Why Terrestrial Stable Carbon-isotope Stratigraphy Works: a Review

Carbon-isotope stratigraphy launched since the early technological development of carbonisotope measurement in 1950 s, however, the emergence and advance of terrestrial carbon-isotope stratigraphy took quite a long way. At early stage the exploration of carbon-isotope stratigraphy based on the marine biological shell carbonates was verified by repeatable carbon-isotope stratigraphic data, laboratory chemical experiments and the later laboratory foraminiferal culture experiments. The breakthrough for testifying the fundamentals of terrestrial carbon-isotope stratigraphy lies on the synchronous fluctuations between the carbon-isotope stratigraphic curves derived from marine biological shell carbonates and those derived from terrestrial C3 plants. The character that carbon-isotope stratigraphic curves can be globally synchronously correlated over the marine and terrestrial/atmospheric reservoir mainly excludes the potential biasing factors, such as diagenetic bias, carbon-isotope variations in intra/inter individual plant in same species or between species, ecological changes, changes in aridity, changes in source input and representative sampling. Therefore, the fundamentals of terrestrial carbon-isotope stratigraphy based on C3 plant successfully established. The terrestrial carbon-isotope stratigraphy can be used for global stratigraphic correlation, reconstructing the evolution of atmospheric CO2 and can further verify the published global carbon-cycle models. The terrestrial carbon-isotope stratigraphy based on the compound specific biomarkers and single-grained pollen may be a promising perspective in future.