Collision Earth

I recently came across this interesting article that tackles a number of anomalies in the climatic record. The 1159 BCE event we have already associated with a volcanic event Hekla and the 12900 BCE impact event in Northern Canada. This article isolates from cultural referents these dates:

7640 BCE, 3195 BCE, 2354 BCE, 1628 BCE, 1159 BCE, 207 BCE, 44 BCE, and 540 CE.

We have Thera to apply to the 1628 BCE event. As a warning the apparent exact nature of this date and the later dates are controversial at the least but are typically associated with carbon dates and an independent Chinese record for 1618 BCE. I have associated 1159 BCE with the inundation of Atlantis and the resulting collapse of their seaborne mercantile civilization. We surmise that the Thera drove the collapse of Minoan civilization and this event was the foundation of the tale of the exodus. The tale itself could well have already been legend at the time of actual historic biblical event and could clarify a two hundred disparity. I have found that these ancient records never fail to include a good story even if the actual linkage is a stretch. And why not? This was their only way to transmit cultural history.

You will have followed my recent pursuit of the possibility that the little ice age was triggered by a major volcanic event in Alaska. It certainly looks promising and explains the reoccurrence of cooling in the Arctic over the past two to three millennia without having to call upon other even less provable sources like solar variation. It is also one of the nastiest places on earth for this type of volcanic activity with no lack of candidates.

To this we now should add cosmic events. We should also get much more serious about their potential for damage. Science has understated and actually misled us all on the potential for damage from this source. Perhaps we need to respect ignorance instead.

Firstly a sea based impact has never been studied. We do not understand the possibilities. All the energy will surely be absorbed by the water, just as all the energy of the stony meteorites is typically absorbed in the atmosphere up to a fairly large size. So although a fair range of small to mid sized objects are packing huge amounts of energy, those two blankets will discharge the energy fairly well.

I add to this the 12900 BCE impact of the Canadian Ice sheet which hurled ice into the Carolinas and likely the Atlantic. It also delivered entrained material into the Ohio Valley recently identified. The bulk of the energy was still absorbed by the crust and surely left a crater now flooded with water. Happy hunting.

To affect climatic temperature, the event has to hit land and sent a vast amount of dust into the atmosphere or itself be a massive source of dust. Tunguska shows us how this could be. That means that a huge scar must exist that would be discernable even today if the event took place in the last 10,000 years.

Recall that the big volcanic events threw twenty to fifty cubic miles of rock into the atmosphere. An asteroid needs to be that large or at least a reasonable fraction thereof to have the same impact. Again the atmosphere will break it up on the way in. The fact is, is that we lack observational evidence to make proper predictions except by analogy.

What this article does bring home is that the energy is out there and has certainly been felt. Whether it applies to this sequence of climatic anomalies is only prospective when we have the alternatives of the Indonesian volcanoes and those of Alaska. And even for the protracted Little Ice Age, I am more inclined to chase volcanoes than a major cosmic event whose effect should have dissipated very quickly, if only because of the lack of chemical aerosols.

I have every reason to think that as our dating of the eruptive periods of all the world’s volcanoes improves so will the correlation with global climate. We only need to remember that an Arctic chill affects the northern portion of the northern hemisphere, while a much larger chill at the equator hits us all.


Collision Earth:

The Threat From Outer Space (2004)

BY JASON JEFFREY

Over a century ago Ignatius Donnelly summed up our precarious existence: We are but vitalized specks filled with a fraction of God’s delegated intelligence, crawling over an egg-shell filled with fire, whirling madly through infinite space, a target for the bombs of the universe.

By bombs Donnelly meant the untold number of asteroids and comets that fill the heavens around us which on perhaps not a few occasions have smashed into Earth itself, and may do so again.

Through revolutionary new techniques in observation, detection and photography, modern astronomers and astrophysicists have now identified two new classes of celestial objects which could pose a real danger to our planet within the foreseeable future, called NEA’s (Near Earth Asteroids) and ECC’s (Earth-Crossing Comets).

On September 29, asteroid “4179 Toutatis” passed within 1.6 million kilometres of Earth. Its approach was the closest in this century of any known asteroid the size of Toutatis, which measured around 4.6 kilometres in length. If it had struck the Earth, we could have faced what scientists have dubbed “a mass extinction event.”

Scientists believe the asteroid poses no risk at least through 2562, when Toutatis will pass within 400,000 kilometers of Earth – but astronomers admit there are forces in the solar system that can alter an asteroid’s orbit and put it on a collision course with Earth.

