James Kennett

Kennett is widely credited with helping to establish the field of paleoceanography, using deep-sea sediment cores to reconstruct the history of Earth's oceans and climate. His research documented major Cenozoic climatic shifts, including the transition from the warm greenhouse Earth to the current icehouse conditions marked by Antarctic glaciation.

Yes, Kennett has been one of the prominent researchers advocating for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which proposes that a cosmic impact event triggered the abrupt climate cooling around 12,800 years ago. This work, involving the identification of impact proxies in sediment layers, has generated significant attention and remains debated within the geological community.

Kennett spent much of his career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a professor in the Department of Earth Science. Originally from New Zealand, he built an influential research program there focused on marine geology, paleoceanography, and the study of deep-sea drilling cores.

Kennett's research using deep-sea drilling cores helped establish the timeline for the development of Antarctic ice sheets, particularly documenting the major cooling and ice growth event near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary approximately 34 million years ago. This transition marked one of the most significant climatic shifts of the Cenozoic era, from a largely ice-free world to one with persistent polar ice.