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March 26, 2021 at 8:29 am

Work by Three Retired Geology Professors Cited in News Stories

Work by three retired Geology Department faculty was recently cited in news stories about their research: David Kidder, Damian Nance and Thomas Worsley.

A geoscience magazine (GEOExPro) write about The Supercontinent Cycle: Patterns and Impacts:

…This line of thinking was taken up by Thomas Worsley of Ohio University at Athens and his colleagues R. Damian Nance and Judith Moody (his wife) in the 1980s. They argued that tectonic and magmatic activities, as well as climatic shifts, sea-level changes, biogeochemical signatures, and biological evolution observed during specific intervals are related to the assembly, duration or breakup of supercontinents, and that Pangaea was the last of a series of supercontinents Earth has witnessed. Based on clustering of radiometric ages, Worsley and colleagues identified five supercontinents at 250 million years, 650 million years, 1,100 million years, 1,600–1,800 million years, 2,100 million years, and 2,600 million years ago, consistent with similar geochronologic patterns recognised by Gordon Gastil, Keith Runcorn, and John Sutton in the early 1960s. Other geologists such as Kent C. Condie and John J.W. Rogers have also contributed to tectonic episodicity and formation of supercontinents.

A Carleton University (Canada) study about climate change on Venus published in Nature Communications was written about in the Charlatan:

Ernst cited research by David Kidder and Thomas Worsley at Ohio University, who investigated how long humanity could keep pushing our current levels of CO2 into the atmosphere until there was a mass extinction event. The findings showed that it was only a matter of a few hundred years before CO2 would get to the level of wiping humanity off the map.

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