|
||||||
|
Bill Napier sent the Tusk a note regarding Joe Rogan’s unforgettable debate-style podcast on the Young Dryas Boundary Hypothesis. His informed correction of Marc Defant’s self-styled skeptical authority on comets is priceless and instructive. A cultural genre of all-purpose professional “skeptics,” like Defant and Shermer, have emerged since James Randi kicked off their gig forty years ago. Like many fashions, professional skepticism served a role and had its day, but then devolved into a vanity-infested quasi-intellectual troupe of know-it-alls PhD’s — in something — who nonetheless are regularly consulted by the media and listened to concering all things “science.” (Somehow “science” persisted for 400+ years before their preening website and yearly convention). As a generalist myself, and an expert in nothing, the Tusk has no problem with generalist commentary and skepticism. I consider myself a skeptical generalist and my wife would agree. But experts in a particular subject — volcanology in Marc’s case — should exhibit and disclose some humility before and perhaps after they harrumph, guffaw and dismiss the long-published data-driven conclusions of expert workers in other subjects — especially when the subject is controversial and concerns a worldwide threat. If they do not declare their relative ignorance, they are “dangerously misinformed” — precisely what they purport to eradicate. Defant showed zero humility and spoke of comets with the familiarity of a volcanologist. He should be ashamed to dismiss the work of Bill Napier, Fred Whipple, Clube, Asher, Palmer, Steel, etc. etc etc, without explaining or perhaps even knowing of their work first. Dafant makes a complete hash of comet science. He tells us that the comet impact hypothesis is incorrect because comets break up only under the relatively short-term influence of a planet (his example is “Shoemaker-Levy 9,” a profound recent event for which he cannot recall the name) or the relatively momentary drag of a planetary atmosphere. He may or may not know it, but Dafant’s received wisdom (in keeping with his fellow Skeptic Mark Boslough) is 1960’s grade school comet science. The published truth is horrifying. Some comets begin to disintegrate when they are thrown into the inner planetary system, generating streams of debris for millennia. The Taurids being a major complex of such material. They are increasingly less noticeable when they degrade, but still dangerous in proportion to the “spread” of the debris, the size range of the objects, and the approach of our planet within the stream. As Napier and his colleagues have maintained for decades, and all but proven, a monstrously large comet entered our solar system roughly 20,000 years ago, began disintegrating, and left a stream of debris we encounter annually ever since. 8000 years later, or ~12,875 years ago, we orbited through a particularly rough patch of the Taurid stream that caused world-wide doom, with pieces and parts of all sizes — but still a fraction of the original beast — crashing into mother earth and causing extinctions. Other impacts of various sizes have occurred before and after that event depending on our trajectory as we pass through the lumpy haze of the relict comet around late June and Halloween June each year. The comet did not disintegrate in the atmosphere or because of our planet’s gravity. Under a cloudless night sky outside Flagstaff, Arizona, I once asked Mark Boslough, a fellow-traveler of Shermer and Defant, what he thought of Whipple’s clear evidence and Napier’s concern regarding progressively disintegrating bodies in short-period orbits. Boslough said he did not know what the hell I was talking about. Neither does Defant.
Click here for a public link to the file The Tusk has had several requests for Carolina Bay images lately, including drone video for a forthcoming episode of “What On Earth?”, the most popular show on Discovery Science. In the process of putting my material together in one place, I realized how cool it would be to share my meager but unique collection with anyone who wants to look it over or use in some way. What also intrigued me is the incentive a public archive would provide for me to obtain more drone coverage of bays. I am lucky to have nearly limitless access to drones in my work. (They come in very handy when you manage 120,000 acres of evolving ecology at 50 locations). In the old days, for work and bays, I hung my head out of Cessna’s with a Cannon, which quickly turns from great fun to very old. So, in the last few years, as drone technology improved, I constantly felt the need to get out there and nail the bays with these incredibly intelligent, nearly self-flying, perfectly balanced and steady, aerial cameras. But how best to share? I hate the idea of tediously selecting a half-dozen pics and maybe a video or two from a trip downeast and posting them individually with custom narrative. After some consideration, my belief now is that it is much better to just throw it ALL out there in a single permanent public file and let people “have at” the material. Less selecting, editing and narrative for me — and more bays for you. So, now that I have a proper approach, I plan to drone-the-hell out of bays well into the future and add the material to this file as frequently as I can. I should note that while this is MY comprehensive bay file, it is hardly a comprehensive treatment of the bays in general, and probably will remain uncomprehensive for some time. Considering their stupefying range and number across the US, and several documented morphologies, the file at this point is mearly snapshots (many of them very bad photos or taken under poor conditions) from a relatively few North Carolina locations and do not cover the subject adequately. But this collection is surely the best available archive right now from which people can peruse — or use — Carolina bay pics and video. So, have at, and please use the images in any way you like. No license from or attribution to the Tusk is required for any use whatsoever of this media.
