Steven Robbins on Titicaca's Recent Uplift

This item was written a couple of years back.  What is important is the part underlined.  After that we get an eccentric interpretation and historical reconstruction lacking a convincing scientific basis.

What is real is the impossible reality of the seaport in the High Andes and the Pleistocene strata buried in the Himalayas.  This and much else in terms of geological evidence continue to be outright ignored.  In fact there is massive evidence that these points are not even particularly unique.

Yet this is the first time that I have seen the argument for recent mountain building taking place around 12.900 years ago fully spelled out outside my own writing in the Pleistocene Nonconformity in particular.

I get everything I want without destroying Earth by impacting the crust with a comet.  The crust lets go and shifts thirty degrees before been halted.  Two equatorial zones slide into natural compression zones and two other zones must subside (Gulf of Mexico and south Indian Ocean).

Beyond this those ocean fossils will have organic content and can be aged with carbon 14 testing.  Those directly associated with docks should be.

Carbon 14 work has been done on more recent habitation zones but I see no indication of deeper work or of working with the shells.

None of that matters except we have convincing evidence that sea bottom material rose two miles.  That is the fact that must be addressed.  It is bigfoot walking into a doctor’s office.

Exploring the True Story of the Events of 10,000 B.C.By Stephen Robbins, Ph.D.

http://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/2008/11/01/the-place-that-mocks-science/

THE PLACE THAT MOCKS SCIENCE

Twelve miles south of Lake Titicaca, the ruins of the ancient of city of Tiahuanaco speak in eloquent silence. Due to the alignments of the city’s massive observatory, the Kalasasaya, the archeoastronomer Rolf Müller argued that the city had been constructed in 15,000 B.C. Its massive stone docks are ringed with ocean fossils. The city was a seaport. It rests today, miles from any water, let alone the sea, on an Andean plateau, 13,300 feet above sea level. Archaeolo­gists vaguely wonder how and why the city, with its huge, 400-ton dressed stones, was built at this elevation. In inim­itable archaeological style, it was once considered a ceremonial-only “ritual city,” as if the primitive peoples of archae­ologists’ prehistory had the time and energy to do this. Now the city is just not considered, for Tiahuanaco mocks the academic community: Your entire consensus on the prehistory of this planet is wrong.

A little-understood feature of geological understanding is that virtually every mountain range on the planet rose “at the end of the Pleistocene (12,000 to 13,000 years ago).” All the mountains of the world belong to either of two great systems—the Circum-Pacific or the Alpine-Himalayan. When the great plate of the Indian subcontinent moved far enough north to contact the Eurasian plate, the two compressed and folded, forming the immensely high Hima­layas, nowhere lower than 24,000 feet. The Kashmir valley rose 6,000 feet simultaneously. The process can be dated precisely—the valley contained Pleistocene fossils, and the Himalayas were folded over Pleistocene gravel beds. The Pir Panjals, part of the western Himalayas, and the rugged, soaring Kailas rose at the same time. To the west, the Afri­can plate moved north as well, up-folding the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Atlas range. The highest Alpine peaks reach 15,000 feet, and the uplift of the original 2,000-feet-high north Italian hills was another 13,000 feet. There is little erosion on these peaks; they are recent creations. A recent academic study breathlessly announced the “surprising discovery” that the Andes rose “quickly,” over the course of three million years, beginning only seven million years ago. For this theory, Tiahuanaco emits a sigh.

All these processes were linked. They occurred at the “end of the Pleistocene.” It is not a risky deduction to as­sume that at the end of the Pleistocene, Tiahuanaco left its place by the sea forever, accompanied by the rest of the Andes. It was not alone. Something vast took place at the end of the Pleistocene, something that required enormous forces.

10,000 B.C.—Not a Good Time

It is “Journey to 10,000 B.C.” on the History Channel. Several mammoths plod along in a scenario of western rock bluffs, sparse vegetation and cold during a lessening of the Ice Age, while Clovis hunters in fur skins—apparently the only level of civilization on planet archeology—chip away at their spear points. To the north is the massive Laurentide ice sheet covering much of North America and Europe to a depth of 2-4 kilometers (1.2 to 2.5 miles). It is just be­fore the Younger Dryas (the return in force of the ice) around 12,900 years ago, yes, at the “end of the Pleistocene.” Though it is clearly stated that the 20,000 lb. creatures must munch 700 pounds of feed a day, the archaeologist-consultants are apparently oblivious to the incongruity between this food requirement and the picture of the climate they present. Meanwhile, we see a fairly dumb mammoth has gotten stuck in the La Brea tar pits, a low-IQ saber-toothed tiger leaping on top of the mammoth’s back, and an intellectually challenged dire-wolf attempting the same, all contributing to the inexhaustible pile of skeletons in these tar pools. These mammoths and this Clovis civilization, along with the saber-toothed tigers, dire-wolves, bear-sized beavers and seventy other species disappeared with the beginning of the Younger Dryas. The narration first explores the comfortable, gradualist hypothesis that the drainage route from the Laurentide sheet changed from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence, causing a change in the Atlantic ocean currents sufficient to cause a ten-degree drop in world temperature and a great re-expansion of the ice. A little reluctantly, an alternative catastrophist theory is also described.

