Earth Sciences: Year In Review 2000Article Free Pass
In 2000 J.L. Kirschvink (California Institute of Technology) published a novel report (with six coauthors from the U.S. and South Africa) relating the end of the 2.4 billion-year “Snowball Earth” to global geochemistry and major episodes in the history of life. He had originated the Snowball Earth concept about a decade earlier and by 2000 had evidence for two periods when the Earth was completely glaciated, covered with ice like a snowball, at about 2.4 billion and 600 million to 800 million years ago. The evidence includes measurements of the Earth’s ancient magnetic field preserved in old rocks, which indicate the near-equatorial latitude of rock formations known to indicate the presence of ice. There is a 45-m (147.6-ft)-thick layer of manganese ore in the Kalahari Desert with an age corresponding to the end of the 2.4 billion-year Snowball Earth period, and the report proposed that its deposition was caused by the rapid and massive change in global climate as the snowball melted.
Most primitive organisms had been wiped out as the freeze developed on a global scale. The ice-covered oceans, separated from oxygen by thick sea ice, became reducing agents and therefore dissolved more metals. Carbon dioxide from increased volcanic activity is a candidate for cause of the eventual global warming, creating a greenhouse effect by preventing much of the Sun’s radiation from escaping into space. As the ice melted, the dissolved metals and most other essential nutrients for photosynthesis were available for the hungry blue-green algae that had escaped extinction, and the algae bloom released enough oxygen to cause a cascade of chemical reactions. The global warming associated with oxidizing conditions led to the precipitation from seawater of iron and carbonates, producing characteristic rock masses known as banded iron formations and postglacial cap carbonates (limestones deposited above glacial rock deposits). The oxygen spike, in effect, led to a “rusting” of the iron and manganese. The manganese precipitation involved large quantities of oxygen, and these geochemical changes may have forced the organisms to mutate in such a way that they were protected from the changing chemical environment. Kirschvink suggested that the organisms may have adapted the enzyme known as superoxide dismutase to compensate for the changes. The enzyme and its evolutionary history were well known to biologists, but this was the first time a global climatic change had been suggested as a cause of the enzyme’s diversification.
Much attention had been devoted to tracking the history of continental migration, with evidence for the formation of supercontinent Pangaea being firmly based on ocean-floor magnetic anomalies. Information about the assembly of the previous supercontinent of Rodinia was more speculative. I.W.D. Dalziel at the University of Texas at Austin and two coauthors in 2000 presented testable evidence for the hypothesis that Rodinia formed by the amalgamation of four separate continental entities along three boundaries, which are belts of mountain formation between 1.2 billion and 1 billion years ago. C.R. Scotese at the University of Texas at Arlington and his colleagues had devoted 20 years to the PALEOMAP Project, with the goal of illustrating the plate tectonic development of oceans and continents and their changing distribution during the past 1.1 billion years. The project also generated maps showing plate tectonics in the far future, illustrating the formation of the next supercontinent of “Pangea Ultima.” The results were made available on a World Wide Web site, <www.scotese.com>, in an atlas of full-colour paleogeographic maps showing ancient mountain ranges, active plate boundaries, and the extent of paleoclimatic belts. In addition, the site provided many animations, including how the continental configuration could change over the next 250 million years.
Development of plate tectonic theory after the 1960s demonstrated with precision how the continental masses drifted across the Earth during the past 250 million years, but understanding the origin and evolution of the continents remained a major objective. Several reports published during 2000 demonstrated the power of geochemical data produced by the measurement of isotope ratios by mass spectrometers to advance the understanding of the structure and evolution of continents. Three examples outlined below are the continental growth of southern Africa and the current collision between India and Asia as generators of major fault systems, and huge sedimentary fans accumulated from the erosion products of the Himalayas.
