Worlds Revealed Speaker Series | Asteroids, Plankton and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs

Worlds Revealed Speaker Series

 Asteroids, Plankton and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs with Dr. Kent Colbath

66 million years ago, an asteroid larger than Mt. Everest crashed into what we now call the Yucatan Peninsula and triggered an ecological disaster that wiped out 70% of the species on Earth, or so the story goes. In this presentation, we’ll dig into the gory details of how a fringe idea becomes widely accepted, and the surprising way this connects astronomers to micropaleontologists.

Retired geology professor, member of the Lowell Observatory Advisory Board, and total science geek. Kent began his research career in the 1970’s studying one of Earth’s mass extinction events (the wrong one, as it turns out), followed by post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian and the University of Queensland in Australia. After retiring from his position as Chair of Earth Science at Cerritos Community College in Southern California, Kent and his late wife Jill made the inspired decision to move permanently to Flagstaff in 2005.