Bayesian age–depth modeling in deep time

Abstract

Relating stratigraphic position to time is a common challenge across a wide variety of Earth science disciplines. Timing is everything when investigating past climates (Westerhold et al. 2024), but the rock record does not uniformly track the passage of time. Instead, variation in the rate of sediment accumulation (including erosion) can produce intricate patterns of the relationship between deposition and time in the rock record (Meyers 2019), oftentimes driven by climate and tectonic feedbacks. Consequently, different sequences of ´contemporaneous´ strata contain different records of absolute time. Furthermore, no single stratigraphic section, drill core, or outcrop contains a continuous record of Earth´s (climate) history. Instead, different locations represent different time intervals of Earth’s history.