Neo-Catastrophism

Discussion

Quotes collected by Thomas Nail:

"Neocatastrophism has enlivened modern geo-science by dispatching the belief that the planet took on its current shape only through the gradual and continuous operation of familiar processes like erosion and sediment buildup. The new geology lets into the picture abrupt die-offs and bursts of species formation, climatic and geomorphological upheavals, and high-speed collisions with extraterrestrial bodies.”

Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018),

“Neocatastrophism has introduced us to a whole list of geophysical forces—asteroids, ocean currents, volcanoes, and the like—that, under the right circumstances, can suddenly come to exert a much greater and more destabilizing influence than usual on the workings of the earth system.”

Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene, 10.

(https://syntheticzero.net/2025/04/06/geokinetics-and-the-metastable-eaarth/)