Mark Andrew MaslinUniversity College London | UCL · Department of Geography
Mark Andrew Maslin
BSc, PhD
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369
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Introduction
Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. He is a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, Executive Director of Rezatec Ltd and Director of The London NERC DTP. Maslin is a leading scientist with particular expertise in past and future global and regional climatic change. He has publish over 165 papers and 9 popular books. He has been PI or Co-I on grants worth over £45 million. His areas of scientific expertise include the global carbon cycle, climate policy, biodiversity, rainforests, Anthropocene, an early human evolution.He was included in Who’s Who in 2009 and made a Royal Society Wolfson Research Scholar in 2011. His latest book is "The Human Planet" with Prof. Simon Lewis published by Penguin and Yale University Press
Additional affiliations
January 1995 - present
Publications
Publications (369)
The Late Quaternary Amazon deep-sea fan provides a modern analogue to ancient fan systems containing coarse-grained hydrocarbon reservoirs. Sand lenses deposited within the Amazon Fan, due to abrupt shifts in channel pathways called avulsion events, were drilled as part of ODP Leg 155. The hemipelagic sediment directly on top of the avulsion sands...
This paper stages a dialogue between a human geographer and a physical geographer about the concept of the Anthropocene. The aim of the dialogue is not to arrive at an agreement about how the Anthropocene should be defined, but rather to open up the question of the politics of the concept and its definition. The dialogue revolves around three issue...
According to the UN Refugee Agency in 2016 there were over 20 million displaced people in Africa. There is considerable debate whether climate change will exacerbate this situation in the future by increasing conflict and thus displacement of people. To explore this climate-conflict-refugee nexus this study analyses whether climatic changes between...
Gradual falls and sharp rises in temperature for millions of years have profoundly affected living conditions on the planet and, consequently, our own evolution.
Sulfur in the form of sulfuric acid is a crucial part of our modern industrial society. It is required for the production of phosphorus fertiliser and manufacturing lightweight electric motors and high‐performance lithium‐ion batteries. Over 246 million tonnes of sulfuric acid are used annually. Rapid growth in the green economy and intensive agric...
Following the recent rejection of a formal Anthropocene series/epoch by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), and its subsequent confirmation by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the opportunity arises to reset the definition of the Anthropocene. The case for i...
Subtropical gyre (STG) depth and strength are controlled by wind stress curl and surface buoyancy forcing1,2. Modern hydrographic data reveal that the STG extends to a depth of about 1 km in the Northwest Atlantic, with its maximum depth defined by the base of the subtropical thermocline. Despite the likelihood of greater wind stress curl and surfa...
In 2000-2002 a climate scientist and limnologist recommended that the Anthropocene
become a human-influenced Geological Time Scale addition. In 2009 an Anthropocene
Working Group was mandated by the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s
Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy to investigate it. Developments unfolded in
several phases. In 2015...
The transition from a humid green Sahara to today’s hyperarid conditions in northern Africa ~5.5 thousand years ago shows the dramatic environmental change to which human societies were exposed and had to adapt to. In this work, we show that in the 620,000-year environmental record from the Chew Bahir basin in the southern Ethiopian Rift, with its...
Inadequate potassium management jeopardizes food security and
freshwater ecosystem health. Potassium, alongside nitrogen and phosphorus, is a vital nutrient for plant growth1 and will be fundamental to achieving the rapid rises in crop yield necessary to sustain a growing population. Sustainable nutrient management is pivotal to establishing sustai...
Addressing the large carbon footprint of conferences such as the United Nations Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties (COP) will be important for maintaining public confidence in climate policy. Transparency is also a vital aspect of creating equitable outcomes in climate policies, as those most likely to be affected or who can create...
After decades-long advocacy by developing countries, the establishment of a Loss and Damage (L&D) fund during COP27 was monumental. With the fund still in its infancy, we stress the need to understand the differentiation between the types of finance that are suitable for other forms of climate action from those required for addressing loss and dama...
The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings are pivotal events for collective action to combat climate change. This year, as world leaders, government officials and observers convene in Dubai, UAE, for COP28, climate justice will be a central theme. In light of these negotiations, we present an updated version of UCL’s carbon footprint calc...
