Below is a brief overview of my main research areas:

sulfurization of organic matter

To date there is not a clear understanding of the mechanisms that promote organic carbon burial, but recent literature suggests the incorporation of sulfur into the organic structure may play an important role. Specifically sulfur can incorporate into the structure of organic matter making it less bio-available and more likely to preserve, this process is called sulfurization. Sulfurization as a mechanism operates most rapidly in waters that contain no oxygen, therefore we have been investigating this as a mechanism of enhancing the preservation of organic matter across an oceanic anoxic event of the Early Jurassic, the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE, ~183 Ma). We are in the early stages of interpreting our data and the implications for incorporating this process into global sulfur and carbon models.

THe Toarcian Oceanic anoxic event (t-oae)

Much of my PhD research has focused on an early Jurassic Oceanic Anoxic Event (OAE) known as the Toarcian OAE or T-OAE (~183 Million Years ago). This event records a very distinctive negative carbon isotope excursion that has been correlated globally across numerous sections. Recent work from colleague Dr. Teddy Them showed through Thallium isotopes that global anoxia developed well before and persisted after the conventional isotope excursion defining the OAE interval. This suggests de-oxygenation may have been a more pervasive occurrence across the broad interval of the Toarcian. To investigate this, my advisor, Dr. Ben Gill, and I were able to gather samples from a variety of global localities to investigate the local development of anoxia across this global oceanic anoxic event. Our hope is that these data will provide more insight into the range of conditions developed across different basins that record the same snapshot in Earth’s history. Because of the generosity of many other researchers to send us samples for this study (>2000 samples!) these data are still actively being generated. We hope to have the first portions of this study submitted for publication by early 2021.

Triassic Jurassic boundary mass extinction

The Triassic-Jurassic boundary (T-J, ~201 Million Years ago) records one of the largest mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic where 80% of known marine organisms went extinct. My PhD started with a group field expedition to the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska to explore sedimentary successions preserving Triassic to Jurassic sedimentation in a mixed carbonate-siliciclastic ramp off of an island arc system that accreted onto Western North America. Today these deposits of the Wrangellia Terrane system are preserved within the Wrangell’s of Alaska into Western Canada and even into the Western US (Washington and Oregon). With these data I have generated carbon and sulfur isotope data as well as redox data using an Fe Speciation proxy (for more details on this proxy, see labwork page). This Alaskan section records the development of anoxic conditions and a broadly positive shift in pyrite sulfur isotopes across the T-J boundary.

In order to corroborate these findings we expanded our study into carbonate successions from Europe and North America to get records of the global seawater sulfate record across this time interval. These records are from Italy and Nevada and are currently being analyzed. Ideally these data will be published by the end of 2021.

Exceptional fossil preservation

My masters work focused on an extinct group of organisms, vampyropods, most related to modern Vampire squid. Because these organisms are mostly soft bodied this group has a very poor fossil record. The record that does exist is dominated by their harder internal support structure called a gladius. These gladii are preserved in the fossil record and we are able to use characteristic growth lines on them to assign generic (and specific) designations. My masters thesis was focused on systematic paleontology where I was identifying the vampyropods preserved in an exceptional deposit from Alberta, Canada called Ya Ha Tinda. This lagerstatte records one of the largest deposits of these organisms outside of Europe for the early Jurassic. This work resulted in two publications on which I am an author: one from 2017 in the journal Geology and one from 2018 in the journal Papers in Palaeontology.

Many researchers have dedicated their careers to understanding exceptional preservation and tackle this from different perspectives, ranging from decay experiments in the lab to basin specific processes to global forcings. My masters work led to further research questions of mine rooted in understanding what drives exceptional preservation globally and whether there are geochemical drivers to this. If so, can we pinpoint the geochemical conditions that promote exceptional preservation through time and do the geochemical trends match our record of exceptional preservation. These research questions are what drove me to explore the geochemical record of extreme biotic collapse in Earth’s past associated with expanded oceanic anoxia (lack of oxygen) known as OAEs.