Luis Alvarez - The Scientific Detective

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth only 65 million years ago. Some were massive, weighing up to 110 tons. Some were ferocious and could rip apart their prey in seconds. But if the dinosaurs were such a force to be reckoned with, why did they suddenly disappear?

Scientists have considered many options. In 1980, Luis Alvarez and his son Walter published the “Alvarez Hypothesis” in a scientific journal. Luis was an experimental physicist, inventor, and professor. His son was a geologist. The article contained radical ideas that would knock everyone’s socks off. Alvarez and his son suggested that a massive asteroid had crashed into the Earth from space and penetrated the crust. The impact would have triggered severe fires, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, storms, and even acid rain. The Earth’s atmosphere would have drastically changed, and as a result -POOF! The dinosaurs were wiped out.

What could have sparked such a dramatic theory? Rocks. You may be wondering what rocks have to do with dinosaurs. But Luis Alvarez was doing geological research in Italy in the 1970s when he discovered limestone beds that included strata from the dinosaur era. He also found a thin layer of clay from between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic rocks. The clay was a bit of a mystery.

Walter showed the mysterious clay to his father. Together with the help of nuclear chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, they used the technique of neutron activation analysis. They found that the clay contained high levels of iridium, a very hard metal that is more common in meteorites than in the Earth’s crust. The team hypothesized that the iridium had been deposited following an asteroid impact.

The Alvarez Hypothesis was first met with a lot of criticism from other scientists, but it became more accepted over time. Ten years later, a large crater called Chicxulub was found off the coast of Mexico. In 2010, a panel of 41 scientists agreed that the Chicxulub asteroid impact triggered the mass extinction.

Although Luis Alvarez was most famous for this discovery, he also accomplished many other things in his lifetime. He researched the atomic nucleus, light, electrons, and radars. For example, his research with microwave radars led him to build a radar system that could guide airplanes through darkness and fog. He also participated in a top-secret project with the U.S. government and helped develop the atomic bomb. In 1968, he received the Nobel Prize for his work with subatomic particles.

Alvarez was constantly curious about the world around him and was known as a “scientific detective.” He would stop at nothing and conducted all kinds of experiments to figure things out – even if the ideas seemed a little dramatic at the time.