I am just beginning to read this Carolina Bays paper. I am basically upset in reading it, because it states the aeolian hypothesis as fact. The authors accept unchallenged the concept that the winds on shallow ponds would create wave action all in one direction for a wide region. How they or the previous authors could assume a consistent direction for the winds is beyond me, because at the present time that is not the case at all.
Although I do not live there, I have paid attention to weather reports in that area for some reason, in terms of the weather systems. The systems come from the SW for much of the year, just as they come from the SSW to my NE Illinois area for much of the year. I most often see the weather systems coming across from approximately Mobile, AL or Gulfport, MS, across Georgia toward and more or less paralleling the southern Carolina coast. From http://tiny.cc/98vsc : “[For North Carolina] The prevailing winds are generally from the southwest for 10 months of the year, and from the northeast during September and October.” From http://tiny.cc/6ifge : For South Carolina, “On a monthly basis, prevailing winds tend to be either from the northeast or southwest. [accompanying chart]”
The prevailing winds are not only not out of the NW, but in no season are they from the north or west, either. Even hurricane season brings winds from the SE and S.
These winds simply do not jibe with the NW-SE alignments of the CBs. How the CBs can have NW-SE alignments and higher rims on the SE end is beyond my comprehension when the winds normally come from directions that would not create a high rim to the SE.
If they see some consistent pattern from the NW I could see their point, at least intuitively, and would be prone to give at least some aeolian support. Since I don’t see wind patterns coming from a logical direction, I have to dispute the basis being laid for this paper.
It doesn’t help that the authors simply go with a simple aeolian seem to completely blow off the work of Doug Johnson who tried the aeolian idea and found it completely unworkable by itself and had to add, not one or two or even three, but four other “patches” – assumed actions added-on to massage the aeolian hypothesis hoping to make it workable. His hypothesis is called the “complex theory,” to separate it from the simple aeolian theory.
I challenge the aeolians to put up or shut up. If aeolian is such a great idea, then they should put it to the test in a wind tunnel and see if they can make winds create elliptical bays from variously-shaped shallow ponds – especially with winds coming from a) right angles to the long axes of the resultant bays or b) from 135-180 degrees from the high rims and from the bulged-out sides of the resultant bays.
I predict that A) this will falsified, and B) the only feature that can be assigned to the prevailing winds would be the bulges opposite the SW wind systems’ prevailing SW direction.
My position is more or less supported by the aeolian-created riverine dunes studied in “Riverine dunes on the Coastal Plain of Georgia, USA” (Ivester & Leigh 2002). It supports in two ways. One, the dunes are at some distance to the NE of the rivers which generally flow NW-SE. Secondly, the dunes do not in any way form elliptical shapes but parabolic (and never come close to the rivers’ edges where ellipticity might possibly be seen. That may seem like a small distinction, since both are curved. But that there is no dune formed to the SW of the rivers, it would be left to the CB aeolian thinkers to explain how the SW side of the bays would achieve such elliptical shapes. I will point out that another big difference in the riverine dunes and CB rims is that the riverine dunes are tens of meters high, while the CB NE rims are consistently less than one meter.
Now, if they argue that this pattern was not true in the Pleistocene, due to differences caused by the ice cap up north, so far I haven’t seen any that assert this. They merely speculate (and I hate it when anyone tries to explain any phenomena with speculation, especially when it is done by scientists). They speculate that the wind does it, but offer no examples nor evidence to support the speculation. I am certain that riverine dunes are called to mind and applied in the case of the CBs uncritically. And contrary to uniformitarian principles, if they argue that prevailing winds more than 13,000 years ago were such that they would form the CBs into ellipses, they would need to explain why these shallow rims haven’t been erased by the Holocene wind patterns which have included probably 600 or more hurricanes.
I did some research on the OSL dating technique. Bottom line, because the method is inherently a radiometric method, it is subject to the same unprovable assumptions that deep time geochronology methods are. I read in one article that an OSL scientist is happy with a 100% error bar! I’m not sure how one can have any assurance that radionuclide leaching and contamination in unconsolidated sediments are not a problem in this method. I’m sure that ad hoc interpretations are common when dates do or do not agree with one’s stratigraphic expectations.
Is it appropriate to use OSL for sandy rims that are subject to aeolian effects?
It seems that the tumbling of dunes and sand rims by wind brings with it the probability of particles being exposed multiple times to sunlight – possibly from even before such features as the CBs were formed.
For more solid soil layers I have no problem with using OSL, but it seems wholly inappropriate to use it in sandy wind-blown areas.
I have no dispute that there are aeolian effects on the CBs. I would argue that due to the prevailing winds and the shapes of many of them (more bulged out on the NE side than the SW side, that this is the ONLY aeolian effect. That this is so consistent on that NE side should argue that something different is going on on that side from the other. But then extrapolating data found on that side of the CBs to the entire bay is wholly inappropriate, since it has been exposed to an additional process from the rest of the bay. This can only confuse the dating of the bays and stretch out the dating over an artificially wide range.
It seems clear that the two sides of the bays were at one time more symmetrical in reference to their long axes. The two sides should not be studied together, except to note the differences. And studies should always make clear at all points in the discussion which side is being talked about.
BTW, I am somewhat skeptical that the CBs are connected to the Y-D, so I am not arguing from a biased ET POV. I have no idea what will be the final definitive explanation for them.
But I am certain that aeolian forces did not CAUSE them. Winds certainly have affected them since their formation, but they didn’t create them. That argument has been tried for nearly 80 years, and though this paper states that as THE explanation, the paper is flying in the face of much research that simply finds that explanation totally inadequate. I’ve seen cherry picking of data before, but cherry picking explanations in toto is even further removed from the scientific method.
One could verify with cores that the underlying clay CB basin is also elliptical. It is quite unlikely that wind could greatly affect a clay substrate, even if the overlying sand eventually adopted an elliptical shape.
I am highly skeptical, too, that any long-term, low-energy process could be responsible for very similar sub-elliptical depressions that range in size from a few tens of meters to nearly 10 kilometers in size. The uniform scaling of these magnitudes simply doesn’t work in a windy environment. Look at the irregularity of sand dunes. Whatever caused the bays likely happened in a very short period of time by one type of process that we do not see happening in the present.
Right, about sand dunes. As I said about riverine dunes, which are dunes formed downwind of rivers, and even in these same areas of the country, they form parabolic shapes, even lines of parabolic shapes that parallel the river at some distance away. The dunes are more or less continuous along the length of the river – AND they are considerably taller. But they are not consistent, depending on the topography for their size and shape.
This is the first time I’ve directed anyone to Flickr, so if someone could inform me if you can or cannot access these, it would be appreciated.
The main point is that the aeolian theory may sound generically feasible on the surface, but when looking at particular details, it does not seem to me to hold water. This is especially true of the overlapping bays, that the aeolian can not be correct.
Terry: “I did some research on the OSL dating technique. Bottom line, because the method is inherently a radiometric method, it is subject to the same unprovable assumptions that deep time geochronology methods are.”
Terry, let’s continue this discussion over here. What research have you done? Archival research? Lab research?
These isotopic/decay methods are based on theory and lab experiments. You might have a beef with the theory, but the lab experiments are where they get their values from for half-lifes. Do you question specific methodology? Those half life numbers didn’t just fall out of the sky. With your assertion here I would think they can back up their values with papers which have falsifiable experiment (meaning experience) behind them. What backs up your assertion of unprovability? If you’ve got it, I’d like to see it. That is a heavy assertion.
I DO know that for any new dating method they have to have it vetted quite thoroughly before anyone trusts it. That means not only theoretical but also with fully explained lab techniques. Where exactly do the inaccuracies come in? Remember, to go from 14 billion years (their universe) down to 7,000 years, you’ve got to knock off 6 zeros just to get in the right magnitude. (I erroneously stated this as 200,000 previously). You have to not only assert and show why their numbers are wrong, but why they are wrong by a factor of about 2 million.
