Quantitative paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic reconstruction ...

ARTICLE IN PRESS
44 N.D. Sheldon, N.J. Tabor / Earth-Science Reviews xxx (2009) xxx–xxx
9. Summary
Paleopedology is still a relatively immature field, with many
fundamental discoveries about processes and proxies left to be made.
The shift in recent years from a largely qualitative type of analysis to a
largely quantitative one has important implications both for the field
itself, but also more broadly, for the reconstruction of past environmental
and climatic conditions. Given that one of our best means of
projecting how ongoing anthropogenic greenhouse gas additions will
affect future climate is to look at how the Earth's climate has reacted
during previous high CO 2 times, these new tools and proxies for
making quantitative reconstructions are an important new means of
addressing those effects. More specifically, though many marine
proxies give broad “global” climatic information, they are indirect
proxies because they are typically recording changes to a much more
slowly reacting entity (i.e., ocean temperature and composition) and
in the case of records derived from benthic foraminifera, one divorced
from direct contact with the Earth's climate and atmosphere. Understanding
how the Earth's surficial environments have changed is
ultimately equally if not more important in projecting the impacts of
anthropogenically-driven climate change on our lives. Paleopedology
promises to be increasingly important in this endeavor. However, we
would like to reiterate that, ideally, none of these proxies should stand
alone as indications of paleoclimate and that our inferences about
paleoclimate are only strengthened by applying multiple proxies to
many paleosol profiles. Ultimately, all of these geochemical proxies
should agree with other observations of the geological record and if
they do not, it is the proxies that should be considered suspect.
Paleoclimatic and environmental properties that may be reconstructed
using the new geochemical proxies include protolith provenance,
weathering intensity, mean annual precipitation and
temperature during pedogenesis, nutrient fluxes into and out of the
paleosols, the atmospheric composition of important gases including
CO 2 and O 2 , paleosol soil gas composition and mixing relationships,
soil moisture, crystallization temperature of pedogenic minerals,
reconstructed vegetative covering, and paleo-altitude. Future work
promises yield to other proxies for pedogenic processes, including
perhaps paleo-pH and paleo-energy usage. A firm understanding of
pedogenic processes and the limits of the proxies need to form the
basis for applications of paleosol geochemistry, because, with all of the
proxies, our applications are only as good as our understanding of the
whole system.
Acknowledgements
NDS would like to acknowledge the previous support for this work
from GSA, NSF, and NERC, and his very understanding fiancé Selena.
NJT is supported by NSF-EAR 0617250, NSF-EAR 0545654, and NSF-
EAR 0447381. This manuscript benefited from the thoughtful reviews
by Greg Retallack and Carmala Garzione. In addition, the authors
would like to acknowledge numerous colleagues who, through
various interactions, have had an immense influence on this work:
Isabel Montañez, Crayton Yapp, Doug Ekart, Greg Retallack, Jonathan
Wynn, Steve Driese, and Lee Nordt.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in
the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2009.03.004.
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Please cite this article as: Sheldon, N.D., Tabor, N.J., Quantitative paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic reconstruction using paleosols, Earth-
Science Reviews (2009), doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2009.03.004