Environmental change, evolution and extinction in the Triassic of northwest Pangaea

Project Description

This project examines “Environmental change, evolution and extinction in the Triassic of northwest Pangaea”. The Triassic period started unfavourably for life, with an unusually long and protracted recovery from the greatest biotic crisis in Earth history, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction interrupted by several further crises. Most knowledge of life in this dynamic period derives from low-latitude settings. Williston Lake (a > 200 km long hydroelectric reservoir in British Columbia) presents an excellent opportunity to evaluate the conditions that influenced the recovery of marine biodiversity after Permian-Triassic extinction in higher latitude settings. Every spring, the operator Hydro BC drops the reservoir level by up to 17 m to accommodate spring snowmelt. This seasonal fluctuation creates very clean outcrop along the length of the lake and a ~2-4 week window to work on extraordinarily well-exposed continuous stratigraphic sections.

This work will generate (1) a complete Triassic record (with focus on key intervals such as the Spathian-Anisian transition that saw the onset of recovery) of environmental variables (redox, productivity and volcanism) on the northwestern margin of Pangaea; (2) a record of contemporaneous biodiversity in the form of macro- and microfossil occurrences and ranges (e.g. ammonoids, bivalves, brachiopods, crinoids, foraminifera); (3) a carbon isotopic chemostratigraphic framework to complement existing conodont biostratigraphy and constrain (1) and (2) and facilitate global correlation; and (4) a suite of 400 fresh samples from a difficult-to-reach location that can be archived for future palaeontological and related study.