Honors Theses

Advisor

Daniel Goldman, Ph.D.

Department

Geology

Publication Date

4-2018

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Abstract

The Geological Time Scale is a fundamental tool for geoscientists that is revised and republished every eight years. It is a representation of the geologic record - a system composed of radioisotope dates interpolated into fossil successions that can be used to correlate rocks. The current Geologic Time Scale for the Ordovician Period (GTS 2012) is composed of a sequence of species ranges from a group of fossils called graptolites with interpolated radiometric dates. Building a global geologic time scale requires correlating between different biofacies.

In this thesis I will attempt to combine stratigraphic range data from different kinds of Ordovician fossils in order to improve the precision and usefulness of the Ordovician time scale. I will conduct field studies to make new, detailed fossil collections and use these in conjunction with already published literature. In particular I will look for unusual co-occurrences of both types of fossils on single bedding planes, which have been reported in the geologic literature from Newfoundland. I plan to use the computer-assisted graphic correlation program CONOP9 to create composite taxon ranges from many localities based on the first and last appearance data for each species and then construct a more precise correlation network between sections that represent disparate biofacies. This correlation network can be used in the revision of the Ordovician Time Scale for 2020.

Permission Statement

This item is protected by copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code) and may only be used for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes

Keywords

Undergraduate research

Disciplines

Geology

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