首页|Power-law patterns in the Phanerozoic sedimentary records of carbon,oxygen,sulfur,and strontium isotopes
Power-law patterns in the Phanerozoic sedimentary records of carbon,oxygen,sulfur,and strontium isotopes
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Power-law patterns appear in a variety of natural systems on the modern Earth;nevertheless,whether such behaviors appeared in the deep-time environment has rarely been studied.Isotopic records in sedimentary rocks,which are widely used to reconstruct the geological/geochemical conditions in paleo-environments and the evolutionary trajectories of biogeochemical cycles,offer an opportunity to investigate power laws in ancient geological systems.In this study,I focus on the Phanerozoic sedimentary records of carbon,oxygen,sulfur,and strontium isotopes,which have well documented and extraordinarily compre-hensive datasets.I perform statistical analyses on these datasets and show that the variations in the sedi-mentary records of the four isotopes exhibit power-law behaviors.The exponents of these power laws range between 2.2 and 2.9;this narrow interval indicates that the variations in carbon,oxygen,sulfur,and strontium isotopes likely belong to the same universality class,suggesting that these systematic power-law patterns are governed by universal,scale-free mechanisms.I then derive a general form for these power laws from a minimalistic model based on basic physical principles and geosystem-specific assumptions,which provides an interpretation for the power-law patterns from the perspective of thermodynamics.The fundamental mechanisms regulating such patterns might have been ubiquitous in paleoenvironments,implying that similar power-law behaviors may exist in the sedimentary records of other isotopes.
Power lawsPhanerozoic sedimentary recordsCarbon isotope(δ13C)Oxygen isotope(δ18O)Sulfur isotope(δ34S)Strontium isotope(87Sr/86Sr)
Haitao Shang
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Institute of Ecology and Evolution,University of Oregon,Eugene,OR,97403,USA
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