332-1 Testing Models of Continental Sedimentary Rock Cycling in Northern Eurasia

Abstract:

Sedimentary rocks archive the history of the Earth-life system and contain most of the surface-accessible mass of elements critical to life and climate. Understanding the formation and destruction of sedimentary rocks is, therefore, essential to understanding our sample of Earth history and the factors that govern it. The sedimentary rock cycle is typically posited to be at steady state, wherein total sedimentary rock quantity is invariant and age-independent destruction is persistent, resulting in exponential decline in surviving rock quantity with increasing rock age. Quantity-age data for sediments deposited on oceanic crust are consistent with this cycling model, but comparable data for sediments in North America suggest that the continental sedimentary rock reservoir has undergone non-steady state growth, with a lesser signature of destruction, especially among the marine sedimentary rocks comprising most of the surviving continental sediment volume.  Here we use a new macrostratigraphic compilation of 166,007 rock units distributed among 2,312 regional columns spanning 15.3 million square km of northern Eurasia to assess continental sedimentary rock cycling models. On the East European Craton, sedimentary rock area peaks in the Late Devonian–Carboniferous, with pronounced minima in the middle Cambrian and Triassic–Jurassic. Marine deposits dominate the Paleozoic maximum, whereas non-marine strata predominate in the Neogene–Quaternary. On the Siberian Craton, sedimentary rock area peaks in the Cambrian, with marine deposits of this age covering nearly the entire platform; non-marine sediments are more prevalent in the Cenozoic. On both platforms and intervening areas combined, there is no decline from the Neogene to late Ediacaran in total sedimentary rock quantity with increasing age, suggesting a prominent signal of variable accommodation and a much lesser one for erosion. Although a late Ediacaran to Cambrian increase in preserved sedimentary rock quantity denotes a shift to a higher Phanerozoic baseline relative to the Precambrian, the increase in area from the Proterozoic occurs earlier and is less pronounced than it is in North America, owing to more widespread Meso- and Neoproterozoic sedimentary deposits. Within the Phanerozoic, first-order variability in sedimentary area attributable to the supercontinent cycle is similar to that in North America, but the relative magnitudes and phases of Sloss sequence-like second-order oscillations differ, suggesting more regional control on this scale of variability in the extent of sedimentation.  

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