The current rapid increase in atmospheric CO2, linked to the massive use of fossil fuels, will have major consequences for our climate and for living organisms. To understand what is happening today, it is informative to look at the past. The evolution of the carbon cycle, coupled with that of the past climate system and the other coupled elemental cycles, is explored in the field, in the laboratory, and with the help of numerical modeling. The objective of numerical modeling is to be able to provide a quantification of the processes at work on our planet. Of course, we must remain aware that a numerical model, however complex, will never include all the relevant processes, impacts, and consequences because nature is complex and not all the processes are known. This makes models uncertain. We are still at the beginning of the exploration of the deep-time Earth. In the present contribution, we review some crucial events in coupled Earth-climate-biosphere evolution over the past 540 million years, focusing on the models that have been developed and what their results suggest. For most of these events, the causes are complex and we are not able to conclusively pinpoint all causal relationships and feedbacks in the Earth system. This remains a largely open scientific field. ▪ The era of the pioneers of geological carbon cycle modeling is coming to an end with the recent development of numerical models simulating the physics of the processes, including climate and the role of vegetation, while taking into account spatialization. ▪ Numerical models now allow us to address increasingly complex processes, which suggests the possibility of simulating the complete carbon balance of objects as complex as a mountain range. ▪ While most of the processes simulated by models are physical-chemical processes in which the role of living organisms is taken into account in a very simple way, via a limited number of parameters, models of the carbon cycle in deep time coupled with increasingly complex ecological models are emerging and are profoundly modifying our understanding of the evolution of our planet's surface.

中文翻译：

---

模型告诉我们显生宙碳源和碳汇的演化

目前大气中二氧化碳含量快速增加2与化石燃料的大量使用相关的，将对我们的气候和生物体产生重大影响。要了解今天发生的事情，回顾过去会提供很多信息。碳循环的演变，加上过去的气候系统和其他耦合元素循环的演变，在现场、实验室中并借助数值模拟进行了探索。数值建模的目标是能够对地球上运行的过程进行量化。当然，我们必须意识到，无论多么复杂，数值模型永远不会包括所有相关的过程、影响和后果，因为自然是复杂的，并非所有过程都是已知的。这使得模型具有不确定性。我们对地球深处的探索仍处于起步阶段。在本文中，我们回顾了过去 5.4 亿年来地球-气候-生物圈耦合演化中的一些关键事件，重点关注已开发的模型及其结果所表明的内容。对于大多数这些事件，原因很复杂，我们无法最终确定地球系统中的所有因果关系和反馈。这仍然是一个很大程度上开放的科学领域。 ▪ 随着最近开发出模拟过程物理过程（包括气候和植被作用，同时考虑空间化）的数值模型，地质碳循环建模先驱的时代即将结束。 ▪ 数值模型现在使我们能够处理日益复杂的过程，这表明模拟像山脉这样复杂的物体的完整碳平衡的可能性。 ▪ 虽然模型模拟的大多数过程都是物理化学过程，其中通过有限数量的参数以非常简单的方式考虑生物体的作用，但深时碳循环模型与日益复杂的环境相结合。生态模型不断涌现，并深刻地改变着我们对地球表面演化的理解。