Карбон кезеңінің алғашқы сатысы: Турне жасы

First stage of the Carboniferous

The Tournaisian is in the ICS geologic timescale the lowest stage or oldest age of the Mississippian, the oldest subsystem of the Carboniferous. The Tournaisian age lasted from Ma to Ma. It is preceded by the Famennian (the uppermost stage of the Devonian) and is followed by the Viséan. In global stratigraphy, the Tournaisian contains two substages: the Hastarian (lower Tournaisian) and Ivorian (upper Tournaisian). These two substages were originally designated as European regional stages.

The Tournaisian was named after the Belgian city of Tournai. It was introduced in scientific literature by Belgian geologist André Hubert Dumont in 1832. Like many Devonian and lower Carboniferous stages, the Tournaisian is a unit from West European regional stratigraphy that is now used in the official international time scale. The Tournaisian correlates with the regional North American Kinderhookian and lower Osagean stages and the Chinese Tangbagouan regional stage. In the British Isles, where the Hastarian and Ivorian are difficult to distinguish, the entire Tournaisian was equivalent to the Courceyan regional stage.

The Tournaisian coincides with Romer's gap, a period of remarkably few terrestrial fossils, thus constituting a discontinuity between the Devonian and the more modern terrestrial ecosystems of the Carboniferous. The middle of the Tournaisian is marked by a southern glaciation event, of a slightly lesser extent than the glaciations which swept over Gondwana in the later Carboniferous and the very end of the Devonian. During the Tournaisian, South America was located at south polar latitudes and formed the westernmost part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The southwestern coastline of Gondwana was bustling with distinctive cold water brachiopod and bivalve faunas. Coal is less common in the Tournaisian than in the rest of the Carboniferous, and forests and swamps were at low density despite some trees reaching heights of up to 40 meters (131 feet). Anabranching channels and anastomosing rivers (with permanent channels splitting around large vegetated islands) would not develop until the Viséan, and river systems of the Tournaisian were more similar to those of the Late Devonian.

The Tournaisian saw a new diversification of arborescent (tree sized) lycophytes and giant sphenophytes (horsetails). They coexisted alongside ferns and lignophytes (wood bearing plants), including early seed plants such as lyginopteridalean pteridosperms ("seed ferns"). Tropical and subtropical swamps, in what is now Europe, North America, and China, represent a low latitude paleobiogeographical realm known as the Amerosinian realm. Divaricating (widely branching) trunks of Lepidodendropsis lycophytes are by far the most abundant and widespread plant fossils of the Tournaisian, yet there was some minor variation in other flora through time and space. In eastern North America, lyginopterids and probable progymnosperms were also common, as indicated by leaf form genera such as Adiantites, Rhodeopteridium, and Genselia. Subtropical and temperate lycophytes such as Lepidodendropsis, Archaeosigillaria, and Frenguellia could be found in some parts of the supercontinent, such as Argentina and Australia. Tournaisian terrestrial sediments in South America are additionally characterized by the miospore index fossil Waltzispora lanzonii. The floral diversity of Tournaisian southern tundra consists almost entirely of relict Devonian genera; this suggests that Late Devonian land plant extinctions in lower latitudes were mostly driven by competition from new tropical species, rather than global environmental pressures. Most early Tournaisian trilobites were widespread deep water species. By the late Tournaisian, they had recolonized shallower environments and divided into three different biogeographic zones corresponding to North America, Europe, and East Asia.