Shanan E Peters

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• Professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison

The delay between the origin of animals in the Neoproterozoic and their Cambrian diversification remains perplexing. Animal diversification mirrors an expansion in marine shelf area under a greenhouse climate, though the extent to which these environmental conditions directly influenced physiology and early organismal ecology remains unclear. Here,...

A geologically rapid Neoproterozoic oxygenation event is commonly linked to the appearance of marine animal groups in the fossil record. However, there is still debate about what evidence from the sedimentary geochemical record—if any—provides strong support for a persistent shift in surface oxygen immediately preceding the rise of animals. We pres...

Strata of the Ediacaran Period (635–538.8 Ma) yield the oldest known fossils of complex, macroscopic organisms in the geologic record. These “Ediacaran-type” macrofossils (known as the Ediacaran biota) first appear in mid-Ediacaran strata, experience an apparent decline through the terminal Ediacaran, and directly precede the Cambrian (538.8–485.4...

A geologically rapid Neoproterozoic oxygenation event is commonly linked to the appearance of marine animal groups in the fossil record. However, there is still debate about what evidence from the sedimentary geochemical record – if any – provides strong support for a persistent shift in surface oxygen immediately preceding the rise of animals. We...

Strata of the Ediacaran Period (635–538.8 Ma) yield the oldest known fossils of complex, macroscopic organisms in the geologic record. These “Ediacaran-type” macrofossils (known as the Ediacaran biota) first appear in mid-Ediacaran strata, experience an apparent decline through the terminal Ediacaran, and directly precede the Cambrian (538.8–485.4...

Macrostrat is a platform for deep‐time geoscientific research that integrates stratigraphic columns and geologic maps into a digital description of the crust. The database and supporting software track crustal evolution and provide location‐based geological information to geoscience end users. Macrostrat houses multiple scales of mapping and strati...

The delay between the origin of animals in the Neoproterozoic and their Cambrian diversification remains perplexing. Animal diversification mirrors an expansion in marine shelf area, but the mechanisms linking this environmental change to early organismal ecology are unclear. In this study, we used a biogeochemical model to consider oxygen dynamics...

The fossil record reveals that biotic diversity has fluctuated quasi-cyclically through geological time. However, the causal mechanisms of biotic diversity cycles remain unexplained. Here, we highlight a common, correlatable 36 ± 1 Myr (million years) cycle in the diversity of marine genera as well as in tectonic, sea-level, and macrostratigraphic...

The release of phosphorus (P) from crustal rocks during weathering plays a key role in determining the size of Earth's biosphere, yet the concentration of P in crustal rocks over time remains controversial. Here, we combine spatial, temporal, and chemical measurements of preserved rocks to reconstruct the lithological and chemical evolution of Eart...

For over 50 years, cores recovered from ocean basins have generated fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives that have revolutionized fields within the earth sciences. Although scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data are openly available following each expedition, the formats for these data are heterogeneous. Furthermore, lithological, chronological,...

Geographically explicit, taxonomically resolved fossil occurrences are necessary for reconstructing macroevolutionary patterns and for testing a wide range of hypotheses in the Earth and life sciences. Heterogeneity in the spatial and temporal distribution of fossil occurrences in the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) is attributable to several differen...

The North American continent has a rich record of the tectonic environments and processes that occur throughout much of Earth history. This Memoir focuses on seven “turning points” that had specific and lasting impacts on the evolution of Laurentia: (1) The Neoarchean, characterized by cratonization; (2) the Paleoproterozoic and the initial assembl...

Ediacaran sediments record the termination of Cryogenian ‘Snowball Earth’ glaciations, preserve the first occurrences of macroscopic metazoans, and contain one of the largest known negative δ13C excursions (the Shuram-Wonoka). The rock record for the transition between the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic in North America is also physically distinct, wi...

Rocks in Earth's crust are formed, modified, and destroyed in response to myriad interactions between the solid Earth (tectonics, geodynamics), the fluid Earth (ocean-atmosphere, cryosphere), and the living Earth (evolution, biochemistry). As such, the geological record is an integrator of geological, biological, and climatological processes and th...