Entire essay on grahamhancock.com I just discovered a welcome recent essay from Graham Hancock summing up the profound intellectual significance — and petty scholastic dramas — of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis since 2007. Hancock doesn’t note his good timing, but 2017 is the 10th anniversary of the Comet Research Group’s Acapulco AGU presentations introducing the YDIH. This summary is helpful to me at this point, and it will be particularly helpful to readers new to our subject, or who have followed the narrative at some point but need it all recounted in one place. The Tusk wishes it had written something like this. But the content and timeline of our subject is so damn convoluted and confusing that, even with a front row seat, your’s truly has failed to write down all the papers and rebuttals, charges and counter-charges, requiems and refutations since Mexico in a single narrative. Graham thankfully, as former journalist, had patience for the tedium and recounts our tumultuous decade quite brilliantly. If they be reading here: I challenge Hancock’s many detractors to locate references to their oft-noted Hancock provocations. Advanced pre-diluvium civilizations, post-cataclysm wisemen and future threats of impact are absent. Note: I omit the fascinating but well-established story of Harlan Bretz and the Channeled Scablands, in keeping with our concentration on the YDIH.
Almost 24 hours later and I am still catching my breath. Last night’s Joe Rogan Experience podcast was pure heaven for the Tusk. As folks might have noted, the world’s most popular interview podcast has taken a long-standing interest in our subject. Graham Hancock has appeared on Rogan six times in recent years, I believe, each visit breaking new viewership records for the show and each episode more closely studying the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. Rogan’s regular audience is perhaps second only to the regular readership of this blog in their understanding of the YDIH. What pleasurable company. The special thing about this particular episode, despite its wide popularity, was the debate format. Joe paired Graham with another regular guest, professional skeptic Michael Skeptic, and he and Graham brought like-minded sidekicks Randall Carlson and Mark Defant, respectively. If that were not enough to pull you in, Dr. Malcolm LeCompete of the Comet Research Group was introduced for the last 45 minutes in order to close the deal. So who won the debate? Hancock and crew OWNED Shermer et al., to the point of embarrassment. It was truly hard to watch Shermer, a likable fellow, wither in the face of the peer-reviewed science. He and skeptical fellow travelers (like Mark Boslough) are very subject to difficulties with long-form communication. “Back-and-forth” ain’t their thang — and it shows.
