評論
打印
The first Anderson or Witzke learned of this setback to their careers was when they arrived at a conference in South Dakota and found people coming up to them with sympathetic looks and saying: "We hear you lost your crater." It was the first they knew that Izett and the other USGS scientists had just announced refined figures revealing that Manson couldn't after all have been the extinction crater.
這對他們的事業(yè)是個挫折。安德森和威策克最初聽到這個消息是在他們出席南達(dá)科他州的一次會議的時候。他們發(fā)現(xiàn)人們以同情的目光朝他們走來，說：“我們聽說你們丟了那個大坑。”艾澤特和美國地質(zhì)勘測局的其他科學(xué)家剛剛宣布了經(jīng)過修改的數(shù)字，表明曼森大坑原來不是造成恐龍滅絕的原因。這對安德森和威策克來說還是新聞。
It was pretty stunning, recalls Anderson. "I mean, we had this thing that was really important and then suddenly we didn't have it anymore. But even worse was the realization that the people we thought we'd been collaborating with hadn't bothered to share with us their new findings."
“這真令人吃驚，”安德森回憶說，“我的意思是，我們本來有一件著實(shí)重要的東西，然后突然之間又失去了。但是，更加糟糕的是，我們意識到，那些我們以為在跟我們合作的人懶得與我們分享他們新的成果。”
Why not?
“為什么？”
He shrugged. "Who knows? Anyway, it was a pretty good insight into how unattractive science can get when you're playing at a certain level."
他聳了聳肩：“誰知道呢？反正我們深刻體會到，科學(xué)原來可以這么骯臟，要是你在某個層面上玩弄的話。”
The search moved elsewhere. By chance in 1990 one of the searchers, Alan Hildebrand of the University of Arizona, met a reporter from the Houston Chronicle who happened to know about a large, unexplained ring formation, 120 miles wide and 30 miles deep, under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula at Chicxulub, near the city of Progreso, about 600 miles due south of New Orleans. The formation had been found by Pemex, the Mexican oil company, in 1952—the year, coincidentally, that Gene Shoemaker first visited Meteor Crater in Arizona—but the company's geologists had concluded that it was volcanic, in line with the thinking of the day.
考察工作轉(zhuǎn)向別處。1990年，亞利桑那大學(xué)一位名叫艾倫·希爾德布蘭德的考察員碰巧遇見一名《休斯敦記事報》的記者。該記者恰好知道有一個原因不明的巨大的圓形結(jié)構(gòu)。它位于新奧爾良正南大約950公里的地方，離墨西哥普羅格雷索市不遠(yuǎn)，在尤卡坦半島的奇克休留布底下，寬達(dá)193公里，深有48公里。這個結(jié)構(gòu)是由墨西哥石油公司于1952年發(fā)現(xiàn)的──恰好是尤金·蘇梅克首次考察亞利桑那州的隕星坑的那一年──但該公司的地質(zhì)學(xué)家認(rèn)為那是火山形成的，與當(dāng)時的思想完全一致。