The redox structure of the water column in anoxic basins through geological time remains poorly resolved despite its importance to biological evolution/extinction and biogeochemical cycling. Here, we provide a temporal record of bottom and pore water redox conditions by analyzing the temporal distribution and chemistry of sedimentary pyrite. We com...

Geobiology explores how Earth's system has changed over the course of geologic history and how living organisms on this planet are impacted by or are indeed causing these changes. For decades, geologists, paleontologists, and geochemists have generated data to investigate these topics. Foundational efforts in sedimentary geochemistry utilized sprea...

Machine learning technology promises a more efficient and scalable approach to locating and aggregating data and information from the burgeoning scientific literature. Realizing this promise requires provision of applications, data resources, and the documentation of analytic workflows. GeoDeepDive provides a digital library comprising over 13 mill...

Graph embeddings have emerged as the de facto representation for modern machine learning over graph data structures. The goal of graph embedding models is to convert high-dimensional sparse graphs into low-dimensional, dense and continuous vector spaces that preserve the graph structure properties. However, learning a graph embedding model is a res...

Rock quantity and age are fundamental features of Earth’s crust that pertain to many problems in geoscience. Here we combine new estimates of igneous rock area in continental crust from the Macrostrat database (https://macrostrat.org/) with a compilation of detrital zircon ages in order to investigate rock cycling and crustal growth. We find that t...

Large datasets increasingly provide critical insights into crustal and surface processes on Earth. These data come in the form of published and contributed observations, which often include associated metadata. Even in the best-case scenario of a carefully curated dataset, it may be non-trivial to extract meaningful analyses from such compilations,...

The composition of continental crust records the balance between construction by tectonics and destruction by physical and chemical erosion. Quantitative constraints on how igneous addition and chemical weathering have modifed the continents' bulk composition are essential for understanding the evolution of geodynamics and climate. Using novel data...

The composition of continental crust records a history of construction by tectonics and destruction by physical and chemical erosion. Quantitative constraints on how both igneous addition and chemical weathering have modified the continents' bulk composition are essential for understanding the evolution of geodynamics and climate. We have extracted...

High Spatial-resolution Assessment of Diagenesis and Primary Isotopic Variability in Maastrichtian Molluscan Carbonates from Antarctica - Benjamin Linzmeier, Thomas Tobin, Peter Ward, Ian Orland, Daniella Assing, Kouki Kitajima, Phillip Gopon, Brian Huber, Shanan Peters, John Valley

Ediacaran-aged (635–541 million years ago) marine sediments contain a large negative carbon isotope (δ13C) excursion, in which carbonate δ13C values reach −12‰ (VPDB). Known as the ‘Shuram’ excursion, many workers have interpreted this δ13C record as an unprecedented perturbation to the global carbon cycle, leading to speculation about a causal con...

Late Devonian (Famennian) marine successions globally are typified by organic‐rich black shales deposited in anoxic and euxinic waters and the cessation of shelf carbonate sedimentation. This global ‘carbonate crisis’, known as the Hangenberg Event, coincides with a major extinction of reef‐building metazoans and perturbations to the global carbon...

We study the problem of object detection over scanned images of scientific documents. We consider images that contain objects of varying aspect ratios and sizes and range from coarse elements such as tables and figures to fine elements such as equations and section headers. We find that current object detectors fail to produce properly localized re...

The late Miocene witnessed the tectonic uplift of the Isthmus of Panama, the onset of modern-like thermohaline circulation, changes in global patterns of deep-sea sedimentation, and a negative shift of ~1‰ in the carbon isotopic composition (δ¹³C) of marine carbonate sediments. Although previous work has attributed the late Miocene carbon isotopic...

ABSTRACT A basic outline is established here for the dolomitization history of the mixed carbonate-clastic facies that comprise the middle Bakken tight-oil reservoir of the Williston Basin (Late Devonian – Early Mississippian). A mineralogical dataset compiled from sources in the public domain reveals a strong correspondence between the clay and do...

The Great Unconformity, a profound gap in Earths stratigraphic record often evident below the base of the Cambrian system, has remained among the most enigmatic field observations in Earth science for over a century. While long associated directly or indirectly with the occurrence of the earliest complex animal fossils, a conclusive explanation for...

