The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) global warming event at ∼56 million years before present changed catchment weathering and erosion. Increased chemical weathering of silicate minerals is thought to be an important process removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. However, changes in clay mineralogy can often be explained by enhanced erosion of catchment laterites during the event. Here, we investigate chemical and physical weathering and erosive flux changes through the PETM interval in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, a Laramide foreland basin, in a proximal continental-interior alluvial setting. These show an increase of detrital smectite with a lag time of 20-kyr after the main onset the PETM. The smectite increase continued for at least 50-kyr after the event. In-situ, post-depositional pedogenic clay mineral formation is similar between pre-PETM and PETM soil profiles, despite large macroscopic differences between soils that formed before and during the event. Drier, hotter summers during the PETM probably caused decreased vegetation cover that, in concert with more frequent and heavier rainstorms, intensified the erosion of smectite-rich Cretaceous bentonites on the margins of the catchment, which exceeded changes in chemical weathering within the catchment. The lagged response in reaching full PETM clay mineral values can be explained by the time required for upstream sediment to reach the catchment basin floodplain. The prolonged nature of smectite enhancement after the PETM event may again relate to signal propagation times that are now even longer due to lower fluvial recycling rates. Our results indicate that chemical weathering changes were probably superceded by enhanced physical weathering and clay-mineral transport from basin margins at this continental-interior study site.

Massive addition of isotopically-depleted carbon to the ocean and atmosphere caused a carbon isotope excursion (CIE) and global greenhouse warming during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) circa 56 million years ago. The body of the CIE is followed by a recovery interval that is key to understanding Earth's capacity for carbon uptake, mechanisms of carbon uptake, and biotic responses following an extreme greenhouse warming event. Expanded terrestrial stratigraphic sections in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming provide exceptionally high-resolution records of the CIE and can be linked directly to the mammalian fossil record. Here, we provide carbon isotope records of unprecedented resolution measured on in-situ pedogenic carbonate nodules in two parallel 8-km-spaced sections of upper Paleocene and lower Eocene fluvial sediments in the northern Bighorn Basin. We find consistent precession-driven sedimentary cycles in the two sections. Cycle thicknesses show significant lateral, and thus vertical, variation, demonstrating that astronomical age models constructed for fluvial successions require detailed sedimentary facies analysis of parallel sites. Plotting the high-resolution carbon isotope records in time using our astronomical age model for the correlated sections indicates a CIE body duration of 101 ± 9 kyr. The CIE shows an initial recovery step of +2.7 ± 1.0‰. This step occurs across the single, well-developed paleosol marker bed known as Purple-4, which represents a time interval of up to 15 kyr. The rapidity of recovery at the end of the CIE body is remarkable in light of existing hypotheses for carbon removal from the ocean–atmosphere system. Concurrent mammal finds show that the transition from faunal zone Wa-0 to faunal zone Wa-1 occurred in two steps, with a transitional Wa-R fauna preceding the CIE initial recovery step and Wa-1 fauna following the step.

Series of transient greenhouse warming intervals in the early Eocene provide an opportunity to study the response of rock weathering and erosion to changes in temperature and precipitation. During greenhouse warming, chemical weathering is thought to increase the uptake of carbon from the atmosphere, while physical weathering and erosion control sediment supply. A large ancient greenhouse warming event is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum at 56 Ma. In many coastal sites, an increase in the abundance of kaolinite clay during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is interpreted as the result of reworking from terrestrial strata due to enhanced runoff caused by increased seasonal precipitation and storminess during a time of decreased vegetation cover. In the continental interior of North America, Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum paleosols show more intense pedogenesis and drying, which are indicated by deeply weathered and strongly oxidized soil profiles. The weathering and oxidation could be related to temperature and precipitation changes, but also to increased time available for weathering and increased soil permeability in coarser sediment. Here, we provide evidence for enhanced climate seasonality, increased erosion ofproximal laterites and intrabasinal floodplain soils, and a potential slight increase in chemical weathering during the smaller early Eocene hyperthermals (Eocene Thermal Maximum 2, including H1 and H2) postdating the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, for which no previous clay mineral data were available. Hyperthermal soil formation at the site of floodplain deposition causes a similar, insignificant clay mineralogical change as occurred during the background climates of the early Eocene by showing small increases in smectite and decreases in illite-smectite and illite. Remarkably, the detrital sediments during the hyperthermals show a similar pedogenic-like increase of smectite and decreases of mixed-layer illite-smectite and illite, while the kaolinite and chlorite proportions remained low and unchanged. Since sedimentation rates and provenance were similar during the events, enhanced smectite neoformation during soil formation in more proximal settings, and associated reworking, is the likely process causing this clay mineralogical change. The hundreds to thousands of year time scales at which individual paleosols were formed were probably too short for significant alteration of the rocks by in situ chemical weathering despite changing climates during the two post-Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum greenhouse warming episodes. The relatively small signal, however, raises the question of whether increased chemical weathering can indeed be a strong negativefeedback mechanism to enhanced greenhouse gas warming over the time scales at which these processes act.

Transient greenhouse warming events in the Paleocene and Eocene were associated with the addition of isotopically light carbon to the exogenic atmosphere-ocean carbon system, leading to substantial environmental and biotic change. The magnitude of an accompanying carbon isotope excursion (CIE) can be used to constrain both the sources and amounts of carbon released during an event and also to correlate marine and terrestrial records with high precision. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is well documented, but CIE records for the subsequent warming events are still rare, especially from the terrestrial realm. Here, we provide new paleosol carbonate CIE records for two of the smaller hyperthermal events, I1 and I2, as well as two additional records of Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2) and H2 in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA. Stratigraphic comparison of this expanded, high-resolution terrestrial carbon isotope history to the deep-sea benthic foraminiferal isotope records from Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) sites 1262 and 1263, Walvis Ridge, in the southern Atlantic Ocean corroborates the idea that the Bighorn Basin fluvial sediments record global atmospheric change. The ∼34m thicknesses of the eccentricity-driven hyperthermals in these archives corroborate precession forcing of the ∼7m thick fluvial overbank-avulsion sedimentary cycles. Using bulk-oxide mean-annual-precipitation reconstructions, we find soil moisture contents during the four younger hyperthermals that are similar to or only slightly wetter than the background, in contrast with soil drying observed during the PETM using the same proxy, sediments, and plant fossils. The magnitude of the CIEs in soil carbonate for the four smaller, post-PETM events scale nearly linearly with the equivalent event magnitudes documented in marine records. In contrast, the magnitude of the PETM terrestrial CIE is at least 5 % smaller than expected based on extrapolation of the scaling relationship established from the smaller events. We evaluate the potential for recently documented, nonlinear effects of pCO₂ on plant photosynthetic C-isotope fractionation to explain this scaling discrepancy.We find that the PETM anomaly can be explained only if background pCO₂ was at least 50%lower during most of the post-PETM events than prior to the PETM. Although not inconsistent with other pCO₂ proxy data for the time interval, this would require declining pCO₂ across an interval of global warming. A more likely explanation of the PETM CIE anomaly in pedogenic carbonate is that other environmental or biogeochemical factors influencing the terrestrial CIE magnitudes were not similar in nature or proportional to event size across all of the hyperthermals. We suggest that contrasting regional hydroclimatic change between the PETM and subsequent events, in line with our soil proxy records, may have modulated the expression of the global CIEs in the Bighorn Basin soil carbonate records.