School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
CNRS, ISTerre, Université Grenoble-Alpes, Grenoble, France.
Nature. 2023 Dec;624(7990):115-121. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06777-z. Epub 2023 Nov 29.
The long-term diversification of the biosphere responds to changes in the physical environment. Yet, over the continents, the nearly monotonic expansion of life started later in the early part of the Phanerozoic eon than the expansion in the marine realm, where instead the number of genera waxed and waned over time. A comprehensive evaluation of the changes in the geodynamic and climatic forcing fails to provide a unified theory for the long-term pattern of evolution of life on Earth. Here we couple climate and plate tectonics models to numerically reconstruct the evolution of the Earth's landscape over the entire Phanerozoic eon, which we then compare to palaeo-diversity datasets from marine animal and land plant genera. Our results indicate that biodiversity is strongly reliant on landscape dynamics, which at all times determine the carrying capacity of both the continental domain and the oceanic domain. In the oceans, diversity closely adjusted to the riverine sedimentary flux that provides nutrients for primary production. On land, plant expansion was hampered by poor edaphic conditions until widespread endorheic basins resurfaced continents with a sedimentary cover that facilitated the development of soil-dependent rooted flora, and the increasing variety of the landscape additionally promoted their development.
生物圈的长期多样化是对物理环境变化的响应。然而，在整个大陆上，生命的几乎单调扩张在显生宙早期开始得比海洋领域晚，海洋领域的属的数量随时间而增减。对地球动力学和气候强迫变化的综合评估未能为地球生命长期进化模式提供统一的理论。在这里，我们将气候和板块构造模型相结合，数值重建了整个显生宙时期地球景观的演化，然后将其与海洋动物和陆地植物属的古生物多样性数据集进行比较。我们的结果表明，生物多样性强烈依赖于景观动态，而景观动态始终决定着陆地和海洋的承载能力。在海洋中，多样性与为初级生产提供养分的河流沉积物通量密切相关。在陆地上，植物的扩张受到贫瘠土壤条件的阻碍，直到广泛的内陆盆地重新出现，大陆被沉积层覆盖，这促进了依赖土壤的有根植物的发展，而景观的多样化也促进了它们的发展。
