions that engage society and people of all ages. Why is Earth habitable? How did life evolve? Why do we have icecaps and mountains and forests and why did they form when they did? Because the work done in this project encompasses multiple Earth ‘spheres’, we can begin to start offering firm answers to these questions grounded in the physical Earth
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The late Neoproterozoic Era marks some of the most important changes in the biogeochemical evolution of our planet. During the late Cryogenian,Ediacaran and Early Cambrian Periods (ca. 650–520 Ma), our planet was marked by a global icehouse event (‘Snowball Earth’), a rapid rise in oxygen content of the atmosphere, evolution of animals and complex life forms and the amalgamation of the Gondwanian supercontinent, which formed the earliest ‘modern’ style mountain belts with the deep burial of continental crust resulting from massive continental-continental collisions. So far, biogeochemical modelling, geochemical analysis and general circulation climate models (GCMs) have linked all these key events to plate tectonic processes. However, there is yet to be a fully complete linked tectonic-biogeochemical-climate model, where geologically grounded parameters are passed directly into both biogeochemical and GCMs, principally because there is no full tectonic model of this time. Recent advancements in plate tectonic modelling have produced models that map the explicit kinematic evolution of plate boundaries and tectonic plates back to 1 Ga. Using this model as a foundation, I propose to construct secondary tectonic parameters (palaeobathymetry, palaeotopography, carbon flux) of the world between 650 and 520 Ma in order to act as a series of boundary conditions for a GCM and biogeochemical model. The GCM is constructed using the surface conditions from the tectonic parameters (palaeobathymetry, palaeotopography, continental positions) to produce surface temperature and hydrological estimates at key time intervals. These estimates, along with carbon flux estimates—calculated using the same plate model—are used to derive self-consistent biogeochemical cycles (e.g. O2, CO2, P cycles) which can then be evaluated against independent proxies from the geological record, allowing us to independently evaluate the impact of tectonic drivers on these pronounced global events.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS · LeedsCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union