The Nastiest Feud in Science

August 10, 2018 7:24 PM

A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions.
posted by the man of twists and turns (42 comments total)

Wow, that was a very interesting article, thanks for the post.
posted by dhruva at 7:44 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

Anacondas in Madagascar?
posted by mollweide at 7:52 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Dinosaurs are what paleontologists call “charismatic megafauna”: sexy, sympathetic beasts whose obliteration transfixes pretty much anyone with a pulse.

I don't consider dinosaurs sexy, but to each her own.
posted by betweenthebars at 7:56 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Ok so deep down in the article there's a mention of Keller having to eat a pet cat as a child
posted by Hermione Granger at 8:07 PM on August 10, 2018 [8 favorites]

I thought the nastiest feud in science was whether the sense of smell used molecule shape or vibration to differentiate different molecules?
posted by Quackles at 8:16 PM on August 10, 2018 [5 favorites]

Also.....tigers in Belize? my Fun Animal Facts pedant nature cannot abide by such errors.
(interesting piece, though).
posted by faineg at 8:19 PM on August 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ok so deep down in the article there's a mention of Keller having to eat a pet cat as a child

The next sentence says what happened to the family dog, too.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:20 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

(The dinosaurs were never obliterated, though. They simply flew away.)
posted by tapesonthefloor at 8:27 PM on August 10, 2018 [8 favorites]

The dispute is a manifestation of gradualism vs. catastrophism, and that's historically nasty because of theology.
posted by thelonius at 9:03 PM on August 10, 2018 [10 favorites]

If we are cataloguing nitpicks, the 45th parallel runs through the middle of Oregon - hardly the border between the US and Canada.
But I thought this was pretty interesting - I had not heard this counter view before at all.
posted by janell at 9:22 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was always taught that it was both honestly- that we deffo had evidence of a meteor impact and the subsequent bad stuff, but that around that time (geologically speaking) a bunch of basalt traps were also active. Like 8 years ago during an intro to geology class the professor even posited that it was possible that the meteor impact kicked off the eruptions. por que no los dos?
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:40 PM on August 10, 2018 [25 favorites]

Because one of them gets put in grade school science textbooks and the other gets mentioned offhandedly in college-level geology class discussions.
posted by Small Dollar at 9:49 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I think the Iridium, and as I recall, the finding of the likely crater of said asteroid, suggests otherwise. 1980's Geology grad here. Too many BS bits here...
posted by Windopaene at 10:04 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I don't consider dinosaurs sexy, but to each her own.

Indeed.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:21 PM on August 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I got the asteroid impact story growing up (mid to late 80s was my dino phase) but agree with H. neanderthalensis in that I've head more recently (within 10 years or so) that a combo theory was seeming more likely--to the point that (non-avian) dinos were already in decline before the K-T impact and that the impactor pushed them over the edge.
posted by MikeKD at 11:47 PM on August 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also, the article's set up seems overly dramatic; I'd contend the Bones Wars were nastier, not the least because, reportedly, dynamite was involved.
posted by MikeKD at 12:09 AM on August 11, 2018 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I remember hearing/reading that the dinosaurs were dying down/out slowly from the effects of the vulcanization - that some pretty major species had already gone - when the asteroid impact finished the rest off.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:22 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

The article mentions Walter Alvarez only once, in passing, while it painstakingly presents Luis Alvarez as an arrogant physicist. But his son Walter is a geologist and this originated in his work, and then Luis collaborated.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:37 AM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don't consider dinosaurs sexy, but to each her own.

What about their tractors? Do you think their tractors are sexy?
posted by NoMich at 4:41 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

My favorite alternate theory for the dinosaur extinction is punctuated equilibria. Basically that evolutionary systems can look stable for long periods of time and then whammo, all by their own internal dynamics there's a collapse and radical shift in a short period of time. There's a lot of mathematical modelling that suggests this is not only possible, but likely to occur.

