Abstract
Comparison of results for the original burial rate of carbonate sediments over Phanerozoic time, as calculated using the GEOCARBSULFvolc model, with their rate of preservation to the present (survival rate) shows a considerable loss of mass, partly by subduction of oceanic crust, during the past 250 million years. Before that time, despite the evidence that preserved Paleozoic carbonates appear to have been deposited only in shallow water, we contend that there was also inorganic deposition of carbonates in the Paleozoic deep sea with subsequent loss by subduction. Inorganic carbonate deposition may have been abetted by the vastly different seawater and atmospheric composition for most of the Paleozoic than those of post-Cretaceous and end Paleozoic–early Mesozoic times. The hypothesis helps to explain the loss of mass greater than that predicted for shallow-water carbonates prior to 250 Ma.
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Acknowledgments
We both acknowledge the important influence that John Morse had on our research and regret deeply his untimely demise. This paper we feel is an appropriate tribute to John and to his outstanding contributions to the study of sedimentary carbonates. RAB remembers his collaboration with John, when John was a graduate student at Yale, on the kinetic origin of the lysocline and CaCO3 compensation depth. John was a student who learned less from RAB than RAB learned from him. FTM first met John during John’s graduate student days in a carbonate biogeochemistry class that FTM taught at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. From that moment on, John and FTM were friends and had a productive scientific collaboration resulting in publication of the book Geochemistry of Sedimentary Carbonates (1990) and a number of scientific papers. FTM acknowledges NSF Grant OCE 07-49401 for partial support of this research.
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Berner, R.A., Mackenzie, F.T. Burial and Preservation of Carbonate Rocks Over Phanerozoic Time. Aquat Geochem 17, 727–733 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10498-010-9113-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10498-010-9113-0