The Nastiest Feud in Science

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-
debate/565769/

Gerta keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a
flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me
cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of
traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at
Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob,
wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated
ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

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I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary
because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a
tendency to attract disaster. Long before our 90-minute flight touched
down, she’d told me about having narrowly escaped death four times—once
while attempting suicide, once from hepatitis contracted during an
Algerian coup, once from getting shot in a robbery gone wrong, and once
from food poisoning in India—and this was by no means an exhaustive list.
She has crisscrossed dozens of countries doing field research and can
claim near-death experiences in many of them: with a jaguar in Belize, a
boa in Madagascar, a mob in Haiti, an uprising in Mexico.*

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary
because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a
tendency to attract disaster. Long before our 90-minute flight touched
down, she’d told me about having narrowly escaped death four times—once
while attempting suicide, once from hepatitis contracted during an
Algerian coup, once from getting shot in a robbery gone wrong, and once
from food poisoning in India—and this was by no means an exhaustive list.
She has crisscrossed dozens of countries doing field research and can
claim near-death experiences in many of them: with a jaguar in Belize, a
boa in Madagascar, a mob in Haiti, an uprising in Mexico.*

Keller had vowed not to return to India after the food-poisoning debacle.
But, never one to avoid calamity, she’d traveled to Mumbai—and gotten sick
before her plane had even landed; an in-flight meal had left her retching.
Keller was in India to research a catastrophe that has consumed her for
the past 30 years: the annihilation of three-quarters of the Earth’s
species—including, famously, the dinosaurs—during our planet’s most recent
mass extinction, about 66 million years ago. She would be joined in
Hyderabad by three collaborators: the geologists Thierry Adatte, from the
University of Lausanne; Syed Khadri, from Sant Gadge Baba Amravati
University, in central India; and Mike Eddy, also from Princeton. They
picked us up at the airport in a seat-belt-less van manned by a driver who
looked barely out of his teens, and we began the five-hour drive to our
hotel in a town so remote, I hadn’t confidently located it on a map.

Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and
chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was
searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about
what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that
many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-
established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated
when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed
into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact
unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking
earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what
one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other,
similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony,
protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-
weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in
1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues
from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had
found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of
planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the
same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en
masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing
iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life
forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks
sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch
to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl
Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a
catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust
cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and
extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and
the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying
attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists
rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-
called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA
evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican
town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as
the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and
natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as
the killer.

The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle,
and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story
about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to
a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told
Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since,
impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I would
argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution
hypothesis,” says Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of
Texas at Austin who studies the Chicxulub crater. “We have it nailed down,
the case is closed,” Buck Sharpton, a geologist and scientist emeritus at
the Lunar and Planetary Institute, has said.

But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from
sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a
really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.”

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the
cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently,
lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused
not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of
colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan
Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all
but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with
specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals,
has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta
uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice,
simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist
at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a
previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous
and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’
War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum
of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of
vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander,
sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo
careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,”
Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running
list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind
her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the
most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at
the stake.”

Understanding the cause of the mass extinction is not an esoteric academic
endeavor. Dinosaurs are what paleontologists call “charismatic megafauna”:
sexy, sympathetic beasts whose obliteration transfixes pretty much anyone
with a pulse. The nature of their downfall, after 135 million years of
good living, might offer clues for how we can prevent, or at least delay,
our own end. “Without meaning to sound pessimistic,” the geophysicist
Vincent Courtillot writes in his book Evolutionary Catastrophes, “I
believe the ancient catastrophes whose traces geologists are now exhuming
are worthy of our attention, not just for the sake of our culture or our
understanding of the zigzaggy path that led to the emergence of our own
species, but quite practically to understand how to keep from becoming
extinct ourselves.”


“It has all the aspects of a really nice story,” Keller says of the
asteroid theory. “It’s just not true.” (Cole Wilson)
This dispute illuminates the messy way that science progresses, and how
this idealized process, ostensibly guided by objective reason and the
search for truth, is shaped by ego, power, and politics. Keller has had to
endure decades of ridicule to make scientists reconsider an idea they had
confidently rejected. “Gerta had to fight very much to get into the
position that she is in right now,” says Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, a
collaborator of Keller’s from Heidelberg University. “It’s thanks to her
that the case is not closed.”


2.
Over the course of its 4.5-billion-year existence, the Earth has
occasionally lashed out against its inhabitants. At five different times,
mass extinctions ensued.

Seven hundred million years ago, the oceans’ single-cell organisms started
linking together to form multicellular creatures. Four hundred and forty-
four million years ago, nearly all of those animals were wiped out by the
planet’s first global annihilation. The Earth recovered—fish appeared in
the seas, four-legged amphibians crawled onto land—and then, 372 million
years ago, another catastrophe destroyed three-quarters of all life. For
more than 100 million years after that, creatures thrived. The planet
hosted the first reptiles, the first shelled eggs, the first plants with
seeds. Forests swarmed with giant dragonflies whose wings stretched two
feet across, and crawled with millipedes nearly the length of a car. Then,
252 million years ago, the “Great Dying” began. When it finished, 96
percent of all species had vanished. The survivors went forth and
multiplied—until, 201 million years ago, another mass extinction knocked
out half of them.

