Samuele Boschi together with researchers in Nanjing, China, has published the article: Traces of major collisional events in the asteroid belt in late Eocene marine sediments in Italy in Geology. The authors are Samuele Boschi, Birger Schmitz, Shiyong Liao, Cheng Xu and Weiqiang Li.
Link to article: https://doi.org/10.1130/G52994.1
Tao Anna Zhang at the Purple Mountain Observatory, Nanjing, has published the article: L-chondrite body breakup in Ordovician strata in China-A time tie point globally an across the inner solar system in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The authors are Tao Anna Zhang, Shiyong Liao, Rongchang Wu, and Birger Schmitz.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X24003248
At the Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Los Angeles, August 2023, Birger
Schmitz was awarded the Barringer Medal and Award, see:
https://meteoritical.org/awards/barringer-award
and:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.14037
One of the most important discoveries shedding light on what happened on Earth hours and days after the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid impact was made by a young scientist, Robert DePalma. At a locality that he named Tanis in North Dakota he found a tsunami deposit that was triggered by seismic waves in Earth’s interior emanating from the asteroid impact. The tsunamis wave from the Western interior seaway moved up on land along a river valley. At the same time a huge, hundred meters high “curtain” of magma and ash from the Chicxulub impact crater passed by at a speed of 10,000 kilometres per hour. The tsunamis deposit that Robert found contains a chaotic mixture of freshwater and marine animals together with billions of microscopic glass spherules that condensed from the magma cloud on its way northward. A BBC documentary starring David Attenborough and Robert tells the story about the Tanis site, The Last Day of the Dinosaurs. In the second week of August 2023 Birger Schmitz visited the Tanis locality together with Robert to see with his own eyes. Everything as described by Robert was there, including a footprint by a small three-toed dinosaur just at the base of the tsunamis deposit. This was one of the probably most exiting experiences a geologist can have.
Link to paper: A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North
Dakota by Robert DePalma et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1817407116
Link to editorial article in Science where accusations against Robert DePalma are laid out for having fabricated data for an article claiming the Chicxulub impact took place in spring:
On the 8th of October 2021, Ellinor Martin successfully defended her doctoral thesis: The micrometeorite flux to Earth through the Phanerozoic Eon. The Faculty opponent was Professor Timothy Swidle, University of Arizona, USA. The examination committee comprised three persons: Professor Ulf Hålenius, The Swedish Museum of Natural History; Professor Vivi Vajda, The Swedish Museum of Natural History, and Professor Kristina Stenström, Lund University. Chairman of the event was Professor Knut Deppert, Lund University.
Ellinor has been a great asset for the AGB laboratory and we will miss her. We whish her all the luck in the future. Her impressing thesis comprising nine articles in high ranked journals will undoubtedly be a great stepping stone for the future career!
On the 13th of December 2019, Samuele Boschi successfully defended his doctoral thesis: The flux of extraterrestrial spinels to Earth associated with He-3 anomalies in Cenozoic and Ordovician sediments. The Faculty opponent was Professor Luigi Folco, University of Pisa, Italy. The examination committee comprised three persons: Professor Jan Smit, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Associate Professor Davide Lenaz, University of Trieste; and Professor Per Ahlberg, Lund University.
Samuele’s hard and meticulous work for 4 years resulted in a thesis with many peer-reviewed articles in high ranked journals. He is also the first to become a PhD within the field of Astrogeobiology.
Two members of the examination committee and the Faculty opponent at the AGB office. From left to right: Jan Smit (holding a fossil meteorite), Luigi Folco and Davide Lenaz.
Luigi Folco, Jan Smit and Davide Lenaz in the hydrochloric acid laboratory.
Birger Schmitz1*, Kenneth A. Farley2, Steven Goderis3, Philipp R. Heck4,5, Stig M. Bergström6, Samuele Boschi1, Philippe Claeys7, Vinciane Debaille8, Andrei Dronov9,10, Matthias van Ginneken11, David A.T. Harper12, Faisal Iqbal1, Johan Friberg1, Shiyong Liao13,14, Ellinor Martin1, Matthias M. M. Meier15,16, Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink17, Bastien Soens7, Rainer Wieler15, Fredrik Terfelt1
1Astrogeobiology Laboratory, Department of Physics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.2Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. 3Department of Chemistry, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. 4Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, USA. 5Department of the Geophysical Sciences, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. 6School of Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. 7Analytical, Environmental, and Geo-Chemistry, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. 8Laboratoire G-Time, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. 9Geological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. 10Institute of Geology and Oil and Gas Technologies, Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Kazan, Russia. 11Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, Belgium. 12Department of Earth Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK. 13Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China. 14CAS Center for Excellence in Comparative Planetology, Hefei, China. 15Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. 16Naturmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland. 17Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft passed within 2200 miles of object 2014 MU69, also called “Ultima Thule”, in the Kuiper Belt 6.6 billion kilometres from Earth and 1.6 billion kilometres beyond Pluto. Ultima Thule is the most distant object ever studied up-close by humans.
At the NOVA-NASA event in connection with the flyby at New Years Eve Walter Alvarez gave a talk entitled “Studying the Solar System by looking down”.