The history of the global carbon cycle as recorded by the chemical composition of shallow-water marine carbonate sediments

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• John Higgins, Princeton University
• Thursday 07 October 2021, 15:00-16:00
• Department of Earth Sciences, Tilley Lecture Theatre.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Oscar Branson.

This is a hybrid event. It will be live in the Tilley Lecture Theatre and broadcast on Zoom (https://zoom.us/j/99984123581)

Shallow-water carbonate sediments are one of the most important geologic sinks of CO2 emitted from Earth’s interior and a widely used archive of Earth’s chemical and climate history. Some of the main limitations in interpreting the chemistry of ancient carbonate sediments include the potential for post-depositional diagenetic alteration and uncertainties in how to relate chemical changes in shallow-water environments to the global carbon cycle. In this talk I will discuss my labs efforts – using measurements of the stable isotopes of calcium, magnesium, and lithium – to disentangle the effects of diagenesis and local processes in ancient shallow-water marine carbonates in order to more accurately reconstruct the chemical composition of seawater in the geologic past. I will argue that our results are inconsistent with the commonly-used approach of using stratigraphic excursions in carbon and other geochemical proxies in shallow-water marine carbonate sediments as quantitative indicators of global isotopic mass balance.

This talk is part of the Department of Earth Sciences Seminars (downtown) series.

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• Department of Earth Sciences Seminars (downtown)
• Department of Earth Sciences seminars
• Department of Earth Sciences, Tilley Lecture Theatre
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