By

The stratigraphic record preserves a library of global climate change that allows us to use the past as the key to the present by studying prior examples of the multiple climate states of our planet’s history. The cause and affect relationships within the global climate system as well as the triggers and eventual consequences of prior examples of global environmental change are all preserved in the rock record. This global library is well-utilized for records from the recent past but there is diminishing attendance as one moves to the parts of the library containing older and older global environmental records. This is largely due to the difficulty in obtaining, reading, interpreting, and correlating global environmental records from the distant past. The work presented here is from the Silurian Period, including an interval from roughly 440 to 423Ma (Millions of years ago), and demonstrates that it is possible to produce a timescale for an interval hundreds of millions of years ago that nearly matches the resolution of more recent time periods. By producing a Phanerozoic timescale of equal resolution and fidelity throughout, over 500 million years of global environmental history can be brought to bear on our understanding of the modern climate system. Such a goal is decades away however, but thi