But what about those mountains?…

Historical Parameters

There is an equation to be solved, whether by one event or by several. Tiahuanaco is the first parameter to be held in mind. The second: it requires tremendous forces, applied globally, to lift world-mountains in a geological instant. The third is the menu of the mammoths. The fourth is a parameter and a problem: In theory, the great Laurentide Ice Sheet began 125,000 years ago. As Graham Hancock (Underworld) recounts brilliantly, three massive floods would occur, pouring down the Mississippi drainage basin. The first started roughly at 14,000 B.C.—close enough to be the “end of the Pleistocene.” The next was around 9,000 B.C., and the last around 5,000 B.C., effectively ending the Ice Age. This sequence was caused by the sudden collapse of ice dams restraining three huge Ice Age lakes, respective­ly, the Ontario (over 700,000 cubic kilometers released at once), then the Agassiz, and then the Ojibway. In total, these and other floods raised the world ocean 120 meters. Hancock felt these floods buried several civilizations, un­wisely parked on what was once dry land, near the sea. The great release of pressure from the ice at these times un­doubtedly caused tremendous stresses and compensations (isostacy) in the earth’s jello-like crust, inducing great earthquakes. However, no one suggests these forces could have raised the Himalayas. Nor would the form of these floods, massive as they were, correspond to the violence and duration of the events described with Noah.

The creation of this massive ice sheet, supposedly 100,000 years earlier, required the swiping of water from the world ocean to a depth of 165 meters. How can such a tremendous amount of ocean be turned to water vapor, and then ice? The fourth parameter then: to begin an Ice Age, it takes a powerful source of heat. The heat is needed to evaporate water, the water vapor to make a voluminous rain. Then and only then does freezing cold become the next necessary ingredient for ice.

The Ice Age was invented to explain the presence of “erratics.” These massive stones are found everywhere—one of 10,000 tons in New Hampshire, 13,500 tons in Ohio, big and little erratics in the Sahara, Mongolia, Uruguay, Eu­rope, slammed into the Labrador hillsides. Something moved them there. The theory of an ice sheet moving them slowly as it crept, initiated by Louis Agassiz and influentially backed by the gradualist Charles Lyell, was eventually accepted. But pesky laws of physics posed a problem—ice does not move by itself and it cannot move uphill. To solve this, a vast and high mountain range in the arctic north, from which the ice could flow, was invented. The range has never been found. Then, to account for continuing discoveries of warm weather plants and fossils, inter-glacial peri­ods began to be posited—two, then three, then four…seven. The forgotten and mythical mountains of the Arctic popped up and down like a jack-in-the-box.

It is truly a question whether the great Laurentide ice sheet actually existed before the great event that raised Tia­huanaco. The scenario we are about to view will propose that all the parameters can be accounted for by one event. I paint it as only a beginning of the kind of parametric-integration theory required. It will hold that the Laurentide did not pre-exist the event. That the first of the great Laurentide floods is thought to be around 14,000 B.C. seems proble­matic, for the scenario will imply that this first flood actually came after the “10,000 B.C.” (or so) event to be de­scribed, but our dating methodologies are less than precise (see AR #70). The first flood date could be too early—and mistaken. Something started the Ice Age; something initiated the end of the Ice Age. The “it” could be one and the same. This initial lake-release event and its timing: a fifth parameter. That there are ruins of civilizations now under the sea, there is great evidence—a sixth parameter. Does this imply a 100,000-year period available to civilization on portions of dry land, made possible only by the ice sheet? Perhaps not. Finally, a seventh parameter: something came through the solar system, wreaking havoc, and not so long ago.

“And There Was War in Heaven…”

What entered the solar system was more than a mass of supernova debris. Oxford astronomer Victor Clube and his colleague William Napier argued that a giant comet entered the system and began to fragment, causing ruin, “less than 20,000 years ago.” Brennan (The Atlantis Enigma) in a brilliant treatment I am largely following, argues rather for the source in a supernova in the constellation Vela, an event roughly 12,000 B.C., only 45 light years away. What came, he argued, was a blazing fragment of an exploded star, perhaps 100 times the volume of earth. Brennan names it Vela-F. In its path was a solar system in much different shape than it is now, a system with planets with upright axis and orbits after Newton’s own heart. The massive intruder began an assault, a warpath through the solar system. First, perhaps, it encountered a small planet in an orbit outside of Pluto today, smashing it to bits, leaving the Kuiper belt in its wake. Then, encountering Neptune, it disrupted the two moons, Triton and Nereid, leaving the strange or­bits they possess today, throwing a former Neptunian moon, Pluto, into its present position, and tilting Neptune 29 degrees. But Neptune, with its massive field, at least managed to redirect Vela-F, hurtling it towards an encounter with Uranus, speeding this planet’s rotation and knocking it on its side, leaving its rotation in the same plane as its orbit. Saturn was next. Whether the encounter created Saturn’s massive rings, with their many tiny bodies, is un­clear, but its rotation appears to have sped up, and the moon Phoebe put into a retro orbit. Jupiter, the next in line, seems unscathed, perhaps due to an orbital position at the moment located away from the fray. Vela-F hurtled on.

