Gerald R. Dickens is Professor of Earth Science at Trinity College Dublin, and researches the history of the world’s oceans, with respect to the changing patterns of their geology, chemistry and biology.
Dickens was chief editor for several major earth science journals, notably Geology, and GSA Today, published by the Geological Society of America, but he was also past Editor in Chief of Paleoceanography.
Dickens was interviewed for the BBC's Horizon documentary series in 2002 in a programme called 'The Day the Earth Nearly Died'.
[6][7] He was also interviewed on the History Channel's 'Mega Disasters' which focused on eruptions of methane gas deep in the ocean.
[8] In the interview Dickens claimed that Methane had been identified as a cause for catastrophic disasters at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago.