EAR-PF: RECALIBRATING THE SILURIAN SYSTEM USING INTEGRATED HIGH-RESOLUTION BIOCHEMOSTRATIGRAPHY AND GEOCHRONOLOGY: A CASE STUDY FOR THE PALEOZOIC ERA

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Dr. Bradley Cramer has been granted an NSF Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a research and education plan at the Kansas Geological Survey and the University of Kansas. The proposed research will undertake an investigation to significantly improve the Silurian timescale (444 to 416 million years ago) and better constrain our understanding of the rates of Paleozoic global climate change (542 to 251 million years ago). This project will integrate high-resolution biostratigraphy of conodonts and graptolites, high-resolution carbonate carbon isotope chemostratigraphy, new single grain zircon U/Pb age dates, and the Average Spectral Misfit (ASM) method of orbital tuning to produce a Silurian timescale with resolution and fidelity approaching that of modern global climate records. The proposed research will include study areas from the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Estonia. The proposed research will increase the resolution of the Silurian portion of the Geologic Timescale by more than an order of magnitude, and when completed, will mark a significant improvement in our ability to tell time in the deep past, at the scale of thousands of years. Resolving the deep-time climate history of the Earth to such short timescales would allow over 500 million years of global climate change to be directly brought to bear on our understanding of the modern climate system and significantly improve our understanding of the natural variability within the ocean-atmosphere system. Research methods and results will be integrated into course material to be taught by the PI at the KU, Department of Geology, and both graduate and undergraduate students will be included in the field and laboratory portions of the proposed research to provide hands-on training for students.