THEORY ON TRIAL - Night Comes to the Cretaceous - page 59

FIGURE Q Imprints left by
K-T spherules where they
fell in soft clay. From a drill
core that penetrated the
K-T boundary underneath
New Jersey. [Photo courtesy
of Richard Olsson, Rutgers
University. 10 ]
themselves—it was "invented here," and could be seen with a micro-
scope. Bohor and others went on to find shocked quartz at many
other K-T boundary sites around the world. Stishovite, which pro-
vides evidence of extreme pressures, has been found at several.
Many K-T sites have yielded millimeter-sized spherules that
look for all the world like microtektites externally but that internally
are composed not of glass but of various crystallized minerals. Some
show beautiful flowlines on their surfaces. They have been studied
extensively and have a mineralogy unlike anything geologists have
seen before. The pro-impactors interpret them as droplets melted by
the shock of impact and blasted into the earth's atmosphere, where
they solidified and fell to earth (Figure 9), subsequently recrystalliz-
ing into the minerals that we now find.
PREDICTION 6: A huge impact crater formed 65 million years ago.
If it has not disappeared, it may yet be found.
If the Alvarez theory is correct, there once existed, and we can hope
there still does exist, a huge crater exactly 65 million years old. Fail-
ure to find it would not falsify the theory, however, because the
crater could easily have escaped detection. The meteorite might
have hit somewhere in the two-thirds of the earth's surface that is