Before it lay what is now the asteroid belt. According to Ovenden’s refinement of Bode’s law, a Saturn-sized gas giant with a mass 90 times that of earth should have occupied this orbit, and though the material volume of the 5000+ asteroids in the belt is not commensurate with this size, a gas giant may have had little in terms of solid core. If some form of planet was there at this time, there may have been an actual collision, exploding the planet, hurtling a bombardment of debris towards its neighbors, one being Mars. There is no question that Mars was obliterated by a veritable shotgun blast of large, high velocity bodies. Over 3,000 gouged 30 kilometer-minimum craters; there were myriad smaller hits. Olympus Mons, 27 kilometers (85,500 ft) above the Mars plain, rises on the planet’s side opposite three of the largest impacts (630 km, 1000 km, 2000 km). A 4,500-mile rift, the Valles Marineris, runs four times deeper, six times wider than the Grand Canyon (Hancock, The Mars Mystery). The crust of the entire northern hemi­sphere, 3-4 kilometers in thickness, was ripped off.

But when and where?

Life on Earth in the “Ice Age”

At the time, the earth had a near vertical axis. It had and needed, I believe, no moon. The Proselenes of Greece, noted Aristotle, claimed to exist before the moon. So did the Arcadians and other peoples. The earth’s rotation was slower. Due to these conditions the world climate was balmy, nearly tropical, with virtually no seasons. There was no Ice Age, no Laurentide ice sheet. Some of the water of the world’s oceans may have been held in the atmosphere as water vapor. The oceans may have been a little lower, allowing Hancock’s now-submerged cultures. The planet sus­tained vast forests of massive trees and lush vegetation, and huge populations of large animals. In this clime, 20,000 lb. mammoths could easily order 700 pounds of food from the daily menu.

The garden of earth may not have been as perfect as it once was. Perhaps there was once an even greater concen­tration of oxygen. Why were there once dragonflies with two-foot wingspans? Why enormous brontosaurs with nos­trils scarcely enough to support a horse? This is yet another “parameter.” These questions beg answers. But at this time, the dinosaurs had already been (mostly?) extinguished, perhaps by the asteroid(s) of the K/T boundary event, though not nearly so long ago as the orthodox consensus, with its shaky dating methods, believes. But as a cataclys­mic event, this and others earlier did not have the effect on the axis or compare to what was about to come.

Tiahuanaco did not represent the only civilization at the time. There was a global civilization. The evidence is ubiquitous—the water-worn Sphinx, the underwater structures in the Pacific, the cities of the Brazilian jungle— there is no need to detail this here. Its existence was about to be so thoroughly obliterated by the forces to come that archaeologists have managed to ignore the remnants. Suffice it to say, the spectacular trail and cosmic battles of Vela-F did not go unnoticed or unrecorded. Revelations, is one example: “A wonder in heaven…A woman clothed with the sun (the star) and the moon under feet (with perhaps the moon in tow) …” Rather than a prediction, it is a recording, the ancient record of the events encompassing the end of a world civilization with its trade and commerce

– the “great city,” “destroyed in one day,” for which “the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn”—revamped in Christian style.

Earth versus Star

As the star remnant approached, its gravitational force took hold. The earth’s lithospheric shell began to fracture. The Great Rift Valley of Africa, up to 100 miles wide, extends 3,000 miles from Mozambique to Syria. The great tec­tonic plates began to move and buckle. The mountain ranges were thrust to enormous heights. Volcanoes erupted globally, rivers of lava flowed, millions of tons of hot ash began to encircle and darken the planet. The inevitable ef­fect on earth’s rotation spawned violent, global winds. Simultaneously, with the great heat of the star, the world’s oceans were boiling, evaporating, and the result: a massive, seemingly unending rain, driven by hurricane-force winds. Given the darkening of the planet, this fell as snow in the northern regions. This was the beginning of the Flood, but only the beginning. With the plate subduction and mountain raising, rivers changed course, seas began to empty. As the 1,500 mile Tien Shan range rose, the great Han Hai sea, 2,000 miles long by 700 miles wide, once in human memory occupying the Gobi basin, emptied in one enormous outpouring.

As the star moved closer, trailing an array of captured bodies and debris, even splinters of itself (the “crown of twelve stars”), a massive bombardment of projectiles ensued. The record of these strikes is in fact found in craters now being discovered (many via satellite) all over the earth, not just the Carolina Bays. The earth’s axis swung through 30 degrees, from 7 degrees in one direction to 23 degrees in the other, carrying wonderfully temperate re­gions with masses of animals towards the pole. But the most remarkable effect was yet to come.

