In September 2018, Dr’s Sarah Greene and Ian Boomer travelled to the core store of the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland (GSNI) in Belfast. Along with colleagues from Trinity College Dublin, the University of St. Andrews, and the GSNI, Sarah and Ian sampled a core spanning the end-Triassic mass extinction, one of the most severe biotic crises in Earth history.
This new core contains highly expanded sediments conducive to high-resolution study and hosts very well-preserved fossil material. These features mean that this core has the potential to produce perhaps the most-detailed and robust record of global carbon cycling across the end-Triassic mass extinction anywhere globally. The visit was funded by the GEES pump-priming scheme that will also support the analysis of samples collected during the trip using a number of established and cutting-edge geochemical approaches.