The age of the dinosaurs opened with continents on the move. Landmasses
that had spent millions of years knotted together into the supercontinent
of Pangaea began to drift apart, and oceans—teeming with sponges, sharks,
snails, corals, and crocodiles—flooded into the space between them. It was
swimsuit weather most places on land: Even as far north as the 45th
parallel, which today roughly marks the U.S.–Canada border, the climate
had a humid, subtropical feel. The North Pole, too warm for ice, grew lush
with pines, ferns, and palm-type plants. The stegosaurs roamed, then died,
and tyrannosaurs took their place. (More time separates stegosaurs from
tyrannosaurs—about 67 million years—than tyrannosaurs from humans, which
have about 66 million years between them.) It was an era of evolutionary
innovation that yielded the first flowering plants, the earliest placental
mammals, and the largest land animals that ever lived. Life was good—right
up until it wasn’t.

That’s according to the Alvarez theory, which mass-extinction devotees,
with their typical gallows humor, refer to as the “bad weekend” scenario:
The dinosaurs didn’t see the end coming, didn’t stand a chance, and by
Monday it was all, abruptly, over. Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs,
and boom they go. (Some of the species that avoided the dinosaurs’ fate
are still around today in a form nearly identical to their ancestors,
including gingko trees, magnolias, roaches, crocodiles, and tortoises,
which Keller keeps as pets.)

Alvarez’s theory was a boon for the catastrophist school of thought, which
maintains that the Earth is shaped by sudden, violent events—and can turn
on its occupants in a heartbeat. The impacters contend that the fossils of
both marine- and land-dwelling organisms show an abrupt and instantaneous
die-off at virtually the same moment, geologically speaking, that the
asteroid hit. “If you look at the extinction rate up to the event and you
look at the recovery after, this is the most sudden of all the known
extinctions,” Sean Gulick says. “This one is like a knife-sharp boundary
in the geologic record”—consistent with the kind of destruction an
asteroid could cause.

Alvarez’s theory initially faced strong opposition from the gradualists,
who argue that enormous planetary changes tend to result from slower, less
adrenaline-pumping forces. Among those who disagreed with him was Keller.

Keller barely got through her introduction before the audience tore into
her: “Stupid.” “You don’t know what you’re doing.” “Totally wrong.”
“Nonsense.”
Her first interaction with the community investigating the dinosaurs’
disappearance took place at a 1988 conference on global catastrophes. She
presented results from her three-year analysis of a rock section in El
Kef, Tunisia, that has long been considered one of the most accurate
records of the extinction. Keller specializes in studying the fossils of
single-celled marine organisms called foraminifera—“forams,” once you’re
on a nickname basis, as Keller is. (She considers these creatures, which
include many species of plankton, “old friends.”) Because their fossils
are plentiful and well preserved, paleontologists can trace their
extinction patterns with considerable accuracy, and thus frequently rely
on them as a proxy for other creatures’ well-being.

When Keller examined the El Kef samples, she did not see a “bad weekend,”
but a bad era: Three hundred thousand years before Alvarez’s asteroid
struck, some foram populations had already started to decline. Keller
found that they had become less and less robust until, very rapidly, about
a third of them vanished. “My takeaway was that you could not have a
single instantaneous event causing this pattern,” she told me. “That was
my message at that meeting, and it caused an enormous turmoil.” Keller
said she barely got through her introduction before members of the
audience tore into her: “Stupid.” “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Totally wrong.” “Nonsense.”

Ad hominem attacks had by then long characterized the mass-extinction
controversy, which came to be known as the “dinosaur wars.” Alvarez had
set the tone. His numerous scientific exploits—winning the Nobel Prize in
Physics, flying alongside the crew that bombed Hiroshima, “X-raying”
Egypt’s pyramids in search of secret chambers—had earned him renown far
beyond academia, and he had wielded his star power to mock, malign, and
discredit opponents who dared to contradict him. In The New York Times,
Alvarez branded one skeptic “not a very good scientist,” chided dissenters
for “publishing scientific nonsense,” suggested ignoring another
scientist’s work because of his “general incompetence,” and wrote off the
entire discipline of paleontology when specialists protested that the
fossil record contradicted his theory. “I don’t like to say bad things
about paleontologists, but they’re really not very good scientists,”
Alvarez told The Times. “They’re more like stamp collectors.”

Scientists who dissented from the asteroid hypothesis feared for their
careers. Dewey McLean, a geologist at Virginia Tech credited with first
proposing the theory of Deccan volcanism, accused Alvarez of trying to
block his promotion to full professor by bad-mouthing him to university
officials. Alvarez denied doing so—while effectively bad-mouthing McLean
to university officials. “If the president of the college had asked me
what I thought about Dewey McLean, I’d say he’s a weak sister,” Alvarez
told The Times. “I thought he’d been knocked out of the ball game and had
just disappeared, because nobody invites him to conferences anymore.”
Chuck Officer, another volcanism proponent, whom Alvarez dismissed as a
laughingstock, charged that Science, a top academic journal, had become
biased. The journal reportedly published 45 pieces favorable to the impact
theory during a 12-year period—but only four on other hypotheses. (The
editor denied any favoritism.)

