The influence of climatic change on exposure surface development: A case study from the Late Dinantian of England and Wales

Exposure surfaces represent an integral part of Asbian-Brigantian cyclothemic platform carbonates in England and Wales. These are characterized by the association of clay palaeosols, calcrete and palaeokarst and in most instances would appear to have been polygenetic. Alternating calcrete-karst stratigraphies associated with individual exposure surfaces indicate that the climate changed from semi-arid to humid to semi-arid conditions during each sea-level fall/rise cycle. Lowstand intervals were humid and resulted in karstification of the cyclothem-top sediments and the formation of a mineral soil. In contrast, regressive/transgressive phases were semi-arid and resulted in calcretization of the emergent platform carbonates. The influence that climatic cyclicity had upon exposure surface development was modulated by variations in platform bathymetry, subsidence and spatial climatic variation, and platforms exhibit their own individual record of what was essentially an idealized sequence of events. As with the sea-level oscillations responsible for cyclothemic sedimentation, the climatic cyclicity is thought to be the product of orbital forcing and probably reflects either eccentricity-driven shifts in the locus of monsoonal precipitation, or precession-driven variations in monsoonal intensity. If precessional in origin, exposure surface development represents a single minimum to minimum excursion, some 20 ka in duration, whereas if eccentricity-driven this may have been appreciably longer. Nevertheless, the immature nature of the exposure surfaces suggests that emergence was probably only of the order of a few tens of thousands of years.