Signals and Noise in Terrestrial Archives of Organic Carbon: examples from the PETM

Abstract:

Past climatic hyperthermals, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), provide imperfect but useful geological analogs to human-induced climate warming. Changes in terrestrial biota, hydrology, sedimentary processes, and climate patterns during past abrupt warming events provide valuable insights to the intensity of climate impacts on water and carbon cycles on land. Carbon isotope excursions (CIE) that accompany warming are often documented first in marine records, and then used to connect events from sea to land, and across diverse terrestrial environments. As a result, CIE are highly valuable chemostratigraphic signals, even though their records on land can be noisy. Isotopic records of organic carbon in terrestrial environments are widespread and preserved even when carbonate records are lacking. While readily measured, they are often less reliable, exhibiting both enhanced noise and attenuated signals relative to marine and inorganic records. Soil organic matter is subject to extensive carbon loss, selective preservation, and the inputs of refractory, allochthonous carbon. This is particularly true during the PETM, and new records and quantitative treatments lend insights to the relative influence of each.

Patterns in preservation are not the only source of isotope variability in terrestrial organic carbon. Landscapes also experience strong heterogeneity in biomass production, transport, and deposition, all of which are sensitive to geographic and ecological patterns in water and carbon dynamics. Lipid biomarkers from ancient plants provide useful tools to recognize and circumvent this complexity. In particular, insights to ecological and climatic patterns can be gained from abundances and isotopic characteristics of taxon-specific compounds. Biomarkers also can help resolve the influence of marine organic carbon when terrestrial materials are deposited in coastal or marginal marine settings.

This presentation will illustrate the challenges and opportunities in interpreting terrestrial records of the PETM CIE using bulk and biomarker data from the eastern coastal US and intermountain basins of Wyoming and Colorado.