Gerta Keller facts for kids

Gerta Keller (born 7 March 1945) is a famous geologist and paleontologist. She studies big events in Earth's history, like global disasters and times when many types of plants and animals died out. Since 1984, she has been a professor of geosciences at Princeton University. In July 2020, she became a professor emeritus, which means she is retired but still connected to the university.

Gerta Keller has a different idea about what caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. This was the time about 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. Many scientists believe a giant asteroid hitting Earth at Chicxulub crater caused this. This idea is called the Alvarez hypothesis. However, Keller believes the asteroid impact happened before the main extinction. She thinks that huge volcano eruptions in India were the main reason for the extinction. These eruptions changed the environment a lot. She thinks the asteroid might have made things worse, but it wasn't the only cause. Keller is known as a top expert on these big events and how they affect life on Earth.

Her Early Life and Education

Gerta Keller grew up in Switzerland on a dairy farm. She was one of 12 children and her family was very poor. In her one-room school, boys learned science and math, while girls were taught cooking and cleaning. These were considered skills for housewives.

But Gerta loved to learn. She would read her older brothers' and sisters' textbooks. She even wrote summaries for them!

When she was 14, she went to a special school to learn sewing. She once led a protest there because girls had to wear skirts. She rode her bicycle three miles to school every day and wanted to wear pants to stay warm. The girls won, and from then on, they could wear pants.

After finishing school at 17, she worked for a famous fashion designer, Pierre Cardin. She sewed fancy dresses but was paid very little. She then traveled the world, learning English in England. She also visited North Africa, Spain, and Australia. In Australia in 1965, she had a scary experience during a bank robbery. She woke up in a hospital, but she recovered.

In 1968, Gerta Keller arrived in San Francisco. She decided to focus on her education. She passed a test to get her high school diploma. At first, she studied anthropology in college. But she wanted to travel more, so she switched to geology and then paleontology. She earned her first degree from San Francisco State University. Later, she received her doctorate in geology and paleontology from Stanford University in 1978.

Her Research on Mass Extinctions

After getting her doctorate, Dr. Keller worked for the United States Geological Survey and Stanford. She came to Princeton University in 1984. After a few years, she started studying the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. This is a special layer of rock that marks the time of the dinosaur extinction.

Dr. Keller's research led her to believe that the Chicxulub asteroid impact did not cause the extinction all by itself. She found evidence that the impact happened before the main extinction event. She once said that the dinosaurs "had a headache" the day after the impact, but that we "vastly overestimate the damage" the asteroid caused to life.

Many scientists who support the Alvarez hypothesis point to certain clues found worldwide. These clues include tiny pieces of shocked quartz, glass balls called spherules, and tektites. These are all signs of an asteroid impact. They are found in a layer of clay that also has a lot of iridium, a rare metal.

However, Dr. Keller's research found places where the glass spherules and the iridium clay are separated. There can be as much as 8 feet (2.4 m) of sand and other material between them. Scientists who support the Alvarez hypothesis think this sand was put there by a giant tsunami from the asteroid impact. They believe the tsunami pushed the sand between the layers.

But Dr. Keller's studies of these layers tell a different story. She found signs of tiny sea creatures called plankton, worms, and weathering in the material between the layers. This suggests that the material was laid down over a very long time, possibly as much as 300,000 years. This would mean the asteroid impact happened much earlier than the extinction itself.

Dr. Keller has received many awards for her important work. In 2022, The University of Lausanne in Switzerland gave her the title of Doctor Honoris. This was for her big contributions to the debate about the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. She also received the Radhakrishna Prize in 2012 for her research on the Deccan volcanism and its link to the extinction.

See also

In Spanish: Gerta Keller para niños