Global Patterns of Continental Uplift: Insights Inferred from
Paleobiological Data
Abstract
Vertical motions of Earth’s surface are used to inform almost all
branches of the Earth Sciences, and central role in understanding
geological, biological and climatic processes. An important challenge is
generating enough information to reliably constrain histories of
vertical motion. Significant effort has been expended in generating
information about denudation (e.g. from thermochronometry), uplift (e.g.
from stable isotopes or drainage analyses) and subsidence patterns.
However, a canonical inventory of measurements that determine
continental uplift on timescales pertinent to growth and decay of
continental topography does not exist. We address this issue using the
distribution of unequivocally marine rock recorded in new, detailed,
paleobiological inventories. We show that these new compilations of
paleobiological and paleoenvironmental data, that were generated to
address paleobiological problems, also provide an unprecedented number
of self-consistent, high-resolution measurements of continental and
ocean island uplift. We focus on the Cretaceous to Recent history, which
captures the large-scale marine incursions of the continents. Our
results highlight that significant improvements can be made in
understanding the histories of the continents in using these
measurements of uplift. We present examples from North and South
America, southern Africa and Australia to show how this new database can
be explored to better understand the processes that generate high
topography. They emphasize the importance of large inventories of
paleobiological data for understanding long-wavelength uplift and the
role tectonic and mantle convective processes play in generating
continental topography.