Wyoming rocks could unlock earth's warming cycle

Drilling samples collected across the Big Horn Basin this summer have been shipped to Germany, where researchers will begin to study the rock, looking for clues surrounding one of the greatest Earth-warming cycles in the age of mammals. During the summer, a team of roughly 30 scientists from 11 institutions punched through the Big Horn Basin’s stratified layers by drilling a series of cores to depths of nearly 500 feet. “All of the cores had really good rock with them,” said Mike Bies, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Worland. “They were shipped to Germany, and a group of researchers and graduate students will be leaving in January to go over there and process the cores.” The samples may help scientists better understand what led to a massive release of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere some 50 million years ago, prompting one of the largest extinctions in the age of mammals. Scientists refer to the extreme warming event as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and there are few land locations better suited for the study than the Big Horn Basin. The arid Wyoming basin has gone through a series of changes during the previous 100 million years. Fossil records suggest that it was once a large inland sea. It also was a flat savanna before violent uplifting created the Big Horn and Absaroka Mountains, helping isolate the desert basin...more