Research Description
Walter is a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Berkeley. His group’s discovery in 1980 of the iridium anomaly at the K-T boundary and their hypothesis that the K-T extinction was due to a huge impact paved the way for our current understanding of catastrophic events in Earth history. He is currently continuing long-term programs of studying mass extinctions and Mediterranean tectonics. He is also involved in developing Big History, the new approach that aims to tie the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity into a coherent understanding of the grand sweep and character of history.