That the dinosaur wars drew in scientists from multiple disciplines only
added to the bad blood. Paleontologists resented arriviste physicists,
like Alvarez, for ignoring their data; physicists figured the stamp
collectors were just bitter because they hadn’t cracked the mystery
themselves. Differing methods and standards of proof failed to translate
across fields. Where the physicists trusted models, for example,
geologists demanded observations from fieldwork. Yet even specialists from
complementary disciplines like geology and paleontology butted heads over
crucial interpretations: They consistently reached opposing conclusions as
to whether the disappearance of the species was fast (consistent with an
asteroid’s sudden devastation) or slow (reflecting a more gradual cause).
In 1997, hoping to reconcile disagreement over the speed of extinction,
scientists organized a blind test in which they distributed fossil samples
from the same site to six researchers. The researchers came back exactly
split.

Keller and others accuse the impacters of trying to squash deliberation
before alternate ideas can get a fair hearing. Though geologists had
bickered for 60 years before reaching a consensus on continental drift,
Alvarez declared the extinction debate over and done within two years.
“That the asteroid hit, and that the impact triggered the extinction of
much of the life of the sea … are no longer debatable points,” he said in
a 1982 lecture. “Nearly everybody now believes them.” After Alvarez’s
death, in 1988, his acolytes took up the fight—most notably his son and
collaborator, Walter, and a Dutch geologist named Jan Smit, whom Keller
calls a “crazy SOB.”

Ground down by acrimony, many critics of the asteroid hypothesis
withdrew—including Officer and McLean, two of the most outspoken
opponents. Lamenting the rancor as “embarrassing to geology,” Officer
announced in 1994 that he would quit mass-extinction research. Though he
did ultimately get promoted, McLean later wrote on his faculty website
that Alvarez’s “vicious politics” had caused him to develop serious health
problems and that, for fear of a relapse, he couldn’t research Deccan
volcanism without “the greatest of difficulty.” “I never recovered
physically or psychologically from that ordeal,” he added. Younger
scientists avoided the topic, fearing that they might jeopardize their
careers. The impact theory solidified, and volcanism was largely
abandoned.

But not by everyone. “Normally, when people get attacked and given a hard
time, they leave the field,” Keller told me. “For me, it’s just the
opposite. The more people attack me, the more I want to find out what’s
the real story behind it.”

As Keller has steadily accumulated evidence to undermine the asteroid
hypothesis, the animosity between her and the impacters has only
intensified. Her critics have no qualms about attacking her in the press:
Various scientists told me, on the record, that they consider her
“fringe,” “unethical,” “particularly dishonest,” and “a gadfly.” Keller,
not to be outdone, called one impacter a “crybaby,” another a “bully,” and
a third “the Trump of science.” Put them in a room together, and “it may
be World War III,” Andrew Kerr says.

Video: Is the Dinosaur-Apocalypse Story Wrong?

https://youtu.be/SFAnrNZ4pD0

As the five-hour drive to our hotel in rural India turned into 12 after a
stop to gather rock samples, Keller aired a long list of grievances. She
said impacters had warned some of her collaborators not to work with her,
even contacting their supervisors in order to pressure them to sever ties.
(Thierry Adatte and Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, who have worked with Keller for
years, confirmed this.) Keller listed numerous research papers whose early
drafts had been rejected, she felt, because pro-impact peer reviewers
“just come out and regurgitate their hatred.” She suspected repeated
attempts to deny her access to valuable samples extracted from the
Chicxulub crater, such as in 2002, when the journal Nature reported on
accusations that Jan Smit had seized control of a crucial piece of
rock—drilled at great expense—and purposefully delayed its distribution to
other scientists, a claim Smit called “ridiculous.” (Keller told me the
sample went missing and was eventually found in Smit’s duffel bag; Smit
says this is “pure fantasy.”) Several of Keller’s stories—about a past
adviser, for example, or a former postdoc—ended with variations of the
same punch line: “He became my lifelong enemy.”


3.
Keller planned to spend a week gathering rocks in two different regions of
India, beginning with the area around Basar, a dusty village of 5,800 in
the center of the country. Our days in the field settled into a
predictable routine. From about 7:30 every morning until as late as
midnight, we fanned out from the hotel. Our six- or seven-hour drives to
distant quarries revealed the rhythms of rural neighborhoods, where women
still fetched water from communal pumps and shepherds scrolled on
smartphones while grazing their flocks.

The geologists were searching for outcrops—areas where erosion,
construction, or tectonic activity had exposed the inner layers of rock
formations, from which the scientists could decode the history of the
landscape. Most mornings, Thierry Adatte set our course by studying
satellite images for signs of quarries (big beige rectangles) or
switchback roads (pale zigzags). Keller and her colleagues saw the
landscape in greater relief than most: When explaining how volcanoes
extrude magma from the planet’s inner mantle, Mike Eddy characterized the
surface of the Earth—the foundation of our homes, cities, civilizations—as
“this little tiny scum,” as puny as the skin of milk that gathered on our
tea each morning.

For someone accustomed to thinking about time in multimillion-year
increments, Keller grew surprisingly impatient over wasted minutes. “Why
so slow?” she muttered next to me in the back seat, craning her neck to
see the speedometer as we plowed into oncoming traffic and past slower
cars. “Should I go and push?” She discouraged us from stopping at roadside
stands for tea and, over meals, needled her colleagues about their halting
progress on several co-authored manuscripts.

