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When studying the history of the Earth, there is a lot of information that needs to be taken into account. There is even more information that hasn’t been found yet, or has been lost to time entirely. Researchers, however, are able to pinpoint various major events like mass extinctions, biodiversity booms, major changes in geology, and much more.
For the most part, these events seemed to happen randomly and were spread out over the course of millions, or even billions, of years.
A new study that is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, however, found that these things may not actually be random at all.
Instead, the authors propose, there is a hidden, hierarchical pattern involved that can be found if they look close. Professor Andrej Spiridonov from Vilnius University’s Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences told IFLScience in an email:
“Geological time scales may look like tidy timelines in textbooks, but their boundaries tell a much more chaotic story. Our findings show that what seemed like uneven noise is actually a key to understanding how our planet changes, and how far that change can go.”
The Earth’s history is divided up by eons, eras, periods, and epochs, but this study attempted to show that these time periods actually followed mathematical patterns. They used global scales as well as localized fossil-based scales to come up with their information, and then applied mathematical modeling to find patterns.
Their results indicated that the boundaries between events were not random, but they also weren’t evenly spaced out. In reality, they form a hierarchy of clusters and gaps. These clusters and gaps seem to follow fractal rules. Spiridonov explains:
“The intervals between key events in Earth’s history, from mass extinctions to evolutionary explosions, are not scattered completely evenly. They follow a multifractal logic that reveals how variability cascades through time.”
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Some people might expect that if this were the case, someone would have noticed before. The problem with this, however, is that the data is spread out over hundreds of millions of years, or possible even billions of years. In addition, the number of data points needed to come up with the theory haven’t been available for very long. As more fossil records and geological information is connected, their results can be more finely tuned. Spiridonov went on to say:
“If we want to understand the full range of Earth’s behaviors, whether periods of calm or sudden global upheaval, we need geological records that cover at least half a billion years. And ideally, a billion. We now have mathematical evidence that Earth system changes are not just irregular, they are deeply structured and hierarchical. This has huge implications not only for understanding Earth’s past but also for how we model future planetary change.”
While this study can’t be used to make direct predictions about the future of planet Earth, it can help to give ideas about how things may occur. The more detailed the information gets, the better those predictions can become.
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