Michael R. Rampino is a Geologist and Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at New York University, known for his scientific contributions on causes of mass extinctions of life. Along with colleagues, he's developed theories about periodic mass extinctions being strongly related to the earth's position in relation to the galaxy. "The solar system and its planets experience cataclysms every time they pass "up" or "down" through the plane of the disk-shaped galaxy." These ~30 million year cyclical breaks are an important factor in evolutionary theory, along with other longer 60-million- and 140-million-year cycles potentially caused by mantle plumes within the planet, opining "The Earth seems to have a pulse," He is also a research consultant at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
Rampino's research has been concentrated in several areas including: studies of climate change on various timescales; the products and dynamics of volcanic eruptions and their effects on the global environment; and the relationship of large asteroid and comet impacts, and massive flood-basalt volcanism, with mass extinctions of life.
His most recent work has sought a connection between geologic events and astronomical processes, including encounters of Earth with dark matter in the Galaxy.
Rampino's interest in Astrobiology is evidenced by the text, “Origins of Life in the Universe”,Jastrow, R., and Rampino, M.R., 2008, Origins of Life in the Universe (Cambridge University Press) 978-0521532839. co-authored with Robert Jastrow (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and a new book, “Cataclysms: A New Geology for the 21st Century”Rampino, M.R., 2017, Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century (Columbia Univ. Press) 978-0231177801. (Columbia University Press, 2017).
Rampino received his B.A. from Hunter College of CUNY and a Ph.D. in geological sciences from Columbia University. He was a post-doc at the NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York studying climate change. He was an Associate Research Scientist at the NASA, Goddard Institute for 5 years, studying the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate, before taking up his present position at NYU.
Fields of study Climate change on various timescales Rampino has been interested in climatic changes on time scales ranging from decades to hundreds of millions of years (Paleoclimatology). Early work centered on multi-year climate cooling after explosive volcanic eruptions,Self, S., M.R. Rampino, and J.J. Barbera, 1981, The effects of large 19th and 20th Century volcanic eruptions on zonal and hemispheric surface temperatures, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, v. 11, p. 41-60. the post-glacial rise in sea level over the last 10,000 years,Rampino, M.R., 1979, Holocene submergence of southern Long Island, New York, Nature, v. 280, p. 132-134 and glacial/interglacial climate and sea level over the last 150,000 years.Rampino, M.R., and J.E. Sanders, 1981, Upper Quaternary stratigraphy of southern Long Island, New York, Northeastern Geology, v. 3, p. 116-128 In papers with Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution, he explored the relationships of seafloor-spreading rates, atmospheric and climate in the very warm mid-Cretaceous Period 100 million years ago. They also considered the so-called “Goldilocks Problem” of Earth's habitability.Caldeira, K., and M.R. Rampino, 1991, The Mid-Cretaceous super plume, carbon dioxide and global warming, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 18, p. 987-990 More recent research is focused on the effects of flood-basalt volcanism and asteroid/comet impacts on climate and biological evolution.Rampino, M.R. and Caldeira, K., 2018, Comparison of the ages of large-body impacts, flood basalt eruptions and extinction events over the last 260 Myr: A statistical study: International Journal of Earth Sciences, v. 107, p.601-60 Rampino proposed the radical idea that some “glacial” deposits in the geologic record are actually impact-related debris flows.Rampino, M.R., 2017, Are some tillites impact-related debris-flow deposits? Journal of Geology, v. 125, p. 155-164
Effects of volcanic eruptions on the global environment Rampino has investigated the climatic and environmental effects of stratospheric aerosol clouds produced by explosive volcanic eruptions.Rampino, M.R., and S. Self, 1982, The historic eruptions of Tambora (1815), Krakatau (1883) and Agung (1963), their stratospheric aerosols and climatic impact, Quaternary Research, v. 18, p. 127-143. With his colleagues Stephen Self, now at UC Berkeley and Richard Stothers of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies he studied the volcanic production of atmospheric sulfate aerosols using volcanological measurements of magmatic sulfur release,Rampino, M.R., and S. Self, 1984, Sulphur-rich volcanism and stratospheric aerosols, Nature, v. 310, p. 677-679. observations of volcanic aerosol clouds, and the record of atmospheric phenomena and climate changes after volcanic eruptions from historical accounts (including the ancient literature),Rampino, M.R., S. Self, and R.B. Stothers, 1988, Volcanic winters, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science, v. 16, p. 73-9 and from the record of volcanism contained in polar ice coresCastellano, E., Rampino, M.R. et al., 2005, Holocene volcanic history as recorded in the sulfate stratigraphy of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctic Dome CV (EDC96) ice core: Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, v. 110, p. 121-12