Current debate on the status and character of the Anthropocene is focussed on whether this interval of geological time should be designated as a formal unit of epoch/series rank in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart/Geological Time Scale, or whether it is more appropriate for it to be considered as an informal ‘event’ comparable in signifi...
Addressing the large carbon footprint of conferences such as the UN Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties (COP) will be important for maintaining public confidence in climate policy. Transparency is also a vital aspect of creating equitable outcomes in climate policies, as those most likely to be affected or who can create change on t...
Climate justice is not just a financial transaction to protect the environment. It needs to be seen as the protection of the most vulnerable in society after centuries of resource exploitation. African countries disproportionately face impacts of climate change on their environments, their economies, their resources and their infrastructure. This l...
The last 35 years have been a period of intense and continuous international negotiations to deal with climate change. During the same period of time humanity has doubled the amount of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There has, however, been progress and some notable successes in the negotiations. In 2015, at COP21 of the United Nat...
Addressing the large carbon footprint of conferences such as the UN Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties (COP) will be important for maintaining public confidence in climate policy. Transparency is also a vital aspect of creating equitable outcomes in climate policies, as often those most likely to be affected or who can create chang...
Climate justice needs to be at the heart of the COP27 negotiations in Sharm El Sheikh. Climate justice is not just a financial transaction to protect the environment. It needs to be seen as the protection of the most vulnerable in society after centuries of resource exploitation. African countries disproportionately face impacts of climate change o...
This paper outlines the stratigraphic basis of a proposed Anthropocene Event. It considers a diachronous event framework to be more appropriate for understanding the Anthropocene than treating it as a new geological series/epoch. Four general categories of material evidence are identified as of particular relevance: ‘artificial’ strata with natural...
The last 30 years have been a period of intense and continuous international negotiations to deal with climate change. During the same 30 years, humanity has doubled the amount of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There has, however, been progress and some notable successes in the negotiations. In 2015, at the 21st Conference of the P...
The last 30 years have been a period of intense and continuous international negotiations to deal with climate change. During the same 30 years, humanity has doubled the amount of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There has, however, been progress and some notable successes in the negotiations. In 2015, at the 21st Conference of the P...
Like doctors, civil engineers should make a professional promise not to cause any harm to the environment. Richard Clarke of Ortec Finance and Mark Maslin of University College London say this will empower the profession to make real progress towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change is now an infrastructure challenge. Within the next 30 years our energy generation must switch from fossil fuels to renewables (IPCC, 2022). New buildings need to be zero-carbon and existing buildings need to be retrofitted (IPCC, 2022). Our global transportation network will need to be transformed. Delivering the Net Zero world is a...
Climate change is likely to increase both the extent of seasonal weather variation and the magnitude of extreme weather events. The food security of those living in poorer countries and in poorer communities will be disproportionately affected by this change in weather patterns. We explored how the heterogeneity that exists within the Rama Indigeno...
The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown is published as the world confronts profound and concurrent systemic shocks. Countries and health systems continue to contend with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a persistent fossil fuel overdependence has pushed the world into global...
Addressing the large carbon footprint of conferences such as the UN Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties (COP) will be important for maintaining public confidence in climate policy. Transparency is also a vital aspect of creating equitable outcomes in climate policies, as often those most likely to be affected or who are able to crea...
Addressing the large carbon footprint of conferences such as the UN Climate Change Convention Conference of the Parties (COP) will be important for maintaining public confidence in climate policy. Transparency is also a vital aspect of creating equitable outcomes in climate policies, as often those most likely to be affected or who are able to crea...
Can the Anthropocene be defined as a chronostratigraphic
series with its corresponding Anthropocene epoch as a formal
entry on the Geological Time Scale? Since 2009, the
Anthropocene Working Group (of the Subcommission on
Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on
Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences)
has a...
The last 30 years have been a period of intense and continuous international negotiation to deal with climate change. During the same 30 years, humanity has doubled the amount of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There has, however, been progress and some notable successes. In 2015 at COP21, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement st...
An interdisciplinary interrogation of the Anthropocene misses the chance to probe broader and deeper.
Despite its prominence within food security debates, Food Sovereignty is still a developing and contested concept. This article illustrates two of the tensions within the Food Sovereignty literature through an analysis of the foodways of the Rama indigenous group in Nicaragua. Firstly, the results show that there is considerable heterogeneity in ho...
