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	Spring 2006

Walter Alvarez to receive DRI’s Nevada Medal for 2006

Dr. Walter Alvarez (photo by David Shimabukuro)

UC Berkeley Professor led successful effort to solve the mystery behind the extinction of the dinosaurs Geologist Walter Alvarez, the central scientist in the resolution of what may be the world’s ultimate “cold case”—the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs—will receive the Desert Research Institute’s 2006 Nevada Medal in Reno, March 6, and in Las Vegas, March 9. Following two decades of dramatic effort, Prof. Alvarez and his colleagues proved that an asteroid or meteor had smashed into the coast of Yucatan 65 million years ago, causing the global catastrophe.

DRI President Stephen G. Wells said Dr. Alvarez, a UC Berkeley professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences, employed newly emerging technology and an international cast of scientists in a quest that ended up overturning one of geology’s fundamental assumptions about the process of change.

“Prof. Alvarez’s investigation produced a tale of uncommon scientific drama and collegial conflict, and extraordinary initiative and ingenuity,” said Wells. In 1997, Alvarez published the top-selling non-fiction narrative on the effort, “T. rex and the Crater of Doom” (Vintage Books/Princeton University Press). Wells noted that the book’s preface begins with, “This is the story of one terrible day in the history of the Earth,” setting the tone for an exciting read for scientists and non-scientists alike.

“It’s an intriguing mystery story that compares well with the best-selling novels of popular fiction,” said Wells, who also noted that the successful multidisciplinary nature of Alvarez’s investigation is fundamentally the same as that employed by DRI’s highly diverse scientific faculty.

Dr. Alvarez will present the 19th Nevada Medal Lectures, “Great Impact Events, Mass Extinctions and the Character of History,” at Truckee Meadows Community College (in the Sierra Building, Room 108) in Reno at 4:00 p.m. on March 8 and at DRI’s Southern Nevada Science Center in Las Vegas at 4:00 p.m. on March 9. The lectures are free to the public. The Nevada Medal is an international recognition of scientific and engineering accomplishment and includes a minted silver medallion and a $20,000 honorarium underwritten by AT&T Nevada.

Widely acknowledged for his leadership and perseverance in the long-running and wide-reaching investigation, Alvarez is quick and insistent in recognizing the critical contributions of many other scientists involved, contributions, he frequently points out, that often prevented the effort from ending in defeat. Even after evidence firmly established by the early 1980s that an impact was the cause of the extinction, it took another decade to find the location of the crater, Chicxulub, in Mexico, and convince most remaining doubters.

The investigation began in the early 1970s when Alvarez’s analysis of a thin layer of sediment near a small mountain village in Italy led him to the realization that the sudden loss of so many species in the geologic record could not have occurred in an orderly, gradual process, but rather through some catastrophe. One of geology’s firmly held principles insisted on a gradual, uniform pace as reflected in the incremental deposition of strata, and the arguments by Alvarez and his colleagues that the evidence showed occasional catastrophic change generally were regarded as heresy in the field of science.

Alvarez’s geologic specialty is plate tectonics, the process by which major plates in the Earth’s crust cause the continents to move, expand and break apart. Ironically, this major breakthrough in understanding this gradual, fundamental process of change in the Earth’s surface only reinforced the resistance to the catastrophic scenarios proposed by Alvarez and his associates.