Given the (newly acquired) tilt of the earth’s axis, the star is likely to have passed over the northern regions of the planet. Due to its gravitational field, the entire world ocean began to flow north. When the people emerged from their mountaintop cave, there was water as far as the eye could see. Perhaps the Grand Canyon is simply another great rift, but it also looks suspiciously like a very large and deep version of the Scablands of eastern Washington, themselves formed soon after this event by the bursting of an ice dam holding back Ice Age Lake Missoula.

Epilogue

Eventually, these waters would drain, interspersed with the great periodic floods from the melting ice sheet. After centuries, agriculture would begin again—always starting, appropriately, at higher altitudes—the first levels to drain. Huge herds of mammoths would be found quick-frozen in the once very temperate north. An island near Siberia would be found, appearing to be entirely composed of mammoths, cemented in a frozen mass. Caves would be found in Sicily, Crete, Malta, England, Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lebanon, Russia, China, Australia, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada, Brazil, and other locations all over the planet with intermingled masses of fragmented skele­tons of animals—hippos, rhinos, horses, sloths, mammoths, deer, bison, lions, humans, even whales and sharks— crushed and transported by the rushing waves and slammed by chance into any openings in the water’s path. The La Brea tar pits would confuse archaeologists for years with the strange stupidity of the animals deposited in-mass there. And a moon whose origin, method of capture, anomalous density, and rotational properties yet cannot be explained, would hang in the sky in precisely the correct position over the once-garden planet, gently modulating tides and sta­bilizing earth’s axis.

by dougkenyon - November 1st, 2008.
Filed under: Alternative Archeology, Featured, Stories.

Four Fish with Paul Greenberg

Four Fish with Paul Greenberg

I found Paul Greenberg ‘s book to be extremely hopeful.  The past forty years, mankind has embarked on a great enterprise to master the art and science of converting certain ideal species from the sea into domesticated food sources.  First, as is made clear here, is that we have already succeeded brilliantly.

Further more major new species will come to market for many good reasons, but mostly because they are filling market niches now still supplied by wild stock.  The wild fishery is been displaced by suitable domesticated varieties.

A tuna like product is already coming out of Hawaii.

The future will see this fine tuned and vastly expanded to where fish in its many forms will be our dominant protein.  Most of it will be served as sushi, though the recent advent of basa filets and tilapia is bringing fish water vegetarian fish to our tables as traditional processed fish and pan fried filets.  They have even mastered the art of producing good tasting fresh water fish.

Most of the expansion will be vegetarian based fish to relieve the need to mine the oceans for wild fish feed.

More importantly the wild fishery is exhausting the stocks available to industrial fisheries.  Sooner or later these will be over and the fleets will be broken up.  Attempting to stop this juggernaut has been futility.  Let it simply bankrupt itself.  We had to let that happen to the cod fishery on the Grand banks. 

Those stocks are still been clipped but it is now small time.  In time all parties may decide to form a Grand Banks Authority that sets out to optimize the whole biome. 

More hopefully, proposals to demark management zones properly enshrining ownership- and responsibilities will be established and the seas will live again in the natural abundance that they are capable of.

Some day, perhaps a young boy can go down to the creek in Mid West Ontario and hope to catch a fresh water Coho.  For that the riverside habitat needs to be fully restored throughout the watershed.  I believe it to be possible and I even know how to do it all.

Catch of the Day

By SAM SIFTON

Published: July 29, 2010

In the late fall of 2009, bluefin tuna came inshore along the New Jersey coast and began to crash the surface of the ocean, chasing bait. For days, fast, open fishing boats played run-and-gun with them across the waters near Deal and Asbury Park, not 30 miles from New York City as the gannet flies.

FOUR FISH

The Future of the Last Wild Food

By Paul Greenberg. 266 pp.

These were not giant bluefin, the 1,000-pound bullet trains so prized by the Japanese that they might sell for $100,000 or more. Those are almost gone now, as Paul Greenberg points out in his important and stimulating new book, “Four Fish,” which takes as its subject the global fisheries market and the relationship humans have with tuna, cod, sea bass and salmon. Giant bluefin tuna have been overharvested here and abroad as they travel north and south, east and west, heedless of international borders or treaties, their population hovering on the brink of total collapse.

These tuna were instead their progeny’s progeny, fish of merely 75 or 150 pounds, the shape of huge, iridescent footballs. They are graceful as ballet dancers, and as strong, some of “the wildest things in the world,” as Greenberg calls them.

A fishing guide I know well was out there and got a client close enough to a small pod of tuna to cast to it. The client got his fish, which is his own story. And a few hours later, my friend, driving north through Brooklyn with five pounds of ruby­-red tuna belly resting on ice in the back of his car, called me to ask if I had any soy sauce.

I was newly installed as the restaurant critic of The New York Times and had spent the previous few months on a surreptitious tour of some of the city’s best restaurants. I had been eating stupendously well. But nothing I had eaten that summer and fall prepared me for the taste of this tuna that late afternoon, for the intense blast of flavor and rich, creamy fattiness delivered by a cut of truly fresh otoro — supreme tuna belly, in the parlance of the sushi bar — not yet four hours old.

