In 1980, physicist Luis Alvarez; his son, geologist Walter Alvarez; and nuclear chemists Frank Asaro and Helen V. Michael from the University of California, Berkeley discovered unusually high concentrations of iridium in a specific layer of rock strata in the Earth's crust. Iridium is an element that is rare on Earth but relatively abundant in many meteorites. From the amount and distribution of iridium present in the 65-million-year-old "iridium layer", the Alvarez team later estimated that an asteroid of must have collided with Earth. This iridium layer at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary has been found worldwide at 100 different sites. Multidirectionally shocked quartz (coesite), which is normally associated with large impact events or atomic bomb explosions, has also been found in the same layer at more than 30 sites. Soot and at levels tens of thousands times normal levels were found with the above.