Pretty sure the iridum layer + actual crater explains the dinosaur extinction. But there are many massive extinction events in earth's history. They're probably not all caused by asteroids.
posted by Nelson at 6:55 AM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Every seventeen years the physicists rise on gossamer wings and descend on some unsuspecting discipline, rising again after some time has passed to leave behind something that will be broken for decades.
It really is that bad - see Fred Hoyle and his campaign against Archaeopteryx for another example.
The stamp collecting jab goes back to at least Arthur Eddington and has always been bullshit - if we weren't out there collecting data (and collecting data without prejudging it's meaning is a difficult skill in itself and deserves respect) the people with advanced cases of physicist disease wouldn't have anything to build their crystal castles on (although string theory, and it's experimental untestability, suggests that certain physicists at least have given up on reality entirely).
There are no neat clear solutions in the observational sciences. FWIW, the general feeling in geology and palaeontology, among people not directly involved in the controversy, is that a whole bunch of stuff contributed to the extinction with the asteroid being part of the mix.
It's messy and complex and people who require simple, definitive solutions should probably look elsewhere.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:29 AM on August 11, 2018 [14 favorites]

I dunno, I was watching a thing on TV where this archaeologist was widely ridiculed for suggesting that the pyramids in Egypt were built as landing pads for alien spaceships, and it turned out he was right, so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by xedrik at 7:52 AM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

Wat
posted by lalochezia at 7:58 AM on August 11, 2018

Fascinating and beautifully written article.

It's funny how much the perspective depends on who's doing the telling, though. In my undergrad evolutionary biology course, when we covered the K-T extinction, the asteroid hypothesis was presented as the plucky fringe theory that was widely laughed at until Alvarez and others finally won over the scientific community by careful assembly of the evidence.

Honestly, my takeaway from this article is that all the major players involved in this research sound like they have tremendous egos and would be really unpleasant to work with. Keller does sound like a badass, though, but maybe easier to admire from a slight distance.
posted by biogeo at 8:12 AM on August 11, 2018 [5 favorites]

the pyramids in Egypt were built as landing pads for alien spaceships,
Nonsense! We know that the pyramids were used by aliens to store grain.
posted by TwoStride at 8:40 AM on August 11, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm still fully behind Gary Larson's theory.

It's a good article. It sounds like Gerta Keller can give it as well as she receives it, but that list of insults is pretty telling. How many male scientists would casually say these things about a male colleague: "stupid," "you don’t know what you’re doing," "totally wrong," "nonsense," “fringe," "unethical," "particularly dishonest," and "a gadfly"?
posted by peeedro at 9:11 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

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.”

While I take their meaning, there is no (or scarcely any) theology of hell in the Old Testament, at best an amorphous Sheol, a kind of dusty, wispy place not very different from the ancient Greek Hades. An Old Testament version of hell would be more boring than anything else. You don't get the lake of fire stuff until the New Testament, and even then it's not terribly descriptive. What they really want, I think, is Dante.

/theology derail
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:24 AM on August 11, 2018 [16 favorites]

and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact

I kinda get what he's aiming for here, but I would still hope that most, if not all, Science teachers don't teach anything as "uncontested", since that's pretty antithetical to science in the first place.
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:45 AM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

Nonsense! We know that the pyramids were used by aliens to store grain.

posted by TwoStride at 8:40 AM on August 11 [2 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]

Clearly it's true. Government experts say it is.
posted by Mental Wimp at 9:51 AM on August 11, 2018

I have no trouble believing there is plenty of assholism going on, people were equally assholish to the Alvarez camp before the accumulating discovers made it extremely clear that indeed, a very large meteor had hit the earth and drastically pruned the evolutionary tree, allowing the later expansion of the mammalian and avian dinosaur groups. But the attitude of I've got the secret knowledge that will "invalidate the asteroid-impact theory", if only I wasn't being oppressed by Big Science makes me roll my eyes.

There's all sorts of debate about to what degree Chicxulub was just the biggest hammer blow in ongoing challenges to the existing order, but even finding a non-avian dinosaur fossil from after the strike wouldn't "invalidate" it; I don't think scientists would be hugely surprised if some of the smaller non-avian dinosaurs survived the initial period and then were out-competed by the burgeoning mammals. It's a question of understanding more about the context before and after, not invalidating it.
posted by tavella at 12:50 PM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

The insults hurled at Keller are (unfortunately) routinely thrown among male scientists at each other. Look at the feuds between Isaac Newton and his contemporaries Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz. Biology to the present day has plenty of nasty public fights between men taunting each other like grade schoolers. The fact that Keller is on the receiving end of similar invective, like asteroid-dissenters the late Charles Officer and late Charles Drake before her, is hardly an indication of sexism on the part of her opponents, even if it is bad behavior.
posted by haiku warrior at 1:13 PM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah, men might certainly be quicker and more relentless in insulting a woman in science (and I've sure watched that happen) but nothing here is anything they wouldn't say about a man.

