Project Title: Co-evolution of life and environment across the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary in Northeastern Ellesmere IslandApplicant: Dr. Peter W. Crockford, Carleton UniversityProject Description Objectives/ResearchQuestions: The Ediacaran-Cambrian (E-C) transition (550-530 million years ago) marks a first-order change to Earth’s biosphere and surface environments. This proposal seeks to constrain paleoenvironmental changes across the E-C boundary through novel investigation of sedimentary strata on Northeastern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. This succession provides an exceptional opportunity to establish new high- resolution chemostratigraphic datasets during this critical time interval of Earth history. The end result will be a robust understanding of changes in the carbon cycle and in marine oxygenation during the radiation of modern animal clades from strata that have not been investigated since field work in the 1990s. The proposed research will further fundamental understanding of the geology of Ellesmere Island, likely leading to improved understanding of the tectonic evolution of Arctic Canada and the Proterozoic to early Cambrian stratigraphic architecture of the Canadian Arctic Islands. Detailed geologic mapping and stratigraphic data sets will be published and publicly accessible, improving understanding of geologic resource potential in the region. All advancements will be publicized in scientific journals, as well as through public media outlets, increasing general interest in the geology of this region. Furthermore, summaries of scientific findings will be translated into Inuktitut and distributed within northern communities in outreach efforts. All field data and geochemical data will be made publicly available through online data repositories, and all collected samples will be archived at the Geological Survey of Canada and/or the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, working in coordination with the Government of Nunavut (Nunavut Geoscience and Nunavut Department of Culture and Heritage), which currently does not host their own sample repositories.