Alvarez, Walter

Фамилия:  Alvarez
Имя:  Walter

Walter Alvarez received his PhD in Geology from Princeton University. His thesis fieldwork (and honeymoon) took place in a roadless desert in Colombia, living with the indigenous Guajiro and smugglers. Much of his research has been in Italy, where he worked on archeological geology in Rome, on the tectonics of the geologically complex Mediterranean, and on the Earth's magnetic reversals recorded in deep-water limestones in the Apennines. In 1977, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and began a study of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Evidence from iridium measurements suggested that the extinction was due to impact on the Earth of a giant asteroid or comet, and many years later that hypothesis was confirmed by the discovery of a huge impact crater, buried beneath the subsurface of the Yucatán Peninsula, dating from precisely the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. He is currently engaged in work with Big History. Dr. Alvarez has received honorary doctorates from the University of Siena in Italy and the University of Oviedo, in the Principality of Asturias, in Spain, where his family originated.

Faculty Researche Lecture "Earth History in the Broadest Possible Context" (April, 2010)