After working countless hours digging soil samples and analyzing them with sophisticated microscopes, Great Falls High School freshman Katelyn Gibbs has come up with evidence that a comet or meteorite crashed to Earth in Montana 13,000 years ago and had major impact on animals living here at the time.

"Bing! She nailed it!" said David Baker of Monarch, a veteran earth science research scientist who mentored Gibbs on the project. "Katelyn found definitive proof - nanodiamonds and iron micrometeorites - for the extraterrestrial impact event that killed the mammoths in Montana.

"She is making discovery after discovery; she's an incredible kid," Baker said.
All that from a 15-year-old student who decided to put a little extra time into a science fair topic.

Jonathan Logan, her Great Falls High science teacher, said he often has to prod students into doing science fair projects and help them along the way.

Not Gibbs.

"She is a very self-directed student who spends lots of time on her regular classes and then two or three hours a night on her science fair project," Logan said. "She watched a TV show and read a book about how extraterrestrial events changed the course of animals, and now she's writing her own Montana chapter."

Gibbs said she watched a National Geographic TV special last year called "Mammoth Mystery" that showed research elsewhere in North America that an extraterrestrial impact event - a comet or meteorite hitting with huge force - caused the large hairy beasts to die.

"I was hooked and wanted to find out if there was any evidence that such events happened in Montana," she said.

She read Arizona expert Allan West's book, "Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophe," and talked to Logan and Baker about it.

Katelyn, who wants to become an aerospace scientist and possibly an astronaut for NASA, had impressed Baker when he judged her previous year's science fair entry, "Protecting Astronauts from Galactic Cosmic Rays."

"Dr. Baker pointed the finger generally on what sites she should look for, but Katelyn swung into action," recalled her mother, Celeste Gibbs, a pre-school teacher.

"Neither my husband, Richard, a supervisor at AvMax, nor I had been keenly interested in science, so it's been quite a challenge for us to keep up with her.

"There was a stretch of several months where we went out nearly every weekend to cover the hills of Montana to find sites in the right geological layer and time. Katelyn did all the digging and climbing into an exposed gorge. We were her mule pack, driving and carrying shovels and a ladder. Katelyn learned how to use all kinds of microscopes and a special type of Geiger counter."

Essentially, Gibbs followed Baker's suggestions, including where to look and what to look for. She worked for hours to find rusty brown soil samples in a particular geological layer at three different sites whose age had been determined to be from 13,000 years ago, the period when mammoths became extinct.

She was allowed access to one site on the Rocky Mountain Front near Augusta where mammoth fossils had been discovered.

Other successful sites were at a Hutterite colony near Choteau and a geological dig by Townsend.

She took extensive soil samples and put them in water to see if they floated, which would indicate they contained carbon, Gibbs explained. If they still floated when she examined them under a microscope, it meant they were carbon glass spherules - tiny gray solidified droplets.

Finally, she sent those samples to West, the Arizona scientist and author, who examined them with a powerful transmission electronic microscope. He determined she had found nanodiamonds, tiny, shiny particles formed at ultra-high temperatures, such as when a comet or meteorite crashes through the Earth's atmosphere.

She also found iron micrometeorites and radioactive particles that Baker said are all proof that an extraterrestrial impact event - probably a comet hitting - occurred in Montana 13,000 years ago.

Furthermore, Gibbs found iron micrometeorites embedded in the tusk of the mammoth, further linking the animal's possible extinction to the comet striking.

Baker goes even further, noting that the Clovis Culture of Paleo-Indian people had lived in Montana about the same time and depended on mammoths for food. Evidence of their culture seemed to abruptly terminate when the mammoths disappeared, he said.

"I was so excited to be the first in Montana to find this kind of evidence," Gibbs said.

Parents and even judges at science fairs sometimes scratched their heads at the extensive and complex explanations on Gibbs' science fair project.

"When they read about extraterrestrial impact events, they think I'm talking about aliens or ET arriving," she chuckled. The word simply means "something coming from outside the earth's limits." She's been looking for something that would crash at high speed and explode.

For example, the micrometeorites are so hot that they form fusion crusts and flow lines that can be viewed under a microscope, she said.

In fact, Gibbs, her teacher Logan and mentor Baker all noted that her findings were all microscopic, explaining why they were so hard to find.

Baker put it in hard-to-fathom scientific terms: "A nanodiamond is approximately 5 to 10 millionth of a millimeter in diameter."

Gibbs' mother Celeste used more understandable terms: "It takes 30,000 nanodiamonds laid side by side to equal the width of a human hair."

Gibbs did well at the Montana state science fair last month in Missoula, winning several awards and placing third runner-up for the grand award.

She will show her project at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Atlanta on May 11-16.

In the meantime, she said she wasn't a bit nervous giving talks to two Montana science groups. "Katelyn gave a 20-minute presentation to the Montana Archeological Society in Billings last month and had 60 professional archeologists in the palm of her hands," Baker said.