Number of days writer Richard Kerr has failed to inform his Science readers of the confirmation of nanodiamonds at the YDB: 4 years, 2 months, and 6 days
Your correspondent has some fun news to share. The Tusk is writing from downtown Amman, Jordan, after joining Trinity Southwest University on a fabulous dig for biblical Sodom.
I have been meaning for weeks to let you all in on the adventure but have been distracted more than usual by my work and preparations for the trip. Also, it seemed such a wild proposition that — until it actually happened — it seemed premature to “announce” it.
But here I am. Indeed, I can hear loud protest drums and Arabic chanting in the streets as I write (let us pray it is Pro-King).
The story of Steven “Dr. C” Collins and the Tall el-Hammam archeological dig is a wonderful tale. I know Tusk readers will hit Google and read all about it, so I will not stay up late explaining it all tonight. But what attracted me to Dr. Collins and this project was more than simply the catastrophic tangent (which was plenty). It was also the intellectual courage, deep curiosity and faithful determination demonstrated by Dr. C and his team.
Like the YDB team, Collins et al. must not only convince the professional skeptics and know-nothings — they must also persuade their colleagues and traditional intellectual allies their quest is well founded. That is a difficult job, which makes it worthy and interesting.
So, I am here for two weeks and promise to provide some pics and irregular updates. (For readers who are on Facebook and have not friended me in the past, please do if you would like to see some photos).
Quite reasonably, I cannot share any details regarding what is being found this season. But rest easy, my readers, it is extraordinary — and right up your alley.
We agree with them that glass could be formed a lot of different ways. We don’t have a problem with that,” said Allen West, a retired oil and gas executive who is one of the leading proponents of the theory.
“You can get them from grass fires but you also get melt glass from lightning, volcanic eruptions and you also get it from cosmic impacts. The trick is being able to tell them apart.”
West said house fires don’t explain why they found evidence of particles from the Syrian soil and in North America that contained rare minerals like suessite, which melts at 4,100 degrees, and corundum, which melts at 3,200 degrees.
“No building fire can create those temperatures, a fact that refutes their hypothesis that this glass was produced in low-temperature building fires,” he said. “The sad thing is that these guys ignored all the high temperature evidence.”
So it’s clear the debate will go on.
West said he and several other supporters of the impact theory are readying papers that will provide further evidence of additional cosmic minerals at the sites, as well as more evidence shoring up the dates of the impact sites.
“The only time these melted minerals are seen in glass is when there was a cosmic impact or an atomic bomb blast,” West said of the new findings. “We can pretty much rule out an atomic bomb in Syria at that time.”
As a rule, the Tusk is scrupulously clean of politics. There is a reference in my own blog bio to being a former conservative policy staffer in the US Senate, but that is background and not polemics. I am old fashioned and believe politics is generally if not inherently destructive of sound inquiry. The more political a scientist appears to me, the less likely I am to take him or her seriously.
If you are wondering, Boslough assumed the “Uterus” appellation out of sympathy for a senator’s failing 2014 campaign. Readers are forgiven for forgetting the election trivia that departing senator Mark Udall (D-CO) was dubbed Mark “Uterus” Udall by his state. Udall’s shameless consultant-driven flogging of an imaginary “War on Women” became a joke — and he got clobbered.
Boslough maintains the silly moniker today, nearly two months following Udall’s rejection by voters.
If you doubt a federally funded media scientist would be so foolish and overt, take a look at the Bos’ public Facebook page, or his regular contributions to the Huffington Post. It is pure polemics. No cat pics, hiking in the mountains, or birthday parties for The Bos’ Facebook. Just snarky, condescending, frequently vile and universally left-wing political red meat. And his HuffPo work, which at best could provide informed commentary on threats to all of us, instead proselytizes science as a political tool to damage some of us.
For The Bos, politics is not the contest of ideas — It is the justification to silence opposing thoughts.
But why should it matter that Mark Boslough is a polemicist with two left feet? It matters because his politics have had a significant negative influence on our favorite topic here at the Tusk, the Younger Dryas Boundary Hypothesis.