Earlier this year, on March 31, an asteroid skimmed past the Earth at a distance of just 6500 kilometres above the ground. Object “2004 FU162”, which spans 5-10 metres across, would have burned up as a fireball ending with a smaller explosion, had it ventured into the Earth’s atmosphere. The problem was astronomers did not discover it until after its passing. Scientists have since calculated the asteroid’s orbit was shifted by a whopping 20 degrees because of the Earth’s gravity.

The previous record for the closest asteroid approach to Earth was set on 18 March by an object called “2004 FH” which missed the Earth by about 40,000 kilometres. That was a much larger object, around 30 metres in diameter, but big enough to produce a one-megaton explosion in the atmosphere.

NASA calculates objects in the 100-200 metre range hit Earth about once every 700-1,000 years. Such an object did hit the Earth in 1908, over Tunguska in Siberia.

In the ECC (Earth-Crossing Comet) category, a very serious future candidate for an Earth grazing is comet Finlay, due to pass on October 27, 2060 – perhaps as close as 150,000 kilometres.In 1993, astrophysicist Brian Marsden announced that comet Swift-Tuttle could possibly strike Earth in the 22nd century. It is scheduled to pass the Sun incoming from deep space on July 11, 2126, and on August 14 will come very close to our world. Should the slightest irregularity occur in its long periodic path during the intervening one and a half centuries, it could hit the planet dead-centre, and with a force equivalent to 100 million megatons of TNT.

Over the past few years we have often heard about the discovery of new asteroids and comets. This is the result of NASA’s 25-year survey of the sky to find objects wider than a kilometre that could have a devastating impact if they collided with Earth.

Fortunately, nothing of a dangerous size has been spotted heading our way for at least a century – or so they tell us. According to a US government advisor, secrecy would be the best option if scientists discovered a giant asteroid was on course to collide with Earth.Speaking to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Geoffrey Sommer, of the Rand Corporation, said:

“If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss. As a matter of common sense, if you can’t intercept it and you can’t move people out of the way in time, there’s nothing you can do in terms of reducing the costs of the potential impact.”

Deep Impact

For one week in July 1994, astronomers watched a planetary body under attack, when two dozen pieces of the disintegrated comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged into Jupiter with explosive results, equivalent to 40 million megatons of TNT going off in a chain reaction. As several scientists warned, this was Earth’s wake-up call for a similar event to happen to us.

Recent computer simulations reveal that if a comet or asteroid hit the Earth on one side, the seismic waves generated would be transmitted through the planetary interior. By being focused on account of the Earth’s curvature, the waves would meet together at the location directly on the opposite side where the impact took place, and the high stress energy released could disrupt the surface area, causing a tremendous outpouring of volcanic activity.

The air blast resulting from an impact would lead to large-scale and worldwide pressure shock waves oscillating the entire atmosphere and ionosphere, creating winds greater than the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded.

Fragments of the asteroid and earth hurled into space by the impact would rain down all over the planet, setting forest fires. The resulting smoke would further darken the atmosphere, plunging the world into permanent night. The temperature would plummet.

Calculating the amount of dust, water vapour and smoke injected into the sky from a kilometre wide object hitting the Earth, scientists estimate a drop of world temperatures by about 15 degrees Celsius lasting for about 15 days.

By far the worst-case scenario is an asteroid or comet striking one of the world’s deep oceans. Some researchers worry the sudden displacement of such large volumes of water across thousands of kilometres of ocean would affect the axis spin and polar stability of the Earth, like adding an off-balancing weight to a spinning gyroscope. Even more disastrous would be a celestial object furrowed into the ocean at a more oblique angle. In this case the energy of the mass dissipates by pushing a titanic amount of water over a large surface area, creating a tsunami wave so high and large in size as to defy imagination.As a tsunami wave reaches nearer to a coast with a shallower continental shelf, its speed slows down, but its height is increased by a factor of 10 to 40. Thus a deep ocean wave of 100 metres might break ashore with a height of 1,000 to 4,000 metres.

A major earthquake triggered off the coast of Chile in May 1960 generated waves in the deep water of the Pacific travelling a full 150 degrees around the globe, or more than 16,000 kilometres distance, landing ashore in Japan at a height of up to 4.5 metres, and killing over 200 people. Earlier, in 1946, a similar event took place when a tsunami originating in the Aleutians killed a handful of people along the nearby Alaskan shores, yet also went on to take the lives of 150 people in Hawaii 8,000 kilometres away. Computer projections indicate that a 9-metre asteroid impacting the ocean between Australia and New Zealand would produce tsunamis breaking on the southern Japanese coastline at 38 to 50 metres high.

