The Great Extinction at the end of the Cretaceous : a history of the Alvarez's impact theory and contemporary view on the event K-Pg
Abstract
In 1980, geologist Walter Alvarez and his Nobel Prize-winning father, physicist Luis Alvarez claimed, that 65 million years ago a comet or asteroid about 10 km across, traveling at about 20 kilometers per second, blasted its way through our atmosphere and crashed into the Earth's surface.This cataclysmic event produced an enormous lethal effects and destroyed large par of end-Cretaceous biosphere. Not only dinosaurs, but the majority of species became extinct.
This asteroid-impact theory was initially mostly rejected by paleontologists, but a decade after it was proposed, a huge impact crater of the right age and 180 km across was found buried beneath the Yucatan peninsula in the Mexican Gulf. This work summarizes this dramatic "detective" story and provides information about the latest discoveries and theories related to the K-Pg event.