Walter Alvarez

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Walter Alvarez

For his grandfather, the American doctor, see Walter C. Alvarez
Walter C. Alvarez

Walter Clement Alvarez was an United States doctor of Spanish American descent. He authored several dozen books on medicine, and wrote Introductions and Forewords for many others....
.

Walter Alvarez (born 1940) is a professor in the Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Earth is the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System in diameter, mass and density. It is also referred to as the World and Wiktionary:Terra.Note that by International Astronomical Union convention, the term "Terra" is used for naming extensive land masses, rather...
and Planetary Science

Planetary science

Planetary science, also known as planetology and closely related to planetary astronomy, is the science of planets, or planetary systems, and the solar system....
department at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley is a public university research university located in Berkeley, California, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines....
. His father was Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize , established in the 1895 will of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel; it was first awarded in Nobel Prize in Physics, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Nobel Prize in Literature, and Nobel Peace Prize in 1901....
winning physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many Physics#Major fields of physics spanning all length scales: from atom particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole ....
Luis Alvarez

Luis Alvarez

Luis W. Alvarez was an United States physics and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley....
.

Biography
Born in Berkeley, California

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in Northern California, in the United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland, California and Emeryville, California....
, he earned his B.A. in geology

Geology

Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitute the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structural geology, physical properties, dynamics, and History of the Earth of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed....
in 1962 from Carleton College

Carleton College

Carleton College is an independent Sectarianism, coeducational, Liberal arts colleges in the United States in Northfield, Minnesota, Minnesota, United States....
in Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States of the United States. The twelfth largest state by area in the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with just over five million residents....
and Ph.D.

Doctor of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph.D. or PhD for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", is an postgraduate academic degree awarded by University....
in geology from Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private university university located in Princeton, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and has the largest per-student Financial endowment in the world....
in 1967.

His grandfather is the famed physician Walter C. Alvarez

Walter C. Alvarez

Walter Clement Alvarez was an United States doctor of Spanish American descent. He authored several dozen books on medicine, and wrote Introductions and Forewords for many others....
and his great-grandfather Luis F. Alvarez

Luis F. Alvarez

Luis F. ?lvarez was a Spanish American physician and researcher who practiced in both California and Hawaii.?lvarez was born in Salas, a small municipality near Oviedo, Spain....
, who worked as a doctor in Hawaii

Hawaii

File:Pahoehoe and Aa flows at Hawaii.jpgThe State of Hawaii is a U.S. state in the United States, located on an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of Australia....
, developed a method for the better diagnosis of macular leprosy

Leprosy

Leprosy , or Hansen's disease , is a Chronic disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis. Leprosy is primarily a granulomatous disease of the Peripheral nervous system and Mucous membrane of the upper respiratory tract; skin lesions are the primary external symptom....
.

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Encyclopedia

Walter Alvarez (born 1940) is a professor in the Earth

Earth

Planetary science

University of California, Berkeley

Nobel Prize

Physicist

Luis Alvarez

Luis W. Alvarez was an United States physics and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley....
.

Biography

Born in Berkeley, California

Berkeley, California

Geology

Carleton College

Carleton College is an independent Sectarianism, coeducational, Liberal arts colleges in the United States in Northfield, Minnesota, Minnesota, United States....
in Minnesota

Minnesota

Doctor of Philosophy

Princeton University

Walter C. Alvarez

Luis F. Alvarez

Hawaii

Leprosy

Mabel Alvarez

Mabel Alvarez was a Spanish-American artist and oil painter. She was born to a prominent Spanish family who lived on the island of Oahu, Hawaii....
was a noted California

California

California is a U.S. state on the West Coast of the United States of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. It is bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada to the east, Arizona to the southeast, and to the south the Mexico state of Baja California....
artist and oil painter.

He worked for American Overseas Petroleum Limited in The Netherlands, and in Libya

Libya

Libya , officially the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya , is a country located in North Africa. Bordering the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Libya lies between Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
at the time of Colonel Gadaffi

Muammar al-Gaddafi

Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi#Name also known as Colonel Gaddafi has been the de facto leader of Libya since a 1969 coup....
’s revolution. Having developed a side interest in archaeological geology, he left the oil company and spent some time in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
, studying the Roman volcanics

Volcano

A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in a planet's surface or Crust , which allows hot, molten rock, ash, and gases to escape from below the surface....
and their influence on patterns of settlement in early Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
times.