That large asteroids have hit the Pacific before is evident from geological remains on the islands within its perimeter. Deposits of unconsolidated corals have been found almost a thousand feet above the present coasts on Lanai, Hawaii, Oahu, Molokai and Maui, indicating they were washed up to that height by a tremendous wave of water in the distant past. Ordinary tsunamis generated by earthquakes along the Ring of Fire do not produce waves of that magnitude – only a major displacement of ocean waters from an impact event would fit the findings.

The Atlantic Ocean is also in danger. Estimates are an impact anywhere in the Atlantic by an asteroid 365 metres wide would devastate coasts on either side with tsunami waves 60 metres high. Major cities either on the coast or with river, bay or harbor accesses such as New York, Boston, Washington, London, Amsterdam and Copenhagen are in danger of being completely obliterated.

A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California shows waves as high as 120 metres sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.
The researchers based their simulation on a real asteroid known to be on course for a close encounter with Earth eight centuries from now.

March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as “1950 DA”, a huge rock 1.2 kilometres in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 60,000 kilometres per hour.
“From a geologic perspective, events like this have happened many times in the past. Asteroids the size of 1950 DA have probably struck the Earth about 600 times since the age of the dinosaurs,” warns researcher Steven Ward.

Impact Events Linked to Evolution of Life on Earth

It is known the Earth was pummelled by asteroids, comets and other massive heavenly bodies in the early days of its formation – over 3 billion years ago. But, until recently, most scientists thought this was an event limited to Earth’s distant past. They also believed the ancient celestial pounding eventually gave way to billions of years of gradual, non-catastrophic evolution.

In the 1950s, astronomer Gene Shoemaker sent shock waves through the scientific community by suggesting various craters on our planet (and the Moon) were formed by asteroids or comets, rather than volcanic eruptions, which was what most scientists believed at the time.

There doesn’t appear to be one square kilometre of the lunar surface that is not pockmarked with impact craters. While some craters are undoubtedly very ancient, they also contain within their rims a myriad of newer craters from more recent impacts.

The reason why craters do not remain visible on Earth is due to their swift erosion by rain, snow, and wind, whereas on the Moon they remain for eons until a new projectile strikes the scar zone.

Using the Moon’s potholed surface as a reference point, Shoemaker tried to determine how often celestial objects smashed into the Moon and, by extension, struck the Earth. With the help of modern satellite and aerial surveillance, Shoemaker and other scientists soon identified over 200 impact sites around the planet.

In 1980 scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez claimed they had found evidence of a huge impact event 65 million years ago. This age corresponded with the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The evidence included a worldwide layer of clay with high levels of the rare element iridium, usually the signature of an impact.

In 1990, the buried remains of a 180-kilometre-diameter crater were discovered near the town of Chicxulub on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. A crater this size would have been blasted out by a 16-kilometre-wide comet or asteroid colliding with the Earth at some 80,000 kph.

Some scientists now believe this crater as the long sought-after “smoking gun” responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs and more than 70 percent of Earth’s living species 65 million years ago.

In June 2003 Science published a report about a team of scientists who believe a massive object from space smashed into what is now the Moroccan desert 380 million years ago. Dates for the impact coincide with the “Kacak/otomari” extinction, when up to 40% of all animals living in the sea perished. Fossils found in rock layers just above the impact layer suggest many new species appeared after the disaster.

And in November 2003, another team of scientists reported on evidence for a massive asteroid colliding with the Earth 251 million years ago which may have killed 90 per cent of all life.

The study, based on meteorite fragments found in Antarctica, suggests the Permian-Triassic event, perhaps the greatest extinction in the planet’s history, may have been triggered by a mountain-sized space rock that smashed into a southern land mass.

“It appears to us that the two largest mass extinctions in Earth history... were both caused by catastrophic collisions” with asteroids, the researchers say in their study in Science.

The evidence indicates asteroid impacts are the key factors in the development of life on this planet. In wiping out a large proportion of life on the planet periodically, the asteroids have played a more important role in evolutionary development than previously thought.More pertinent is the question of cosmic impacts on the rise and fall of mankind’s ancient civilisations. Is there any evidence backing up the stories of ancient apocalypse and hell fire from the sky that are preserved in mythology and some of the world’s religions?

Collapse of Civilisation

...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup.

