Alvarez T. rex and the Crater of Doom

With a New Foreword by Carl Zimmer
ISBN: 978-1-4008-4740-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Science Library

Sixty-five million years ago, a comet or asteroid larger than Mount Everest slammed into the Earth, inducing an explosion equivalent to the detonation of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Vaporized detritus blasted through the atmosphere upon impact, falling back to Earth around the globe. Disastrous environmental consequences ensued: a giant tsunami, continent-scale wildfires, darkness, and cold, followed by sweltering greenhouse heat. When conditions returned to normal, half the plant and animal genera on Earth had perished.

This horrific chain of events is now widely accepted as the solution to a great scientific mystery: what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? Walter Alvarez, one of the Berkeley scientists who discovered evidence of the impact, tells the story behind the development of the initially controversial theory. It is a saga of high adventure in remote locations, of arduous data collection and intellectual struggle, of long periods of frustration ended by sudden breakthroughs, of friendships made and lost, and of the exhilaration of discovery that forever altered our understanding of Earth's geological history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Alvarez, Walter

Weitere Mitwirkende

Zimmer, Carl

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Geologie Paläontologie, Taphonomie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword ix

Preface xix

CHAPTER 1: Armageddon 3

CHAPTER 2: Ex Libro Lapidum Historia Mundi 19

CHAPTER 3: Gradualist versus Catastrophist 43

CHAPTER 4: Iridium 59

CHAPTER 5: The Search for the Impact Site 82

CHAPTER 6: The Crater of Doom 106

CHAPTER 7: The World after Chicxulub 130

Notes 147

Index 171

Über Autor(innen)

Walter Alvarez is professor of geology at the University of California, Berkeley.