Read about evidence for petroleum generation and migration through the 1.9 Ga old Gunflint banded iron formation in Ontario, Canada HERE
Interleaved chert (white) and ironstone of the Palaeoproterozoic Gunflint Iron Formation of Ontario, Canada and Minnesota, USA.
The first clear and abundant signs of multicelled organisms appear in the geological record during the 635 to 541 Ma Ediacaran Period of the Neoproterozoic, named from the Ediacara Hills of South Australia where they were first discovered in the late 19thcentury. But it wasn’t until 1956, when schoolchildren fossicking in Charnwood Forest north of Leicester in Britain found similar body impressions in rocks that were clearly Precambrian age that it was realised the organism predated the Cambrian Explosion of life. Subsequently they have turned-up on all continents that preserve rocks of that age (see: Larging the Ediacaran, March 2011). The oldest of them, in the form of small discs, date back to about 610 Ma, while suspected embryos of multicelled eukaryotes are as old as the very start of the Edicaran (see; Precambrian bonanza for palaeoembryologists, August 2006).
Artist’s impression of the Ediacaran Fauna (credit: Science)
The Ediacaran fauna appeared soon after the Marinoan Snowball Earth glaciogenic sediments that lies at the top of the preceding Cryogenian Period (650-635 Ma), which began with far longer Sturtian glaciation (715-680 Ma). A lesser climatic event – the 580 Ma old Gaskiers glaciation – just preceded the full blooming of the Ediacaran fauna. Geologists have to go back 400 million years to find an earlier glacial epoch at the outset of the Palaeoproterozoic. Each of those Snowball Earth events was broadly associated with increased availability of molecular oxygen in seawater and the atmosphere. Of course, eukaryote life depends on oxygen. So, is there a connection between prolonged, severe climatic events and leaps in the history of life? It does look that way, but begs the question of how Snowball Earth events were themselves triggered.
There are now large amounts of geochemical data from Neoproterozoic sedimentary rocks that bear on processes in the atmosphere, seawater, continental crust and the biosphere of the time. Some are indicative of the reducing/oxidising (redox) potentials of ocean water in which various sediments were deposited. Carbon isotopes chart organic burial and the abundance of CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere. Strontium isotopes give details of the rates of continental erosion. The age statistics of zircon grains in sediments are useful; the proportion of zircons close in age to the time of sediment deposition relative to older grains is a proxy for the rate of continental-arc volcanism and thus for subduction rates. Joshua Williams of Britain’s University of Exeter and colleagues from the universities of Edinburgh and Leeds have used complex modelling to assess the pace at which oxygen was added to the surface environment through the Ediacaran Period (Williams, J.J. et al. 2019. A tectonically driven Ediacaran oxygenation event. Nature Communications, v. 10 (1); DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10286-x).
They estimate a 50% increase in atmospheric oxygen during the Ediacaran to about 0.25 % of the present concentration, which would be sufficient to support large, mobile animals. They attribute this primarily to a boost in the supply of CO2 to the atmosphere as a result of increased volcanic activity. This would have warmed the surface environment so that exposed rock on the continents underwent accelerated chemical weathering. By freeing from continental crust increased amounts of nutrients, such as phosphorus and potassium, the boost to photosynthesis would have increased the oceanic biomass, thereby emitting oxygen. Multicelled animals would have been beneficiaries of such a transformation. The trend continued into the Cambrian, thereby unleashing the explosion of animals and their evolution that continued through the Phanerozoic. Ultimately, the trigger was increased Late-Neoproterozoic tectonic activity that drove the massive Pan-African orogeny and the accretion of the Gondwana supercontinent.
See also: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190619130315.htm
Note added, 26 June 2019: Roger Mason has referred me to the carbon-isotope record during the Ediacaran. It shows some of the stratigraphic record’s largest negative δ13C excursions in carbonate rocks (Tahata, M. and 10 others 2013. Carbon and oxygen isotope chemostratigraphies of the Yangtze platform, South China: Decoding temperature and environmental changes through the Ediacaran. Gondwana Research, v.23, p. 333-353; DOI: 10.1016/j.gr.2012.04.005). Such isotopic excursions went on throughout the Ediacaran, along with sudden fossil appearances and disappearances – so-called ‘Strangelove’ oceans – plus fluctuations in sediment types and climate. The Ediacaran was a wild time in most respects.
