Integrating Earth’s deep-time archives: rebuilding the future of palaeoecosystem science

The Earth is entering uncharted territory. As anthropogenic warming pushes planetary boundaries, as biodiversity declines at rates comparable to past mass extinctions 1 , 2 , and as ecosystem resilience erodes across biomes, a fundamental predicament confronts us: our instrumental records span mere centuries. We are attempting to forecast the trajectory of a complex ecosystem while observing only the final frame of a feature-length film. To understand systemic ecological responses to perturbation—and to anticipate where critical thresholds may lie—we must consult Earth’s only complete archive of coupled climate–biotic experiments: the deep-time sedimentary and fossil record.