ABSTRACT
Short-term environmental change, a subject of great current interest, has applications in ocean study, because the oceans have responded quickly to changes in the past, and almost certainly will do so in the future. Changes are revealed by the sedimentary and biotic record and had huge repercussions on surface environments. Sediments show sharp changes, and fossil assemblages show extinction. In this context, timescales of change may be regarded as geologically short (hundreds of thousands to millions of years), although modern studies of ocean systems suggest that the oceans were/are able to respond on the decade scale, considered more in Chapter 11. This chapter completes a survey of ocean processes in geological history by examining a selection of features at key points during the Phanerozoic. This chapter is thematic, rather than chronological, and examines processes causing ocean change.
