Question on the theories of LaViolette, Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith

[Hans]

'The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes' - Firestone, West & Warwick-Smith.

Dr Paul LaViolette's 'Earth Under Fire'.

Can anyone give me a scientific understanding of what these two books are claiming? On another site a 'researcher' is claiming these books provide proof of a cycle of cosmic destruction which he then claims is encoded in the Giza plateau.

[astromark]

The scientific explanation you seek does not exist.
These books and the followers of this notion are those same people that claim to have found the proof that cosmic events have caused mass extinctions in the past and can be predicted into our future.
I will watch with my preconceived prejudice for other opinions...
These theories are not mine. Obviously. Maybe best found in alt theories.

[Hans]

Continuing my own research I think LaV's Earth under Fire is fringe but not so sure about the other book as I found its authors had this paper

Not sure its legimate as I'm unfamilar with 'EOS transactions' can anyone comment?

Abstract below

Author : Firestone, R.B.; West, A.; Revay, Z.; Belgya, T.; Smith, A.; and Que Hee, S.S.
Date : 2007.
Title : Evidence for a massive extraterrestrial airburst over North America 12.9 ka ago.
Publication : Eos Transactions. American Geophysical Union, Joint Assembly. May 22-25, 2007. Acapulco, Mexico.
Issue : Supplement 88(23):
Page(s) : PP41A-01.

Abstract
A carbon-rich black layer commonly referred to as a black mat, with a basal age of approximately 12.9 ka, has been identified at over 50 sites across North America1. The age of the base of the black mat coincides with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas cooling and megafaunal extinctions in North America. In situ bones of extinct mammals, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, camels, many smaller mammals and birds, and Clovis tool assemblages occur below the black mat but not within or above it. In this paper, we provide evidence for an ejecta layer at the base of the black mat from an extraterrestrial impact event 12.9 ka ago. We have investigated nine terminal Clovis-age sites in North America and a comparable site in Lommel, Belgium that are all marked by a thin, discrete layer containing varying peak abundances of (1) magnetic grains/microspherules containing iridium concentrations up to 117 ppb, (2) charcoal, (3) soot, (4) vesicular carbon spherules, (5) glass-like carbon, and (6) fullerenes enriched in 3He. This layer also extends throughout the rims of at least fifteen Carolina Bays, unique, elliptical, oriented lakes and wetlands scattered across the Atlantic Coastal Plain whose major axes point towards the Great Lakes and Canada. Microspherules, highly enriched in titanium, were found only in or near the YD boundary (YDB) layer with greatest deposition rates (35 per cm2) occurring near the Great Lakes. Magnetic grains also peak in the YDB with maximum deposition near the Great Lakes (30 mg/cm2). Magnetic grains near the Great Lakes are enriched in magnetite (4 mg/cm2) and silicates (23 mg/cm2) but contain less ilmenite/rutile (1 mg/cm2) than distant sites where ilmentite/rutile deposition ranges up to 18 mg/cm2. Analysis of the ilmenite/rutile-rich magnetic grains and microspherules indicates that they contain considerable water, up to 28 at.% hydrogen, and have TIO2/FeO, TIO2/Zr, Al2O3/FeO+MgO, CaO/Al2O3, REE/chondrite, K/Th, FeO/MnO ratios and SIO2, Na2O, K2O, Cr2O3, Ni, Co, Ir, Th, U, and other trace element abundances that are inconsistent with all terrestrial and extraterrestrial sources except for Lunar Procellarum KREEP terrain (PKT). We propose that the YDB layer is the ejecta layer from an airburst over the Laurentide Ice Sheet that deposited local, low-speed terrestrial material near the airburst site and KREEP-like, high-speed projectile material farther away, leaving little or no permanent crater. The associated blast wave and thermal pulse would have contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and destabilized the Laurentide Ice Sheet, loading the atmosphere with dust, soot, NOx, and water vapor and triggered the YD cooling.

[tusenfem]

EOS is the biweekly "newspaper" of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
The AGU organizes 2 large general assemblies every year, known as the spring and fall AGU meeting, the latter always in San Francisco in December. The abstracts of the talks and posters submitted for these conferences are published in a supplement to EOS, it used to be an abstract book that became bigger and Bigger and BIGGER, but now luckily gets published on cd-rom.

So EOS is a legit "journal" and what you quote from is an abstract for a talk or a poster that will be presented at the spring meeting in Acapulco (man I wish I could go there!).

[dryas]

There will be several talks and posters in Acapulco revealing apparently new infomation regarding the Younger Dryas (YD) Impact:

http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5...2A&maxhits=400

The lead author Firestone is a federal nuclear scientist of much distinction:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/...xtinction.html

This is a major discovery and quite "legit"!

[jmarpl]

Professor Firestone is certainly 'legitimate', extraordinarily capable in fact.
I contacted him in '02 re his Supernova notion because that had a bearing on the date of my Carolina Bay origin conjecture. His response did not impel me to continue correspondence only because I lacked sufficient information about and technical knoweldge of the complex interactions involved.

