Collaborative Research: Boron Isotopes Across the Carboniferous-Permian Glaciation: Assessing the Relationship of pCO2 to Seawater Chemistry

由于化石燃料燃烧导致的后工业时代大气二氧化碳(CO2)的增加，其潜在的环境、社会和经济后果是当今科学研究的最重要领域之一。这种增加是否会影响天气模式(即，更频繁或更严重的风暴，降水变化导致洪水或干旱)，海平面上升(即。需要更好地了解格陵兰和南极冰川融化造成的沿海洪灾)，以便能够制定政策以避免或适应这些后果。要了解地球如何应对大气中二氧化碳浓度的这种变化，一个有用的方法是回顾过去，当时的情况与我们今天所经历的情况相似。研究人员建议使用一种相对较新的工具来解决这个问题，即海洋碳酸盐的硼同位素组成，它已被证明反映了海水的酸度。众所周知，大气中二氧化碳的增加会导致表层海水变得更加酸性。因此，硼同位素在研究过去地质时期大气二氧化碳的变化方面具有很大的潜力。他们建议对石炭纪-二叠纪(3.6亿-2.6亿年前)进行研究，这个时间类似于今天的地球，因为它代表着一个广泛的冰川时期，冰川-间冰期的变化类似于晚新生代，随后是显著的气候变暖。他们将从一套腕足类贝壳中产生高分辨率的记录，这些贝壳从密西西比早期的寒冷条件延伸到早二叠世冰川的顶峰和变暖。扰乱地球气候系统的可能性与全球社会直接相关。这项建议不仅将深入解决气候变化问题，这将有助于了解目前的情况，它还将继续开发硼同位素作为pH替代物，为全球气候变化的多替代研究提供额外的工具，这将对广泛的气候科学家具有价值。调查人员是皇后学院(Queens College)和石溪大学(Stony Brook University)的教授，这两所大学拥有相当多的文化多样性，并制定了鼓励来自代表性不足群体的学生从事科学研究的计划。这两位研究人员都指导了来自代表性不足群体的本科生和研究生，并将积极招募他们参加这个项目。他们为高中生制定了暑期计划，采用嵌套系统，在指导学生研究时为研究生、博士后和地球科学教师提供宝贵的指导经验。每周以海水化学为主题的研讨会将为学生提供了解其工作相关性的背景。这种方法带来了巨大的协同效应，自然导致了更好的科学交流，因为老师们把这种经验带回了他们的课堂。

The potential environmental, social, and economic consequences from the post-industrial increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) due to fossil fuel burning is one of the most important areas of scientific research today. Whether this increase will affect weather patterns (ie. more frequent or more severe storms, changes in precipitation resulting in floods or droughts), sea level rise (ie. coastal flooding due to melting of Greenland and Antarctic glaciers), needs to be better understood so that policies can be put in place to avoid or adapt to these consequences. A useful approach to understanding how the Earth responds to such changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration is to look back in time to periods when the conditions were similar to those we are experiencing today. Investigators propose using a relatively new tool to address this, the boron isotope composition of marine carbonates which have been shown to reflect the acidity of seawater. It is known that increasing atmospheric CO2 causes surface seawater to become more acidic. Thus, boron isotopes have great potential for examining changing atmospheric CO2 in the geologic past. They propose a study of the Carboniferous-Permian interval (360-260 million years ago), a time similar to today's Earth in that it represents a time of extensive glaciation, with glacial-interglacial variability analogous to the Late Cenozoic, that is then followed by significant climate warming. They will produce a high-resolution record from a suite of brachiopod shells that extend from the cold conditions of the early Mississippian to the culmination of the glaciations and warming in the early Permian.The potential for perturbing the Earth's climate system is of immediate global societal relevance. This proposal will not only address climate change questions in deep time, which will help to inform the present, it will also continue the development of boron isotopes as a pH proxy in deep time, providing additional tools for multi-proxy studies of global climate change that will be valuable to a wide range of climate scientists. The investigators are professors at Queens College and Stony Brook University, institutions with considerable cultural diversity and programs in place to encourage students from underrepresented groups to become engaged in scientific research. Both investigators have mentored undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups, and will actively recruit them for this project. They have developed a summer program for high school students employing a nested system that provides valuable mentoring experience for graduate students, post-docs, and Earth Science teachers as they guide the student research. Weekly seminars on the topic of seawater chemistry will provide the students with the background to understand the relevance of their work. This approach leads to great synergy and naturally results in better communication of the science, as the teachers take this experience back to their classrooms.