Carbon isotope excursions (CIEs) serve as key geological markers that coincide with global climate change, extinctions, Oceanic Anoxic Events, and hydrocarbon source rocks. Accurate delineation of CIEs is essential for global-scale correlations, calculation of their duration and generation of Earth System process models. However, defining the initiation and termination boundaries of CIEs remains subjective, resulting in a wide variety of boundaries in published literature. In this study, various statistical approaches for delineating carbon isotope excursions are reviewed and quantitatively assessed. By evaluating these approaches, the aim is to enhance precision in determining the beginning and end of CIEs, thereby enabling accurate calculation of durations and identification of potential lead-lag relationships with causal mechanisms. Additionally, an integrated workflow methodology is proposed that combines the selected statistical techniques to establish a new standard for CIE delineation. The significance of this research extends beyond the field of CIEs. The proposed approaches and workflow methodology have the potential to be applied in other disciplines for correlating trends and detecting shifts in various datasets, such as climatological, petrophysical, geological, and geochemical data, across different scales.

中文翻译：

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改进碳同位素偏移定义的统计方法


碳同位素偏移 (CIE) 是与全球气候变化、物种灭绝、海洋缺氧事件和碳氢化合物源岩相一致的关键地质标志。准确描述 CIE 对于全球尺度的关联、计算其持续时间以及生成地球系统过程模型至关重要。然而，定义 CIE 的启动和终止边界仍然是主观的，导致已发表的文献中存在各种各样的边界。在这项研究中，回顾并定量评估了描述碳同位素偏移的各种统计方法。通过评估这些方法，目的是提高确定 CIE 开始和结束的精度，从而能够准确计算持续时间并识别与因果机制的潜在超前-滞后关系。此外，还提出了一种集成的工作流程方法，该方法结合了所选的统计技术来建立 CIE 划分的新标准。这项研究的意义超出了 CIE 领域。所提出的方法和工作流程方法有可能应用于其他学科，用于关联趋势并检测不同数据集（例如不同尺度的气候、岩石物理、地质和地球化学数据）的变化。