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

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.