Linking paleogeography and Earth system dynamics to evolutionary innovation during the Cambrian Explosion

Geodynamic redistribution of continents fundamentally reshapes Earth’s climate, ocean circulation, and nutrient cycles, thereby exerting a first-order control on biological evolution. A possible example of this coupling is the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that followed profound tectonic, climatic, and oceanographic reorganization during the late Neoproterozoic. However, identifying the causal drivers of the Cambrian explosion remains challenging due to the fragmentary geological record.  To circumvent these limitations, we implement an integrated, mechanistic simulation framework that integrates the key Earth system processes governing climate, circulation, surface evolution, and marine biogeochemistry, allowing their interactions to be explored consistently in space and time. These components provide time-evolving boundary conditions for biological productivity, oxygen availability, and nutrient supply, which are then used to study how changing environmental states shape the range of biologically feasible organismal strategies.  Rather than simulating realized biodiversity or reconstructing a specific episode of Earth history, the model explores the full dynamical evolution of an Earth-like system across a supercontinent cycle, from continental assembly to breakup. In this framework, changing Earth system states expand or restrict the range of biologically feasible organismal strategies, providing a quantitative link between paleogeographic restructuring and the environmental opening of functional trait space relevant to the Cambrian explosion.