Cyclostratigraphy: The Third Milestone of Stratigraphy in Understanding Time
Focusing on understanding geological time, stratigraphy has made three milestone achievements characterized by lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and cyclostratigraphy. A geological time scale based mainly on both biostratigraphy and radiometric dating created stratigraphic refulgence, but at the cost of lowered accuracy and preciseness and weakened function of serving the human society. The paper briefly reviews the long history of stratigraphy in understanding geological time, expatiating on the origin, formation and development of cyclostratigraphical concepts, and on similarities and differences between cyclostratigraphy and sequence stratigraphy in the scientific objective, research content and method. Taking the Late Devonian Frasnian-Famennian transitional marine carbonate successions from Guangxi, South China as an example, the paper discusses the research method of cyclostratigraphy, and the prospect and scientific significance of cyclostratigraphy in establishing the high-resolution geological time scale which bridges the gap between the existing geological time coordinate with time unit of million-year scale and anthropological time units such as millennium, century and year, etc.
cyclostratigraphylithostratigraphybiostratigraphytimeMilankovitch cycleDevonianSouth China