Geochemical changes recorded in the complete Ediacaran sedimentary sequence of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, China (credit: Tahata et al. 2013; Fig. 4)
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The northwest of Scotland has been a magnet to geologists for more than a century. It is easily accessed, has magnificent scenery and some of the world’s most complex geology. The oldest and structurally most tortuous rocks in Europe – the Lewisian Gneiss Complex – which span crustal depths from its top to bottom, dominate much of the coast. These are unconformably overlain by a sequence of mainly terrestrial sediments of Meso- to Neoproterozoic age – the Torridonian Supergroup – laid down by river systems at the edge of the former continent of Laurentia. They form a series of relic hills resting on a rugged landscape carved into the much older Lewisian. In turn they are capped by a sequence of Cambrian to Lower Ordovician shallow-marine sediments. A more continuous range of hills no more than 20 km eastward of the coast hosts the famous Moine Thrust Belt in which the entire stratigraphy of the region was mangled between 450 and 430 million years ago when the elongated microcontinent of Avalonia collided with and accreted to Laurentia. Exposures are the best in Britain and, because of the superb geology, probably every geologist who graduated in that country visited the area, along with many international geotourists. The more complex parts of this relatively small area have been mapped and repeatedly examined at scales larger than 1:10,000; its geology is probably the best described on Earth. Yet, it continues to throw up dramatic conclusions. However, the structurally and sedimentologically simple Torridonian was thought to have been done and dusted decades ago, with a few oddities that remained unresolved until recently.
Simplified geological map of NW Scotland (credit: British Geological Survey)
One such mystery lies close to the base of the vast pile of reddish Torridonian sandstones, the Stac Fada Member of the Stoer Group. Beneath it is a common-or-garden basal breccia full of debris from the underlying Lewisian Complex, then red sandstones and siltstones deposited by a braided river system. The Stac Fada Member is a mere 10 m thick, but stretches more than 50 km along the regional NNE-SSW strike. It comprises greenish to pink sandstones with abundant green, glassy shards and clasts, previously thought to be volcanic in origin, together with what were initially regarded as volcanic spherules – the results of explosive reaction of magma when entering groundwater or shallow ponds. Until 2002, that was how ideas stood. More detailed sedimentological and geochemical examination found quartz grains with multiple lamellae evidencing intense shock, anomalously high platinum-group metal concentrations and chromium isotopes that were not of this world. Indeed, the clasts and the ensemble as a whole look very similar to the ‘suevites’ around the 15 Ma old Ries Impact crater in Germany. The bed is the product of mass ejection from an impact, a designation that has attracted great attention. In 2015 geophysicists suggested that the impact crater itself may coincide with an isolated gravity low about 50 km to the east. A team of 8 geoscientists from the Universities of Oxford and Exeter, UK, have recently reported their findings and ideas from work over the last decade. (Amor, K, et al. 2019. The Mesoproterozoic Stac Fada proximal ejecta blanket, NW Scotland: constraints on crater location from field observations, anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility, petrography and geochemistry. Journal of the Geological Society, online; DOI: 10.1144/jgs2018-093).
The age of the Stac Fada member is around 1200 Ma, determined by Ar-Ar dating of K-feldspar formed by sedimentary processes. Geochemistry of Lewisian gneiss clasts compared with in situ basement rocks, magnetic data from the matrix of the deposit, and evidence of compressional forces restricted to it suggest that the debris emanated from a site to the WNW of the midpoint of the member’s outcrop. Rather than being a deposit from a distant source, carried in an ejecta curtain, the Stac Fada material is more akin to that transported by a volcanic pyroclastic flow. That is, a dense, incandescent debris cloud moving near to the surface under gravity from the crater as ejected material collapsed back to the surface. On less definite grounds, the authors suggest that a crater some 13 to 14 km across penetrating about 3 km into the crust may have been involved.
Together with evidence that I described in Impact debris in Britain (Magmatism February 2018) and Britain’s own impact (Planetary Science November 2002) it seems that Britain has directly witnessed three impact events. But none of them left a tangible crater.
