Rothman D H
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001 Apr 10;98(8):4305-10. doi: 10.1073/pnas.071047798.
Paleontological data for the diversity of marine animals and land plants are shown to correlate significantly with a concurrent measure of stable carbon isotope fractionation for approximately the last 400 million years. The correlations can be deduced from the assumption that increasing plant diversity led to increasing chemical weathering of rocks and therefore an increasing flux of carbon from the atmosphere to rocks, and nutrients from the continents to the oceans. The CO(2) concentration dependence of photosynthetic carbon isotope fractionation then indicates that the diversification of land plants led to decreasing CO(2) levels, while the diversification of marine animals derived from increasing nutrient availability. Under the explicit assumption that global biodiversity grows with global biomass, the conservation of carbon shows that the long-term fluctuations of CO(2) levels were dominated by complementary changes in the biological and fluid reservoirs of carbon, while the much larger geological reservoir remained relatively constant in size. As a consequence, the paleontological record of biodiversity provides an indirect estimate of the fluctuations of ancient CO(2) levels.
海洋动物和陆地植物多样性的古生物学数据表明，在大约过去4亿年里，这些数据与稳定碳同位素分馏的同步测量结果显著相关。这些相关性可以从以下假设推导得出：植物多样性的增加导致岩石化学风化加剧，进而导致从大气到岩石的碳通量增加，以及从大陆到海洋的营养物质通量增加。光合碳同位素分馏对CO₂浓度的依赖性表明，陆地植物的多样化导致CO₂水平下降，而海洋动物的多样化源于营养物质可用性的增加。在全球生物多样性随全球生物量增长这一明确假设下，碳的守恒表明，CO₂水平的长期波动主要由碳的生物和流体储库中的互补变化主导，而规模大得多的地质储库在大小上保持相对恒定。因此，生物多样性的古生物学记录提供了对古代CO₂水平波动的间接估计。
