Towards community-driven paleogeographic reconstructions: integrating open-access paleogeographic and paleobiology data with plate tectonics

Abstract

A variety of paleogeographic reconstructions have been published, with applications ranging from paleoclimate, ocean circulation and faunal radiation models to resource exploration; yet their uncertainties remain difficult to assess as they are generally presented as low-resolution static maps. We present a methodology for ground-truthing the digital Palaeogeographic Atlas of Australia by linking the <i>GPlates</i> plate reconstruction tool to the global Paleobiology Database and a Phanerozoic plate motion model. We develop a spatio-temporal data mining workflow to validate the Phanerozoic Palaeogeographic Atlas of Australia with paleoenvironments derived from fossil data. While there is general agreement between fossil data and the paleogeographic model, the methodology highlights key inconsistencies. The Early Devonian paleogeographic model of southeastern Australia insufficiently describes the Emsian inundation that may be refined using biofacies distributions. Additionally, the paleogeographic model and fossil data can be used to strengthen numerical models, such as the dynamic topography and the associated inundation of eastern Australia during the Cretaceous. Although paleobiology data provide constraints only for paleoenvironments with high preservation potential of organisms, our approach enables the use of additional proxy data to generate improved paleogeographic reconstructions

Plate tectonic regulation of global marine animal diversity

“…To quantify paleogeographic state over time, we developed an index that is sensitive to the connectivity of continental crustal blocks, and we apply that index to reconstructed paleogeographies from an EarthByte (earthbyte.org) paleogeographic rotation model (23). The continental fragmentation index time series is then compared with estimates of global richness independently compiled from fossil occurrences in the Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org) (24).…”

“…We calculate the index only for those continental blocks that are present throughout the entire duration of the Phanerozoic. Together, these persistent continental fragments comprise 88% of total present-day continental area in the EarthByte model (23).…”

Improving global paleogeography since the late Paleozoic using paleobiology

“…6b); for example, there are more than 4000 in total within 269-248 Ma but only 20 during 37-29 Ma. These variations are due to the spatiotemporal sampling bias and incompleteness of the fossil record (Benton et al, 2000;Benson and Upchurch, 2013;Smith et al, 2012;Valentine et al, 2006;Wright et al, 2013), biota extinction and recovery (Hallam and Wignall, 1997;Hart, 1996), the uneven entry of fossil data to the PBDB (Alroy, 2010) and our temporal selection criterion. In addition, the differences in the duration of geological time subdivisions lead to some time intervals having shorter time spans that contain fewer fossil records, which we discuss in a later section.…”

“…The PBDB is a widely used resource (e.g., Wright et al, 2013;Finnegan et al, 2015;Heim et al, 2015;Mannion et al, 2015;Nicolson et al, 2015;Fischer et al, 2016;Tennant et al, 2016;Close et al, 2017;Zaffos et al, 2017), yet, the spatial coverage of data is still highly heterogeneous, with relatively few data points across large areas of the globe for some time periods. Hence, it is important to combine it with other geological data, such as stratigraphic data from StratDB Database (http://sil.usask.ca) and Macrostrat Database (https://macrostrat.org/) and other sources of paleoenvironment and paleo-lithofacies data, to further constrain the paleogeographic reconstructions.…”

“…This is the first step towards the construction of paleogeographic maps with flexible spatial and temporal resolutions that are more easily testable and expandable with the incorporation of new paleoenvironmental data sets (e.g., Wright et al, 2013). In this study, we use a set of global paleogeographic maps (Golonka et al, 2006) covering the entire Phanerozoic time period as the base paleogeographic model.…”