Non-steady state diagenesis and Earth's climate

There is a definite role for non-steady-state diagenesis in exercising control over marine organic carbon accumulation and remobilisation and transport of biologically essential elements. It sets up a transient process in the biogeochemical cycling of the elements in the ocean, and such a transient process can implicate an unpredictable impact on Earth's climate. Most of the contradictions observed in the palaeoclimate of the Earth and its consequences, for example, the mass extinction during Late Ordovician glacial maximum and the warming-associated Mesozoic anoxic events (Pohl et al., 2021), requires a reinvestigation into the role of non-steady-state diagenesis that might have occurred during those times.
 

Many studies have assumed steady-state diagenesis; however, non-steady-state diagenesis is most common in several parts of the world's oceans, for example, the Peruvian Shelf (Sellappa Gounder et al., 2020; and references cited in the supplement; Sulpis et al., 2021). The non-steady-state diagenesis affects the extent and intensity of the Oxygen Minimum Zone (OMZ). It also impacts the quantity of trace elements diffusing across the sediment-water interface in the continental margin and deep oceanic regions and affects the cycling of many elements, including sulphur, silicon, and aluminium.

Further reading:
 

Pohl, A., Lu, Z., Lu, W., Stockey, R.G., Elrick, M., Li, M., Desrochers, A., Shen, Y., He, R., Finnegan, S., Ridgwell, A., 2021. Vertical decoupling in Late Ordovician anoxia due to reorganisation of ocean circulation. Nat. Geosci. 14, 868–873. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00843-9
 

Sellappa Gounder, E., Sundaramurthy, S., Ramasamy, N., Palanivel, P., 2020. Palaeoenvironmental applications of chromium and aluminium: Concerns on partitioning and early diagenetic remobilisation. Geological Journal 56, 2379–2397. https://doi.org/10.1002/gj.3913
 

Sulpis, O., Humphreys, M., Wilhelmus, M., Carroll, D., Berelson, W., Menemenlis, D., Middelburg, J., Adkins, J., 2021. RADIv1: a non-steady-state early diagenetic model for ocean sediments in Julia and MATLAB/GNU Octave (preprint). Oceanography. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2021-211