– An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 BCE

Biblical stories, apocalyptic visions, ancient art and scientific data all seem to intersect at around 2350 BCE, when one or more catastrophic events wiped out several advanced societies in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Archaeological findings show that in the space of a few centuries, many sophisticated civilisations disappeared. The Old Kingdom in Egypt fell into ruin. The Akkadian culture of Iraq, thought to be the world’s first empire, collapsed.

Around the same time apocalyptic writings appeared. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the fire, brimstone and flood of possibly real, not mythical, events. Omens predicting the Akkadian collapse preserve a record that “many stars were falling from the sky.” The “Curse of Akkad,” dated to about 2200 BCE, speaks of “flaming potsherds raining from the sky.”

In 1650, the Irish Archbishop James Ussher mapped out the chronology of the Bible – a feat that included stringing together all the “begats” to count generations – and put Noah’s great flood at 2349 BCE.

All coincidence? A number of scientists don’t think so.

Mounting hard evidence collected from tree rings, soil layers and even dust that long ago settled to the ocean floor indicates there were widespread environmental nightmares in the Near East during this period: Abrupt cooling of the climate, sudden floods and surges from the seas, huge earthquakes.

In 1999 geologist Dr. Sharad Master spotted a 3-kilometre-wide crater in southern Iraq after studying satellite images. Scientists now believe this circular depression bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater, one that caused devastating fires and flooding. They are now attempting to date the time of the impact, with some of the main researchers estimating an age of around 6,000 years – placing it in the close vicinity of the sudden decline in Middle East civilisation around 2300 BCE.

Mike Baillie, professor of palaeoecology at Queens University in Belfast and author of Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets, figures it would have taken just a few bad years to destroy societies.

Even a single comet impact large enough to have created the Iraqi crater, “would have caused a mini nuclear winter with failed harvests and famine, bringing down any agriculture based populations which can survive only as long as their stored food reserves,” Baillie says. “So any environmental downturn lasting longer than about three years tends to bring down civilisations.”

Professor Mike Baillie is an authority on dendrochronology, the science of studying tree growth rings. His decades long collaborative effort with many scientists has developed a worldwide record of climate modulated, annual tree growth as recorded in tree growth rings. That effort has produced a reliable timeline from the present back to several thousand years BCE.

Occasionally environmental conditions are so extreme that trees all over the world are affected. Certain of these patterns imply weather conditions leading to local or worldwide catastrophes, including crop failures, famine and flooding.

As described in Exodus to Arthur, the dates linked to extreme events are: 3195 BCE, 2354 BCE, 1628 BCE, 1159 BCE, 207 BCE, 44 BCE, and 540 CE.

The significance of the date 2354 BCE has been noted. The other date to stand out is 540 CE, with the extreme weather events actually starting in 536 CE.

Until recently, historians had little notion dramatic climatic events had occurred. The accounts left by contemporary observers were poorly understood and overshadowed by later historical events. In fact, those later events, it turns out, may have been caused, directly or indirectly, by the weather of the time.

The Praetorian Prefect Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, who lived between 490 and 585 CE, wrote a letter documenting the conditions. “All of us are observing, as it were, a blue coloured sun; we marvel at bodies which cast no mid-day shadow, and at that strength of intensest heat reaching extreme and dull tepidity... So we have had a winter without storms, spring without mildness, summer without heat... The seasons have changed by failing to change; and what used to be achieved by mingled rains cannot be gained from dryness only.”

In the wake of this inexplicable darkness, crops failed and famine struck. Then a new disease swept across the entire continent of Eurasia: bubonic plague. It ravaged Europe over the course of the next century, reducing the population of the Roman empire by a third, killing four-fifths of the citizens of Constantinople, reaching as far east as China and as far northwest as Great Britain.

Other reports about the weather conditions from Byzantine and Constantinople record the same environmental phenomena such as dry fog, darkness, cold, drought, and famine.In 1984, Mike Baillie proposed that the climatic event of 536 CE (and by extension, all six of the others) could have been caused by “an asteroid, a comet, cometary fragment(s), or cosmic swarms.”

Perhaps one of the most fascinating and well researched theories is offered by authors Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas in their book Uriel's Machine: The Prehistoric Technology That Survived The Flood.

They present recent geological evidence showing that in 7640 BCE Earth was hit by seven comet fragments causing gigantic tidal waves. These findings are derived from the work of Austrian geologists Alexander and Edith Tollmann of Vienna University's Geological Institute.

By combining evidence from various disciplines (including the global distribution of tektites and a study of worldwide myths and legends), the Tollmanns propose that a comet approached the Earth from the south-east and fragmented into seven pieces which fell subsequently into the oceans causing mass destruction on all continents. One piece is believed to have landed in the North Atlantic, while another is considered to have fallen into “the Central Atlantic south of the Azores” creating a direct hit on “Atlantis”.

