Seawater-buffered diagenesis, destruction of carbon isotope excursions, and the composition of DIC in Neoproterozoic oceans.

Carbonate sediments of nonglacial Cryogenian (659 to 649 Ma) and early Ediacaran (635 to 590 Ma) age exhibit large positive and negative δ13Ccarb excursions in a shallow-water marine platform in northern Namibia. The same excursions are recorded in fringing deep-sea fans and in carbonate platforms on other paleocontinents. However, coeval carbonates in the upper foreslope of the Namibian platform, and to a lesser extent in the outermost platform, have relatively uniform δ13Ccarb compositions compatible with dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in the modern ocean. We attribute the uniform values to fluid-buffered diagenesis that occurred where seawater invaded the sediment in response to geothermal porewater convection. This attribution, which is testable with paired Ca and Mg isotopes, implies that large δ13Ccarb excursions observed in Neoproterozoic platforms, while sedimentary in origin, do not reflect the composition of ancient open-ocean DIC.