For gendered insults, watch for backhanded compliments, like "She should stick to what she does well, which is not this," or insinuations that she's too emotionally attached to her theory ('cause dudes aren't, no, never).
posted by BrashTech at 2:05 PM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

"Every seventeen years the physicists rise on gossamer wings and descend on some unsuspecting discipline, rising again after some time has passed to leave behind something that will be broken for decades."

This is so true but, again, this originated with Walter Alvarez, and as a geologist this was entirely in his wheelhouse.

The impression I get is that Keller professionally came of age just when catastrophism had finally been put aside in geology and paleontology. Catastrophism was a perspective borne from religious myth and it was especially pernicious im geology and paleontology (both relatively young sciences). To Keller, the catastrophism of the impact hypothesis for the K-T boundary and mass extinction event was regressive, a step backward into superstition. I'm old enough to recall when tectonic theory was still thought outlandish and Velikovsky's book still a bestseller. Keller's skepticism, at that precise time, and within the context of the disconfirming evidence she found early in her career, all add up to her strong resistance being quite understandable. This is a common story in science; there are always holdouts and most of them aren't cranks. Sometimes, but rarely, they're eventually vindicated.

Even so, the dissident scientist bravely fighting the establishment is a misleading and harmful pop-culture narrative -- it's an artifact of selection bias (what and how science history is taught) coupled with the familiar American narrative of inspiring individualism. Much more often than not, the consensus is correct (given the available evidence at the time) and science itself is 98% gradual process and 2% extraordinary revision.

The telling thing in this article for me is that Keller seems resistant to any any connection between the K-T extinction and the Chicxulub impact while, in contrast, the impact consensus still allows for the role of the Deccan Traps eruptions. Additionally, the impact consensus is narrowly focused -- it's not a theory of mass extinctions, it's an explanation of only one, specifically.

Whenever there's a major revision like this, there are always skeptics who look for (and often find) some disconfirming evidence for the rest of their careers. It's not only typical, it's how science is supposed to work. Just as most attempts at revolutionary research are fruitless, yet necessary, so too are the long-term holdouts.

I'm also not impressed by acrimonious debates between septuagenarian scientists - they're almost without exception people still fighting the last war, and often because the disagreement became personal.

The writer uses millenia to signify a great amount of time in the context of geology and paleontology, which irked me.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:19 PM on August 11, 2018 [8 favorites]

The impression I get is that Keller professionally came of age just when catastrophism had finally been put aside in geology and paleontology.

This is pretty much exactly backwards. Catastrophism was first proposed scientifically by paleontologist Georges Cuvier in the early 1800s based on his interpretation of the stratigraphic record. It had nothing to do with religious catastrophes. But some theologians appropriated his ideas to support a biblical interpretation.

Around the 1850s James Hutton (sometimes called the father of geology) and Charles Lyell were proponents of the idea of uniformitarianism, the idea that geologic processes were slow and uniform over immense periods of time.

Uniformitarianism, the opposite of catastrophism, was the dominant view in geology from the 1850s through the 1960s. Harlen Bretz was the victim of this dominant view when he first proposed in 1923 that the channeled scab lands of eastern Washington were the result of a gigantic flood over a few days caused by the breaking of a glacial dam in prehistoric Lake Missoula. It took 40 years for this catastrophic view to prevail. Since the 1960s, catastrophism has finally become dominant with the idea that slow geologic history is punctuated by periods of very rapid change.

I don't think the Deccan Traps falls into the category of uniformitarianism. Like the asteroid impact it occurred as a catastrophe in just a blink of geologic time, but the asteroid impact is just a more extreme case.
posted by JackFlash at 2:50 PM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I know less about this than I ought and I'm confusing some things together.

Don't you think, though, that Keller seems to see the impact hypothesis as prima facie absurd, as sensationalistic and Velikovskian? There's catastrophism and then there's catastrophism. Many scientists have the same reaction to the collision hypothesis about the Moon.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:25 PM on August 11, 2018

In the history of geology, it is uniformitarianism that was orthodoxy for more than a century and I think Keller is a holdover from that orthodoxy. She's not the revolutionary. She is the stubborn conformist of the previous century.

Neo-catastrophism is the latest idea. Geologic processes seem to come in episodic bursts -- volcanism, continental rifting, mountain building, glacial floods, meteorite impacts, the formation of the moon. While uniformitarianism has its uses for studying geologic processes, it is too limiting because it presumes that only what we see happening today can explain what happened in the past. That is why it was so hard for uniformitarians to accept the idea of enormous glacial floods in eastern Washington that were magnitudes greater than anything experienced by humans today. Now we recognize the same sorts of erosional events on Mars.

