Two errors in your article (in the same sentence):
Nick Pinter and Ishman are at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, not the University of Illinois, Carbondale. There is no such school as the latter.
And it is not ROBERT Ishamn. It is of Paleobiologist SCOTT Ishman, an Associate Professor in the Geology Departartment at SIUC.
As to “less-qualified tomato throwers,” that is a very apt identification of anyone from SIUC, a noted party college and so far down the list of Geology Departments that they barely show up on the ratings.
I am quite familiar with SIUC, having grown up in Southern Illinois. That is the college one attends if no one else will take you. Pinter is a minor-leaguer, and Ishman, too, unless they pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get positions at a real institution of higher learning.
“Less qualified?” You bet. You may now proceed to laugh them out of the building.
Another article in The Pleistocene Coalition News, on pgs 7-10, brought this to mind (George, please delete if it is off-topic):
Vance Hayne’s name came up in a book someone pointed me to, The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World”, by Christopher Hardaker, available from Amazon (Kindle available). He was a minor player in that book, but even in 1962 he was a big name in Clovis-First defense.
The book is a devastating exposé of the nastiness of archeologists, and their 50-year suppression of the true age of human habitation in the Americas.
The book is one I can TRULY say I couldn’t put it down till I finished it. Some of the acts perpetrated by one villain are stupefyingly nasty. The cowardice of the archeologists in the face of actual replicated lab tests – U-series dating, in particular – by geologists, was revealed in all its ‘scientific criminality’. I use the term criminality partly because the author brought up the term, but mostly because hiding facts from the scientific community by sweeping them under the carpet) is fraudulent against science and the public. Evidence was clearly found – under the auspices of the highest levels of archeology – FIFTY years ago that blew the Clovis First paradigm out of the water by a full ten thousand years at minimum. At maximum, it said humans were south of Puebla, Mexico 220,000 years ago. Presently the earliest dates talked about are ~22,000 ya, with some considering ~25,000 ya.
Vance Haynes – at that time already a big name in archeology – played a small part in the cover-up. It is not surprising that he has become a defender of the faith on the YDB issue, too. It seems to be his modus operandus. What he hopes to gain it is difficult to tell, because the Clovis barrier is dead and will never see the light of day again.
Besides having an entertaining social environment, SIUC has had some fine archaeologists – Brucew Masse was trained there, and they had a really good expert in Mississippian culture who has recnetly retired.
On this topic, I want to mention that someone needs to go to Fairbanks Alaska and recover materials on the actual deposits which Hibben observed there. It was my pleasure to defend this honorable departed wounded veteran’s work for some six months, but clearly there are others more able to do this than myself now.
I’m still skeptical of the YD impact Carolina Bays connection, but I’m keeping an open mind about it, and I’m still not convinced that Paul Heinrich has adequately falsified my nutty Lake Nipigon Impact Glacial Lake Agassiz dicharge hypothesis, but I’m keeping an open mind about that as well. Also, it’s clear that the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis Wikipedia page needs to be completely rewritten and that simply reversing Michael Simpson’s Uninformed Trashing of the very mild and quite reasonable and modest additions made to it after the release of the most recent PNAS paper will be grossly insufficient to cover the advances that have been made on this subject. However, I still remain skeptical of the relationship of this alleged impact to the Younger Dryas chronozone until some more definitive evidence of a very large airburst or impact can be presented.
On the other hand, I found these publication in progress :
J. H. Wittke, J. C. Weaver; T. E. Bunch, D. K. Kennett, A. M. T. Moore, G. C. Hillman, A. Tankersley, Goodyear, C. Moore, R. Daniel, Lopinot, I-A. Israde, J. L. Bischoff, P. S. DeCarli, R. E. Hermes, Kloosterman, R.  B. Firestone, Z. Revay, G. A. Howard, D. R. Kimbel, C. P. Lipo, S. Sakai, A. West; and. J. P. Kennett. Impact-related microspherules on three continents at the Younger-Dryas onset (12.9 ka): in preparation for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2012.
T. E. Bunch, R. E Hermes, A. M. T. Moore, D. K. Kennett, J. C. Weaver, J. H. Wittke, P. S. DeCarli, J. L Bischoff, G. C. Hillman, G. A. Howard, D. R. Kimbel, G. Kletetschka, C. P. Lipo, S. Sakai, Z. Revay, A. West, R. B. Firestone & J. P. Kennett, 2013, High-Temperature Scoria-like Objects and Glassy Spherules: Evidence for a Cosmic Impact with Earth at 12.9 ka: in review for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, April 2012.
Methods for the Extraction and Purification of Nanodiamonds from Cretaceous-Tertiary and Younger Dryas Boundary Sediments
Charles R. Kinzie and Wendy S. Wolbach
In progress.
Evidence for Widespread Biomass-Burning at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) at 12.9 ka
J.P. Kennett, A. West, P.A. Mayewski, T.E. Bunch, T.W. Stafford, Jr., J. Ballard, and W.S. Wolbach
In progress.
Somebody please un-confuse me: In the last year or so EPG explained on Tusk that CBs and YDr are NOT related, and someone put CBs at ~34K BP while YDr ~12.9K BP.
That both occur in George Howard’s article is more of an accidental linkage?
George, that must have been some impressive term paper on the CBs. Nice to know how you got into impact science.
My only motivation since teen years was the rumors about Hawaii’s central Pacific location somehow having to with this lop-sided hole in the Earth with all continents on the opposite hemisphere. Then I read there were magmatic traps in Siberia, and now we may trust the West-Siberian impacts 250M BP were responsible for the Pacific Ocean hole. That is, barring those tomato throwers.
BTW, reading the posts on Tusk, and comments by Steve and others, pretty much leaves me in the dust as that rank amateur that I am.
Thomas Lee: “I’m still not convinced that Paul Heinrich has adequately falsified my nutty Lake Nipigon Impact Glacial Lake Agassiz dicharge hypothesis, but I’m keeping an open mind about that as well.”
Your term “Lake Nipigon Impact Glacial Lake Agassiz discharge” I can’t quite catch the drift of, since it seems to include an impact with the Lake Agassiz emptying. I must have missed it when you posted it. Apologies for that…
For general reference as to why Lake Agassiz could not have sent a surge to the Atlantic, you might want to buy a copy of Rodney Chilton’s “Sudden Cold.” There is a link to it in the RH column. Rodney points out many of the holes in the Lake Agassiz draining, and the even bigger holes in the underlying THC oceanic conveyor hypothesis.
I love highly respected oceanographer Carl Wunsch’s take on the THC:
“…you can’t turn the Gulf Stream off as long as the wind blows over the North Atlantic and the earth continues to rotate!” and went on to describe the ‘conveyor’ as “a kind of fairy-tale for grownups.” Professor Wunsch said that “I’m willing to talk about these things. I believe that there are all kinds of things happening in the oceans, many highly troubling, but I also believe that one should distinguish what the science tells us and what is merely fantasy.”
If the THC is “merely [a] fantasy”, then Lake Agassiz draining becomes a non-nothing.
Rodney points out, among other things, that at the YDB the ice sheet still had not receded far enough, therefore there was no outlet to the Atlantic. Subsequent efforts have been tried, to show the lake draining to the NORTH, along the Mackensie River instead, which is ludicrous, because then the cold fresh water would have been mixed in among even colder saline water in the Arctic Ocean, and then would have had to travel thousands of miles through the frozen north (being diluted more and more during the whole journey) in order to arrive at the THC sinking spot in the N Atlantic. The “work-around” thus becomes more ‘fantastic’ than the original – kind of like fantasy-squared.
Then there is the journal paper that pointed out that Lake Agassiz didn’t even NEED a sudden drainage, that it very likely simply evaporated away. (Sorry I don’t have the source handy.)
Hermann: “Somebody please un-confuse me: In the last year or so EPG explained on Tusk that CBs and YDr are NOT related, and someone put CBs at ~34K BP while YDr ~12.9K BP. ”
You know, Hermann, I am with you on that! I thought the CB-YDB link was kaput, too – from things I’ve read HERE.
From a ‘scientific elegance’ POV, I’d LOVE the two to be compatible, but then EPG had pretty much disabused me of that elegance.
And now I have whiplash, too.
I’ve read enough of Davias’ web pages to have seen that most of the lab datings have been in the 35ky-40kya range for CB soils. That puts it right smack dab in the middle of Firestone’s C14 problem period – where dates might just as easily read ~38kya or ~32kya. Firestone pointed at his supernova theory on that. But the dates aren’t compatible with the YDB.
At the same time, from reading Chris Moore’s comments on the “Davias Presents…” post and his pdfs, I am VERY MUCH questioning where on the CBs is the correct place to be taking OSL dates from.
My reason? The sand deposits which Davias puts much focus on, these in Moore’s lacustrine arguments are shown to be laid over the top of what the underyling form of the CBs is/are. The sand is failry evenly deposited, following the countours of the outlying ground, the rims. and the CB basins. This in no way argues for lacustrine, since lake shorelines are always at ONE elevation at a time, leaving shoreline features that are clearly evident. Instead, the sand layer flows up and over the rims. Clearly not lacustrine, and clearly laid over what land from existed previously.
In addition, there is NO layering in the sand whatsoever (noted time and time again in the literature) – which indicates not only that the sand was laid down in one fell swoop, but that there has been no wind effects or siltation effects, either.
What this all says to me is that the CB bottoms were formed first, and that the sand was deposited afterward, like powdered sugar on pastries. And THAT says to me that measuring the sand in the rims is nonsense. IMHO, the dating should all be in the first cms of the CB basins and the first cms in the under-sand soil outside. Measuring anytihing IN the rims is garbage, because that was the region that MAY HAVE BEEN disrupted, in case of low-velocity impacts.
NO ONE argues that the CBs were primary impacts. Ergo, either they are lacustrine (rejected by the facts in many papers), aeolian (rejected by the facts in many papers), or low-impact craters (never rejected – mostly because no one knows what it is they are rejecting). By process of elimination, the focus on CB causes should be on ejecta impacts – if for no other reason than to honestly falsify the hypothesis.
But as to dating, I accept the 35-40kya dates – but I argue that they are dating the wrong strata. That being the case, I no longer accept EPG’s outright rejection of the BC-YDB link. The link may still be wrong, but I haven’t seen the evidence that convinces me.
To me the door has opened again. Thanks more to Moore and his lacustrine pdfs than to anything Davias or EPG has said.
Moore’s pdfs were completely unconvincing of the lacustrine hypothesis, and actually had NO evidence that I saw supporting the idea. Instead, their evidence showed the opposite – that lacustrine was specifically excluded from consideration.
Since that time, I have actually arrived at a scenario by which I believe the CBs were formed. I will go into it in due time, after I’ve run over it a few times to work out the bugs or falsify it logically.
Since OSL is only measuring how long a mineral has been laying in darkness, it only really works for stratigraphic studies of Aeolian, and lacustrine sediments when the layers have been laid down gradually, and sequentially over a long time. If the bays all formed at once, as many of us think they did, then using OSL to date them is useless. If I take a piece of ancient material, and move it violently without exposing it to sunlight, OSL won’t tell you when I moved it.
If you had a fairly good understanding of the exact physical mechanism of the formation of the bays, like the understanding we have of the evolution of an impact crater, then you would understand the sequence the materials were deposited during formation; as well as which materials were moved, and where to. And you could go directly to the layer of materials that were exposed to sunlight before the event, and buried at the moment of formation, to give you the correct age for the structure. But without such an understanding, your OSL dates are going to be all over the place. Because all you will really be measuring is how long the antecedent materials you’re testing have been lying in darkness.
Since there is really no solid understanding of the mechanism of their formation, there is also no rhyme or reason to the choice of where folks take their specimens, it’s like picking up a large book that’s written in a foreign, or ancient tongue you don’t understand. And then picking random characters from the middle of words here and there in the book, and presuming to understand what the book is all about.
And if the materials were not laid down in a gradual layer by layer sequence as the devout uniformitarian folk assume. (I don’t think they were) Then OSL data is meaningless.
I finally got home to an IP address that Wikipedia had blocked for editing and reversed some of the edits and added a paragraph to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis page. My very first edit.
“If you had a fairly good understanding of the exact physical mechanism of the formation of the bays, like the understanding we have of the evolution of an impact crater, then you would understand the sequence the materials were deposited during formation; as well as which materials were moved, and where to. And you could go directly to the layer of materials that were exposed to sunlight before the event, and buried at the moment of formation, to give you the correct age for the structure.”
If the sand was deposited all at once (it is NOT native to the coastal plain), then what is UNDER it is what has last seen the Sun at point X in time. The clay at the bottoms of the bays is what should be looked at with OSL. The clay under the sand outside the bays should have OSL testing. And where the sand drapes (Davias’ tem, which I agree with) over the rims, then the rim soil immediately under the sand should be tested.
This is a falsifiable premise/prediction. True scientific understanding predicts certain things. I predict that the OSL dates under the soils in those different locations will read the same. We do not have to prove something else first. We can say, “THIS should be what is found, based on this hypothesis, so let us go see if THIS is what IS found.” It alone does not prove the ejecta impact hypothesis, but if it is consistent with the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is strengthened.
If, as researchers have noted, the quartz sand was all deposited at one time, then the OSL date for lower sand and upper sand should date to the same time. I would exclude sand too close to the surface, as it would have been blown about, and would have also had some sunlight bleed through grains above it. With some sand beds as thick as 10 meters, this test would falsify or verify the single-deposition understanding.
‘@Dennis:
“Since there is really no solid understanding of the mechanism of their formation, there is also no rhyme or reason to the choice of where folks take their specimens”
But I am saying that the OSL can itself be used to support or weed out some mechanisms. That is part of what evidence is supposed to be used for, after all.
But I am saying specifically that there ARE locations that will tell us more.
I have in mind a mechanism which does cover the bases, and I think it is solid. It is close to Davias’ thinking, but we differ a bit. I am gathering my points. He is more likely correct than me, but I see a few pints of contention. Between the two, I think we narrow the possibilities substantially. And both ideas are nothing people here would be shocked by.
One location I would look at would be the the stratigraphic horizon at the interface under the sand rims that separates them from the surface they are laying on. If the Bays are the result of secondary impacts, the sand rims would’ve been emplaced at the time of that impact. So it would be interesting to see if a number of bays return the same age from that horizon.
But one test that may provide some clue would be to pick a common structural location from the same place in a dozen bays picked at random. Such as the stratigraphic horizon described above, or at the clay-sand interface, say on the NW end. If we get dates that are all over the place then we have a problem.
But it would also help if more than one dating method were available for any given specimen, so they could be cross-checked. Since as I said, If a piece of material was moved in the formation event without exposing it to sunlight, then OSL will only tell you how long it’s been since the specimen has seen the light of day. And not how long it’s been since the formation event itself.
Dennis –
“One location I would look at would be the the stratigraphic horizon at the interface under the sand rims that separates them from the surface they are laying on. If the Bays are the result of secondary impacts, the sand rims would’ve been emplaced at the time of that impact. So it would be interesting to see if a number of bays return the same age from that horizon.”
That is my point exactly, Dennis.
If you look at Chris Moore’s pdfs, the GPR transects show the folds in the ground under the rims. At least that is how I interpret them. My bet is the OSL readings inside, on and outside the rims is the same, for a given depth under the sand.
“But one test that may provide some clue would be to pick a common structural location from the same place in a dozen bays picked at random.”
I agree with that, too. I don’t think any conclusions should be drawn except if replicated for several bays.
“If a piece of material was moved in the formation event without exposing it to sunlight, then OSL will only tell you how long it’s been since the specimen has seen the light of day. And not how long it’s been since the formation event itself.”
THAT is what I am asking about the 100,000 year dates and 40,000, too.
A low-velocity ejecta impact can push clay downward and outward without destroying the impact location – if the velocity is low enough. And with terminal velocity (due to atmospheric drag) a factor in ejecta trajectories, landing velocities may very well have been low enough to ONLY ‘dimple’ (Davias’ term) the soil. And if the soil surface has not been disintegrated or exploded, but only compressed downward and pushed outward, then the top soil surface would have not been changed – meaning OSL tells us nothing. Nothing except that if we OSL date the right places and equal depths and find out that the readings are the same, then we know the landform was merely deformed, but not catastrophically.
This would also rule out aeolian and lacustrine as anything more thanreworking the pre-existing landform. Lacustrine has to do with sedimentation and shoreline creation. Aeolian has been shown by Davias’ LIDAR to give characteristics completely different than the bays possess. Both are a non-starters.
I just read in “Geographical Portraits of North America” today that the level of the ground in bays is lower than the surrounding ground. That is consistent with this scenario. A volumetric study can also be done on bays – to find out if the rim volume of each is equal to or less than the missing volume of the lowered bay basin.
Why ‘less than’? Because the underlying soil may be compressed straight downward, without ever showing up in the rims. But if rims are shown to have MORE volume than the missing volume below external ground level, then some other mechanism must be at work.
I believe rim volume will be MUCH less, because the largest force component would have been downward, and most of the energy would have been in compressing the soil downward.
All these relatively simple tests can be done, so as to refine the concept if needed. But I am betting they will all hold true.
My first attempt at righting a Wikipedia wrong was horrific. I guess I won’t be editing any more Wikipedia pages if this is the way it works.
The Wikipedia software wasn’t as near as user friendly as I was led to believe as well.
I would have tried it earlier but the local IP was blocked from Wikipedia until the 14th and I wanted to give you a chance to change it yourself. At the very least there should be mention of this paper in the references of both the Younger Dryas pages and the hypothesis page.
A hypothesis that is still in fluid motion it seems. However, these people have chosen to dedicate some portion of their careers to developing the field of microscopic impact proxy detection and analysis, and that moving forward. You need to listen to what they’re saying.
Since That Michael Simpson guy’s definition of “pseudoscience” is anything he doesn’t think is consistent with his own narrow view of the “consensus”, and never mind if a reference is in refereed literature. You’re right. His edits of the YD hypothesis page on Wikipedia come under the heading of unjustified censorship since he removes any reference he doesn’t agree with, including current and recent peer reviewed literature. How do we go about petitioning Wikipedia to get the narrow minded idiot’s editing privileges cut off?
No, I made my point. He must have used the term fringe science a dozen times in the editing war, and I’m in enough trouble already. I happen to think this is cutting edge science myself, even if everything ends up wrong things are advancing well.
Maybe email me at [email protected], and I can point out one or two things about editing in WIkipedia. I managed okay somehow. Maybe one thing is holding you up, and it might be something I’ve learned.
(My edits have been mainly in non-controversial subjects, so maybe that makes a difference.)
Each subject does also have a discussion page. You can go there and point out your problems with Simpson. Someone may have a suggestion how to deal with him. He DOES need to be reported. In global warming, one of the assholes who kept editing out stuff he didn’t like was banned. It took quite a while, but it did happen.
Controversial subjects often have Sections which are labeled “The Controversy Over ______”
I am not an expert, but have edited 30-40 pages, usually points of substance.
You need to understand that Morrison was/is heavily connected with the Sceptical Inquirer.
Unfortunately, that gave Morrison the ability to block sceptiscism of his own dangerously low estimates of the cometary impact hazard.
One key element in moving these studies foward is unfortuntately going to be removing Morrison from any controlling position. This is unfortunate given Morrison’s pioneering work in the field of impact studies.
Aside from that, many people have invested their careers in other explanations for the phenomenon seen at the HSIE.
Some people will make unreasonble demands: Mike here is demanding an analysis of starvation species by species, in a far different world than we hav today.
There is a final remark that I’d like to add here” 41 of the world’s leading scientists wrote a paper staating that the Chicxulub impact was sufficient for the KT ELE, omlyy to have the Shiva data come up later. And while the Shiva data had been ignored, the US NSF had wasted a ton of money of Keller’s work.
It’s all going to make one hell of a story someday. Too bad I’m in no shape to write it.
I kept a full copy so that I can re-paste sections as simply and quickly as possible, when the guy re-edits it.
I will get notices when it is edited, so I will be able to undo his nastiness as easily as he does ours.
FYI: I left in the critical parts that were still valid, including their criticism – but clearly labeled as criticisms, not as the final word. They can criticize all they want, as long is the pro-YDB info is not removed, and as long as they don’t claim their criticism is the final word.
If the guy keeps it up, I will follow up your complaint, Dennis. Wiki will have a copy of every edit, so they can see what is going on.
I DID paste in the paragraph from the Lake Cuitzeo paper that lists all the other independent confirmations.
I also reorganized the page. It was terrible, jumping back and forth, and some things it repeated up to three times.
The Wiki page is still as I edited it. That may not last long.
I have the full text saved, including references and footnotes.
I can’t get on for now, Dennis, so would you like me to email it to you for quick re-editing? If you do, do NOT say anything about Simpson in your editing reason.
What the hell does “attempting to out another editor” mean?
In any case, you guys are playing low stakes poker. You have to remember Morrison was a “referee” on academic publications for years, until his editorial bias became clearly evident.
As I’ve told all of you repeatedly, we’re playing for real money here. Since the impact hazard is far greater than NASA has previously admitted, demontrating this means that NASA will have to change its distribution of expenditures.
This involves peoples’ incomes, as well as the Mars fantasies of key NASA supporters. Don’t expect them to play fair.
A very high evidence level is needed. and you can expect constant personal attacks while trying to present that evidence.
Aside from that, since Benny took the Cambridge Conference over to AGW scepiciam, impact is now needlessly associated with AGW scepticism.
As I muself have been “stalked” for years, Steve, I don’t think your “STALKER EDITOR’ comment was justified. You also need to remember that Michael is not operating alone, but has his own support network.
Also, as I have mentioned here before, the real work on impact is not done publicly for very good reasons. Right now it has to be done very, very privately.
Like I said before, this is going to make a great story whenever someone writes it.
As far as public perceptions go, google “the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs”.
Just an update on the Younger Dryas Wikipedia pages scandal, the editing and accusations by Michael Simpson (aka Skeptical Raptor) have become so extreme and outrageous that I have indeed been literally forced by this individual to directly contact the senior editor and explain the situation and recommend that he consider banning the user Skeptioal Raptor (who is indeed Michael Simpson as any superficial research will reveal) from any further editing of the two Younger Dryas pages, and that editing be handled by an unbiased observer. If any of you have Wikipedia accounts, I agree with Dennis that you should contact the appropriate editor (I believe it is DougWeller) and request the same from him.
I note that the Wikipedia article says that there is no evidence of population decline 12,900 ya. But Terry Jones at Cal Poly says differently. According to him there was a 700 year hiatus in human occupation in California beginning 12,900 YA.
California archaeological record consistent with Younger Dryas disruptive event
Terry L. Jones
Department of Social Sciences, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407-0329, USA.
Buchanan et al. (1) assert that the radiocarbon record from the United States and Canada does not support the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis, but their claims do not hold true for the California archaeological record. Fluted projectile points marking Paleoindian occupations have been reported from no fewer than 51 locations in California (2), and no fewer than 38 sites have produced radiocarbon evidence for occupation between 10,500 and 9,000 calibrated yrs BP (3). Only two sites have produced fluted points and early Holocene occupational residues together in stratified context. At the same time, none of the sites that have produced radiocarbon evidence for occupation between 10,500 and 9,000 calibrated yrs BP have yielded fluted points. There are no archaeological sites in California that have reliable radiocarbon dates between 12,900 and 12,200 calibrated yrs BP and precious few that date between 12,000 and 10,500 calibrated yrs BP. The earliest archaeological record from California is therefore marked by a strong cultural unconformity between the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene that is consistent with a significant disruptive event of the type described by Firestone et al. (4) and Kennett et al. (5). A more careful evaluation of the full cultural and archaeological record from the regions discussed by Buchanan et al. (1) would likely show similar patterns.
References
1. Buchanan B, Collard M, Edinborough K. (2008) Paleoindian demography and the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:11651–11654.
2. Klar KL, Rondeau M, Cassidy J, Jones TL. (2007) in California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity, eds Jones TL, Klar KL (Altamira, New York), pp 63–70.
3. Klar KL, Erlandson JM, Rick TC, Jones TL, Porcasi JF. (2007) in California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity, eds Jones TL, Klar KL (Altamira, New York), pp 53–62.
4. Firestone RB, et al. (2007) Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16016–16021.
5. Kennett DJ, et al. (2008) Wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California’s northern Channel Islands at the Ållerød-Younger Dryas boundary (13.0–12.9 ka) Quat Sci Rev 27:2528–2543.
Michael SImpson is also a very poor writer. I am no James Michener, but at least I do not subject you all to that drivel. Or edit encyclopedias with a hatchet!
It was explained to me why Wikipedia’s approach to our handling of him is problematic. First of all, specifically mentioning any editor by their real name on wiki is a huge no no; too many legal issues come into play for them. Also, there is a problem with labeling the idiot as a “stalker” since the use of that word also opens wiki up to law suits.
The admin folks have explained to me that the correct handling is to simply edit the correct information into the Wiki page without making any specific mention of the idiot.
So if he deletes something, we just quietly put it right back again without making a personal issue of it. And each time we do, we put a little bit more of the truth into the replacement copy.
I am exploring a couple of different WYSIWYG editors that are compatible with wiki, and should simplify the process of doing so; complete with pictures.
Something that should also be put into that page are the YDB team’s responses to those criticisms. Such as quoting or including the full ‘Potential misidentification of markers’ paragrph of the Lake Cuitzeo paper.
Outing an editor I believe means trying to snitch on him.
As to Stalker Editor, from what Thomas was telling us, Simpson was keeping tabs on edits of that page. It is just a simple check box to be notified of them.
In global warming there was LOT of that by alarmists, and it took a VERY LONG TIME to get the people at Wikipedia to address the situation. Any page associated in any way with global warming issues was not allowed to have ANY assertions of the incorrectness of the alarmist position. Any skeptical edits were very quickly deleted, by a group of individuals. After years of it, they finally banned one of the guys.
By stalker I meant someone who was dling that – ‘tending a web page” to keep it ‘clean’. That was exactly what Thomas said was going on, and when I got to the YDI Hyptohesis page, there was not ONE mention of anything positive about the impact scenario. The only mentions on our side were of the 2007 stuff, and the Pinter,Daulton, Holliday non-replications and accusations of stupidity, not being able to tell nanodiamonds from insect crap. All the verbiage was snide and insulting. The entire presentation was on of ridicule. Nothing was posted about any studies since 2007.
Thomas said he tried to put in more recent factual stuff and it disappeared later, after it was on the page.
That is what I mean by ‘stalker’. I would have thought the heavy-handed senior editor would have at least asked me what I meant. The first I heard from him, I was blocked – INDEFINITELY – with no chance of reinstatement unless my appeal was accepted.
I mean the guy about global warming only got a year and half, after abusing the editorial privileges for years. I used the term ‘stalker’ ONCE – in a field that is not even shown to the public. And I am supposed to be banned for LIFE?
Dennis – I did not know the guy had a user ID other than his name. I think I use my own name.
And if they have a problem with that, why don’t they say so or warn me about using real names? If Thomas had referred to his user ID I would have, too.
George – Yes, the guy’s writing was pathetic. He repeated himself all over the place. He showed no respect for anyone who differs with him.
Dennis – After the experience the global warming skeptics had for so long, I thought it was imperative to draw their attention to the guy’s actions. Quietly editing never did ANY good on global warming.
Also, Dennis, I am not sure those WYSIWYG editors are useful on Wiki. Links to other topics need the double brackets, and the references are really heinous to do for journal entries.
Dennis has some wise remarks, good advice. A famous scientist once was quoted: “The wrong ideas die out when those who hold them pass away.” So, let’s be patient. This may take a while.
An Italian police chief claims Julius Caesar suffered from battle wounds [Battle of Munda March 17, 45 BC] so severely, seemingly having epileptic seizures, that he asked his 23 closest friends to kill him on March 15, 44 BC, a form of suicide. The works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, illegitimate son of QE1. These versions even if true may never be accepted by the public. There were so many Taurid meteorite stream (Comet Encke) impacts on Earth since the late Pleistocene that we may never figure out what happened, when, and in which order, and may have to live with the public never becoming convinced of any of it.
Neither that Isaac Newton found a high frequency expectation of destructive comet impacts nor the scarred faces of most solar system bodies have ended Unitarian geology after debunking Georges Cuvier’s catastrophism, triumphant but false.
So, who are we to quibble about YDr, CBs, and Dennis’ glazed mountains being caused by frequent comets strafing of planet Earth.
But, small progress does happen, if we are careful: On the Wikipedia page for Chicxulub, we can now read the following sentence: “Another possible crater thought to have been formed at the same time is the Shiva crater, though the structure’s status as a crater is contested.” And on the Wikipedia page for Shiva the 500 km crater is pictured by its gravitational anomalies due to Chatterjee et al, whose paper was never published in a refereed journal.
Posting another editor’s personal information is harassment, unless that person voluntarily had posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia. Personal information includes legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, or other contact information, whether any such information is accurate or not. Posting such information about another editor is an unjustifiable and uninvited invasion of privacy and may place that editor at risk of harm outside of their activities on Wikipedia. This applies to the personal information of both editors and non-editors.”
This definition leaves much unclear.
What constitutes ‘posting’?
I filled in a field that was only going to be seen by ONE Admin, if that.
As such, it was not posting it to the Wiki page for all the world to see.
I believe the Admin guy (who on his own talk page was accused by others of being high-handed and a bit power crazy) – who is Italian – doesn’t understand English and misinterpreted ‘posting’ and ‘outing’ both.
My email to him never got to him. The email address disappeared in transmitting it, and I’ve not been able to find it again. But I found another route and re-appealed.
In my mind I did not out the guy. But I told them if they call that outing, then I will abide by it and not do it again. I had no intention of outing his personal info out to the public. I only wanted them to know who they needed to look at for abusive editing practices.
They’ve unblocked me. But I’m not ready to change anything just yet. Before I try any actual editing on Wiki I want to be clear that I am standing on firm ground, and doing everything strictly by the accepted rules of Wikipedia.
But Ya’ll can be sure that I am “gatherin’ me weapons” as grandpa used to say. And sharpening my hatchet.
I’m not worried about gettin’ flammed by Michael Simpson. I’ve been torched by the best. And I ain’t no slouch with a fire extinguisher. I happen to have a vocabulary. And I’m not afraid to load it with attitude and use it.
Hi everybody, I worked through the misunderstandings with the senior editors of wikipedia and tried my hand at cleaning up the mess Michael Simpson (Skeptical Raptor) made of the hypothesis page, and of course he was all over that again. It’s sad that Wikipedia has to be the battleground of Michael Simpson’s geological education, and that I have to educate him.
Anyways, the primary references are restored (by Skeptical Raptor himself apparently realizing what a big hole he has dug for himself) but now he is dragging Carbonado into the debate, as if exotic macroscopic black diamonds formed in interstellar space and deposited deep into the crust by a gigantic asteroid impact billions of years ago is somehow relevant to the Younger Dryas era. Carbonado itself is an interesting topic, though, but he’s desperately clinging to his idea that somehow that detecting and analyzing microscopic nanodiamonds is somehow fringe science, but big diamonds are not. What is clear from all of this is that impact proxies have definitely arrived on the scene as a viable method of tracking cosmic changes through time.
It’s already an edit war again. I give up. Simpson does not seem to be able to do any credible superficial scientific research, and it took me all of five minutes to work through the entire body of peer reviewed literature on Carbonado and Yukatite. It even has its own wiki page!
I left a comment in the talk section of the YD page over there regarding potential misidentification of markers. It quotes the section of the same name from the Lake Cuitzeo paper.
NO. I beg to differ. Wiki hasn’t done a damned thing. Simpson’s sheit is back up. The opening line calls the hypothesis “discredited” – AND THEY HAVE FROZEN THE PAGE SO HIS LIES ARE UP THERE TILL THE WHOLE THING IS RESOLVED.
I saw that and screamed bloody murder at my arbitration contact, about the deletion of peer-reviewed evidence. BIG TYPE AND RED BOLD LETTERS.
No, George, it is not calm like TL, but the guy had seen how reasonable I am. I pasted in the Tusk Tweets about him deleting.
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence
See what kind of opinion the world has of Wikipedia?
Here we are, trying to keep Wikipedia up-to-date on the peer-reviewed evidence on this hypothesis, and there is a total saboteur and you all are letting him get away with it.
LOOK AT YOUR RECORD OF EDITS. The guy goes around twittering and bragging about deleting stuff. FACTUAL STUFF.
If you want to keep him as an editor, I withdraw my appeal. I don’t want to be associated with an online encyclopedia that has no interest in SCIENTIFIC FACTS, as presented in peer-reviewed journals.
What is the point in trying to help Wikipedia? You think I put in 6 hours the other night – till 5:00 a.m. – for my health? The paper from last month had no fewer than SIXTEEN scientists as co-authors. And where is it? I edited it IN. Where is it?!
It was deleted. By a knowledge CRIMINAL, an information saboteur.
Boy that guy is really digging himself into a hole!
On my very first foray into this, and my very first edit, he accused me of all sorts of offensive stuff! On the Talk section of the YD page I put in a direct literal quote of the lake Quitzeo paper at the bottom of the talk page. Specifically, the section titled Potential Misidentification of markers. And he went ballistic! He has most certainly got me confused with someone else.
This is what he said:
WP:SPA. WP:NPA. WP:RS. WP:FRINGE. WP:STALK. WP:NOR. Also primary research rarely qualifies as a reliable source, because, as real scientists know, lots of primary research gets thrown out because of any number of issues from fraud to incompetence to outright mistakes. That’s why we usually wait until real science is completed, which often takes years. Further, you have been warned by an admin for wikistalking. Please stop. It’s really getting frightening what you are writing to me in emails and posts and here. I have never been so creeped out by a stalker before. SkepticalRaptor (talk) 00:45, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Oh, WP:NOTAFORUM. You are doing a lot of original research here. But that’s not as bad as your continued harassment and stalking of me on and off-wiki. you see, a real scientist doesn’t invoke emotion, ad hominems, and strawman arguments. A real scientist tries to develop a consensus. A real scientist doesn’t send emails, write blogs and other stuff that insults me. It’s really pathetic that someone has to do this. Very sad. SkepticalRaptor (talk) 00:49, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
So I answered him: What are you talking about? As a new Wikipedian, that quote was my very first edit. WP:FRINGE. It is not clear what you define as “fringe science”. But the source of that quote is Isabel Israde-Alcántara et al. PNAS 2012, and is directly from a recently published, peer reviewed paper in a well recognized, and respected scientific journal. And while in the future someone may provide evidence in the literature to refute it, until that time comes, it stands as a valid reference to the latest science in refereed literature related to this subject. And directly quoting a recently published peer reviewed reference most certainly does not come under the heading of invoking emotion, ad hominems, or strawman arguments. WP:STALK. Regarding your ridiculous,accusation of stalking, that’s just about as offensive as it can get. I have never sent you even 1 email. Or commented on your talk page. Nor have I ever blogged about you. In fact, since outing an editor is forbidden here, and our identities are immaterial to this discussion anyway, I have no concern whatsoever for who you are. —CometHunter (talk) 01:39, 17 April 2012 (UTC)CometHunter
Steve, no need for caps and bolds. Relax. They blocked me too for using “largely” instead of simply “discredited.”
I was just testing the nature of the beast, and it is scary. However, it will be hard for the Wikians to hold back many more peer reviewed articles in major journals.
Great article, George! Once again you have shown your finely honed skill for presenting the facts of a story (your own story, in this case) with a healthy dose of even-handed patience with those involved. Thanks for the narrative. Can’t wait to read the book.
I everybody, I have spoken with the senior editor and I have decided to formally recuse myself from any further edits of the Wikipedia Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis webpage. Just FYI. Thanks.
Hi guys, just another quick FYI. Skeptical Raptor has taken his debunking over to the Younger Dryas page now, dragging the Laacher See volcano into the mix, which is nutty because Laacher See tephra anchors the varve sequence and isotope excursions several hundred years prior.
I made a couple of edits and gave up, and I recuse myself from the Younger Dryas page as well, William Connelley will just have to try and monitor it as best he can, because you can see that he has taken it over to the Laacher See page as well. You can view history to see my comments.
William Connelly is one of the gatekeepers on global warming. If he is the monitor, 0% gets past him that isn’t consensus. He is NOT a person who will allow anything to challenge the establishment paradigm.
Mr. Garcia, there are no ‘gatekeepers on global warming’. There are just data archives and peer reviewed research references. I have reviewed Skeptical Raptor’s internet comments with regard to the Younger Dryas and found his Wikipedia editing examples to be corrupted by his ‘beliefs’, on several different internet pages already. I’m not about to pursue this any further because it is pointless and futile. If he wants to continue to make a public spectacle of his skepticism, then there’s much more I can do about it other than what I have already done. He doesn’t get it.
Let’s just give him as much rope as he needs, ok, that was the only point of my quick edits. I’m confident that he will be eventually censured because I’ve already taken this to administrators.
On the YDIH Wiki talk page He’s already pretty much dangling from that rope already. His stated reason for deleting reference to the Lake Cuitzeo is: “Only to shut up everyone did I edit in the article, but it really doesn’t qualify as a Reliable Source, by any definition of the word. By the way, the work in Mexico has been debunked by a lot of people smarter than me.”
The hole he’s dug for himself is the fact that he personally took it upon himself to “Shut everyone up”. And the only justification he can come up with for that destructive edit is the personal opinions of some anonymous people he thinks are smarter than him.
He probably didn’t have a hard time finding someone smarter than he is. But with that silly line he set the bar for providing reliable sources in the discussion with an appeal to inappropriate authority. His entire argument is coming from that attitude, he hasn’t said a single thing that wasn’t based on blatant ad hominem, and so so far he has yet to provide a single valid reference. This is good, because some kind admin person finally got fed up and put a sock in it for him. As it stands now the last significant edit of the talk page is a list of supportive evidence. look over that list folks. If any of you can think of a relevant paper that’s missing from that list. Or if you can provide a link to one on that list that doesn’t already have one let me know.
If anyone here thinks the YDIH is a controversial subject, global warming is that times 50.
As for SR, all of our fretting over him isn’t going to do anything useful. If Wiki wants him gatekeeping, he will continue. If they don’t, he will be blocked, too. If Wiki has agendas or favored sides, nothing we say will change it.
Dennis – Thanks for fighting the good fight on Wiki’s talk page, but I think it is a lost cause. Until someone with creds gets on their case – and that isn’t any of us except George, and HE is blocked – it will remain SR’s way. Someone who has their papers being blocked will have to jump on them.
Of course, SR’s, “It doesn’t qualify as a reliable source,” is pulled out of his rectum. Of course he doesn’t know what he is talking about. But SR is a front man for powers that be. He is just their attack dog. But for those who actually read what venom he spews out, his viciousness degrades their arguments.
I see Wiki trying to suck up to the establishment consensus on all fronts, trying to establish some cred that their model cannot support or sustain. When anyone can come in and edit, they have to maintain more rent-a-cops, and those rent-a-cops don’t know 90% of the topics they are policing. So monumentally stupid people like SR can put up anything and they don’t know the diff. Then they just go look it up in a 3th grade text book, and whatever is there, that is what they sign on to.
It’s like the difference between Britannica and World Book Encyclopedias, only more so.
Guys, when Firestone et al came up with the YDIH, they knew it was going to step on toes. This is all just part of the fray they stirred up. And Wiki is the LEAST likely place to actually present the issue properly. Wiki admins don’t know what the hell the arguments are. So to put down the new boys on the block they pick out phrasings they don’t like – and then ban the people for life for J-walking. They have no capacity to judge the evidence, and Wiki is not designed to deal with cutting edge science. So they end up doing the bidding of what they think the consensus thinks. Like all bureaucrats, they are just paper pushers checking to see if all the ‘j’s’ are dotted and all the ‘t’s’ are crossed – and go along thinking that is important.
If and when they uphold my appeal, I will inform them to remove me as an editor. Like I said, I won’t be a part is an institution that would have SR as an editor. I have too much self respect.
Tusk Commenters: Can I draw your attention to the core issue of high ET impact frequency, often mentioned by EPG. This has not affected the accepted standard planetary science dispensation. So far, Uniformitarianism has been modified THRICE, items:
ONE, plate tectonics.
TWO, Morgan mantle plume.
THREE, Chicxulub impact.
Regarding item TWO, quoting Wikipedia:
In 1971, geophysicist W. Jason Morgan proposed the hypothesis of mantle plumes. In this hypothesis, convection in the mantle transports heat from the core to the Earth’s surface in thermal diapirs.
Trouble for the standard guys is that mantle plumes are non-existent see the web page http://www.mantelplumes.org, Do plumes exist? The need of plumes for plate tectonics has receded because it finally dawned on geologists that plates are driven by gravity, isostasy, the older plate parts contracting hence getting heavier, sinking back down into the mantle. This is cited as the reason for the Challenger Deep of 35,814 ft in the Marianas Trench, this being the oldest extant oceanic crustal plate, hence the heaviest.
The point is that plate tectonics and other crustal deformations are PRIMARILY caused by impacts. Hence we don’t have Earth look like Mercury. Plates carry craters away from the impact site in the mantle with its remnant hot spot.
EXAMPLE: While the hot spot of the 250M BP impact is under the island of Hawaii, the crater(s), there may be three, are in Asia: 1. West Siberian Basin, 2. South Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean bounded by Novaya Semelya, 3. Mt. Emei Shan, Western Sichuan Basin, SW China.
MORAL: None of these things, including mantleplumes.org are standard dispensation and the false Morgan plume still reigns although isostasy is a published cause of plate tectonics. Hence, the YDIH is only a tiny grain of quartz on the vast shore of inofficial planetary science, which in reality should be dominated by the frequent comet impacts.
Thanks Steve,
You can’t clean out a sewer if you’re afraid of getting shit on. SR’s comments and senseless attacks leave a permanent record of his unqualified and uniformed skeptical bias. And spouting off topic personal ad hominem attacks instead of providing any reliable references at all really show his true colors in bright contrast. He’s got the debate skills of a child.
I’m thinkin’ that giving him an opportunity to spew all that senseless ad hominem in public as a clear and undeniable public record of how his childish close-minded thinking works is a good thing.
The sweet part is taking all that crap, then putting up that list of actual relevant supportive papers, and then having the last word after some admin person stuck a sock in it for him.
He claims that there are just as many papers out there that refute the YDIH. But we all know that’s not true. And of the few there are, most have themselves been debunked in the literature. So it’ll be fun to see what actual refs he comes up with.
Truthfully though, an unbiased comprehensive list of all relevant papers to date, from both sides of the isle, and listed in the order they were published with a brief commentary for each one describing its relative importance in the on-going debate would be a good thing too.
Someday it’ll make a hell of a story for the history books.
Dennis –
SR’s ignorant vitriol may or may not take him down. It depends on if and when the powers behind him decide to throw him under the bus. And as 19th century uniformitarianism and evolution showed, old dogs do not learn new tricks; i.e., the only way evo-gradualism won out was that the old guard died off, leaving the new ideas no more opponents. We have little reason to think that it will be different this time.
The point of all that was that the powers that be behind SR will not give up the ghost. But they may die out. It won’t be fast enough for us, either figuratively or literally – we are getting old as fast as they are.
At the same time, yes, a comprehensive list of papers is not a bad idea. I would suggest a two-column table, done chronologically. Perhaps an alternate third column could be included for comments/1-sentence summaries of how each paper changed the balance at that time. (A comment might say something like “Refuted Pinter’s findings of a lack of markers.”) Comments should not have editorializing in them, merely a statement of what they did to the balance at that time. Comments should be fair to the skeptical side; if they found no markers, that should be simply stated – even if later papers refuted them.
This would be a useful thing to send to the Admins, even if it does not win the day. It is also a useful scorecard for sending out to anyone at any time.
Each paper reference should have a hyperlink to the paper.
I would also suggest that that table might be a good resource on CT as a “Summary of YDIH Papers – 2007 to the Present”.
Yes, EPG asserted the same in his book in 2003 or 2005, but it is not a peer-reviewed paper. It might be mentioned, though. Dennis, I know you and Ed don’t like each other, but he does know his stuff. He didn’t just guess at the YD Impact.
I don’t know, Ed, I think Dennis’ nutty crackpot ideas are pretty interesting and not that far out there. He has simply hypothesized that geoablative impacts do occur, and he has gone out to look for evidence of their occurrence. We have Tunguska, so this isn’t all that unreasonable.
Irregardless of all the petty infighting here, on Tuesday afternoon a major announcement is coming on a topic that many of you may find interesting.
I received the following email from my appeals contact at Wiki:
Hello Steve
The Committee is concerned regarding your editing of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis article, and of your interactions with SkepticalRaptor, but notes that you have made contributions to Wikipedia on other subjects since March 2010, so is prepared to unblock you on condition that you do not edit within the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis topic – that is the article itself and any related articles, the talkpages of those articles, and any areas of Wikipedia which may relate to those articles, and that you do not interact with or discuss SkepticalRaptor on Wikipedia.
If these terms are agreeable to you, please let me know and I will unblock you.
If these terms are not agreeable then you would remain blocked, but you would be able to appeal to the Committee again in six months time.
Regards
Steve/SilkTork
I responded:
Steve –
It is unclear for one thing if this is a permanent block for me editing that page.
It is also unclear whether Skeptical Raptor has rights to edit that page. I think I have a right to know this, if you are blocking me from editing that page.
It is also unclear what in my edit was connected with the OUTING, which is the reason for my block. I was not being blocked for my edit, after all. What does it have to do with my outing charge?
The two issues are not one and the same. There has been zero communicated to me that my edit was in any way out of line. If it was out of line, please explain. I am not understanding at all what connection the two things have to each other. Is something in my edit offensive to the general knowledge an encyclopedia should have? Is there some non-fact issue at hand here? I put in nothing that was not factual – and on topic – so I am 100% perplexed here why I would be blocked from editing that page.
I also must ask if this block on this particular page has any time element to it.
I await the answers to these issues. I may have other issues that come to mind.
At this time I neither agree nor reject the terms you have presented. I first need answers to the questions above.
First of all, I wish Dennis and Ed would imply stop their childish behavior and act like grownups.
As to geo-ablative features, I invite you all to look at what are called “vitrified forts” in Scotland.
Coords:
56°29’20″N 5°24’28″W – Dun Mac Sniachan
57°28’38″N 4°16’11″W – Craig Phadraig
57°30’45″N 4°13’55″W – Ord Hill, Kessock
56°47’06″N 5°04’04″W – Dun Deardail
57°35’31″N 4°30’12″W – Knock Farril
57°51’48″N 4°16’31″W – Dun Creich (apparently different alignment)
56°41’25″N 2°48’24″W – Finavon
56°30’14″N 2°49’46″W – Laws (with some apparent CBs, also aligned with it)
57°21’05″N 2°51’30″W – Tap o’ Noth (aligned differently)
55°37’31″N 2°39’34″W – Cowdenknowes
For all the world they look to me to be the same as the ablative features Dennis points to in SW USA/NW MX. Not only that, but they are aligned, too (SW-NE). I am not smart enough to tell for sure if the apparent Tunguska direction is from the NE or the SW. I WANT it to be from the NE, but my visual impression is more that the force came from the SW.
The last one has the clearest similarity to Dennis’ ablated hills.
They aren’t barren like in NW Mexico, but one would not expect that in Scotland’s climate. Other than that they look like his geo-ablative hills/cerros. They have the same kind of flow, and even the same visual aerodynamic impression.
I submit that their elevation exposed these hilltops to the worst of the infrared of passing comet fragments through the atmosphere. They are not the only elevated places in Scotland, of course, but these might have been directly under the air blasts.
These are very much an unexplained enigma, why the stones were vitrified. All other explanations fall short.
Tap o’ Noth appears to have been an actual stone structure, as does Dun Creich, since both seem to have ‘courtyards’ within walls. Most of the rest appear to ‘just’ be ablated hilltops. If there are structures on the hilltops, I don’t see them.
I can only speculate about Tap o’ Noth’s and Dun Creich’s different alignments, and my first guess – trying to fit them in with the others – is that the pre-existing structures had enough elevation and their structures took the brunt of the ‘ablative’ heat. AND that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t expect that this guess is correct, but just throw it out as a starting point.
One thing seems likely: If Dennis’ hills are ablated, then so are these.
The majority alignment direction for the vitrified forts seems to be roughly at right angles to Dennis’ hills. This strongly implies separate events. Even allowing for later/earlier arrivals, the direction is just not close to being the same.
All in all, it seems that this explanation fits the evidence better than any other causes that have been considered.
Dating? I know what I would like them to be, but that doesn’t mean anything. Later than humans (due to Tap o’ Noth and Dun Creich). But with the numbers of impacts being discussed, that could be as many as ten possible dates, based on various author’s thinking, from 30 kya to <2 kya. I don't rule out any of them at this point.
YD impact is no longer a mere hypothesis, and of huge importance to mankind, being so close to our epoch in time. Dennis’ glazed hills — Steve’s Scottish “vitrified forts” point at ET impact causation. The hills in Steve’s list esp. 55°37’31″N,2°39’34″W should interest Scottish geologists, what do they write about them? The larger issue of high ET impact frequency esp. comets is the source of official science resisting any new insights, as to them it’s odious. — They might read Isaac Newton though.
Ed – ..oil pools in impact fractures
First proven at Ames, Major County, Oklahoma. Carpenter and Carlson, 1992; Hamm and Olsen, 1992. http://principles.ou.edu/ames/index.html Nice picture of gravity anomalies.
Google’s Eric Schmidt and film director James Cameron back venture to mine in space
Forget the gold rushes of the Wild West, the next grab for natural riches could eclipse anything that has gone before it. Power players including Eric Schmidt, the Google chairman, and James Cameron, the film director, are planning to mine the final frontier: space.
As a matter of fact I do think the Vitrified Forts were torched by comet fire. But there is nothing in my thinking that requires them to be associated with the YD event, or any specific date for that In fact if there is a way to get a positive handle on the date, I’m thinking a hell of a lot more recent than that. Perhaps as late as the bronze age.
If as Clube & Napier have proposed, the catastrophes of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition were the result of of the progressive breakup of the Taurid progenitor object, than the resulting cluster airburst events from that breakup would have been a bi-annual event of varying intensity for 15,000 to 20,000 years beginning 20,000 to 30,000 YA.
In other words it is to be expected that if those events did leave a different kind of planetary scarring from what has been studied before, then once they have all been identified, whatever those locations have in common, it won’t be the dates. And to find planetary scarring with dates that are all over the place during that long time span is to be expected.
This is why my own thinking has focused on trying to get a handle on the actual mechanism of what happens to the ground in a very large cluster airburst event, and the resulting planetary scarring if it isn’t the nice round craters that have always been taught to expect. And to work out the when of any given event as a separate problem.
At a lecture I once attended by Buckminster Fuller, he said that mankind needs to mine, and even to colonize, the asteroid belt, and all of the inner planets. He said that we could continue to think of ourselves as a bunch of different peoples who have to divide and share the resources of a single small planet. In which case we go the way of the dinosaurs in less than a couple of centuries.
Or we can begin to think of ourselves as one people who have the resources of an entire solar system at our disposal. I think he’s right. Our future is out there. And if we restrict ourselves to this increasingly crowded dirtball we’ll die in our own waste.
The vitrified forts are looked at as exactly that: Hilltop forts that somehow or other got the stones heated till they turned to glass.
As such they are a total enigma – no one has a clue. Except perhaps me. After looking at Dennis’ ablated hills, those came to mind, and I went looking to see just what they might have in common. I was startled at the similarities. Putting two seemingly unconnected things together and seeing virtually the same things – that was really freaky, but cool.
I think it is as good an explanation as anyone else has come up with. Everyone else just looks at them and shrugs. Some alternate researchers speculate that the vitrified forts were hit with particle beams in some ancient war with India (of all places).
The main alignment of the vitrified forts does not appear to align with either Rio Cuarto or Saginaw. It is not far from either, but on a spherical Earth it seems to not quite fit.
I may be completely wrong, too. But for now, with my limited knowledge of both vitrified forts and air bursts, they seem to show evidence of the intense infrared of a shower of air bursts. Tunguska people might be interested in them.
ON mining space, my engineering mind goes to the practicalities of getting mined ore down to terra firma. Any ores worth going to get are going to be in the billions of tons. How to get that down from orbit? The dump truck vehicle will drop like a rock (pun intended).
I can see Cameron blowing all his “Titanic” money on a losing mining venture like so many people have done in the past.
Personally, I can’t see space mining taking off until the moon has refinement plants. And that may – in the long term – be a terrible idea, changing the mass of the moon. If refinement plants are out in the asteroid belts, they will be creating billions more NEOs, albeit tiny ones.
Like I said, as an engineer my mind goes to what kinds of problems need to be solved.
I agree with you, that the vitrified forts are not the YD. And I also agree – because of Tap o’ Noth and Dun Creich – that they were in the Bronze Age or thereabouts.
It seems unlikely that those two were hit in some other direction at a different time, with the area being essentially the same as the others. Lightning striking twice seems terrifically unlikely. That is why I look to an explanation to include those two with the rest, even though their ‘fortifications’ are not aligned with the rest. And that brings them into the Bronze Age more or less. Real forts that got vitrified – That suggests that one of those two was the first discovered, then the rest were included as discovered, even if they had no forts. I am guessing, but it seems reasonable.
Bucky Fuller notwithstanding, the energy requirements to move ores across from the asteroid belt to Earth are rally, really high. I can’t see there being a net gain. Not unless a new energy source is used. Thorium might do it, actually. But all our current energy sources are completely inadequate – unless we blow off a few hundred million people in the third world.
We still have the vast sources of the Andes, the Himalayas, Siberia, and Africa, not to mention most of Canada. I think all those will buy us time. Yes, in the long term – if a cheap efficient energy source is found – we can go to the asteroid belt. I see it being most likely in about 500 years. Less than 200? I’d bet against it.
Bucky Fuller was more or less a dreamer who never came up with anything useful except the geodesic dome. His dymaxion car and other things looked good back in mid-century, but never went anywhere. Like all the ‘futurists’ of that time, he projected things that never came to pass and most likely never will. We aren’t going to have moving sidewalks everywhere, no heli-cars or aero-cars, and no driverless highways. All in all, Jules Verne and HG Wells did a better job of predicting the future.
My take on Cameron is that he is an attention seeker – anything to keep himself in the public eye. An egotist of the first order. He is a movie director. What could he know about mining ore anywhere – even on Earth? If he tries mining in space – at this time in human history – he will lose his shirt. And then we might be thankfully rid of him and his “Look at me, look at me, look at me” ego.
If icy bodies contain as much water ice as some people think, there may be enough H & O to manufacture all the fuel we could ever need in the body of just one good sized comet, and it’s already out there. That question remains to be settled though.
As a certified welding inspector with a little foundry experience, maybe I can give you a little insight on the potential for space based ore processing.
The value of those ores wouldn’t be so much in their unprocessed value, as it would be in the kinds of materials that could be made from them if they were processed out there in a zero gravity environment.
One theoretical material that could be produced would be ultra-lightweight steel alloys. If you work up molten steel into foam in a crucible here on Earth you can come up with stuff that has some limited uses. But the fact that it is difficult to control the size and distribution of the bubbles on anything but the smallest of castings makes such materials useless for any kind of large scale construction.
But if ores were processed in a weightless environment it should be possible to achieve perfectly round bubbles of inert gasses in steal foam, with almost perfectly uniform size, and distribution. So you could manufacture very large structural beams with all the strength and heat resistant properties of steal, but at fractions of the weight per foot that can be achieved in a normal Earth-based foundry operation.
The slag from the space based ore processing, and foundry operations could then be used to make heat shields so you could drop the finished product at a safe location for pickup somewhere on Earth.
UPDATE ON MY BLOCK AT WIKI:
My comments are in green.
I would please ask that someone among the Admins who is technically informed in these areas by included in your assessing of my points below.
On 4/22/2012 5:25 PM, Steve Pereira wrote:
Hello Steve
The Committee at this point is not looking into the conduct of SkepticalRaptor, so that user is not blocked from editing. No user has “rights” to edit any article on Wikipedia. People are encouraged to get involved, but if their conduct or editing is such that if it appears that their contributions are more negative than positive, then we ask them to stop, or technically prevent them from editing. We block to prevent harm and disruption, so sometimes we block before harm has been caused if it seems likely that harm will occur.
This harm to the progress of the science in this area by Skeptical Raptor is the very issue I was trying to address, even if by using Skeptical Raptor’s name I inadvertently crossed a line I should not have crossed. But that outing has nothing to do with your intent to block my editing this page.
I am amazed that the committee cannot see this damage done by Skeptical Raptor.
Then first issue is the claim that no one else has been able to repeat the findings of Firestone et al (2007).
From the current written page (which appears NOT to be the one I was confronted with when I first opened the page):
[Skeptical Raptor, I assume] “The hypothesis has been largely discredited by research that showed that most of the conclusions cannot be repeated by other scientists, misinterpretation of data, and the lack of confirmatory evidence.”
This is patently untrue. The term “cannot be repeated by other scientists” is not true. The following papers show that the conclusions have been repeated by these other scientists:
Mahaney et al (2008)
Haynes et al (2010)
Andronikov et al (2011)
Tian et al (2010)
Van Hoesel (2011)
Israde-Alcántara et al (2012)
The scientists Skeptical Raptor chose to show “could not repeat” – but this is refuted by this statement in the CONCLUSIONS of the 2012 Israde-Alcántara et al (and 15 other scientists, which I listed in my footnote):
“Some independent workers have been unable to reproduce earlier YDB [Younger Dryas Boundary] results for MSp [magnetic spherules], CSp [carbon spherules], and NDs [nanodiamonds], as summarized in a “News Focus” piece in Science, which claims that the YDB evidence is “not reproducible” by independent researchers. Refuting this view, multiple groups have confirmed the presence of abundant YDB markers, although sometimes proposing alternate hypotheses for their origin. For example, Mahaney et al. [2008] independently identified glassy spherules, CSps, high temperature [sic] melt-rocks, shocked quartz, and a YDB black mat analogue in the Venezuelan Andes. Those authors conclude the cause was “either an asteroid or comet event that reached far into South America” at 12.9 ka. At Murray Springs, Arizona, Haynes et al. [2010] observed highly elevated concentrations of YDB MSp and iridium. Abundances of MSp were 340 × higher than reported by Firestone et al. and iridium was 34 × higher, an extraordinary enrichment of 3,000 × crustal abundance. Those authors stated that their findings are “consistent with their (Firestone et al.’s) data.” In YDB sediments from North America and Europe, Andronikov et al. (2011) reported anomalous enrichments in rare earth elements (REE) and “overall higher concentrations of both Os and Ir [osmium and iridium]” that could “support the hypothesis that an impact occurred shortly before the beginning of the YD cooling 12.9 ka.”. Tian et al. [2010] observed abundant cubic NDs at Lommel, Belgium, and concluded that “our findings confirm … the existence of diamond nanoparticles also in this European YDB layer.” The NDs occur within the same layer in which Firestone et al. found impact related materials. Similarly, at a YDB site in the Netherlands, Van Hoesel et al. [2011] observed “carbon aggregates [consistent with] nanodiamond.” Recently, Higgins et al. independently announced a 4- to 4.5-km-wide YDB candidate crater named Corossol in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, containing basal sedimentary fill dating to 12.9 ka. If confirmed, it will be the largest known crater in North and South America within the last 35 million years Because of the controversial nature of the YD impact debate, we have examined a diverse assemblage of YDB markers at Lake Cuitzeo using a more comprehensive array of analytical techniques than in previous investigations. In addition, different researchers at multiple institutions confirmed the key results.”
Your confrontational approach to the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis article and SkepticalRaptor,
I would ask that you present me with any examples of this “confrontational approach” WITHIN THE EDIT.
was revealed in your edit summary,
Me asking YOU to look into the biased one-sided editing by Skeptical Raptor – just how is that confrontational? I did not get in his face. All I did was edit the page. And again I ask for examples of “confrontational approach within the edit itself. Me mentioning him in the Edit Summary was not confrontational – it was asking for your HELP.
and confirmed in your messages to us with statements such as :
‘I can tell you this: If I get editing rights back, every time I see his up, I am wiping it and replacing it with mine. IF HE WANTS WAR, I WILL GIVE HIM WAR.’
Yes, and if you could see what he says on his tweets, you would see how confrontational HE is.
You are saying that HE can completely wipe out MY entire edit, and that is not confrontational – but that if I do it to his, it IS confrontational.
WHY are you not looking into his edits as counter to the state of the science on this issue????
I had recommended you to be unblocked based on our initial discussion. I felt that you had made a genuine error, and that you were not interested in confrontation, merely in presenting a balanced article. Your later messages, however, were so heavily focused on confrontation, that it seemed that collegiate and reasonable discussions to find the best way forward on the article would not be possible.
Whatever you interpreted that as, you are actually wrong. ALL I want is for both sides’ presentations to be presented. HIS edits completely ERASED OUR ENTIRE SIDE OF THE ISSUE. MY edits left his IN. And MY edits ALWAYS will include his side of the issue.
The discussion then turned to a straightforward decline, as it seemed apparent to us that unblocking you would simply lead to a disruptive and unpleasant edit war. Another Committee member pointed out that you had made edits to Wikipedia outside of that article, so you had an interest in helping build Wikipedia itself,
AND THAT IS ALL I WANT TO DO HERE. Why can you not see that it is Skeptical Raptor who is the one who is determined to NOT build Wikipedia?
Here I will list his insulting adjectives and incorrect statements in his last edit:
“The hypothesis has been largely discredited” — Absolutely untrue, as noted above. Completely independent research supporting the hypothesis has been coming out of the woodwork since 2008.
“Nearly all of this evidence was found to be non-reproducible and has been dismissed as support for the hypothesis.” — Untrue
“There is also no evidence of continent-wide wildfires at any time during terminal Pleistocene deglaciation” — Untrue. The black mat itself – in places 4″ thick – is evidence for wildfires. It is the very source of many of the carbon spherules and cubic nanodiamonds.
“Scientists have asserted that the carbon spherules originated as fungal structures and/or insect fecal pellets,” — While true, those scientist’s work has been shown to be in itself sloppy, and that they almost certainly took their samples from the wrong layers.
“… and that the claimed nanodiamonds are actually misidentified graphene and graphene/graphane oxide aggregates.” — While true, this work has been superseded by later researchers…
I DO note that Skeptical Raptor left in some of my edit THIS time. Others have not been so lucky.
And he also toned down his rhetoric in this edit.
Whatever the consequences here, I have to ASK: Is someone among you Admins leaking information about my block and appeal to Skeptical Raptor?
I ask this because the edit I changed was MUCH MORE INSULTING and Derogatory.
If this is happening, you have a political element and agenda among some of you Admins.
And if this is happening, I believe I have a case against someone among you, which I will not be shy about bringing to higher authorities at Wikipedia.
You need to convince me this is not happening. Skeptical Raptor all of a sudden ALLOWING some of the opposite side to be heard – that is NOT like him. I can only assume he has ‘gotten the word’ from an insider.
Yet, in your first sentence of this email you said: “The Committee at this point is not looking into the conduct of SkepticalRaptor, so that user is not blocked from editing.” How is it that his behavior has improved so instantaneously, just at this time, if the Committee is not looking into his behavior?
Can you say incontrovertibly that none on the Committee are in contact with Skeptical Raptor?
not just push a single point of view in one article, so we felt that it would be more appropriate and fairer to unblock you to allow you to edit Wikipedia, but ask that you voluntarily stay away from the article and the user where you may cause disruption.
As I have said several times in several ways: I was not there to cause disruption – I was there to hopefully STOP disruption.
The topic ban is voluntary. However, if you break the ban, you would be blocked.
You contradict yourself. If it is voluntary, then it is up to me. But you then turn around and tell me I will be blocked.
Which is it? Voluntary or mandatory?
If you honour the ban you would be able to appeal it after six months.
Well, six months is better than “without expiry”, but I 100% disagree with ALL of the charactarising ME as the trouble maker. ALL OF THIS REVOLVES AROUND SKEPTICAL RAPTOR AND HIS STALKING THE PAGE AND ERASING EDITS HE DOESN’T HAPPEN TO LIKE.
His behavior at this moment is still crossing the line, because he is not allowing all of the opposing PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL PAPERS to be edited in.
At this time I still neither accept nor refuse the Committee’s stance, not until the above issues are covered.
Steve
P.S. Steve, I very much do appreciate your level of involvement and your asking for adjustments in the block. Nevertheless, I do still feel that if no warning goes out to Skeptical Raptor, none of this means anything. As long as he gets to play “Gatekeeper’ on that page, the page is less than factual – and that reflects poorly on Wikipedia. I say this because If WE want to build Wikipedia, we can’t have some uncontrolled individual playing God on pages having to do with current scientific research.
P.P.S. This is all OFF TOPIC! My block had to do with OUTING.
P.P.P.S. Read my edit again. (Then go read Skeptical Raptor’s previous edit. Then you decide who is confrontational and who isn’t.) Nothing in my edit was confrontational. I just re-read it from start to finish, and I fail to see anything confrontational in it. As I asked twice above, would you please point me at the offensive passages? I know how to be insulting and confrontational, but I was neither in that edit.
Maybe someone has made this work and everything I say here is wrong, but…
I would have THREE major concerns with such a material.
1. Stress analysis and all steel design based on this analysis is fundamentally based on the very real concept of “MAXIMUM FIBER STRESS”. The stresses are not spread evenly throughout the steel member; there are place where the stresses are highest, and those places MUST be full strength. On a beam supported at both ends, for example, the maximum fiber stress is at the middle of the span length and at the very TOP and very BOTTOM of the beam. Halfway down the height of the beam this means one may cut a round hole through from one side to the other, even right in the middle of the span. But having bubbles right at the TOP and BOTTOM of the beam – I am pretty darned sure the beam will fail; you can’t have bubbles right where the max fiber stress is. Actually, the BOTTOM is the worst fiber stress condition, because under a load it will be in tensile, and steel is much stronger in compression than in tension. So, even though both would be subject to the same unit fiber stress, the bottom would fail first.
2. Steel derives its strength from its crystalline structure – ‘normal steel’ being either Austenitic or Martensitic in its crystalline structure. Putting bubbles in that lattice seems to me to be creating problems. It is worth trying, but I would expect early failure.
3. ALL steel has microfractures in the crystalline lattice, where one layer of crystals ‘slides’ – or ‘shears’ over another. With bubbles the effect of these microfractures would likely be magnified. I might be wrong on this. It might be that the bubbles terminate a microfracture before it can propagate. It would need testing. I’d say it was 50-50, if that.
4. Ever heard of “hydrogen in metals?” ALL metals suffer from this. This is a major source of microfractures. Hydrogen migrates into metals and causes failures. The Hydrogen gets into the crystalline lattice in prodigious quantities. (Due to this they are even looking into using metals as storage for Hydrogen fuels.) The Hydrogen builds up HUGE pressures – in the 10-15 GigaPascal range (about 1.5 million psi). It begins to push the lattice apart. In space it may not be a problem because there isn’t much Hydrogen, but one simply cannot look at any part made of steel and treat it as a homogeneous whole. A failure of a hull in space is an unforgiving failure.
Yes, I do think the foam steel should be looked into. At the same time, I wouldn’t expect much from it.
Okay, I looked at the strength curves from Johns Hopkins Univ., and the highest any go goes is 10 MegaPascals – about 1450 psi. Normal structural steel is about 66,000 psi yield strength. Cheap aluminum is abut 48,000 psi yield. Another paper shows 50% relative density (50% bubbles by volume) stainless steel foam has 95 MPa (14,000 psi) strength – versus 70,000 psi if it is annealed or 125,000 psi if it is rolled to ‘quarter hard’ state. But at a savings of only HALF the weight, what is gained? Better to use aluminum, which has 2/3 less weight.
All this argues that the material is weak, but would still have some applications – maybe a LOT of applications. And space might be one of them – if it is both made and used in space, its strength may not have to be much. But I wouldn’t use it for hulls. I think I’d rather use foamed glass.
Actually, thinking about it, I would laminate thin steel sheets on both sides of steel foam. That could work REALLY well, if the foam and sheet can be fused together – and I am sure it can be. That might even be patentable!
Making it in space and shipping it to the Earth’s surface still has the same problems – how do you get it down here?
Since Wikipedia is already recognized and scorned as an unreliable reference by the academic community. We should realize that the scientists and academics we need to make our case to aren’t paying any attention to them anyway.
It’s a matter of public record on the YDIH talk page now that SkepticalRaptor’s appeal to inappropriate authority in saying the work in Mexico had already been “debunked by people smarter than him” was given more weight as a reliable reference on Wiki than peer reviewed literature. And that he only did that edit to “shut everyone up” That one paragraph represents an epic fail for Wikipedia’s credibility.
The reality is that it is highly unlikely that any of the academics, or scientists, those of us who are working on this problem need to make our case to will ever bother to read the YDIH Wikipedia article anyway. Much less take it seriously.
Wikipedia is about appealing to the “consensus”. And since we’re all working on the new side of a paradigm shift in the Earth sciences that’s every bit as profound as the shift away from geo-centrism, and flat world theory, finding ourselves in the same playground as the consensus just isn’t part of the postulate in the foreseeable future. And Wikipedia is simply not an important enough venue to be worth the headache.
The best place to put a new and complete unbiased article that tells the entire YDIH story from the first dig to present time, with all relevant papers, and posters from both sides of the debate included in the order they were published, and with hyperlinks to every reference given is right here on the Tusk. And then as soon as it’s published here it should be mirrored in a prominent way by every one of us who have our own blogs.
For the record, while I don’t disagree with anything you said about steel, as I said, I am a certified welding inspector with 25 years experience in some of the biggest steal shops on the west coast. The Chemistry and structural properties of steal are no mystery to any CWI. So you’re preaching to the choir.
My point there was that space based ore processing, and steel manufacture opens the door to developing a completely new bag of tricks. It also opens the door to very large constructions in space without having to deal with having to lift stuff out of the Earth’s gravity well. And iron isn’t the only metal out there, or the only potential building material.
As for getting it down here, one possibility might be to use some of waste products from the smelting process to build an ablative heat shield. But I think the biggest potential is in what can be accomplished if we don’t even try to bring it down here. But instead, use it to build with out there.
All good points. I DID want to do whatever I could to get them aware of Skeptical Raptor’s actions. Beyond that, I don’t give a sheit. All my pleadings are done with the ida that if I don’t get what I want, I simply don’t participate anymore. I only edit on Wiki about once every 5 months or so, so it isn’t like my life depends on it.
I was really put off by the fact that they bait-and-switched me. My block was about Outing the guy. Then in midstream they blew that off and decided I was a confrontational influence and blocked me for that. That’s like being in court on one charge and then the judge throwing another charge at me after I got off the first charge.
You are right – I don’t give a damned about what the YDIH page on Wiki is about, either. I just got in to help out TLE, and to test it out, see how long my edit would stay up.
And the big issue here IS that we are declaring the world to not be flat. I’ve commented before on how the consensus scientists think in reductionist terms – breaking every complex issue into the simplest possible parts. Then they think that by trying to understand the parts they will understand the whole. That is fine – IF they have the right overall POV when they look at the parts. And it is IMPOSSIBLE, IMHO, to really build up from the parts; it takes just the right projection forward in order to not get off track and end up with the wrong gestalt. But they started out with uniformitarianism as their model for all the parts, and that was their big mistake. It means that they have to go through ever more weird contortions to fit everything together. That is how you can tell they have the wrong basic premise, when the patches on patches appear.
Yes, uniformitarianism operates everywhere – but not every time. And without that catastrophe element in their minds, they have to come to wrong conclusions. It is just like when Galileo and Copernicus were having to realize that the consensus was wrong: What were they supposed to do then?
But we don’t have a good handle on it, either. It would help if we were funded, so we could do some fundamental research. I can probably come up with ten or so inquiries I’d like to undertake. Maybe twenty.
You know, Steve, at this point is all on the table for me. But, if pressed, I have always thought the YDB evidence that the location of blast(s) was in CanadaMichwhatever was not as strong as the dating. So, I think they could be wrong about the location of the 12.9 event and right about the time. In which case something else could have happened around 34k bp in the mid-west to account for the bays, and the YDB event could have been centered elsewhere — or all over the place. Remember, that the tusks (including mine) and skulls with suspected ET material, which the researchers thought would date to 12.9, ending up all coming from ~34K. All sorts of other evidence point to something happening around this time, as detailed in the Cycle of Catastrophes. I also think there is a chance the bays have absolutely nothing to do with anything from space, as Gore-like certainty is not my thing.
To tell the truth I’d like to think they are, but I’m ambivalent about it. I think I can identify enough pristine hydrothermal blast burns in the Canadian Shield to account for the almost complete destruction of the LIS in matter of seconds, and in the process account for enough hydrothermal explosive force to loft an awful lot of ice-based ejecta that far from multiple locations. But until some field work can get a definitive age date for the burns I’m looking at, and someone can come up with a reliable and consistent way to date the bays that inspires more confidence than what I’ve seen so far, I’ll hold off on categorically tying the Bays to the YD event.
I should note here though that the burns I’m studying don’t show any indication of being damaged by glacial activity after they formed, a fact puts them at or near the end of the last ice age. And the idea that the LIS took two hits on that scale in almost the same locations but a few thousand years apart is a bit of a stretch.
Thanks for your perspective. It is just about what mine is.
It is pretty obvious now that something catastrophic happened at 12.9kya. It also seems certain that something also happened at ~34kya. As I recall, Cycle of Catastrophes also pointed out the C14 problems of the mid-30-40kya range, so I maybe put TWO “~”s in front of that ~~34 kya.
It seems that Saginaw (or something reasonably close by) is tied to the CBs, though until I get a handle on where dating samples were taken, I neither accept nor argue with early dates. Chris’ pdfs got me to doubting the whole assumptions about the formation of the CBs – especially as it pertains to the dating of them.
At the risk of sounding “Gore-like,” I am thinking that the CBs have NO possible terrestrial explanations. With at least 20 rejected, it doesn’t look good for them. But do ET explanations stand on their own? Actually, I think they can – though not any yet that are out there.
Thus it seems likely to me that there will be yet more time spent in analyzing how this sampling went awry.
In my opinion, it also seems likely that there will be no wiki edits by anyone here at the Tusk for quite a while yet.
Finally, it’s going to take the dicovery of a larger astrobleme from the HSIE to close the debate. This is why the Assiniboine memories of the HSIE are so important.
George –
Two errors in your article (in the same sentence):
Nick Pinter and Ishman are at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, not the University of Illinois, Carbondale. There is no such school as the latter.
And it is not ROBERT Ishamn. It is of Paleobiologist SCOTT Ishman, an Associate Professor in the Geology Departartment at SIUC.
As to “less-qualified tomato throwers,” that is a very apt identification of anyone from SIUC, a noted party college and so far down the list of Geology Departments that they barely show up on the ratings.
I am quite familiar with SIUC, having grown up in Southern Illinois. That is the college one attends if no one else will take you. Pinter is a minor-leaguer, and Ishman, too, unless they pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get positions at a real institution of higher learning.
“Less qualified?” You bet. You may now proceed to laugh them out of the building.
Another article in The Pleistocene Coalition News, on pgs 7-10, brought this to mind (George, please delete if it is off-topic):
Vance Hayne’s name came up in a book someone pointed me to, The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World”, by Christopher Hardaker, available from Amazon (Kindle available). He was a minor player in that book, but even in 1962 he was a big name in Clovis-First defense.
The book is a devastating exposé of the nastiness of archeologists, and their 50-year suppression of the true age of human habitation in the Americas.
The book is one I can TRULY say I couldn’t put it down till I finished it. Some of the acts perpetrated by one villain are stupefyingly nasty. The cowardice of the archeologists in the face of actual replicated lab tests – U-series dating, in particular – by geologists, was revealed in all its ‘scientific criminality’. I use the term criminality partly because the author brought up the term, but mostly because hiding facts from the scientific community by sweeping them under the carpet) is fraudulent against science and the public. Evidence was clearly found – under the auspices of the highest levels of archeology – FIFTY years ago that blew the Clovis First paradigm out of the water by a full ten thousand years at minimum. At maximum, it said humans were south of Puebla, Mexico 220,000 years ago. Presently the earliest dates talked about are ~22,000 ya, with some considering ~25,000 ya.
Vance Haynes – at that time already a big name in archeology – played a small part in the cover-up. It is not surprising that he has become a defender of the faith on the YDB issue, too. It seems to be his modus operandus. What he hopes to gain it is difficult to tell, because the Clovis barrier is dead and will never see the light of day again.
Steve –
Besides having an entertaining social environment, SIUC has had some fine archaeologists – Brucew Masse was trained there, and they had a really good expert in Mississippian culture who has recnetly retired.
The key to the Clovis First nastiness lies with the Hrdlicka (no that’s not a typo) of the Smithsonian:
http://books.google.com/books?id=soKaIm76kHgC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=Smithsonian+anthropology+lost+data+Hrdlicka&source=bl&ots=j1rEhb5CIP&sig=80I1lDzBfy6a6lkoJllkiju-BpM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1jWIT_TFAdPptgfitbDzCQ&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
The late Vine De Loria commented on this:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/720497/posts
Betty Meggers had difficulty with the Smithsonian as well:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/archaeologistsmn/qt/meggers_bettyj.htm
Currently many anthropologists are so caught up in their paradigms that they spend a lot of time staring at their navels:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n11_v9/ai_13624717/
Impact events breing a certain hardness to this very soft science.
They are a very powerfful new tool.
On this topic, I want to mention that someone needs to go to Fairbanks Alaska and recover materials on the actual deposits which Hibben observed there. It was my pleasure to defend this honorable departed wounded veteran’s work for some six months, but clearly there are others more able to do this than myself now.
I’m still skeptical of the YD impact Carolina Bays connection, but I’m keeping an open mind about it, and I’m still not convinced that Paul Heinrich has adequately falsified my nutty Lake Nipigon Impact Glacial Lake Agassiz dicharge hypothesis, but I’m keeping an open mind about that as well. Also, it’s clear that the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis Wikipedia page needs to be completely rewritten and that simply reversing Michael Simpson’s Uninformed Trashing of the very mild and quite reasonable and modest additions made to it after the release of the most recent PNAS paper will be grossly insufficient to cover the advances that have been made on this subject. However, I still remain skeptical of the relationship of this alleged impact to the Younger Dryas chronozone until some more definitive evidence of a very large airburst or impact can be presented.
On the other hand, I found these publication in progress :
J. H. Wittke, J. C. Weaver; T. E. Bunch, D. K. Kennett, A. M. T. Moore, G. C. Hillman, A. Tankersley, Goodyear, C. Moore, R. Daniel, Lopinot, I-A. Israde, J. L. Bischoff, P. S. DeCarli, R. E. Hermes, Kloosterman, R.  B. Firestone, Z. Revay, G. A. Howard, D. R. Kimbel, C. P. Lipo, S. Sakai, A. West; and. J. P. Kennett. Impact-related microspherules on three continents at the Younger-Dryas onset (12.9 ka): in preparation for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2012.
T. E. Bunch, R. E Hermes, A. M. T. Moore, D. K. Kennett, J. C. Weaver, J. H. Wittke, P. S. DeCarli, J. L Bischoff, G. C. Hillman, G. A. Howard, D. R. Kimbel, G. Kletetschka, C. P. Lipo, S. Sakai, Z. Revay, A. West, R. B. Firestone & J. P. Kennett, 2013, High-Temperature Scoria-like Objects and Glassy Spherules: Evidence for a Cosmic Impact with Earth at 12.9 ka: in review for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, April 2012.
Methods for the Extraction and Purification of Nanodiamonds from Cretaceous-Tertiary and Younger Dryas Boundary Sediments
Charles R. Kinzie and Wendy S. Wolbach
In progress.
Evidence for Widespread Biomass-Burning at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) at 12.9 ka
J.P. Kennett, A. West, P.A. Mayewski, T.E. Bunch, T.W. Stafford, Jr., J. Ballard, and W.S. Wolbach
In progress.
Thomas Lee –
still skeptical of the YD impact CB connection
Somebody please un-confuse me: In the last year or so EPG explained on Tusk that CBs and YDr are NOT related, and someone put CBs at ~34K BP while YDr ~12.9K BP.
That both occur in George Howard’s article is more of an accidental linkage?
George, that must have been some impressive term paper on the CBs. Nice to know how you got into impact science.
My only motivation since teen years was the rumors about Hawaii’s central Pacific location somehow having to with this lop-sided hole in the Earth with all continents on the opposite hemisphere. Then I read there were magmatic traps in Siberia, and now we may trust the West-Siberian impacts 250M BP were responsible for the Pacific Ocean hole. That is, barring those tomato throwers.
BTW, reading the posts on Tusk, and comments by Steve and others, pretty much leaves me in the dust as that rank amateur that I am.
How science progresses:
We have a pardigm, such as
“Comets and Asteroids do not hit the Earth.”
The data is collected that is at variance with that paradigm.
Then we generate a new paradigm:
“Comets and asteroids hit the Earth.”
The way that this mechanism has worked and has not worked in the case of impacts has been strange indeed.
Everyone pretty much fell into impact research when confronted with data that could not be explained by the existing paradigm.
Thomas Lee: “I’m still not convinced that Paul Heinrich has adequately falsified my nutty Lake Nipigon Impact Glacial Lake Agassiz dicharge hypothesis, but I’m keeping an open mind about that as well.”
Your term “Lake Nipigon Impact Glacial Lake Agassiz discharge” I can’t quite catch the drift of, since it seems to include an impact with the Lake Agassiz emptying. I must have missed it when you posted it. Apologies for that…
For general reference as to why Lake Agassiz could not have sent a surge to the Atlantic, you might want to buy a copy of Rodney Chilton’s “Sudden Cold.” There is a link to it in the RH column. Rodney points out many of the holes in the Lake Agassiz draining, and the even bigger holes in the underlying THC oceanic conveyor hypothesis.
I love highly respected oceanographer Carl Wunsch’s take on the THC:
If the THC is “merely [a] fantasy”, then Lake Agassiz draining becomes a non-nothing.
Rodney points out, among other things, that at the YDB the ice sheet still had not receded far enough, therefore there was no outlet to the Atlantic. Subsequent efforts have been tried, to show the lake draining to the NORTH, along the Mackensie River instead, which is ludicrous, because then the cold fresh water would have been mixed in among even colder saline water in the Arctic Ocean, and then would have had to travel thousands of miles through the frozen north (being diluted more and more during the whole journey) in order to arrive at the THC sinking spot in the N Atlantic. The “work-around” thus becomes more ‘fantastic’ than the original – kind of like fantasy-squared.
Then there is the journal paper that pointed out that Lake Agassiz didn’t even NEED a sudden drainage, that it very likely simply evaporated away. (Sorry I don’t have the source handy.)
Hermann: “Somebody please un-confuse me: In the last year or so EPG explained on Tusk that CBs and YDr are NOT related, and someone put CBs at ~34K BP while YDr ~12.9K BP. ”
You know, Hermann, I am with you on that! I thought the CB-YDB link was kaput, too – from things I’ve read HERE.
From a ‘scientific elegance’ POV, I’d LOVE the two to be compatible, but then EPG had pretty much disabused me of that elegance.
And now I have whiplash, too.
I’ve read enough of Davias’ web pages to have seen that most of the lab datings have been in the 35ky-40kya range for CB soils. That puts it right smack dab in the middle of Firestone’s C14 problem period – where dates might just as easily read ~38kya or ~32kya. Firestone pointed at his supernova theory on that. But the dates aren’t compatible with the YDB.
At the same time, from reading Chris Moore’s comments on the “Davias Presents…” post and his pdfs, I am VERY MUCH questioning where on the CBs is the correct place to be taking OSL dates from.
My reason? The sand deposits which Davias puts much focus on, these in Moore’s lacustrine arguments are shown to be laid over the top of what the underyling form of the CBs is/are. The sand is failry evenly deposited, following the countours of the outlying ground, the rims. and the CB basins. This in no way argues for lacustrine, since lake shorelines are always at ONE elevation at a time, leaving shoreline features that are clearly evident. Instead, the sand layer flows up and over the rims. Clearly not lacustrine, and clearly laid over what land from existed previously.
In addition, there is NO layering in the sand whatsoever (noted time and time again in the literature) – which indicates not only that the sand was laid down in one fell swoop, but that there has been no wind effects or siltation effects, either.
What this all says to me is that the CB bottoms were formed first, and that the sand was deposited afterward, like powdered sugar on pastries. And THAT says to me that measuring the sand in the rims is nonsense. IMHO, the dating should all be in the first cms of the CB basins and the first cms in the under-sand soil outside. Measuring anytihing IN the rims is garbage, because that was the region that MAY HAVE BEEN disrupted, in case of low-velocity impacts.
NO ONE argues that the CBs were primary impacts. Ergo, either they are lacustrine (rejected by the facts in many papers), aeolian (rejected by the facts in many papers), or low-impact craters (never rejected – mostly because no one knows what it is they are rejecting). By process of elimination, the focus on CB causes should be on ejecta impacts – if for no other reason than to honestly falsify the hypothesis.
But as to dating, I accept the 35-40kya dates – but I argue that they are dating the wrong strata. That being the case, I no longer accept EPG’s outright rejection of the BC-YDB link. The link may still be wrong, but I haven’t seen the evidence that convinces me.
To me the door has opened again. Thanks more to Moore and his lacustrine pdfs than to anything Davias or EPG has said.
Moore’s pdfs were completely unconvincing of the lacustrine hypothesis, and actually had NO evidence that I saw supporting the idea. Instead, their evidence showed the opposite – that lacustrine was specifically excluded from consideration.
Since that time, I have actually arrived at a scenario by which I believe the CBs were formed. I will go into it in due time, after I’ve run over it a few times to work out the bugs or falsify it logically.
Since OSL is only measuring how long a mineral has been laying in darkness, it only really works for stratigraphic studies of Aeolian, and lacustrine sediments when the layers have been laid down gradually, and sequentially over a long time. If the bays all formed at once, as many of us think they did, then using OSL to date them is useless. If I take a piece of ancient material, and move it violently without exposing it to sunlight, OSL won’t tell you when I moved it.
If you had a fairly good understanding of the exact physical mechanism of the formation of the bays, like the understanding we have of the evolution of an impact crater, then you would understand the sequence the materials were deposited during formation; as well as which materials were moved, and where to. And you could go directly to the layer of materials that were exposed to sunlight before the event, and buried at the moment of formation, to give you the correct age for the structure. But without such an understanding, your OSL dates are going to be all over the place. Because all you will really be measuring is how long the antecedent materials you’re testing have been lying in darkness.
Since there is really no solid understanding of the mechanism of their formation, there is also no rhyme or reason to the choice of where folks take their specimens, it’s like picking up a large book that’s written in a foreign, or ancient tongue you don’t understand. And then picking random characters from the middle of words here and there in the book, and presuming to understand what the book is all about.
And if the materials were not laid down in a gradual layer by layer sequence as the devout uniformitarian folk assume. (I don’t think they were) Then OSL data is meaningless.
I finally got home to an IP address that Wikipedia had blocked for editing and reversed some of the edits and added a paragraph to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis page. My very first edit.
Wow, Michael Simpson (aka SkepticalRaptor) is quite the Skeptical Asshole.
Dennis – You are right in saying,
“If you had a fairly good understanding of the exact physical mechanism of the formation of the bays, like the understanding we have of the evolution of an impact crater, then you would understand the sequence the materials were deposited during formation; as well as which materials were moved, and where to. And you could go directly to the layer of materials that were exposed to sunlight before the event, and buried at the moment of formation, to give you the correct age for the structure.”
If the sand was deposited all at once (it is NOT native to the coastal plain), then what is UNDER it is what has last seen the Sun at point X in time. The clay at the bottoms of the bays is what should be looked at with OSL. The clay under the sand outside the bays should have OSL testing. And where the sand drapes (Davias’ tem, which I agree with) over the rims, then the rim soil immediately under the sand should be tested.
This is a falsifiable premise/prediction. True scientific understanding predicts certain things. I predict that the OSL dates under the soils in those different locations will read the same. We do not have to prove something else first. We can say, “THIS should be what is found, based on this hypothesis, so let us go see if THIS is what IS found.” It alone does not prove the ejecta impact hypothesis, but if it is consistent with the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is strengthened.
Oh, and if it turns out to not be correct, then we adjust to the facts.
Another OSL dating test to be done:
If, as researchers have noted, the quartz sand was all deposited at one time, then the OSL date for lower sand and upper sand should date to the same time. I would exclude sand too close to the surface, as it would have been blown about, and would have also had some sunlight bleed through grains above it. With some sand beds as thick as 10 meters, this test would falsify or verify the single-deposition understanding.
‘@Dennis:
“Since there is really no solid understanding of the mechanism of their formation, there is also no rhyme or reason to the choice of where folks take their specimens”
But I am saying that the OSL can itself be used to support or weed out some mechanisms. That is part of what evidence is supposed to be used for, after all.
But I am saying specifically that there ARE locations that will tell us more.
I have in mind a mechanism which does cover the bases, and I think it is solid. It is close to Davias’ thinking, but we differ a bit. I am gathering my points. He is more likely correct than me, but I see a few pints of contention. Between the two, I think we narrow the possibilities substantially. And both ideas are nothing people here would be shocked by.
One location I would look at would be the the stratigraphic horizon at the interface under the sand rims that separates them from the surface they are laying on. If the Bays are the result of secondary impacts, the sand rims would’ve been emplaced at the time of that impact. So it would be interesting to see if a number of bays return the same age from that horizon.
But one test that may provide some clue would be to pick a common structural location from the same place in a dozen bays picked at random. Such as the stratigraphic horizon described above, or at the clay-sand interface, say on the NW end. If we get dates that are all over the place then we have a problem.
But it would also help if more than one dating method were available for any given specimen, so they could be cross-checked. Since as I said, If a piece of material was moved in the formation event without exposing it to sunlight, then OSL will only tell you how long it’s been since the specimen has seen the light of day. And not how long it’s been since the formation event itself.
Dennis –
“One location I would look at would be the the stratigraphic horizon at the interface under the sand rims that separates them from the surface they are laying on. If the Bays are the result of secondary impacts, the sand rims would’ve been emplaced at the time of that impact. So it would be interesting to see if a number of bays return the same age from that horizon.”
That is my point exactly, Dennis.
If you look at Chris Moore’s pdfs, the GPR transects show the folds in the ground under the rims. At least that is how I interpret them. My bet is the OSL readings inside, on and outside the rims is the same, for a given depth under the sand.
“But one test that may provide some clue would be to pick a common structural location from the same place in a dozen bays picked at random.”
I agree with that, too. I don’t think any conclusions should be drawn except if replicated for several bays.
“If a piece of material was moved in the formation event without exposing it to sunlight, then OSL will only tell you how long it’s been since the specimen has seen the light of day. And not how long it’s been since the formation event itself.”
THAT is what I am asking about the 100,000 year dates and 40,000, too.
A low-velocity ejecta impact can push clay downward and outward without destroying the impact location – if the velocity is low enough. And with terminal velocity (due to atmospheric drag) a factor in ejecta trajectories, landing velocities may very well have been low enough to ONLY ‘dimple’ (Davias’ term) the soil. And if the soil surface has not been disintegrated or exploded, but only compressed downward and pushed outward, then the top soil surface would have not been changed – meaning OSL tells us nothing. Nothing except that if we OSL date the right places and equal depths and find out that the readings are the same, then we know the landform was merely deformed, but not catastrophically.
This would also rule out aeolian and lacustrine as anything more thanreworking the pre-existing landform. Lacustrine has to do with sedimentation and shoreline creation. Aeolian has been shown by Davias’ LIDAR to give characteristics completely different than the bays possess. Both are a non-starters.
I just read in “Geographical Portraits of North America” today that the level of the ground in bays is lower than the surrounding ground. That is consistent with this scenario. A volumetric study can also be done on bays – to find out if the rim volume of each is equal to or less than the missing volume of the lowered bay basin.
Why ‘less than’? Because the underlying soil may be compressed straight downward, without ever showing up in the rims. But if rims are shown to have MORE volume than the missing volume below external ground level, then some other mechanism must be at work.
I believe rim volume will be MUCH less, because the largest force component would have been downward, and most of the energy would have been in compressing the soil downward.
All these relatively simple tests can be done, so as to refine the concept if needed. But I am betting they will all hold true.
My first attempt at righting a Wikipedia wrong was horrific. I guess I won’t be editing any more Wikipedia pages if this is the way it works.
The Wikipedia software wasn’t as near as user friendly as I was led to believe as well.
I would have tried it earlier but the local IP was blocked from Wikipedia until the 14th and I wanted to give you a chance to change it yourself. At the very least there should be mention of this paper in the references of both the Younger Dryas pages and the hypothesis page.
A hypothesis that is still in fluid motion it seems. However, these people have chosen to dedicate some portion of their careers to developing the field of microscopic impact proxy detection and analysis, and that moving forward. You need to listen to what they’re saying.
Sorry, by you I mean Michael Simpson. My apologies.
Hey Thomas,
Since That Michael Simpson guy’s definition of “pseudoscience” is anything he doesn’t think is consistent with his own narrow view of the “consensus”, and never mind if a reference is in refereed literature. You’re right. His edits of the YD hypothesis page on Wikipedia come under the heading of unjustified censorship since he removes any reference he doesn’t agree with, including current and recent peer reviewed literature. How do we go about petitioning Wikipedia to get the narrow minded idiot’s editing privileges cut off?
No, I made my point. He must have used the term fringe science a dozen times in the editing war, and I’m in enough trouble already. I happen to think this is cutting edge science myself, even if everything ends up wrong things are advancing well.
Thomas Lee –
Maybe email me at [email protected], and I can point out one or two things about editing in WIkipedia. I managed okay somehow. Maybe one thing is holding you up, and it might be something I’ve learned.
(My edits have been mainly in non-controversial subjects, so maybe that makes a difference.)
Thomas Lee –
Which subject exactly?
Each subject does also have a discussion page. You can go there and point out your problems with Simpson. Someone may have a suggestion how to deal with him. He DOES need to be reported. In global warming, one of the assholes who kept editing out stuff he didn’t like was banned. It took quite a while, but it did happen.
Controversial subjects often have Sections which are labeled “The Controversy Over ______”
I am not an expert, but have edited 30-40 pages, usually points of substance.
I put a writup complaining about his biased edits on the noticeboard Although I don’t know if it’ll do any good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Bad_edits_of_The_Younger_Dryas_Impact_Hypothesis_page.
Dennis, it’s gone at this time. Wiki editors act quickly if under attack.
Hi TLE, Steve –
You need to understand that Morrison was/is heavily connected with the Sceptical Inquirer.
Unfortunately, that gave Morrison the ability to block sceptiscism of his own dangerously low estimates of the cometary impact hazard.
One key element in moving these studies foward is unfortuntately going to be removing Morrison from any controlling position. This is unfortunate given Morrison’s pioneering work in the field of impact studies.
Aside from that, many people have invested their careers in other explanations for the phenomenon seen at the HSIE.
Some people will make unreasonble demands: Mike here is demanding an analysis of starvation species by species, in a far different world than we hav today.
There is a final remark that I’d like to add here” 41 of the world’s leading scientists wrote a paper staating that the Chicxulub impact was sufficient for the KT ELE, omlyy to have the Shiva data come up later. And while the Shiva data had been ignored, the US NSF had wasted a ton of money of Keller’s work.
It’s all going to make one hell of a story someday. Too bad I’m in no shape to write it.
The typos only show up in the larger type of the post.
For ” read :
For “staatng” read “stating”
For “onlyy” read “only”
For “of Keller’s” read “on Keller’s”
Thomas Lee and Dennis –
I edited the hell out of the YD Impact Wiki page.
I kept a full copy so that I can re-paste sections as simply and quickly as possible, when the guy re-edits it.
I will get notices when it is edited, so I will be able to undo his nastiness as easily as he does ours.
FYI: I left in the critical parts that were still valid, including their criticism – but clearly labeled as criticisms, not as the final word. They can criticize all they want, as long is the pro-YDB info is not removed, and as long as they don’t claim their criticism is the final word.
If the guy keeps it up, I will follow up your complaint, Dennis. Wiki will have a copy of every edit, so they can see what is going on.
I DID paste in the paragraph from the Lake Cuitzeo paper that lists all the other independent confirmations.
I also reorganized the page. It was terrible, jumping back and forth, and some things it repeated up to three times.
Ed –
Are you saying Chixculub didn’t do it – that Shiva did?
If so, my long-held doubts about Chicxulub finally have a hero.
Woah! I got blocked as an editor on Wiki – for “attempting to out another editor.”
I put this as my edit reason:
“Re-inserted supporting evidence which was removed by a STALKER EDITOR named Micheal Simpson, who is being reported.”
I will be attempting to appeal the Block, and I think if anyone here wants to provide me with fodder, please send it to me here.
ALSO:
The Wiki page is still as I edited it. That may not last long.
I have the full text saved, including references and footnotes.
I can’t get on for now, Dennis, so would you like me to email it to you for quick re-editing? If you do, do NOT say anything about Simpson in your editing reason.
Steve –
What the hell does “attempting to out another editor” mean?
In any case, you guys are playing low stakes poker. You have to remember Morrison was a “referee” on academic publications for years, until his editorial bias became clearly evident.
As I’ve told all of you repeatedly, we’re playing for real money here. Since the impact hazard is far greater than NASA has previously admitted, demontrating this means that NASA will have to change its distribution of expenditures.
This involves peoples’ incomes, as well as the Mars fantasies of key NASA supporters. Don’t expect them to play fair.
A very high evidence level is needed. and you can expect constant personal attacks while trying to present that evidence.
Aside from that, since Benny took the Cambridge Conference over to AGW scepiciam, impact is now needlessly associated with AGW scepticism.
As I muself have been “stalked” for years, Steve, I don’t think your “STALKER EDITOR’ comment was justified. You also need to remember that Michael is not operating alone, but has his own support network.
Also, as I have mentioned here before, the real work on impact is not done publicly for very good reasons. Right now it has to be done very, very privately.
Like I said before, this is going to make a great story whenever someone writes it.
As far as public perceptions go, google “the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs”.
Just an update on the Younger Dryas Wikipedia pages scandal, the editing and accusations by Michael Simpson (aka Skeptical Raptor) have become so extreme and outrageous that I have indeed been literally forced by this individual to directly contact the senior editor and explain the situation and recommend that he consider banning the user Skeptioal Raptor (who is indeed Michael Simpson as any superficial research will reveal) from any further editing of the two Younger Dryas pages, and that editing be handled by an unbiased observer. If any of you have Wikipedia accounts, I agree with Dennis that you should contact the appropriate editor (I believe it is DougWeller) and request the same from him.
I note that the Wikipedia article says that there is no evidence of population decline 12,900 ya. But Terry Jones at Cal Poly says differently. According to him there was a 700 year hiatus in human occupation in California beginning 12,900 YA.
California archaeological record consistent with Younger Dryas disruptive event
Terry L. Jones
Department of Social Sciences, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407-0329, USA.
Buchanan et al. (1) assert that the radiocarbon record from the United States and Canada does not support the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis, but their claims do not hold true for the California archaeological record. Fluted projectile points marking Paleoindian occupations have been reported from no fewer than 51 locations in California (2), and no fewer than 38 sites have produced radiocarbon evidence for occupation between 10,500 and 9,000 calibrated yrs BP (3). Only two sites have produced fluted points and early Holocene occupational residues together in stratified context. At the same time, none of the sites that have produced radiocarbon evidence for occupation between 10,500 and 9,000 calibrated yrs BP have yielded fluted points. There are no archaeological sites in California that have reliable radiocarbon dates between 12,900 and 12,200 calibrated yrs BP and precious few that date between 12,000 and 10,500 calibrated yrs BP. The earliest archaeological record from California is therefore marked by a strong cultural unconformity between the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene that is consistent with a significant disruptive event of the type described by Firestone et al. (4) and Kennett et al. (5). A more careful evaluation of the full cultural and archaeological record from the regions discussed by Buchanan et al. (1) would likely show similar patterns.
References
1. Buchanan B, Collard M, Edinborough K. (2008) Paleoindian demography and the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:11651–11654.
2. Klar KL, Rondeau M, Cassidy J, Jones TL. (2007) in California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity, eds Jones TL, Klar KL (Altamira, New York), pp 63–70.
3. Klar KL, Erlandson JM, Rick TC, Jones TL, Porcasi JF. (2007) in California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity, eds Jones TL, Klar KL (Altamira, New York), pp 53–62.
4. Firestone RB, et al. (2007) Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16016–16021.
5. Kennett DJ, et al. (2008) Wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California’s northern Channel Islands at the Ållerød-Younger Dryas boundary (13.0–12.9 ka) Quat Sci Rev 27:2528–2543.
Check out tweets to the Raptor. His conduct is sickening. Will be blogging this all soon.
Michael SImpson is also a very poor writer. I am no James Michener, but at least I do not subject you all to that drivel. Or edit encyclopedias with a hatchet!
It was explained to me why Wikipedia’s approach to our handling of him is problematic. First of all, specifically mentioning any editor by their real name on wiki is a huge no no; too many legal issues come into play for them. Also, there is a problem with labeling the idiot as a “stalker” since the use of that word also opens wiki up to law suits.
The admin folks have explained to me that the correct handling is to simply edit the correct information into the Wiki page without making any specific mention of the idiot.
So if he deletes something, we just quietly put it right back again without making a personal issue of it. And each time we do, we put a little bit more of the truth into the replacement copy.
I am exploring a couple of different WYSIWYG editors that are compatible with wiki, and should simplify the process of doing so; complete with pictures.
Steve,
Something that should also be put into that page are the YDB team’s responses to those criticisms. Such as quoting or including the full ‘Potential misidentification of markers’ paragrph of the Lake Cuitzeo paper.
Ed –
Outing an editor I believe means trying to snitch on him.
As to Stalker Editor, from what Thomas was telling us, Simpson was keeping tabs on edits of that page. It is just a simple check box to be notified of them.
In global warming there was LOT of that by alarmists, and it took a VERY LONG TIME to get the people at Wikipedia to address the situation. Any page associated in any way with global warming issues was not allowed to have ANY assertions of the incorrectness of the alarmist position. Any skeptical edits were very quickly deleted, by a group of individuals. After years of it, they finally banned one of the guys.
By stalker I meant someone who was dling that – ‘tending a web page” to keep it ‘clean’. That was exactly what Thomas said was going on, and when I got to the YDI Hyptohesis page, there was not ONE mention of anything positive about the impact scenario. The only mentions on our side were of the 2007 stuff, and the Pinter,Daulton, Holliday non-replications and accusations of stupidity, not being able to tell nanodiamonds from insect crap. All the verbiage was snide and insulting. The entire presentation was on of ridicule. Nothing was posted about any studies since 2007.
Thomas said he tried to put in more recent factual stuff and it disappeared later, after it was on the page.
That is what I mean by ‘stalker’. I would have thought the heavy-handed senior editor would have at least asked me what I meant. The first I heard from him, I was blocked – INDEFINITELY – with no chance of reinstatement unless my appeal was accepted.
I mean the guy about global warming only got a year and half, after abusing the editorial privileges for years. I used the term ‘stalker’ ONCE – in a field that is not even shown to the public. And I am supposed to be banned for LIFE?
Thomas – The editor that blocked me was someone named Salvio.
Dennis – Feel free to rebut on that page. Add all those references!
I RECOMMEND THAT ALL EDITING BE COPY-CLIPPED AND SAVED, SO YOU CAN RE-ENTER IT QUICKLY. Also, save a copy of the pre-edit page!
Dennis – I did not know the guy had a user ID other than his name. I think I use my own name.
And if they have a problem with that, why don’t they say so or warn me about using real names? If Thomas had referred to his user ID I would have, too.
George – Yes, the guy’s writing was pathetic. He repeated himself all over the place. He showed no respect for anyone who differs with him.
Dennis – After the experience the global warming skeptics had for so long, I thought it was imperative to draw their attention to the guy’s actions. Quietly editing never did ANY good on global warming.
Also, Dennis, I am not sure those WYSIWYG editors are useful on Wiki. Links to other topics need the double brackets, and the references are really heinous to do for journal entries.
Dennis has some wise remarks, good advice. A famous scientist once was quoted: “The wrong ideas die out when those who hold them pass away.” So, let’s be patient. This may take a while.
An Italian police chief claims Julius Caesar suffered from battle wounds [Battle of Munda March 17, 45 BC] so severely, seemingly having epileptic seizures, that he asked his 23 closest friends to kill him on March 15, 44 BC, a form of suicide. The works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, illegitimate son of QE1. These versions even if true may never be accepted by the public. There were so many Taurid meteorite stream (Comet Encke) impacts on Earth since the late Pleistocene that we may never figure out what happened, when, and in which order, and may have to live with the public never becoming convinced of any of it.
Neither that Isaac Newton found a high frequency expectation of destructive comet impacts nor the scarred faces of most solar system bodies have ended Unitarian geology after debunking Georges Cuvier’s catastrophism, triumphant but false.
So, who are we to quibble about YDr, CBs, and Dennis’ glazed mountains being caused by frequent comets strafing of planet Earth.
But, small progress does happen, if we are careful: On the Wikipedia page for Chicxulub, we can now read the following sentence: “Another possible crater thought to have been formed at the same time is the Shiva crater, though the structure’s status as a crater is contested.” And on the Wikipedia page for Shiva the 500 km crater is pictured by its gravitational anomalies due to Chatterjee et al, whose paper was never published in a refereed journal.
Ed –
Wikipedia’s Outing definition:
This definition leaves much unclear.
What constitutes ‘posting’?
I filled in a field that was only going to be seen by ONE Admin, if that.
As such, it was not posting it to the Wiki page for all the world to see.
I believe the Admin guy (who on his own talk page was accused by others of being high-handed and a bit power crazy) – who is Italian – doesn’t understand English and misinterpreted ‘posting’ and ‘outing’ both.
My email to him never got to him. The email address disappeared in transmitting it, and I’ve not been able to find it again. But I found another route and re-appealed.
In my mind I did not out the guy. But I told them if they call that outing, then I will abide by it and not do it again. I had no intention of outing his personal info out to the public. I only wanted them to know who they needed to look at for abusive editing practices.
They’ve unblocked me. But I’m not ready to change anything just yet. Before I try any actual editing on Wiki I want to be clear that I am standing on firm ground, and doing everything strictly by the accepted rules of Wikipedia.
But Ya’ll can be sure that I am “gatherin’ me weapons” as grandpa used to say. And sharpening my hatchet.
I’m not worried about gettin’ flammed by Michael Simpson. I’ve been torched by the best. And I ain’t no slouch with a fire extinguisher. I happen to have a vocabulary. And I’m not afraid to load it with attitude and use it.
I am not out to flame anyone. I am just wanting to have the facts out there.
Hi everybody, I worked through the misunderstandings with the senior editors of wikipedia and tried my hand at cleaning up the mess Michael Simpson (Skeptical Raptor) made of the hypothesis page, and of course he was all over that again. It’s sad that Wikipedia has to be the battleground of Michael Simpson’s geological education, and that I have to educate him.
Anyways, the primary references are restored (by Skeptical Raptor himself apparently realizing what a big hole he has dug for himself) but now he is dragging Carbonado into the debate, as if exotic macroscopic black diamonds formed in interstellar space and deposited deep into the crust by a gigantic asteroid impact billions of years ago is somehow relevant to the Younger Dryas era. Carbonado itself is an interesting topic, though, but he’s desperately clinging to his idea that somehow that detecting and analyzing microscopic nanodiamonds is somehow fringe science, but big diamonds are not. What is clear from all of this is that impact proxies have definitely arrived on the scene as a viable method of tracking cosmic changes through time.
You are my hero, Tommy Lee. Responsible, considerate, adult action — instead of tongue flapping and key tapping. Nice work.
It’s already an edit war again. I give up. Simpson does not seem to be able to do any credible superficial scientific research, and it took me all of five minutes to work through the entire body of peer reviewed literature on Carbonado and Yukatite. It even has its own wiki page!
Hi TLE –
http://www.theonion.com/articles/wikipedia-celebrates-750-years-of-american-indepen,2007/
Note the mammoth fossil date. :p)
Always remember that the stupid, nasty, and insane will outnumber you
I left a comment in the talk section of the YD page over there regarding potential misidentification of markers. It quotes the section of the same name from the Lake Cuitzeo paper.
It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
Thomas Lee and George –
NO. I beg to differ. Wiki hasn’t done a damned thing. Simpson’s sheit is back up. The opening line calls the hypothesis “discredited” – AND THEY HAVE FROZEN THE PAGE SO HIS LIES ARE UP THERE TILL THE WHOLE THING IS RESOLVED.
I saw that and screamed bloody murder at my arbitration contact, about the deletion of peer-reviewed evidence. BIG TYPE AND RED BOLD LETTERS.
No, George, it is not calm like TL, but the guy had seen how reasonable I am. I pasted in the Tusk Tweets about him deleting.
I started a content dispute. I’ll see how that goes.
And, NO, Tommy Lee, Carbonado is NOT on the page.
George, the page is pretty much exactly as I found it.
They’ve already locked the dispute forum. He has accused me of sending him threatening emails, which is, of course, false.
My last email to Wiki:
Boy that guy is really digging himself into a hole!
On my very first foray into this, and my very first edit, he accused me of all sorts of offensive stuff! On the Talk section of the YD page I put in a direct literal quote of the lake Quitzeo paper at the bottom of the talk page. Specifically, the section titled Potential Misidentification of markers. And he went ballistic! He has most certainly got me confused with someone else.
This is what he said:
So I answered him:
What are you talking about? As a new Wikipedian, that quote was my very first edit. WP:FRINGE. It is not clear what you define as “fringe science”. But the source of that quote is Isabel Israde-Alcántara et al. PNAS 2012, and is directly from a recently published, peer reviewed paper in a well recognized, and respected scientific journal. And while in the future someone may provide evidence in the literature to refute it, until that time comes, it stands as a valid reference to the latest science in refereed literature related to this subject. And directly quoting a recently published peer reviewed reference most certainly does not come under the heading of invoking emotion, ad hominems, or strawman arguments. WP:STALK. Regarding your ridiculous,accusation of stalking, that’s just about as offensive as it can get. I have never sent you even 1 email. Or commented on your talk page. Nor have I ever blogged about you. In fact, since outing an editor is forbidden here, and our identities are immaterial to this discussion anyway, I have no concern whatsoever for who you are. —CometHunter (talk) 01:39, 17 April 2012 (UTC)CometHunter
Steve, no need for caps and bolds. Relax. They blocked me too for using “largely” instead of simply “discredited.”
I was just testing the nature of the beast, and it is scary. However, it will be hard for the Wikians to hold back many more peer reviewed articles in major journals.
It will make a good story one day.
Great article, George! Once again you have shown your finely honed skill for presenting the facts of a story (your own story, in this case) with a healthy dose of even-handed patience with those involved. Thanks for the narrative. Can’t wait to read the book.
Apparently, the global impactite layer and global species extinction is not enough to swing the debate.
IMO, its going to take rigorously documenting one of the larger holes left in the ground by the HSIE.
That’s why the Assiniboine HSIE account is so important.
Why not try to develop your wiki skills editing the wiki pages on Chicxulub/Shiva?
I everybody, I have spoken with the senior editor and I have decided to formally recuse myself from any further edits of the Wikipedia Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis webpage. Just FYI. Thanks.
Hi guys, just another quick FYI. Skeptical Raptor has taken his debunking over to the Younger Dryas page now, dragging the Laacher See volcano into the mix, which is nutty because Laacher See tephra anchors the varve sequence and isotope excursions several hundred years prior.
I made a couple of edits and gave up, and I recuse myself from the Younger Dryas page as well, William Connelley will just have to try and monitor it as best he can, because you can see that he has taken it over to the Laacher See page as well. You can view history to see my comments.
I’m done. Thanks!
TLE –
William Connelly is one of the gatekeepers on global warming. If he is the monitor, 0% gets past him that isn’t consensus. He is NOT a person who will allow anything to challenge the establishment paradigm.
Mr. Garcia, there are no ‘gatekeepers on global warming’. There are just data archives and peer reviewed research references. I have reviewed Skeptical Raptor’s internet comments with regard to the Younger Dryas and found his Wikipedia editing examples to be corrupted by his ‘beliefs’, on several different internet pages already. I’m not about to pursue this any further because it is pointless and futile. If he wants to continue to make a public spectacle of his skepticism, then there’s much more I can do about it other than what I have already done. He doesn’t get it.
Let’s just give him as much rope as he needs, ok, that was the only point of my quick edits. I’m confident that he will be eventually censured because I’ve already taken this to administrators.
On the YDIH Wiki talk page He’s already pretty much dangling from that rope already. His stated reason for deleting reference to the Lake Cuitzeo is:
“Only to shut up everyone did I edit in the article, but it really doesn’t qualify as a Reliable Source, by any definition of the word. By the way, the work in Mexico has been debunked by a lot of people smarter than me.”
The hole he’s dug for himself is the fact that he personally took it upon himself to “Shut everyone up”. And the only justification he can come up with for that destructive edit is the personal opinions of some anonymous people he thinks are smarter than him.
He probably didn’t have a hard time finding someone smarter than he is. But with that silly line he set the bar for providing reliable sources in the discussion with an appeal to inappropriate authority. His entire argument is coming from that attitude, he hasn’t said a single thing that wasn’t based on blatant ad hominem, and so so far he has yet to provide a single valid reference. This is good, because some kind admin person finally got fed up and put a sock in it for him. As it stands now the last significant edit of the talk page is a list of supportive evidence. look over that list folks. If any of you can think of a relevant paper that’s missing from that list. Or if you can provide a link to one on that list that doesn’t already have one let me know.
TLE –
I meant gatekeeper on Wiki. Connally is.
If anyone here thinks the YDIH is a controversial subject, global warming is that times 50.
As for SR, all of our fretting over him isn’t going to do anything useful. If Wiki wants him gatekeeping, he will continue. If they don’t, he will be blocked, too. If Wiki has agendas or favored sides, nothing we say will change it.
Here’s a little more on Connolley. http://www.conservapedia.com/William_M._Connolley
Dennis – Thanks for fighting the good fight on Wiki’s talk page, but I think it is a lost cause. Until someone with creds gets on their case – and that isn’t any of us except George, and HE is blocked – it will remain SR’s way. Someone who has their papers being blocked will have to jump on them.
Of course, SR’s, “It doesn’t qualify as a reliable source,” is pulled out of his rectum. Of course he doesn’t know what he is talking about. But SR is a front man for powers that be. He is just their attack dog. But for those who actually read what venom he spews out, his viciousness degrades their arguments.
I see Wiki trying to suck up to the establishment consensus on all fronts, trying to establish some cred that their model cannot support or sustain. When anyone can come in and edit, they have to maintain more rent-a-cops, and those rent-a-cops don’t know 90% of the topics they are policing. So monumentally stupid people like SR can put up anything and they don’t know the diff. Then they just go look it up in a 3th grade text book, and whatever is there, that is what they sign on to.
It’s like the difference between Britannica and World Book Encyclopedias, only more so.
Guys, when Firestone et al came up with the YDIH, they knew it was going to step on toes. This is all just part of the fray they stirred up. And Wiki is the LEAST likely place to actually present the issue properly. Wiki admins don’t know what the hell the arguments are. So to put down the new boys on the block they pick out phrasings they don’t like – and then ban the people for life for J-walking. They have no capacity to judge the evidence, and Wiki is not designed to deal with cutting edge science. So they end up doing the bidding of what they think the consensus thinks. Like all bureaucrats, they are just paper pushers checking to see if all the ‘j’s’ are dotted and all the ‘t’s’ are crossed – and go along thinking that is important.
If and when they uphold my appeal, I will inform them to remove me as an editor. Like I said, I won’t be a part is an institution that would have SR as an editor. I have too much self respect.
Tusk Commenters: Can I draw your attention to the core issue of high ET impact frequency, often mentioned by EPG. This has not affected the accepted standard planetary science dispensation. So far, Uniformitarianism has been modified THRICE, items:
ONE, plate tectonics.
TWO, Morgan mantle plume.
THREE, Chicxulub impact.
Regarding item TWO, quoting Wikipedia:
In 1971, geophysicist W. Jason Morgan proposed the hypothesis of mantle plumes. In this hypothesis, convection in the mantle transports heat from the core to the Earth’s surface in thermal diapirs.
Trouble for the standard guys is that mantle plumes are non-existent see the web page http://www.mantelplumes.org, Do plumes exist? The need of plumes for plate tectonics has receded because it finally dawned on geologists that plates are driven by gravity, isostasy, the older plate parts contracting hence getting heavier, sinking back down into the mantle. This is cited as the reason for the Challenger Deep of 35,814 ft in the Marianas Trench, this being the oldest extant oceanic crustal plate, hence the heaviest.
The point is that plate tectonics and other crustal deformations are PRIMARILY caused by impacts. Hence we don’t have Earth look like Mercury. Plates carry craters away from the impact site in the mantle with its remnant hot spot.
EXAMPLE: While the hot spot of the 250M BP impact is under the island of Hawaii, the crater(s), there may be three, are in Asia: 1. West Siberian Basin, 2. South Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean bounded by Novaya Semelya, 3. Mt. Emei Shan, Western Sichuan Basin, SW China.
MORAL: None of these things, including mantleplumes.org are standard dispensation and the false Morgan plume still reigns although isostasy is a published cause of plate tectonics. Hence, the YDIH is only a tiny grain of quartz on the vast shore of inofficial planetary science, which in reality should be dominated by the frequent comet impacts.
Thanks Steve,
You can’t clean out a sewer if you’re afraid of getting shit on. SR’s comments and senseless attacks leave a permanent record of his unqualified and uniformed skeptical bias. And spouting off topic personal ad hominem attacks instead of providing any reliable references at all really show his true colors in bright contrast. He’s got the debate skills of a child.
I’m thinkin’ that giving him an opportunity to spew all that senseless ad hominem in public as a clear and undeniable public record of how his childish close-minded thinking works is a good thing.
The sweet part is taking all that crap, then putting up that list of actual relevant supportive papers, and then having the last word after some admin person stuck a sock in it for him.
He claims that there are just as many papers out there that refute the YDIH. But we all know that’s not true. And of the few there are, most have themselves been debunked in the literature. So it’ll be fun to see what actual refs he comes up with.
Truthfully though, an unbiased comprehensive list of all relevant papers to date, from both sides of the isle, and listed in the order they were published with a brief commentary for each one describing its relative importance in the on-going debate would be a good thing too.
Someday it’ll make a hell of a story for the history books.
Dennis –
SR’s ignorant vitriol may or may not take him down. It depends on if and when the powers behind him decide to throw him under the bus. And as 19th century uniformitarianism and evolution showed, old dogs do not learn new tricks; i.e., the only way evo-gradualism won out was that the old guard died off, leaving the new ideas no more opponents. We have little reason to think that it will be different this time.
The point of all that was that the powers that be behind SR will not give up the ghost. But they may die out. It won’t be fast enough for us, either figuratively or literally – we are getting old as fast as they are.
At the same time, yes, a comprehensive list of papers is not a bad idea. I would suggest a two-column table, done chronologically. Perhaps an alternate third column could be included for comments/1-sentence summaries of how each paper changed the balance at that time. (A comment might say something like “Refuted Pinter’s findings of a lack of markers.”) Comments should not have editorializing in them, merely a statement of what they did to the balance at that time. Comments should be fair to the skeptical side; if they found no markers, that should be simply stated – even if later papers refuted them.
This would be a useful thing to send to the Admins, even if it does not win the day. It is also a useful scorecard for sending out to anyone at any time.
Each paper reference should have a hyperlink to the paper.
I would also suggest that that table might be a good resource on CT as a “Summary of YDIH Papers – 2007 to the Present”.
Yes, EPG asserted the same in his book in 2003 or 2005, but it is not a peer-reviewed paper. It might be mentioned, though. Dennis, I know you and Ed don’t like each other, but he does know his stuff. He didn’t just guess at the YD Impact.
Hermann –
Given that oil pools in impact fractures…
Ed
I don’t know, Ed, I think Dennis’ nutty crackpot ideas are pretty interesting and not that far out there. He has simply hypothesized that geoablative impacts do occur, and he has gone out to look for evidence of their occurrence. We have Tunguska, so this isn’t all that unreasonable.
Irregardless of all the petty infighting here, on Tuesday afternoon a major announcement is coming on a topic that many of you may find interesting.
Enjoy!
UPDATE:
I received the following email from my appeals contact at Wiki:
I responded:
TLE/Dennis/EPG –
First of all, I wish Dennis and Ed would imply stop their childish behavior and act like grownups.
As to geo-ablative features, I invite you all to look at what are called “vitrified forts” in Scotland.
Coords:
56°29’20″N 5°24’28″W – Dun Mac Sniachan
57°28’38″N 4°16’11″W – Craig Phadraig
57°30’45″N 4°13’55″W – Ord Hill, Kessock
56°47’06″N 5°04’04″W – Dun Deardail
57°35’31″N 4°30’12″W – Knock Farril
57°51’48″N 4°16’31″W – Dun Creich (apparently different alignment)
56°41’25″N 2°48’24″W – Finavon
56°30’14″N 2°49’46″W – Laws (with some apparent CBs, also aligned with it)
57°21’05″N 2°51’30″W – Tap o’ Noth (aligned differently)
55°37’31″N 2°39’34″W – Cowdenknowes
For all the world they look to me to be the same as the ablative features Dennis points to in SW USA/NW MX. Not only that, but they are aligned, too (SW-NE). I am not smart enough to tell for sure if the apparent Tunguska direction is from the NE or the SW. I WANT it to be from the NE, but my visual impression is more that the force came from the SW.
The last one has the clearest similarity to Dennis’ ablated hills.
They aren’t barren like in NW Mexico, but one would not expect that in Scotland’s climate. Other than that they look like his geo-ablative hills/cerros. They have the same kind of flow, and even the same visual aerodynamic impression.
I submit that their elevation exposed these hilltops to the worst of the infrared of passing comet fragments through the atmosphere. They are not the only elevated places in Scotland, of course, but these might have been directly under the air blasts.
These are very much an unexplained enigma, why the stones were vitrified. All other explanations fall short.
Tap o’ Noth appears to have been an actual stone structure, as does Dun Creich, since both seem to have ‘courtyards’ within walls. Most of the rest appear to ‘just’ be ablated hilltops. If there are structures on the hilltops, I don’t see them.
I can only speculate about Tap o’ Noth’s and Dun Creich’s different alignments, and my first guess – trying to fit them in with the others – is that the pre-existing structures had enough elevation and their structures took the brunt of the ‘ablative’ heat. AND that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t expect that this guess is correct, but just throw it out as a starting point.
One thing seems likely: If Dennis’ hills are ablated, then so are these.
The majority alignment direction for the vitrified forts seems to be roughly at right angles to Dennis’ hills. This strongly implies separate events. Even allowing for later/earlier arrivals, the direction is just not close to being the same.
All in all, it seems that this explanation fits the evidence better than any other causes that have been considered.
Dating? I know what I would like them to be, but that doesn’t mean anything. Later than humans (due to Tap o’ Noth and Dun Creich). But with the numbers of impacts being discussed, that could be as many as ten possible dates, based on various author’s thinking, from 30 kya to <2 kya. I don't rule out any of them at this point.
YD impact is no longer a mere hypothesis, and of huge importance to mankind, being so close to our epoch in time. Dennis’ glazed hills — Steve’s Scottish “vitrified forts” point at ET impact causation. The hills in Steve’s list esp. 55°37’31″N,2°39’34″W should interest Scottish geologists, what do they write about them? The larger issue of high ET impact frequency esp. comets is the source of official science resisting any new insights, as to them it’s odious. — They might read Isaac Newton though.
Ed – ..oil pools in impact fractures
First proven at Ames, Major County, Oklahoma. Carpenter and Carlson, 1992; Hamm and Olsen, 1992. http://principles.ou.edu/ames/index.html Nice picture of gravity anomalies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Google’s Eric Schmidt and film director James Cameron back venture to mine in space
Forget the gold rushes of the Wild West, the next grab for natural riches could eclipse anything that has gone before it. Power players including Eric Schmidt, the Google chairman, and James Cameron, the film director, are planning to mine the final frontier: space.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02199/mine-space-schmidt_2199798b.jpg
As a matter of fact I do think the Vitrified Forts were torched by comet fire. But there is nothing in my thinking that requires them to be associated with the YD event, or any specific date for that In fact if there is a way to get a positive handle on the date, I’m thinking a hell of a lot more recent than that. Perhaps as late as the bronze age.
If as Clube & Napier have proposed, the catastrophes of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition were the result of of the progressive breakup of the Taurid progenitor object, than the resulting cluster airburst events from that breakup would have been a bi-annual event of varying intensity for 15,000 to 20,000 years beginning 20,000 to 30,000 YA.
In other words it is to be expected that if those events did leave a different kind of planetary scarring from what has been studied before, then once they have all been identified, whatever those locations have in common, it won’t be the dates. And to find planetary scarring with dates that are all over the place during that long time span is to be expected.
This is why my own thinking has focused on trying to get a handle on the actual mechanism of what happens to the ground in a very large cluster airburst event, and the resulting planetary scarring if it isn’t the nice round craters that have always been taught to expect. And to work out the when of any given event as a separate problem.
Hermann,
At a lecture I once attended by Buckminster Fuller, he said that mankind needs to mine, and even to colonize, the asteroid belt, and all of the inner planets. He said that we could continue to think of ourselves as a bunch of different peoples who have to divide and share the resources of a single small planet. In which case we go the way of the dinosaurs in less than a couple of centuries.
Or we can begin to think of ourselves as one people who have the resources of an entire solar system at our disposal. I think he’s right. Our future is out there. And if we restrict ourselves to this increasingly crowded dirtball we’ll die in our own waste.
Hermann –
Now apply that principle to Shiva
Steve –
Here’s an idea:
Why don’t you ask Dennis to ask his good friend David Morrison to edit the wikipedia KT and HSIE pages?
Since they’re important to you why don’t you do it yourself?
Hermann –
The vitrified forts are looked at as exactly that: Hilltop forts that somehow or other got the stones heated till they turned to glass.
As such they are a total enigma – no one has a clue. Except perhaps me. After looking at Dennis’ ablated hills, those came to mind, and I went looking to see just what they might have in common. I was startled at the similarities. Putting two seemingly unconnected things together and seeing virtually the same things – that was really freaky, but cool.
I think it is as good an explanation as anyone else has come up with. Everyone else just looks at them and shrugs. Some alternate researchers speculate that the vitrified forts were hit with particle beams in some ancient war with India (of all places).
The main alignment of the vitrified forts does not appear to align with either Rio Cuarto or Saginaw. It is not far from either, but on a spherical Earth it seems to not quite fit.
I may be completely wrong, too. But for now, with my limited knowledge of both vitrified forts and air bursts, they seem to show evidence of the intense infrared of a shower of air bursts. Tunguska people might be interested in them.
Hermann –
ON mining space, my engineering mind goes to the practicalities of getting mined ore down to terra firma. Any ores worth going to get are going to be in the billions of tons. How to get that down from orbit? The dump truck vehicle will drop like a rock (pun intended).
I can see Cameron blowing all his “Titanic” money on a losing mining venture like so many people have done in the past.
Personally, I can’t see space mining taking off until the moon has refinement plants. And that may – in the long term – be a terrible idea, changing the mass of the moon. If refinement plants are out in the asteroid belts, they will be creating billions more NEOs, albeit tiny ones.
Like I said, as an engineer my mind goes to what kinds of problems need to be solved.
Dennis –
I agree with you, that the vitrified forts are not the YD. And I also agree – because of Tap o’ Noth and Dun Creich – that they were in the Bronze Age or thereabouts.
It seems unlikely that those two were hit in some other direction at a different time, with the area being essentially the same as the others. Lightning striking twice seems terrifically unlikely. That is why I look to an explanation to include those two with the rest, even though their ‘fortifications’ are not aligned with the rest. And that brings them into the Bronze Age more or less. Real forts that got vitrified – That suggests that one of those two was the first discovered, then the rest were included as discovered, even if they had no forts. I am guessing, but it seems reasonable.
Dennis –
Bucky Fuller notwithstanding, the energy requirements to move ores across from the asteroid belt to Earth are rally, really high. I can’t see there being a net gain. Not unless a new energy source is used. Thorium might do it, actually. But all our current energy sources are completely inadequate – unless we blow off a few hundred million people in the third world.
We still have the vast sources of the Andes, the Himalayas, Siberia, and Africa, not to mention most of Canada. I think all those will buy us time. Yes, in the long term – if a cheap efficient energy source is found – we can go to the asteroid belt. I see it being most likely in about 500 years. Less than 200? I’d bet against it.
Bucky Fuller was more or less a dreamer who never came up with anything useful except the geodesic dome. His dymaxion car and other things looked good back in mid-century, but never went anywhere. Like all the ‘futurists’ of that time, he projected things that never came to pass and most likely never will. We aren’t going to have moving sidewalks everywhere, no heli-cars or aero-cars, and no driverless highways. All in all, Jules Verne and HG Wells did a better job of predicting the future.
Hermann –
My take on Cameron is that he is an attention seeker – anything to keep himself in the public eye. An egotist of the first order. He is a movie director. What could he know about mining ore anywhere – even on Earth? If he tries mining in space – at this time in human history – he will lose his shirt. And then we might be thankfully rid of him and his “Look at me, look at me, look at me” ego.
Steve,
If icy bodies contain as much water ice as some people think, there may be enough H & O to manufacture all the fuel we could ever need in the body of just one good sized comet, and it’s already out there. That question remains to be settled though.
As a certified welding inspector with a little foundry experience, maybe I can give you a little insight on the potential for space based ore processing.
The value of those ores wouldn’t be so much in their unprocessed value, as it would be in the kinds of materials that could be made from them if they were processed out there in a zero gravity environment.
One theoretical material that could be produced would be ultra-lightweight steel alloys. If you work up molten steel into foam in a crucible here on Earth you can come up with stuff that has some limited uses. But the fact that it is difficult to control the size and distribution of the bubbles on anything but the smallest of castings makes such materials useless for any kind of large scale construction.
But if ores were processed in a weightless environment it should be possible to achieve perfectly round bubbles of inert gasses in steal foam, with almost perfectly uniform size, and distribution. So you could manufacture very large structural beams with all the strength and heat resistant properties of steal, but at fractions of the weight per foot that can be achieved in a normal Earth-based foundry operation.
The slag from the space based ore processing, and foundry operations could then be used to make heat shields so you could drop the finished product at a safe location for pickup somewhere on Earth.
Mr. Cox…
For me, it would be a waste of time, as my edits would be undone.
I’m a primary researcher, self published at that, working on this problem.
While I do have peer review, and rather constant and rigorous peer review at that, it is not academic peer review for acedemic publication.
What will close the HSIE debate will be the discovery and documentation of a rather large feauture from it.
UPDATE ON MY BLOCK AT WIKI:
My comments are in green.
I would please ask that someone among the Admins who is technically informed in these areas by included in your assessing of my points below.
On 4/22/2012 5:25 PM, Steve Pereira wrote:
This harm to the progress of the science in this area by Skeptical Raptor is the very issue I was trying to address, even if by using Skeptical Raptor’s name I inadvertently crossed a line I should not have crossed. But that outing has nothing to do with your intent to block my editing this page.
I am amazed that the committee cannot see this damage done by Skeptical Raptor.
Then first issue is the claim that no one else has been able to repeat the findings of Firestone et al (2007).
From the current written page (which appears NOT to be the one I was confronted with when I first opened the page):
[Skeptical Raptor, I assume] “The hypothesis has been largely discredited by research that showed that most of the conclusions cannot be repeated by other scientists, misinterpretation of data, and the lack of confirmatory evidence.”
This is patently untrue. The term “cannot be repeated by other scientists” is not true. The following papers show that the conclusions have been repeated by these other scientists:
Mahaney et al (2008)
Haynes et al (2010)
Andronikov et al (2011)
Tian et al (2010)
Van Hoesel (2011)
Israde-Alcántara et al (2012)
The scientists Skeptical Raptor chose to show “could not repeat” – but this is refuted by this statement in the CONCLUSIONS of the 2012 Israde-Alcántara et al (and 15 other scientists, which I listed in my footnote):
“Some independent workers have been unable to reproduce earlier YDB [Younger Dryas Boundary] results for MSp [magnetic spherules], CSp [carbon spherules], and NDs [nanodiamonds], as summarized in a “News Focus” piece in Science, which claims that the YDB evidence is “not reproducible” by independent researchers. Refuting this view, multiple groups have confirmed the presence of abundant YDB markers, although sometimes proposing alternate hypotheses for their origin. For example, Mahaney et al. [2008] independently identified glassy spherules, CSps, high temperature [sic] melt-rocks, shocked quartz, and a YDB black mat analogue in the Venezuelan Andes. Those authors conclude the cause was “either an asteroid or comet event that reached far into South America” at 12.9 ka. At Murray Springs, Arizona, Haynes et al. [2010] observed highly elevated concentrations of YDB MSp and iridium. Abundances of MSp were 340 × higher than reported by Firestone et al. and iridium was 34 × higher, an extraordinary enrichment of 3,000 × crustal abundance. Those authors stated that their findings are “consistent with their (Firestone et al.’s) data.” In YDB sediments from North America and Europe, Andronikov et al. (2011) reported anomalous enrichments in rare earth elements (REE) and “overall higher concentrations of both Os and Ir [osmium and iridium]” that could “support the hypothesis that an impact occurred shortly before the beginning of the YD cooling 12.9 ka.”. Tian et al. [2010] observed abundant cubic NDs at Lommel, Belgium, and concluded that “our findings confirm … the existence of diamond nanoparticles also in this European YDB layer.” The NDs occur within the same layer in which Firestone et al. found impact related materials. Similarly, at a YDB site in the Netherlands, Van Hoesel et al. [2011] observed “carbon aggregates [consistent with] nanodiamond.” Recently, Higgins et al. independently announced a 4- to 4.5-km-wide YDB candidate crater named Corossol in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, containing basal sedimentary fill dating to 12.9 ka. If confirmed, it will be the largest known crater in North and South America within the last 35 million years Because of the controversial nature of the YD impact debate, we have examined a diverse assemblage of YDB markers at Lake Cuitzeo using a more comprehensive array of analytical techniques than in previous investigations. In addition, different researchers at multiple institutions confirmed the key results.”
I would ask that you present me with any examples of this “confrontational approach” WITHIN THE EDIT.
Me asking YOU to look into the biased one-sided editing by Skeptical Raptor – just how is that confrontational? I did not get in his face. All I did was edit the page. And again I ask for examples of “confrontational approach within the edit itself. Me mentioning him in the Edit Summary was not confrontational – it was asking for your HELP.
Yes, and if you could see what he says on his tweets, you would see how confrontational HE is.
You are saying that HE can completely wipe out MY entire edit, and that is not confrontational – but that if I do it to his, it IS confrontational.
WHY are you not looking into his edits as counter to the state of the science on this issue????
Whatever you interpreted that as, you are actually wrong. ALL I want is for both sides’ presentations to be presented. HIS edits completely ERASED OUR ENTIRE SIDE OF THE ISSUE. MY edits left his IN. And MY edits ALWAYS will include his side of the issue.
AND THAT IS ALL I WANT TO DO HERE. Why can you not see that it is Skeptical Raptor who is the one who is determined to NOT build Wikipedia?
Here I will list his insulting adjectives and incorrect statements in his last edit:
“The hypothesis has been largely discredited” — Absolutely untrue, as noted above. Completely independent research supporting the hypothesis has been coming out of the woodwork since 2008.
“Nearly all of this evidence was found to be non-reproducible and has been dismissed as support for the hypothesis.” — Untrue
“There is also no evidence of continent-wide wildfires at any time during terminal Pleistocene deglaciation” — Untrue. The black mat itself – in places 4″ thick – is evidence for wildfires. It is the very source of many of the carbon spherules and cubic nanodiamonds.
“Scientists have asserted that the carbon spherules originated as fungal structures and/or insect fecal pellets,” — While true, those scientist’s work has been shown to be in itself sloppy, and that they almost certainly took their samples from the wrong layers.
“… and that the claimed nanodiamonds are actually misidentified graphene and graphene/graphane oxide aggregates.” — While true, this work has been superseded by later researchers…
I DO note that Skeptical Raptor left in some of my edit THIS time. Others have not been so lucky.
And he also toned down his rhetoric in this edit.
Whatever the consequences here, I have to ASK: Is someone among you Admins leaking information about my block and appeal to Skeptical Raptor?
I ask this because the edit I changed was MUCH MORE INSULTING and Derogatory.
If this is happening, you have a political element and agenda among some of you Admins.
And if this is happening, I believe I have a case against someone among you, which I will not be shy about bringing to higher authorities at Wikipedia.
You need to convince me this is not happening. Skeptical Raptor all of a sudden ALLOWING some of the opposite side to be heard – that is NOT like him. I can only assume he has ‘gotten the word’ from an insider.
Yet, in your first sentence of this email you said: “The Committee at this point is not looking into the conduct of SkepticalRaptor, so that user is not blocked from editing.” How is it that his behavior has improved so instantaneously, just at this time, if the Committee is not looking into his behavior?
Can you say incontrovertibly that none on the Committee are in contact with Skeptical Raptor?
As I have said several times in several ways: I was not there to cause disruption – I was there to hopefully STOP disruption.
You contradict yourself. If it is voluntary, then it is up to me. But you then turn around and tell me I will be blocked.
Which is it? Voluntary or mandatory?
Well, six months is better than “without expiry”, but I 100% disagree with ALL of the charactarising ME as the trouble maker. ALL OF THIS REVOLVES AROUND SKEPTICAL RAPTOR AND HIS STALKING THE PAGE AND ERASING EDITS HE DOESN’T HAPPEN TO LIKE.
His behavior at this moment is still crossing the line, because he is not allowing all of the opposing PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL PAPERS to be edited in.
At this time I still neither accept nor refuse the Committee’s stance, not until the above issues are covered.
Steve
P.S. Steve, I very much do appreciate your level of involvement and your asking for adjustments in the block. Nevertheless, I do still feel that if no warning goes out to Skeptical Raptor, none of this means anything. As long as he gets to play “Gatekeeper’ on that page, the page is less than factual – and that reflects poorly on Wikipedia. I say this because If WE want to build Wikipedia, we can’t have some uncontrolled individual playing God on pages having to do with current scientific research.
P.P.S. This is all OFF TOPIC! My block had to do with OUTING.
P.P.P.S. Read my edit again. (Then go read Skeptical Raptor’s previous edit. Then you decide who is confrontational and who isn’t.) Nothing in my edit was confrontational. I just re-read it from start to finish, and I fail to see anything confrontational in it. As I asked twice above, would you please point me at the offensive passages? I know how to be insulting and confrontational, but I was neither in that edit.
Dennis –
Thanks for the info on foamed steel.
Maybe someone has made this work and everything I say here is wrong, but…
I would have THREE major concerns with such a material.
1. Stress analysis and all steel design based on this analysis is fundamentally based on the very real concept of “MAXIMUM FIBER STRESS”. The stresses are not spread evenly throughout the steel member; there are place where the stresses are highest, and those places MUST be full strength. On a beam supported at both ends, for example, the maximum fiber stress is at the middle of the span length and at the very TOP and very BOTTOM of the beam. Halfway down the height of the beam this means one may cut a round hole through from one side to the other, even right in the middle of the span. But having bubbles right at the TOP and BOTTOM of the beam – I am pretty darned sure the beam will fail; you can’t have bubbles right where the max fiber stress is. Actually, the BOTTOM is the worst fiber stress condition, because under a load it will be in tensile, and steel is much stronger in compression than in tension. So, even though both would be subject to the same unit fiber stress, the bottom would fail first.
2. Steel derives its strength from its crystalline structure – ‘normal steel’ being either Austenitic or Martensitic in its crystalline structure. Putting bubbles in that lattice seems to me to be creating problems. It is worth trying, but I would expect early failure.
3. ALL steel has microfractures in the crystalline lattice, where one layer of crystals ‘slides’ – or ‘shears’ over another. With bubbles the effect of these microfractures would likely be magnified. I might be wrong on this. It might be that the bubbles terminate a microfracture before it can propagate. It would need testing. I’d say it was 50-50, if that.
4. Ever heard of “hydrogen in metals?” ALL metals suffer from this. This is a major source of microfractures. Hydrogen migrates into metals and causes failures. The Hydrogen gets into the crystalline lattice in prodigious quantities. (Due to this they are even looking into using metals as storage for Hydrogen fuels.) The Hydrogen builds up HUGE pressures – in the 10-15 GigaPascal range (about 1.5 million psi). It begins to push the lattice apart. In space it may not be a problem because there isn’t much Hydrogen, but one simply cannot look at any part made of steel and treat it as a homogeneous whole. A failure of a hull in space is an unforgiving failure.
Yes, I do think the foam steel should be looked into. At the same time, I wouldn’t expect much from it.
Okay, I looked at the strength curves from Johns Hopkins Univ., and the highest any go goes is 10 MegaPascals – about 1450 psi. Normal structural steel is about 66,000 psi yield strength. Cheap aluminum is abut 48,000 psi yield. Another paper shows 50% relative density (50% bubbles by volume) stainless steel foam has 95 MPa (14,000 psi) strength – versus 70,000 psi if it is annealed or 125,000 psi if it is rolled to ‘quarter hard’ state. But at a savings of only HALF the weight, what is gained? Better to use aluminum, which has 2/3 less weight.
All this argues that the material is weak, but would still have some applications – maybe a LOT of applications. And space might be one of them – if it is both made and used in space, its strength may not have to be much. But I wouldn’t use it for hulls. I think I’d rather use foamed glass.
Actually, thinking about it, I would laminate thin steel sheets on both sides of steel foam. That could work REALLY well, if the foam and sheet can be fused together – and I am sure it can be. That might even be patentable!
Making it in space and shipping it to the Earth’s surface still has the same problems – how do you get it down here?
Don’t take it so personaly Steve,
Since Wikipedia is already recognized and scorned as an unreliable reference by the academic community. We should realize that the scientists and academics we need to make our case to aren’t paying any attention to them anyway.
It’s a matter of public record on the YDIH talk page now that SkepticalRaptor’s appeal to inappropriate authority in saying the work in Mexico had already been “debunked by people smarter than him” was given more weight as a reliable reference on Wiki than peer reviewed literature. And that he only did that edit to “shut everyone up” That one paragraph represents an epic fail for Wikipedia’s credibility.
The reality is that it is highly unlikely that any of the academics, or scientists, those of us who are working on this problem need to make our case to will ever bother to read the YDIH Wikipedia article anyway. Much less take it seriously.
Wikipedia is about appealing to the “consensus”. And since we’re all working on the new side of a paradigm shift in the Earth sciences that’s every bit as profound as the shift away from geo-centrism, and flat world theory, finding ourselves in the same playground as the consensus just isn’t part of the postulate in the foreseeable future. And Wikipedia is simply not an important enough venue to be worth the headache.
The best place to put a new and complete unbiased article that tells the entire YDIH story from the first dig to present time, with all relevant papers, and posters from both sides of the debate included in the order they were published, and with hyperlinks to every reference given is right here on the Tusk. And then as soon as it’s published here it should be mirrored in a prominent way by every one of us who have our own blogs.
By the way Steve,
For the record, while I don’t disagree with anything you said about steel, as I said, I am a certified welding inspector with 25 years experience in some of the biggest steal shops on the west coast. The Chemistry and structural properties of steal are no mystery to any CWI. So you’re preaching to the choir.
My point there was that space based ore processing, and steel manufacture opens the door to developing a completely new bag of tricks. It also opens the door to very large constructions in space without having to deal with having to lift stuff out of the Earth’s gravity well. And iron isn’t the only metal out there, or the only potential building material.
As for getting it down here, one possibility might be to use some of waste products from the smelting process to build an ablative heat shield. But I think the biggest potential is in what can be accomplished if we don’t even try to bring it down here. But instead, use it to build with out there.
Dennis –
All good points. I DID want to do whatever I could to get them aware of Skeptical Raptor’s actions. Beyond that, I don’t give a sheit. All my pleadings are done with the ida that if I don’t get what I want, I simply don’t participate anymore. I only edit on Wiki about once every 5 months or so, so it isn’t like my life depends on it.
I was really put off by the fact that they bait-and-switched me. My block was about Outing the guy. Then in midstream they blew that off and decided I was a confrontational influence and blocked me for that. That’s like being in court on one charge and then the judge throwing another charge at me after I got off the first charge.
You are right – I don’t give a damned about what the YDIH page on Wiki is about, either. I just got in to help out TLE, and to test it out, see how long my edit would stay up.
And the big issue here IS that we are declaring the world to not be flat. I’ve commented before on how the consensus scientists think in reductionist terms – breaking every complex issue into the simplest possible parts. Then they think that by trying to understand the parts they will understand the whole. That is fine – IF they have the right overall POV when they look at the parts. And it is IMPOSSIBLE, IMHO, to really build up from the parts; it takes just the right projection forward in order to not get off track and end up with the wrong gestalt. But they started out with uniformitarianism as their model for all the parts, and that was their big mistake. It means that they have to go through ever more weird contortions to fit everything together. That is how you can tell they have the wrong basic premise, when the patches on patches appear.
Yes, uniformitarianism operates everywhere – but not every time. And without that catastrophe element in their minds, they have to come to wrong conclusions. It is just like when Galileo and Copernicus were having to realize that the consensus was wrong: What were they supposed to do then?
But we don’t have a good handle on it, either. It would help if we were funded, so we could do some fundamental research. I can probably come up with ten or so inquiries I’d like to undertake. Maybe twenty.
George –
On to the topic of this post – the CBs.
A question: Do you yourself tie the CBs to the YDB, and if so, why? And if not, which time period/impact do you connect them with?
I jump back and forth myself. One of these days it might lock into one, but so far, no.
You know, Steve, at this point is all on the table for me. But, if pressed, I have always thought the YDB evidence that the location of blast(s) was in CanadaMichwhatever was not as strong as the dating. So, I think they could be wrong about the location of the 12.9 event and right about the time. In which case something else could have happened around 34k bp in the mid-west to account for the bays, and the YDB event could have been centered elsewhere — or all over the place. Remember, that the tusks (including mine) and skulls with suspected ET material, which the researchers thought would date to 12.9, ending up all coming from ~34K. All sorts of other evidence point to something happening around this time, as detailed in the Cycle of Catastrophes. I also think there is a chance the bays have absolutely nothing to do with anything from space, as Gore-like certainty is not my thing.
I agree, Dennis. I will be putting up the definitive list which you and I have developed.
To tell the truth I’d like to think they are, but I’m ambivalent about it. I think I can identify enough pristine hydrothermal blast burns in the Canadian Shield to account for the almost complete destruction of the LIS in matter of seconds, and in the process account for enough hydrothermal explosive force to loft an awful lot of ice-based ejecta that far from multiple locations. But until some field work can get a definitive age date for the burns I’m looking at, and someone can come up with a reliable and consistent way to date the bays that inspires more confidence than what I’ve seen so far, I’ll hold off on categorically tying the Bays to the YD event.
I should note here though that the burns I’m studying don’t show any indication of being damaged by glacial activity after they formed, a fact puts them at or near the end of the last ice age. And the idea that the LIS took two hits on that scale in almost the same locations but a few thousand years apart is a bit of a stretch.
Ooops, I wasn’t paying attention, and answered a question aimed at George.
Shutting up now.
George –
Thanks for your perspective. It is just about what mine is.
It is pretty obvious now that something catastrophic happened at 12.9kya. It also seems certain that something also happened at ~34kya. As I recall, Cycle of Catastrophes also pointed out the C14 problems of the mid-30-40kya range, so I maybe put TWO “~”s in front of that ~~34 kya.
It seems that Saginaw (or something reasonably close by) is tied to the CBs, though until I get a handle on where dating samples were taken, I neither accept nor argue with early dates. Chris’ pdfs got me to doubting the whole assumptions about the formation of the CBs – especially as it pertains to the dating of them.
At the risk of sounding “Gore-like,” I am thinking that the CBs have NO possible terrestrial explanations. With at least 20 rejected, it doesn’t look good for them. But do ET explanations stand on their own? Actually, I think they can – though not any yet that are out there.
Dennis –
What you are seeing in google earth are “features”, not “burns”, until they are confirmed as burns through field work by trained geologists.
So far your “yield rate” has been negligible, and absymal in comparison to Pierson’s.
Given the Sioux memories of the HSIE, and their location at that time, one place to look for impact structures is along the Cordillera.
Since the Bays were being utilized by Clovis peoples, clearly they predate the HSIE.
For everyone else:
http://news.yahoo.com/mysterious-black-mats-earth-not-outer-space-190401558.html
Thus it seems likely to me that there will be yet more time spent in analyzing how this sampling went awry.
In my opinion, it also seems likely that there will be no wiki edits by anyone here at the Tusk for quite a while yet.
Finally, it’s going to take the dicovery of a larger astrobleme from the HSIE to close the debate. This is why the Assiniboine memories of the HSIE are so important.
Mr Grondine-
You simply can’t proclaim a white man’s unproven personal subjetive interpretation of Native American oral traditions to be a “memory”.