THE CRITICAL ROLE OF CONTINENTAL DRILLING TO PALEOZOIC RESEARCH AND THE REALITIES OF NOT HAVING A SHIPBOARD SCIENTIFIC TEAM

The ODP/IODP has been one of the most successful international scientific endeavors of the past century and has been critical to unlocking the history of the Earth system from present-day climate change through much of the Mesozoic. The lack of Paleozoic sea floor has necessarily meant that Paleozoic research has never been a part of this exercise, however, many of the lessons learned and methodologies developed by these programs have been directly applicable to Paleozoic investigations. In particular, the unique opportunities provided by drill core specifically targeted to select stratigraphic intervals and the ability to have disparate data sets produced and integrated from a single, well-measured and well-described stratigraphic section (i.e., the core) have begun to revolutionize our ability to produce Neogene-scale temporal resolution during ancient biogeochemical events.

Several critical limitations in Paleozoic continental drilling persist and unfortunately there are limited mechanisms available to address the challenges unique to this enterprise. Firstly, there is no shipboard scientific team, which means that a ‘complete’ analysis of the core will often take a decade or more to even begin to come to fruition. In addition, the funding mechanisms for such sustained and broad-based research on a single continental core are few and far between at NSF or any other agency. This is not to complain, but rather, to highlight that continental drilling for Paleozoic studies simply require a different time frame and pace of output. As an example, we drilled the Altajme core from Gotland, Sweden, in 2015 that contains three major biogeochemical events (Hirnantian, Ireviken, Mulde). More than $150,000 has already been spent on recovery and analysis of the core involving >20 scientists and providing research opportunities for five graduate students, four undergraduates and one post-doc. Data from this core have begun to revolutionize how we approach Paleozoic Earth system research and this talk will highlight some of this work as well as some of the temporal and scheduling challenges associated with a student-led scientific team.