Nothing I had ever eaten could have. The bluefin tuna you get at restaurants, even the best ones, has been flash-frozen and thawed, is days — or weeks — old, has traveled thousands and thousands of miles. In a bite of that absolutely fresh tuna from New Jersey, I experienced a taste of truly wild food, a majestic flavor, something incredibly rare.

And as it melted on my tongue and receded into memory, I felt guilt and doubt and fear. Will my children, who demurred in eating the fish that day, ever have a chance to eat bluefin tuna? Will their children? Will anyone? Should they? What are we really to do with these fish?

Greenberg, a journalist who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, has constructed a book that, even as it lays out the grim and complicated facts of common seas ravaged by separate nations, also manages to sound a few hopeful and exciting notes about the future of fish, and with it, the future of civilizations in thrall to the bounty of the sea.

The point of the book comes down to the push and pull of our desire to eat wild fish, and the promise and fear of consuming the farmed variety. As Greenberg follows his four species, and our pursuit of them, farther and farther out into the ocean, he posits the sense of privilege we should feel in consuming wild fish, along with the necessity of aquaculture.

Along the way, Greenberg raises real-life ethical questions of the sort to haunt a diner’s dreams, the kind of questions that will not be easily answered by looking at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s seafood-watch card. In truth, he shows, there is rarely such a thing as a good wild fish for any of us to eat, at least not if all of us eat it.

Combining on-the-ground and on-the-ocean reporting from the Yukon to Greece, from the waters of Long Island Sound to the Mekong Delta, along with accounts of some stirring fishing trips, Greenberg makes a powerful argument: We must, moving forward, manage our oceans so that the fish we eat can exist both in aquacultural settings and within the ecosystems of wild oceans.

Wild fish were once everywhere, of course, in such numbers as to astound. (And still, Greenberg reports, the current global catch of wild fish measures 170 billion pounds a year, “the equivalent in weight to the entire human population of China.”) Wild fish seemed to be, as Greenberg puts it, “a crop, harvested from the sea, that magically grew itself back every year. A crop that never required planting.”

Once, Greenberg writes, as many as 100 million Atlantic salmon larvae hatched every year in the upper reaches of the Connecticut River and eventually made their way south to Long Island Sound, and north from there to Greenland before returning to the Berkshire foothills to spawn. Dams, overfishing and more dams still have taken their grim toll on their descendants. Today, every piece of Atlantic salmon you’ll find at your local supermarket or fishmonger, smoked into lox, wrapped around mock crabmeat, or lying flat and orange against crushed ice, is farmed. As Greenberg explains clearly and well, the process by which that farming is undertaken threatens the future of what wild salmon remain here and in the Pacific. The amount of wild fish needed to feed farmed salmon, the threat of farmed salmon escaping and crossbreeding with wild salmon stocks, the rise of pollution from the farms themselves — when it comes to the business of domesticating salmon, Greenberg writes, “we should have chosen something else.”

Of course we did choose something else, some of us. That fish is sea bass — branzino, as it’s mostly called on restaurant menus now — a species that once thrived in the wild along the coast of Europe, throughout the Mediterranean Sea and through the Strait of Gibraltar, along the western coasts of Portugal, Spain and France, north to England. No more, though the farmed version is a success story of ample proportions, as anyone who spends more nights than not in white-tablecloth restaurants can tell you.

Greenberg’s accounting of the 2,000-year process of learning to farm sea bass, “one that involved the efforts of ancient Roman fishermen, modern Italian poachers, French and Dutch nutritionists, a Greek marine biologist turned entrepreneur, and an Israeli endocrinologist,” reads in parts like the treatment for a Hollywood film, a toga epic in fishy smell-o-vision.

And cod? As Greenberg writes, it fueled the American economy in its early days, and good parts of the European one, too. A five-foot wooden carving of the fish hangs from the ceiling in the Massachusetts State House, to celebrate its place in the region’s history.

But industrial fishing of these tremendous and once common animals, by fishermen the world over, has led to terribly depleted stocks and closed fishing grounds — and, Greenberg reports, to a turn toward wild Alaskan pollock to fill our desire for firm, white-fleshed fish to make fish sticks and battered-fish sandwiches, and from there toward farmed Vietnamese tra and African tilapia.

These shifts, of course, come with their own nightmares and possibilities, their own showcases of human frailty in the face of commerce, greed and hunger. Greenberg’s reporting lays these out with care.

The story of the bluefin tuna, meanwhile, is one of the great tragedies of the modern age. This magnificent creature, once mostly shunned by the world’s cooks and diners for its bloody flesh unsuitable for human consumption, now teeters almost on the edge of extinction, principally because the world’s nations cannot agree to the one measure that will guarantee its future: a total ban on its commercial harvest, in all waters.

