During the last 500 million years, Earth has experienced five mass extinctions and may be heading to its sixth.
Dr. Janok Bhattacharya '89 is the Susan Cunningham Research Chair in Geology in McMaster's School of Earth, Environment and Society.
He will talk about the conditions that led to each of these five extinctions. Although there is no consensus on whether a sixth extinction is coming, current anthropogenic rates of CO2 release from fossil fuel consumption mirror the release caused in a the Permian geological period, which ended in one of our planet's mass extinctions and experienced catastrophic global die-offs.