First, it is well rumored that he was directly responsible for a PBS NOVA episode sympathetic to the ice age impact, “Mammoth Mystery,” being removed without explanation by WGBH Boston and PBS’ on-line streaming service. If true, this was a despicable act of intellectual suppression and digital book burning. I’d welcome hearing The Bos was uninvolved and the decision was inspired by the producers. But I doubt it.
The Bos actually makes a living downplaying the seriousness of his own damn subject — while stoking a fever pitch of worry for another! He is cynical 21st century media politics at its best…and science at its worst.
Update: I have now re-uploaded another half dozen publications to recent posts. Slowly but surely…
A disaster befell our favorite blog late this summer and for weeks I have cowered under my digital bed, pained and confused about what is to be done. While still tender, I have summoned the courage to speak of it now, will try to characterize the forward challenge, and perhaps gain some assistance from readers in plotting a course home — walking as I must.
The entire “Scribd” library of publications embedded in over 350 posts by the Cosmic Tusk has been lost. On the basis of copyright infringement the Scribd service summarily canceled my account without the opportunity to retrieve my uploads or otherwise mirror the files to my own computer. The PDF’s embedded in hundreds of posts, as commenters have noted, are all now dead ends.
I am tentatively committed to working myself back through the Tusk, determining along the way what documents were originally posted to Scribd (no easy task), obtaining the paper from my own or others’ files, and reposting the PDF text to a server with no intermediary service — all while keeping a reliable copy on my own machine in case such a catastrophe should occur once more.
Microscopic Diamonds Suggest Cosmic Impact Responsible for Major Period of Climate Change
A new study published in The Journal of Geology provides support for the theory that a cosmic impact event over North America some 13,000 years ago caused a major period of climate change known as the Younger Dryas stadial, or “Big Freeze.”
Around 12,800 years ago, a sudden, catastrophic event plunged much of the Earth into a period of cold climatic conditions and drought. This drastic climate change—the Younger Dryas—coincided with the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, such as the saber-tooth cats and the mastodon, and resulted in major declines in prehistoric human populations, including the termination of the Clovis culture.
With limited evidence, several rival theories have been proposed about the event that sparked this period, such as a collapse of the North American ice sheets, a major volcanic eruption, or a solar flare.
However, in a study published in The Journal of Geology, an international group of scientists analyzing existing and new evidence have determined a cosmic impact event, such as a comet or meteorite, to be the only plausible hypothesis to explain all the unusual occurrences at the onset of the Younger Dryas period.
Researchers from 21 universities in 6 countries believe the key to the mystery of the Big Freeze lies in nanodiamonds scattered across Europe, North America, and portions of South America, in a 50-million-square-kilometer area known as the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) field.
Microscopic nanodiamonds, melt-glass, carbon spherules, and other high-temperature materials are found in abundance throughout the YDB field, in a thin layer located only meters from the Earth’s surface. Because these materials formed at temperatures in excess of 2200 degrees Celsius, the fact they are present together so near to the surface suggests they were likely created by a major extraterrestrial impact event.
In addition to providing support for the cosmic impact event hypothesis, the study also offers evidence to reject alternate hypotheses for the formation of the YDB nanodiamonds, such as by wildfires, volcanism, or meteoric flux.
The team’s findings serve to settle the debate about the presence of nanodiamonds in the YDB field and challenge existing paradigms across multiple disciplines, including impact dynamics, archaeology, paleontology, limnology, and palynology.
One of the oldest journals in geology, The Journal of Geology (www.journals.uchicago.edu/JG) has since 1893 promoted the systematic philosophical and fundamental study of geology.
Though Panspermia is not the focus of this blog, I consider the theory and body of evidence a friendly intellectual cousin to the Tusk’s Coherent Catastrophism and worthy of defense on the same grounds. Both philosophies (to use the old term) come from a place of humility in the cosmos — and both endure a fierce majority of opponents who attack not so new ideas with a nasty contempt beneath the expectations of fairly conducted debate. Such displays are particularly grating when the attacker has a demonstrably inferior intellect to the attacked.
