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Do we have (open source) data or simulations that trace the paths of rocks and other material masses through time and space? You mention that we can account for

Do we have (open source) data or simulations that trace the paths of rocks and other material masses through time and space? You mention that we can account for 1/5th of the sediments of eroded rocks from this periode between 1,7 billion and 550 million years. Do we have accounts for part of the 4/5th that have turned into sediments deposited elsewhere. You already answered this, my question is more wide in scope. Has science put all those paths of material through time and space into a single database or simulation yet? For example, the Cambrian explosion was detected by study of fossils at the Burgess Shale. We can trace the rock from that quarry back in time from today to 508 million years ago when this Stephen Formation was formed in undersea mud slides burying the animals that became fossils [1]. We can trace cratons back to there origin, map megafloods and trace the path of tectonic plates through time. If we made a list of every cubic meter of earth, mainly the upper crust of the earth, we could probably trace back all the ocean crust and some of the continental crusts. By labeling all the bits we do know about (or have theories on) we could, by process of elimination, map out what parts we know about and what we don't know yet and where we have not looked at all. The simulation would show animations of the movements and transformations of each cubic meter throughout the last 10 billion years with an margin for error of the data at each point on the timeline. It would look like the plate tectonic simulations but at a much smaller scale and linking all the scientific papers related to this cubic meter of material through time and space. This would suggest where to go look for new histories in the rock and where the edges of regions are where we could find new unconformities. I'm eager to write the simulation/database software to do this mapping in time and space. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228535120_A_new_Burgess_Shale-type_assemblage_from_the_thin_Stephen_Formation_of_the_Southern_Canadian_Rockies https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228535120_A_new_Bur...

cbkeller 5y ago
I would love it, but no one has quite managed it yet! There are simulations of, e.g., plate motions, but even those get quite uncertain if you go back more than about a billion years. Forward models of the flow of the atmosphere, oceans, or even the mantle all exist, but with harsh tradeoffs between resolution and how much geologic time you can simulate. For this reason, we have coupled atmosphere-ocean models, but not really atmosphere-ocean-mantle models (because the timescale of mantle convection is just too much slower than the other two). I would really love to see more integrated whole-earth-system modelling, and that's probably something I'll try to work on in the future, but we may have a long way to go!
- morphle 5y ago
  The way to integrate all these simulations at different time and spatial scales and different models would be at a meta-model or (lack of a better word) meta-simulation level. That is what I propose. It would allow your future research to retrofit in the partial simulations we have today. I think it requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between my kind of 'computer science' with mostly geologists, paleontologist and a few planetairy scientists, cosmologists and evolutionairy biologists. Maybe documentairies like Cosmos would fund part of it for they also make many such animations.

cbkeller 5y ago

I would love it, but no one has quite managed it yet! There are simulations of, e.g., plate motions, but even those get quite uncertain if you go back more than about a billion years. Forward models of the flow of the atmosphere, oceans, or even the mantle all exist, but with harsh tradeoffs between resolution and how much geologic time you can simulate. For this reason, we have coupled atmosphere-ocean models, but not really atmosphere-ocean-mantle models (because the timescale of mantle convection is just too much slower than the other two). I would really love to see more integrated whole-earth-system modelling, and that's probably something I'll try to work on in the future, but we may have a long way to go!

morphle 5y ago
The way to integrate all these simulations at different time and spatial scales and different models would be at a meta-model or (lack of a better word) meta-simulation level. That is what I propose. It would allow your future research to retrofit in the partial simulations we have today. I think it requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between my kind of 'computer science' with mostly geologists, paleontologist and a few planetairy scientists, cosmologists and evolutionairy biologists. Maybe documentairies like Cosmos would fund part of it for they also make many such animations.