T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

Princeton Science Library

By: Walter Alvarez, Carl Zimmer - foreword

Narrated by: Joel Richards

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 100,000,000 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.

©1997 Princeton University Press (P)2020 Tantor

A Great International Piece of Detective Work

How do you go about discovering what may or may not have happened on Planet Earth some 65 million years ago that might have caused the demise of the largest critters to have ever walked the planet (and swam and flew)? Walter Alvarez lets us all in on the secrets in this fascinating book. From iffy hypothesis to the identification of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan, he takes the listener on a captivating trip around the world with some of the world's top scientists in several disciplines to piece together what actually happened on that day all those millions of years ago when the Earth experienced an unprecedented physical upheaval that wiped out an estimated 75% of all species of life at that time, including the awesome dinosaurs. The results of his research and that of his fellow researchers was not readily embraced by his scientific colleagues, but ongoing investigations continued to turn up tantalizing clues that eventually formed a picture of the alien impact with Earth that changed the direction of life on our world forever.

classic

very informative, but a little lack luster in narration. kind of drones on in parts that are very interesting.

Asteroid or Comet?

Walter Alvarez, the author of this book is a Professor of Earth & Planetary Science at UC Berkeley and the son of Luis Alvarez who was a highly respected Physicist & inventor from UC Berkeley also. Luis won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968 and combined with Walter to hunt for the extinction event of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This is a fascinating voyage through not only the past 65 million years, but also the last 50 years or more of current science & technology. The evidence which was not discovered until Luis Alvarez had passed 1988 is over whelming and back in the 1990's moved from hypothesis to reality with the location of the Yucatan Crater off the Gulf of Mexico that resulted in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. The first evidence came from a geological dig at the K-T Boundary in Gubbio, Italy in 1981. The only contention is was it an asteroid or a comet. What ever fell from space not only killed many of the dinosaurs but may have been the end result of allowing the human species to emerge. I highly recommend this audio if you are interested the history of our planet. Joel Richards does an excellent narration and puts you back in the time and places that this story covers.

awesome book if you like dinosaurs and geology

I loved this entire read and highly recommend it to anyone interested in how the dinosaurs went extinct.

Should be required reading.

This should be required reading in school. Shows our civilization working at its highest levels.