Daily Mail on the Younger Dryas Impact
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4457530/Mini-Ice-Age-wiped-cvilisation-13-000-years-ago.html#ixzz4fysPahTi
Response from Gobekli Tepe dig and back at you from Edinburg Ok, I’ve finally found a little time to provide some commentary after posting the Gobekli Tepe \ YD Comet paper last week. I have more substantive comments underway (believe it or not) but first I thought I would rail a bit about the press. The treatment of this particular story by the American press, and its larger context, the Younger Dryas Boundary Impact Hypothesis, continues to be despicable. The Brits led the way again on this subject and carried most of the planet in their wake. This fascinating little paper is being picked up all over the globe with dozens of re-writes by hundreds of publications — but very nearly zero from the US. It would seem the US science desks and editors could find some common interest in this subject with our closest intellectual cousin, global warming certainly dominates coverage in both countries. But no. Just like the Widespread Platinum paper in Nature Reports last month, crickets in the US and reported in the UK. It seems we have our own science news, and they have theirs. How’s that for legitimacy of science? The always depressing fact is that the U.S. science press has become so overtly politicized that it has no ink for anything that does not extend the narrative. There is no room for a serious, mitigable and global “science” threat that does not involve polluters and conservatives as the bad guys. Space rocks are hard to blame – and distracting. Imagine if a media kid dares take this seriously, and (gasp) does some ‘enterprise reporting’ on the magnitude and quality of the research? They may reveal to themselves a threat on a par with CO2. Who would embark on a writing project that might result in THAT? For the rest of their career they would be intellectually compelled to write the next global warming story with an acknowledgement that the subject is our #2 global problem. That makes it hard to get up in the morning to cover the March for Science. So why the Brits? I think catastrophism, as a philosophy and a way to see world history, is still a faint cultural recollection for them. And therefore of more interest to their readers and their writers. Like so many non-US cultures, in the United Kingdom they are still surrounded by their dragons — and most have had to consider, at least once, whether their ancestors really saw flying fire lizards, were full of shit, or maybe, just maybe, they saw flaming bolides with snake-like smoke tails — just like they record today with their iPhones. Moreover, a hardy band of UK researchers has been making precisely these same claims in peer-reviewed publications for decades — approximately 40 decades. From Newton and Whiston, to Clube and Napier, it is hard to put a Brit down who knows he has been right for millennia. There is clearly some thread of understanding in the UK Fourth Estate that this is an area of legitimate intellectual inquiry with a long and distinguished history. Our press, on the other hand, only honors fashions that were born after they were. So that’s that on the press coverage. As I say, more is coming, on our newest British friend, Dr. Martin Sweatman, author of the paper that inspired this deviation.
Wonderful Supplementary Information for the paper below
I have provided some counter points below to the arguments made in the recent publications from Daulton and Scott (regular critics). However, I was particularly disturbed to see that the papers failed to include very significant confirmations of our work, for instance Adronikov 2016. Unlike Tian (2011) and Bement 2014. Daulton claims failure to locate diamonds, but that is no excuse for leading people to believe there have been no recent high-level confirmations of the data from others. Regardless, there are some obvious shortcoming to the papers and I speak here as a member of the Comet Research Group: 1. NANODIAMONDS. The Daulton et al. paper makes it sound like there is no evidence for nanodiamonds at all, when in fact they admit to the opposite. On page 22, they write, “While there is evidence of cubic nanodiamonds in Late Pleistocene sediments, their presence does not provide evidence of an impact because they have not been linked to impact processes.” The only way they can make that claim is to ignore all of the other evidence that we have such as high-temperature melted spherules and meltglass. LONSDALEITE. We wrote in Kinzie et al. (2014) that YDB “lonsdaleite-like” particles have all the characteristics of lonsdaleite, but there are too few of them for us to confirm that. We agree with Dalton that these particles are still debatable, and we agree that we misidentified some of them, but not all. PEAKS IN NANODIAMONDS. Daulton disputes that we have identified peaks in nanodiamonds, but frankly, that is just a nonsensical argument. While it is true that we cannot tell how many nanodiamonds are in the peaks, nevertheless, we know that there are qualitative peaks. Here’s a real world example of why Daulton is wrong. Let’s say that I look out the window onto a pond and I don’t see any ducks. Next day, I look out and there are lots of ducks. There are too many to count, but I know that there are a lot more than zero. The next day the ducks are gone. By definition, there was a peak in ducks on the previous day. The same applies to Daulton’s claim that we don’t have a peak in nanodiamonds. He is simply wrong – the peak has been confirmed by independent groups, including Bement et al. in Oklahoma and in Belgium by Tian et al., who are critics of the YDB hypothesis. NANODIAMONDS AND IMPACTS. Daulton and others keep repeating “Yes, the diamonds are there but that doesn’t prove there was an impact.” While that is true, technically, there is no other known way to have nanodiamonds appear in sediment except by an impact. To me, to use the same analogy as above, if they look like ducks, they probably are. 2. The Scott et al. paper looked for wildfire evidence in just one area, the Channel Islands in California. They found lots of charcoal and carbon spherules in many strata, and they state on page 11, “Carbonaceous materials from Arlington Canyon do not require extraterrestrial input or ignition, or in some cases preclude such an event,” in contradiction to their press release, which makes it seem like they have completely refuted the YDB hypothesis. Just to be clear, they’re saying that they can’t rule out an extraterrestrial impact. They also argue that the carbonaceous materials indicate low-temperature wildfires which, they assume, precludes extraterrestrial impacts. That assumption just shows their lack of knowledge of impact wildfires, such as those that occurred at Tunguska in 1908, where low-temperature wildfires were triggered beneath the fireball. At Tunguska, the highest temperatures were generated closest to the fireball, and temperatures dropped off exponentially with distance, meaning that at Tunguska and presumably, any other impact event, there are both high-and low-temperature fires.
