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Carleton University students spend a month studying in Antarctica
This is no conventional classroom

Published: April 18th, 2011
Tom Spears

OTTAWA — Seven Carleton University students are back from a classroom where they learned first-hand how continents move and how a disaster once cause massive extinction.

A month in Antarctica, looking at dinosaur fossils and charcoal from ancient forest fires, will teach what a conventional classroom cannot.

The seven went with two Carleton professors, Claudia Schroder-Adams and Natalia Rybczynski, on a ship run by a company called Students on Ice. And, with some hunting, they discovered evidence of an ancient disaster on a global scale.

The group travelled to Seymour Island, offshore from the main continent. “There you have fossils of ancient ecosystems from when Antarctic was still forested,” Rybczynski said. “It’s the end of the age of dinosaurs. You’ve got the tree remains, and they found vertebrate remains on that island as well.”

And that’s where the discovery came.

“We went and we identified the K-T boundary — the end of the age of dinosaurs.”

This is a layer in rock laid down 65 million years ago, the point in Earth’s history where dinosaurs suddenly became extinct. (The name K-T refers to the change from Cretaceous to Tertiary geological periods. The K comes from German.)

The theory is that an asteroid crashed into Earth, causing a firestorm and environmental changes that killed the dinosaurs. And the “boundary” layer of rock is found in many parts of the planet.

That’s what the students discovered on an Antarctic island.

“From the literature, we knew what it should generally look like, and so we found that spot. It also had a lot of evidence of burning, like from forest fires. And of course that’s one of the great events associated with the catastrophe,” Rybczynski said.

“That was something we hadn’t really been prepared to see. Even though it’s a course, there’s an element of discovery on the ground that these students are never going to forget.”

The Carleton students mostly study earth sciences. But other students on the ship came from other backgrounds, including biologists studying sea creatures. For them, the finding of ancient worlds preserved in rock was an unequalled chance “giving them that deep-time perspective of the environment they are in.”

Master’s student Thomas Cullen, 22, wrestled with a problem that Schroder-Adams threw at the group involving the shifting of continent-sized masses. “This area we had to pass in the ship, the Drake Passage — how did that form?”

His own specialty is paleontology, but studying the ocean helped him see the bigger picture. As Antarctica became cut off from other continents, and surrounded by a fast, cold ocean current, the influx of warm air and warm water stopped. That, in turn, forced the pattern of life there to change. He also found fossil evidence of a lost world: trees, big plant-eaters, and big meat-eaters. There was charcoal from an old forest fire, tens of millions of years old yet looking as though it burned just a little while ago.

“You cannot transfer Antarctica into the classroom. The immenseness of it, the role of Antarctica in global climate — all that is so much more intense when you are actually there,” said Schroder-Adams.

They sailed their ship into a volcanic crater.

“You cannot simulate that in a classroom,” she said. “No computer screen with all its pixels is the same as when you see it with your own eyes.”

The students gave a public lecture to a full house at the Museum of Nature Thursday evening. That too was part of their assignment.

Original source taken from: Ottawa Citizen