Date/Time
Date(s) - 13/10/2023
8:30 am - 4:30 pm

Friday, October 13, 2023
8:30 a.m. – 4: 30 p.m. (talk begins at 9:00 a.m.)
McMaster University Main Campus
1280 Main Street West
Peter George Centre for Living and Learning (PGCLL), Rooms M12 and M16

$15 per person (Price includes lunch and beverages. Campus parking not included.)
REGISTRATION closes Sunday, October 8, 2023.
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Course Description

Compelling evidence implies that the oceans were in total darkness under global ice shelves for 70 million years of the Cryogenian Period (717?635 Ma). Simultaneously, all land areas were frozen where not blanketed by ice sheets. The global freeze-ups self-terminated abruptly, less than 60 million years before the Ediacaran-Cambrian ‘explosion’ of macroscopic organisms. Their legacy is expressed in the genomes of living organisms. These lectures will highlight how the phenomena was discovered, its climate dynamical basis, its recorded expression in geochemical cycles, and the ecosystem translocations that allowed select biomes to endure in sufficient diversity to account for the subsequent marine and terrestrial recolonizations. The speaker, a McMaster graduate (class of 1964), has been the leading ‘snowball Earth’ advocate for 25 years, based on geological investigations in Africa, Arctic Europe, eastern Asia and western North America.

Lecture 1: Glacial geology meets climate physics: worlds in collision

Lecture 2: Strange climate dynamics on snowball Earth

Lecture 3: Geochemical records of extreme CO2 hysteresis

Lecture 4: Ecosystem translocations and the ancestry of modern surface life
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Speaker Biography

Paul F. Hoffman is a former Senior Research Scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology Emeritus at Harvard University, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Earth & Ocean Sciences at The University of Victoria (BC). Now in his seventh decade as an active field geologist, he is an Officer in the Order of Canada and recipient of major career achievement awards from leading geological, geophysical and geographical organizations in Europe, Africa and North America.

For more information, and to register please visit alumni.mcmaster.ca/snowballearth