Unravelling the history of underSEA oceanic plateau VOLCanism and its environmental impact in Earth’s past

Oceanic plateaus are amongst the largest geological phenomena on Earth, and their undersea volcanic formation had profound environmental effects, such as climate warming and ocean anoxia.

Whilst huge progress has been made to link their land-based counterparts, continental flood basalt provinces, with climate change and mass extinctions, oceanic plateaus have been comparatively understudied due to their limited accessibility and relatively benign ecological impact.

Yet, plateau volcanism triggered severe climatic and environmental disruption, but the precise mechanism(s) by which they influenced the Earth’s surface are unclear.

Further, most known oceanic plateaus formed in the Cretaceous, with their likely existence and environmental impact earlier in Earth’s history seldom considered.The SEA-VOLC Project utilizes my expertise in studying past environmental crises and geochemically fingerprinting large-scale volcanism to reconstruct the mechanism(s) by which oceanic plateaus triggered global change, and for the first time, investigate the history and impact of older plateaus that no longer exist.

Combining inorganic and organic geochemistry, I will create global maps of trace-metal nutrient disruption and biological productivity during times of Cretaceous and Triassic plateau activity.

Resolving the relative environmental impact of this process vs CO2 output and warming is critical to understand whether continental and oceanic volcanism influenced the Earth system differently, and why the former was often more lethal.

State-of-the-art geochemical proxies that have recorded Cretaceous episodes of undersea volcanism will be applied to Silurian–Devonian sedimentary archives of Cretaceous-like anoxic events, showing whether earlier environmental crises were also linked to plateau formation for the first time.

Exploring this possibility provides a unique new perspective how the Earth’s interior and its interactions with surface environments have evolved over time.