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

9314080 该美洲计划奖将支持普林斯顿大学的Gerta Keller教授与墨西哥利纳雷斯新莱昂自治大学的Jose洛佩斯奥利瓦教授进行研究合作。 研究人员打算研究白垩纪/第三纪（K/T）过渡，这标志着地球历史上巨大的环境变化之一，导致恐龙，无脊椎动物和海洋浮游生物灭绝。 目前的动物、地层和矿物学记录表明，K/T边界事件的生物影响在低纬度地区最为严重，在高纬度地区可以忽略不计，可能发生了多起事件，长期的海洋不稳定标志着K/T过渡。 研究人员建议研究大规模灭绝是否是尤卡坦半岛地区巨大的地球撞击火流星的结果，这种影响的影响是否更严重或仅限于低纬度地区，以及是否有长期海洋不稳定的证据表明火流星撞击是时间巧合，而不是大规模灭绝的主要原因。 在这项工作中，基于实验室的地球化学和定量动物群研究将主要在普林斯顿大学进行，而沉积物和地层分析将主要在墨西哥的新莱昂大学进行。 ***

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. ***