Grad student Seth Burgess is back in Siberia this summer studying the "Flood Basalts" to learn about the End-Permian Extinction. Find out all about this project and follow this year's trip at the team's stunning expedition blog.
In 2012 we are visiting the Tura area, smack in the middle of Siberia, and the Noril'sk region, further to the northwest and closer to the mouth of the Yenesei River where it meets the Kara Sea. East of Noril'sk we hope to sample the very first and the very last lavas, and on the Nizhnaya Tunguska river near Tura we hope to see where, ~252 million years ago, the early explosive phase of eruption changed over to lavas. This year it will be Elkins-Tanton and Seth Burgess from the US, joining our friends Volodia Pavlov, Roma Veselovskiy, Alexei Ivanov, and Viktor Rad'ko in Russia. In 2009 we explored the Maymecha-Kotuy area, far to the north of the Arctic Circle, which hosts some of the most intriguing rocks of the Siberian Traps--including what may be the earliest and latest phases of Siberian magmatism.
