EAPS

Title:  The Trans-Amazon Drilling Project

Paul A. Baker (Duke U.) and Sherilyn C. Fritz (University of Nebraska, Lincoln)

Abstract:

The Amazon/Andes of tropical South America is a key region on Earth, and its rainforests host over half of all terrestrial plant species. The forests and their biota have evolved together with the physical landscape, closely linking processes in the Earth's interior with surface climate and landscapes, ecosystems, and biodiversity. The proposed Trans-Amazon Drilling Project will address fundamental questions about the geologic and biotic evolution of the Amazon, focusing on (1) how Cenozoic climate and geologic history, including uplift of the Andes and development of the Amazon fluvial system, influenced the origins of the Amazon rainforest and its incomparable biodiversity; and (2) the origin of the Amazonian “Pentecaua” diabase sills, one of Earth’s largest intrusive complexes, and the impacts of this intrusion on the atmospheric gas composition and mass extinction at the Triassic/Jurassic boundary. These goals require long sedimentary records, which, in most of the Amazon region, can only be obtained by drilling. We propose ICDP drilling of the entire Cenozoic sequence and where they occur, the underlying CAMP mafic sill/sediment comples in five continental sites in four different ancient sedimentary basins that are aligned along the modern Amazon River and that transect the entire near-equatorial Amazon region of Brazil, from the Andean foreland to the Atlantic Ocean. This transect, coupled with proposed IODP sites on the Amazon continental margin, will span 40˚W to 73˚W, thus encircling nearly 10% of Earth’s equatorial circumference. We believe that this work will provide transformative understanding of Amazonian geological and biotic evolution that addresses important and long-standing questions about the linkages between the geophysical environment and its biotic history.

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