By Frank Church, news director, University Relations

Researcher, student continue mass extinction research in Japan

Imagine getting on a plane with 200 pounds of rocks in your suitcase. And sending another 600 pounds of rocks home before you get on the plane!

It was just part of the job for UW Oshkosh geologist Daniel Lehrmann and UW Oshkosh student David Follett on a December 2004 trip to Japan.

They collected the half-ton of rocks as part of a research project funded by the American Chemical Society (previous funding from the UW Oshkosh Faculty Development Program served as seed money).

Joining them for their research in Japan were Hiroyoshi Sano with students from Kyushu University and Jon Payne, a doctoral candidate at Harvard.

The research relates to the return of life after the earth’s largest mass extinction approximately 250 million years ago. Long before the well-known extinction of the dinosaurs, the event eliminated more than 90 percent of life on earth.

One hypothesis is that the mass extinction resulted from heavy volcanic eruptions and other events that began a process of global warming.

This summer, Lehrmann and student Margaret Seibel of Fond du Lac will do more geologic fieldwork for the project in Turkey.

Last spring, Follett and Seibel discovered structures in rocks from south China containing crystals that formed in seawater following the extinction—crystals that do not form in the modern ocean and are absent throughout most of earth’s history.

Lehrmann and the students have now found the same structures in the rocks from Japan.

“These structures offer exciting new evidence supporting our hypothesis of unusual ocean chemistry following the extinction,” Lehrmann said. “Their presence indicates that, along with global warming and sudden changes in ocean chemistry, there were bursts of high carbonate saturation in seawater.”

Some fear that the current, unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere could lead to global warming and another mass extinction.

Lehrmann said an “exciting outcome” of the trip to Japan is that the two UW Oshkosh students worked with Payne, the Harvard doctoral student, to analyze the rocks.

Lehrmann and Payne also are working on additional grant proposals to support the research. In January, they submitted a collaborative research proposal to NationalScience Foundation requesting $497,915 for continued research. UW Oshkosh will lead collaborative research with researcher Douglas Erwin at the Smithsonian and Timothy Lyons at University of California Riverside.

“I consider the involvement of undergraduate students one of the most important aspects of my research program,” Lehrmann said. “The efforts of our faculty to involve students in research has made our program especially active. Our students do high-quality work that gets published.”

UW Oshkosh student Shannon Christensen was awarded an Undergraduate Student/Faculty Collaborative Research grant for summer 2004 to study Middle Triassic reefs. Most recently, Meg Seibel and David Follett were awardedUndergraduate Student/Faculty Collaborative Research grants for the 2005-2006 academic year.

In 2004, an article by Lehrmann and five other researchers attracted international ttention after it was published in Science magazine. He has presented his research at universities in Indonesia as an American Association of Petroleum Geologists Distinguished Lecturer and as a keynote speaker at the annual Geological Society of America meeting in 2003.

In May, he will lead a field trip to south China about his research for the International Geological Congress. Researchers from throughout the world will be part of the trip.