The Tusk was absolutely thrilled to see the publication last week of a paper concerning Carolina Bays in the distinguished journal, Geomorphology. Other than a brief role for the Carolina bays in the early papers of the Comet Research Group, and a much longer series of Geological Society of America posters laboriously researched and determindly published by Michael Davias et. al, Zamora’s A Model for the Geomorphology of Bays is the only peer-reviewed and published ‘ET origin’ work on bays in the last two decades — and it is a doozy.
Zamora builds on the work of Willam Prouty and Melton and Schriver in the first half of the 20th century, with an assist from Eyton and Parkhurst in the 70’s, and finally Davias and Kimbel’s efforts in recent years. Each of the researchers maintained that the bays were formed at once by a barrage of material from the midwest. But, just as the early researchers ultimately decided, those around today also dismiss bays as the direct impacts of ET fragments of a comet or asteroid, and consider them to be the remnant features of secondary impacts from the ejecta and ballistic shockwaves of a northerly catastrophe. They are wise to do so. The correct theory must account for ALL the easily observed, unique characteristics of bays. [See list of 16 from Eyton and Parkhurst here] The “wind and wave,” gradual formation, theories that continue to hold sway in classrooms, and publications from Ivestor and Brooks, fail miserably to account for all the observed phenomena. Zamora checks each off with ease. When time permits I hope to address them one by one. Significantly, Zamora’s work is multidisciplinary and, like Davias, assisted by geometry as well as geology. Here is a sample:
The bay rims to Zamora are the result of a complex mathematical equation. They are the final surface expression of thousands of conical, inclined ballistic shock cones, each traveling with a giant ice fragment blown from the ice sheet in a nine-minute supersonic arc from the frigid north to the Carolina coast. (I will work on that sentence but you get the idea). These icebergs from space slammed into the supersaturated unconsolidated clayey sands of the coastal plain and left behind the shock “ripples” and “flaps” that we recognize today as bay rims. Zamora even provides an equation relating the perfection and ellipticity of bays to the degree of unconsolidated sediments encountered by the ice bullets:
That makes sense to me, and accounts for the “classes” of similar bays, an aspect unexplained by wind and water enthusiasts, but first investigated and catalogued by Davias. In addition to the present journal publication, Zamora makes his case in detail in a recently published book available from Amazon: Killer Comet: What the Carolina Bays tell us. I am reading it now and will update this post accordingly. On the shoulders of genius, Zamora has provided defensible and superior answers to the many questions provoked by the appearance and distribution of Carolina bays. The geological community will largely ignore this paper, of course, but some will take note. And there is always reason for hope as the class of geologists who reject recent catastrophic explanations out-of-hand continue their long march from the tenured defense of the known, to retirement, and finally to death. I note that in closing Zamora gives a shout-out to his editor, Professor Andrew J. Plater of the University of Liverpool, clearly an enlightened man, who tweets here as @GeomorphologyDr if you care to thank him.
|
||||||
|
Copyright © 2017 The Cosmic Tusk - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||||
Recent Comments