According to the authors of Uriel's Machine, there is a Masonic tradition that the biblical character Enoch constructed a machine to predict comets on an Earth collision course. They believe the ancient Book of Enoch describes how this machine should be constructed, and how this secret technology has been preserved since ancient times in Freemasonic lore.

ConclusionThe fall of ancient civilisations may now come to be viewed not as a failure of social engineering or political might but rather the product of climate change and, possibly, heavenly happenstance.

The Bible and other ancient texts have kept alive the memory of ancient catastrophes whose scientific analysis and understanding might now be vital for the protection of our own civilisations from future impacts.

These concerns are probably why the European Space Agency’s chief scientist wants a “Noah’s Ark” on the Moon, in case life on Earth is wiped out by an asteroid or nuclear holocaust.“If there were a catastrophic collision on Earth or a nuclear war, you could place some samples of Earth’s biosphere, including humans, [on the Moon],” said Dr. Bernard Foing. “You could repopulate the Earth afterwards, like a Noah’s Ark.”

At this point, only two things are certain: The Earth could be hit at any moment by a roving asteroid or comet, and we will be hit, again, unless something is done to prevent it.

Jason Jeffrey holds an interest in a wide range of subjects including geopolitics, the "New World Order", Big Brother, suppressed technology, psychic/spiritual development, ancient civilisations and esotericism.

He can be contacted at:

jasonjeffrey33@yahoo.com.au© Copyright New Dawn Magazine,

[link to www.newdawnmagazine.com.] Permission granted to freely distribute this article for non-commercial purposes if unedited and copied in full, including this notice.

[link to www.newdawnmagazine.com]

Alternative History of the Holocene.

As my readers know, I am presenting an alternative history of the Holocene that is radically different than that ascribed to by everyone else. It is my expectation that this alternative history will require much of a generation to pass before it is actually accepted into the mainstream.

Fifteen years ago, it was very obvious to me that the Pacific coastal route was a major highway for human migration into the Americas. I live there, after all. It is only now that we are seeing rising acceptance of this idea. Also, the archeologists are now digging deeper than the Clovis record and are actually finding the necessary evidence.

Let us discuss the idea of archeological evidence. One of the poorly understood aspects of such evidence is the input distribution curve. Modest reflection tells us that the input curve is not very likely to match the output curve. What does this mean? It means that a culture can occupy a river valley for 10,000 years and that all evidence of their passing will be recycled by the meandering river bed for the duration leaving only a scattered location or two to interpret. A sampling of this remaining evidence cannot be expected to tell us very much at all about the real history of this occupation and most critically, the fall off in evidence as we retreat in time is naturally precipitous.

We have the example of Monte Verde which is telling us that humanity was in all the Americas for most of 50,000 years. And why not? Our problem is that we have only one or two such sites, while we have many more recent sites. But this is to be expected. What is important is to confirm the antiquity of mankind in the Americas or ignore every piece of cracked stone that may be a human artifact in the Americas while accepting such in the rest of the world.

We now have the important Topper site in North Carolina receiving the same treatment. It is already a very important Clovis site that confirms the meteoric extinction event of 12900 BCE. It also revealed much deeper strata that gave up radiocarbon readings of 50,000 years for charcoal associated with apparent human occupation.

I have had my eyes open for evidence of this nature for many years and it is nice to see it been slowly dug up. And let us not blame the archeologists for a lack of insight. They were far too few and had far too much reputation vested in bad ideas for this to be easily changed. And everyone wants that scant piece of evidence interpreted.

When I reconstructed Bronze Age mathematics, I understood that the measuring stick used by builders of the pyramids needed to have specific marks on the back. When one of these sticks became available for me to inspect, I was electrified to find those marks exactly were they should be.

The same was true when it was revealed that the Paleolithic coastal natives of Eastern Siberia had the best developed upper bodies ever seen for their kayaks.

These alternative historical interpretations continue to accrete new and compelling evidence. They are clearly not bad ideas.

Returning to the Holocene, we have a world utterly changed by the 12900 BCE crustal shift. Prior to this event, the temperate zone was locked in a climate regime that was dominated by the polar ice caps and produced temperature ranges much broader than to day and inimical to any form of stable crop production. It could only support a hunter gatherer society.

