Maslin has published over 230 scientific papers,[2][3] some of them in journals such as Nature,[4] having received approximately 36,000 citations according to ResearchGate[5] and more than 44,700 according to Google Scholar, where his h-index is given to be 82 and an i10 index of 214.[6]
Maslin teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University College London[7] and has supervised many PhD and MSc dissertations.[8]
From 2014 to 2019, he was Director of The London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership.[1] He was also the co-founder of Rezatec Ltd.[9] In 2024 he set up the UCL Institute for Sustainable Aviation and Aerospace to provide expert advice and support to help the aviation sector decarbonise now.[10][11]
The Spanish and Portuguese colonisation of the Americas led to the death of 56 million people, approximately 90% of the indigenous population, in less than 100 years. This was because the indigenous population had no natural immunity to the diseases brought across the Atlantic Ocean. The population collapse led to the collapse of most of the agriculture and infrastructure.[12]: 3 According to research by Alex Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, the global temperature decreased between 1550 and 1700 as forest regeneration resulted in additional carbon sequestration.[12]: 3 Describing this decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide as the orbis spike, Maslin and Lewis state that the event could be viewed as the beginning of the Anthropocene.[13]
Mark Maslin’s research has radically altered our views on the causes of early human evolution in Africa particularly with regards to speciation, brain expansion and dispersal events. By creating and compiling palaeoclimate and hominin records he has proposed the ‘Pulsed Climate Variability’ hypothesis. Maslin and colleagues have shown that the slow drying out of the East African climate over the last 5 million years was punctuated by episodes of short, alternating periods of extreme wetness and aridity. These periods of extreme climate variability are characterised by the precessionally forced rapid appearance and disappearance of large, deep fresh-water lakes in the East African Rift Valley. These ephemeral lakes are only possible due to the dynamic tectonics of the region, which has produced so called Amplifier Lake basins. The ’Pulsed Climate Variability’ hypothesis overturned the over-simplified ‘aridity hypothesis’, which had been the theory for human evolution for the last 20 years changing the paradigm and fundamentally altering our views of what caused human evolution in Africa.
In the context of science communication, he has appeared on such shows as Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time[14][15] and David Attenborough's Climate Change – The Facts,[16][17] at Talks at Google,[18] on BBC's Newshour,[19] on Channel 4's Dispatches[20] on BBC World service The Climate Question and BBC 4 The Briefing Room. Furthermore, he has written numerous books on environmental matters and has authored articles on for The Conversation,[21] The Guardian,[22] The New York Times[23] and other media.
