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.
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Review This Product
Tue, 28 Jun 2022 | Review
by: Tanya K.
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom is a pulp fiction title that really doesn't fit with the nonfiction contents of the book. So if you are expecting dinosaurs, you will be disappointed. This is a book about a geology, astrology, physics and an ancient mystery that gets solved by a collection of scientists all working together.
The mystery to be solved is the cause of the mass extinction about 65 million years ago that exterminated the dinosaurs and a large portion of life on this planet. The story Alvarez tells is the description of the scientific investigations which led to the development of the impact hypothesis, the various bits of evidence to strengthen this hypothesis, and the subsequent search for the impact crater. I particularly enjoyed how Alvarez shows how science is supposed to work: by explaining how his ideas developed, how other scientists in different fields ended up involved and contributing to his project, their contributions (whether confirmations or poking holes in his ideas and methods), the blind-alleys, the disappointments and excitement, as well as additional work by other scientists to expand on the original hypothesis.
Walter Alvarez tells a compelling story about solving an ancient mystery, while also making complex scientific details accessible to the general public.
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