Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!

Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction! 

Laura Knight-Jadczyk & Henry See

Signs of the Times

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:59 EDT

©n/a

Are we past our due date?

Often, some of the most important news comes from local papers,
stories that don't make it up the feeding chain and onto the news wires
or major newspapers or nightly network news. It can be news that at
first glance wouldn't appear to have a national or international
impact. Second glance, and a good memory, can reveal that the impact
may well be quite significant.

The other day a reader sent us an article link that he found on another alt.news website: Bad news - we are way past our 'extinct by' date

Since we had run the same story back when it first came out, we
thought "yeah! Flashback!" After all, with all the talk about Global
Warming, it served to remind readers that human caused CO2 levels are
not all there is to what is going on here on the BBM today.

Later in the evening, we had a conversation here at SOTT Central
about this article and how it relates to a book that is currently being
passed around in the house here: The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone, Allen West, Simon Warwick-Smith. This book is
about the "Event" that took place about 12,000 years ago that is
recorded in myth and legend variously as the Fall of Atlantis and
Noah's Flood.

Plato describes a destruction that occurred in a day and a night,
and the Bible recounts the story of torrential rains and an immense
flood in which most of the life on earth perished. There is also a rich
body of Native American literature about a worldwide cataclysm of
fires, followed by floods and death raining down from the skies. As
many as fifty different cultures around the globe record versions of
this story, and physicist Firestone, along with his geologist
co-authors, have put together a book, based on hard scientific
evidence, describing a cosmic chain of events that they believe
culminated in the global catastrophe of 12,000 years ago. They believe
that the Event was triggered by a nearby supernova that occurred 41,000
years ago.

Regular readers of SOTT are familiar with my Cassiopaea website
and the experiment in superluminal communication that I began in 1992
which finally bore fruit in 1994 on the day that the fragments of Comet
Shoemaker Levy began impacting the planet Jupiter. We find it amusingly
synchronous that one of the themes
of the Cassiopaean information is planetary destruction via a Comet
Cluster that cycles through the solar system every 3,600 years as a
consequence of the orbit of our Sun's solar Companion, a smaller, dark,
Twin Sun. As it happens, Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith also talk
about a bombardment of Planet Earth by literally thousands of
asteroids, comets, or other debris, though they attribute it to the
supernova 28 or 29 thousand years earlier; it took that long for the
ejecta from the supernova - along with debris it kicked out of the Oort
cloud - to reach Earth.

©NASA

Shoemaker-Levy Hitting Jupiter

With the idea that there is a Cometary Bombardment Cycle, we have
naturally been alert to the fact that the last few years have brought
increasing evidence that this theory may very well be the correct one.
This evidence includes the fantastic increase in the number of "moons"
attached to Jupiter that have so recently been "discovered", as well as
the increase in frequency of comets over the past few years, along with
the astonishing increase in meteorites and fireballs entering Earth's
atmosphere and falling to earth. In some cases, these events have
resulted in damage to human beings and property, and one recent case
even resulted in deaths as we will see further on...

Anyway, to get back to our conversation about humanity being past
its "extinct by" date, I mused that anybody with eyes and ears and a
bit of scientific knowledge can look around and see that something is
going on "out there". It's in the news everyday, you just have to
search for it (or read SOTT: we do the searching for you). The problem
is, of course, that the masses of humanity are so distracted by all the
concerns of everyday life - many of which are quite serious nowadays,
especially the threat of nuclear war brought to us by George W. Bush
and the Ziocons - that most of them haven't got a clue that they
probably don't have to worry about Global Warming. (And just because I
say that people don't have to worry about Global Warming doesn't mean
they don't have to worry!)The evidence that is all around us nowadays
even helps us to realize that there was nothing really magical or
mysterious about the story of Noah. The Bible tells us that God told
Noah that something was up, something was coming, and that he should
build an ark and that would enable him and his family and a few
critters to survive. But obviously, in this day and time, we really
don't need God to tell us that Something Wicked This Way Comes. Noah
probably didn't either.

Then, of course, it was pointed out to me that it was the Cs that
told me about the cycle of Cometary disasters. I thought about that for
a moment and said, "well, partly". I did write about all of this in my
book The Noah Syndrome back in 1985, long before the Cs proper
ever introduced themselves. (This book was never published, but much of
it is incorporated into Secret History.)
Of course, back then, I had started from a purely metaphysical
question: "Is there going to be an end of the world as described in the
Bible, and if so, what does it really mean?" It was that question that
lead to a deep study of the Bible, which then led to a realization that
the destruction described in the book of Revelation was almost
identical to what was described in the story of the Exodus, so whatever
happened then, was being predicted to happen again. It wasn't until I
read Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision
that I realized that this was very likely talking about a bombardment
of the Earth by rocks and bolides from space. Velikovsky, of course,
attributed it to an errant planet Venus that came careening into the
solar system just as Firestone et al attribute it to a supernova 41,000
years ago. The Cyclic Comet Cluster related to a Companion Sun
explanation is a better fit to all the data, though a supernova could
also be involved as well as a "Newcomer" to the Solar System. Reading
Velikovsky changed the flavor of my research from metaphysical to
scientific, and the result was "The Noah Syndrome."

