Crustal Shift

It has been two years since I posted a copy of my chapter on the Pleistocene Conformity and my revitalization of the crustal shift conjecture previously championed by Einstein and Hapgood back in the Fifties. It is now timely to revisit the conjecture, since I am alluding to it again and again and other developments are enhancing our understanding.

I will not outline the supporting evidence which is ample and most importantly successfully eliminates contradictions and serious overreaches in our present understanding of the possibilities of the Pleistocene transition to the Holocene. It is enough to say that it works as a thirty degree pole shift to the center of present day Hudson Bay.

What I want to revisit are the two primary objections that need to be overcome if this conjecture can survive to the next level of investigation. These objections are angular momentum and crustal slipperiness. We can deal with the issue of angular momentum first.

The thirty degree shift released a balance problem created by the then present polar ice cap regime. First off, the South Pole was in the open ocean just adjacent to the West Antarctic Polar Ice cap. That placed the present day mass on one side of the pole only and with the balance of the Antarctic shifted north and carrying much less ice. The actual ice mass was somewhat less than at present but not significantly so. It is now much better balanced and is inherently more stable as the East Antarctic sheet has since grown.

The real difficulty was presented by the Northern Polar Ice Cap. Again, the bulk of the ice buildup took place on land mostly on the North American side of the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ice accumulated during the Ice Age landed again on one side of the pole. And what an accumulation! It has since added three hundred feet to the sea level and this means that this mass also altered the globe’s angular momentum on the same side of the global axis as the South Polar Ice Cap.

The key take home point is that this build up of ice changed angular momentum significantly and sufficiently to seriously load the crust should it begin to move and likely also induced a wobble. It has been conjectured by others that it had moved twice before within the past 100,000 years. I do not see that as necessary to the success or failure of the conjecture, except that recent evidence makes the deliberate nature of the last shift highly probable and such could not have taken place without clear prior histories. It is likely that the angular momentum displacement caused by the alignment of the mass of the two ice caps created a roving crust that was naturally catastrophic and naturally drove efforts to resolve it. Again, it is suggestive but unnecessary to this discussion.

The present configuration eliminated the Northern Ice Cap and has totally stabilized the crust possibly for millions of years. This ended a clear imbalance in angular momentum that had accumulated for at least a million years and likely a lot longer than that, replacing it with a well balanced Southern Cap and an unloaded Northern Cap that is a minor fraction of its peak.

Been rid of that objection we can now deal with the more serious objection. How is it possible for the crust to move at all? I also want to observe that the clear reality of plate tectonics is not an answer either. This provides completely ironclad evidence of mass transfer from one side of a continental plate to the other side. Even allowing it to be forced by heat transfer it still must overcome viscosity on an unimaginable scale. Simply put, current explanations are at best acknowledgement of the reality of the phenomenon.

Logically, plate movement and a complete movement of the crust can only occur if it is possible for a layer to exist whose viscosity approaches zero or whose contact layer exhibits friction approaching zero. That is why plate tectonics was rejected outright for seventy years until the evidence became impossible to explain away.

This deal breaker problem became resolvable when I began to take an interest in the properties of elemental carbon. Recent discoveries regarding graphene have allowed us to become even more confident.

Fundamental to this conjecture is that carbon has the highest melting point of any element and is well above the disassociation energy of any compound. That means that unmelted carbon can be dragged down to a melt layer below all the crust yet to just above the metallic core. That layer is likely at least a hundred feet thick and perhaps a lot thicker. The depth is almost one hundred mile beneath us which is really not very much.

I describe it as molten but the bulk of it is more likely in the form of graphene, now that we know that exists. This layer does have a viscosity approaching zero. We already know that from recent work on graphene, but we also know that from our understanding of diamond pipes.

A diamond pipe rockets through the crust at about seventy miles an hour, originating from this layer. They are typically eighty to a hundred feet across and yet survive the trip. This is surely possible only because they begin as pure carbon, picking up and altering material on the way to the surface. In fact, the high carbon content is necessary in order to reach the surface, but once that motion ends, the surrounding and contained rock consumes the carbon leaving a fine distribution of carbon crystals known as diamonds.

