Luis Walter Alvarez was born in San Francisco on June 13, 1911, the second child and oldest son of Walter C. Alvarez, a physician, and his wife Harriet nee Smyth, and a grandson of Luis F. Alvarez, a physician who lived for a time in Spain, then Cuba, and finally the United States, who found a better method for diagnosing macular leprosy. He had an older sister, Gladys, a younger brother, Bob, and a younger sister, Bernice. His aunt, Mabel Alvarez, was a California artist specializing in oil painting. He attended Madison School in San Francisco from 1918 to 1924, and then San Francisco Polytechnic High School.
In 1980 Alvarez and his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, along with nuclear chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, "uncovered a calamity that literally shook the Earth and is one of the great discoveries about Earth's history". During the 1970s, Walter Alvarez was doing geologic research in central Italy. There he had located an outcrop on the walls of a gorge whose limestone layers included strata both above and below the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Exactly at the boundary is a thin layer of clay. Walter told his father that the layer marked where the dinosaurs and much else became extinct and that nobody knew why, or what the clay was about -- it was a big mystery and he intended to solve it. Alvarez had access to the nuclear chemists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and was able to work with Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, who used the technique of neutron activation analysis. In 1980, Alvarez, Alvarez, Asaro, and Michel published a seminal paper proposing an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (then called the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction). In the years following the publication of their article, the clay was also found to contain soot, glassy spherules, shocked quartz crystals, microscopic diamonds, and rare minerals formed only under conditions of great temperature and pressure. Publication of the 1980 paper brought criticism from the geologic community, and an often acrimonious scientific debate ensued. Ten years later, and after Alvarez's death, evidence of a large impact crater called Chicxulub was found off the coast of Mexico, providing support for the theory. Other researchers later found that the end-Cretaceous extinction of the dinosaurs may have occurred rapidly in geologic terms, over thousands of years, rather than millions of years as had previously been supposed. Others continue to study alternative extinction causes such as increased volcanism, particularly the massive Deccan Traps eruptions that occurred around the same time, and climate change, checking against the fossil record. However, on March 4, 2010, a panel of 41 scientists agreed that the Chicxulub asteroid impact triggered the mass extinction.

Q: Did he make many discoveries about dinosaur extinction?
A: Walter told his father that the layer marked where the dinosaurs and much else became extinct and that nobody knew why, or what the clay was about --

Q: Did he go on any digs?
A: During the 1970s, Walter Alvarez was doing geologic research in central Italy.

Q: What did he find on his Italy dig?
A: There he had located an outcrop on the walls of a gorge

Q: What was the significance of that find?
A: Walter told his father that the layer marked where the dinosaurs and much else became extinct and that nobody knew why, or what the clay was about --
Did he make any other significant finds in Italy?
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