DR. WALTER ALVAREZ

Dr. Walter Alvarez was raised in Berkeley, California, attended Carleton College in Minnesota, and earned a Ph.D. in Geology in 1967 from Princeton University, with a thesis on the structure of the northernmost Andes in Colombia and Venezuela. He then worked for American Overseas Petroleum Limited in Holland and in Libya.

Having developed a side interest in archeological geology, he left the oil company and spent time in Italy, studying the Roman volcanics and their influence on patterns of settlement in early Roman times.

He then moved to Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University and began studying Mediterranean tectonics in the light of the then-new theory of plate tectonics.Work on tectonic paleomagnetism in Italy led to a study of the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field recorded in Italian deep-sea limestones, and he and his team were able to date the reversals for an interval of more than 100 million years of Earth history.

In 1977, Dr. Alvarez went to the University of California at Berkeley and began a study of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period as recorded in the Italian limestones. Evidence from iridium measurements suggested that the extinction was due to the impact on the Earth of a giant asteroid or comet, and now, many years later, that hypothesis has been confirmed by the discovery of the largest impact crater on the planet, in the subsurface of the Yucatán Peninsula, dating from precisely the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.

From 1994 to1997, Dr. Alvarez was Chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and then returned to teaching, and to research centered on Mediterranean tectonics, impact events, and Earth history as recorded in the beautifully exposed sedimentary rocks of the Colorado Plateau and in the deep-water limestones of Italy. Dr. Alvarez is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991.