Called him this spring and mentioned the crater under the south basin of Lake Michigan in connection with asteroid impact causing a sudden climate change (it cut off the very high head of the ice stream, precipitating rapid meltback)
and the Carolina Bays, but again I had insufficient cause to pursue a discussion.

My scan last month of the abstract for the upcoming AGU Acapulco discussion led me to be doubtful of the evidence of impact-produced fires and to wonder if corroborating ice core evidence has been identified, but I've not read Firestone's "Cosmic Collisions" or other of his works, and am not qualified to judge their worth in any case..

Hopefully the AGU session will produce something useful but its very knowledgeable principals may be too constrained by limited life experence, academic tunnel vision and flawed assumptions to recognize what they see.
They are not dealing with a "major discovery" in this, it's been dicussed by many though they were not inclined to publish the speculations drawn from insufficient evidence about ocean temperature changes, wildfires, paleoclimates and impact scars. I discussed alternate causes of the Younger Dryas with my professor Hammond of U Wisconsin-Madison forty years ago, while questioning his assumption that glacial flows scoured the crater under lower Lake Michigan, and was urged to follow up on my asteroid impact scenario. Family and finances kept me busy until '96 but since then I've assembled most elements of my 'impactual geomorphology' view into a tale of more than a dozen significant impacts worldwide in the past ~50,000 years that have had dramatic effects upon several broad landscapes/populations and upon 'normal' global climate change.
I think it likely the impact that brought on the YD accomplished this far from the Midwest. But then, this is mere conjecture by a non-scientist.

j marple at carolina.net

[jmarpl]

Looks like Dryas is too busy to point out flaws in my suggestion on several Forum threads that this cool episode was precipitated by a meteorite, yes, but not an airburst over the Midwest.
But then, I've been told I'm overly sensitive and impatient, inclined to perceive a non-existing condescension by the academic world in re opinions of non-scientists regarding such matters.

I'll get to work on correcting this personality flaw while I wait with unabated breath to see how data of the Looks like Dryas is too busy to point out flaws in my suggestion on several Forum threads that his Younger Dryas namesake was ended, not precipitated, by a meteorite impact. The notion of an airburst over the Midwest is fanciful but the wildfire and megafauna extinction connexions are really really weak.

But then, I've been told I'm overly sensitive and impatient, inclined to perceive a non-existing condescension by the academic world in re opinions of non-scientists regarding such matters, so I'd best not enter into discussion with the proponents of imaginative hypotheses that conflict with my own.

I'll get right to work on correcting this personality flaw manana I await AGU revelation of the gambit that gets around obvious truths on the http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/story3.html chart.

marp

[tusenfem]

Well, I would say, why go into deep discussion right now, when the AGU meeting in Acapulco does not start until monday?

And don't expect too much of the meeting, because in general one will have 15 minutes including questions, to present work. If it is an invited talk, the amount of time might go up to 30 minutes. Meetings are just to show other scientists what you are working on a the moment. The real results will be published later in the (next) year in respectable journals.

[jmarpl]

tsf

You say; "why go into deep discussion right now, when the AGU meeting in Acapulco does not start until monday?"

I've been discussing the 'distant deep impact' notion of Carolina Bay formation with technicians of government agencies for over eight years here in the heart of the pattern of impacta dents it caused. They've accepted it as a 'logical' explanation for these features, the only one that meets all criteria set by researchers.

Seems appropriate to be pointing out here that this prime example of 'impactual geomorphology' caused by an extraterrestrial object has not yet been recognized by the undoubtedly excellent scientists who speal at AGU expositions.
I've no cause to believe they'll get it right this time, though I've provided compelling evidence to some of them.

jim marple

[jlhredshift]

Their paper available here.

News conference on You Tube here.

Of interest to me is that they set a hard boundary to the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

At the sites studied, independent radiocarbon (1) and optically
stimulated luminescence dates that tend to cluster near 13 ka were
used to establish the age of the YDB. For example, the end-Clovis
stratum (theYDB)is well dated at Murray Springs,AZ, (eight dates
averaging 10,890 14Cyr or calendar 12.92 ka) and the nearby Lehner
site (12 dates averaging 10,940 14C yr or 12.93 calendar ka). Haynes
(2) correlated the base of the black mat (the YDB) with the onset
of YD cooling, dated to 12.9 ka in the GISP2 ice core, Greenland
(see GISP2 chronology in SI Fig. 6) (18). Therefore, we have
adopted a calendar age of 12.9 0.1 ka for the YD event.
We propose that the YD event resulted from multiple ET
airbursts along with surface impacts. We further suggest that the
catastrophic effects of this ET event and associated biomass burning
led to abrupt YD cooling, contributed to the late Pleistocene
megafaunal extinction, promoted human cultural changes, and led
to immediate decline in some post-Clovis human populations (19).

If true, it calls into question a lot of the older(1960's) carbon dating of Mastodon material showing a younger age.