Terry: “One could verify with cores that the underlying clay CB basin is also elliptical. It is quite unlikely that wind could greatly affect a clay substrate, even if the overlying sand eventually adopted an elliptical shape.”
Terry, here I agree with you on all points. The way the sand is draped over the CB rims is counter to experience in terms of wind – wind would tend to clip off the sand over the rims themselves, because of exposure. This would classify as a form of erosion, certainly.
The bit about cores has been tackled. One of George’s pdfs clearly shows coring at various positions on a lengthwise transect of a CB. Also, some guy was on here briefly, also with a pdf showing coring and even (as I recall) trenching through a rim (though his choices of trench locations were quite questionable). In his pdf he asserted evidence of aeolian formatino, but his claims were refuted by his own evidence (IMHO), which I pointed out.
Regarding your assertion of unprovability of OSL-type dating methods, I recently read “The First Americans” about the Valsequillo site near Puebla, Mexico. The REALLY big issue with the site was the finding by lab tests of 240,000 years old for some layers in which clearly human artifacts were found.
Because the date was 20 times older than the Clovis Barrier, the site manager refused to publish any papers on the site.
The 240,000 date was determined by a uranium method I had not previously heard of. The lab tests was run by geologists. The site manager and the team (including Vance Haynes, as I recall) were chosen because they were among the very best in their fields. Yet the site manager would not accept the very early dating.
The complete lab testing method has since then been reviewed extensively (it was relatively new at that time – the early 1960s) and found to be valid, and the method has been used since then many times. When I say “reviewed extensively” I mean that the method was fully vetted – which means fully proven out.
Yes, you and the young earthers will question.even a fully vetted methodology – but in doing so the onus is on you to show specifically where the errors exist and why they are wrong..
In reading the paper above, on pg 4 (pg 148 of the journal issue), Brooks says,
OSL dating estimates the time since last exposure to sunlight for quartz sand and similar materials. Its range is ~150 ka B.P., well beyond the range of radiocarbon dating, and it is particularly applicable to dating eolian deposits of the Coastal Plain.
Leaving out for this moment his assumption about eolian (which has specifically been ruled out by several CB researchers of note), my question would be this:
If quartz in Saginaw or elsewhere were ejected by an ice sheet impact, being shredded/pulverized in the process, when that material is lain down on a CB, does the short time it was in ballistic flight count as “exposed to sunlight”?
I would wonder that the material might have been last exposed to the sun at SAGINAW at the ages shown in the paper (>100 kya) and then reburied in the sand deposits of the alluvial plain, on the CBs and their rims and in the areas in between.
Secondarily, I would ask if any of the quarts sand well outside CB rims has been dated by OSL.
I have no bone to pick here except my concern that if the material was lofted from elsewhere and then deposited in the areas of CBs, I simply wonder if the samples are taken at appropriate locations. I would think that CB rims might be specifically tthe WRONG places to be sampling. In addition, I would wonder at what depths samples for OSL are taken.
Personally I think the clay directly under the sand would be the best place to sample for OSL – because if the overlain sand came from a distant impact or from blowing wind, it is not the sand that should be sampled, but the clay. It is the sand-clay interface that is the point of interest.
So, again my main question is this:
Materials buried in one location and then ejected and re-buried a long distance away, which burial is being read by an OSL test – the original burial or the last one?
I highly doubt that the momentary exposure to sunlight during ballistic flight is sufficient to be seen in an OSL test.
Ed, you pointed me to this paper after I asked about your source for Clovis tools at CB sites.
A careful reading of this paper (but not overly so) in regards to Clovis shows either a lack of clear origination for Clovis artifacts, or – with those whose provenance is clearly stated, Clovis artifacts are or appear to be from below the sand.
Beginning on pg 10 {pg 154) :
… was bulldozed in the late 1980s. For several years after leveling, artifacts eroding from the exposed subsoil were collected. The site. . . produced an impressive array of Paleo-Indian (Clovis, SImpson, Dalton) and Early Archaic. . . artifacts, along with . . .
If found UNDER the CB, in the subsoil, it would seem that the Clovis predated the bay – if it was formed by an impact.
… the base of a metavolcanic Clovis point and. . . were the only temporally diagnostic artifacts. [No mention of what layer the Clovis was found in.]
The bay . . . the rim has been cultivated and collected fordecades, producing Clovis, Palmer/Kirk, . . .
Cultivated means the subsoil was turned up, suggesting the Clovis might easily have come from below the sand layer – meaning the point could have been there before the sand was deposited, whether by secondary impact or otherwise.
A. C. Goodyear. . . reports a total of eight paleopoints (Clovis, Redstone…) in the Larry Strong collection from three unnamed Carolina bays. . . as well as a Clovis-ageblade. . .
No provenance mentioned.
These appear to be the only references to Clovis in this paper.
Conclusion: It is uncertain if any of the Clovis artifacts came from above the subsoil. Some certainly came from the subsoil itself. If SOME of them did, that may suggest that all of the Clovis artifacts did. After all, Clovis did not last all that long, so one would not expect to see temporally widely spaced Clovis artifacts. This paper says nothing at all conclusive about Clovis being at the Savannah River Site AFTER the CB was formed.
Also, based on the mention of these few artifacts, it would appear that Clovis predated the formation of the CBs discussed, meaning that this paper could be used to argue FOR the YDB possibly being contemporaneous with the CB formations.
I need more information.
Ed, can you point me at another paper that connects Clovis to the CBs?
I would point out that the early YDB team reported finding Clovis UNDER the black mat. If Clovis Man came about 13,500 years ago and did not last past the black mat at 12,900, then Clovis Man only lasted 600 years, more or less.
If so, what are Clovis artifacts in those CBs in the above paper doing UNDER something that – according to the dating of the CBs – happened around 40 kya and/or around 130 kya?
Is it significant that there is no black mat in the area of the CBs? Or am I wrong in that? I do not recall ever read anything about a black mat in association with the CBs. But I might have a faulty memory on that.
this paper could be used to argue FOR the YDB possibly being contemporaneous with the CB formations.
BINGO!!! abt 3200 years ago at the bronze age collapse….. Eleushian / Aleshia / Alyshia / Allege/ biblical Elishah fields for everrrrrrrr! damn it Eleshah became ” heaven” ( it means God saves, YEP and to think I’m more tradional than sweat lodgers mexicans/Mayans and asians will ever believe ) even before the event it was heaven .. we were heaven and all men wanted to come here , nothing has ever changed ,, then it was heaven and or hell after the event .
It ruled the world before the event. SO surely it did after with in the limits of limited minds.. it must of ruled hell after that event as they thought that it was sunk it to the bottom of the sea so they ‘thought” ! so they justified! , so they hoped ! so they wished they they used it ! but really turtle island was just Moved.. it is all there even in the whole of old world records. now those hints of the little bits of truth are completely ignored by those who claim logic their non spiritual ,spiritual guides but are still just another whole bunch of limited minds justifying , hoping and wishing and using !!! … so real history goes ignored. because of what the rebellious minds of men do to truth or the tiny piece they manage to record or find of it.
Actually, that article sums up several different site reports by several different archaeologists, so it already has the multiple sources you requested.
What the finds indicate is that the Bays were being exploited by people equipped with Clovis toolkits.
Your understandings of stratigraphy and lithics in general are both deeply flawed. While I am not an expert, I do have friends amoung those who are, and the minimum requirement is being able to understand what they tell you.
“you got to know I was into that at 12…
I was just trying to get to school on the bus without throwing up.. and to my classes without getting beat up or felt up.”
I am sorry to hear of your bad experience. They go a long way towards explaining your behaviors.
As no one here was among those who beat you up or felt you up, perhaps you might want to re-consider wishing that we would all go to hell.