Evidence about continental origins involving the birth and death and erosion of successive mountain ranges is found in the oldest, stabilized parts of the continents, called cratons. The origin and history of the craton in South Africa was recently described in considerable detail in a report by R.W. Carlson (Carnegie Institution of Washington) and 16 coauthors from the U.S., Great Britain, and South Africa. This integrated investigation illustrated the necessity for a multidisciplinary approach involving geology, geochemistry, and geophysics for the comprehension of processes in the Earth sciences. The geology of the shallow crust of the craton was very well known. Hundreds of kimberlites (a rare, deep-seated kind of volcanic eruption) brought rock samples of upper mantle and lower crust (xenoliths) through cylindrical pipes to the Earth’s surface. High-resolution measurements of isotopes of uranium-lead and rhenium-osmium systems on many samples revealed a long, complex history. Rocks of the upper mantle have ages of 3.5 billion to 3.3 billion years, and the craton was stabilized about 3 billion years ago. Mantle rocks formed during that time interval included subducted materials from plate margins around the continent, and these became attached to the continent through time, creating a stable block of lithosphere. The craton consists of crust and a thick section of the underlying mantle.
The Indian subcontinent collided with Asia about 50 million years ago, and the continued convergence of these masses at a rate of about five centimetres (two inches) per year has elevated the huge area to an average height of about five kilometres (three miles). This continental collision provided a natural laboratory for the study of the plate tectonic forces that generate continents. An example is a series of huge strike-slip faults in northern Tibet where blocks of the Earth’s crust slide past one another. There are two competing models: Do these faults define major discontinuities to depths of 100 km (60 mi), through the crust and into the upper mantle, or are they relatively shallow features playing a secondary role to displacements in a more fluid (but solid) lithosphere? Geophysicists Rick Ryerson, Jerome Van der Woerd, Bob Finkel, and Marc Caffee at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., with collaborators from Los Angeles, Paris, and Beijing, made the first-ever measurements of the rates of long-term movement along these large faults in order to characterize their large-scale behaviour. Specific fault breaks (tectonic offsets) were first identified from satellite images with a resolution of 10 m (33 ft). Sensitive accelerator mass spectrometry made it possible to measure very low levels of the nuclides Be10 and Al26, which provided dates for the surfaces exposed by faulting. Slip rates can be calculated from those ages. The first stage of the research suggested that the northern portion of the Tibetan plateau had been uplifted by successive episodes of eastward fault propagation coupled with the uplift of young mountain ranges. The Livermore data indicated that the models representing the lithosphere as fluid might be flawed.
The Himalayan mountains are being eroded rapidly. The products of erosion have been deposited into the huge submarine sedimentary fans on either side of India—the eastern Bengal Fan and the western Indus Fan. The Bengal Fan is fed by the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, which deliver sediments derived from the high Himalayas along much of the mountain range. This fan is swamped by material from the rapidly unroofing Himalayas, which has occurred during the past 20 million years. The material and structure of the Indus Fan had been investigated by deep-ocean drilling. Its age had been debated for a decade, with one view being that the fan was formed as a response to the high Himalayan uplift and unroofing starting about 20 million years ago. The sequence of sediments deposited on the Indus Fan yields information on the uplift and erosion of the western Himalayas, as described in a 2000 report by Peter D. Clift (Woods Hole [Mass.] Oceanographic Institution) and six coauthors from the U.S., Germany, and Pakistan. The erosion sequence is more readily isolated than for the sediments of the Bengal Fan. Modern microbeam mass spectrometry is capable of measuring the very small amounts of lead occurring in feldspars eroded and transported from the mountains. Clift and his colleagues characterized various parts of the Himalayas in terms of their lead isotope ratios and then measured the lead isotopes in feldspars from sediment cores drilled from the Indus Fan. The significant observation was that the mineral grains were derived from the northwestern regions, and none were derived from the Indian plate. These results, together with new seismic studies of fan structure, suggested that the Indus River and fan system were initiated soon after the India-Asia collision, about 55 million years ago. These results demonstrated that different sedimentary fans may provide quite different images of evolving mountain ranges, which is important when determining the history of ancient deposits that are contemporaneous with mountain-building episodes.
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