The Great Unconformity, a profound gap in Earth’s stratigraphic record often evident below the base of the Cambrian system, has remained among the most enigmatic field observations in Earth science for over a century. While long associated directly or indirectly with the occurrence of the earliest complex animal fossils, a conclusive explanation fo...

A research agenda for intelligent systems that will result in fundamental new capabilities for understanding the Earth system.

New online resources are opening doors for education and outreach in the earth sciences. One of the most innovative online earth science portals is Macrostrat and its mobile client Rockd - an interface that combines geolocated geological maps with stratigraphic information, lithological data, and crowd-sourced images and descriptions of outcrops. T...

Ammonites have disparate adult morphologies indicative of diverse ecological niches, but ammonite hatchlings are small (~1 mm diameter), which raises questions about the similarity of egg incubation and hatchling life mode in ammonites. Modern Nautilus is sometimes used as a model organism for understanding ammonites, but despite their outward simi...

The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Wadi Al-Hitan near Fayum in the Western Desert of Egypt is well-known for its remarkable abundance and diversity of late Eocene marine fossils, especially well-preserved cetaceans and sirenians. However, the taphonomy of the early Priabonian whales and sea cows is still not fully understood. These marine mammals of...

The sedimentary rock reservoir both records and influences changes in Earth's surface environment. Geoscientists extract data from the rock record to constrain long-term environmental, climatic and biological evolution, with the understanding that geological processes of erosion and rock destruction may have overprinted some aspects of their result...

Characterizing the lithology, age, and physical-chemical properties of rocks and sediments in the Earth's upper crust is necessary to fully assess energy, water, and mineral resources and to address many fundamental questions. Although a large number of geological maps, regional geological syntheses, and sample-based measurements have been produced...

Characterizing the lithology, age, and physical-chemical properties of rocks and sediments in the Earth's upper crust is necessary to fully assess energy, water, and mineral resources and to address many fundamental questions in the Earth sciences. Although a large number of geological maps, regional geological syntheses, and sample-based measureme...

Response by Shanan E. Peters for the presentation of the 2014 Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society - Volume 91 Issue 6 - Shanan E. Peters

Ammonites are the most iconic of extinct mollusks. Their wide spatial distribution and biostratigraphic utility make them ideally suited to investigate past climate. To date, stable isotope analyses of ammonites have focused on adult shells that can be sampled by bulk methods and have suggested adults had a nektobenthic mode of life. Eggs and hatch...

The End-Devonian global Hangenberg Crisis was an environmental perturbation characterized by a mass extinction, large sea level fluctuations, a carbon isotopic excursion, and widespread marine anoxic-euxinic conditions. Sedimentological proxies provide a useful mechanism for identifying this global event in local stratigraphic sections and basins,...

GeoDeepDive combines library science, computer science, and geoscience to dive into repositories of published text, tables, and figures and return valuable information.

Stromatolites are abundant in shallow marine sediments deposited before the evolution of animals, but in the modern ocean they are restricted to locations where the activity of animals is limited. Overall decline in the abundance of stromatolites has, therefore, been attributed to the evolution of substrate-modifying metazoans, with Phanerozoic str...

Significance Understanding the processes that govern biodiversity is a central goal of biology. It has been hypothesized that global biodiversity is influenced by tectonically driven shifts in the arrangement of continental crust. We use globally distributed fossil data and quantitative analyses of shifting continental configurations in paleogeogra...

Sedimentary rocks are often described as declining in quantity with increasing age due to the cumulative effects of crustal deformation and erosion. One important implication of such a model is that the geological record becomes progressively less voluminous and less complete with increasing age. Here we show that the predictions of a model in whic...

Atmospheric oxygen concentration has increased over Earth history, from ∼0 before 2.5 billion years ago to its present-day concentration of 21%. The initial rise in pO2 approximately 2.3 billion years ago required oxygenic photosynthesis, but the evolution of this key metabolic pathway was not sufficient to propel atmospheric oxygen to modern level...

Fluid circulation in the Earth's crust plays an essential role in surface, near-surface, and deep-crustal processes. The permeability of the Earth's crust is of particular interest because it determines the feasibility of important physicochemical processes, such as advective solute/heat transport and the generation of elevated fluid pressures by p...

