Acceptance speech for the Barringer Award of the Meteoritical Society, July 30, 2013

Thank you Christian, for your kind presentation, and to all those who helped make this award possible, especially the Barringer family who have so generously supported this society. It is a special honor to look at the list of previous Barringer Awardees and see so many very familiar and respected names, including Jan Smit and Bruce Bohor, the most recent Barringer Awardees, who are companions from the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary wars. Finding myself thus in the company of so many long-time colleagues and friends has led me to think about the role of friendship and collegiality in science.

I imagine that many nonscientists think of us scientists as being in an emotionless profession, stuck in cold laboratories, and lacking the warmth of human relationships. Maybe this view is not surprising. After all, we write cold, emotionless prose in our scientific papers.

However, that, we have learned, is the way to deeply understand Nature. In trying to find out how the world works, and what has happened in the past, we must never let our druthers—our emotional preferences—get in the way of what we observe, analyze, and conclude. It is ironic, I guess—we spend our lives exploring the deepest secrets of the universe, what Einstein called the thoughts of God, and the price we pay is to write like accountants.

What those nonscientists do not recognize is the deep humanity of a life in science—the lifelong friendships, the working together with colleagues from all over the world. We have the privilege of sharing research and discoveries with scientists from other countries, sometimes even when the countries are at war. We are something like the peripatetic scholars of the Middle Ages, who were welcomed everywhere, even at the courts of enemy rulers.

This is the way it was during the KT research of the 1980s and 1990s, when our networks of colleagues stretched across the world, even bridging the fearful nuclear enmity between the Soviet Union and the West. And these collegial relationships in science are particularly special, because they are underlain by the commitment to honesty and integrity that scientists all over the world share and live by. I cannot think of another profession that gives its practitioners that particular blessing.

Wonderful international friendships blossom out of this collegiality. Let me just mention three great friends from impact research who are previous Barringer Awardees. Jan Smit and I long thought that we had first met at a KT Boundary meeting in Copenhagen in 1979.

However, recently, I happened across one of my old photographs and realized that we had met in the field in Spain in 1973 (Fig. 1), and evidently impressed each other so little that neither of us remembered it. Our friendship, beginning at Copenhagen, has led to many adventures together, the most significant of which was a pair of trips to Mexico in 1991 and 1992, where we discovered the many proximal boundary ejecta sites exactly at the stratigraphic KT boundary, which demonstrated that the recently recognized Chicxulub crater was indeed the KT-boundary impact site (Fig.

2). Now Jan and I, with Jesse and Milly, are involved with the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco—a research station in the Apennine Mountains of Italy that was built by a remarkable scientist and unforgettable character named Sandro Montanari and his wife Paula. And that is where the second Barringer Award winner and close friend comes in—Christian Koeberl.

For Chris and Dona are also major figures at Coldigioco, and we all see each other there often (Fig. 3). Coldigioco, visible on Google Earth at 43.3476° N, 13.1208° E, is a remarkable place.

It is an “observatory” because it is located in the Umbria-Marche Apennines, where the wonderful sequence of pelagic limestones offers absolutely the best record anywhere of about 150 Myr of Earth history, waiting to be observed. This is where the original KT-boundary iridium anomaly was measured, in outcrops near the little Mediaeval city of Gubbio (Fig. 4), and where other impact proxies have been discovered, as described in a book by Sandro and Christian (Montanari and Koeberl 2000).

Literally hundreds of research scientists and geology students from around the world have come to Coldigioco for research projects and field classes, and if your research would benefit from a beautiful, complete, undisturbed record of Cretaceous and Paleogene impact events, Coldigioco may be the place for you. Last fall, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco, and all of the collaborations and discoveries and friendships it has fostered (Fig. 5).

And we remembered the third of my Barringer Awardee KT friends, Gene Shoemaker, who sadly of course could not be there. However, Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker were among the earliest of the scientists to make Coldigioco a research base (Fig. 6) —for work they did with Sandro on the Eocene-Oligocene impact events—and I think of Gene as the last of the major mentors I was fortunate to have as a scientist.

So, once again Christian, thanks to you and your co-conspirators for bringing me into the circle of Barringer Awardees, and for the chance to spend a few minutes together thinking about the life of friendship, global collegiality, and integrity that the profession of science offers to all of us.