I think Keller has collected great data that needs to be explained by the impact theory. But I also think she is too stubborn in denying the impact effect in any way. Using Keller's data, even Alvarez is now combining the Deccan Traps and the impact in a one-two punch. He sees her data as supporting a long decline in species for about 200,000 years before the impact, then the sudden impact extinction event, followed by another 500,000 years of volcanism that delayed the recovery of new species.
posted by JackFlash at 5:22 PM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

Neo-catastrophism is the latest idea. Geologic processes seem to come in episodic bursts -- volcanism, continental rifting, mountain building, glacial floods, meteorite impacts, the formation of the moon.

These are odd things to say.
With the exception of your last two examples, these are all perfectly acceptable uniformitarian processes in that they can all be seen in action today. And, again except for the last two, they are all very long term and not at all catastrophic in the technical sense.
You can have meteorites. Yes, sudden change from outside the system happens. Name a system that wouldn't be susceptible to a six mile bullet. Moon formation in a crowded early solar system is essentially an astronomical problem with geological components and is a poor example for your argument.
I look out of the window and I see a flooded chalk quarry here in Austin Texas. That chalk is formed from the skeletons of trillions of long dead microscopic creatures laid down in the bizarre North South trending ocean that bisected North America in the Late Cretaceous. The Austin Chalk is almost a kilometer thick. It's deposition took millions of years. Millions of years of consistent deposition.
While there are certainly catastrophic, in the technical sense, geological events almost all the actual rocks we see are the result of long term processes we can still see today. Most of your counter examples are nothing of the sort. They are singular events caused by processes.
The Himalayas are still growing. New turbidites form off the Gulf of Mexico Continental shelf. Unnoticed, basaltic lava leaks out of a crack deep beneath the mid Atlantic as tube works squirm in the darkness.
It's all process. All of it.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:23 PM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

One of the more interesting studies to come out this year is related to volcanism at the mid-ocean ridges. You might recall that volcanism at the ridges was the first solid evidence behind the other big revolution in geology in the 1960s, continental drift. Magnetic surveys of the lava as you move horizontally away from the ridge showed alternating ribbons of oppositely magnetized rock corresponding to periodic flips in the earth's magnetic poles. There were mirror images of these ribbons on both sides of the ridge as if the lava injected at the ridge were being carried away in opposite directions by two conveyor belts. This was the first solid evidence for continental drift.

Well, the latest survey, this time using gravity from satellite observations instead of magnetism show an anomalous thickening on each side of the ridges that corresponds closely to the time of the meteor impact. Assuming that the rate of horizontal movement is constant, an anomalous thickening in the sea floor crust would indicate an increase in the rate of volcanic injection at that time that crust was at the mid-ocean ridge. This time corresponds to the impact event.

So the idea is that the force of the meteor impact was powerful enough to change the plumbing of magma around the world. The increase in volcanism would contribute to the after effects of the impact. There seems to also be a similar increase in the volcanism of the Deccan Traps at this time, also confirmed by Keller's data.

Again, this is a catastrophic speculation. There are only two other impact events we know of the size of Chixulub and both of those were almost two billion years earlier, before life had even gotten much of a start. So there just isn't anything to compare to determine if such an impact could have widespread volcanic effects. Uniformitarianism, the idea that processes we see today are the key to processes in the past, is no help here.
posted by JackFlash at 6:25 PM on August 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

There's so much that could be said about this.

Suffice it to say, this is the pattern in the history of science. We are often told that science replaced the orthodoxy and untestable tenets of religion with falsifiable tenets based strictly in the evidence. But scientists are human beings, and the age-old patterns keep re-asserting themselves. Observation is followed with interpretation. Orthodox interpretations arise. New evidence threatens the rock that church is built on.

Wegner's continental drift idea was ignored for a half-century. A generation of resisters had to die.

In the early 1800s, 1/10 to 1/3 of hospital babies were dying of puerperal fever ... spread mostly by doctors and nurses who aren't hand washing enough. In 1847 Vienna doctor Ignaz Semmelweis institutes scrubbing in his ward. Cases fall to one percent. (Other doctors in the UK and US ... including Oliver Wendell Holmes ... had noticed before him.) For the next 20 years, until Lister, babies kept dying. For lack of soap and water.

