Even if in the history books the East geological they all seem ordered, “in line”, actually follow one hidden and more complex hierarchical scheme than we thought: a research guided by theUniversity of Vilnius (Lithuania) shows that these temporal boundaries reflect deeper fluctuations in the earth’s system. The discovery could rewrite our way of thinking about the past of our planet and its possible future.
Geological temporal stairs may seem temporal lines ordered in textbooks, but their boundaries tell a much more chaotic story – explains Andrej Spiridonov, co -author of work – our results show that what seemed an irregular noise is actually the key to understanding how our planet changes and how much this change can extend
The study focused in particular on the distribution of boundaries that define eras, periods and eras in geological timethrough theInternational ChronostraGraphic Chart and the temporal stairs based on extinct organisms such as conodons, graptolites and amo admires, used just as a guide fossils to date the rocks and reconstruct the geological eras.
Result? In all these temporal lines, from local to global ones, one emerged surprising scheme: the boundaries of the units of time. The boundaries appear instead clusterseparated from long intervals of relative quiet. This extreme irregularity was described using the concept of multi -comprehensivemathematical models that repeat to different stairs.
The intervals between key events in the history of the earth, from mass extinctions to evolutionary explosions, are not completely uniformly distributed – continues Spiridonov – follow a multi -comprehensive logic that reveals how variability is distributed to waterfall over time
This analysis also allowed researchers to estimate the “EXTERNAL TEMPORAL SCALE” of the Earth systemor the time interval necessary to reveal the entire flow of its natural variability. This limit, they discovered, is approximately 500 million years or even more.
If we want to understand the entire range of the behavior of the earth, whether it is periods of calm or sudden global upheavals, we need geological data that cover at least half a billion years. And ideally, a billion
According to the authors of the study, this intuition helps to explain why shorter stairs often cannot capture the extremes, both stable and chaotic, which define theplanetary evolution.
The study also introduces a new theoretical model to describe the distribution of these geological boundaries, which scientists call ‘Compound Multifractal-Poisson Process’. This model suggests that geological events are nestled in each other, forming one cascade scheme in which the clusters appear within other clusters, all governed by a single statistical process.
Now we have the mathematical proof that the changes in the earth system are not only irregular, they are also deeply structured and hierarchical. This has enormous implications not only for the understanding of the past of the Earth, but also for the way we model future planetary changes
concludes Spiridonov
If now this complexity appears little more than a scientific curiosity, it could actually have some enormous repercussions on our understanding of how the earth has evolvedbut above all of how it could evolve in the future. Man permitting Obviously.
The work was published on Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Sources: Phys.org / Earth and Planetary Science Letters
