A major oil source in North America reveals insights into one of the planet's most devastating mass extinctions. The Bakken Shale Formation, spanning an area of 200,000 square miles beneath parts of Canada and North Dakota, has been a prolific source of oil and natural gas for North America for the
, and the Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor, have devised a novel approach for studying the paleontological and biogeochemical information gleaned from the formation’s rock.
“For the first time, we can point to a specific kill mechanism responsible for a series of significant biotic disruptions during the late Devonian Period,” said UMD Geology Professor Alan Jay Kaufman, a senior author of the paper. “There have been other mass extinctions presumably caused by expansions of hydrogen sulfide before, but no one has ever studied the effects of this kill mechanism so thoroughly during such a critical period of Earth’s history.
Undergraduate laboratory assistant Tytrice Faison —who joined Kaufman’s lab after taking a course with him through the Carillon Communities living-learning program—prepared and analyzed more than 100 shale and carbonate samples taken from the formation.
The team’s research is not exclusive to global biotic disruptions from hundreds of millions of years ago. Kaufman suggests that their findings are not just applicable to the shallow inland seas of the Devonian Period, but perhaps also to the oceans of today affected by global warming. He compared the ocean’s circulatory system to a “conveyor belt” carrying nutrients, oxygen, and microorganisms from place to place.
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