Gallery
Dear friends and colleagues,
the 12-th “Jurassica” Conference will be held on 19-22th April, 2016 in the Congress Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences at the Smolenice Castle.
We will overlap some of our arrangements with Berriasian WG members and their workshop, which will be held at the Smolenice Castle on April 22-23rd, 2016.
Jurassic period is a famous time interval, well known to wide public. The immense treasure of fossils, namely ammonites, belemnites, bivalves, brachiopods, corals, dinosaurs (popularized by Spielberg film) and many other groups served as a base for the development of modern concepts of biostratigraphy, chemostratigraphy, paleoclimatology, ecosystems and Earth systems evolution. The primary criteria for recognition of chronostratigraphic units and correlations come from precised ammonite biostratigraphy, supplemented by all other aspects of stratigraphy.
Eleven brilliant scientific conferences and eight congresses devoted to the Jurassic period have been organized in past decades with wide participation of specialists from all the world. They collected huge amount of top knowledge and contributed to scientific research of this time period. On the other hand, many aspects concerning fauna, flora, paleobiogeography and climate remain unrecognized. At present, only seven of eleven Jurassic stages are characterized by Global Stratotype Section and Points (GSSP) criteria (Hettangian, Sinemurian, Pliensbachian, Toarcian, Aalenian, Bajocian, Bathonian). This very special period is typical with unique global regime with rather stable condition. Strong cyclicity observed in continuous rock sequences can be used for astronomically calibrated timescales, since the periodicity of these rhythms is consistent with orbital forcing due to Milankovitch cycles. Jurassic paleoclimatic models, quite different from successive Cretaceous ones can learn us on rules of alternation between glacial (icehouse) and greenhouse conditions on the Earth.
Jurassica workshops organized in close cooperation of Polish colleagues with Slovak and Czech partners became an efficient platform to exchange of scientific informations from all geoscientific specializations concerning with Jurassic problematics. We hope that this coooperation will evolve to be more strenght and complex in the future.