Something completely unrelated, but the Russian threat is too buried to find quickly. Luna just got hit with a significant meteor and we just have a ELE sized rock doing an earth crossing 31 May 2013 —
I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: NASA Announces Brightest Lunar Explosion Ever Recorded. “A boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon in March, igniting an explosion so bright that anyone looking up at the right moment might have spotted it, NASA announced Friday. NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office is reporting the discovery of the brightest impact seen on the moon in the eight year history of the monitoring program. Some 300 lunar impact events have been logged over the years but this latest impact, from March 17, is considered many orders of magnitude brighter than anything else observed.”
Related: Dark, massive asteroid to fly by Earth on May 31. “It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.”
Posted at 7:38 am by Glenn Reynolds
Watching the Moon for impacts on a continuing basis will give us a statistical basis for Earth crossing debris.
We also need better ELE rock detection gear, plus some means of close deflection.
” They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers. ” 1775 Dragging canoe w hat was traditions was combined with canaanite religion and maybe jewish and whatever religion showed up , to become what is now called traditional . and here I call Bull shit on on the age of “alautun” in on the mayan calender . it wasn’t billions and billions of years . it was just an age not like this age. just Tiny little minds who don’t know anything and assume everything !
Yes, I am aware that the article is by/about several researchers.
If you will read the article carefully, you will see that:
1.) I extracted ALL of the mentions of Clovis out of it, and
2.) NONE of them say that any Clovis toolkits were found ABOVE the sand/subsoil interface.
3.) The article does not even differentiate Clovis from post-YDB cultures (PaleoInidian, Kirk, Archaic, Simpson,…), so even where Clovis is mentioned there is not enough specificity to understand ANYTHING about where Clovis artifacts were found.
4.) So, as I concluded, this article says nothing that can make someone conclude that Clovis artifacts are in younger strata. It either doesn’t address the point, or it states that the artifacts were in OLDER strata (IN the subsoil)
–
So, I ask again if you are aware of any OTHER mentions of Clovis tools and where the artifacts were found in the layers. I can’t say “sediments” because the sand HAS no sediment. Ask Michael Davias about that. It is all deposited like loess – one homogeneous entirety, and all of it is quartz sand of an amazingly consistent size.
If you don’t know of anymore articles or papers, thanks for trying, anyway. Ciao!
Ed: “What the finds indicate is that the Bays were being exploited by people equipped with Clovis toolkits.”
Actually, Ed, no, it doesn’t.
What it says is that Clovis Man was at that location when the subsoil was exposed.
(I hardly think they would have dug down through the sand to embed the tools underneath.)
There is nothing that says that the bays had been formed prior to the Clovis tools being laid down. If ejecta arrived from Saginaw and formed the bays and also deposited the sand, then whatever is found in the subsoil PREDATES the impacts.
The two events – formation of bays and sand deposition – are not necessarily the same thing, but it is hard to figure that the sand could have been deposited to 10 meters thick in the region sans layering (in one entire thick layer) and NOT be from an impact event that formed the bays. To imagine TWO odd events happening at the same location in the last 130 kya or less – that takes more of a miracle than the YDB event itself.
I DID read the article very carefully, and I stated so.
That is where the commented excerpts came from.
Those are the only mentions of Clovis in the article.
I can’t read what isn’t there. And what is there is far short of indicating that Clovis Man was at the bays after they were formed. The only specific mentions show the OPPOSITE – that the Clovis artifacts are UNDER the sand (i.e., under the bays).
And what does under mean in stratigraphy? It means older. (Unless, as happens, there is evidence of folding over. This is not the case in the CBs.)
* * *
You call my understanding “flawed,” without being specific. Just because I conclude something you don’t conclude does not make my reading of the article flawed.
If you have specific reasons to say that, let me know where my error is.
>>Actually, the Moon forms one part of the two body Earth-Moon system.
A valid statistical extrapolation based upon real Moon impact data, plus earth satellite data, and the two body system orbital elements at impact will provide insights on when the Moon shields or aids in creating terrestrial impacts of earth crossing rocks.
Why the hell you think that ancient man simply walked about disposing points at random is beyond me.”
Well, Ed, I will come back with:
“Where in the hell did you read me saying that?”
I have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about.
If anything, I think they (the points and the humans who “disposed” of them – after, of course, making as much use as they could of them like any rational human would do after spending time making them or trading for the points) came from the Solutrean area of mostly northern Spain and SW France. I also think that they used hunting-wise them for far more than hunting mammoths and giant sloths (which would have so much wasted meat it buggers the mind). I think that the Clovis people specifically did NOT come from SIberia, where no such tech has been found to have existed.
And let’s dispense with the “hells” now that we are even at one apiece. Truce?
As to them being found around bays, Ed, they could have used them around bay areas before or after the bays were formed. The ground existed there before, and the ground existed afterward.
MY argument has nothing to do with the latitude and longitude relative to bays, but the TIME element. If they were found in the SUBSOIL under bays, they could not have left those points AFTER the sand was deposited.
None of your comments back to me have addressed how the points came to be UNDER the sand.
From what I know so far, the sand had to have been deposited WITH the formation of the bays. Would you agree or disagree, Ed?
I agree with you. As multiple-function humans and multiple-finction human groups we have the capacity to investigate both lunar cratering and Earth cratering. Earth craters have only been recognized as such since Gene Shoemaker. Lunar ones have been recognized as not volcanic (mostly) since about the Apollo missions (which isn’t that much longer).
While we can’t date lunar ones so easily, we can at least SEE them a whole lot better and investigate some of their properties. We can do that with our right hand, while with our left hand (lovely multi-functional dudes that we are) we can do what we can hear on Earth. Outside of funding, there is no practical reason we cannot do both.
Either inquiry should render the same info, but both inquiries have weaknesses – and different weaknesses. So both should be done. If NASA or others are not doing more on Earth OR the moon because of funding, that is a reality, but a different argument, a political will argument. I see your point being a technical issue.
Clovis was a very short-lived culture, as far as cultures go. With its window of time being only 13.5-12.9 kya, if their tools are found UNDER the quartz sand – as opposed to on top of it – then something seems to be wrong with the OSL datings for the CBs that put the CBs’ formation at 130 kya or 40 kya. Artifacts from 13 kya should not be under sand deposited 130 kya or 40 kya. Since OSL itself is solid science, that suggests that the sampling has been done incorrectly, or assumptions are being made that are misleading.
Even if we extend Clovis back to 22 kya (based on the work of Bradley and Stanford), 22 is less than 40 or 130.
Given people like the Daulton Gang, who everyone says can’t follow a protocol, erroneous sampling is not out of the question. (Though I am not suggesting any plot to bogus up the readings. In this case I suggest bogus assumptions about ejecta.) Since so many of the papers are behind paywalls, I can’t get at them to find out where the samples for OSL dating of the CBs were taken from.
For the purposes of honesty and transparency, I also repeat my OTHER point that if the quartz sand was ejected from Saginaw and in the air for around 10-15 minutes – and then reburied – I think that sampling that particular quartz sand for OSL is not going to give the CB (impact) formation date but give the dates of its entombment at Saginaw. The basic assumption with OSL is that the material was buried in via Gradualist mechanism. If the material is ejecta from elsewhere,will OSL be able to give any useful information?
So, I went to look that up. I found this in Wikipedia, and it turns out that one assumption I made is wrong:
The optical dating method relies on the assumption that the mineral grains were sufficiently exposed to sunlight before they were buried. This is usually, but not always, the case with Aeolian deposits, such as sand dunes and loess, and some water-laid deposits.
All sediments and soils contain trace amounts of radioactive isotopes including uranium, thorium, rubidium and potassium. These slowly decay over time and the ionizing radiation they produce is absorbed by other constituents of the soil sediments such as quartz and feldspar. The resulting radiation damage within these minerals remains as structurally unstable electron traps within the mineral grains. Stimulating samples using either blue, green or infrared light causes a luminescence signal to be emitted as the stored unstable electron energy is released, the intensity of which varies depending on the amount of radiation absorbed during burial. The radiation damage accumulates at a rate over time determined by the amount of radioactive elements in the sample. Exposure to sunlight resets the luminescence signal and so the time period since the soil was buried can be calculated.