Keller’s publication list runs to more than 250 articles, about half of
which attempt to poke holes in the impact theory. After her 1988 paper on
forams in Tunisia, she decided to see whether the slow and steady
extinction pattern she’d observed at El Kef held true elsewhere, and she
analyzed foram populations pre- and post-Chicxulub at nearly 300 sites
around the world. Over and over, Keller saw “no evidence of a sudden mass
killing.” Instead, she found more proof that the Earth’s fauna grew
progressively more distressed starting 300,000 years before the
extinction. The forams, for example, gradually shrank, declined in number,
and showed less diversity, until only a handful of species
remained—results consistent with what many paleontologists have observed
for animals on land during the same time.

More problematic still, Chicxulub did not appear to Keller to have been
particularly deadly. Samples she gathered in El Peńón, Mexico, west of the
crater, revealed healthy populations of forams even after the asteroid
struck. Photosynthetic creatures, which should have been doomed by the
dust cloud’s shroud of darkness, also managed to survive.

And then there was the issue of the four previous mass extinctions. None
appeared to have been triggered by an impact, although numerous other
asteroids have pummeled our planet over the millennia. (Pro-impact
scientists counter that not only was the Chicxulub asteroid gigantic, it
also landed in the deadliest possible site: in shallow waters, where it
kicked up climate-altering vaporized rock.)

Keller found the asteroid’s timing suspect, too. The impacters had long
pegged Chicxulub’s age to the date of the extinction, which is widely
agreed to have occurred approximately 66 million years ago. They reasoned
that the two must be synchronous, because the destruction caused by the
asteroid would have been near-instantaneous. This looked like circular
logic to Keller, who in 2002 set out to investigate whether the two really
were concurrent. Analyzing samples drilled from deep within the Chicxulub
crater, Keller uncovered 20 inches of limestone and other sediment between
the fallout from the asteroid and the forams’ most pronounced die-off.
This was evidence that thousands of years had elapsed in between, she
argued. (Smit’s findings from the same samples were diametrically opposed;
he countered that a tsunami, triggered by the asteroid, had deposited the
sediment essentially overnight.) Based on similar results from Haiti,
Texas, and elsewhere in Mexico, Keller concluded that the asteroid had hit
200,000 years before the extinction—far too early to have caused it.

So what did cause it? Keller began searching for other possible culprits.
She was looking for a menace that had become gradually more deadly over
hundreds of thousands of years, such that it would have caused increasing
stress followed by a final, dramatic obliteration.

She had a promising lead: The Earth’s four prior mass extinctions are each
associated with enormous volcanic eruptions that lasted about 1 million
years apiece. The fifth extinction, the one that doomed the dinosaurs,
occurred just as one of the largest volcanoes in history seethed in the
Deccan Traps.

Yet it is not only a volcano’s absolute size that makes it catastrophic,
but also the pace of its eruptions. The Earth can recover from large
environmental disturbances—unless those disruptions come too quickly,
compounding the injury until they overwhelm the planet’s ability to
equilibrate.


India’s Deccan Traps were formed by the release of an estimated 720,000
cubic miles of lava, over an area three times the size of France. (Bianca
Bosker; Denise Nestor)
Until the mid-1980s, geologists believed that Deccan’s network of
volcanoes had erupted over millions of years, simmering so gently as to be
mostly harmless. A 1986 paper concluded that the bulk of its eruptions had
occurred within 1 million years, but scientists still couldn’t connect
those explosions to the mass dying. Keller’s first paper on Deccan
volcanism, in 2008, provided unprecedented evidence that suggested there
could be a link: She documented huge lava flows just preceding the
extinction, which was demarcated in the rock record by the fossils of
creatures that had evolved only after the mass dying. Using new dating
techniques, Keller and her Princeton colleagues further condensed Deccan’s
activity to about 750,000 years. Now, on this trip, she was drafting a new
paper showing that the biggest Deccan eruptions—accounting for nearly half
of the volcanoes’ explosive output—had been squeezed into the last 60,000
years before the mass extinction. During that time, so much gas, ash, and
lava were pumped into the ecosystem that the Earth hit “the point of no
return,” she said.

On this excursion, Keller hoped to gather samples that would allow her to
create a detailed timeline of Deccan activity in the 100,000 years leading
up to the extinction. The goal: to see whether its biggest belches
correlated with environmental stress and mass dying around the world.
Basar was 300 miles east of some of the highest points in the Deccan
Traps, an area near the epicenter of the eruptions. Keller had chosen
Basar because she suspected that the long, low stretches of basalt around
us had been formed by some of the largest lava flows—ejected during major
eruptions immediately preceding the extinction. To prove that, however,
Keller needed to have the rock dated.

We were snaking down a sinewy road one afternoon when Adatte hollered, the
van screeched to a stop, and everyone scrambled out to inspect a steep
hill in the elbow of a hairpin turn. It didn’t look like much to me.
Rising up from the asphalt were several yards of pebbly, khaki-colored
rock, then a thin band of seafoam-green rock, followed by a pinkish layer,
and then round, brown rocks interspersed with white roots.