An example of wonderful science being dismissed by a low-brow bully is the Plait\Wickramasinghe affair of 2013. Last year Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe announced the discovery of diatomaceous material in a meteorite, a notion previously endorsed by the President of the United States. This provoked popular science blogger Phil Plait to publish a series of juvenile assaults on the beloved Sri Lankan researcher [herehere and here].
Plait is entitled to disagree with Wickramasinghe. But what disgusts the Tusk is his failure to respectfully acknowledge Chandra Wickramasinghe’s profound career of accomplishment in science — indeed astronomy, a subject with which Plait purports familiarity!
Science punk Plait makes no reference whatsoever to Wickramasinghe’s credentials or documented intellectual journey. Indeed, he attacks Dr. Wickramasinghe so directly and recklessly he creepily admits he is operating ad hominem:
Now, you might accuse me of using an ad hominem, an argument that cast aspersions on the person making the claim, and not attacking the claim itself. I’ll get to the claim in a moment, but sometimes an ad hominem is warranted! If Sylvia Brown claims she can predict someone’s future, you would be right to doubt her based on her past, since she has continually failed in every attempt to do so. If Jenny McCarthy claimed botox cures autism, again, you might be forgiven for doubting it based on her previous anti-vaccine and other false claims. You still need to examine the claims on their own merits, of course, but: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
So, to be polite about it, Wickramasinghe is something of a fringe scientist. Who would publish a paper by him?
When Wickramasinghe first walked the yards of Cambridge and published in Nature with his contemplative cohort Hoyle – Phil Plait’s cosmic life was created by Fisher-Price. Wickramasinghe has certainly forgotten more of science than Phil Plait has published.
I was comforted to see one of the few men alive who could adequately empathize with Dr. Wickramasinghe, Bill Napier, send Phil a one-day-to-be-iconic letter below in defense of his dear colleague. I wonder if Phil Plait even knows what it means to be collegial?
In response to an inquiry from the Tusk, Joanne Ballard of the University of Tennessee very graciously provided our blog the unpublished photos, field notes and narrative below from her recent trip to Netherlands. She personally inspects and samples the Usselo Boundary, or black mat of Europe. Absolutely fascinating.
Here is some background on the research of the Usselo horizon sites and narrative for the slides.
I am currently a 4th year PhD student in the Geography Department at the University of Tennessee. I research major paleoenvironmental change since the last ice age, by analyzing lake sediment cores. The proxies I use are pollen, charcoal, stable C and N isotopes, X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, light microscopy, and thin sections.
Usselo Horizons in the Netherlands and Belgium typically date to the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD), but in some locations appear to be end-YD. In Germany, this layer is referred to at the Finow soil.
It is a dark, charcoal-rich layer suspended in the coversands. Above is yellow quartz sand, and directly below the dark layer, the sand appears bleached.
While I was a M.S. student at the University of Cincinnati, Han Kloosterman sent me some samples from the Ossendrecht (Netherlands) Usselo horizon. I wet-sieved the sample from the charcoal-rich horizon to concentrate the quartz grains for thin section analysis. The images of this thin section show that all grains are internally fractured, and there are parallel “decorated” lines that may or may not be shock lamellae. There is a quartz grain that appears to have a track with an offset in it that stops in the center of that grain and is radially fractured (Slides 8,9). This suggests to me that there was a rapid shift from a semi-molten state (for a microimpacting grain to penetrate the quartz grain in such a way) followed by fast cooling resulting in the fractures radiating out from the center. The black sphere in the image of the grain with the track in it, is probably an air bubble. The ‘Ossendrecht Medallion’ (Slides 11,12)is a peculiar structure that looks suggestive of a molten quartz grain that was flattened and shock lines were recorded, but I am not an impact physicist. Analyses of the Ossendrecht loose grains using high magnification light microscopy revealed fused grains of quartz. SEM images were also obtained and you can see the comparison of the one grain with Bevan French’s image.
One of the objections from scientists some years ago in discussion about these features, was that they could be detrital material washed in or blown in from some far distant area that had an ET impact.
Therefore, in 2011, I went to the Netherlands and collaborated with several scientists there to collect samples from three different locations, two in the Netherlands (Laarder Wasmeren and Lutterzand) and one in Belgium (Lommel). Colleagues assisting on this trip were Andre Bijkerk; Han Kloosterman; Bas van Geel and Jan Sevink of the Universiteit Amsterdam; and Ferdi Geerts, Conservator at the Museum De Kolonie, Lommel. I took samples from several depths at each site in order to compare the grains at each level. If the grains in the dark layer are all internally fractured at all sites, and levels above and below it are not, it supports the hypothesis that it is an event horizon. I also collected samples from a documented, stand-killing, severe forest fire.
In reviewing these samples under high magnification light microscopy, I found melt glass, fused grains, quartz “needles”, charcoal, wood fragments, and well-rounded black micrograins. These have not yet been analyzed.
At Lommel, we found a section of the Usselo horizon that actually had fine laminations. This set of laminae were not level but arcuate, so not likely to have been a pond or lake depositional setting. These laminae are in situ, and not detrital. I interpret these laminae as algal in nature. Why are these fine algal layers here and nowhere else in the stratigraphic column? My hypothesis is that the surface of the sand was showered by nitric acid rain on a cyclical basis. Each lamina represents one nitric acid rain shower. Nitric acid rain occurs following an extraterrestrial event (Prinn and Fegley 1987, Toon et al. 1997, Kolesnikov and Kolesnikova 2010) and has been documented for the Tunguska event of 1908 (Kolesnikov et al. 1998). The ET shock wave dissociates the N2 in the atmosphere, and the ozone in the stratosphere, and nitrate forms. This rains out over an estimated months to years (Prinn and Fegley 1987).
I have not been able to do a comparative analysis of the different levels at the four sites using thin sections yet, as I have not been able to secure funding to cover the cost of thin sections and radiocarbon dates.
If anyone discusses any of this unpublished material, please cite me.
Slide 1 View of the laminated Usselo Horizon at Lommel Belgium, closeup of the laminations, and a grain from within the layers.
Slide 2 Examples of what the Usselo horizon is– a dark charcoal rich layer in the coversands, underlain by bleached-looking sand, and overlain by yellow sand. Important early papers on the Usselo Horizon are Van Geel et al. (1979) Alex Andronikov, of the Lunar and Planetary Science
Institute, Arizona also visited sites in the Netherlands in 2011, and was reported on the Cosmic Tusk.
Slide 3 More views of Usselo horizons from Kaiser et al. 2009.
Slide 4 Distrubution of coversands vs. river-deposited sands
The four sampling sites are marked with red stars.
Slides 5-8 show the internal fractures in quartz grains from t he
Usselo layer at Ossendrecht, the Netherlands
Slide 8 A peculiar quartz grain with a track or channel in it.
Slide 9 Close up of that track, clearly showing the groove from
exterior to interior of grain, and the central radial
fracture pattern as if from a projectile
Very rapid quenching of molten material may have occurred?
Slide 10 More strange features from the Ossendrecht Usselo thin
section
Slides 11-12 The “Ossendrecht Medallion”, arcuate lines enclosed in
quartz grains suggest shocking. Grain is fractured at foci
of arcuate lines. This also suggests phase changes of
matter from fluid to solid very rapidly
Slides 12-14 Discussion of traditional markers of an extraterrestrial
event, referencing French and Koeberl 2010. The YDB impact
does contain breccia when you consider the internal
fracturing of the quartz grains. Shatter cones would not
be produced in a sandy area; they require bedrock. There
is possible shocked quartz here, but I need a collaborator
to help assess this aspect of the grains. There is melt
glass, without a doubt.
Slide 17 Comparison of a shocked grain under SEM (French and Koeberl
2010) with a grain from Ossendrecht. May or may not be
the same process.
Slide 18 Comparison of decorated PDFs of French and Koeberl (2010)
and Ossendrecht. PDF = planar deformation feature
Slide 19 Comparison of Ballen Quartz (French and Koeberl 2010)
and arcuate fractures in quartz grains from Ossendrecht, as
seen in thin section.
Slides 20-22 The Usselo section at Laarder Wasmeren site, near
Amsterdam, thanks to Jan Sevink and Bas van Geel.
Slide 23 Lutterzand, near the Dinkel River on the east side of the
Netherlands. This Usselo section was very peaty.
Slide 24 Microscope images of grains from Lutterzand. Fused quartz.
Slides 25-26 There are many of these “quartz needles” at all three
sites. Some appear to be quartz filaments but others that
are tapered on the ends, look like sponge spicules.
Further investigation is needed.
Slide 27 A remarkably fresh looking fragment of wood was observed
under the microscope. It should appear weathered after
all these years. One reason it might retain its fresh
look is by being coated by a layer of quartz. This is not
unreasonable given the fused grains and melt glass in these
samples.
Slide 28 Lommel, Belgium.
Slide 29 Microscope image of more elongated quartz needles.
Slide 30 The curved laminae, quartz-rich and probably carbon and
nitrogen rich from the brown organic material that is
likely consecutive algal mats from successive nitric acid
rain showers.
Slide 31 From the bleached layer below the laminae (Lommel), melt
glass with a black grain fused to it.
Slide 32-34 Self explanatory
Slide 35 SEM of one of the grains from the brown organic laminae.
You can see clearly that the dark material is adhered to
the surface of the quartz grain.
Slide 36 Summary of Hypotheses that link the three sites.
Slides 37-38 Many researchers refer to the Usselo horizon as a soil,
which forms slowly over thousands of years. I compare
images of the Usselo horizon with a podzol and show clearly
that they are not the same.
Slide 39 Podzol distribution map
Slide 40 When nitric acid rain occurs, it is damaging to vegetation,
but also has a fertilization effect in aquatic
environments, with massive algal and diatom blooms
occurring. Nitric acid rain has been well studied in
recent times in association with the Industrial Age. Since
1850 pollution from factories has acidified precipitation
with sulfates and nitrates. Diatomists were able to show
the link between onset of factory pollution and
acidification of landscapes and aquatic environments. Some
diatoms prefer more alkaline environments, and others prefer more acidic. By tracking changes in the diatom
communities, they were able to show this connection.
Diatoms, then can be used to reveal nitric acid rain peaks
at the YDB. Acidification can be detected in the Greenland
ice cores using ECM (Electrical Conductivity)
Slide 41 Future work, research questions.
Slide 42-47 Additional images of the quartz needles
Slide 48 I visited a modern forest fire to collect samples for
comparison to paleofire sites.
Slide 49 Digital Elevation Map of the Netherlands showing the four
sites.
References
French, B. and Koeberl, C., 2010. The Convincing Identification of Terrestrial Meteorite Impact Structures: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why. Earth Science Reviews 98 (1–2):123–170.
Kaiser, K.; Hilgers, A.; Schlaak, N.; Jankowski, M.; Kühn, P.; Bussemer, S.; Przegiętka, A.,
2009 Palaeopedological Marker Horizons in Northern Central Europe Characteristics of Late Glacial Usselo and Finow Soils. Boreas 38 (3): 591-609.
Kolesnikov, E.M.; Kolesnikova, N.V.; and Boettger, T., 1998. Isotopic anomaly in peat nitrogen is a probable trace of acid rain caused by 1908 Tunguska bolide. Planetary Space Science 46 (2/3):163–167.
Kolesnikov, E.M. and Kolesnikova, N.V., 2010. Traces of Cometary Material in the Area
of the Tunguska Impact (1908). Solar System Research 44 (2): 110–121.
Stapert, D. and Veenstra, H.J., 1988. The Section at Usselo; Brief Description, Grain-Size Distributions, and some Remarks on the Archaeology. Paleohistoria 30: 1-28.
Van Geel, B.; Coope, G.R., and Van der Hammen, T. B. 1989. Palaeoecology and Stratigraphy of the Lateglacial Type Section at Usselo (The Netherlands). Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 60: 25–129.
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