That all gave me a bit of hope – the bit about dunes and loess – but this shot it down:
Surface dating by luminescence: An overview
Ioannis Liritzis – Geochronometria September 2011, Volume 38, Issue 3, pp 292-302 **
Abstract
Daylight radiation resets luminescence ‘clock’ to zero on rock surfaces, but transmission depends on the transparency of the rock. On burial, surfaces are no longer exposed to daylight and accumulation of trapped electrons takes place till the excavation. This reduction of luminescence as a function of depth fulfils the prerequisite criterion of daylight bleaching. Thus rock artefacts and monuments follow similar bleaching rationale as those for sediments. In limestone and marble, daylight can reach depths of 0.5–1 mm and up to 16 mm respectively, while for other igneous rocks e.g. quartz in granites, partial bleaching occurs up to 5mm depth under several hours of daylight exposures and almost complete beaching is achieved in the first 1 mm within about 1 min daylight exposure…
A sample in which the mineral grains have all been exposed to at least a few seconds of daylight can be said to be of zero age; when excited it will not emit any such photons. The older the sample is, the more light it emits.
So, that seems to answer my question. It does NOT take a long time to reset the clock on the physics of optical luminescence; it only takes a few seconds. Wow.
The quartz sand at the CBs has grain sizes at or smaller than 1mm – certainly all of it is less than a 5mm radius. So, if it was exposed to sunlight for one second, my idea is wrong.
Or is it?
The Taurids come at two times of the year, the end of June and around Halloween. The June ones are when the Earth passes through the outgoing matter stream – coming away from the Sun after rounding it. If the Saginaw impact occurred at that time all the quartz would have been hit by sunlight and been reset. However, if the Saginaw impact occurred during the Earth’s passage through the incoming stream around Halloween, that side of the Earth would have been in shadow – no direct daylight.
The Abstract does begin with “Daylight radiation…”
If all that is the final word, then that means there is about a 50-50 chance of the ejecta being thrown up in daylight vs at night. That 50-50 may actually be a bit skewed though, because of the dark-light line at dawn and dusk – ejecta could still be exposed to some level of daylight while in flight, even if the ground were not in direct sunlight. So, let’s make it about 60-40 in favor of sunlight exposure. Still, 40% is a pretty decent chance the quartz sand was NOT exposed.
So the idea that the OSL can be misleading for ejecta material lofted from Saginaw to the CB areas is still somewhat tenable.
Based on that, one could posit two things that would make a Saginaw impact and CB secondary impact consistent with the OSL dating, and the second one is at least possibly falsifiable:
1.) That the Saginaw impact occurred around the end of October (by our calendar)
2.) That samples of CB quartz sand might reveal a trend from north to south – and probably the east vs west “splash” – in case the impact came near the dawn or dusk line.*** If so, then there might be some pattern of variation in the OSL dating from north to south and east vs west. I would say this has about a 10-20% chance of being true. But if found out to be true, it would explain the hypothesized variations. In addition, it would lend some support for the YDB impact hypothesis.
*** The number of days between the vernal equinox and the impact of the Chelyabinsk meteor was very much the same as the number of days between the autumnal equinox and the Taurids at the end of October. The Chelyabinsk meteor happened to arrive just at dawn. All that is almost certainly just a coincidence, but perhaps not. That is something I will hold in the back of my mind. Just in case…
In addition, the Chelyabinsk meteor had a radiant in daylight but landed in – or almost in – darkness. The dawn had only come about 5 minutes before, in Chelyabinsk, so Lake Chebarkul was right on the dividing line. Another few hundred meters of altitude and it might have landed many kilometers farther to the west. Thus, sometimes objects are in daylight while in flight but can land in darkness. That is possible with the proposed Saginaw quartz sand.
p.s. I have even a further and wilder speculation, having to do with the ejected ice/water/steam, but I will pass on that for now.
p.s. Quartz is one of the best two materials for OSL dating, the other being feldspar. (Both are two of the three main constituents of granite, so granite must be about the most easily dated material by this method.) It also turns out that sand-sized grains are what is usually used, too, so the CB sand is like the poster boy for OSL dating.
Your inability to read an a report of an archaeological survey is not my problem.
Anyone proposing an impact origin for the Bays,
(and I believe that this first occured in the 1930’s, and was later taken up by Otto Muck) has to deal with the water worn pebbles incalated with the sand. Their impact process and/or impact transport mechanism will have to account for their remaining intact during it.
(Earlier statements have been made here that the sands are entirely sterile. The transport of pebbles, and not of small shells, is still anomalous.)
Some of the key factors which have not been examined in Bay analyses are the Teays River outflows, and the Pleistocene Glacial Minimums. At some points during the Pleistocene the sea level was actually much higher than it is today.
I have no inability to read an archaeological paper. I, in fact, quoted verbatim the portions that referenced Clovis artifacts and pasted them into my comment. The references are few and are insufficient to draw the conclusions you draw. There are ZERO statements that specifically support Clovis being there after the bays were formed. One might read that into the paper, but if so, that is the imagination of bias of the reader, not what is specifically stated. Read the paper again and find some mentions of Clovis I did not cut-and-paste here. There are none that I missed.
Without going into the technical points here,
what the archaeologists are trying to tell you is that the Bays were a hunting spot for early man, going back to Clovsi times. That is because game animals gathered at the Bays.
Ths points accumulated in the sand around the Bays. When the bays are plowed down, the points can be collected from the exposed soil. Aside from that, they were found in the shovel tests they conducted.
Stwvw, you need to understand that in my Cambridge Conference notes I documented more pror-historical impact structures than anyone else had before, and that record will likely stand due to my luck in getting an early start on the problem.
I myself NEVER examined the bays as impact structures, but I was willing to consider the conjectures of others. They are not inclued in my book.
I made notes on ellisions in these studies over on another thread here, and I made comments on necessary background pre-studies and the data from the Bays here (see above).
I am very used to people claiming that they have an impact structure when they do not.
From my point of view, I am more interested in coastal tsunami deposits in that area, and currently have other areas with possible HSIE impact structures that need to be looked at.
I know that the Bays are what introduceed George to this field, and that they still remains “mysterious”. But they “belong” to the Perigee Zero folks.
— If the points were in the sand I am wrong. But the VERY little specific information I’ve been able to find (which I totally admit is not much) puts the points not in the sand but in the subsoil. Even if some of the artifacts were in the sand, how does that explain that some artifacts predate the sand deposition?
If the sand is dated by OSL at 130 kya and 40 kya, but Clovis artifacts dating from 13.5-13.0 kya are under the sand, Ed, how do you rectify that?
— The papers I’ve read have the greater density of artifacts in the wet areas around rivers and streams, and specifically not in the areas without water. Some bay investigators (Brooks for one) make many erroneous blanket statements such as that the bays were all ponds, based on their own assumptions that they were aeolian and fluvial in their formation.
— My questions keep on being such as “what shovel tests”? Shovels where? Into what materials? If you can, please point me at some other papers. That one argued if anything for a younger sand deposit. Given that no known terrestrial mechanism can explain the uniformity of the quartz sands to the depths that exist without also creating some level of observable sedimentation, an ET cause has to be considered.
— You say that you did not look at the bays as impact formations. Does that mean you were accepting the aeolian or fluvial causes? Even though both have specifically been shown to have NOT been the case (Johnson for one in the 1950s and 1960s). Talk to Michael Davias and George on that.
— I agree 100% that the bays do not have prototypical hyper-velocity impact structures. I also wish someone had done work on NON-hyper-velocity model of crater formation. Given that aeolian doesn’t work and fluvial doesn’t work, and hyper-velocity impacts are out, someone needs to look into other possible processes. Davias’ work is in this direction, and is promising, but he is getting the cold shoulder from journals.
