U-Pb (zircon) age constraints on the timing and duration of Wenlock (Silurian) paleocommunity collapse and recovery during the "Big Crisis"
Bradley D. Cramer et al., Kansas Geological Survey/Dept. of Geology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66047, USA. Posted online 2 October 2012; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/B30642.1.
The history of life on Earth is recorded in the stratigraphic record. Stated another way, the rocks that make up the Earth itself are a book that contains the story of our planet's tumultuous history. The interactions between climate, biology, the oceans, and the atmosphere are all preserved in the rock record, and it is the job of geoscientists to decipher these events. As expected, however, deciphering this history gets increasingly complex the further back in time one chooses to look. A particularly large stumbling block to the study of Earth history in deep time (many hundreds of millions of years ago) has traditionally been our inability to determine precise and reliable dates and durations of ancient global change events. Bradley D. Cramer of the Kansas Geological Survey and colleagues combine a series of recent advances in analytical chemistry together with recent a
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