The regions of the world that could have evolved an antique civilization were constrained to SE Asia, India, Africa and the Amazon. So far though, our evidence is strictly Paleolithic from typically highland regions. Since modern humanity arose around 70,000 years ago and had sixty thousand years to establish antique civilizations not unlike those of the Maya and Mesopotamia in any convenient river bottom, it is a good surmise that these were all obliterated in 12900 BCE and their littorals flooded out as the sea levels rose from melting ice.

There is no evidence whatsoever to suppose that such a hypothetical population achieved a culture any more sophisticated than that of an advanced stone and wood based society. This is assured by the pervasiveness of surrounding Paleolithic culture.

After the event known as the Pleistocene nonconformity, the temperate zone became hospitable with the removal of the Northern ice Cap with the concomitant 300 foot sea rise and has continued hospitable to this day. The only anomalies of mention are the drop in global heat content caused by mankind’s denuding of the Sahara and the occasional nasty 1159 BCE blip produced by the likes of Hekla.

Such blips are typically volcanic in origin and Hekla’s lasted a full twenty years. The unrecognized consequence of such an event is the establishment of a huge amount of multi year ice in the high Arctic. This sea ice is only removed very slowly in the years that follow. There is good reason to suggest that the consequence of the little ice age was a slow recovery that has lasted two hundred years and only now is showing signs of fully abating.

Thus revegetating the Sahara and the Middle East is a priority to finish the job that nature is trying to complete and protect. The added global heat will allow us to recover far more quickly from the next Hekla style event. And the crust will never move again unless plate tectonics shifts Antarctica fifteen degrees or lifts the Arctic sea bed starting a new ice cap. By then we should have terraformed Venus and not care too much.

I have roughly sketched a history that included ample Bronze Age trading ending abruptly with Hekla and most certainly saw the rise and fall of many organized cultures. Many of those cultures left no stonework to mark their passing. In the Amazon we have a unique man made soil to indicate a population of millions. Without that there is nothing. We will find it necessary to err on the side of the large populations wherever possible.

Hekla's Tsunami and Atlantis

And if yesterdays posting were not enough we have this item which even gives us a firm description of the 1159 event. It confirms the existence of a major tsunami on the west coast of Scotland.

This same tsunami traveled south parallel to the Iberian coast and hit the Moroccan Coast squarely. Look at a map. Much of this energy would also funnel toward the strait of Gibraltar, even if only as tangential effect. An additional funneling effect would cause a massive energy release into the mouth of the river which is naturally funneled.

Quite honestly, this was one dumb place to build a sea level city. It is quite likely that the city was built on a large delta island and after the tsunami; the shallow coastal plain was converted into a mud plain which is still intact.

This tells us the size of the event, and a casual look at a map immediately confirms our worst fears regarding the particular river mouth.

What I find most astounding, having followed the debate on Atlantis since I was a teenager, is the fact that the report of Plato is completely trustworthy. I read way too many attempts to relocate and modify by questioning the accuracy of the report. In retrospect, scholars should have asked only two questions. Were the scholars of Egypt five hundred years earlier capable of recording momentous recent history and was Plato smart enough to get it right? Of course they were.

The big news is that Athens was well founded well back in the Bronze Age if it could sustain a war against Atlantis just before 1159 BCE. This also puts the Homeric literature back before Atlantis rose to dominate its culture and also explains its survival.

I personally anticipate that we have located less than ten percent of all urban centers associated with the Bronze Age in both Europe and the Middle East. This has severely clouded our understanding of the actual robustness of this world. And my earlier postings have made clear that the population of the Americas was equally robust.

I also forget that I have at least partially appreciated the depth of the European Bronze Age for over twenty years and have anticipated many of the discoveries as they emerge. Why do you think I jumped on terra preta? I knew they had to be there. My readers are unlikely to have any of this background.

First though, the manufacture of bronze requires a large central economic base to properly sustain itself as compared to iron. This existed for over two thousand years and finally ended in 1159 BCE. The value of copper was that of currency during this era. Homer makes that very clear as does the fact that ore grading a mere eight pounds to the ton was mined in Ireland. That alone explains the mining of ores grading a hundred pounds or more to the ton in Lake Superior country and in Bolivia. And yes, the infrastructure is emerging compared to what was to hand twenty years ago. Archeology is slowly catching up.

Atlantis was the natural choke point for this trade and industry as the same area was for the conquistadors. A large city there, drawing adventurers from both the northern European littoral and the Mediterranean littoral could organize fleets to dominate both at will. The historical evidence suggests that they were locked into a battle to cease control of Egypt in 1159 BCE and most certainly would ultimately have won as did the Romans a thousand years later.

The foundations have now been located and they match the description of Plato. Read yesterday’s post.