I haven’t been to Perigee Zero in a good long while. Maybe I will find something there. Thanks for that reminder.
I am just beginning to read this Carolina Bays paper. I am basically upset in reading it, because it states the aeolian hypothesis as fact. The authors accept unchallenged the concept that the winds on shallow ponds would create wave action all in one direction for a wide region. How they or the previous authors could assume a consistent direction for the winds is beyond me, because at the present time that is not the case at all.
Although I do not live there, I have paid attention to weather reports in that area for some reason, in terms of the weather systems. The systems come from the SW for much of the year, just as they come from the SSW to my NE Illinois area for much of the year. I most often see the weather systems coming across from approximately Mobile, AL or Gulfport, MS, across Georgia toward and more or less paralleling the southern Carolina coast. From http://tiny.cc/98vsc : “[For North Carolina] The prevailing winds are generally from the southwest for 10 months of the year, and from the northeast during September and October.” From http://tiny.cc/6ifge : For South Carolina, “On a monthly basis, prevailing winds tend to be either from the northeast or southwest. [accompanying chart]”
The prevailing winds are not only not out of the NW, but in no season are they from the north or west, either. Even hurricane season brings winds from the SE and S.
These winds simply do not jibe with the NW-SE alignments of the CBs. How the CBs can have NW-SE alignments and higher rims on the SE end is beyond my comprehension when the winds normally come from directions that would not create a high rim to the SE.
If they see some consistent pattern from the NW I could see their point, at least intuitively, and would be prone to give at least some aeolian support. Since I don’t see wind patterns coming from a logical direction, I have to dispute the basis being laid for this paper.
It doesn’t help that the authors simply go with a simple aeolian seem to completely blow off the work of Doug Johnson who tried the aeolian idea and found it completely unworkable by itself and had to add, not one or two or even three, but four other “patches” – assumed actions added-on to massage the aeolian hypothesis hoping to make it workable. His hypothesis is called the “complex theory,” to separate it from the simple aeolian theory.
I challenge the aeolians to put up or shut up. If aeolian is such a great idea, then they should put it to the test in a wind tunnel and see if they can make winds create elliptical bays from variously-shaped shallow ponds – especially with winds coming from a) right angles to the long axes of the resultant bays or b) from 135-180 degrees from the high rims and from the bulged-out sides of the resultant bays.
I predict that A) this will falsified, and B) the only feature that can be assigned to the prevailing winds would be the bulges opposite the SW wind systems’ prevailing SW direction.
My position is more or less supported by the aeolian-created riverine dunes studied in “Riverine dunes on the Coastal Plain of Georgia, USA” (Ivester & Leigh 2002). It supports in two ways. One, the dunes are at some distance to the NE of the rivers which generally flow NW-SE. Secondly, the dunes do not in any way form elliptical shapes but parabolic (and never come close to the rivers’ edges where ellipticity might possibly be seen. That may seem like a small distinction, since both are curved. But that there is no dune formed to the SW of the rivers, it would be left to the CB aeolian thinkers to explain how the SW side of the bays would achieve such elliptical shapes. I will point out that another big difference in the riverine dunes and CB rims is that the riverine dunes are tens of meters high, while the CB NE rims are consistently less than one meter.
Now, if they argue that this pattern was not true in the Pleistocene, due to differences caused by the ice cap up north, so far I haven’t seen any that assert this. They merely speculate (and I hate it when anyone tries to explain any phenomena with speculation, especially when it is done by scientists). They speculate that the wind does it, but offer no examples nor evidence to support the speculation. I am certain that riverine dunes are called to mind and applied in the case of the CBs uncritically. And contrary to uniformitarian principles, if they argue that prevailing winds more than 13,000 years ago were such that they would form the CBs into ellipses, they would need to explain why these shallow rims haven’t been erased by the Holocene wind patterns which have included probably 600 or more hurricanes.
If aeolian is the cause, I can’t see how.
Hi George –
The clovis finds indicate that the bays pre-date the YD event.
It looks like they may be related to the perigee zero groups Saginaw Bay event, but there has been no search in that area yet for impactites.
I did some research on the OSL dating technique. Bottom line, because the method is inherently a radiometric method, it is subject to the same unprovable assumptions that deep time geochronology methods are. I read in one article that an OSL scientist is happy with a 100% error bar! I’m not sure how one can have any assurance that radionuclide leaching and contamination in unconsolidated sediments are not a problem in this method. I’m sure that ad hoc interpretations are common when dates do or do not agree with one’s stratigraphic expectations.
I have a fundamental procedural question:
Is it appropriate to use OSL for sandy rims that are subject to aeolian effects?
It seems that the tumbling of dunes and sand rims by wind brings with it the probability of particles being exposed multiple times to sunlight – possibly from even before such features as the CBs were formed.
For more solid soil layers I have no problem with using OSL, but it seems wholly inappropriate to use it in sandy wind-blown areas.
I have no dispute that there are aeolian effects on the CBs. I would argue that due to the prevailing winds and the shapes of many of them (more bulged out on the NE side than the SW side, that this is the ONLY aeolian effect. That this is so consistent on that NE side should argue that something different is going on on that side from the other. But then extrapolating data found on that side of the CBs to the entire bay is wholly inappropriate, since it has been exposed to an additional process from the rest of the bay. This can only confuse the dating of the bays and stretch out the dating over an artificially wide range.
It seems clear that the two sides of the bays were at one time more symmetrical in reference to their long axes. The two sides should not be studied together, except to note the differences. And studies should always make clear at all points in the discussion which side is being talked about.
BTW, I am somewhat skeptical that the CBs are connected to the Y-D, so I am not arguing from a biased ET POV. I have no idea what will be the final definitive explanation for them.
But I am certain that aeolian forces did not CAUSE them. Winds certainly have affected them since their formation, but they didn’t create them. That argument has been tried for nearly 80 years, and though this paper states that as THE explanation, the paper is flying in the face of much research that simply finds that explanation totally inadequate. I’ve seen cherry picking of data before, but cherry picking explanations in toto is even further removed from the scientific method.
One could verify with cores that the underlying clay CB basin is also elliptical. It is quite unlikely that wind could greatly affect a clay substrate, even if the overlying sand eventually adopted an elliptical shape.
I am highly skeptical, too, that any long-term, low-energy process could be responsible for very similar sub-elliptical depressions that range in size from a few tens of meters to nearly 10 kilometers in size. The uniform scaling of these magnitudes simply doesn’t work in a windy environment. Look at the irregularity of sand dunes. Whatever caused the bays likely happened in a very short period of time by one type of process that we do not see happening in the present.
Terry –
Right, about sand dunes. As I said about riverine dunes, which are dunes formed downwind of rivers, and even in these same areas of the country, they form parabolic shapes, even lines of parabolic shapes that parallel the river at some distance away. The dunes are more or less continuous along the length of the river – AND they are considerably taller. But they are not consistent, depending on the topography for their size and shape.
If it works, please see the GE images I have saved at “overlapping Carolina Bays” on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/33314128@N06/sets/72157625936043166/
The comments on the aerial images speak for me.
This is the first time I’ve directed anyone to Flickr, so if someone could inform me if you can or cannot access these, it would be appreciated.
The main point is that the aeolian theory may sound generically feasible on the surface, but when looking at particular details, it does not seem to me to hold water. This is especially true of the overlapping bays, that the aeolian can not be correct.
Steve, the link worked fine. And those were good examples of what we are speaking.
Terry: “I did some research on the OSL dating technique. Bottom line, because the method is inherently a radiometric method, it is subject to the same unprovable assumptions that deep time geochronology methods are.”
Terry, let’s continue this discussion over here. What research have you done? Archival research? Lab research?
