Italy's geologic history becomes a personal tale in Walter Alvarez'...(tory in New York before landing at UC Be...)

"I always knew that some day I wanted to write a book about the Apennines, and it just simply took a long time to learn enough about the mountains. Geologists didn't understand the mountain range well enough either, so I couldn't have written the book in the '70s or '80s or probably even the '90s," he said. "There is a lot we don't yet understand, but the story has come together enough that I thought I could tell a reasonable geological story."

Still curious about the geology of Italy, he currently is working with graduate student David Shimabukuro to determine the relationship between the island of Sardinia and Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, which has moved southeastward over the millennia to open up the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Just as his book displays a deep interest in the connection between human and geologic history, he has developed a course at UC Berkeley called "Big History" that explores the commonalities in the evolution of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity and the chance events underlying historical change.

"It is fun to think about contingency in history," he said, that is, when some unforeseen event - a comet impact, for example - comes along and "completely derails things so that tomorrow's history is nothing at all like last year. I think I can make a contribution here because of my work on the impact that did in the dinosaurs, which ... was an outrageously unlikely event that, had it not occurred, the dinosaurs would still be around and there wouldn't have been any human beings."

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