At key points in Earth’s history, enormous volcanic eruptions have dramatically altered climate, and in some cases have been linked with mass extinctions of life. How Earth systems—climate, weathering, and biology—recover after these events remains an open question. EPS faculty Ben Black and Lauren Adamo, along with DMCS faculty Danielle Santiago Ramos and colleagues at the University of Oregon, UC Davis, UCLA, Princeton, Oxford, and University of Leeds, have received a new grant to understand how deep Earth dynamics, magmas, and weathering combine to shape climate and diversity during the aftermath of major disruptions of Earth’s carbon cycle.
The >$3 million Rutgers-led grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.K. National Environmental Resources Council is supported by the Frontier Research in Earth Sciences program, designed to “support research in Earth systems from the core through the critical zone.”
Principal Investigator Ben Black says the project has the potential to shed light on our planet’s future as well as its past: “These past carbon cycle disruptions represent some of the only available analogs for the scale of present-day human-driven carbon release. Learning how the planet recovered and rediversified in the past could teach us about our future on geologic timescales—and possibly about how present and future climatic changes could act as forces for evolutionary selection.”
