ORIGINS OF DINOSAUR DOMINANCE IN THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY RIFT BASIN A Field Trip Sponsored by the Keck Foundation Paul E. Olsen 2017 1 ORIGINS OF DINOSAUR DOMINANCE IN THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY RIFT BASIN A Field Trip Sponsored by the Keck Foundation & Hosted by Wesleyan University Paul E. Olsen Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University Palisades, NY 10968 [email protected] 2017 Cover image, Coelophysis and trithelodont by Larry Felder, from the book In the Presence of Dinosaurs, by John Colagrande and Larry Felder, copyright 2000, TIME/LIFE Books, used with permission of the artist. Fire is from advancing CAMP lava flows. 2 ABSTRACT The Connecticut Valley Rift Basin is one of the best places in the world to see the record of the environmental and biological events that resulted from a mass extinction 202 million years ago that led to 136 million years of dinosaur ecological dominance. The extinction was tied to extremely high CO2 and sulfur aerosols spewed out some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history. We will examine excellent exposures of lavas from the eruptions that caused the extinction and interbedded and overlying lake and lake margin sediments that reveal the exag- gerated climate swings that preserved diverse fish species and extraordinarily abundant dinosaur footprints from the recovery from the mass-extinction and consequent dinosaurian dominance. CONTEXT This field trip is de- A B signed around a series of four vignettes, our field trip stops (Figs. 1-3), based on localities near Wesleyan University. While it is quite normal to discount one’s sur- roundings as mundane, deep scientific explora- tion of virtually anything CAMP Rift System can reveal deep insights that transcend the provin- Figure 1: Earth at 202 Ma (red dot locates Connecticut Valley Rift cial and parochial. That is Basin); A, outlines of the present continents, the CAMP, and rift sys- tem; B, interpretive image showing wet (green) and dry (yellow) areas. the case with the geology of the Connecticut Valley Rift Basin in which Middletown, CT is located (Figs. 2-3). Formed during Triassic-Jurassic the sedimentary and igneous rocks of the basin preserved a record of events occurring during the rise to ecological dominance of dinosaurs, with implications for top- ics as diverse as mass extinc- tion and solar system dynam- ics. The Great Triassic-Jurassic Rift System After more than 100 mil- lion years of continental as- sembly, the resulting super- continent of Pangea (Fig. 1), was beginning a long period of pulling apart forming many rift valleys, each being a down-dropped segment of the Earth’s crust formed Figure 2: Present East African rift system compared to that of Eastern where the crust is being North American and African parts of the Early Mesozoic rift system. stretched. En mass, these rift 3 valleys comprised rift systems that can occupy thousands of kil- Crystalline VT Basement MA ometers. The initial stages of Pangean disassembly were under- New Haven Fm. way during the early part the Age of Dinosaurs, the Triassic Peri- Talcott od (253-202 million years ago), and what would become North Fm. America was beginning to pull away from the southern continents Shuttle Meadow Fm. and Eurasia. This early continental rifting produced the World’s Holyoke Basalt largest rift system as innumerable faults and their attending rift East valleys accommodated the stretching, extending over ten thou- Berlin Fm. Hampden sand kilometres, bisecting Pangea from the present Arctic Ocean Basalt / Granby Tuff through the Gulf of Mexico to the present Pacific Ocean. One of Portland Fm. these rift valleys is preserved today as the Connecticut Rift [Val- Intrusive CAMP ley] Basin, close to the center of the entire rift system (Figs. 1 and 2). The Connecticut Valley Rift Basin subsided and accumulated MA sediments from the surrounding highlands at least from the Late CT Triassic around 215 to 195 million years ago in the Early Juras- sic. During this time the crust in the rift valley slowly dropped asymmetrically like a gigantic westerly-hinged trap door opening along its east side along its west-dipping eastern border fault (Figs. 3-6), while all the time sediment was pouring in form the surrounding highlands keeping the valley floor nearly flat. During this time more than 6 km of sedimentary and volcanic rocks were deposited in the basin and these are divided into eight formations in the large southern sub- basin of the Connecticut Valley Rift Basin, called the Hartford Basin (Fig. 3). These are, from the bottom up; the New Haven For- mation, an overwhelming- LongIslandSound ly red and tan fluvial unit with some minor lacustrine Figure 3: Geologic