T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

The title of this book says everything you need to know about its literary style. It's a fun romp through one of the leading scientific controversies in modern geology and paleontology, told by one of the central figures. It is not a scientific treatise, but a book of scientific history, detailing the process by which geochemical "detectives" sorted through Nature's red herrings in the attempt to track down the object that murdered the dinosaurs. It's also a case study in the philosophical debate between catastrophe theories and gradualism in a science so marked by its long debate with certain groups of religious conservatives that it developed a reflexive antagonism to any suggestion that some events might not have taken place over "geologic" time scales. A world-altering meteor impact was not something the gradualists wanted to discover.

Alvarez clearly believes that the discovery of a 65-million-year-old impact crater on Mexico's Gulf Coast has pretty much resolved the question of what killed the dinos, and he's written his book to an audience of like-minded folk. If you're on the fence, the book might convince you. If you're in the opposing camp, it won't-nor is that the book's purpose. Rather, Alvarez is out to tell a good story of the progress of science. If, along the way, he teaches a bit of geology and convinces a few readers that geochemistry and geophysics are "cool," so much the better. Give this book to a high school kid with an interest in science-but read it yourself, first.

Although there are many questions that still remain about the extinction of the dinosaurs, this book does a very good job in detailing the work involved with finding the impact crater that hit 65 million years ago. This is one of the few science books that go into detail about the dead ends of the scientific quest not just the positive finds.

T.rex and the Crate of Doom written by Waler Alvarez is a book about what occured around 65 million years ago on earth. Yes, the Chicxulub crater off the North coast of the Yucatan peninsula.

As it seems, the disciplines of geology and paleontology are the are the Earth historians. Like you or I reading a paper for the news, geologists and paleontologists read the fossil recond in the rocks. By observing, measuring, and interpreting the information held fast through the eons of time, the earth's history can been seen and understood.

There are two camps in these disciplins the camp of gradualism where everything takes times... sometimes an enormous length of time, then there are those of the camp catastrophism, something awful happen like a comet of meteor crashing into the earth. Well, this book falls mainly into the latter camp as the work on the K-T layer (Cretaecous-Tertiary) Iridium was found and the cause soon revealed that it came from an extraterrestrial source.

To be realistic, one must use both camps to come up with the true answer.

This book has seven chapters: Armageddon, ExLibro Lapidum Historia Mundi, Gradualist versus Catastrophist,
Iridum, The Search for the Impact Site, The Crater of Doom, and The World after Chicxulub. Each of these chapters bring the read more information on how science, if applied correctly can render an answer to some nagging questions.

This book tell about what happens when a meteor the size of Mt. Everest crashes into the earth and the consequenses that follow. As the author states, "The hugh cloud of vaporized rock generated at ground zero was driven outward by its own heat and pressure in a colossal fireball." Mexican geologists found the Chicxulub crater back in the 1950's, but the general knowledge of Chicxulub didn't become common knowledge until 1991. As more and more evidence becames available, the extinction of the mosters of the Mesozoic is starting to favor the catastrophist theory... but we can only guess, but an intelligent guess is better than not knowing.

This book was a fast read and the narrative flowed freely just like reading a detective story and all of the pieces of the mystery come together. This book has a little chemistry and physics in it so I believe that this show be read by age 16 and up. All in all, the is an excellent book and a fascinating story unfolds with some of the best firsthand paleontological science unraveling the mystries of that great extinction 65 millions years ago.

Nevertheless, this is a chilling reminder of the fragility of the biosphere, which is under a constant threat from asteroids, meteorites, bolides and comets.

It's interesting to see that this book is now being used as a text in high school and even junior high school science classes. I had a great laugh from the reaction of a young reader who wrote that it was "boring" and that "Innocent eight graders shouldn't have to read this stuff"!