In any event, what is perfectly clear is that the story of Noah and
the story of Atlantis are apocryphal: many small groups of people
around the world survived the event of 12,000 years ago here and there,
and very likely many of them survived because they realized what was
coming - the "read the signs". Afterward, in their stories and legends
their descendants ascribed their survival to the intervention of their
particular deity to give that deity more authority. Bottom line is:
anybody can be a Noah today if they are informed and pay close
attention to what is going on.

Getting back to the article that started the discussion: Bad news - we are way past our 'extinct by' date, we are told:

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, wrote Robert Frost. But whatever is to be our fate, it is now overdue.




After analysing the eradication of millions of ancient species,
scientists have found that a mass extinction is due any moment now.




Their research has shown that every 62 million years - plus or
minus 3m years - creatures are wiped from the planet's surface in
massive numbers. Even worse, scientists have no idea about its source.




'There is no doubting the existence of this cycle of mass
extinctions every 62m years. It is very, very clear from analysis of
fossil records,' said Professor James Kirchner, of the University of
California, Berkeley. 'Unfortunately, we are all completely baffled
about the cause.'

This part of the article is actually quite disingenuous. It is well
known that there are other major extinctions and the cycle is not ONLY
every 62 million years! There is also a very strong signal for a 26
million year extinction cycle. The different estimates of the number of
major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years are due mainly to
what the individual researcher chooses as the threshold for naming an
extinction event as "major" as well as what set of data he selects as
the determinant measure of past diversity. As it happens, the 62
million event data stems mainly from marine fossil evidence.

The report, published in the current issue of Nature,
was carried out by Professor Richard Muller and Robert Rohde also from
the Berkeley campus. They studied the disappearances of thousands of
different marine species (whose fossils are better preserved than terrestrial species) over the past 500m years.




Their results were completely unexpected. It was known that mass
extinctions have occurred in the past. During the Permian extinction,
250m years ago, more than 70 per cent of all species were wiped out,
for example. But most research suggested that these were linked to
asteroid collisions and other random events.




But Muller and Rohde found that, far from being unpredictable, mass extinctions occur every 62m years, a pattern that is 'striking and compelling', according to Kirchner.




But what is responsible? Here, researchers ran into problems. They
considered the passage of the solar system through gas clouds that
permeate the galaxy. These clouds could trigger climatic mayhem.
However, there is no known mechanism to explain why the passage might
occur only every 62m years.




Alternatively, the Sun may possess an undiscovered companion star.
It could approach the Sun every 62m years, dislodging comets from the
outer solar system and propelling them towards Earth. Such a companion
star has never been observed, however, and in any case such a lengthy orbit would be unstable, Muller says.




Or perhaps some internal geophysical cycle triggers massive
volcanic activity every 62m years, Muller and Rohde wondered. Plumes
from these would surround the planet and lead to a devastating drop in
temperature that would freeze most creatures to death.




Unfortunately, scientists know of no such geological cycle.




'We have tried everything we can think of to find an explanation
for these weird cycles of biodiversity and extinction,' Muller said.
'So far we have failed. And, yes, we are due one soon, but I would not
panic yet.'

©n/a

Coming Our Way?

Well,
they have a problem, don't they? They think it's coming and, based on
the ancient legends, it happens very fast and almost without warning.

The classical "Big Five" mass extinctions identified by Raup and
Sepkoski in 1982 (interestingly, right about the same time I started
asking questions about the End of the World as prophesied in
Revelations culminating in The Noah Syndrome in 1985!) are widely agreed upon as some of the most significant. They are:

The late Ordovician period (about 438 million years
ago) - 100 families extinct - more than half of the bryozoan and
brachiopod species extinct.

78 million years later:

The late Devonian (about 360 mya) - 30% of animal families extinct.

106 million years later:

At the end of the Permian period (about 245 mya) -
Trilobites go extinct. 50% of all animal families, 95% of all marine
species, and many trees die out.

37 million years later:

The late Triassic (208 mya) - 35% of all animal
families die out. Most early dinosaur families went extinct, and most
synapsids died out (except for the mammals).

