Over the course of the past two days I have spent over 20 hours trying to locate the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary, which is the physical remnant of the impact event that is believed to have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. I have attempted to find known localities of the boundary over the course of the past week through the use of GPS and online mapping technology. Unfortunately it has been difficult to physically get to those locations, because we do not have permission from area ranchers to access their land. To respect those ranchers’ wishes, today we traveled north and west of Casper Wyoming to a little town named Kaycee. Just outside of this town we believe we have located a few instances of the Cretaceous/Tertiary or K/T boundary. Tomorrow we plan to once again travel to these locations and attempt to physically locate this boundary through the use of a handheld XRF, or an X-ray Fluorescence analyzer. This tool will allow us to locate this boundary in real time, instead of sending samples off to a laboratory, a process that is costly in both time and money. I look forward to examining these sites and examining the chemistry of the material that resulted from that famous impact event.
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