Ah, yes. Innocence. But 14-year-olds aside, this is a fascinating and delightful story of scientific discovery and triumph second to none. It can be compared to James D. Watson's The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, both in terms of the importance of the discovery and for bringing to the reader some of the excitement and adventure of the quest. It is not, however, as the title might imply, the reading equivalent of watching a Stephen Spielberg movie! And perhaps we can be thankful for that.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom is the story of one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Prior to Alvarez's work, it was not known what had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Volcanism, disease, climate change, etc., were put forward as possibilities. But in1970 Alvarez began to believe that a large meteor or a comet had struck the earth with enormous force causing the extinctions. But how to prove it? At first it wasn't even imagined how a meteor could bring about such a catastrophe; but gradually it was seen that the debris thrown into the atmosphere by the force of impact would encircle the earth and block out the rays of the sun for months or even years at a time, thereby killing off plants both on the land and in the sea, thereby collapsing the food chain and starving the dinosaurs and most other creatures.

This was the breakthrough idea, and an exciting idea it was. Of course there was great resistance, as there always is in science when established opinions are threatened, and Alvarez and his team of scientists had to fight mightily against the orthodoxy of uniformitarianism which had held sway in geology and paleontology since the time of Charles Lyell. It wasn't until twelve years later in 1992 that Alvarez's theory finally found general acceptance in the scientific community.

One of Alvarez's purposes in this book is to show a general readership how scientific discoveries are made and confirmed. His tone is generous and he goes out of his way (unlike Watson in The Double Helix) to give credit to everyone involved. He makes it clear that the work was a shared enterprise. One thing that stood out in my mind was the central contribution from Alverez's father, Luis, a physicist who unfortunately died before the theory could be confirmed.

Alvarez does however allow himself an occasional sarcasm vis-a-vis the old order. Characterizing the "conventional geologic opinion" on the formation of craters like the Meteor Crater in Arizona as due to "mysterious explosions that occurred at random times and places for no evident reason," he appends this observation: "In retrospect this causeless mechanism...is indistinguishable from magic, but at the time many geologists considered it preferable to catastrophic impacts." (p 76)

Science is especially subject to the braking effect of established opinion because it is extremely difficult for anybody to allow that the established beliefs of their entire professional career can suddenly be overturned. All your life you believed one thing and one day you wake up and some whippersnapper has overturned the entire edifice! That is hard to take, and so entrenched opinion wars against new discovery. But that is as it should be since extraordinary claims do indeed require extraordinary proof.

Therefore, just as "the course of true love never did run smooth" (Shakespeare), so it is with science. Alvarez recounts an early misdirection in the quest when it was thought that they had found plutonium-244 in the KT boundary clay, possibly indicating a nearby supernova explosion 65 million years ago. He and Frank Asaro took their discovery to Earl Hyde, a nuclear chemist who listened patiently to the details and then said, "Do it all over again." This was very good advice because when they did it all over again they found they had erred: there was no plutonium-244 in the clay samples! (p. 74)

After reading this book we are left with an intriguing question: what was the role of volcanism, not only in the KT extinction but in the Permian-Triassic as well? Alvarez hints that there must be more than coincidence involved in the fact that during both extinctions there is indisputable evidence of vast lava flows. Does a truly monstrous impact somehow trigger volcanic eruptions? An "intriguing mystery" is what Alvarez calls it. (pp. 143-144)

This book should be read in conjunction with David M. Raup's The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science which covers some of the same ground (especially the fight against established opinion) while claiming a 26-million year periodicity for impact extinctions caused by Oort Cloud perturbations from a hypothetical companion star, dubbed "Nemesis."

If you're over 30, you've lived through the period during which extinction of the dinosaurs by catastrophic means was debated and explained. At first Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, were ridiculed for their explanation of what happened at the Cretaceous/Tertiary or K/T boundary.

Walter's book explains the chronology of events in a very readable fashion -- much less academic than the style of Stephen Gould and others. Its a story that tells how father and son found a way to work together, despite very different professions. It also shows how different disciplines worked together, across borders and countries.

What's surprising is how quickly evidence began to accumulate to support the Alvarez' theory. And its interesting to see where they might have been sidetracked or made critical mistakes, were it not for good scientific practice