I personally admit that I never dreamed this city state could be other than as an exaggeration of something else. And the history described seemed fabulous in light of the accepted backwardness. I also was Greek centric in my thinking as I had to be. To find it sitting in the mud right were Plato said it was with floor plan intact is a miracle.

Now we need to convince the historians of the historicity of the Bronze Age Atlantic trading empire of Atlantis with a history that was at least a thousand years old in 1159 BCE. It was the collapse of the Bronze Age itself that allowed no successor state to take its place, The Atlantic littoral fell into a deep sleep that only truly ended with the Romans.

It is also heartbreaking to know that two thousand years of the histories of many coterminous organized nations is totally lost.



21 May 2006

The impact of a volcanic eruption to prehistoric Scotland

Mount Hekla is one of Iceland's most active volcanoes. It was known to islanders as the "Gateway to Hell" - with good reason. When it erupted in 1159 BCE the effects were felt hundreds of miles away. In Scotland the whole of the west coast was devastated. A sulphuric cloud of ash and acid rain fell on the land, a tsunami raced across the sea and the sun was hidden for years. Such an event immediately changed the lives of the inhabitants of what we now call Scotland and may well have permanently changed their way of life.

Alistair Moffat, author of Before Scotland, has no doubt that when Hekla blew, the west coast inhabitants must have heard the boom and panicked. Moffat thinks they would have been in no doubt that the god's were angry. The eruption would have been heralded with ferocious electrical storms and the weather would have changed. These people, who we think lived by gathering food from the sea, would have seen their livelihood disappear. The sea changed, crops would have failed and afterwards, for a generation, there was no summer. "We know it happened because of dendochronology. By measuring tree rings in ancient trees you can see that it was a climate-changing event. It shows that for 18 to 20 years there were no summers."

Faced with this, Moffat maintains that the people would have had little choice. They must have moved, quitting the populous west coast and moving east."My own view is that people moved to avoid the anger of the gods," says Moffat. This sudden influx of people moving east resulted in, according to Moffat, a change from a hunter-gatherer society into a much more warrior-like one. "Archaeological records support this. There were more swords and less ploughshares found – a crude way of putting it. The decorative jewellery [from this time] too speaks of a warrior elite." Moffat believes that the pressure for land led to the creation of what he describes as a "iron warlords" – people who won their honour and wealth through battle and protecting land.

Where do they get this? Anyone on the west side died unless they were extraordinarily lucky and the restoration of agriculture was at least a generation away. The east coast was spared but swiftly impoverished which explains a return to barbarism. And hunter gatherers do not use plowshares.

It is possible that people's religious lives also changed in reaction to the cataclysmic events after Hekla. Moffat believes that people in prehistoric Scotland started to worship by water hoping to propitiate the gods who could command the seas. This worship took the form of placing expensive goods in watery or boggy places. "These objects were items of value," explains Moffat. It's like us throwing bars of gold into the water." Nowhere is this more evident than in Duddingston Loch, Edinburgh. In 1778 a massive find of 53 late Bronze Age weapons were dredged from the loch. Moffat believes they were put there during a ritual. And who can blame these people for trying to get on the right side of these gods whom they thought had such power.

Source: The Scotsman (18 May 2006)

I hate to be hard on anyone but the only reason 53 swords end up in a loch is that the damn boat sank.

The Baltic was surely uninhabitable after this and that explains the sharp movement south of Nordic peoples about this time.

Primacy of Volcanism

I think that considering our investigations over the past year, that it is now time to attempt a finding about the climate of the Northern Hemisphere that conforms to the data that we have. This is not a finding on the actual validity of the currently fashionable CO2 global warming conjecture, for which direct evidence remains unconvincing.

Left undisturbed, the atmospheric heat content of the Northern Hemisphere will rise and fall in response to Solar variation which is postulated to vary over a two degree spread (at the moment by circular reasoning) and in equilibrium with the polar sea ice. We have been living in an era reaching the top of the range and if uninterrupted will now swiftly dispose of all the long term sea ice.

This regime can be and has been disturbed by volcanism, ranging from a couple of years to the 1159 BCE catastrophe extreme which blocked summer growth for eighteen years and appears to have collapsed the European Bronze Age culture and destroyed Atlantis.

It is my conjecture that the cause of major cooling is occasional volcanism and that it will be possible to link the global tree ring data for the past 10,000 years to individual major volcanic events. This is not a new conjecture, but my position is that it is now the strongest.

