The science of Walter Alvarez and his colleagues in ‘T-Rex and the Crater of Doom’ may become intriguing science [fiction ?] when compared with the mythology [?] of Plato in ‘Timaeus and Critias’.

‘What if’ is a fun and an interesting exercise in thought experiment.

1 – What if the capital city of Atlantis, described as a set of concentric circles is an impact crater, which is also described as a set of concentric circles?

Chixculub may be too big if the current idea of the length of a stade is correct.

2 – What if the lost metal oricalc [chalk ore] of Atlantis is equivalent to iridium [a platinum metal] found around impact craters?

Maybe there is evidence of iridium mining around some impact crater?

3 – There seem to be other ‘what ifs’ in Plato that may be explained by an impact or crater.

Could I just make free with your comments, in a totally on topic way, to plug our package of special material on impacts in Nature this week, which contains a lot of stuff about killer asteroids. The whole package can be found here and this story makes some specific points about the way the Alvarez paper influenced debates about impacts in general.

http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/KTHIT.jpg

for a 1980 Discover survey of mass extinction theories I was writing, I was every bit as thrilled as you at 14. (And hey… I’ve never met a science writer who didn’t become one “by luck rather thn foresight.”:-)

I was at the first or second AAAS meeting after the first paper. There were quite a few symposia and such on what was looking like a very serious revision of thinking. Exciting as hell.