Gerta Keller

Geologist and paleontologist (born 1945), professor of geosciences at Princeton University since 1984, known for challenging the mainstream view that a single asteroid impact at Chicxulub caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction. Drawing on nearly 300 publications, she argues that the Deccan Traps volcanism in India and its associated environmental disruption was the more likely primary driver of the extinction, and that the Chicxulub impact predates the extinction boundary rather than causing it. Her position remains one side of an active, still-debated scientific controversy over the cause of the end-Cretaceous extinction.