A multi-million pound drilling project on Shell Island will allow scientists to discover how life, the environment and climate evolved nearly 200 million years ago.

A team of international experts will start scientific drilling at the campsite next month with geologists from the universities of Exeter, Leeds, Oxford as well as the British Geological Survey.

The aim of the £5 million project is to extract a drill core, greater than one kilometre in length, through a unique Jurassic sedimentary rock sequence from the Cardigan Bay Basin.

The site at Shell Island, known locally as Mochras farm, has already seen a research drilling operation nearly 50 years ago that led to the discovery of the world-class archive of deep time global change. Experts are now revisiting the site using modern technology and scientific tools.

Once drilling starts, the campsite clubhouse will host a display explaining the background to the project.

A drilling project at the same site between 1967-1970 uncovered an exceptionally thick section of rocks from the Early Jurassic – thicker than anywhere else. The rocks from the core drilled in that project are particularly interesting, because in the Early Jurassic the location was experiencing processes that happened both locally and globally.

Professor Stephen Hesselbo from University of Exeter’s Camborne School of Mines, is one of the lead academics conducting the research.

He said: “This project gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study environmental change that occurred millions of years ago, essentially at the birth of the world we see around us today.

“The last project at this site was truly revolutionary. This new project tackles fundamental questions about how the planet’s environmental systems work, such as how planetary orbits and volcanic events combine to change atmosphere and ocean chemistry over very long timescales.”

More than 50 Earth Science experts from 13 countries will study the rocks and the fossils embedded in them to understand, in unprecedented detail, how conditions on planet Earth evolved over a period of 25 million years.

Llanbedr Community Council has supported the planning application for a drill site but admits to having reservations, particularly regarding road safety.

The drilling itself is expected to take around 70 days (24 hours per day, seven days per week), starting in January 2018.

The team expects there will be very little environmental impact and that a key part of the process after drilling has finished will be to restore this land to its former condition.