Book - "Volcanism, Impacts, and Mass Extinctions: Causes & Effects"

[Mal7]

Volcanism, Impacts, and Mass Extinctions: Causes & Effects
edited by Gerta Keller and Andrew C. Kerr.
(Geological Society of America Special Paper 505).
_http://rock.geosociety.org/Store/detail.aspx?id=spe505

This is a large volume of scientific papers recently published (September 2014) by the Geological Society of America. I had a quick look at a copy at the library today.

Most of the papers seem to deal with the 5 main mass extinction events (of which the most recent was at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago).

The paper by W. M. Napier, "The Role of Comets in Mass Extinction", and the following paper by Duncan Steel, "Implications of the centaurs, Neptune-crossers, and Edgeworth-Kuiper belt for terrestrial catastrophism" are more relevant to the issue of the present-day risk of cometary catastrophe.

This volume comprises articles stemming from the international, multi-disciplinary conference that took place in March 2013 at London's Natural History Museum (NHM). This conference brought together researchers across geological, geophysical, and biological disciplines to assess the state of research into the causes of mass extinction events and, in particular, to evaluate the respective roles of volcanism, bolide impacts, and associated climate and environmental changes. Key results of this seminal conference are presented in papers spanning a wide range of disciplines. Participants concluded that large igneous province volcanism along with associated climate and environmental changes played significant roles in four of the five major mass extinctions in Earth history. There was overwhelming agreement that a single large asteroid or comet impact (Chicxulub) could not have been the sole cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, but rather was a contributing factor along with volcanism.

- _http://rock.geosociety.org/Store/detail.aspx?id=spe505

Table of Contents is here:
_http://rock.geosociety.org/store/TOC/SPE505.pdf