“The passion to save bluefin is as strong as the one to kill them,” Greenberg writes, “and these dual passions are often contained within the body of a single fisherman.” “Four Fish” is a marvelous exploration of that contradiction, one that is reflected in the stance and behavior of all nations that fish. It is a necessary book for anyone truly interested in what we take from the sea to eat, and how, and why.

New Laid Drumlins

If I have bone to pick here is the assumption that the layering represents something slow acting.  It makes way more sense for a summer’s melt to surge after every rainfall as gathered rainwater fills a channel flushing sediments into the drop zones first fast and then very slowly.  The sediment is constantly replaced by the continuous melting of the ice.

 

Thus a drumlin would form close to the retreating edge and be heavily layered.  As the ice rotted away the channels would open up eliminating further deposition and limiting erosion.

 

The layering is actually confirmation of their swift emergence and actual history.

 

Rain fall gathering on a glacier escapes down sinkholes and finds its way to surface material and then burrows its way out forming a river like channel.  It is quite possible that a drumlin is simply the bottom of such a vertical channel.

 

New-laid drumlins

 

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2011/01/new-laid-drumlins.html

You can find some surprising things at the bed of the glacier. Normally it is inaccessible to direct observation, but these days most glaciers are retreating. If you don’t mind waiting a bit — and glacial geomorphologists don’t really have the option — then keeping a close eye on what is emerging can be very informative.

In a paper published recently in Geology, Mark Johnson and co-authors present another surprise: nice fresh drumlins. Múlajökull is an outlet glacier, draining one of the ice caps in Iceland. Like almost every other glacier, it has been retreating. Like only a small proportion of other glaciers, it is a surging glacier — which is going to set the cat among the pigeons when we have had time to think it over and decide whether the surging is relevant. For the retreat of Múlajökull has exposed a field of drumlins.

Johnson and his co-authors were able to show that the drumlins consist of multiple layers of till, sediment carried by the glacier and deposited by a mixture of lodgement — expulsion from the moving ice — and deformation of the sediment over which the ice was flowing. The evidence suggests that each of the till layers represents a surge of the glacier. What is more, at least one of the boundaries between till layers is an erosion surface. That is, the lower layer has been truncated before the upper layer was draped over it.

This is yet another confirmation that the old question about drumlins, “Are they formed by erosion or by deposition?”, was the wrong question to ask. The answer is “Sometimes one and sometimes the other, and often (as at Múlajökull) a bit of both, with some deformation of what was there already mixed in”.

The resemblance of drumlin fields to baskets of eggs has been remarked on before. Lowland Britain is covered with them — tens of thousands of eggs. What is most interesting about the Múlajökull drumlins is that they are new-laid eggs, and the hens are still busy in the coop.

Nobody believes that the drumlins we see today in places like Great Britain and central North America have changed much since the retreating ice margins exposed them to view thousands of years ago. All the same, drumlins that are henhouse-fresh exert a powerful pull on the geomorphological and geological imagination. This is because of actualism, the ingrained principle that the present is the key to understanding the past. The likelihood is that there are lots more drumlins still forming behind the present-day retreating margin of Múlajökull, and as the authors point out we know as yet of no other drumlins that are in process of formation.

One thing that bothers me about the Múlajökull drumlins is that I have trouble seeing the multiple till layers in the photograph that is supposed to illustrate them. But among the reasons why I am not a sedimentologist is that dirt is not very photogenic, and I am prepared to go along with the authors’ interpretation of what they saw in the field. Let us take it that these drumlins are indeed layered, and let us go one step further and accept their evidence that the layers have probably formed during the successive surges of the glacier. (They come along every 15 to 20 years, short-lived advances of a couple of hundred metres, punctuating a retreat that has been going on for about 200 years.)

Does this mean that there is something special about drumlins that are shaped by surging glaciers? Surging glaciers are sufficiently uncommon, and drumlins sufficiently widespread, that it is not likely that surging behaviour is a necessity for drumlinization. It is, however, interesting, and maybe significant, that the deposition probably accompanies the surges and not the longer intervals of retreat, during which there was either erosion or at least non-deposition.

Is there, instead, significance in one or both of two observations made in the Johnson paper: that the drumlins appear to have formed very close to the ice margin, within a kilometre; and that they appear to have formed beneath crevasses that run parallel to the flow direction of the ice? The authors offer only a sketch of an argument for why these associations might be a source of insight. But drumlins have been a puzzle for more than a hundred years. More facts can only help, even if all they do is to make us confused in a deeper and richer way — but especially if they are new-laid facts.

Mortgage Swindle Thoughts

I do not know what more to say about the mortgage collapse, but this item names names and ends the fiction of Democrat innocence or even Republican tardiness.  I understood the danger itself in 1998 and watched it all then unfold without much grasp of the details.  Many others have the necessary depth to have done the same and they certainly present among the elected republicans.

In the end, a few hundred men and women will have to be tried for treason to set the system right.  That is what actually took place.

And understand something else.  The real victims are the poor and lower middle class who lost their dead end jobs and loan sharked houses.  The rest are diminished but survived well enough.