143 million years later:

At the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary (about 65
mya) - about half of all life forms died out, including the dinosaurs,
pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, ammonites, many families of fishes,
clams, snails, sponges, sea urchins and many others.

As you can see from the above, using the number "62 million years" and building a theory on it is really a bit misleading.

Raup and Sepkoski are mentioned as identifying the "Big Five", but
the fact is that Sepkoski, a University of Chicago paleontologist
actuatlly suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million
years ago was part of a 26 million year cycle!!
However, I would like to mention that if you multiply 26 there are
interesting results such as: 3X 26 is 78 - which just happens to be the
time between the Ordovician and Devonian extinctions; 4 X 26 is 104
which is very close to the 106 million years between the Devonian and
Permian extinctions; and 5 X 26 is 130, which (when dealing with these
kinds of numbers) is close enough to the gap between the Triassic and
K-T extinction to be in the ballpark. So, maybe there is something to
this 26 million year thing after all, only each "return" has varying
effects based on many other solar system variables. A companion star
with a 26 million year orbit might be more stable, since Muller has
suggested that a 62 million year orbit is too great to be stable.

As it happens, if we postulate the 26 million year orbit of a
Companion Star, using the Big Five Extinctions as our jumping off
point, we would find that there ought to have been a return about 39
million years ago, and then another 13 million years ago, which would
put us half-way in the Companion star orbit cycle now. Question: is
that half-way as in aphelion or perihelion? Wherever the theorized Twin
Sun might be at the moment, what we know is that there are other
extinction events of great magnitude that seem to have little to do
with just a 62 million year cycle and a great deal to do with some
other cycle. Another thing that is a fact is that extinction events
occur far more frequently than the general public is aware of and yes,
we are way overdue for one.

Leaving the possible triggers for mass extinctions for the moment,
let's look at some hows extinctions might occur. Here is a handy little
run-down of the problem:

Ways to Destroy Life




Of all the ways scientists have proposed to cause a mass extinction
here are a few of the front runners. Conceptually there are 4 main
ways:

1. Freeze it (Snowball Earth)


2. Boil it (Greenhouse Earth)


3. Drop a meteor on it ( Meteor Impact)


4. Cover it with ash and Lava (Giant Volcanic Eruption)

It is important to realise that numbers 3 and 4 are essentially
ways which have been put forward to explain 1 and 2, though Snowball
earth and Greenhouse earth are still theories in their own right, as
they are to some extent self replicating, i.e. we rather get stuck in
vicious circles as the more we warm the earth, the more greenhouse
gasses we can potentially release, (at least in theory).




Now that's all very well and good but, how do these physical effects [1 and 2 alone] cause mass extinctions?




The simplest answer to this is climate. Every species alive on
earth today and so presumably in the past is adapted to a certain range
of conditions. In the same way that if we were suddenly whisked off to
the North Pole and expected to live there for a year with only a woolly
jumper and a Mars bar, we would surely die. It is the same in an
extinction event, climatic zones essentially shift around the globe (so
us being placed on the north pole is not as far fetched as you first
thought), or ecosystems are starved of light or nutrients. This results
in plants and animals being out of equilibrium with their surroundings,
this not only causes the death of individuals but whole species. With
the death of a species there is a gap in the food chain, and so even
animals which have adapted to the new climate find themselves with no
food so die out and so on...




EXTINCTION PROBLEMS IN A STRANGE ECOSYSTEM




If we consider the example of us at the North Pole, but this time
with a whole box of Mars bars, assuming we did not freeze to death in
the first day, we would slowly become more accustomed to the cold,
maybe we would find shelter from the cold, but either way as soon as
our prey (the Mars Bars) ran out, unless we found an alternative source
of food we would starve. To create a more dynamic ecosystem let us
assume we provide a food source for another organism such as a polar
bear, now if we died what would the polar bear eat?




Unfortunately my example falls down here as no one is going to
believe that without us eating Mars bars they're going to reproduce
uncontrollably. However, in our North Pole ecosystem of Mars bars, us
and Polar bears, let us assume we find extra clothes and shelter, so
the cold no longer controls our numbers, and we manage to find the
recipe and ingredients for mars bars (and by some freak coincidence
they provide us with all the essential nutrients for life), in this
case it would be the polar bears controlling our numbers since they are
our direct predators. So if polar bears were wiped out, then our
numbers would no longer be controlled, so our population would over
many generations grow, until eventually we could no longer supply
ourselves with mars bars, or we may have even eaten all the mars bars
in the world. This would cause a huge population crash, or maybe even
extinction of the human race (or at least those dependent on Mars
Bars). This rather abstract example helps illustrate the point that all
the trophic levels of a food chain (or web) need to be in place,
otherwise there will be instability in all other populations.

