Organic-carbon burial, climate change and ocean chemistry (Mesozoic–Palaeogene)

Abstract

This thematic set brings together a selection of papers that were presented at a conference entitled ‘Organic-Carbon Burial, Climate Change and Ocean Chemistry (Mesozoic–Palaeogene)’ at the Geological Society of London, 9–11 December 2002. The conference, informally known as ‘the Black Shales Meeting’, was convened by Hugh Jenkyns, Juergen Thurow and Tom Wagner. It attracted over 100 scientists from 15 different countries, proving that current research into Black Shales is highly active. Twenty-seven talks were given during the meeting, and some 40 posters were also presented. Although the nine papers that are published here represent a relatively small part of the large number of topics that were discussed, we nevertheless hope that they reflect the diversity and far-reaching nature of the research that is currently being carried out on ‘Black Shales’. Whilst Mesozoic Black Shales have enormous economic significance as hydrocarbon source rocks, the emphasis of the December 2002 meeting was on the importance of Black Shales and associated lithologies as palaeoenvironmental indicators in the broadest sense. This importance comes about because individual Black Shale samples can contain a wide variety of records of prevailing ocean chemistry, while Black Shale successions—which are often stratigraphically complete, undisturbed, and available for study at a relatively high resolution—can reflect longer-term temporal changes in palaeoenvironmental conditions. It is over 20 years since the first international conference on Black Shales took place, on 5 May 1979, at the Geological Society of London (Hallam 1980). That conference was held at a time when …