This was a financial swindle that used the vulnerable to loot the financial system itself.  It would have been better and cheaper to simply have written them all a one time check for the sum of $50,000.  Think about that.  Instead all that money is now hiding somewhere else mostly offshore.

No wonder the Russians wonder if we have gone mad.

Investigate This!

Posted by Ann Coulter on Jan 6th, 2011 and filed under Daily Mailer, FrontPage.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/01/06/investigate-this/

The Republicans are back in charge in the House of Representatives this week, and not a moment too soon!

Forget “stimulus” bills and “shovel-ready” bailouts (for public school teachers, who need shovels for what they’re teaching), the current financial crisis, which is the second Great Depression, was created slowly and methodically by Democrat hacks running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past 18 years.

As even Obama’s treasury secretary admitted in congressional hearings, “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.” And if it’s something Tim Geithner noticed, it’s probably something that’s fairly obvious.

Goo-goo liberals with federal titles pressured banks into making absurd loans to high-risk borrowers — demanding, for example, that the banks accept unemployment benefits as collateral. Then Fannie repackaged the bad loans as “prime mortgages” and sold them to banks, thus poisoning the entire financial market with hidden bad loans.

Believe it or not, the loans went belly up, banks went under, and the Democrats used taxpayer money to bail out their friends on Wall Street.

So far, Fannie and Freddie’s default on loans that should never have been made has cost the taxpayer tens of billions of dollars. Some estimates say the final cost to the taxpayer will be more than $1 trillion. To put that number in perspective, for a trillion dollars, President Obama could pass another stupid, useless stimulus package that doesn’t create a single real job.

Obama’s own Federal Housing Finance Agency reported recently that by 2014, Freddie and Fannie will cost taxpayers between $221 billion to $363 billion.

Over and over again, Republicans tried to rein in the politically correct policies being foisted on mortgage lenders by Fannie Mae, only to be met by a Praetorian Guard of Democrats howling that Republicans hated the poor.

In 2003, Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee wrote a bill to tighten the lending regulation of Fannie and Freddie. Every single Democrat on the committee voted against it.

In the House, Barney Frank angrily proclaimed that Fannie Mae was “just fine.”

Rep. William Clay, D-Mo., accused Republicans of going on a “witch hunt” against Fannie Mae and attempting a “political lynching of Franklin Raines” (which, in a game of “bad metaphor Scrabble” would have been a double word score).

Fannie was pressuring banks to write mortgages with no money down and no proof of income. What could go wrong?

In 2004, Bush’s White House Chief Economist Gregory Mankiw warned that Fannie was creating “systemic risk for our financial system.” In response, Barney Frank went to a champagne brunch with his partner “just because.”

Democrats saw nothing of concern in the Fannie debacle. Bad mortgages don’t contain sodium, do they? They don’t engage in “hate speech.” And they don’t emit carbon dioxide. There was nothing to catch a Democrat’s eye.

In 2005, when the housing bubble burst, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., introduced a bill allowing Fannie Mae to buy up even more schlock mortgages, apparently reasoning that if owning some toxic mortgages is bad, owning lots of them must be better!

He accused Republican opponents of his suicidal bill of being against affordable housing. (And that is a specific example of how liberals love the poor so much, they promoted policies to create millions more of them.)

As late as 2008, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who had received more than $133,000 in political contributions from Fannie Mae, called Fannie “fundamentally strong” and “in good shape” — which is the kind of thing the Politburo used to say about Yuri Andropov right after he died.

(Amazingly, Dodd was only the second most embarrassing Democrat to run for president in 2008, but only because John Edwards was also running that year.)

As the titanic losses were racking up, Fannie Mae’s operators, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, disguised the catastrophe by orchestrating a $5 billion accounting fraud — all the while continuing to pressure banks to make absurd, politically correct loans and denouncing Republicans as enemies of the poor.

In Gorelick’s defense, at least when she was wrecking the economy, she wasn’t able to wreck national security by building any more walls between the FBI and the CIA.

Have you ever noticed that whenever there’s a major calamity in this country, the name “Jamie Gorelick” always pops up? I think I’ll pull some articles about the Great Chicago Fire from Nexis to see if there was a “Gorelick” living on Catherine O’Leary’s block.

As Peter Schweizer points out in his magnificent book “Architects of Ruin,” which everyone should read, Enron’s accounting fraud was a paltry $567 million — and it didn’t bring down the entire financial system. Those involved in the Enron manipulations went to prison. Raines and Gorelick not only didn’t go to jail, they walked away with multimillion-dollar payouts, courtesy of the taxpayer.

(Here’s more fascinating Jamie Gorelick trivia: That giant wall she built between the FBI and the CIA, making 9/11 possible? It was financed with a risky loan from Fannie Mae.)

Under the Democrats’ 2010 “Financial Reform” bill (written by Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Goldman Sachs), Raines keeps his $90 million, Jamie Gorelick keeps her $26.4 million, and Goldman keeps its $12 billion from the AIG bailout.

Let’s get it back. Twelve billion, one hundred and sixteen point four million dollars might not sound like a lot to you, but it starts to add up.