The mere existence of diamond pipes is proof of a super slippery layer between the crust and the denser metallic core, and the lack of chemical bonding at this temperature and depth assures us that that layer is actually smooth. The mere fact that a pipe loaded with liquid carbon could penetrate the crust in about sixty minutes makes the proposition of the crust shifting a few miles an hour for a few days completely feasible until it was braked by the temporary loss of the carbon layer at the equators.

Therefore, our conjecture that the moderately unbalanced crust will respond to a nudge in the right direction appears to be well founded. That it may have happened naturally a couple of times is possible but unnecessary. That human intervention triggered it appears likely but is also unnecessary. That it shifted thirty degrees is necessary to resolve a range of logical impossibilities in the geological record.

It is worth observing that the Andes and the Himalayas are on the proper axis to have absorbed the necessary braking energy while the Gulf of Mexico may have additionally subsided. Once the conjecture is accepted then a lot of interpretive evidence will spring out at us. The safest place to be during all this was the continent of Africa.

Han Joachim Braun on Wheat Fungus

This is a red alert that warns us that a rust variety is spreading that has the ability to collapse huge sections of the global wheat crop. And as is pointed out, it has almost passed in living memory in North America. I do recall it been discussed in the fifties when it scared farmers of wheat if a better alternative existed.

The vulnerability is very real and can abruptly slash wheat harvests almost anywhere by forty to eighty percent

This reports on the emergency action now underway, but as observed, new seed stocks need time to be grown and distributed. In the meantime, let us hope that customs are now doubly vigilant, and ask anyone returning from the affected countries it they visited farms there. This time it is for real.

That it has not devastated China and India is only because Iran is suffering severe droughts.

I actually cannot see us dodging this particular bullet in the next couple of years. A weather change in Iran and an air traveler can do the rest just too easily.

Global Wheat Crop Threatened by Fungus: A Q&A with Han Joachim Braun

A new strain of a devastating fungus could impact wheat crops the world over--and scientists are scrambling to nip it in the bud
By David Biello

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=global-wheat-crop-threatened-by-fungus&sc=CAT_INNO_20090320

In 1999 agricultural researchers discovered in Uganda a new variety of stem rust—a fungus that infects wheat plants and wiped out 40 percent of U.S. wheat harvests in the 1950s. Millions of spores have spread from Uganda to neighboring Kenya and beyond to Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen, wiping out as much as 80 percent of a country's harvest. In fact, the only thing that has stopped the rust from devastating the breadbaskets of China, India and Ukraine has been several years of drought in Iran.

The world should hope for three more dry years in that region, because that's how long it will take to breed enough seeds of wheat strains that are resistant to the fungus, according to Hans Joachim Braun, director of the global wheat program at leading agricultural research institute, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico. An international symposium on the agricultural threat was held this week in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico, and ScientificAmerican.com spoke with Braun, who attended, to glean the latest developments on efforts to defeat the fungus.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What is the problem we are facing?

Ten years ago we identified a new stem rust race in Uganda—that's why it's called Ug99. More than 90 percent of the world's wheat varieties are susceptible to it. Clearly, this represents a major threat to production because, historically, stem rust was the most important wheat disease.

In the late 1950s stem rust was the first disease for which agricultural scientists developed resistant wheat strains. Resistance was so good that for 50 years, we didn't worry. Norman Borlaug [1970 Nobel Peace Prize–winner and developer of resistant wheat] saw the susceptibility to Ug99 and he rang the alert bell. The Global Rust Initiative was established then to fight stem rust on a global level.

Some 300 to 350 people involved in wheat breeding, and particularly rust resistance, gathered this week [at the international symposium] to discuss the latest progress in developing varieties resistant to stem rust.

How big is the problem?

Stem rust has been confirmed in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan and Iran. Historically, central and eastern Africa is a big center for new rust races. We know that it spreads very fast from East Africa to Asia, southern Africa, even Australia.

From our monitoring system, the rust from eastern Africa is already moving into Asia. It is already established in Iran. Then it can travel via Afghanistan to Pakistan into India and then China. That happened before in 1986.

Back then, a yellow rust race was discovered in East Africa. Within six years, it moved from there to India and caused more than a billion dollars in wheat losses, mainly in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Pakistan.

