New Paper: Deep-Time Perspective of Land-Ocean Linkages

I have a new paper out in the Annual Reviews of Marine Science titled ‘A Deep-Time Perspective of Land-Ocean Linkages in the Sedimentary Record’ that is now available ahead-of-print here. It will come out in print in Volume 5 of this annual series in 2013.

It is becoming increasingly important to understand and predict how marine environments respond to changes in climate, sea level, and other factors such as sediment flux from rivers. The sedimentary record along continental margins is an archive of such changes from the Earth’s past. Thus, the aim of our review paper is to provide the general marine science community a broad review of the methods, approaches, and ideas related to using the sedimentary record to reconstruct land-ocean linkages, especially along continental margins.

To that end, this paper combines fundamental concepts and ideas — things you might find in a textbook — with information and discussion about the state-of-the-art and  the current outstanding questions/issues in the science. If you are a sedimentary geologist already studying continental-margin stratigraphy you probably won’t learn anything new. But, if you are a marine scientist or other Earth scientist generally interested in how the linkages and interactions between continental and marine environments can be recorded at longer time scales, and thus used to reconstruct that environmental change, then I hope our review will provide insight.

Writing a review of such a broad scope was more difficult than I imagined. We certainly hope that our perspective is valuable, especially to marine scientists who don’t spend their time thinking about deep time (>millions of years); however, we also acknowledge that we couldn’t cover everything and undoubtedly overlooked great studies on this subject.

I’m always happy to discuss more!