Dr Paul F Hoffman (2024 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Basic Sciences), a geologist who worked on proving Snowball Earth accelerating life evolution and plate tectonics dating back to the first half of Earth’s history, delivers a lecture as part of the Kyoto Prize at Oxford 2025.
Based on geological evidence obtained over 50 years of extensive and precise field research in Arctic Canada and Africa, Dr Paul F Hoffman has accomplished landmark achievements regarding snowball Earth and plate tectonics in Earth’s early history that led to the present surface environment teeming with diverse life.
Paul F Hoffman’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Professor Ros Rickaby, Chair of Geology, Oxford Earth Sciences, University of Oxford. A drinks reception will be held after the event.
Dancing continents and frozen oceans: reading Earth’s diary in natural stone tablets:
The plate tectonics revolution in Earth Sciences took place while I was in school. It explained how the Atlantic, Indian and Southern oceans have grown at the expense of the Pacific, resulting in the fragmentation of an ancestral supercontinent (Pangea) into the six continents we see today. Eurasia, the largest, is itself an aggregate of six formerly independent continents, their mutual boundaries being the sites where lost oceans closed. Over the past two billion years, a succession of three supercontinents have come and gone, empires dispersed by self-induced uprisings from below. Since the Pacific is now closing while the other oceans are opening, the next supercontinent will be centred on East Asia. We have 200 million years with which to prepare.
A Conservative majority government ended my mapping of Precambrian continental margins in northern Canada. At 52, I moved my tent to subtropical Africa and shifted my focus from dancing continents to ancient climates. For decades geologists had puzzled over evidence of glacial action, not long before the Cambrian, at the coastlines of tropical oceans. Climate scientists inadvertently came up with an explanation—oceans capped by kilometre-thick ice shelves for millions of years. Could such an idea be reconciled with fossil and sedimentary records? Having convinced myself in Africa that the paradox is real, I was drawn to the climatic explanation—a self-reversing ‘Snowball Earth’—because it made testable predictions regarding ice-age longevity, synchroneity and postglacial conditions. Two decades on, those predictions have been shown to be true—the world ocean was ice-covered for 60 million years.
My lecture will conclude by explaining how diverse life forms endured, with testable predictions regarding the particular ancestry of their living descendants.