Context Search Engine Readies Launch

This piece is from the web site mounted by the developers.  The principal is a person I have known for thirty years.  The next phase for this product is to get it up on an open site were you and I can learn to play with it.

We can treat the present class of search engines as first generation systems.  There were earlier badly limited systems before the advent of Google but google was the first that actually was seriously useful.  That was about fifteen years ago.

As an aside, the advent of google immediately made me aware of the need to create an online presence to use the new internet email systems and to locate myself uniquely.  I played around with various spelling variations of my name and came up with several prospective versions.  I discovered on googling Arclein that the only hit was a seventeenth century monk.  That was perfect for my needs.  Today google gave me over 50,000 hits, effectively still mostly related to my blog and myself.

This is a working second generation search engine and overcomes the principal difficulty with google and similar applications.  It appears able to sort out a context driven subset from the internet universe and is in the process is able to tackle complex queries.  Google is great at short simple queries but retards quickly as complexity rises.

Hopefully we will see this in launch mode rather soon.

The Correlation Search Engine

Frequently Asked Questions

    http://www.correlationconcepts.com/

Who are you people? How big are you? Where are you located? What is the company’s history?

  

Correlation Concepts is a virtual company - the Florida, USA-based research, development and sales services arm of Make Sence, Inc., which has core personnel based both in the US and internationally.  Although top level research, product architecture and sales strategy is executed only by key employees, we work with independent contractors and other corporations that provide us with all other required professional services.

While research in the technology has been on-going for more than 15 years, the initial software development was started almost 10 years ago, and active commercialization of the technology began in 2002.

 

What is a Correlation? What are N-Dimensional Queries? Is this just a different type of Search with new algorithms?

N-Dimensional Search supports those queries which are more complex and less obvious - queries that are closer to "real life human questions". For example, compare a typical search query, “pizza, Omaha” to an NDimensional Search Query: "Order 1234", "product shortages", "shipping point", "manufacturing location".

Correlation Technology and the Correlation Search Engine (CSE) utilize “correlations” which are massive networks of associated ”knowledge fragments” to “connect the dots” and establish relationships between terms, phrases, concepts or topics.  The CSE – unlike any other search engine - works by analyzing the networks of knowledge fragments to identify the documents that made the most valuable contributions to the network – because those are the documents most relevant to the query. The CSE – unlike other search engines – does not use any similarity metric, link analysis, popularity (e.g.,” everything celebrity”), or binary logic. The CSE – unlike other search engines – delivers results that mirror the asymmetry that exists in real world data.  When the CSE connects the dots, the results make intuitive sense: enter  "green tea", "life quality", "metastasize" and the CSE produces results relating to cancer; enter  "cash", "terrorist", "charities" and the CSE  produces results relating to money-laundering.

Is the CSE a Semantic Web solution?

  

No.  Rather than trying to translate human expressions  into sterile constructs to provide improved machine comprehension, the CSE extracts “knowledge fragments”  from unstructured human expression and seeks to use the machine to deliver an automated approximation of intuitive  human comprehension. Can I test the Correlation Search Engine against the open Internet?

Yes, but we are limiting tests to several "slices" of the Internet that we have pre-loaded on to our systems. Is the CSE intended for general consumer use or is the CSE an Enterprise solution?

 Both. We will be launching an advertising-based Internet Search Engine to provide consumer access to N-Dimensional Search .Our research shows that N-Dimensional Queries equate to 15-16% of all Search Engine queries - queries which are often unfulfilled and abandoned today.  Metrics indicate that these queries would be among the most highly valued queries from an advertising standpoint, so we anticipate both significant consumer surplus as well as active advertiser participation.   The Enterprise model of the CSE will support N-Dimensional Search mining knowledge fragments from corporate digital assets. The Enterprise CSE will also be adapted for use as a KCE (Knowledge Correlation Engine) by incorporating a specialization layer to exploit specific vertical market needs (e.g., SOX, ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING, RISK MANAGEMENT, etc.).

Are you selling the Correlation Search Engine directly or through distributors?

 "Presently we are commercializing the platform through domains being spun out. In some cases a domain can use the platform on an "as is" basis. In other cases, the highest and best implementation would require an extension and specialization layer to drive results.

Anyone wishing to explore the uses of the platform for any particular 
domain is encouraged to contact us directly"

How many customers do you have? Who are your partners?  Is the CSE software ready now?  

We are preparing for the first general release of the CSE Enterprise Edition within the next six weeks. 

Beyond direct entry as an N-Dimensional Search Engine provider, we are working with specific leaders in specialized Vertical Markets such as SOX, AML, Risk Management, etc.

  

Who can I talk to about Correlation Technology?

Carl Wimmer and Mark Bobick from Correlation Concepts are available to answer all your questions.  Call Carl Wimmer at 702 767-7001 and Mark Bobick at 702 882-5664.

Contact: Mark Bobick m.bobick@correlationconcepts.com          Copyright 2008 Make Sence Florida, Inc.  All Rights Reserved