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The Proterozoic Eon of the Precambrian is subdivided into the Palaeo-, Meso- and Neoproterozoic Eras that are, respectively, 900, 600 and 450 Ma long. The degree to which geoscientists are sufficiently interested in rocks within such time spans is roughly proportional to the number of publications whose title includes their name. Searching the ISI Web of Knowledge using this parameter yields 2000, 840 and 2700 hits in the last two complete decades, that is 2.2, 1.4 and 6.0 hits per million years, respectively. Clearly there is less interest in the early part of the Proterozoic. Perhaps that is due to there being smaller areas over which they are exposed, or maybe simply because what those rocks show is inherently less interesting than those of the Neoproterozoic. The Neoproterozoic is stuffed with fascinating topics: the appearance of large-bodied life forms; three Snowball Earth episodes; and a great deal of tectonic activity, including the Pan-African orogeny. The time that precedes it isn’t so gripping: it is widely known as the ‘boring billion’ – coined by the late Martin Brazier – from about 1.75 to 0.75 Ga. The Palaeoproterozoic draws attention by encompassing the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ around 2.4 Ga, the massive deposition of banded iron formations up to 1.8 Ga, its own Snowball Earth, emergence of the eukaryotes and several orogenies. The Mesoproterozoic witnesses one orogeny, the formation of a supercontinent (Rodinia) and even has its own petroleum potential (93 billion barrels in place in Australia’s Beetaloo Basin. So it does have its high points, but not a lot. Although data are more scanty than for the Phanerozoic Eon, during the Mesoproterozoic the Earth’s magnetic field was much steadier than in later times. That suggests that motions in the core were in a ‘steady state’, and possibly in the mantle as well. The latter is borne out by the lower pace of tectonics in the Mesoproterozoic.
For decades geologists have pondered on ‘orogenic cycles’ and whether they are roughly equally spaced in time. The ‘boring billion’ refutes any such regularity. Stephan Sobolev and Michael Brown of the universities of Potsdam in Germany, and Maryland, USA, have investigates an hypothesis that may account for the long-term irregularity in tectonic processes (Sobolev, S.V. & Brown, M. 2019. Surface erosion events controlled the evolution of plate tectonics on Earth. Nature, v. 570, p. 52-57; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1258-4). This stems from a suggestion in the late 1980’s that, once they begin to be subducted, unconsolidated sediments have a lubricating effect. If so, in the long term, the rate of accumulation of sediments at continental margins has a lot to do with the pace of tectonics. And that leads back to the rate of continental erosion. The two authors use a proxy for the global rate of subduction based on the variation over time of the cumulative length of mountain belts that show paired high- and low-pressure zones of metamorphism. They chart variations in continental erosion from its geochemical effects on ocean water, recorded by strontium isotopes in limestones, and by changes in the hafnium and oxygen isotopes of detrital zircons through time. Three time intervals show increases in Sr and O isotope parameters while that for Hf decreases. These indicators of greater continental erosion coincide with evidence for increased tectonic activity around the end of the Archaean Eon (centred on 2.5 Ga), in the early Palaeoproterozoic (2.2 Ga) and the early Neoproterozoic (0.75 Ga). The latter two bracket episodes of global glaciation that would certainly have shifted eroded material towards continental margins. Sobolev and Brown make a case for each representing episodes of increased lubrication. Lying between the last two tectonic paroxysms, the ‘boring billion’ delivered little sediment from the continents so any subduction was frictionally slowed.
I have little doubt that this view will have its detractors, not the least because the Earth continually generates heat as a result of its internal radioactivity. Plate tectonics is the main means whereby that heat emerges at the surface and radiates to space, thereby balancing heat production. Another issue is that mountain building elevates Earth’s surface, which provides the gravitational potential to drive products of erosion oceanwards. But it increases frictional resistance
Related article: Behr, W. 2019. Earth’s evolution explored. Nature, v. 570, p. 38-39; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-019-01711-8
We have become accustomed to thinking that up to 90% of organisms were snuffed out by the catastrophe at the Permian-Triassic boundary 252 Ma ago. Those are the figures for marine organisms, whose record in sediments is the most complete. It has also been estimated to have lasted a mere 60 ka, and the recovery in the Early Triassic to have taken as long as 10 Ma. There are hints of three separate pulses of extinction related to: initial gas emission from the Siberian Traps; coal fires; and release of methane from sea-floor gas hydrates at the peak of global warming. Various terrestrial sequences record the collapse of dense woodlands, so that the Early Triassic is devoid of coals that are widespread in the preceding Late Permian. A new detailed study of terrestrial sediments in the Sydney Basin of eastern Australia reveals something new (Fielding, C.R. and 10 others 2019. Age and pattern of the southern high-latitude continental end-Permian extinction constrained by multiproxy analysis. Nature Communications, v. 10, online publications: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07934-z).