Anyway, the late Michael Crichton's Caltech lecture contains many more examples.
posted by Twang at 9:32 PM on August 11, 2018

Perhaps I am misreading Keller's statements in the article. I seem to see her argument as being, 300,000 years before the Alvarez date for the Chicxulub impact a decline begins in the number of foraminafera. Both in terms of species and population the drop is geologically rapid but far from overnight. Keller further states that this period of die-off corresponds with the Deccan Traps period of primary volcanic activity. This period, according to her research, seems to have peaked for a 60,000 year period before the Fifth Mass Extinction. Given the effects on the atmosphere of having so much mercury, fluorine, sulfur, and other volcanic gases plus the ash and lava pumped into it in so short a time massive die-off seems to be the inevitable result.

When you also add in Keller's taking samples from four different locations and dating of the Chicxulub impact as occuring 200,000 years before the foraminafera die-off her position seems to be that integrating the volcanic activity into the Chixulub extinction theory is bad science.

I have no way to evaluate if Keller or the impacters are correct. The level of research that I would have to do to get into that circus to cage those monkeys is cost and time prohibitive in my life at this time. What I can say is that if Gerta Keller is correct in her assertions then her refusal to accede to the idea that somehow Chicxulub caused the extinction is wholly correct. Chixulub may well have spread iridium around the Earth, there may well have been a cooling period that immediately followed, and like previous years without a Summer populations no doubt suffered. If this was to the point of extinction I am unable to weigh in. However I do find her case compelling as an argument. I have basically grown up with the K-T impact story and I never had reason to question it until today. Now I could go either way but I would need so compelling reason to see why she is being dismissed if she is bring the science to the table.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 10:35 PM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

I wonder what a profile of Barbara McClintock would have been like, and also how the profile we're discussing would have been different, if written or edited by a science journalist.

There's risk in having a generalist do a profile of an iconoclastic scientist, because the important part of the story isn't the human-interest part.

(But, for all I know there may be a fantastic profile of exactly that sort, just about to drop.)
posted by Baeria at 8:13 AM on August 12, 2018

State shift in Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, possibly induced by impact Renne et al., Science 02 Oct 2015: Vol. 350, Issue 6256, pp. 76-78

Bolide impact and flood volcanism compete as leading candidates for the cause of terminal-Cretaceous mass extinctions. High-precision 40Ar/39Ar data indicate that these two mechanisms may be genetically related, and neither can be considered in isolation. The existing Deccan Traps magmatic system underwent a state shift approximately coincident with the Chicxulub impact and the terminal-Cretaceous mass extinctions, after which ~70% of the Traps' total volume was extruded in more massive and more episodic eruptions. Initiation of this new regime occurred within ~50,000 years of the impact, which is consistent with transient effects of impact-induced seismic energy. Postextinction recovery of marine ecosystems was probably suppressed until after the accelerated volcanism waned.

Triggering of the largest Deccan eruptions by the Chicxulub impact, Richards et al., GSA Bulletin (2015) 127 (11-12): 1507-1520.

New constraints on the timing of the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction and the Chicxulub impact, together with a particularly voluminous and apparently brief eruptive pulse toward the end of the “main-stage” eruptions of the Deccan continental flood basalt province suggest that these three events may have occurred within less than about a hundred thousand years of each other. Partial melting induced by the Chicxulub event does not provide an energetically plausible explanation for this coincidence, and both geochronologic and magnetic-polarity data show that Deccan volcanism was under way well before Chicxulub/Cretaceous-Paleogene time. However, historical data document that eruptions from existing volcanic systems can be triggered by earthquakes. Seismic modeling of the ground motion due to the Chicxulub impact suggests that the impact could have generated seismic energy densities of order 0.1–1.0 J/m3 throughout the upper ∼200 km of Earth’s mantle, sufficient to trigger volcanic eruptions worldwide based upon comparison with historical examples

U-Pb geochronology of the Deccan Traps and relation to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, Schoene et al., Science 09 Jan 2015: Vol. 347, Issue 6218, pp. 182-184

The Chicxulub asteroid impact (Mexico) and the eruption of the massive Deccan volcanic province (India) are two proposed causes of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, which includes the demise of nonavian dinosaurs. Despite widespread acceptance of the impact hypothesis, the lack of a high-resolution eruption timeline for the Deccan basalts has prevented full assessment of their relationship to the mass extinction. Here we apply uranium-lead (U-Pb) zircon geochronology to Deccan rocks and show that the main phase of eruptions initiated ~250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and that >1.1 million cubic kilometers of basalt erupted in ~750,000 years. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the Deccan Traps contributed to the latest Cretaceous environmental change and biologic turnover that culminated in the marine and terrestrial mass extinctions.

Deccan Volcanism, Gerta Keller, Professor of Geosciences
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:11 PM on August 13, 2018