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however, Walter was focusing on the belief that the crater was
located in an ocean basin and might not have taken a proposed con-
tinental site seriously.
14
)
The failure of the geological community to jump at the Penfield-
Camargo suggestion and save everyone a decade becomes even more
poignant when we learn that a reporter for the
Houston Chronicle,
Carlos Byars, interviewed Penfield and Camargo in 1981 and wrote
an article about their work.
1
5
In March 1982, an account of the
Penfield-Camargo finding was published in
Sky and Telescope:
"Penfield . . . believes the feature, which lies within rocks dating to
Late Cretaceous times, may be the scar from a collision with an
asteroid roughly 10 km across."
1
6
How could it have been more clear
that here was a lead that demanded to be followed up? And yet it
was not. At least a few pro-impactors must have read that issue of
Sky and Telescope;
if so, they did not take the report seriously. Byars
continued to attend meetings of pro-impactors to push the idea that
the crater might lie underneath the Yucatan, but no one paid any
attention. Perhaps it was necessary for the crater to be discovered, or
rediscovered, not by a journalist or oil geologist, but by a bonafide
member of the pro-impact research community.
Walter Alvarez argues that not finding the crater for 10 years
"was actually a blessing" because it forced the pro-impactors to con-
front the repeated challenges from the Officer-Drake school.
1
7
Since
one cannot rerun history and thereby learn what would have hap-
pened had he and others paid attention to Penfield and Camargo, it
is hard to know whether he is right. In the long span of scientific his-
tory, a decade is not much, surely, and yet one can wonder what
advances might have been made had the crater been confirmed in
1980 or 1981 and the next 10 years been spent differently.
T
ESTING
C
HICXULUB
The geophysical maps of the Chicxulub feature (Figure 14) showed
it to have the form of a buried crater. The announcement of its dis-
covery by a card-carrying pro-impactor, Alan Hildebrand, galvanized
his colleagues into furious activity. Today, only a few years later, a
vast amount of information has been assembled about the Chicxu-
lub structure, more than enough to test the proposal that it is the
K-T impact crater. Following the list of predictions given earlier, I
will summarize the results of the many person-years of work on
Chicxulub that have been crammed into the brief period from 1991
to 1997.