We have what is called a Rustmapper, which continuously monitors wind movements. At any time, we can look up where there is an outbreak of rust disease and check the direction in which the wind is blowing. That allows us to predict where to look for rust movement.

Based on wind direction, we've seen spores move in 72 hours from Yemen via Pakistan to India and up to China. At any point, if it rains and the spores come down, we could have a new epidemic.

Remember, there are billions of spores produced once a susceptible variety is infected, so it multiplies very fast in the right environment. They go into the air, are carried by the wind and, in a short period, infect large areas. Last year, we were lucky that Iran had a very sever drought so the rust would not be multiplying. I am sorry for Iranian farmers but it really protected the world from Ug99.

How was the yellow rust stopped?

We identified new sources of resistance and replaced susceptible varieties with new varieties. In the case of Ug99, this process is slower because resistance can only be tested in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Every wheat breeder who knows that stem rust could be a problem is sending breed lines to Kenya and Ethiopia for screening. Some 20,000 to 30,000 lines have been tested for response to this rust. The world really has to thank these two countries for making their resources available. Otherwise, we could not screen for resistance to this disease and the world would just have to wait for this disease to arrive.

What has the testing found so far?

We have found wheat that is resistant to the fungus. This [symposium] brings rust researchers together so they can exchange what new genes are available to fight the infection. Most of the rust-resistant genes are not effective anymore.

Generally, rust resistance is based on one gene. Either the plant is resistant or susceptible. A spore lands on the surface of the leaf. The spore germinates. The plant responds [if it's resistant]. The cells that the spore tries to open kill themselves and the spore cannot grow and also dies. This is a typical resistance reaction.

But it only takes one mutation on the rust side, and then it can overcome this resistance. Such resistance genes typically last for four or five years. Then nature produces a mutant that can overcome this resistance.

CIMMYT has developed another approach where we try to bring together four or five minor genes. None of these individual genes provide total resistance or immunity but each reduces the infection by 15 to 20 percent. If you bring four or five genes like that together, you can bring the level of resistance very high. Then a mutation that overcomes one gene doesn't cause as much of a problem.

That worked with leaf rust. We are now producing lines for stem rust that combine such minor genes. We have identified such lines in Kenya, and USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] has provided funds for seed production in countries such as Ethiopia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The multiplication of resistant varieties is well underway.

How vulnerable are countries like Australia, Canada, the U.S. and Ukraine, which provide the bulk of the world's wheat?

They are as vulnerable as the rest of the world. Seventy-five percent of the varieties in the U.S. are susceptible. Historically, stem rust was the major disease in Australia, U.S., Canada and Ukraine. Their [temperate] environments allow the rust to move fast.

Imagine a tourist in a wheat field in Kenya. Millions of spores cling to his trousers and shoes. He doesn't wash them and goes into a wheat field that is ready to be infected. You only need a few spores.

The most dangerous transmission is through people. A very virulent yellow rust was introduced to Australia by a farmer who visited Europe.

Will farmers plant these new strains?

We must provide farmers with varieties that are better than what they currently grow. Farmers haven't seen stem rust for 50 years so they will just ignore [the threat]. We have to have strains with 10 percent higher yield, otherwise they won't change.

Will these new strains offer benefits for other problems, like drought?

We cannot develop a cultivar only for one specific trait. They have to have a package. That package includes drought tolerance, yield, ability to withstand nutrient deficiency, and resistance to a wide spectrum of disease.

I am concerned about investment in wheat research. The private sector has limited interest in investing in wheat. Most wheat research is done by public institutions. But we could have similar progress in wheat like genetically modified cotton, canola and soy. Five or six big international companies invest more than a billion dollars each year in maize research. That's twice as much as the budget of all [public sector] international agricultural research centers.

Transgenic wheat [which incorporates modified or imported genes] would be interesting. But we're not allowed to use it. No country has released a genetically modified wheat. If we could use genetic modification, that would be a new road to address production constraints in wheat.

Will the new cultivars be susceptible to some new form of rust?

If we have only major genes the [new strains] will not last very long, that's why [CIMMYT] is pushing this minor-gene, or durable-gene, resistance concept. Bring together four or five genes [where] each has a smaller effect. [Combine] all five [of these] genes, each of which provides 20 percent resistance, and you may have zero infection. This resistance will last much longer than [that] based on only one gene.

