Walter Alvarez '62
From CarlWiki
Walter Alvarez is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a B.A. in geology from Carleton in 1962, and a Ph.D. in geology from Princeton in 1967.
Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, proposed that the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction was caused by the impact of a large asteroid with the Earth. They based this theory on the discovery of large amounts of iridium in a clay layer at the K-T boundary. Iridium is common in asteroids, but very uncommon on Earth. Most scientists currently accept this theory as the most likely cause of the K-T extinction.
Further reading
- T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez ISBN 0375702105
External links
- Some of this article's text is from Wikipedia, and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