The strong contrast between egg size and hatchling ecology of ammonoids and nautiloids is thought to explain why ammonoids were more vulnerable to extinction and more prone to diversification than nautiloids throughout the fossil record. Nautiloids had large slowly developing eggs (20-30 mm) and nektobenthic juveniles and ammonoids had small eggs (...

Nautilus is often used as an analogue for the ecology and behavior of extinct externally shelled cephalopods. Nautilus shell grows quickly, has internal growth banding, and is widely believed to precipitate aragonite in oxygen isotope equilibrium with seawater. Pieces of shell from a wild-caught Nautilus macromphalus from New Caledonia and from a N...

SEM and CLFM images of transects on Nautilus belauensis, AMNH 102555. (PDF)

Table of all SIMS analyses including rejected values for sample Nautilus macromphalus, AMNH 105621. Complete data table of analyses in the outer prismatic layer of the wild-caught Nautilus macromphalus including bracketing standards and aragonite standard. (XLSX)

Table of all SIMS analyses including rejected values for sample Nautilus belauensis, AMNH 102555. Complete data table of analyses in the outer prismatic layer of the aquarium-reared Nautilus belauensis including bracketing standards and aragonite standard. (XLSX)

Significance The Carboniferous−Permian marks the greatest coal-forming interval in Earth’s history, contributing to glaciation and uniquely high oxygen concentrations at the time and fueling the modern Industrial Revolution. This peak in coal deposition is frequently attributed to an evolutionary lag between plant synthesis of the recalcitrant biop...

Cycles of supercontinental assembly and disassembly may exert a first-order control on patterns of global biodiversity (Valentine and Moores 1970). Periods of fragmentation could cultivate biodiversity by increasing continental isolation and fostering the formation of distinct marine provinces. Here, we investigate the relationship between skeleton...

The Paleobiology Database (PBDB; https://paleobiodb.org ) consists of geographically and temporally explicit, taxonomically identified fossil occurrence data. The taxonomy utilized by the PBDB is not static, but is instead dynamically generated using an algorithm applied to separately managed taxonomic authority and opinion data. The PBDB owes its...

The fossil record acts as a time machine, providing data on the morphology, ecology and biogeography of ancient species. Therefore, ideally, fossil data should be included in evolutionary, macroecological and biogeographical studies. However, paleontological data are often not used in biological research, in part because of the difficulty of extrac...

Many aspects of macroevolutionary theory and our understanding of biotic responses to global environmental change derive from literature-based compilations of paleontological data. Existing manually assembled databases are, however, incomplete and difficult to assess and enhance with new data types. Here, we develop and validate the quality of a ma...

Fluid circulation in the Earth's crust plays an essential role in surface, near surface, and deep crustal processes. Flow pathways are driven by hydraulic gradients but controlled by material permeability, which varies over many orders of magnitude and changes over time. Although millions of measurements of crustal properties have been made, includ...

Planktic foraminifera are an abundant component of deep-sea sediment and are critical to geohistorical research, primarily because as a biological and geochemical system they are sensitive to coupled bio-hydro-lithosphere interactions. They are also well sampled and studied throughout their evolutionary history. Here, we combine a synoptic global c...

Many aspects of macroevolutionary theory and our knowledge of biotic responses to global environmental change derive from literature-based compilations of paleontological data. Although major features in the macroevolutionary history of life, notably long-term patterns of biodiversity, are similar across compilations, critical assessments of synthe...

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We describe our proposed demonstration of GeoDeepDive, a system that helps geoscientists discover information and knowledge buried in the text, tables, and figures of geology journal articles. This requires solving a host of classical data management challenges including data acquisition (e.g., from scanned documents), data extraction, and data int...

Vast quantities of rock that went missing hundreds of millions of years ago could explain the origin of animal life argue geologists Robert Gaines and Shanan Peters

Understanding the links between long-term biological evolution, the ocean-atmosphere system and plate tectonics is a central goal of Earth science. Although environmental perturbations of many different kinds are known to have affected long-term biological evolution, particularly during major mass extinction events, the relative importance of physi...