The distinctive, tongue-like form of Glossopteris leaves that dominate the coal-bearing Permian strata of the southern coninents. Their occurrence in South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica prompted Alfred Wegener to suggest that these modern continents had been united in Pangaea by Permian times: a key to continental drift. (Credit: Getty Images)
Christopher Fielding or the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and colleagues focused on pollens, geochemistry and detailed dating of the sedimentary succession across the P-Tr boundary exposed on the New South Wales coast. The stratigraphy is intricately documented by a 1 km deep well core that penetrates a more or less unbroken fluviatile and deltaic sequence that contains eleven beds of volcanic ash. The igneous layers are key to calibrating age throughout the sequence (259.10 ± 0.17 to 247.87 ± 0.11 Ma using zircon U-Pb methods). The pollens change abruptly from those of a Permian flora, dominated by tongue-like glossopterid plants, to a different association that includes conifers. The change coincides with a geochemical ‘spike’ in the abundance of nickel and a brief change in the degree of alteration of detrital fledspars to clay minerals. The first implicates the delivery of massive amounts of nickel to the atmosphere, probably by the eruption of the Siberian Traps , which contain major economic nickel deposits. The second feature suggests a brief period of warmer and more humid climatic conditions. A third geochemical change is the onset of oscillations in the abundance of 13C that are thought to record major changes in plant life across the planet. These features would have been an easily predicted association with the 252 Ma mass extinction were it not for the fact that the radiometric dating places them about 400 thousand years before the well-known changes in global animal life. Detailed dating of the Siberian Traps links the collapse of Glossopteris and coal formation to the earliest extrusion of flood basalts, which suggests that the animal extinctions were driven by cumulative effects of the later outpourings
Related article: Chris Fielding comments on the paper at Nature Research/Ecology and Evolution
Read more on Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy
Radiocarbon dating is the most popular tool for assessing the ages of archaeological remains and producing climatic time series, as in lake- and sea-floor cores, provided that organic material can be recovered. Its precision has steadily improved, especially with the development of accelerator mass spectrometry, although it is still limited to the last 50 thousand years or so because of the short half-life of 14C (about 5,730 years,). The problem with dating based on radioactive 14C is its accuracy; i.e. does it always give a true date. This stems from the way in which 14C is produced – by cosmic rays interacting with nitrogen in the atmosphere. Cosmic irradiation varies with time and, consequently, so does the proportion of 14C in the atmosphere. It is the isotope’s proportion in atmospheric CO2 gas at any one time in the past, which is converted by photosynthesis to dateable organic materials, that determines the proportion remaining in a sample after decay through the time since the organism died and became fossilised. Various approaches have been used to allow for variations in 14C production, such as calibration to the time preserved in ancient timber by tree rings which can be independently radiocarbon dated. But that depends on timber from many different species of tree from different climatic zones, and that is affected by fractionation between the various isotopes of carbon in CO2, which varies between species of plant. But there is a better means of calibration.
The carbonate speleothem that forms stalactites and stalagmites by steady precipitation from rainwater, sometimes to produce visible layering, not only locks in 14C dissolved from the atmosphere by rainwater but also environmental radioactive isotopes of uranium and thorium. So, layers in speleothem may be dated by both methods for the period of time over which a stalagmite, for instance, has grown. This seems an ideal means of calibration, although there are snags; one being that the proportion of carbon in carbonates is dominated by that from ancient limestone that has been dissolved by slightly acid rainwater, which dilutes the amount of 14C in samples with so called ‘dead carbon’. Stalagmites in the Hulu Cave near Nanjing in China have particularly low dead-carbon fractions and have been used for the best calibrations so far, going back the current limit for radiocarbon dating of 54 ka (Cheng, H. and 14 others 2018. Atmospheric 14C/12C during the last glacial period from Hulku Cave. Science, v. 362, p. 1293-1297; DOI: 10.1126/science.aau0747). Precision steadily falls off with age because of the progressive reduction to very low amounts of 14C in the samples. Nevertheless, this study resolves fine detail not only of cosmic ray variation, but also of pulses of carbon dioxide release from the oceans which would also affect the availability of 14C for incorporation in organic materials because deep ocean water contains ‘old’ CO2.
Read more on Stratigraphy
My first field trip from the Geology Department at the University of Birmingham in autumn 1964 was located within hooter distance of the giant British Leyland car plant at Longbridge. It involved a rubbish-filled linear quarry behind a row of shops on the main road through south Birmingham. Not very prepossessing but it clearly exposed a white quartzite, which we were told was a beach deposit laid down by a massive marine transgression at the start of the Cambrian. An hour later we were shown an equally grim exposure of weathered volcanic rocks in the Lickey Hills; they were a sort of purple brown, and said to be Precambrian in age. Not an excellent beginning to a career, but from time to time other Cambrian quartzites sitting unconformably on Precambrian rocks entered our field curriculum: in the West Midlands, Welsh Borders and much further afield in NW Scotland, as it transpired on what had been two separate continental masses of Avalonia and Laurentia. This had possibly been a global marine transgression.
