Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A Brash Young Man
The Hopi Reservation of the Colorado Plateau is one of the most isolated spots in
the continental United States. The night sky appears just as our ancestors saw it,
filled with a myriad of brilliant stars, bisected by a luminous Milky Way, and early
on the rise of the full Moon, host to an enormous golden orb. In this setting, one's
thoughts of an evening naturally turn to the heavens and their mysteries.
In the late 1950s, a self-described “rather brash young man,” a precocious geo-
logy graduate of the California Institute of Technology, was working for the USGS
mapping a set of odd geologic plateau features called the Hopi Buttes. They are
igneous but appear on the surface not as volcanic rocks but as shallow, flat-
floored craters and pipe-like structures filled with chunks of rock entrained by hot
volcanic fluids rising to the surface. The young man, Eugene Merle Shoemaker
(1928-1997), thought that the Hopi Buttes just might represent the kind of fea-
tures that geologists would encounter when they got to the Moon. Shoemaker was
convinced that geologists would get there, and he intended to be one of them. On
learning that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was experimenting with captured Ger-
man V-2 rockets, Shoemaker exclaimed, “Why, we're going to explore space, and
I want to be part of it! The moon is made of rock, so geologists are the logical ones
right away, the possibly lunar-like Hopi Buttes made a good way station.
One night in October 1957, Shoemaker, his wife Carolyn, and their young fam-
ily had just arrived back at their Hopi Buttes campsite. The two geologists who
had remained stationed there, their only contact with the outside world the radio,
greeted the returning family with the news that the Russians had launched a satel-
lite. Shoemaker's instant reaction was, “Oh no! I'm not ready yet! Its too soon!”
2
But Addison's disease, the same malady that afflicted John F. Kennedy, the presid-
ent who proposed to send men to the Moon, prevented Gene Shoemaker from get-
ting there in this life. Nevertheless, Shoemaker would go on to make key discov-
eries that helped solve two of the greatest puzzles in science: the birth of the Moon
and the death of the dinosaurs. Both would turn out to be caused by the collision of
objectsinspace,anotherconceptthatwasregardedfordecadesasscientificheresy.
Shoemaker would be one of the first to recognize that, as he put it, “the impact of