Adatte sank to his knees and burrowed into the pebbles. Eddy licked a
rock, to determine whether it was clay. Keller sprinted up the incline
until she was eye level with the greenish layer.

“Keep digging!” Keller told Adatte. “This is a real bonanza for us!”

She translated the outcrop for me as though it were text in a foreign
language. Rocks record the passage of time vertically: The distance
between where Adatte sat covered in gravel and where Keller perched at the
top of the hill potentially represented the progression of several hundred
thousand years. “Think of it as walking up through time,” Keller said. She
passed me a chunk of the seafoam-colored rock and pointed to a tiny white
fossil protruding like a baby tooth: evidence of tempestites, broken
shells carried in by a storm. The area near Keller’s head had evidently
once been a prehistoric lake or seaway. The pinkish soil above that had
been buried under lava—the brown rocks covered with tangled roots. Since
the pinkish layer and the shells predated the flows, they could help
pinpoint that particular eruption.

Geology is a field of delayed gratification, and there was little else the
scientists could say definitively before getting the samples into a lab.
While Syed Khadri fielded questions from puzzled locals who wanted to know
why the foreigners were playing in the dirt, Keller, Adatte, and Eddy
filled clear-plastic bags with fistfuls of rock to ship home.

Back in the van, Adatte told me about a recent conference where several
researchers had debated the validity of Deccan volcanism versus the impact
theory in front of an audience of their peers, who had then voted, by a
show of hands, on which they thought had caused the extinction. Adatte
said the result was 70–30 in favor of volcanism. I heard later from the
paleontologist Paul Wignall, who’d argued for the impact side, that
Chicxulub had won 60–40, though he conceded that the scientists were
essentially split—clearly, the question was far from resolved. When I
asked Wignall who had rescued Deccan volcanism and helped popularize it,
he said, “If you were to name one person, you would name Gerta.”


4.
Our long stretches in the car provided Keller ample time to continue
inventorying her own numerous brushes with extinction.

Her childhood could pass for the opening of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
Keller’s mother was the eldest of 12 children in a wealthy Lichtenstein
family. According to stories Keller heard as a kid, their fortune from
hotels and real estate kept the children wearing Parisian couture and
summering in Austria. But the old-money clan grew distant from Keller’s
mother after she married Keller’s father, one of 18 children born to Swiss
woodworkers, whose dreams of becoming a farmer clashed with the bride’s
privileged upbringing. The young couple took out loans to buy a farm,
where they raised cows, sheep, ducks, rabbits, vegetables, and their 12
children, the sixth of whom was Keller.

Keller grew up among rocks, in the alpine crevices of a Swiss village
where the neighbors still believed in witches. Although Keller’s father
enlisted his brood to tend the land—working them so hard that a neighbor
once reported him—the family constantly teetered on the brink of
bankruptcy. To put meat on the table, Keller’s mother once stewed up one
of the cats the family kept on the farm. Another time, she gave an older
daughter some fresh “mutton” as a gift—in actuality, Keller’s butchered
pet dog.

Keller attended a local public school where one teacher oversaw four
grades, an arrangement Keller enjoyed because it allowed her to tackle the
older students’ more difficult assignments. Then, much as now, she
considered herself in a league apart from her peers. “I didn’t socialize
much with the other kids, because I thought they were too dumb,” Keller
told me. (“In school, well, how should I put this? I was very good at
whatever I did,” she said another time.) She devoured books, completed her
siblings’ homework in exchange for them doing her chores, and fumed that
girls had to cook and clean while boys got to study science and math.

At age 12, Keller wanted to become a doctor. Her teacher, concerned by
these delusions of grandeur, called in a Jungian psychologist to
administer a Rorschach test and remind Keller that the daughter of such a
poor family should aspire to less. Shortly afterward, Keller received a
visit from a priest: Keller’s mother wanted him to take her to a nunnery,
but Keller refused to go. Two years later, Keller—given the choice of
becoming a maid, a salesgirl, or a seamstress—apprenticed with a
dressmaker. Her mother hoped that she would help clothe her siblings.
Keller eventually worked for Christian Dior’s fashion house, sewing gowns
for 25 cents an hour.

In her teens, Keller resolved to die before she turned 23. She was
suicidal for reasons she declined to explain to me in detail, but
attributed generally to frustration with Swiss society—her sense that
“options were limited for a kid from a poor family,” plus “the sexual
harassment” and “the way women were treated.” “You were just a piece of
meat at any time,” she told me. She tried to kill herself by taking
sleeping pills, failed, then figured she would live as dangerously as
possible and die in the process. “I just never got killed,” she said. “Not
completely, anyway.”

In 1964, at age 19, Keller quit her job in Zurich and hitchhiked through
Spain and North Africa for six months. She was detained at the
Algeria–Tunisia border amid a coup that deposed Algeria’s president, but
says she eventually charmed an army commander into letting her pass and
even providing her with an escort—a drug trafficker who happened to be
heading the same way. She continued her trek around the globe: Greece,
Israel, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, where her plan to continue on to
Russia was interrupted when her health failed. It was hepatitis, which she
had contracted at the Algerian border. “At the hospital, they didn’t think
that I would live,” she said.

After a year of recovery, Keller set sail from Genoa to Australia, which
she planned to use as a jumping-off point for travel throughout Asia.
Keller recalls that during the three-week journey, her ship collided with
its sister vessel, hit a typhoon in the Indian Ocean, and was found to be
infested with mafiosi smuggling weapons. When Keller disembarked, an
Australian official tried to steer her to a sweatshop crammed with
immigrants at sewing machines, attempting to negotiate a cut of Keller’s
pay, in perpetuity. But Keller spoke better English than the official
realized. She discovered the plan, threatened to report the official, and
worked instead as a nurse’s aide, then a waitress.

She was returning from a picnic near Sydney’s Suicide Cliffs one day when
a bank robber, fleeing the scene of the crime, shot her, puncturing her
lungs, shattering her ribs, and landing her in intensive care. “Woman Shot
‘for No Reason,’?” announced a headline in The Sydney Morning Herald.
(“She looked dead,” a witness told the paper.) A priest came to administer
last rites and, as Keller hovered in and out of consciousness, commanded
her to confess her sins. Twice, she refused. “I credit that priest with my
survival, because he made me so mad,” Keller told me. The experience also
cured her of her death wish.

Keller eventually made her way to Asia, then arrived in California with
plans to continue to South America. Instead, she settled in San Francisco
and, at age 24, returned to school. She enrolled in community college,
telling the registrar that her academic records had been destroyed in a
fire, and later transferred to San Francisco State University, where she
majored in anthropology, the most scientific field she could enter without
a background in math or science. Her passion for mass extinction began
with a geology class she took during her junior year. The professor told
her that if she liked rocks and enjoyed travel, she should become a
geologist—“because there are rocks everywhere, and you can always dream up
some project to do and someone will fund it for you,” Keller recalled him
saying.

She became the first member of her family to graduate from college, and
then one of the first women to receive a doctoral degree in earth sciences
from Stanford. In 1984, she joined the faculty at Princeton, where she is
currently one of two tenured women in the geosciences department.
(According to a 2017 survey by the American Geosciences Institute, 85
percent of the country’s tenured geosciences professors are male.)


Keller doing fieldwork in Alabama in 1982 (Gerta Keller)
Although Keller is alert to situations in which women are treated
differently from men, she hesitates to blame sexism for the hostility she
has faced. “There is clearly sexism going on at some level, but there is
no way I would be able to prove it, nor would I want to,” she told me.
“Because to me, it is critically important that I, as a woman, can make it
in science without even referring to sexism.”

But Vincent Courtillot, an early proponent of Deccan volcanism who has
closely followed Keller’s work, thinks that prejudice has tainted other
scientists’ treatment of her. “She is a forceful woman and she is a
courageous woman in a world where, I don’t have to tell you, for someone
to rise to the top of geology as a female is much harder than for a male,”
he says.

Keller adores her work. Never before have I encountered someone so gleeful
about catastrophe. When we discussed the risk that the Yellowstone
supervolcano might blow at any time, Keller’s eyes twinkled. “It’s a fun
idea,” she said. To her, mass extinctions are not depressing. Rather, they
illuminate life’s fundamental questions. “Ask yourself, ‘Where did you
come from?’ ‘Why are we here?’?” Keller told me. “If you extract all the
religious bullshit away from it, you have to go to nature. And the only
way to find out is really to study the history.”

Though Keller’s critics accuse her of being ego-driven and publicity-
hungry, in the time I spent with her she showed little concern for her
legacy. Instead, she expressed a dim view of what 44,000 years of human
civilization will leave behind, much less her own few decades on the
planet. “Just think, if we wipe ourselves out in the next couple of
thousand years, there will be no record left,” she said, studying the
eroded remains of 66-million-year-old basalt as we drove back to the
Hyderabad airport, from which we would travel to the heart of the Deccan
Traps. “I mean, it’s a second. A nanosecond in history. Who will find our
remains?”


5.
On june 8, 1783, Iceland’s Laki volcano began to smoke. The ground
wrenched open “like an animal tearing apart its prey” and out spilled a
“flood of fire,” according to an eyewitness’s diary. Laki let loose clouds
of sulfur, fluorine, and hydrofluoric acid, blanketing Europe with the
stench of rotten eggs. The sun disappeared behind a haze so thick that at
noon it was too dark to read. (Unlike the cone-shaped stratovolcanoes from
third-grade science class, both Deccan and Laki were fissure eruptions,
which fracture the Earth’s crust, spewing lava as the ground pulls apart.)

Destruction was immediate. Acid rain burned through leaves, blistered
unprotected skin, and poisoned plants. People and animals developed
deformed joints, softened bones, cracked gums, and strange growths on
their bodies—all symptoms of fluorine poisoning. Mass death began eight
days after the eruption. More than 60 percent of Iceland’s livestock died
within a year, along with more than 20 percent of its human population.
And the misery spread. Benjamin Franklin reported a “constant fog” over “a
great part of North America.” Severe droughts plagued India, China, and
Egypt. Cold temperatures in Japan ushered in what is remembered as the
“year without a summer,” and the nation suffered the worst famine in its
history. Throughout Europe, crops turned white and withered, and in June,
desiccated leaves covered the ground as though it were October. Europe’s
famine lasted three years; historians have blamed Laki for the start of
the French Revolution.

“But that’s just a short-term event from a relatively minor eruption,
compared with Deccan,” Keller told me. A single Deccan eruption was
“thousands of times larger” than Laki, she said. “And then you repeat that
over and over again. For basically 350,000 years before the massive die-
off.”

Laki released 3.3 cubic miles of lava; Deccan unleashed an estimated
720,000 cubic miles, eventually covering an area three times the size of
France. It took us five hours of driving, an hour-and-a-half flight from
Hyderabad to Pune, and another three hours in the car to trace the lava
flows from some of their farthest, flattest reaches back to some of their
highest points, in Mahabaleshwar, a vertiginous town crowded with
honeymooners. Mountains of basalt 2.1 miles high—nearly twice as tall as
the Grand Canyon is deep—extended as far as I could see. Even the
geologists, who had visited the Deccan Traps multiple times before, gaped
at the landscape.

“It’s mind-blowing,” Eddy said. “Every time.”

Keller, whose food poisoning had gone from bad to worse, made the van pull
over so we could revisit an outcrop she’d sampled twice before, on
previous trips. At the base of an undulating wall of black basalt, Keller
ran her hand over a blood-colored layer of rock, bumpy and inflamed as a
scab. Where we now stood was virtually within a blink of an eye of the
mass extinction, she explained: Keller’s collaborators had dated this red
layer and found that it was deposited tens of thousands of years before
the extinction, just before Deccan’s largest and most lethal eruptions
began.

“Shit hits the fan for the last 40,000 years,” Keller said. “The eruptions
really took off. Huge. Absolutely huge. That’s when we have the longest
lava flows on Earth, into the Bay of Bengal”—more than 600 miles away,
practically the length of California.

A drawing that hangs over Keller’s desk at Princeton depicts her vision of
this apocalypse, which was heavily informed by accounts of how Laki
poisoned Iceland’s livestock. “I told [the artist], ‘Yellow foaming at the
mouth!’?” Keller recounted, delighted. In the illustration, dinosaurs,
gurgling lime-green vomit, writhe on a hill spotted with flames and
charred tree stumps; just behind them, a diagonal gash in the ground
blazes with lava and spews dark, swirling clouds. According to Keller’s
research, while Deccan’s lava flows would have devastated the Indian
subcontinent, its release of ash, toxic elements (mercury, lead), and
gases (sulfur, methane, fluorine, chlorine, carbon dioxide) would also
have blown around the world, wreaking havoc globally.

As she sees it, the ash, mercury, and lead would have settled over
habitats, poisoning creatures and their food supply. The belches of sulfur
would have initially cooled the climate, then they would have drenched the
Earth in acid rain, ravaging the oceans and destroying vegetation that
land animals needed to survive. The combination of carbon dioxide and
methane would have eventually raised temperatures on land by as much as
14.4 degrees Fahrenheit,** further acidifying oceans and making them
inhospitable to plankton and other forams. Once these microscopic
creatures disappear from the base of the food chain, larger marine animals
follow. “At that point, extinction is inevitable,” Keller said.

Rocks elsewhere in the world support the sequence of events Keller has
discerned in the Deccan Traps. She and her collaborators have found
evidence of climate change and skyrocketing mercury levels following the
largest eruptions, and other researchers have documented elevated
concentrations of sulfur and chlorine consistent with severe pollution by
volcanic gases. Keller posits that even the iridium layers could be linked
to Deccan’s eruptions, given that volcanic dust can carry high
concentrations of the element.

She also sees Deccan’s fingerprints in the fossil record. The gradual
decline of the forams—followed by their sudden, dramatic downfall—aligns
with Deccan’s pattern of eruptions: Over several hundred thousand years,
its volcanic activity stressed the environment, until its largest
emissions dealt a final, devastating blow. The Earth’s flora and fauna did
not show signs of recovery for more than 500,000 years afterward—a time
period that coincides with Deccan’s ongoing belches. The volcano simmered
long after most species had vanished, keeping the planet nearly
uninhabitable.


6.
“Her conclusions are way off,” Jan Smit, the Dutch scientist, told me.
After nearly 40 years of arguing, the two sides still cannot agree on
fundamental facts. Smit and other impacters counter Keller’s scenario with
a long list of rebuttals: The planet’s species went extinct “almost
overnight,” Smit insists, too quickly to be caused by Deccan volcanism.
India’s volcanoes hiccuped for hundreds of thousands of years, too weakly
and for too long to be deadly, Keller’s critics contend. They argue that
there is no evidence that species suffered while Deccan simmered, and that
the biggest volcanic eruptions occurred after the extinction, too late to
have been the catalyst. Besides, they add, new dating places the
asteroid’s impact within 32,000 years of the annihilation—as close as a
“gnat’s eyebrow,” says the geochronologist Paul Renne, who led the study.

Some scientists have attempted to find a middle ground between the two
camps. A team at UC Berkeley, headed by Renne, has recently incorporated
volcanism into the asteroid theory, proposing that Chicxulub’s collision
unleashed earthquakes that in turn triggered Deccan’s most destructive
pulses. But Keller rejects this hypothesis. “It’s impossible,” she told
me. “They are trying to save the impact theory by modifying it.”

