Geoscience Reference
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CO-EVOLUTION OF LIFE, ENVIRONMENT, AND CLIMATE
The deep-time geological record has provided a compelling narrative of
changes in Earth's climate, environment, and evolving life, many of which provide
analogs, insight, and context for understanding human's place in the Earth system and
current anthropogenic change. Deep-time studies document a range in variability and
impact of climate phenomena far broader than archived in more recent records
revealing how physical, chemical, and biological feedbacks have operated differently
during past warmer and transitional climate states (NRC, 2011a). In turn, the deep-
time record captures the importance of life as an agent of change in the environment
affecting the composition and properties of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and
lithosphere. The complexity of this bio-geosystem is only now being fully realized,
with new analytic tools from geochemistry, paleontology, and biology enabling
unprecedented exploration of the coupled time-evolution of past Earth surface
conditions, including temperature, atmospheric chemistry, hydroclimates, chemical
composition of the ocean, and the interrelationship and physiologies of ancient life
forms. Concerted application of interdisciplinary capabilities to the deep-time record
will provide breakthroughs in understanding of this profound and nonlinear bio-
geosystem.
Real or virtual paleoclimate/deep-time initiatives can be pursued that draw
together a broad community of researchers asking critical questions about key
intervals in time or key processes through time that could be evaluated using cutting-
edge environmental proxies, paleobiological methods, and numerical models. Such
initiatives should bridge our understanding of the geological record of past global
“states” with those anticipated in the Anthropocene stemming from changing climate,
growing water demand, energy exploitation, land use, habitat change, and extinction.
Finding 1: Understanding the dynamics of past warm periods and major climate
transitions that have prevailed throughout most of Earth's history provides a valuable
mechanism for assessing anthropogenic changes in the climate system associated with
greenhouse gas emissions.
Finding 2: High-precision and accuracy geochronological tools (both radio-isotopic
and astrochronological), environmental proxies, and molecular (genomic and
proteomics) methods have placed the community on the cusp of a major advance in
our understanding of the influence of major externally driven climate and
environmental change on life and the feedbacks on climate caused by the evolution of
new life forms. Proxy development and calibration studies need to be matched by
complementary efforts to build more spatially and temporally resolved multiproxy
paleoclimate and paleoecological time series with high precision and chronological
constraints. There is an associated need for improved dynamic models and expanded
data-model comparisons.
Finding 3: Major advancements in rapid and relatively inexpensive sequencing
techniques and equally impressive progress in numerical analysis of the results are
allowing the genome of living, and in some cases extinct, organisms to be mined for
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