Lubbock (Texas), Nov. 15: Sankar Chatterjee, the Bengali geoscientist who has ignited a debate around the world about an Indian link to the end of the dinosaur age, came to Lubbock from the centre of it all in Washington because he wanted to be closer to home: India.

Thirty years ago, he gave up a prestigious post at the world-famous Smithsonian Institution when he learned that an academic position at Texas Tech University here that was held by Professor Alton Wade had fallen vacant following Wade’s death. Wade, head of the geology department at Texas Tech, led two expeditions to Antarctica in the 1930s and mapped Antarctica.

Lubbock now has a population estimated at 250,000 and Texas Tech has the biggest campus in area of any university in the US, but three decades ago, it was a big question mark for anyone who heard the name of this town.

Chatterjee, then 36, knew very well from his postgraduate studies at Jadavpur University and from his PhD research in geology at Calcutta University that India, Antarctica and Australia were once joined together, millions of years ago.

It was his life’s ambition to go on an expedition to Antarctica because of its “Indian origin”. The move to Lubbock from Washington where, prior to Smithsonian, Chatterjee was an assistant professor at the highly regarded George Washington University, was well worth it.

Three years after Chatterjee joined Texas Tech as curator of palaeontology and assistant professor of geosciences, he fulfilled his ambition and went to Antarctica on his first expedition, which was sponsored by the university.

Two years later, Chatterjee was leader of another expedition to Antarctica, his third in a row. The excitement of going “home” to Antarctica is still very much there when the 63-year-old geoscientist talks about it now.

“Going to Antarctica is as if visiting India in the geological sense,” Chatterjee told The Telegraph in his office at Texas Tech University’s Paleontology Museum, surrounded by dinosaur skeletons that transport visitors to the world of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.

Any mention of Jurassic Park and Chatterjee is quick to correct that the skeletons here are of the Triassic era, from 251 to 199 million years ago, that predates the Jurassic period.

Work here at the museum, which he created, is Chatterjee’s passion in life. He is proud that there are only 10 universities in all of the US that have permanent halls for dinosaur exhibits and Texas Tech is one of them.

By a coincidence, when this correspondent was interviewing Chatterjee last week, word came that Texas Tech had achieved the status of a “Tier 1” university. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a “Tier 1” university is an institution which is invited to membership of the American Association of Universities and receives at least $100 million in federal research grants annually. Other criteria include endowments and the quality of faculty.

Texas Tech, where Chatterjee has risen to become The Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Geosciences while retaining the post of curator of palaeontology, has 30,000 students. Indians constitute the largest group of foreign students, followed by the Chinese.

For Chatterjee, the move to Lubbock has been a windfall in more ways than one.

In a town called Post, near Lubbock, Chatterjee and his team of geologists have excavated extensively to discover Triassic fossils and rocks of what is known to them as the “Dockum Group.”

“Here I have, near Texas Tech University, one of the finest fossil localities in my backyard,” Chatterjee said. “People from all over the world come here to see Triassic fossils.”

But it is pioneering research, which Chatterjee presented to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Maine, last month which has catapulted him to international celebrity status in the eyes of the larger public. In the world of geoscientists, he has, of course, long been acknowledged and respected.

Chatterjee’s latest research makes a scientific case that a meteorite more than 40km wide hit the earth near Mumbai at a speed of 57,600kmph about 65 million years ago causing the extinction of the dinosaurs who populated our planet.

Indeed, so devastating was the impact of this disaster that it destroyed 70 per cent of earth’s plant and animal species. Hence, Chatterjee has named the event after Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

Despite the acclaim that Chatterjee has received after his most recent research, he is modest and cautions against any tendency to run away with his claims. “This is still a work in progress,” he said. “There is much more to be done.”

THE CHATTERJEE FACTOR

Many scientists believe that dinosaurs were wiped out when an asteroid struck what is now Mexico 65 million years ago, creating the Chicxulub crater which is 180km in diameter.

Sankar Chatterjee

But Sankar Chatterjee says an asteroid created a much bigger crater off the Mumbai coast. Chatterjee calls it the Shiva crater. The Indian explosion could have been 100 times more powerful than the Mexican one.

Shiva’s outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500km in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as Bombay High, which would be 3 miles tall from the ocean floor.
Chatterjee’s findings, made public on October 18, challenge the earlier theories of dinosaur extinction and hold out hope of more petrol and gas reserves on and off India’s west coast.

“It seems to have been a very bad day for dinosaurs,” Chatterjee said. “The energy released on impact would dwarf the detonation of all nuclear weapons on earth combined.” Some scientists are not convinced about his claim that an
asteroid crash created the Shiva Crater. “We have to do much more field work to satisfy the sceptics and I am going to be in India with my team again,” Chatterjee said.
Samyabrata Ray Goswami in Mumbai