Controversy in the Permian

A few months back, a team led by Luann Becker announced that a buried crater off northern Australia marked the cosmic impact that killed everything at the end of the Permian Period (see her gaudy site about it). After the paper appeared in Science, the experts cleared their throats and proceeded to critique most of the juice out of the whole idea. Steve Drury's Earth Pages blog summarizes the brouhaha succinctly and presents some followup. Scientists resampled the localities and 10 different labs are testing the material to see whether to believe Becker's work. Drury says "it looks very much as if a major scandal may break."