Palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental changes across the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic
Earth’s history has been punctuated by several transient climate change events that were superimposed on the natural and gradual climate cycling between icehouse and greenhouse states. Throughout the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, transient climate events were associated with perturbations to the global biogeochemical cycles, mass extinctions, oceanic anoxic events and other extreme environmental changes. These palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental changes often coincided in time with the emplacement of large-scale volcanic provinces, leading to causality scenarios between the magmatism and the environmental changes.
The Sedimentology Research Group is particularly interested in tracing past warming events and associated palaeoenvironmental changes that occurred across the Mesozoic and Cenozoic (e.g., Triassic/Jurassic Boundary, Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event, Cretaceous/Paleogene Boundary, Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) using a multiproxy approach which combines field observations, cutting-edge mineralogical and geochemical tools and experimental approaches at multiple scales. The overarching goal of the research projects developed by the Group is to get quantitative information of the palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental conditions over geological time scales and hence have a holistic understanding of the climate-biogeochemical cycles dynamics. Emphasis is also given to better constrain the feedback mechanisms that enabled the Earth’s system to recover from these past warming events and to stabilize over long time scales.