In North America, then the Laurentian continent, what John Wesley Powell dubbed the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon has as its counterpart to the Lickey Quartzite the thrillingly named Tonto Group of the Lower Cambrian resting on the Vishnu Schists that are more than a billion years older. Part of the Sauk Sequence, the Tonto Group is, sadly, not accompanied by the Lone Ranger Group, but the Cambrian marine transgression crops out across the continent. In fact it was a phenomenon common to all the modern continents. Global sea level rose relative to the freeboard of the continents then existing. A recent study has established the timing for the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon by dating detrital zircons above and below the unconformity (Karlstrom, K, et al. 2018. Cambrian Sauk transgression in the Grand Canyon region redefined by detrital zircons. Nature Geoscience, v. 11, p. 438-443; doi:10.1038/s41561-018-0131-7). Rather than starting at the outset of the Cambria at 542 Ma, the marine transgression was a protracted affair that began around 527 Ma with flooding reaching a maximum at the end of the Cambrian.
Extensive flooding of the continents at the end of the Cambrian (credit: Ron Blakey , Colorado Plateau Geosystems)
It seems most likely that the associated global rise in sea level relative to the continents was a response to the break-up of the Rodinia supercontinent by considerable sea-floor spreading. The young ocean floor, having yet to cool to an equilibrium temperature, would have had reduced density so that the average depth of the ocean basins decreased, thereby flooding the continents. The creation of vast shallow seas across the continents has been suggested to have been a major factor in the explosive evolution of Cambrian shelly faunas, partly by expanding the range of ecological niches and partly due to increased release of calcium ions to to seawater as a result of chemical weathering.
A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook
The longest and most extreme glacial epoch during the Phanerozoic took place between 360 and 260 Ma ago, when it dominated the Carboniferous and Permian sedimentary sequences across the planet. On continents that lay athwart the Equator during these times, sedimentation was characterised by cycles between shallow marine and terrestrial conditions. These are epitomised by the recurring ‘Coal-Measure’ cyclothem of, from bottom to top: open-sea limestone; near-shore marine mudstone; riverine sandstone; coal formed in swamps. This sequence represents a rapid rise in sea level as ice sheets melted, sustained during an interglacial episode and then falling sea level as ice once again accumulated on land to culminate in a glacial maximum when coal formed in coastal mires. During the Late Palaeozoic Era a single supercontinent extended from pole to pole. The break-up of Pangaea was charted by Alfred Wegener in 1912, partly by his using glacial deposits and ice-gouged striations on the southern continents. With the present widely separated configuration of major landmasses glacial sediments and the directions of inferred ice movements could only be reconciled by reassembling Africa, India, South America, Antarctica and Australia in the form of a single, congruent southern continent that he called Gondwanaland. In Wegener’s reconstruction the glacial features massed together on Gondwanaland with the striations radiating outwards from what would then have been the centre of a huge ice cap.
There are many localities on the present southern continents where such striations can be seen on the surface of peneplains etched into older rocks that underlie Carboniferous to Permian tillites, but later erosion has removed the continuity of the original glacial landscape. There are, however, some parts of central Africa where it is preserved. By using the high-resolution satellite images (with pixels as small as 1 m square) that are mosaiced together in Google Earth, Daniel Paul Le Heron of Royal Holloway, University of London has revealed a series of 1 to 12 km wide sinuous belts in a 6000 km2 area of eastern Chad that are superimposed unconformably on pre-Carboniferous strata (Le Heron, D.P. 2018. An exhumed Paleozoic glacial landscape in Chad. Geology, v.46(1), p. 91-94; doi:10.1130/G39510.1). They comprise irregular tracts of sandstone to the south of a major Carboniferous sedimentary basin. Zooming in to them (try using 17.5° N 22.25°E as a search term in Google Earth) reveals surfaces dominated by wavy, roughly parallel lines. Le Heron interprets these as mega-scale glacial lineations, formed by ice flow across underlying soft Carboniferous glacial sediments as seen in modern glacial till landforms in Canada. In places they rest unconformably on older rocks, sometimes standing above the level of the sandstone plateaux as relics of what may have been nunataks. There are even signs of elliptical drumlins.