These isotopic/decay methods are based on theory and lab experiments. You might have a beef with the theory, but the lab experiments are where they get their values from for half-lifes. Do you question specific methodology? Those half life numbers didn’t just fall out of the sky. With your assertion here I would think they can back up their values with papers which have falsifiable experiment (meaning experience) behind them. What backs up your assertion of unprovability? If you’ve got it, I’d like to see it. That is a heavy assertion.
I DO know that for any new dating method they have to have it vetted quite thoroughly before anyone trusts it. That means not only theoretical but also with fully explained lab techniques. Where exactly do the inaccuracies come in? Remember, to go from 14 billion years (their universe) down to 7,000 years, you’ve got to knock off 6 zeros just to get in the right magnitude. (I erroneously stated this as 200,000 previously). You have to not only assert and show why their numbers are wrong, but why they are wrong by a factor of about 2 million.
Terry: “One could verify with cores that the underlying clay CB basin is also elliptical. It is quite unlikely that wind could greatly affect a clay substrate, even if the overlying sand eventually adopted an elliptical shape.”
Terry, here I agree with you on all points. The way the sand is draped over the CB rims is counter to experience in terms of wind – wind would tend to clip off the sand over the rims themselves, because of exposure. This would classify as a form of erosion, certainly.
The bit about cores has been tackled. One of George’s pdfs clearly shows coring at various positions on a lengthwise transect of a CB. Also, some guy was on here briefly, also with a pdf showing coring and even (as I recall) trenching through a rim (though his choices of trench locations were quite questionable). In his pdf he asserted evidence of aeolian formatino, but his claims were refuted by his own evidence (IMHO), which I pointed out.
Terry –
Regarding your assertion of unprovability of OSL-type dating methods, I recently read “The First Americans” about the Valsequillo site near Puebla, Mexico. The REALLY big issue with the site was the finding by lab tests of 240,000 years old for some layers in which clearly human artifacts were found.
Because the date was 20 times older than the Clovis Barrier, the site manager refused to publish any papers on the site.
The 240,000 date was determined by a uranium method I had not previously heard of. The lab tests was run by geologists. The site manager and the team (including Vance Haynes, as I recall) were chosen because they were among the very best in their fields. Yet the site manager would not accept the very early dating.
The complete lab testing method has since then been reviewed extensively (it was relatively new at that time – the early 1960s) and found to be valid, and the method has been used since then many times. When I say “reviewed extensively” I mean that the method was fully vetted – which means fully proven out.
Yes, you and the young earthers will question.even a fully vetted methodology – but in doing so the onus is on you to show specifically where the errors exist and why they are wrong..
I have a question about OSL and the CBs.
In reading the paper above, on pg 4 (pg 148 of the journal issue), Brooks says,
Leaving out for this moment his assumption about eolian (which has specifically been ruled out by several CB researchers of note), my question would be this:
If quartz in Saginaw or elsewhere were ejected by an ice sheet impact, being shredded/pulverized in the process, when that material is lain down on a CB, does the short time it was in ballistic flight count as “exposed to sunlight”?
I would wonder that the material might have been last exposed to the sun at SAGINAW at the ages shown in the paper (>100 kya) and then reburied in the sand deposits of the alluvial plain, on the CBs and their rims and in the areas in between.
Secondarily, I would ask if any of the quarts sand well outside CB rims has been dated by OSL.
I have no bone to pick here except my concern that if the material was lofted from elsewhere and then deposited in the areas of CBs, I simply wonder if the samples are taken at appropriate locations. I would think that CB rims might be specifically tthe WRONG places to be sampling. In addition, I would wonder at what depths samples for OSL are taken.
Personally I think the clay directly under the sand would be the best place to sample for OSL – because if the overlain sand came from a distant impact or from blowing wind, it is not the sand that should be sampled, but the clay. It is the sand-clay interface that is the point of interest.
So, again my main question is this:
Materials buried in one location and then ejected and re-buried a long distance away, which burial is being read by an OSL test – the original burial or the last one?
I highly doubt that the momentary exposure to sunlight during ballistic flight is sufficient to be seen in an OSL test.
Ed, you pointed me to this paper after I asked about your source for Clovis tools at CB sites.
A careful reading of this paper (but not overly so) in regards to Clovis shows either a lack of clear origination for Clovis artifacts, or – with those whose provenance is clearly stated, Clovis artifacts are or appear to be from below the sand.
Beginning on pg 10 {pg 154) :
If found UNDER the CB, in the subsoil, it would seem that the Clovis predated the bay – if it was formed by an impact.
Cultivated means the subsoil was turned up, suggesting the Clovis might easily have come from below the sand layer – meaning the point could have been there before the sand was deposited, whether by secondary impact or otherwise.
No provenance mentioned.
These appear to be the only references to Clovis in this paper.
Conclusion: It is uncertain if any of the Clovis artifacts came from above the subsoil. Some certainly came from the subsoil itself. If SOME of them did, that may suggest that all of the Clovis artifacts did. After all, Clovis did not last all that long, so one would not expect to see temporally widely spaced Clovis artifacts. This paper says nothing at all conclusive about Clovis being at the Savannah River Site AFTER the CB was formed.
Also, based on the mention of these few artifacts, it would appear that Clovis predated the formation of the CBs discussed, meaning that this paper could be used to argue FOR the YDB possibly being contemporaneous with the CB formations.
I need more information.
Ed, can you point me at another paper that connects Clovis to the CBs?
I would point out that the early YDB team reported finding Clovis UNDER the black mat. If Clovis Man came about 13,500 years ago and did not last past the black mat at 12,900, then Clovis Man only lasted 600 years, more or less.
If so, what are Clovis artifacts in those CBs in the above paper doing UNDER something that – according to the dating of the CBs – happened around 40 kya and/or around 130 kya?
Is it significant that there is no black mat in the area of the CBs? Or am I wrong in that? I do not recall ever read anything about a black mat in association with the CBs. But I might have a faulty memory on that.
this paper could be used to argue FOR the YDB possibly being contemporaneous with the CB formations.
BINGO!!! abt 3200 years ago at the bronze age collapse….. Eleushian / Aleshia / Alyshia / Allege/ biblical Elishah fields for everrrrrrrr! damn it Eleshah became ” heaven” ( it means God saves, YEP and to think I’m more tradional than sweat lodgers mexicans/Mayans and asians will ever believe ) even before the event it was heaven .. we were heaven and all men wanted to come here , nothing has ever changed ,, then it was heaven and or hell after the event .
It ruled the world before the event. SO surely it did after with in the limits of limited minds.. it must of ruled hell after that event as they thought that it was sunk it to the bottom of the sea so they ‘thought” ! so they justified! , so they hoped ! so they wished they they used it ! but really turtle island was just Moved.. it is all there even in the whole of old world records. now those hints of the little bits of truth are completely ignored by those who claim logic their non spiritual ,spiritual guides but are still just another whole bunch of limited minds justifying , hoping and wishing and using !!! … so real history goes ignored. because of what the rebellious minds of men do to truth or the tiny piece they manage to record or find of it.
Hi Steve –
Actually, that article sums up several different site reports by several different archaeologists, so it already has the multiple sources you requested.
What the finds indicate is that the Bays were being exploited by people equipped with Clovis toolkits.
Your understandings of stratigraphy and lithics in general are both deeply flawed. While I am not an expert, I do have friends amoung those who are, and the minimum requirement is being able to understand what they tell you.
So go back and re-read the article very closely.
CL –
“you got to know I was into that at 12…
I was just trying to get to school on the bus without throwing up.. and to my classes without getting beat up or felt up.”
I am sorry to hear of your bad experience. They go a long way towards explaining your behaviors.
As no one here was among those who beat you up or felt you up, perhaps you might want to re-consider wishing that we would all go to hell.