This also places the little ice age in its proper perspective. It was a sustained solar minimum and informs us of the worst that can be delivered from that quarter. The question remains as to whether there was a major volcanic event that initially worsened the effect. I do not think that such would have been missed. These events have to be big and messy and they do fill the atmosphere with dust somewhere. Confusing the issue is the claim that there was an increase in volcanic activity at the time, but this likely reflects the age of exploration and the attendant increase in eyeballs.

We can make this finding because of the apparent power of the volcanic mechanism as compared to all other mechanisms that have been trotted out. Solar variation is only good for gradual movement in either direction within the proscribed two degree range.

Ocean currents are also looking like also-rans because of their vast stability and that impact on the atmosphere is at best a surface effect that acts as a stabilizing heat sink.

None of these are contenders for an eighteen year long crop failure.

What I have just said about the obvious variables, also applies to novel hypothesis such as the CO2 idea. Whatever its merits, it is simply subsumed in the background noise that currently includes a global temperature recovery to the optimum.

The important question to ask was always to ask what caused the temperature to precipitously decline from time to time.

Right now, I have learned to respect the inherent stability of the global weather regime and its power to make real adjustments to the overall climate. I also find that the two hemispheres are much more independent of each other that I would ever have surmised. I would like to discover a strong atmospheric mechanism for shifting heat from the north to the south.

It is within our technical capabilities to establish a tree ring data set back to the Pleistocene Nonconformity and also link both northern and southern sets to the ice core data. It is a challenge well worth achieving, knowing that quality will persistently improve as it has over the past decades.

The Holocene record begins with the geological event that ended a million year Panama induced northern ice age and is so far clearly punctuated by one major volcanic event that lasted twenty years. Uncovering the volcanic causation of cooling events will be at least a dated foundation of global history of the Holocene and will allow archeology to hang their discoveries on a supporting historic framework. This will also provide the necessary data to prove up the conjecture beyond any reasonable doubt by supplying a data set large enough to apply statistical tests.

This item helps underline the wide reaching impact of Icelandic Volcanism.

Icelandic volcanic eruption caused 18th century Egyptian famine

Washington, Feb 09: A study by three scientists from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and a collaborator from the University of Edinburth, Scotland have found that an a volcanic eruption that killed around 9000 people in Iceland in the late 18th century, brought a famine to Egypt that reduced the population of the Nile Valley by a sixth.

The scientists used a computer model developed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies to trace atmospheric changes that followed the 1783 eruption of Laki in southern Iceland back to their point of origin and establish linkage between high-latitude eruptions and the water supply in North Africa.

"Our findings may help us improve predictions of climate response following the next strong high-latitude eruption, specifically concerning changes in temperature and precipitation. Given the sensitivity of these arid regions to reductions in rainfall, our predictions may ultimately allow society time to plan for the consequences and save lives,” said Rutgers researcher Luke Oman, first author of the study.

He said while it was known that eruptions of volcanoes in the tropics produced warmer winters in the northern hemisphere, the new study had demonstrated for the first time that volcanic influences can also flow north to south, generating an array of repercussions, including both hot and cold weather.

He said the "new evidence, from both observations and climate model simulations" showed that high-latitude eruptions had altered northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation in the summer following, with impacts extending deep into the tropics.

Historical records show that in June 1783, the Laki volcano began a series of eruptions, regarded as the largest at high-latitude in the last 1,000 years. The eruptions produced three cubic miles of lava and more than 100 million tons of sulphur dioxide and toxic gases, killing vegetation, livestock and people.

These eruptions were followed by a drought in a swath across northern Africa, producing a very low flow in the Nile. Laki's far-flung effects were chronicled by the French scholar Constantin Volney and his friend Benjamin Franklin.

"The annual Nile inundation of 1783 was not sufficient, great part of the lands therefore could not be sown for want of being watered, and another part was in the same predicament for want of seed. In 1784, the Nile again did not rise to the favourable height, and the dearth immediately became excessive. Soon after the end of November, the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as the plague," wrote Volney in his chronicles.

“In the northern hemisphere, the summer of 1783 was chilly – the coldest in at least 500 years in some locations, according to tree ring data. Sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere kept the warmth of the sun from the Earth's surface,” Volney added.

Oman said their study showed that significant warming had occurred in the region west to east across Africa to the southern Arabian Peninsula and on to India during the summer of 1783.

“With little or no monsoon, there were no clouds to bring rain for the rivers or shield the surface from evaporation. Little or no rain, no irrigating floods, no crops and no food – all conspired to bring about the situation Volney described, and all were traceable back to Laki,” Oman added.

The findings were published in the September 30 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters, and now features online at NASA’s website.