"T. rex" and the Crater of Doom
"T. rex" and the Crater of Doom (Princeton Science Library) Walter Alvarez, Carl Zimmer (Foreword)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691131031
DDC: 560
Edition: Paperback; 2008-07-27
Summary:
Sixty-five million years ago, a comet or asteroid larger than Mt.
Everest slammed into the Earth, causing an explosion equivalent to
the detonation of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Vaporized
impactor and debris from the impact site were blasted out through the
atmosphere, falling back to Earth all around the globe. Terrible
environmental disasters ensued, including a giant tsunami,
continent-scale wildfires, darkness, and cold, followed by sweltering
greenhouse heat. When conditions returned to normal, half the genera
of plants and animals on Earth had perished.This horrific story is
now widely accepted as the solution to a great scientific murder
mystery what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? In T. rex and
the Crater of Doom, the story of the scientific detective work that
went into solving the mystery is told by geologist Walter Alvarez,
one of the four Berkeley scientists who discovered the first evidence
for the giant impact. It is a saga of high adventure in remote parts
of the world, of patient data collection, of lonely intellectual
struggle, of long periods of frustration ended by sudden
breakthroughs, of intense public debate, of friendships made or lost,
of the exhilaration of discovery, and of delight as a fascinating
story unfolded.Controversial and widely attacked during the 1980s,
the impact theory received confirmation from the discovery of the
giant impact crater it predicted, buried deep beneath younger strata
at the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Chicxulub Crater was
found by Mexican geologists in 1950 but remained almost unknown to
scientists elsewhere until 1991, when it was recognized as the
largest impact crater on this planet, dating precisely from the time
of the great extinction sixty-five million years ago. Geology and
paleontology, sciences that long held that all changes in Earth
history have been calm and gradual, have now been forced to recognize
the critical role played by rare but devastating catastrophes like
the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
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