Publication Date:
2005-11-29
Description:
We review Phanerozoic sea-level changes [543 million years ago (Ma) to the present] on various time scales and present a new sea-level record for the past 100 million years (My). Long-term sea level peaked at 100 +/- 50 meters during the Cretaceous, implying that ocean-crust production rates were much lower than previously inferred. Sea level mirrors oxygen isotope variations, reflecting ice-volume change on the 10(4)- to 10(6)-year scale, but a link between oxygen isotope and sea level on the 10(7)-year scale must be due to temperature changes that we attribute to tectonically controlled carbon dioxide variations. Sea-level change has influenced phytoplankton evolution, ocean chemistry, and the loci of carbonate, organic carbon, and siliciclastic sediment burial. Over the past 100 My, sea-level changes reflect global climate evolution from a time of ephemeral Antarctic ice sheets (100 to 33 Ma), through a time of large ice sheets primarily in Antarctica (33 to 2.5 Ma), to a world with large Antarctic and large, variable Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (2.5 Ma to the present).〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Miller, Kenneth G -- Kominz, Michelle A -- Browning, James V -- Wright, James D -- Mountain, Gregory S -- Katz, Miriam E -- Sugarman, Peter J -- Cramer, Benjamin S -- Christie-Blick, Nicholas -- Pekar, Stephen F -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2005 Nov 25;310(5752):1293-8.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Geological Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA. kgm@rci.rutgers.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16311326" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
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Medicine
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Natural Sciences in General
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Physics
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