These studies included detailed field investigations of the historic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, the 1963 eruption of Mount Agung and the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, and their climatic aftermath.Self, S., and M.R. Rampino, 1981, The 1883 eruption of Krakatau, Nature, v. 294, p. 699-704. Self, S., M.R. Rampino, M.S. Newton, and J.A. Wolff, 1984, A volcanological studyof the great Tambora eruption of 1815, Geology, v. 12, p. 659-663; Self, S. and Rampino, M.R., 2012, The 1963 eruption of Agung volcano (Bali, Indonesia). Bulletin of Volcanology, v. 74, p. 1521-1536. The famous “year without a summer” in 1816, during which Mary Shelley was forced to stay indoors to write Frankenstein, followed the great Tambora eruption.Rampino, M.R., 1989, Distant effects of the Tambora eruption of 1815: An eyewitness account, Eos, Trans. American Geophysical Union, v. 70, p. 1559. Reprinted in C.R. Harrington, ed., 1992, The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816 (Cambridge University Press), p. 12-15. One focus of investigation is the huge “supereruption” (a word coined by Rampino and Self) of Mount Toba (now Lake Toba) in Sumatra ~74,000 years ago.Rampino, M. R., and S. Self, 1992, Volcanic winter and accelerated glaciation following the Toba super-eruption, Nature, v. 359, p. 50-52. This event may have created a severe “volcanic winter” (another term coined by Rampino) leading to a human population crash predicted from studies of the human genome.Rampino, M.R., and Ambrose, S., 2000, Volcanic winter in the Garden of Eden: The Toba super eruption and Late Pleistocene human population crash, in Heiken, G., and McCoy, F., eds., Volcanic Disasters in Human History, Geological Society of America Special Paper 345, p. 71-82. Such large eruptions threaten civilization.Rampino, M.R., 2002, Super eruptions as a threat to civilizations on earthlike planets: Icarus, v. 156, p. 562-569.
Asteroid and comet impacts, massive volcanism and mass extinctions of life Rampino became interested in the catastrophic effects of asteroids and comet impacts when it was discovered that the Chicxulub asteroid impact event (66 million years ago) had created the huge Chicxulub crater in Mexico, and led to the extinction of many forms of life, including the dinosaurs. Rampino has studied the globally distributed evidence for the Chicxulub impact with fieldwork in Europe, the western United States, Mexico and the Caribbean.Rampino, M.R., and R.C. Reynolds, 1983, Clay mineralogy of the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary clay, Science, v. 219, p. 495-498. After a periodic 26-million year cycle was proposed for mass extinctions of life in 1984,Raup, D.M., and Sepkoski, J.J., Jr., 1984, Periodicity of extinctions in the geologic past: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, v. 81, p. 801-805. Rampino and Stothers reported a similar cycle in the ages of impact craters on the Earth.Rampino, M.R., and R.B. Stothers, 1984, Terrestrial mass extinctions, cometary impacts and the Sun's motion perpendicular to the galactic plane, Nature, v. 308, p. 709-71. To explain the cycles, they proposed the “Shiva Hypothesis” in which the 30-million year oscillation of the Solar System through the dense Galactic plane leads to periodic comet showers on Earth.Rampino, M.R., and Haggerty, B.M., 1996, The "Shiva Hypothesis": Impacts, mass extinctions and the Galaxy, Earth, Moon, and Planets, v. 72, p. 441-460.
More recent work has centered on the severe Permian–Triassic extinction event (252 million years ago), with fieldwork in South Africa, Hungary, Japan, India and China, particularly focused on the so-called “fungal event” marking the devastation of Late Permian vegetation.Steiner, M., Eshet, Y., Rampino, M.R., and Schwindt, D.M., 2003, Fungal abundance spike and the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Supergroup (South Africa): Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 194, p. 405-414. Rampino and colleagues found evidence that the mass extinction of 96% of marine species and much of life on land may have occurred in a brief period of only a few thousand years, suggesting some sort of cataclysm Rampino, M.R., Prokoph, A., and Adler, A.C., 2000, Tempo of the end-Permian event: High-resolution cyclostratigraphy at the Permian-Triassic boundary: Geology, v. 28, p. 415-418. It turns out that this extinction occurred at the same time as the massive eruption of the Siberian Flood basalts. In 2017, Rampino and colleagues, studying the record of the great extinction, discovered a coincident worldwide layer rich in nickel that had been released by emanations from the huge eruptions.Rampino, M.R., Rodriguez, S., Baransky, E., and Cai, Y., 2017, Global nickel anomaly, links Siberian Traps eruptions and the end-Permian mass extinction: Scientific Reports, v. 7, 12416. He and Caldeira concluded that most of the mass extinctions in the last 260 million years seem to have been associated with environmental catastrophes caused by either large impacts or flood-basalt eruptions.Rampino, M.R. and Caldeira, K., 2018, Comparison of the ages of large-body impacts, flood basalt eruptions and extinction events over the last 260 Myr: A statistical study: International Journal of Earth Sciences, v. 107, p.601-60
Connections between geologic events and Earth’s interactions with Dark Matter
In 1993, Rampino and Caldeira reported a ubiquitous 26-million year cycle in geologic plate tectonic and volcanic activity.. Rampino, M.R., and K. Caldeira, 1993, Major episodes of geologic change: