But, in 1980, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, proposed a radical answer: 65 million years ago an asteroid or comet as big as Mt. Everest slammed into the earth, raising a dust cloud vast enough to cause mass extinction. A revolutionary idea that challenged the ice-age extinction theory, the asteroid-impact theory was scorned and derided by the science community. But after years of bitter debate and intense research, an astonishing discovery was made-an immense impact crater in the Yucatán Peninsula that was identified as Ground Zero. The Alvarezes had their proof. A dramatic scientific detective story, Night Comes to the Cretaceous is a brilliant example of science at work-in the trenches, complete with passionate struggles and occasional victories.

    Some fifty years later, however, continental drift was heralded as a major scientific breakthrough and today it is accepted as scientific fact. Why did American geologists reject so adamantly an idea that is now considered a cornerstone of the discipline? And why were their European colleagues receptive to it so much earlier? This book, based on extensive archival research on three continents, provides important new answers while giving the first detailed account of the American geological community in the first half of the century. Challenging previous historical work on this episode, Naomi Oreskes shows that continental drift was not rejected for the lack of a causal mechanism, but because it seemed to conflict with the basic standards of practice in American geology. This account provides a compelling look at how scientific ideas are made and unmade.

    Representing current research priorities, it leaves behind an older--and now outdated--generation of textbooks. The author's aim is to consider the earth in terms of its physical environments, to describe the processes that affect generation, transport and deposition of sediment, and to build up a picture of the stratigraphy generated by these processes. The initial treatment is geomorphological and the general approach is non-mathematical. This will become the introductory textbook of choice in sedimentology and stratigraphy. The first introductory text to relate the units of sedimentology to the larger, stratigraphic picture. Eclipses an older generation of textbooks written before sequence stratrigraphy gave rise to a renaissance in stratigraphy. Covers the full range of sedimentology, from sub-microscopic analysis of grains of sand to the palaeogeographic evolution of whole basins. Largely a non-mathematical approach, within the grasp of students starting a degree course. Explains clearly the technical terms of soft-rock geology.