The current rapid increase in atmospheric CO2, linked to the massive use of fossil fuels, will have major consequences for our climate and for living organisms. To understand what is happening today, it is informative to look at the past. The evolution of the carbon cycle, coupled with that of the past climate system and the other coupled elemental cycles, is explored in the field, in the laboratory, and with the help of numerical modeling. The objective of numerical modeling is to be able to provide a quantification of the processes at work on our planet. Of course, we must remain aware that a numerical model, however complex, will never include all the relevant processes, impacts, and consequences because nature is complex and not all the processes are known. This makes models uncertain. We are still at the beginning of the exploration of the deep-time Earth. In the present contribution, we review some crucial events in coupled Earth-climate-biosphere evolution over the past 540 million years, focusing on the models that have been developed and what their results suggest. For most of these events, the causes are complex and we are not able to conclusively pinpoint all causal relationships and feedbacks in the Earth system. This remains a largely open scientific field. ▪The era of the pioneers of geological carbon cycle modeling is coming to an end with the recent development of numerical models simulating the physics of the processes, including climate and the role of vegetation, while taking into account spatialization.▪Numerical models now allow us to address increasingly complex processes, which suggests the possibility of simulating the complete carbon balance of objects as complex as a mountain range.▪While most of the processes simulated by models are physical-chemical processes in which the role of living organisms is taken into account in a very simple way, via a limited number of parameters, models of the carbon cycle in deep time coupled with increasingly complex ecological models are emerging and are profoundly modifying our understanding of the evolution of our planet's surface.

中文翻译：

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模型告诉我们显生代碳源和碳汇的演化


当前大气中二氧化碳的快速增加与化石燃料的大量使用有关，将对我们的气候和生物体产生重大影响。要了解今天发生的事情，回顾过去会很有帮助。碳循环的演变，以及过去气候系统和其他耦合元素循环的演变，在野外、实验室和数值建模的帮助下进行了探索。数值建模的目标是能够对地球上工作的过程进行量化。当然，我们必须保持意识，一个数值模型，无论多么复杂，都永远不会包括所有相关的过程、影响和后果，因为自然界很复杂，并非所有过程都是已知的。这使得模型不确定。我们仍处于探索深时地球的起点。在本文中，我们回顾了过去 5.4 亿年地球-气候-生物圈耦合演化中的一些关键事件，重点关注已经开发的模型及其结果所暗示的内容。对于大多数这些事件，原因很复杂，我们无法最终确定地球系统中的所有因果关系和反馈。这在很大程度上仍然是一个开放的科学领域。▪随着最近数值模型的发展，地质碳循环建模先驱的时代即将结束，这些模型模拟了过程的物理特性，包括气候和植被的作用，同时考虑到空间化。 ▪▪虽然模型模拟的大多数过程都是物理化学过程，其中生物体的作用是通过有限数量的参数以非常简单的方式考虑的，但深时碳循环模型与日益复杂的生态模型相结合，正在出现，并深刻地改变我们对地球表面演变的理解。