Over the course of the last decade the concept of the Anthropocene has become widely established within and beyond the geoscientific literature but its boundaries remain undefined. Formal definition of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphical series and geochronological epoch following the Holocene, at a fixed horizon and with a precise global s...
Supporting Information for abrupt intrinsic and extrinsic responses of southwestern Iberian vegetation to millennial‐scale variability over the past 28 ka
The Anthropocene has yet to be defined in a way that is functional both to the international geological community and to the broader fields of environmental and social sciences. Formally defining the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphical series and geochronological epoch with a precise global start date would drastically reduce the Anthropocene’s...
We present new high‐resolution pollen records combined with palaeoceanographic proxies from the same samples in deep‐sea cores SHAK06‐5K and MD01‐2444 on the southwestern Iberian Margin, documenting regional vegetation responses to orbital and millennial‐scale climate changes over the last 28 ka. The chronology of these records is based on high‐res...
The hypothesis of a connection between the onset (or intensification) of Northern Hemisphere Glaciation, the stepwise increase in African aridity (and climate variability), and an important mammalian (including hominin) species turnover is a textbook example of the initiation of a scientific idea and its propagation in science. It is, however, also...
Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction examines the science, the history, and the politics of climate change. Drawing on the latest science from the recent IPCC reports, this VSI examines the potential catastrophic impacts of climate change in the future. Global awareness of climate change has grown very rapidly, as shown by the wide support for...
‘Politics of climate change’ begins by looking at the history of the climate change negotiations, considering key milestones such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Paris Agreement. At the Paris climate meeting in 2015, world leaders agreed that global temperature increase should be kept below 2°C, with an aspirational target of...
‘Climate change impacts’ assesses the potential impacts of climate change and how these alter in scale and intensity with increasing warming by breaking down the potential impacts into sectors: extreme heat and droughts, storms and floods, agriculture, ocean acidification, biodiversity, and human health. Policy-makers should identify what dangerous...
‘History of climate change’ traces the history of climate change and the evidence that supports it. The science of climate change started in 1856 with experiments by Eunice Newton Foote demonstrating the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. The essential science of climate change was there in the late 1950s, but it was not taken seriously until the...
‘What is climate change?’ discusses what climate change is. Climate change is no longer just a scientific concern, but encompasses economics, sociology, geopolitics, national and local politics, law, and health just to name a few. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) play an important role in moderating past global climate. Why they have been rising since befor...
‘Modelling future climate’ examines the modelling of future global climate. There is a whole hierarchy of climate models, from relatively simple box models to extremely complex three-dimensional general circulation models (GCMs). Each has a role in examining and furthering the understanding of the global climate system. At the heart of the climate...
‘Climate surprises’ assesses the possibility that there are thresholds or tipping points in the climate system that may occur as we warm the planet. Scientists have been concerned about these tipping points over the last three decades. One can examine the way different parts of the climate system respond to climate change with four scenarios. These...
‘Changing our future’ argues that the challenge of climate change must be seen within the current dominant political and economic landscape. Future policies and international agreements need to provide win-win solutions that deal with the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, which include climate change, environmental degradation...
‘Evidence for climate change’ presents the scientific evidence that anthropogenic climate change is already happening and considers changes in global temperature, precipitation, sea level, and extreme weather events (heatwaves, droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires). The latest IPCC report states that it is virtually certain that anthropogenic cl...
‘Solutions’ outlines the three types of solutions to climate change. The first is adaptation, which is providing protection for the population from the impacts of climate change. Both physical and social adaptations are required to protect people’s lives and livelihoods. The second solution is mitigation, which in its simplest terms is reducing our...
Significance
Our results identify the prime driver of climate variation in Africa’s low latitudes over the past 620 ky—the key time frame for the evolution of our species. Warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean paced by insolation changes modulated the tropical Walker circulation, driving opposing wet–dry states in eastern and western Af...
The Chew Bahir Drilling Project (CBDP) aims to test possible linkages between climate and hominin evolution in Africa through the analysis of sediment cores that have recorded environmental changes in the Chew Bahir basin (CHB). In this statistical project we used recurrence plots (RPs) together with a recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to di...
Over 9.5 billion kg of coffee is produced annually and demand is expected to triple by 2050. Hence, the identification and quantification of the greenhouse gas emission footprint of coffee is essential if it is to become a more sustainable crop. We have produced a detailed life cycle assessment of the carbon equivalent footprint of coffee produced...