Something completely unrelated, but the Russian threat is too buried to find quickly. Luna just got hit with a significant meteor and we just have a ELE sized rock doing an earth crossing 31 May 2013 —
I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: NASA Announces Brightest Lunar Explosion Ever Recorded. “A boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon in March, igniting an explosion so bright that anyone looking up at the right moment might have spotted it, NASA announced Friday. NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office is reporting the discovery of the brightest impact seen on the moon in the eight year history of the monitoring program. Some 300 lunar impact events have been logged over the years but this latest impact, from March 17, is considered many orders of magnitude brighter than anything else observed.”
Related: Dark, massive asteroid to fly by Earth on May 31. “It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.”
Posted at 7:38 am by Glenn Reynolds
Watching the Moon for impacts on a continuing basis will give us a statistical basis for Earth crossing debris.
We also need better ELE rock detection gear, plus some means of close deflection.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Allatum wonder what they are talking about ?
follow the trail to the Nergal and his city state on Cyprus, yes it’s the walmart of the world …… ( we /he had a land and other city states too http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kind+of+Aleshiya++nergal&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#client=safari&rls=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=kind+of+Alashiya++nergal&oq=kind+of+Alashiya++nergal&gs_l=serp.12…22681.22923.0.26798.2.2.0.0.0.1.1036.1981.6-1j1.2.0…0.0…1c.1.14.psy-ab.xf2lX0xclzI&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.46751780,d.dmQ&fp=aaf214d5dc765fc6&biw=1445&bih=865
” They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers. ” 1775 Dragging canoe w hat was traditions was combined with canaanite religion and maybe jewish and whatever religion showed up , to become what is now called traditional . and here I call Bull shit on on the age of “alautun” in on the mayan calender . it wasn’t billions and billions of years . it was just an age not like this age. just Tiny little minds who don’t know anything and assume everything !
Ed –
Yes, I am aware that the article is by/about several researchers.
If you will read the article carefully, you will see that:
1.) I extracted ALL of the mentions of Clovis out of it, and
2.) NONE of them say that any Clovis toolkits were found ABOVE the sand/subsoil interface.
3.) The article does not even differentiate Clovis from post-YDB cultures (PaleoInidian, Kirk, Archaic, Simpson,…), so even where Clovis is mentioned there is not enough specificity to understand ANYTHING about where Clovis artifacts were found.
4.) So, as I concluded, this article says nothing that can make someone conclude that Clovis artifacts are in younger strata. It either doesn’t address the point, or it states that the artifacts were in OLDER strata (IN the subsoil)
–
So, I ask again if you are aware of any OTHER mentions of Clovis tools and where the artifacts were found in the layers. I can’t say “sediments” because the sand HAS no sediment. Ask Michael Davias about that. It is all deposited like loess – one homogeneous entirety, and all of it is quartz sand of an amazingly consistent size.
If you don’t know of anymore articles or papers, thanks for trying, anyway. Ciao!
Ed: “What the finds indicate is that the Bays were being exploited by people equipped with Clovis toolkits.”
Actually, Ed, no, it doesn’t.
What it says is that Clovis Man was at that location when the subsoil was exposed.
(I hardly think they would have dug down through the sand to embed the tools underneath.)
There is nothing that says that the bays had been formed prior to the Clovis tools being laid down. If ejecta arrived from Saginaw and formed the bays and also deposited the sand, then whatever is found in the subsoil PREDATES the impacts.
The two events – formation of bays and sand deposition – are not necessarily the same thing, but it is hard to figure that the sand could have been deposited to 10 meters thick in the region sans layering (in one entire thick layer) and NOT be from an impact event that formed the bays. To imagine TWO odd events happening at the same location in the last 130 kya or less – that takes more of a miracle than the YDB event itself.
Specifically, Ed:
I DID read the article very carefully, and I stated so.
That is where the commented excerpts came from.
Those are the only mentions of Clovis in the article.
I can’t read what isn’t there. And what is there is far short of indicating that Clovis Man was at the bays after they were formed. The only specific mentions show the OPPOSITE – that the Clovis artifacts are UNDER the sand (i.e., under the bays).
And what does under mean in stratigraphy? It means older. (Unless, as happens, there is evidence of folding over. This is not the case in the CBs.)
* * *
You call my understanding “flawed,” without being specific. Just because I conclude something you don’t conclude does not make my reading of the article flawed.
If you have specific reasons to say that, let me know where my error is.
S.
Hi Steve –
Why the hell you think that ancient man simply walked about diposing points at random is beyond me.
That is the kind of error that even a 12 year old field collector would not make.
There is a reason those points were found around Bays, and if you stop writing and think about it for a few minutes it should become clear to you.
Hi Trent –
“Watching the Moon for impacts on a continuing basis will give us a statistical basis for Earth crossing debris.”
Actually, the Moon forms one part of the two body Earth-Moon system.
Aside from that, we have direct data from satellites for small body impacts with the Earth.
>>Actually, the Moon forms one part of the two body Earth-Moon system.
A valid statistical extrapolation based upon real Moon impact data, plus earth satellite data, and the two body system orbital elements at impact will provide insights on when the Moon shields or aids in creating terrestrial impacts of earth crossing rocks.
Hi Trent –
How about recovering data from Earth impact sites?
I know plate tectonics removes it after 200 million years or so, but that still leaves 200 million years of data.
As a matter of fact, the data for the last 6 million years or so that man and his ancestors have been on Earth is pretty damned alarming.
Ed: “Hi Steve –
Why the hell you think that ancient man simply walked about disposing points at random is beyond me.”
Well, Ed, I will come back with:
“Where in the hell did you read me saying that?”
I have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about.
If anything, I think they (the points and the humans who “disposed” of them – after, of course, making as much use as they could of them like any rational human would do after spending time making them or trading for the points) came from the Solutrean area of mostly northern Spain and SW France. I also think that they used hunting-wise them for far more than hunting mammoths and giant sloths (which would have so much wasted meat it buggers the mind). I think that the Clovis people specifically did NOT come from SIberia, where no such tech has been found to have existed.
And let’s dispense with the “hells” now that we are even at one apiece. Truce?
As to them being found around bays, Ed, they could have used them around bay areas before or after the bays were formed. The ground existed there before, and the ground existed afterward.
MY argument has nothing to do with the latitude and longitude relative to bays, but the TIME element. If they were found in the SUBSOIL under bays, they could not have left those points AFTER the sand was deposited.
None of your comments back to me have addressed how the points came to be UNDER the sand.
From what I know so far, the sand had to have been deposited WITH the formation of the bays. Would you agree or disagree, Ed?
Trent –
I agree with you. As multiple-function humans and multiple-finction human groups we have the capacity to investigate both lunar cratering and Earth cratering. Earth craters have only been recognized as such since Gene Shoemaker. Lunar ones have been recognized as not volcanic (mostly) since about the Apollo missions (which isn’t that much longer).
While we can’t date lunar ones so easily, we can at least SEE them a whole lot better and investigate some of their properties. We can do that with our right hand, while with our left hand (lovely multi-functional dudes that we are) we can do what we can hear on Earth. Outside of funding, there is no practical reason we cannot do both.
Either inquiry should render the same info, but both inquiries have weaknesses – and different weaknesses. So both should be done. If NASA or others are not doing more on Earth OR the moon because of funding, that is a reality, but a different argument, a political will argument. I see your point being a technical issue.
Ed, I will reiterate my point:
Clovis was a very short-lived culture, as far as cultures go. With its window of time being only 13.5-12.9 kya, if their tools are found UNDER the quartz sand – as opposed to on top of it – then something seems to be wrong with the OSL datings for the CBs that put the CBs’ formation at 130 kya or 40 kya. Artifacts from 13 kya should not be under sand deposited 130 kya or 40 kya. Since OSL itself is solid science, that suggests that the sampling has been done incorrectly, or assumptions are being made that are misleading.
Even if we extend Clovis back to 22 kya (based on the work of Bradley and Stanford), 22 is less than 40 or 130.
Given people like the Daulton Gang, who everyone says can’t follow a protocol, erroneous sampling is not out of the question. (Though I am not suggesting any plot to bogus up the readings. In this case I suggest bogus assumptions about ejecta.) Since so many of the papers are behind paywalls, I can’t get at them to find out where the samples for OSL dating of the CBs were taken from.
