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In-Depth Information
exception to Kerr's account. In her rebuttal, she claimed that "The
impact tsunami scenario did not win the day. . . . Sedimentologists
generally disagreed with Smit's model of tsunami wave deposi-
tion."
3
8
Kerr replied, "Of the five sedimentologists on the trip other
than Lowe that I interviewed for the story, four of them agreed that
the deposit is consistent with waves from an impact and that no pro-
posed alternative can reasonably explain the deposit."
3
9
PREDICTIONS MET
Officer followed up his 1992 paper (with Drake and Meyerhoff)
with one in the journal
Geology
(with Dartmouth colleague J. B.
Lyons and Meyerhoff) and, later, with a section in his topic with
Page,
The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy.
40
'
41
In the topic,
after setting up the anti-impact position by citing the various (to
him at least, successful) challenges to the Alvarez theory that
Charles Officer has championed through the years, the two authors
come at last to the vexing issue of the crater itself. But for them,
Chicxulub is not vexing at all; they merely rebury it: "The impactors
[pro-impact scientists] would have
something
of a case if they would
point to a massive impact crater . . . dating to the proper time in the
geological record. They have searched far and wide around the
world for evidence of even one such crater, but sadly for them, they
have come up wanting. . . . One of the things that did not happen at
the K-T boundary was impact by a gigantic meteorite."
4
2
How, in the face of all the evidence just reviewed, can two
authors come to such an opposite conclusion from almost everyone
else who has studied the Chicxulub crater? Here is how Officer and
Page managed it:
• Their topic appeared in July 1996, allowing plenty of time for
them to incorporate the results of the new drilling tests that by
1994 had begun to be reported at scientific meetings and in
abstracts. Yet Officer and Page base their conclusions on only two
sources: a report from 1975 and Meyerhoff's three-decades-old
notes.
• They do not mention the strikingly concentric gravity patterns,
the cenotes, or the import of the size of the structure (at 170 km
to 300 km, perhaps the largest on the earth).
• The older paleontologic interpretations dated the Chicxulub
structure at 80 million to 90 million years, far older than K-T
time. Officer and Page mention the modern radiometric age
measurements, but say only that they "give values ranging from