Have farmers started planting the new strains?

We did an emergency multiplication last summertime. We made 3.5 tons of a total of 12 resistant lines. This seed has been sent to the six countries I mentioned earlier, plus Turkey. The multiplication is going well. The lines will produce all together several hundred tons of seed in these countries.

Larger areas will be planted this and next fall, then the year after that [the seed will] also be given to farmers. What we really need, what we really pray for, is another three to four years where the environment is not conducive to a stem rust epidemic. Then we would have sufficient varieties out there to avoid disaster.

Indian Slave Trade

Continuing my reading of Native Roots has opened up another shocker that is certainly a surprise to my readers as well. Settlement of the Atlantic coast was substantially supported by slave trading of American Indians every bit as egregious as that of the African trade. The coastal tribes were depopulated and shipped south into the sugar plantations of the Caribbean from the beginning. Early wars of colonial aggression were ultimately slave raids. It only died down perhaps as superior African slaves took over the market.

This was the nature of the seventeenth century Atlantic economy. That it has been well hidden from our schoolbooks and our historical understanding is an understatement. It also explains the demographic decline of the Eastern Indian Tribes a lot better than the hand wave of disease. The run of an epidemic was always brief and pretty final. Yet healthy tribes operated in the East into the nineteenth century and their final expulsion.

They did not die out slowly. The dying took place often long before Europeans even showed up and what the colonists were dealing with were those who had survived the worst and were actually on equal terms in disease resistance. Recall that Europeans got decimated by smallpox all through this era. And warfare claims only young men, because the women are taken into slavery at worst.

And there is our answer. The slave trade sold the men at least into the Caribbean for hard labour. More likely the women served as slaves on the coast because they were less likely able to escape. Their offspring would be predominantly hybrid stock with the associated vigor and the ready ability to step outside their visible racial designation.

Was this deliberate? Of course it was. You only have to read the treatment practiced on the Indians in California long since institutionalized to understand that the preferred offspring of an enslaved people were a hybrid stock. It is just that it is not discussed or committed to paper in contemporary sources, and so we have been allowed to forget what really happened over and over again.

It is difficult to piece the history of tens of millions of human beings lost to history and touched on by a mere handful of observers, who at best saw often only a village or two. To imagine from that a civilization of millions is to interpret modern North America from a brief visit to a Newfoundland out port. Archeology is slowly showing us a bit of the true histories of the Americas and allowing us to accept that our contact interrupted the lives of tens of millions.

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.

Subsistence Charcoal

I must say that the terra preta group on bionet.org has continued to steadily increase its traffic. I have recently been bombarded with nearly 40 messages a day and I have over 1000 messages that have gone unread. Most of the action has been around various efforts to pursue aspects of pyrolysis in a modern setting.

I have seen no alternative to the corn culture earthen kiln approach that I have proposed a few months back.

Since then we have seen film on the production of subsistence charcoal in Africa and it is very instructive. Firstly, in the modern world, everyone can get their hands on an axe and a simple saw. This makes it easy to hack everything down and to cut it up. Making this woody waste into charcoal is quite another matter.

It fails to pack well but the charcoalers are still able to create pits and to throw dirt on the burning pile to suppress the flames. This obviously will produce some charcoal, but the yield must be terrible. what is clear though is that the produced wood charcoal is poorly charcoaled at best. We see people carrying bundles of charred sticks and bulky bags of char. It makes great fuel. It is almost impossible to use as a soil additive.

Whatever lingering thoughts that I may have had in support of the charcoaling of wood for soil remediation can be laid to rest. Only a modern industrial grade charcoaler might be able to produce suitable material.

Subsistence farmers could not even begin to make wood waste work for them. They needed a helper crop. That was provided in the form of corn to the Amazon Indians.

I also think that wood charcoal was always too valuable as a fuel as is true today in Africa, to ever be crushed and folded into the seedbed. In fact a man load of charcoal probably weighs a hundred pounds and needs be carried miles back to town. That one hundred pounds needed about one ton of source material to be cut down and stacked and covered with dirt while burning. Maybe they did twice as good in terms of yield. However it worked, that man load of charcoal took two days of labor input at the least.

There is simply no way that such a production model could be used to produce terra preta. And the Indians did not have steel tools.