Update:
For the purposes of honesty and transparency, I also repeat my OTHER point that if the quartz sand was ejected from Saginaw and in the air for around 10-15 minutes – and then reburied – I think that sampling that particular quartz sand for OSL is not going to give the CB (impact) formation date but give the dates of its entombment at Saginaw. The basic assumption with OSL is that the material was buried in via Gradualist mechanism. If the material is ejecta from elsewhere,will OSL be able to give any useful information?
So, I went to look that up. I found this in Wikipedia, and it turns out that one assumption I made is wrong:
That all gave me a bit of hope – the bit about dunes and loess – but this shot it down:
So, that seems to answer my question. It does NOT take a long time to reset the clock on the physics of optical luminescence; it only takes a few seconds. Wow.
The quartz sand at the CBs has grain sizes at or smaller than 1mm – certainly all of it is less than a 5mm radius. So, if it was exposed to sunlight for one second, my idea is wrong.
Or is it?
The Taurids come at two times of the year, the end of June and around Halloween. The June ones are when the Earth passes through the outgoing matter stream – coming away from the Sun after rounding it. If the Saginaw impact occurred at that time all the quartz would have been hit by sunlight and been reset. However, if the Saginaw impact occurred during the Earth’s passage through the incoming stream around Halloween, that side of the Earth would have been in shadow – no direct daylight.
The Abstract does begin with “Daylight radiation…”
If all that is the final word, then that means there is about a 50-50 chance of the ejecta being thrown up in daylight vs at night. That 50-50 may actually be a bit skewed though, because of the dark-light line at dawn and dusk – ejecta could still be exposed to some level of daylight while in flight, even if the ground were not in direct sunlight. So, let’s make it about 60-40 in favor of sunlight exposure. Still, 40% is a pretty decent chance the quartz sand was NOT exposed.
So the idea that the OSL can be misleading for ejecta material lofted from Saginaw to the CB areas is still somewhat tenable.
Based on that, one could posit two things that would make a Saginaw impact and CB secondary impact consistent with the OSL dating, and the second one is at least possibly falsifiable:
1.) That the Saginaw impact occurred around the end of October (by our calendar)
2.) That samples of CB quartz sand might reveal a trend from north to south – and probably the east vs west “splash” – in case the impact came near the dawn or dusk line.*** If so, then there might be some pattern of variation in the OSL dating from north to south and east vs west. I would say this has about a 10-20% chance of being true. But if found out to be true, it would explain the hypothesized variations. In addition, it would lend some support for the YDB impact hypothesis.
Notes:
**http://link.springer.com/article/10.2478/s13386-011-0032-7#page-1
*** The number of days between the vernal equinox and the impact of the Chelyabinsk meteor was very much the same as the number of days between the autumnal equinox and the Taurids at the end of October. The Chelyabinsk meteor happened to arrive just at dawn. All that is almost certainly just a coincidence, but perhaps not. That is something I will hold in the back of my mind. Just in case…
In addition, the Chelyabinsk meteor had a radiant in daylight but landed in – or almost in – darkness. The dawn had only come about 5 minutes before, in Chelyabinsk, so Lake Chebarkul was right on the dividing line. Another few hundred meters of altitude and it might have landed many kilometers farther to the west. Thus, sometimes objects are in daylight while in flight but can land in darkness. That is possible with the proposed Saginaw quartz sand.
p.s. I have even a further and wilder speculation, having to do with the ejected ice/water/steam, but I will pass on that for now.
p.s. Quartz is one of the best two materials for OSL dating, the other being feldspar. (Both are two of the three main constituents of granite, so granite must be about the most easily dated material by this method.) It also turns out that sand-sized grains are what is usually used, too, so the CB sand is like the poster boy for OSL dating.
Steve –
Your inability to read an a report of an archaeological survey is not my problem.
Anyone proposing an impact origin for the Bays,
(and I believe that this first occured in the 1930’s, and was later taken up by Otto Muck) has to deal with the water worn pebbles incalated with the sand. Their impact process and/or impact transport mechanism will have to account for their remaining intact during it.
(Earlier statements have been made here that the sands are entirely sterile. The transport of pebbles, and not of small shells, is still anomalous.)
Some of the key factors which have not been examined in Bay analyses are the Teays River outflows, and the Pleistocene Glacial Minimums. At some points during the Pleistocene the sea level was actually much higher than it is today.
Ed –
I have no inability to read an archaeological paper. I, in fact, quoted verbatim the portions that referenced Clovis artifacts and pasted them into my comment. The references are few and are insufficient to draw the conclusions you draw. There are ZERO statements that specifically support Clovis being there after the bays were formed. One might read that into the paper, but if so, that is the imagination of bias of the reader, not what is specifically stated. Read the paper again and find some mentions of Clovis I did not cut-and-paste here. There are none that I missed.
Steve –
Without going into the technical points here,
what the archaeologists are trying to tell you is that the Bays were a hunting spot for early man, going back to Clovsi times. That is because game animals gathered at the Bays.
Ths points accumulated in the sand around the Bays. When the bays are plowed down, the points can be collected from the exposed soil. Aside from that, they were found in the shovel tests they conducted.
Stwvw, you need to understand that in my Cambridge Conference notes I documented more pror-historical impact structures than anyone else had before, and that record will likely stand due to my luck in getting an early start on the problem.
I myself NEVER examined the bays as impact structures, but I was willing to consider the conjectures of others. They are not inclued in my book.
I made notes on ellisions in these studies over on another thread here, and I made comments on necessary background pre-studies and the data from the Bays here (see above).
I am very used to people claiming that they have an impact structure when they do not.
From my point of view, I am more interested in coastal tsunami deposits in that area, and currently have other areas with possible HSIE impact structures that need to be looked at.
I know that the Bays are what introduceed George to this field, and that they still remains “mysterious”. But they “belong” to the Perigee Zero folks.
Ed –
— If the points were in the sand I am wrong. But the VERY little specific information I’ve been able to find (which I totally admit is not much) puts the points not in the sand but in the subsoil. Even if some of the artifacts were in the sand, how does that explain that some artifacts predate the sand deposition?
If the sand is dated by OSL at 130 kya and 40 kya, but Clovis artifacts dating from 13.5-13.0 kya are under the sand, Ed, how do you rectify that?
— The papers I’ve read have the greater density of artifacts in the wet areas around rivers and streams, and specifically not in the areas without water. Some bay investigators (Brooks for one) make many erroneous blanket statements such as that the bays were all ponds, based on their own assumptions that they were aeolian and fluvial in their formation.
— My questions keep on being such as “what shovel tests”? Shovels where? Into what materials? If you can, please point me at some other papers. That one argued if anything for a younger sand deposit. Given that no known terrestrial mechanism can explain the uniformity of the quartz sands to the depths that exist without also creating some level of observable sedimentation, an ET cause has to be considered.
— You say that you did not look at the bays as impact formations. Does that mean you were accepting the aeolian or fluvial causes? Even though both have specifically been shown to have NOT been the case (Johnson for one in the 1950s and 1960s). Talk to Michael Davias and George on that.
— I agree 100% that the bays do not have prototypical hyper-velocity impact structures. I also wish someone had done work on NON-hyper-velocity model of crater formation. Given that aeolian doesn’t work and fluvial doesn’t work, and hyper-velocity impacts are out, someone needs to look into other possible processes. Davias’ work is in this direction, and is promising, but he is getting the cold shoulder from journals.
I haven’t been to Perigee Zero in a good long while. Maybe I will find something there. Thanks for that reminder.
George? Anything to add or input here?
Steve –
I have set out my thoughts on the Bays and their possible formation mechanisms elsewhere here at this site.
While George is very interested in the Bays, and you are as well, once again, I am more interested in the impact mega-tsunami data for this area.