Abstract
Globally researchers have unraveled unique locations that helped to understand the chronology of the critical events concerning the Earth’s past. Among such geological events, the time-shot of the Permian-Triassic (P-Tr) extinction event is one of the significant revelations concerning the end and start of life on Earth. Among various geological sites in the world that contain the critical information regarding the P-Tr extinction event, Guryul ravine in Kashmir India is geologically a treasure. It bears specimens of primordial corals, small invertebrates, plants, and a group of mammal resembling reptiles, called therapsids. Due to its immense importance, the Government of India had decided to accredit the site of Guryul ravine section as an international fossil park. However, due to political turmoil in the region and unabated mining and industrial activities within the vicinity of it, has threatened the very existence of this scientific wealth. This paper reviews the importance of the Guryul Ravine Section, paleoclimatic conditions of that time, and the current threats it is facing to stimulate the stakeholders for the conservation of this site in the global scientific interest.
Keywords: Paleo Climate Change; Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) boundary; P–Tr mass extinction; Guryul Ravine; Kashmir Himalaya
Introduction
Guryul ravine is a fossil enriched area of Kashmir, just south of the Srinagar city. It is a representative of the Permian–Triassic (P–Tr ) extinction event, or the Great Permian Extinction (Chen et al. 2009; Tiwari et al. 2015). Guryul thus possesses a record of a significant geological phenomenon that took place about 251.9 million years ago during the pre-dinosaur Permian period (Becker et al. 2001). Guryul Ravine was known to British geologists as back as the 1880s Sir Walter Lawrence (1895) places on record in his famous book “Valley of Kashmir” of having obtained specimens of Triassic age from the area. He also mentions the fossils specimens being collected earlier by Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, a British Geoscientist, who first discovered Guryul’s fossils in 1886 (Lawrence 1895). Since then, in every decade, geologists from all over the world have been writing and researching about Guryul (Sweet 1970; Teichert et al. 1970; Kapoor and Sahni 1971; Furnish et al. 1973; Shimizu 1981; Wang 1990; Kapoor 1996; Algeo et al. 2007; Brosse et al. 2017). Fig. 1 shows the location of the Guryul ravine in relation to the Kashmir valley, UT of Jammu and Kashmir, and India.