Rachel Mealey: Geologists have finished drilling a three kilometre deep hole into the Queensland Outback and the findings could unlock the answers to some of paleontology’s biggest mysteries, including the secrets of an ancient coral reef. Crispian Yeomans reports.<\/p>\n
Crispian Yeomans: It’s dry, it’s sandy, it’s the Queensland Outback, but two kilometres underneath sits an ancient coral reef that has been left largely untouched for millennia. All that remain are fossils from a past time.<\/p>\n
Espen Knutsen: Often we hear about things that are found at the surface, so dinosaurs in Winton or big marine reptiles in Richmond here in Queensland, but we might forget about all the stuff that’s still hundreds of metres and sometimes even more than that, still underground.<\/p>\n
Crispian Yeomans: Dr Espen Knutsen is a paleontologist from the Queensland Museum. He says back when this ancient reef was formed, the world was much warmer, sea levels were higher and the coral reef now buried underneath Outback Queensland was teeming with marine life.<\/p>\n
Espen Knutsen: About 400-ish million years ago in the Devonian period, we had all these shallow marine habitats and that’s where you get these reefs forming, so there’ll be reefs mainly of sponges and primitive corals. But obviously, just like the reefs you have today, you have all these other animals that live in the reef and have that as a habitat.<\/p>\n
Crispian Yeomans: In the past year, a Geoscience Australia project has drilled a 3km hole into the Earth’s crust and pulled out hundreds of rock samples and fossils, including from this reef. Geoscience Australia’s Mitchell Boumas headed up the project.<\/p>\n
Mitchell Bouma: We actually caught around 975 metres and that’s the most coral that anyone’s pulled out of this Devonian Adelvale Basin.<\/p>\n
Crispian Yeomans: The federal government project cost $31 million and was supposed to find a thick, bory salt layer that could be turned into an underground hydrogen battery, as well as map the minerals and groundwater in the Adavale Basin. But the project didn’t find the salt they were looking for.<\/p>\n
Mitchell Bouma: But we did intercept other types of evaporative rocks. So these are rocks that are formed by the evaporation of a highly saline lake or a cut-off ocean. And we found things like geological structures and textures in the rock around that area that actually tell us that the rock salt was there in the past.<\/p>\n
Crispian Yeomans: The fossils and rocks the project did find could help solve one of the world’s biggest mysteries of paleontology. Why prehistoric fish grew to be so big. Dr. Jeffrey Gilleaudeau studies the evolution of ocean atmosphere chemistry from the George Mason University in the United States. He’s also been watching this project closely.<\/p>\n
Geoffrey Gilleaudeau: Based on some rocks in other places in the world, like for example in the western US, we saw evidence that there was a major rise in oxygen in the oceans across the early to middle part of this Devonian period. So we’re trying to see if that’s a global signal and that’s why we’re looking at another place, which is very, very far away in the Adelvale Basin in Queensland.<\/p>\n
Rachel Mealey: Dr. Jeffrey Gilleaudeau from George Mason University, ending that report by Crispian Yeomans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rachel Mealey: Geologists have finished drilling a three kilometre deep hole into the Queensland Outback and the findings…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[60553,64,63,119481,19145,9867,3755,128],"class_list":["post-910669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ancient","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-coral-reefs","tag-drilling","tag-paleontology","tag-podcast","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}