Travel Grant: Continental Scientific Drilling Project of Cretaceous Songliao Basin

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This award provides support for American participation in the Cretaceous-climate corehole drilling project currently underway in China. The goal of the project is to recover an essentially complete terrestrial sedimentary record of the entire Cretaceous period from a major rift basin in northeastern China, which will provide proxies for Cretaceous nonmarine climate, with particular emphasis on greenhouse and anoxic ocean periods. Using domestic funding resources, Chinese scientists have already cored the entire Upper Cretaceous (ca 2.5 km of core, with recovery 95%). International access to that core has been extremely limited, but the PI and hisAmerican colleagues have been given sufficient access to demonstrate that there are robust C- and O-signals throughout the section. Subsequently, the PI and colleagues have obtained a grant from the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) to core the entire Lower Cretaceous. The PI and colleagues have organized a 3-day meeting of likely collaborators in Beijing to lay plans for the scientific analysis of the ICDP corehole. ICDP participation guarantees international access to the core. Among those participating are a number of noted American scientists specializing in stable isotopes, radiometric dating, magnetostrat, lacustrine sedimentology, and paleoclimatology. This collaboration provides a one-of-a-kind opportunity with respect to understanding global climate history through the Cretaceous terrestrial signals and can have important implications for current climate-change analyses.