"This volume atempts to explore and clarify the relationship among the geological records, the extinctions, and the causes of catastrophes for life in Earth's history. Most of the papers address the geological record and the extinctions across the Cretaceou-Teriary boundary, and the buried Chicxulub structure that is now consensually deemed to be of impact origin and to be intimately related to that boundary." (GSA website).

The conference was held in Snowbird, Utah, October 1988, as a sequel to the Conference on Large Body Impacts held in 1981, also in Snowbird. This volume contains 58 peer-reviewed papers, arranged into sections that cover the major themes of the conference: catastrophic impacts, volcanism, and mass mortality; geological signatures of impacts; environmental effects of impacts; patterns of mass mortality; volcanism and its effects; case histories of mass mortalities; and events and extinctions at the K/T boundary. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Stratigraphy has come to be indispensable to nearly all branches of the earth sciences, assisting such endeavors as charting the course of evolution, understanding ancient ecosystems, and furnishing data pivotal to finding strategic mineral resources. This book focuses on traditional and innovative stratigraphy techniques and how these can be used to reconstruct the geological history of sedimentary basins and in solving manifold geological problems and phenomena.

The existence of rapid and even catastrophic turnovers within the Phanerozoic ecosystems has been discussed controversially for more than 170 years. Since 1980 this discussion has become even more intensive after the hypothesis of Alvarez, explaining the end-Cretaceous mass extinction as the result of a huge asteroid impact on the Earth. This theory stimulated several thousand papers and is still controversial. The international research programme on "Global Biological Events in Earth History" attempts to bring the discussion back to the facts by using multidisciplinary investigations of the major Phanerozoic events. The results of an international group of experts are presented giving a wealth of information and a thorough discussion of the causes of the various global events.