Bo Pagh Schultz is working on a research assessment project with the aim of upgrading to PhD level in accordance. The project is expected to be completed in 2024.
We are a kind of detectives who, through the study of the past, find signs of what the world looked like 55 million years ago. Life, temperature, ocean depth and everything that changed in and around the Moler Sea. A time when many species of fish, insects, birds and plants were rapidly gaining ground on our planet. Moleret is an exceptionally fine climate archive with impressively well-preserved fossils from land, water and air, showcasing a flora and fauna that, through migration and gradual adaptation, is coping well with significant global warming driven by greenhouse gases. Undersea volcanism emits the greenhouse gases, leading to the warming. This is before the volcanoes change character to atmospheric eruption, which then pulls the other way, cooling the climate again.
In the molar we have a mineral phenomenon called Glendonite (petrified crystal) and incredibly well-preserved fossils that form an important link in the understanding between the past and the present, called paleobiology. Fish fossils tell us about the sea and benthic animals and the depths of the ocean that 55 million years ago lay where Denmark is today. Estimated water depth is 200 – 400 m (equivalent to 0.2 to 0.4 kilobars), based on trace fossils (ichnofacies) including bathyal zone Zoophycos in the Holmehus Clay and sublittoral Teichichnus in the younger part of the molar (Pedersen et.al., 2012), representing a basin change presented most recently in Jones et.al 2023.
In a series of presentations I show that glendonite is associated with the mineral ikaite, demonstrating that specific conditions in temperature and chemistry occurred. Fur Formation glendonites occur in supersize, in clusters up to 1.5 m wide, in marine diatomite with embedded volcanic ash layers (Schultz et.al 2020, 2022, 2023, 2023, 2023).
Although the time was warm with an extreme greenhouse climate, the powerful volcanoes made it cold for shorter periods. Bottom water temperature is estimated at >5°C based on delta 47 (Vickers et al. 2020),
Sea surface temperature (SST) obtained by Tex 86 (Stokke 2020) to be 10 ◦C higher during the PETM start, reaching up to ~33 ◦C, followed by a slow decent to post-PETM SST of 11-23 ◦C).
Other advantages of using the Fur Formation for comparison are the excellent preservation (Lindgren, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2019) and well-defined time frame (Jones et.al 2019, 2023) (Stokke 2021). There are many other pseudomorphic sites (e.g. Huggett et al., 2005; Scheller et al., 2021), but none of these come with a comparable pristine preservation of the Fur fm.
Our research may help identify glendonite on Mars, and a better understanding of the ikaite mineral may lead to CO2 being naturally sequestered in coastal areas inundated by seawater. The study of fossils that have lived and wildlife that survived extreme climates can provide clues as to which parts of our flora and fauna are most vulnerable and which parts are more robust to change, provided it is slow and migration is a possibility.
