File talk:Phanerozoic Carbon Dioxide.png

Reversed Time axis

The convention for showing plots against time is to have time going forward as we move to the right. So for example if some quantity is increasing with time, then the graph will slope up, going left to right. This graph currently has reversed time. Which is not even consistent with other graphs on the page. I'd suggest that it should be switched back to the standard. Pnelnik (talk) 11:59, 27 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reversed is the normal convention in certain scientific communities. Dragons flight (talk) 18:59, 27 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Left to right time goes forward is the general standard, if there exist a tiny group who do otherwise (and I would question this), then I wish them well, however the fact remains that they are in a tiny minority, possibly a minority of zero. On the page Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth's_atmosphere there are currently four graphs with time on the x-axis. This one is the only one where time goes backward from left to right. For the record, I'm a physicist. Pnelnik (talk) 16:56, 28 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's not uncommon for publications dealing with deep time to put the present on the left (e.g. [1], [2] both from NOAA). I personally published such a figure in Nature a few years back (Rohde & Muller 2005, if you're curious). If someone feels compelled to swap the orientation (and can do a good job of it), I won't stop them, but I am unlikely to remake the image just for that purpose any time soon. Dragons flight (talk) 01:40, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I trust scientists to keep things straight, but this isn't scientific literature. I agree the image's orientation is problematic for this forum.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:05, 3 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CD amount per reconstructions

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14845/figures/4 prokaryotes (talk) 14:45, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]