Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK.
Science. 2018 Mar 2;359(6379):1022-1024. doi: 10.1126/science.aan4660.
Mudrocks are a primary archive of Earth's history from the Archean eon to recent times, and their source-to-sink production and deposition play a central role in long-term ocean chemistry and climate regulation. Using original and published stratigraphic data from all 704 of Earth's known alluvial formations from the Archean eon (3.5 billion years ago) to the Carboniferous period (0.3 billion years ago), we prove contentions of an upsurge in the proportion of mud retained on land coeval with vegetation evolution. We constrain the onset of the upsurge to the Ordovician-Silurian and show that alluvium deposited after land plant evolution contains a proportion of mudrock that is, on average, 1.4 orders of magnitude greater than the proportion contained in alluvium from the preceding 90% of Earth's history. We attribute this shift to the ways in which vegetation revolutionized mud production and sediment flux from continental interiors.
泥岩是地球历史的主要档案，从太古代到近代，其源汇生产和沉积在长期海洋化学和气候调节中起着核心作用。利用来自地球已知的所有冲积地层的原始和已发表的地层数据，这些地层可追溯到太古代（35 亿年前）到石炭纪（3 亿年前），我们证明了与植被演化同时代陆地上保留的泥质比例增加的论点。我们将这种增加的开始时间限制在奥陶纪-志留纪，并表明陆地植物演化后沉积的冲积物中泥岩的比例平均比地球历史的前 90%的冲积物中的泥岩比例高出 1.4 个数量级。我们将这种转变归因于植被如何彻底改变了内陆地区的泥质产量和沉积物通量。
