Early Jurassic Earth System and Timescale - JET

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Our Story

Imagine a time machine that could transport us 200 million years into the past. The supercontinent Pangaea was slowly breaking up, and newly formed tectonic plates were drifting apart. Animals and plants were just recovering from a big extinction event at the boundary between the Triassic and the Jurassic time periods. Many amphibians and other living organisms had died out, and new species including many dinosaurs were evolving and spreading. How did these lifeforms evolve, and how did changes in the environment influence their evolution? Why was the environment changing? How did volcanic eruptions and small variations in the orbits of the planets in our solar system interact to cause changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans? What can we learn about current changes in environment and climate by understanding these past variations? A time machine could help us to answer these questions, and it turns out we have one in the ground beneath our feet! Below the ground in the Cheshire Basin there is a surprisingly thick section of rocks from the the end of the Triassic and the very beginning of the Jurassic epoch (about 200 Million years ago!). Nowhere else in England is there a thicker section of rocks from the same time, so this is a unique opportunity to analyse rocks and fossils from the Early Jurassic epoch in a lot of detail. If we could drill down to retrieve them, geologists would be able to learn about the environment at that time. This is where we come in! JET is short for “Early Jurassic Earth System and Timescale”. It is a research project funded by NERC (UK Natural Environment Research Council) and the ICDP (International Continental Scientific Drilling Program). Thanks to the funding agencies and the expertise of our science team, we will be able to drill this new hole in Prees (Shropshire) and recover rocks and fossils from the Early Jurassic. We can then study these rocks from the drill core in many different ways. We can assess the rock type, which can tell us about the environment that these rocks were formed in. For example, we think many of the rocks are likely to be mudstones, which were laid down in a part of the ocean that existed in this area in the Early Jurassic. But this is only the first step! Fossil pollen and other plant material can tell us about the type of plants that existed in the region, which helps to learn more about the climate. Bodies or parts of marine animals that died fell to the sea floor, were preserved and can now be found as fossils, so we can study their shapes and the chemical composition of their shells or bones. That way we can learn details about the water temperature or sea level in the past. If a fossil is found higher up (closer to the surface) in the rock sequence that usually means it is from a slightly more recent time compared to a fossil found further down, so we can even assess variations in climate or ocean conditions over time. Updates about the drilling process and examples of our analyses can be found on our wall or on our website (http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/jet/). Our science team comes from many different countries, and will be working together on this project until 2021. Find us on Twitter: @JET_Prees http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/csm/research/globalchange/jet/ Special thanks to the National Museum Wales and the Prees community for welcoming us to the area!