Perturbation of the Earth System at the Proterozoic-Phanerozoic transition and the resilience of the biosphere

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The nature of the research topic means that much of the direct benefit will be for the academic community (see Academic Beneficiaries), however as it tackles the emergence of complex life on Earth there will be significant public interest in the research topic, approach, progress and outputs. Going beyond the topic itself, our approach is non-traditional in that it is highly integrative and seeks to develop and exploit a step change to develop inter-operable multi-parameter datasets and models, impacting how others research similar 'Earth System' topics.

Beyond the academic community we expect the general public, in UK and China, will be beneficiaries of the research. The 'Cambrian explosion' and the origin of complex life on our planet was listed in an Economist article 'Life, the multiverse and everything, Science has remade the world, but scientists are not finished yet' (6th August 2015) as one of Science's six unsolved mysteries. This highlights that the research topic covered by this proposal is one of the big ones that captures the public's interest. Highlighting how the Earth system has evolved and operated prior to becoming our familiar world, will allow us to engage with the public and get them to think about complexity, feedbacks, and how systems evolve. Whilst the current changes facing the planet are operating at different timescales there are parallels to be made and lessons to be learnt from studying the 'Cambrian explosion'.

The focus on data mining and management within this project allows us to identify those organisations and professional scientific bodies who are invested in developing geoscience 'data management' tools. In the case of this project, such organisations would include the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA), and the EARTHTIME Initiative. These organisations will benefit from our engagement with such systems and using this project to accelerate development in identified key areas. These will include aiding the federation of data from the GEOCHRON databased with the stratigraphic data in the GeoBiodiversity Database, and the development of 'age-model' tools within the later.

A third group of beneficiaries represent the industries that are engaged with exploring the resource potential of late Precambrian and earliest Phanerozoic sedimentary successions. The resources in question are primarily hydrocarbons although economic sulphide and phosphorite deposits occur within these successions. With respect to hydrocarbons the late Precambrian is considered a frontier for exploration, and significant accumulations of Precambrian occur in basins such as the South Oman Salt Basin. The primary research we will generate will include information about the geochemistry of specific successions of the South China Platform, information about their paleogeographic history and information about basin development. Companies and industry funded research consortia will benefit from the approach developed in this research programme. Furthermore, the data generated, placed within the developing global 4D framework will allow us to export information to other basins which may have an economic potential (e.g., Oman, Brazil).