Mass extinctions: are we all doomed?

Dr David Bond, University of Hull

The lecture will be preceded by the society’s AGM.

It is likely that Planet Earth faces an impending extinction crisis if humans cannot curb their excesses and given that the fossil carbon pool (i.e. that in geological storage) contains 10,000 x the carbon in the entire biosphere, the end of our CO₂ glut seems distant. Some say the modern extinction has already begun, because species are disappearing at an alarming rate as a result of various anthropogenic pressures. How can we, as the supposed agents of this environmental and ecological catastrophe, know what will happen? Predicting the future is difficult, but fortunately, the fossil record provides many clues from the past.

Precedent for the modern lies in the five major mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic (the most recent of which famously wiped out the non-flying dinosaurs 66 million years ago). Life on Earth has faced countless more near misses. What causes these disasters? Is today really like the past? Is the sixth mass extinction inevitable? We will explore these questions, and inevitably fail to answer them, through a case study of the End Permian Mass Extinction (EPME). As many as 96% of species were wiped out on “the day the Earth nearly died”. But why? And could it happen again?

David Bond works on mass extinctions. Over the past twenty years he has been lucky enough to travel to >30 countries to collect rocks and fossils that help him and his collaborators understand what drove some of the greatest biotic catastrophes of the past ~444 million years. In the past few years he has been working on three crises that occurred between the Middle Permian (~262 Ma) and end Triassic (~201 Ma) – an interval of extremes of climate, extinction and evolution. His focus has been the Boreal Realm of northern high latitudes and he has spent a lot of time in the Canadian and Russian Arctic and Svalbard. In a bid to do fieldwork somewhere warmer he is a Co-Investigator on a large NERC-funded project gathering data on evolution, extinction and environmental change through the entire Devonian Period in northern Spain.

Prior to moving to Hull he worked at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, and before that, down the M62 in Leeds. As well as collecting rocks from interesting places, like many a geologist he likes cricket and beer and has qualifications in both!