The above description of how Global warming or cooling can cause
mass extinctions is clever, but it does not take into account the
creativity of human beings. Certainly, there could be massive
reductions in the human population as a consequence of Global Warming
or Cooling, but it would be unlikely to produce a mass extinction such
as those for which we have evidence in the past. Let me quote a bit
from Secret History:

Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the
University of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for human
remains. He didn't find human remains; he found miles and miles of icy
muck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison,
horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the
members of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed the
half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal
tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings before
a giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death,
most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric
catastrophic disturbance."[Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York: Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946)]

©RPP

The evident violence of the deaths of these masses of animals, combined
with the stench of rotting flesh, was almost unendurable both in seeing
it, and in considering what might have caused it. The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction.[ibid.]
There were trees and animals, layers of peat and moss, twisted and
tangled and mangled together as though some Cosmic mix master sucked
them all in 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid
mass. [Sanderson, Ivan T., "Riddle of the Frozen Giants", Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.]




Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones of
Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the
freezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten million
animals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands
upon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the master
carvers of China, all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons of
Siberia. The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to
the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were
found in its mouth.




What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures in
a single day? Well, the evidence suggests an enormous tsunami raging
across the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to be
finally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction was
not limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing at colder locations
preserved the evidence of Nature's rage up to our present time.




Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the
Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious
episodes in zoological history, confessing, "no one knows the answer."
He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of
the extinction of many other species in America at the same time.
[Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961]
The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth,
the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all
tropical animals. These creatures didn't die because of the "gradual
onset" of an ice age, "unless one is willing to postulate freezing
temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the
question." [Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., "Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists", Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967]




Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones were
discovered in Florida. [Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, The
Mystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969)] Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths
and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain
glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant
jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species
were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the
Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.




This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia
became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the
mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the
American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must
be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual. A
"uniformitarian glaciation" would not have caused extinctions because
the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture. What
is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence. [Leonard, R.
Cedric, Appendix A in "A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge", Special Paper No. 1 ( Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979)]

In other words, 12000 years ago, a time we have met before and will
come across again and again, something terrible happened - so terrible
that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.




Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks
encased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty"
to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, "even if they died in winter." [Lippman, Harold E., "Frozen Mammoths",
Physical Geology, (New York 1969)] This is true especially when many of
these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly.
Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty
Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form,
states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of
the animals and their full stomachs ... the animals were robust and
healthy when they died." [Farrand, William R., "Frozen
Mammoths and Modern Geology", Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17,
1961] Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to
have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe
represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet
right at the end of the Pleistocene. Hibben sums up the situation in a
single statement: "The Pleistocene period ended in death. This
was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period, which fizzled
to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive." [Hibben, op. cit.]




The conclusion is, again, that the end of the Ice Age, the
Pleistocene extinction, the end of the Upper Paleolithic, Magdalenian,
Perigordian, and so on, and the end of the "reign of the gods," all
came to a global, catastrophic end about 12,000 years ago. [The Secret History of the World]

This is the event that Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith discuss in their book, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization, mentioned above.

But if the above accounts are the result of such a catastrophe, what
might the catastrophe itself be like? The following is condensed and
adapted from Chapter 11 of Firestone, West, and Warwick-Smith's book:

It begins with meteors failing like raindrops, a few here and there.
Perhaps a few hit the sun, provoking large solar flares. The solar
flares provoke colourful auroras even in the daytime sky. Then the day
of the comets arrive. From horizon to horizon, growing larger every
second, they streaked into the atmosphere, lighting up brighter than
the sun.

Heated to immense temperatures by its passage through the
atmosphere, the lethal swarm exploded into thousands of mountain-sized
chunks and clouds of streaming icy dust. The smaller pieces blew up
high in the atmosphere, creating multiple detonations that turned the
sky orange and red.

Then the largest comet smashed through the sheet of ice covering
part of the northern hemisphere in what is now Hudson Bay. Other comets
struck in Lake Michigan, Canada, Siberia and Europe. Then the ground
shock waves hit, shaking the earth violently for ten minutes in great
rolling waves and shudders. Fissures opened, trees shook and fell, and
rivers and streams disappeared into the cracked earth.

Within seconds of the impact, the blast of superheated air expanded
outward at more than 1,000 miles an hour, racing across the landscape,
tearing trees from the ground and tossing them into the air, ripping
rocks from mountainsides, and flash-scorching plants, animals, the
earth, as well as any humans in its way. The only living things to
survive would have been those who had sought shelter underground or
underwater.

