“TELECONNECTING” PALEOBASINS: INTRA-, INTER- AND GLOBAL (?) STRATIGRAPHIC CORRELATION – EXTENDING THE POSSIBILITIES
Within this context, the authors highlight a number of studies that document correlations suggesting more than a mere coincidence between emerging patterns. As such we have exapted a term first introduced in the investigation of positively or negatively correlated atmospheric shifts across wide regions. These patterns, thought to reflect large-scale changes in climate belts on a variety of short- to relatively long-temporal scales, appear to span entire continents, entire ocean basins, and can even be recognized at global scales. It is not our claim that emerging stratigraphic patterns found in paleobasins are directly governed by the same processes impacting climatic teleconnection patterns documented on annual to decadal scales today. We nonetheless suggest that the observed sedimentologic record of paleobasins may also be teleconnected and may reflect environmental changes over vast areas resulting from 1) large-scale shifts in climate (due to atmospheric wave and jet stream patterns, temperature shifts, hydrologic shifts, storm tracks, storm intensity, etc.), and/or 2) long-term geologic processes (i.e. mountain building, changes in ocean circulation patterns, and eustatic sea-level change). At the least, these changes may be tied to a range of processes active outside the immediate basin and perhaps even on a global scale.