Dr. Paul Renne of UC Berkeley will give a talk at this week's Speakers Club entitled "New perspectives on the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary."

ABSTRACT:

It is now well established that the Chicxulub impact coincided with profound global biodiversity loss at 66 Ma. Less clear is whether ecosystems were already at a tipping point such that the impact provided a coup de grace. Deccan volcanism is frequently invoked as a cause of precursory climate degradation, but temporal placement of the volcanism into the sequence of events has been poorly constrained. New data from terrestrial environments of the Hell Creek region of Montana and the Deccan Traps support the notion that the Chicxulub impact severely exacerbated ongoing ecosystem decline, and may have triggered the most voluminous eruptions of the pre-existing Deccan magma system.