Chapter 4: The Luck Of The Ammonites

July 14, 2019

     

          In Chapter 4 of The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert starts introducing us to Walter and Luis Alvarez, who as geologists work to uncover what exactly happened at the end of the Cretaceous era. The Alvarezes were investigating clay found in various places for Iridium which come to be very positive indicating that it was from a large asteroid. Thus, the Alvarezes cowrote a paper on their theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out in a mass extinction event caused by the asteroid itself. Many scientists in different areas of expertise resented this theory without hesitation because of the general idea of extinction at that time was that was a slow process that took many years. Now looking at the APES Theme: Science is a process of learning more about the world, the general idea of extinction is not only about to change but the history of the dinosaurs/Cretaceous era also is about to be understood better. In page 80, the scientists under the uniformitarian concept still resent the Alvarezes theory--"Meanwhile evidence for the hypothesis continued to accumulate. The first independent corroboration came in the form of tiny grains of rock known as "shocked quartz"'; there is more evidence supporting the theory such as sandstone proving a tsunami and a huge crater near the Gulf of Mexico. With all this evidence, the public view and opinion changed in favor of the Alverezes theory; as stated in page 82, "Here you have a challenge to a uniformitarian viewpoint that basically every geologist and paleontologist had been trained in, as had their professors and their professors' professors, all the way back to Lyell. And what you saw was people looking at the evidence. And they gradually did come to change their minds". [C] This sort of thing can be seen in almost everyday situations where the mindset of a person won't change until evidence is brought forth.