Just five years after finishing her PhD, UNE lecturer in palaeontology and geology Dr Marissa Betts has won a substantial Australian Research Council (ARC) grant that will support an ambitious three-year project using fossils, rocks and cutting-edge 3D visualisation software.
With the aid of a coveted ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Dr Betts plans to reconstruct the positions and movements of continental plates in the Ediacaran to Cambrian periods (635–485 mya), a time when animal life exploded in diversity and began to form recognisable, modern-style ecosystems.
To build the model, Dr Betts will pull together a vast amount of fossil, rock and geochemical data to reconstruct events of half-a-billion years ago.
"Plate tectonics shapes everything in the geosphere and biosphere, from where mountains form to the direction of ocean currents, species distribution and climate," Dr Betts said.
"And the Cambrian was the time of the amalgamation of the Gondwana supercontinent, so it was a really important period for understanding the early evolution of life on earth."
"By better understanding where these terranes were at this time, I can build a model that can be used to understand the influence of continental movements on the evolution of complex animal life and also show how these animals dispersed around the globe."
Dr Betts’ project will forge new collaborations with Distinguished Prof. and ARC Laureate Zheng-Xiang Li from the Earth Dynamics Research Group at Curtin University, recent ARC Discovery recipients Dr Juraj Farkas and Prof. Alan Collins from the Tectonics and Earth Systems Group at the University of Adelaide, recent DECRA recipient Dr Sabin Zahirovic from the University of Sydney, and Dr Andrew Merdith, a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leeds.
By weaving together reconstructions for shorter time intervals, collaborators Drs. Zahirovic and Merdith have recently built a plate tectonic model that spans 1 billion years to the present day. However, the Cambrian Period remains difficult to resolve, Dr Betts said.
"When I looked across the literature, I found a lot of contradictory ideas about what happened through this period. I thought: there must be a better way of doing this."
Modelling tectonic movements for the last ~200 mya is relatively straightforward. But before this, it is much more challenging as evidence tends to be eroded, deformed or altered in some way.
But it is a task that Dr Betts is equal to. She earned her PhD by combining fossil, rock and geochemical data to build a new early Cambrian timescale for South Australia. This accomplishment means that for the first time, lower Cambrian rocks from South Australia can be correlated with formations of the same age around the world. The work also provides a scaffold for projects like her DECRA.
Dr Betts's previous work is also key evidence in a bid for World Heritage status for the Ikara-Flinders Ranges that has been lodged with UNESCO by the South Australian government.
Dr Betts initially trained as a geologist, but then discovered a passion for palaeontology. “Combining palaeontological and geological data is key to building the clearest picture of what our planet was like in the deep past”, she said.
Interdisciplinary research is also a core value of new geoscientific research group LLUNE that she has founded with UNE geologists Drs Luke Milan and Tim Chapman.
"I’ve always had a deep interest in palaeobiogeography, and the DECRA is a tremendous opportunity for me to establish expertise in this field, build new collaborations and advance my career in a new direction," she said.