map of and eolian strata near the the Connecticut Valley Basin. top (Stop 1); the Talcott See Figs. 3 -6 for key to units. Formation, a basaltic lava flow formation that often exhibits pillows, breccias, and coarse pyroclastics (Stop 1); the Shuttle Meadow Formation, a red, gray, and black cyclical lacustrine sequence with an unusual abundance of 5 km lacustrine limestone; the Holyoke Basalt (Stop 1), the New Talcott Shuttle Holyoke thickest and most widespread basaltic lava flow formation Haven Fm. Fm. Meadow Fm. Basalt East Hampden Portland Intrusive in the basin; the East Berlin Formation, a red, gray, and Berlin Fm. Basalt Fm. CAMP Crystalline Dip & Trip Field Faults black lacustrine sequence, famous for the very abundant Basement Strike Route Stop dinosaur footprints (Stops 2 & 3); the Hampden Basalt Figure 4: Geologic map of field trip (Stop 2), the uppermost basalt flow formation that is re- area. Location is inset in Fig. 2. placed in the north by the Granby Tuff, a formation of 4 Hartford Basin pyroclastics; and the Portland For- mation that is the thickest formation in Age Whole Section Detail map lith the basin with a lower red, gray, and km m black largely lacustrine portion (Stop 1200 4 4) and an upper entirely red fluvial 1100 Stop 4 portion. The subsidence of the basin 1000 ceased at about the time rifting culmi- 3 900 nated between North America and Af- 800 rica with the formation of the first 2 700 ocean crust between the two conti- 600 nents and the birth of the Atlantic Stop 3 1 500 Stop 2 Ocean, although the exact timing of 400 the latter remains murky. Since that 0 300 time, the rift basin fill has been uplift- ing and eroding, supplying sediments 200 to the continental shelf. But as a con- -1 100 Stop 1 sequence of the 30 million years of 0 tilting, the exhumed strata we see at -2 -100 the surface still largely tilt to the east. From its inception to its demise, the Connecticut Rift Valley drifted Figure 5: The Hartford Subbasin part of the Connecticut north from about 12° to 21° North Lat- Valley Rift Basin showing basic units and field stops. itude, along with the rest of central Pangea. Thus, this rift valley was in the tropics, drifting northward though its history from more typically humid to more arid climes. In contrast, rift valleys in higher Pangean latitudes, such as those in Greenland, drifted from more arid climates into more humid ones1. The Triassic-Jurassic Greenhouse World The Triassic and Early Jurassic had a very different global climate than today. There is no evidence of polar glacial ice, and foresets were present all the way to the Pangean North Pole and into the southern latitudes as far as land extended to more than ~70° S (Fig. 1). While there may have been other contributing factors, the leading hypothesis is that the Earth was in a “Green- house” state because of very high CO2, compared to today. That very high CO2, (~1000 to ~4000 ppm as opposed to the present’s 400 ppm) was normal for this time period is indicated by geo- Figure 6: Dia- grammatic cross section of the central Hartford Subbasin of the Connecticut Val- ley Rift Basin. 5 chemical and biological proxies (soil car- bonate2,3,4 and plant leaf stomata5) (Fig. 7). That does not mean there were not freezing temperatures in some areas. Evidence of freezing winter temperatures takes the form of what appears to be lake-ice-rafted debris in the high Pangean latitudes (~60°N) of at least present northwest China – but without evi- dence of glaciers or ice caps. The foresets of the high northern latitudes also had abundant deciduous relatively large-leafed conifers 6 , consistent with a cool winter climate, but nowhere near as cold as today. The humid tropical regions seem to have spanned about the same latitudes as today, as is also true for the arid belts (Fig. 9). Paren- Figure 7: Soil carbonate proxy data for atmospher- thetically, the common characterization of the ic CO2 (left), compared to the relative magnitude of Triassic being a time of great aridity is large- lake level variability envelope at the 405 kyr cycle ly a function of the early and mid 20th century scale from the Newark and Hartford basins (from centers of Euro-American geological research ref. 4). accidently having been located in what were the semi-arid and arid belts of the Triassic where red beds were deposited, drifting to temperate regions later. Overall, because the polar regions today comprise the largest deserts in the world, given that they were covered by vegetation in the Triassic, everything else being equal, the Tri- assic would be seem to be more “humid” on average than today’s climate, although it is worth keeping in mind that area of the Earth north of 60° or south of -60° constitute only 13% the total surface of the globe.