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About Professor Gerta Keller
Professor Gerta Keller in the atrium of Guyot Hall, with an Allosaurus dinosaur excavated during a 1941 dig.
Photo by Peter Murphy.
Gerta Keller is Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Geosciences Department of Princeton University since 1984. She was born in Schaan, Liechtenstein and grew up in Switzerland. She is a citizen of Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the United States of America. She received a B.S. degree from San Francisco State University in 1973 and a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1978. Since 1984 she has been Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University.
In The News
Multiple evidence reveals the killing mechanism for the mass extinction 66 m.y. ago began 25,000 years earlier with the onset of cataclysmic Deccan volcanic eruptions in India that caused hyperthermal warming, mercury toxicity, ocean acidification and acid rain on land.
A Princeton geologist Gerta Keller has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.
Everyone knows the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid — but there were also mega volcanos erupting at the exact same time. What exactly killed the dinosaurs? It's a mystery. Features interviews with Gerta Keller and Jahnavi Punekar.
Gerta Keller of Princeton University has long argued that the Chicxulub impact occurred 100,000 years or more before the mass extinction, so therefore can’t have caused the mass extinction itself, which she and others attribute the Deccan LIP. In favor of that idea, scientists have recorded a number of tracers of…