An oblique Google Earth view looking to the south-east shows mega-scale glacial lineations from a glacial flow way in eastern Chad. The lower-right quadrant shows the unconformity atop older bedded strata that are dipping to the west. Click on the image to see a full resolution view. (Credit: Google Earth)
Glacial tillites and glaciofluvial sediments of Late Palaeozoic age are common across the Sahara and in the Sahelian belt, but in areas as remote as those in eastern Chad. So a systematic survey using the resolving power of Google Earth may well yield yet more examples. It is tedious work in such vast areas, unless, of course, one bears in mind Alfred Wegener, the founder of the hypothesis of continental drift and ‘Big’ Earth Science as a whole, who would have been gleeful at the opportunity.
A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook
During most of the last hundred years every car body, rebar rod in concrete, ship, bridge and skyscraper frame had its origins in vividly striped red rocks from vast open-pit mines. Comprising mainly iron oxides with some silica, these banded iron formations, or BIFs for short, occur in profitable tonnages on every continent.
2.1 billion years old boulder of banded ironstone. (credit: Wikipedia)
This article can now be read in full at Earth-logs in the Sedimentology and stratigraphy archive for 2017
Detailed acoustic imaging above the Troll gas field in the northern North Sea off western Norway has revealed tens of thousands of elliptical pits on the seabed. At around 10 to 20 per square kilometre over an area of about 15,000 km2 there are probably between 150 to 300 thousand of them. They range between 10 to 100 m across and are about 6 m deep on average, although some are as deep as 20 m. They are pretty much randomly distributed but show alignment roughly parallel to regional N-S sea-floor currents. Many of the world’s continental shelves display such pockmark fields, but the Troll example is among the most extensive. Almost certainly the pockmarks formed by seepage of gas or water to the surface. However, detailed observations suggest they are inactive structures with no sign of bubbles or fluid seepage. Yet the pits cut though glacial diamictites deposited by the most recent Norwegian Channel Ice Stream through which icebergs once ploughed and which is overlain by thin Holocene marine sediments. One possibility is that they record gas loss from the Troll field, another being destabilisation of shallow gas hydrate deposits.
Parts of the Troll pockmark field off Norway. A: density of pockmarks in an area of 169 square km. B: details of a cluster of pockmarks. (Credit: Adriano Mazzini, Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) University of Oslo)
Norwegian geoscientists have studied part of the field in considerable detail, analysing carbonate-rich blocks and foraminifera in the pits (Mazzini, A. and 8 others 2017. A climatic trigger for the giant Troll pockmark field in the northern North Sea. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 464, p. 24-34; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.02.014). The carbonates show very negative δ13C values that suggest the carbon in them came from methane, which could indicate either of the two possible means of formation. However, U-Th dating of the carbonates and radiocarbon ages of forams in the marine sediment infill suggest that they formed at around 10 ka ago; 1500 years after the end of the Younger Dryas cold episode and the beginning of the Holocene interglacial. Most likely they represent destabilisation of a once-extensive, shallow layer of methane hydrates in the underlying sediments, conditions during the Younger Dryas having been well within the stability field of gas hydrates. Sporadic leaks from the deeper Troll gas field hosted by Jurassic sandstones is unlikely to have created such a uniform distribution of gas-release pockmarks. Adriano Mazzini and colleagues conclude that rapid early Holocene warming led to sea-floor temperatures and pressures outside the stability field of gas hydrates. There are few signs that hydrates linger in the area, explaining the present inactivity of the pockmarks – all the methane and CO2 escaped before 10 ka.
Gas hydrates are thought to be present beneath shallow seas today, wherever sea-floor sediments have a significant organic carbon content and within the pressure-temperature window of stability of these strange ice-like materials. Mazzini et al.’s analysis of the Troll pockmark field clearly has profound implications for the possible behaviour of gas hydrates at a time of global climatic warming. As well as their destabilisation adding to methane release from onshore peat deposits currently locked by permafrost and a surge in global warming, there is an even more catastrophic possibility. The whole of the seaboard of the southern North Sea was swept by a huge tsunami about 8000 years ago, which possibly wiped out Mesolithic human occupancy of lowland Britain, the former land mass of Doggerland, and the ‘Low Countries’ of western Europe. This was created by a massive submarine landslide – the Storegga Slide just to the north of the Troll field – which may have been triggered by destabilisation of submarine gas hydrates during early Holocene warming of the oceans.
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