HR: 17:00h
AN: H54A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: GeoSystems: Probing Climate and Linked Systems of Earth's Deep-Time Dark Ages
AU: * Soreghan, G S
EM: lsoreg@ou.edu
AF: University of Oklahoma, 100 East Boyd Street, Norman, OK 73019 United States
AB: GeoSystems is a developing community-based initiative that focuses on the importance of the deep-time perspective for understanding the complexities of Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and surficial lithosphere using climate as the focus. Earth's climate operates on a continuum of temporal, spatial and parametric scales. The deep-time geologic record preserves the results of multiple large-scale experiments in climate and broader environmental change, many of which are far more extreme than those archived in instrumental, historical, or Quaternary records, but are potentially repeatable on human time scales. Indeed, aspects of our modern climate are now returning to a state last known from "deep" time. Understanding the ranges, rates, and processes responsible for these "alternative Earth" extremes in global systems behavior is critical for developing a holistic knowledge of our planet's climate system and constraining predictions of future scenarios. Processes such as extinction and evolution of species, orogenic and magmatic events, sea-level change, and the like operate over a variety of time scales and are complexly entwined with climatic trends, many of which also operate over a variety of time scales and must be viewed within the context of the deep-time perspective. Recent research on Earth's climate and linked systems behavior in deep time is shattering previous preconceptions and interpretations by reconstructing, with increasing rigor and resolution, key parameters such as atmospheric CO2, sea-surface temperatures, rates and modes of ocean circulation, ocean state (anoxia, nutrient status, biological productivity), winds, seasonality, and even diurnal terrestrial temperatures from records dating from millions of years in the past. Beyond this, these same records are simultaneously teaching us how the climate system interacted with Earth's biosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere in ways previously unimagined.
UR: http://geosystems.ou.edu
DE: 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE (New category)
DE: 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE
DE: 1000 GEOCHEMISTRY (New field, replaces Rock Chemistry)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting