|
|
Surovell-Holliday 2012 Tusk commentary
Vance Holliday and Todd Surovell published a paper in PLOS One this week. It is unsurprising but again disappointing that these hacks continue their jihad on the YDB hypothesis based on negligent analysis.
Particular galling is their wanton substitution of an optical microscope for an electron microscope. I say “wanton” because the publication history regarding magnetic spherules resulting from impacts clearly calls for the more sensitive instrument to document a spherule as a melt product – not, for instance, rounded sand.
It is impossible to characterize a spherule (of cosmic or terrestrial material) as being of impact origin using a tool that is orders of magnitude less sensitive than what is called for and used to produce the previously published data.
It is as if someone double-checked Holliday and Surovell’s own archeological work by bulldozing an adjacent square, rummaging about, and tossing manhandled contrary items onto the balk.
From LeCompte (2012):
Because those authors did not perform SEM imaging and EDS analyses, it is impossible for them to reach reliable conclusions about what they found. Surovell et al. did not perform SEM imaging or geochemical analyses, and yet, like Pigati et al., asserted that all magnetic spherules are cosmic in origin. Pinter et al. and Haynes et al. did not report the results of their spherule SEM analyses and likewise concluded spherules were of cosmic origin without supporting data. Lacking SEM imaging and/or EDS analyses, the accuracy of their spherule counts and speculations about origin are highly suspect. As an example of this, Pinter et al. reported observing large numbers of framboids and detrital magnetite well outside the YDB and then speculated that most YDB spherules are simply these other particles. Our results and images indicate their claim to be unfounded. There are fundamental and easily observed differences between quench-melted spherules, unmelted detrital magnetite, and authigenic framboids.
Download (PDF, 2.18MB)
Mandelkehr
Kobres
Below is a superbly written exploration of the climate collapse(s) circa. 2200 B.C. by occasional Tusk commentor Jonny McAneney and his mentor, long-time Tusk favorite Mike Baillie.
I don’t know how I missed this paper, but I do know how I found it. Jonny thoughtfully posted the public link back in December 15, 2015 in a Tusk comment and, ever cognizant of each and every word posted here, I stumbled upon the link after midnight last night, May 14. I read late into the night, thrilled with the eloquence of their argument and the depth — and width — of their research and knowledge.
Jonny
Download (PDF, 730KB)
Blackwater Draw
The presence of a high number of the hollow magnetic microspherules can be used for identification of the LYDB. Although some scientists failed to find any microspherules at all along the LYDB in the BWD-1 site (Surovell et al. 2009), others reported strongly elevated concentrations of the magnetic microspherules here (Firestone et al. 2007; LeCompte et al. 2012). Our observations confirm those made by Firestone et al. (2007) and LeCompte et al. (2012). In spite of the failure to find microspherules along the LYDB, Surovell et al (2009) reported a number of magnetic microspherules in sediments located above the LYDB (not as a discrete microspherule rich layer though). Such a distribution of the microspherules can be explained by redeposition in younger sediments of the microspherules delivered from along the LYDB. It is appropriate to suggest that Surovell et al. (2009) just failed to sample the microspherule-rich layer because it is visually featureless in the BWD-1 site and is very difficult to identify in the field.
Alex Andronikov
Download (PDF, 1.49MB)
Download (PDF, 2.15MB)
2011 Poster
Citizen Science and the Unsolved Austral-Asian Tektite Mystery
Carolina Bays in a 12 x 12 mile area of coastal North Carolina presented with LiDAR elevation data.
Bill Napier on the Tusk
Royal Astronomical Society Press Release
Google News
Bonus PDF: Fred Hoyle’s 100th honored
Known severe upsets of the terrestrial environment and interruptions in the progress of ancient civilizations, together with our growing knowledge of interplanetary matter in near-Earth space, indicate the arrival of a Centaur around 30,000 years ago. This giant comet would have strewn the inner planetary system with debris ranging in size from dust all the way up to lumps several kilometers across.
Specific episodes of environmental upheaval around 10,800 BCE and 2,300 BCE, identified by geologists and paleontologists, are also consistent with this new understanding of cometary populations. Some of the greatest mass extinctions in the distant past, for example the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, may similarly be associated with this giant comet hypothesis.
RAS Press Release, December 22, 2015
Download (PDF, 630KB)
Kloosterman
Trevor Palmer and the fine folks across the pond at the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies were thoughtful to contribute a newly translated 2000 monograph by Tusk favorite, Dutchman Han Kloosterman. It is a wonderfully prescient and learned piece that places Kloosterman’s field evidence (the Usselo layer) into centuries of context for catastrophic geology.
The publication was a year before Firestone and Topping’s article in The Mammoth Trumpet presenting evidence for an ice age catastrophe and a full seven years before Firestone and 22 others’ seminal paper in PNAS: Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. As elegantly acknowledged by Kloosterman, however, his paper follows Whiston’s work by 304 years, Cuvier by 168 years, and — I would add — Plato by 2348 years.
But Kloosterman includes something more I find compelling and little discussed in the recent or old school literature: The ice age cataclysm served to catalyze modern civilization. As Kloosterman concludes:
…If the catastrophic events had not occurred, we would still be painting mammoths, bison, and rhinoceroses and we would still be eating roasted reindeer meat.
I have always believed that this possibility undermines the ‘improbability’ argument against such a recent cosmic impact cited by Boslough and others (See 2.3). From Boslough’s temporally provincial point of view ‘we’ are technologically and culturally isolated from the YD impact — not created by it. But if Kloosterman is right, The Bos and his technological toys are themselves the extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claim The Bos rejects.
Download (PDF, 491KB)
|
|
Recent Comments