Alvarez then moved to Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is a research specializing in the Earth sciences and is part of Columbia University. The current director of LDEO is G....
of Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights, Manhattan neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City....
, and began studying the Mediterranean tectonics in the light of the new theory of plate tectonics

Plate tectonics

Plate tectonics describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere. The theory encompasses the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century by Alfred Wegener, and seafloor spreading, understood during the 1960s....
. His work on tectonic paleomagnetism

Paleomagnetism

Paleomagnetism is the study of the record of the Earth's magnetic field preserved in various magnetic minerals through time. The study of paleomagnetism has demonstrated that the Earth's magnetic field varies substantially in both orientation and intensity through time....
in Italy led to a study of the geomagnetic reversal

Geomagnetic reversal

A geomagnetic reversal is a change in the orientation of Earth's magnetic field such that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south become interchanged....
s recorded in Italian deep-sea limestone

Limestone

File:Limestone Formation In Waitomo.jpgLimestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the mineral calcite . The deposition of limestone strata is often a by-product and indicator of biological activity in the geology record....
s, and he and his colleagues were able to date the reversals for an interval of more than 100 million years of Earth history.

Alvarez and his father Luis W. Alvarez are most widely known for their discovery (with Frank Asaro and Helen Michel) that a clay

Clay

Clay is a naturally occurring material composed primarily of fine-grained minerals, which show plasticity through a variable range of water content, and which can be hardened when dried and/or fired....
layer occurring right at the Cretaceous

Cretaceous

The Cretaceous , usually abbreviated K for its German translation Kreide, is a geologic period from circa to million years ago . In the geologic timescale, the Cretaceous follows on the Jurassic period and is followed by the Paleogene period....
-Tertiary

Tertiary

The Tertiary is a a term for a Geologic time scale#Terminology 65 million to 1.8 million years ago. The Tertiary covered the time span between the superseded Secondary period and an out-of-date definition of the Neogene#Controversy....
(K-T) boundary was highly enriched in the element iridium

Iridium

Iridium is the chemical element with atomic number 77, and is represented by the symbol Ir. A very hard, brittle, silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, iridium is the second densest element and is the most corrosion-resistant metal, even at temperatures as high as 2000 ?C....
. Since iridium enrichment is common in asteroid

Asteroid

Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets or planetoids, are small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun, smaller than planets but larger than meteoroids....
s, but very uncommon on the Earth, they further postulated that the layer had been created by the impact

Impact

In computing:* IMPACT , a computer graphics architecture for Silicon Graphics computer workstations* Impact Finite Element Program, an open source finite element program...
of a large asteroid with the Earth and that this impact event was the likely cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event

Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event

The Cretaceous?Tertiary extinction event, which occurred approximately , was a large-scale Extinction event of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time....
.

This iridium enrichment has now been observed in many other sites around the world. And further, the very large Chicxulub crater

Chicxulub Crater

The Chicxulub Crater is an ancient impact crater buried underneath the Yucat?n Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, Yucat?n, after which the crater is named?as well as the rough translation of the Mayan name, "the tail of the devil." The crater is more than 180 kilometers in diameter, making the feat...
was identified and is now regarded as the definitive evidence of a large impact. Consequently, a majority of scientists now accept the impact scenario as the most likely cause for the K-T extinction event which occurred 65 million years ago and eliminated 85% of all species, including all of the dinosaur

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrate animals of Landform ecosystems for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic Period until the end of the Cretaceous Period , when most of them became extinct in the Cretaceous?Tertiary extinction event....
s. His book, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, details the discovery of the K-T extinction event.

In addition to his interest in extinction events and impacts, Alvarez has contributed to the understanding of Mediterranean tectonics, Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
geology and archeology, and the establishment of magnetostratigraphic correlations.

Alvarez is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the prestigious 2006 Nevada Medal and accompanying $20,000 honorarium, the Vetlesen Prize

Vetlesen Prize

The Vetlesen Prize is awarded from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation. The prize is considered by many the earth sciences? equivalent of a Nobel prize award....
, and the Penrose Medal

Penrose Medal

The Penrose Medal was created in 1927 by R.A.F. Penrose, Jr. as the top prize awarded by the Geological Society of America to those who advance the study of geoscience....
, the Geological Society of America

Geological Society of America

The is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the geosciences. The society was founded in New York, New York in 1888 by James Hall, James D....
’s highest award. In 2005, he received the doctorate "Honoris Causa"

Honorary degree

An honorary degree or a degree honoris causa is an academic degree for which a university has waived the usual requirements . The degree itself is typically a doctorate or, less commonly, a master's degree, and may be awarded to someone who has no prior connection with the institution in question....
in Geological Sciences from the University of Siena

University of Siena

The University of Siena in Siena, Tuscany is one of the oldest and first publicly funded universities in Italy. Originally called Studium Senese, the University of Siena was founded in 1240....
, Italy.

Walter Alvarez

Biography

Further reading

External links