From Greenhouse to Icehouse: The Marine Eocene-Oligocene Transition

Abstract

Donald R. Prothero, Linda C. Ivany, and Elizabeth A. Nesbitt, Eds., 2003, Columbia University Press, New York, 541 p. (Hardcover, US $83.50) ISBN: 0-231-12716-2. Occasionally, I am confronted directly with stratigraphy. By this, I mean actually understanding sedimentary rocks in their context of deposition, no matter where they are. One would think that, after excellent training from noted stratigraphers like Robert Garrison and Jeffrey Mount and some detailed work on the Monterey Formation, I would appreciate the importance of stratigraphy and stratigraphic correlation in interpreting critical events in Earth's history, such as the transition from Greenhouse to Icehouse worlds that was marked by the Eocene-Oligocene (E/O) transition. But, in truth, I have always preferred to just get an age—a number that I can then easily stick on a plot to show correlation between several squiggly line geochemical records. There is nothing like the reality-check of reading From Greenhouse to Icehouse: The Marine Eocene-Oligocene Transition to make me humbly return to my stratigraphic roots. In addition to being an excellent series of papers dealing with marine records of the Eocene-Oligocene transition, it is a lesson in the importance of first carefully looking at the rocks themselves in their stratigraphic context, then beginning to match-up squiggly lines. This collection will go a long way toward establishing the stratigraphic context of this event around the world, making additional work in this field that much more valuable and focused. The 1990s saw an explosion in research on the E/O transition from the marine perspective, as a set of excellent volumes based on a 1989 Penrose Conference were being published by Prothero, Berggren, and Emry on various terrestrial and marine records of this transition. The interweaving of a variety of stratigraphic tools allowed researchers to correlate not just the placement of major events during this …