The Lancet Countdown is an international collaboration established to provide an independent, global monitoring system dedicated to tracking the emerging health profile of the changing climate.
The 2020 report presents 43 indicators across five sections: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerabilities; adaptation, planning, and resilience...
Coffee is one of the most traded commodities in the world. It plays a significant role in the global economy, employing over 125 million people. However, it is possible that this vital crop is threatened by changing climate conditions and fungal infections. This paper reviews how suitable areas for coffee cultivation and the toxigenic fungi species...
Coffee is one of the most traded commodities in the world. It plays a significant role in the global economy, employing over 125 million people. However, it is possible that this vital crop is threatened by changing climate conditions and fungal infections. This paper reviews how suitable areas for coffee cultivation and the toxigenic fungi species...
It's easy to feel downbeat about climate change. But as climate scientist Mark Maslin told a recent New Scientist online event, there's so much governments, companies and all of us can do – and now is the time to do it
The Lancet Countdown is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration, dedicated to monitoring the evolving health profile of climate change, and providing an inde pendent assessment of the delivery of commitments made by governments worldwide under the Paris Agreement. The 2019 report presents an annual update of 41 indicators across five key...
The Lancet Countdown is an international, multidisciplinary
collaboration, dedicated to monitoring the
evolving health profile of climate change, and providing
an independent
assessment of the delivery of commitments
made by governments worldwide under the
Paris Agreement.
The 2019 report presents an annual update of
41 indicators across five key d...
Bastin et al . (Reports, 5 July 2019, p. 76) state that the restoration potential of new forests globally is 205 gigatonnes of carbon, conclude that “global tree restoration is our most effective climate change solution to date,” and state that climate change will drive the loss of 450 million hectares of existing tropical forest by 2050. Here we s...
The green economy has previously been defined and measured in various, but limited, ways. This article presents an estimation of the scale of and employment in the US Green Economy using a data triangulation approach that uses many sources of data and multiple types of data. This can give a suggestion of the green economy’s role in economic develop...
The Chew Bahir Drilling Project (CBDP) aims to test possible linkages between climate and evolution in Africa through the analysis of sediment cores that have recorded environmental changes in the Chew Bahir basin. In this statistical project we consider the Chew Bahir palaeolake to be a dynamical system consisting of interactions between its diffe...
Understanding anthropogenic climate change is essential for anyone working in the life sciences. Firstly because climate change has already started to impact the Earth biosphere and human health and these changes need to be documented and acknowledged. Secondly, many of the solutions to climate change, both mitigation and adaptation, will be throug...
Human impacts prior to the Industrial Revolution are not well constrained. We investigate whether the decline in global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 7–10 ppm in the late 1500s and early 1600s which globally lowered surface air temperatures by 0.15∘C, were generated by natural forcing or were a result of the large-scale depopulation of the Ameri...
The following four key messages derive from the Lancet
Countdown’s 2018 report:
1 Present day changes in heat waves, labour capacity,
vector-borne disease, and food security provide early
warning of the compounded and overwhelming impact
on public health that are expected if temperatures
continue to rise. Trends in climate change impacts,
exposures...
The climate deterioration after the most recent African humid period (AHP) is a notable past example of desertification. Evidence points to a human population expansion in northern Africa prior to this, associated with the introduction of pastoralism. Here we consider the role, if any, of this population on the subsequent ecological collapse. Using...
How can we live well on the human planet? The impacts of human actions on our home planet are now so large that many scientists are declaring a new phase of Earth's history. The old forces of nature that transformed Earth many millions of years ago, including meteorites and mega‐volcanoes are joined by another: us. We have entered a new human‐domin...
A recent ruling by geology's governing body defies evidence of a new epoch shaped by humans, say Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis
The southeast Atlantic Ocean is dominated by two major oceanic systems: the Benguela Upwelling System, one of the world's most productive coastal upwelling cells and the Agulhas Leakage, which is important for transferring warm salty water from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Here, we present a multi-proxy record of marine sediments from OD...
In January 2016, after two years of international negotiations, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came into effect. The SDGs are the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and represent an ambitious but potentially flawed agenda for sustainable development through to 2030. This review assesses the legacy of the MDGs, the devel...