The greatest area of consensus between the volcanists and the impacters
seems to be on what insults to sling. Both sides accuse the other of
ignoring data. Keller says that her pro-impact colleagues “will not listen
or discuss evidence that is contrary to what they believe”; Alan
Hildebrand, a prominent impacter, says Keller “doesn’t look at all the
evidence.” Each side dismisses the other as unscientific: “It’s not
science. It sometimes seems to border on religious fervor, basically,”
says Keller, whose work Smit calls “barely scientific.” Both sides contend
that the other is so stubborn, the debate will be resolved only when the
opposition croaks. “You don’t convince the old people about a new idea.
You wait for them to die,” jokes Courtillot, the volcanism advocate,
paraphrasing Max Planck. Smit agrees: “You just have to let them get
extinct.”

All the squabbling raises a question: How will the public know when
scientists have determined which scenario is right? It is tempting, but
unreliable, to trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Forty-one
co-authors signed on to a 2010 Science paper asserting that Chicxulub was,
after all the evidence had been evaluated, conclusively to blame for the
dinosaurs’ death. Case closed, again. Although some might consider this
proof of consensus, dozens of geologists, paleontologists, and biologists
wrote in to the journal contesting the paper’s methods and conclusions.
Science is not done by vote.

Ultimately, consensus may be the wrong goal. Adrian Currie, a philosopher
of science at Cambridge University, worries that the feverish competition
in academia coupled with the need to curry favor with colleagues—in order
to get published, get tenure, or get grant money—rewards timid research at
the expense of maverick undertakings. He and others argue that controversy
produces progress, pushing experts to take on more sophisticated
questions. Some of Keller’s most outspoken critics told me that her
naysaying has motivated their research. “She keeps us sharp, definitely,”
Smit said. Though trading insults is not the mark of dispassionate
scientific research, perhaps detached investigation is not ideal, either.
It is passion, after all, that drives scientists to dig deeper, defy the
majority, and hunt rocks in rural India for 12 hours at a stretch while
suffering acute gastrointestinal distress.


7.
Keller’s attentiveness to the stories that rocks tell enables her to live
concurrently in the past, present, and future. She was here, driving
through Pune’s smog-filled mountains. The sight of their jagged outlines
simultaneously transported her back in time 66 million years, to when the
Indian subcontinent split apart, spewing gas, ash, and fire. That, in
turn, evoked the eventual demise of the human species, which Keller argues
will be triggered by forces similar to Deccan volcanism.

Keller fears that we are filling our environment with the same
ingredients—sulfur, carbon dioxide, mercury, and more—that killed the
dinosaurs and that, left unchecked, will catalyze another mass extinction,
this one of our own devising. “You just replace Deccan volcanism’s effect
with today’s fossil-fuel burning,” she told me. “It’s exactly the same.”

Keller sees a bleak future when she looks at our present. Oceans are
acidifying. The climate is warming. Mercury levels are rising. Countless
species are endangered and staring down extinction—much like the gradual,
then rapid, downfall of the forams. Whether or not Deccan ultimately
caused the mass extinction, its eruptions illuminate how our current
environment may react to man-made pollutants. If Deccan was responsible,
however, Keller’s theory casts our current actions in a terrifying light.
(Not to be outdone, impacters recently highlighted the Chicxulub
asteroid’s relevance to the present day in a paper for Science, arguing
that the asteroid injected enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to
cause 100,000 years of global warming.)

The asteroid theory has ingrained in the public’s imagination the idea
that mass extinction will be quick and sensational—that we will go out in
a great, momentous ball of fire. Big rock from sky hits the humans, and
boom they go. But Keller’s vision of the sixth extinction, given what she
sees as its parallels with Deccan volcanism, suggests that the end will be
drawn out and difficult to recognize as such within humans’ brief
conception of time. “We are living in the middle of a mass extinction
today,” Keller told me. “But none of us feel that urgency, or that it
really is so.”

Death felt especially present the afternoon we visited a quarry that
stretched 15 miles through the countryside. The landscape was eviscerated.
A mountain in the distance had been cut away, leaving a rectangular,
unnatural pit. Hills streaked with orange, purple, red, and yellow dirt
rose around us, their peaks active with trucks dumping more rainbows of
dirt. It was spoil, Eddy explained, the unwanted earth that the strip
miners had to dig through to reach the Jurassic seam—the coal that, 145
million years ago, was a swamp.

The scene got Keller thinking about mass extinctions still to come and the
geologists of the future (“They’ll probably be cockroaches”), who, while
studying this landscape, will be hopelessly confused by all these rock
layers jostled on top of one another, out of order.

“There’ll be someone going around the Earth trying to figure out what
happened to us,” Eddy said. “There’ll be big debates about it.”

“Well, we were stupid and killed ourselves. On a grand scale,” Keller
said. “You rule the world, and then you die.”

We all chuckled at this prediction—mass extinction, by this point, having
become something of a macabre inside joke. Just past the spoil, we reached
the end of the road, which was lined with piles of white dirt too tall to
see over. Clambering over them in search of outcrops, we were confronted
by a strange view on the other side: an enormous field of coal, pockmarked
with holes. The black earth had been dug at regular intervals to create
thousands of pits, all the size and depth of shallow graves. Each one had
its own mound of white earth beside it, as if waiting to be filled. No one
could explain what they were.


--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.