Alan Russell Hildebrand (born 1955) is a planetary scientist and Associate Professor in the Department of

Geoscience Earth science or geoscience includes all fields of natural science related to the planet Earth. This is a branch of science dealing with the physical, chemical, and biological complex constitutions and synergistic linkages of Earth's four sphere ...

at the

University of Calgary The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...

. He has specialized in the study of

asteroid impact An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have physical consequences and have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or me ...

cratering, fireballs and meteorite recovery. His work has shed light on the extinction event caused by the Chicxulub asteroid at the end of the

Cretaceous period The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of t ...

. Hildebrand is one of the leaders of the

Prairie Meteorite Network The Prairie Meteorite Network was a system of sixteen camera stations in Midwestern United States, run by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

search project.Hildebrand, Alan Russell
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Education and career

Hildebrand got a B.S. in

at The

University of New Brunswick The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is a public university with two primary campuses in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick. It is the oldest English-language university in Canada, and among the oldest public universities in North Ameri ...

in 1977. He got a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences at The

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

under William Boynton in 1992 with the dissertation "Geochemistry and stratigraphy of the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary impact ejecta". In 1978 the

Chicxulub Crater The Chicxulub crater () is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore near the community of Chicxulub, after which it is named. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when a large a ...

in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico was discovered by Glen Penfield, but its significance was not recognized at the time. In 1990, as part of his doctoral program, Hildebrand, working with the father-and-son team of

Luis Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archai ...

and

Walter Alvarez Walter Alvarez (born October 3, 1940) is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most widely known for the theory that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact, developed in ...

, published controversial articles suggesting that a large impact from an asteroid caused the mass extinction at the end of the

.A steeply-inclined trajectory for the Chicxulub impact
Collins, G. S., Patel, N., Davison, T. M., ...,

Nature Communications ''Nature Communications'' is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal and it covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medici ...

, Vol 11, Mo 1, May 26,2020 The impact site was eventually determined to be at Chicxulub and the extinction it caused became known as the K-T event.Size and morphology of the Chicxulub impact crater
J Morgan, M Warner, J Brittan, R Buffler, A Camargo, G Christeson, ..., Nature Vol 390, pp. 472–476, (1997) Hildebrand is part of the

Geological Survey of Canada The Geological Survey of Canada (GSC; french: Commission géologique du Canada (CGC)) is a Canadian federal government agency responsible for performing geological surveys of the country, developing Canada's natural resources and protecting the e ...

, focusing mainly on the K-T event.

Selected papers

* 200
The fall, recovery, orbit, and composition of the Tagish Lake meteorite: A new type of carbonaceous chondrite
PG Brown, AR Hildebrand, ME Zolensky, M Grady, RN Clayton, ... Science 290 (5490), 320-325 * 199
Tektite-bearing, deep-water clastic unit at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary in northeastern Mexico
J Smit, A Montanari, NHM Swinburne, W Alvarez, AR Hildebrand, ... Geology 20 (2), 99-103 * 1991
Chicxulub crater: a possible Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula
Mexico, AR Hildebrand, GT Penfield, DA Kring, M Pilkington, A Camargo Z, ... Geology 19 (9), 867-871 * 199
Proximal Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary impact deposits in the Caribbean
AR Hildebrand, WV Boynton, Science 248 (4957), 843-847

References

External links

Official home page

Alan Hildebrand at Google Scholar

The Day the Mesozoic Died: The Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs
video {{DEFAULTSORT:Hildebrand, Alan Canadian geologists Planetary scientists University of Calgary faculty University of Arizona alumni University of New Brunswick alumni 1955 births Living people