[Aqualist] GSA Victoria Selwyn Lecture by Paul Hoffman

[Matt Cupper]

The Geological Society of Australia Victoria Division
cordially invites you to the
SELWYN LECTURE 2008

Thursday 25 September 2008

SELWYN MEMORIAL LECTURE 2008 @ the Copland Theatre, The University of
Melbourne @ 6.30pm by Professor Paul F. Hoffman, Harvard University (FREE
PUBLIC LECTURE)
TITLE: The greenhouse effect, sea-level change, continental drift & the
discovery of the glacial theory of Pleistocene ice ages

Talk summary: The glacial theory for Pleistocene ice ages sparked one of the
most heated geological controversies of the 19th Century. Its lasting impact
was in spawning the concepts of glacial isostasy (Thomas Jamieson), the
greenhouse effect (John Tyndall) and continental drift (Alfred Wegener).
None of these ideas came easily. When the glacial theory was finally
accepted in 1862, Jens Esmark (had he lived) would have been 99 years old.
When continental drift was verified in 1967, Wegener would have been 87.
When the greenhouse effect finally found favour in 1958, Tyndall would have
been 138.  Scientists seldom convert to ideas they at first oppose:
consensus is possible only after the original antagonists pass from the
scene. It follows that no consensus will be forthcoming on current
controversies (e.g., snowball earth) for decades to come, irrespective of
how much new evidence comes to light. Such evidence will, however, bear on
whether an idea is eventually accepted or rejected when consensus is
ultimately achieved.
Biography of speaker: Professor Paul F. Hoffman is an internationally
renowned Canadian field geologist. He spent 25 years mapping two
billion-year-old sedimentary basins and orogenic belts in the northwest of
the Canadian Shield for the Geological Survey of Canada. An early advocate
of Precambrian plate tectonics, he bridged the gap between "soft-rock" and
"hard-rock" geology. A practitioner of the interdependence of research
science and geological mapping, he left the Geological Survey in 1992 after
it deemphasized research. Joining the new School of Earth and Ocean Science
at the University of Victoria in western Canada, he began a 15-year project
studying late Precambrian paleoceangraphy and paleoclimate in
newly-independent Namibia. This work flourished after he moved to Harvard
University in 1994 and led to his outspoken support for the "snowball earth"
hypothesis of global glaciation. His students have carried out extensive
field projects in Arctic Alaska, Mongolia, Morocco and the Svalbard
archipelago. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, a foreign member of the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.  Among his awards are the William Logan Medal of the
Geological Association of Canada, the Alfred Wegener Medal of the European
Union of Geosciences and the Henno Martin Medal of the Geological Society of
Namibia.  In 2008 he became a Harvard-Australian Research Fellow.
-- 
Contact:

Associate Professor Dr Stephen Gallagher

Associate Professor and Reader
Micropalaeontologist & Stratigrapher

School of Earth Sciences
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010
Australia
Ph: +61 3 8344 6513  Fax: +61 3 8344 7761
Email: sjgall at unimelb.edu.au
http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/basinstudies/main.html
http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/