“A Ramble Through Geologic Time”

Presentation Abstract:

My parents believed that young children should be kept outdoors and unsupervised whenever possible—habits I have been reluctant to shake in later life. Canada is a country of many rocks and few people, so the notion that one could tell the planet’s history by mapping its rocks appealed to me. My university attendance coincided with the plate tectonics revolution in Earth science, explaining the slow dance of continents and oceans, the locations of earthquakes and volcanoes, and how geochemical cycles are driven that sustain life and modulate the climate. In northern Canada, I showed that plate tectonics has operated for billions of years, and that North America participated in a succession of supercontinents. In southern Africa, I brought credibility, leading to confirmation, of late pre-Cambrian global glaciations that shuttered the oceans for sixty million years. Their legacy persists in the genomes of living organisms, descended from opportunistically pre-adapted antecedents.

Prof. Paul F. Hoffman will be introduced Prof. Ian Eisenman of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

Paul F. Hoffman is the 2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Basic Sciences. He is an adjunct Professor at University of Victoria, who has conducted groundbreaking research in the “Snowball Earth” (global freezing) hypothesis and plate tectonics occurring in the first half of the Earth's 4.6 billion year history. A Ph.D. graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Hoffman served the Geological Survey of his native Canada for 24 years followed by teaching at Harvard and related research in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has geologically demonstrated the occurrence of the postulated global freeze, so-called "Snowball Earth", which drove the rapid diversification of animals in the Cambrian period approximately 520 million years ago. In 1992 Hoffman received the Geological Association of Canada’s highest honor, the Logan Medal, and in 2011 was awarded the Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America.