U.S.-Mexico: Impacts, Mass Extinctions and the Cretaceous/ Tertiary Boundary

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9314080 This Americas Program award will support Professor Gerta Keller of Princeton University in a research collaboration with Professor Jose Lopez Oliva of the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon in Linares, Mexico. The investigators intend to study the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) transition, which marks one of the dramatic environmental changes in Earth's history, resulting in the extinction of dinosaurs, invertebrates and marine plankton. Current faunal, stratigraphic and mineralogic records suggest that the biotic effects of the K/T boundary event were most severe in low latitudes and negligible in high latitudes, that there may have been multiple events, and that long-term oceanic instability marked the K/T transition. The researchers propose to study whether the mass extinction was the result of a giant earth-impacting bolide in the Yucatan region, whether the effects of this impact were more severe or limited to low latitudes, and whether there is evidence of long-term oceanic instability that would suggest that the bolide impact was a temporal coincidence, rather than the primary cause for the mass extinction. For this work, laboratory based geochemical and quantitative faunal studies will be mostly done at Princeton University, whereas sediment and stratigraphic analyses will be largely done at the University of Nuevo Leon in Mexico. ***