Workshop Proposal: Defining Grand Challenges in Sedimentary Geology & Paleobiology

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Defining Grand Challenges in Sedimentary Geology & Paleobiology Conveners: Isabel Montañez (University of California, Davis) & Charles Marshall (University of California, Berkeley) ABSTRACTThe Earth?s surface crust is host to (1) our mineral, hydrocarbon and water resources, (2) a full-spectrum record of past climate change, (3) a natural laboratory of the magnitude and rates of change in ecosystems under the range of past conditions, (4) the archive of the evolutionary history of life, including biodiversity and evolutionary innovation throughout Earth?s history, particularly during times of rapidly changing environmental conditions, and (5) a record of the processes that lead to or respond to natural hazards such as earthquakes, flooding, volcanic eruptions. Scientific investigation into these and related issues is primarily the purview of sedimentary geologists and geochemists and paleontologists - increasingly working in collaboration. Recent scientific efforts in sedimentary geology and paleobiology (SGP) have led to notable advances in radiometric calibration of the geologic record and in our interpretive understanding of deep-time earth processes that cannot be inferred from any other archive than the Earth?s crustal carapace. Despite these advances the SGP community has not convened in the past decade or more to discuss and develop a SGP-wide and coherent vision for the future of research in our broader disciplinary field. Furthermore, funding levels to support SGP research are increasingly inadequate limiting the pursuit of exciting new scientific opportunities and directions as well as the development of intellectual, cultural and technical infrastructure needed to support research and mentoring activities. PIs propose a workshop for the exchange of ideas among representatives of the various sub-disciplines in SGP in order to identify key research questions and topics in sedimentary geology and geochemistry, deep-time paleoclimatology, and paleobiology that need to be addressed by the community through future research. The three primary objectives of the workshop are (1) to identify high-priority new and emerging research opportunities offered by the sedimentary, geochemical and paleontological records, (2) to develop and prioritize a set of guiding ?grand challenges? for the coming decade of research in the aforementioned sub-disciplines, and (3) delineate key instrumentation and facilities that will needed to support these new and emerging research opportunities.