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Stratigraphic Variation in Marine Carbonate Carbon Isotope Ratios

Department of Geology, University of Puerto Rico- Mayagüez, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00681

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
Stratigraphic variation in the carbon isotopic (¹³C) value of marine carbonate and organic matter preserved within it has become a popular tool for supporting paleoclimatic hypotheses and refining stratigraphic correlation. Virtually every important biostratigraphic and sequence stratigraphic event of the last 800 million years has had a ¹³C dataset collected to aid in interpreting the causal environmental factors that contributed to the event. The stratigraphic resolution obtainable using ¹³C has yielded critical temporal constraints on the interplay between carbon cycle variation and environmental events such as mass extinction and eustasy. Although the non-uniqueness of the carbon isotopic response to different environmental stimuli has frustrated the identification of a unified mechanism linking marine ¹³C variation with distinct environmental forcing functions, the interpretation of ¹³C variation can nonetheless provide important insights into processes that influence major global climatic and surficial systems.

Early studies of marine carbonate minerals suggested that the ¹³C value of ancient oceans was essentially 0 versus the Peedee belemnite standard (PDB) (Clayton and Degens 1959; Schidlowski et al. 1975; see also Keith and Weber 1964). It was later recognized, however, that departures from the PDB standard represented secular variation in the ¹³C values of the marine environment rather than analytical noise, that the record was potentially rich with stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental information (Scholle and Arthur 1980; Veizer et al. 1980; Wadleigh and Veizer 1982; Arthur et al. 1985; Holser et al. 1986; Zachos and Arthur 1986) and that variation was intimately linked to the global carbon, oxygen, and sulfur cycles (Kump and Garrels 1986; Holser et al. 1988). It is now well established that carbonate ¹³C values vary within ±3 from the PDB standard for most of the last 3.5 billion years (Veizer . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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