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Gerta Keller: Dinosaur-Extinction Contrarian
- Most experts think the dinosaurs’ extinction was closely connected with the impact of a meteor near what’s now the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula — the so-called “Chicxulub impact” (pronounced CHEEK-shoe-lube).
But when Gerta Keller, a contrarian geologist at Princeton, is asked by the journalist Joel Achenbach how many extinctions were caused by that single event, she replies: “Not a single species.”
Keller thinks, instead, that the dinosaurs were done in by a host of cataclysmic incidents, including several meteor impacts (of which Chicxulub was just one) and volcanic activity so intense it turned swathes of the earth’s surface into pools of lava.
For her opposition to the standard impact theory, Keller has earned the enmity of some of her academic peers. “They stare,” she says. “Some of them shout, ‘You’re wrong! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Says a colleague: “The winner of a war gets to write the history. Gerta is a contrarian only if she loses.” - 2012-06-06
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