Across the upper part of North America and Europe, the immense
energy from the multiple impacts blew a series of ever-widening, giant,
overlapping bubbles that pushed aside the atmosphere to create a near
vacuum inside. As the bubble passed by, the air pressure dropped making
it difficult to breathe. Behind the expanding edge of the bubble, the
Earth was stripped of the protective shield of the atmosphere. The
blast had ejected tiny, fast-moving grains in all directions through
the thin air. Some lodged into trees, plants and animals, while others
went up only to fall back again at incredible speeds as there was no
atmosphere to break their fall. At the same instant, high
speed cosmic rays bombarded the area with radiation. Animals and humans
dropped dead on the spot from the bombardment. Inanimate objects appeared to come to life and shiver and quake on the ground from the barrage.

When the outward push of the shock wave ceased, the vacuum began to
draw back the air. As the expanded atmosphere rushed back toward the
impact site, the bubbles collapsed, sucking white-hot gases and dust
inwards at tornado speeds and then channelling them up and away from
the ground. Some of the dust escaped from the Earth's atmosphere while
the rest flowed out as a red mushroom cloud that flattened out for
thousands of miles across the upper atmosphere, blocking the sun and
engulfing the Earth in darkness.

The dust and debris that was too heavy began crashing back down to
earth. Still super hot from the blast, it gave off a powerful lava-like
glow. The pieces landed on the continental ice sheet, instantly melting
untold gallons of water that coursed off the ice sheet in all
directions causing flooding.

The raging updraft through the hollow bubbles created an equally powerful downdraft of frigid, high-altitude air, travelling at hundreds of miles per hour. With
temperatures exceeding 150 degrees F below zero, the downward stream of
air hit the ground and radiated out from the many blast sites in all
directions, flash-freezing within seconds everything it touched. The
howling, frigid blast turned trees and plants into brittle ice statues
and flash froze mastodons and mammoths with food in their mouths that
we have uncovered still frozen in Siberia.

The rapid temperature fluctuations meant the end of millions of plants and animals.... but the destruction was only beginning.

The impacts and shock waves triggered enormous earthquakes along
existing fault lines from the Carolinas to California while shaking
awake dormant volcanoes from Iceland across to the Pacific. Erupting
with furious activity, they spewed hot lava across the landscape and
noxious chemicals into the air, adding to the already heavy cloud
cover.

The impacts, the blast waves, and the eruptions started thousands of
ground fires wherever there was fuel to feed them, some of which
continued to burn for days. Fast-moving, wind-driven wildfires formed
spiralling tongues of raging flames that twisted for thousands of feet
into the air and the inferno raced through forests faster than birds
and animals could flee. The roar of the fire shook the ground, and the
fierce heat blew apart trees like bombs, exploded rocks like shrapnel
grenades, and set off steam explosions wherever the fast-moving
fire-front jumped across frozen ponds and streams. When the fires had
finally burned themselves out, there was little left besides smoldering
stumps and telltale charcoal strewn across the continents.

The noxious chemicals in the atmosphere fell back to earth as
poisoned rain. In some places, the air was too toxic and
oxygen-depleted to support life.

The impact in Hudson Bay sent up 200,000 cubic miles of the glacier,
throwing off the icy debris that followed the pieces of the comet out
across the continent. A rain of incandescent debris and chunks of
steaming ice showered down across most of North America, Europe and
Asia. Within minutes, the massive, low-flying clumps crashed into the
Carolinas and the eastern seaboard, exploding into fireballs and
gouging out the Carolina Bays, over 500,000 of them. Other lumps exploded across the plains from Nebraska and Kansas to Arizona.

©Fairchild Aerial Surveys for the Ocean Forest Company

Aerial view of some of the Carolina Bays taken in 1930

Pieces of flying ice and debris, large and small, fell from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, from
Europe over to Asia and even down to Africa. More than one-quarter of
the planet was under siege.

But even that was not all.

The impact through the glacier at Hudson Bay sent high velocity melt-water surging under the ice sheet.The
surges lifted and floated large sections of ice, causing monolithic ice
blocks to slide southward along hundreds of miles of the ice front.
Moving nearly as quickly as a horse is able to run, the blocks plowed over forests, shearing off the trees.

The oceans, too, were targets. Thousands of ice chunks and clouds of
slushy water hit the Atlantic, exploding with colossal detonations. The
multiple concussions triggered immense underwater landslides off the
Carolinas and Virginia, releasing thousands of cubic miles of mud. In
turn, the mud unleashed a 1,000 foot high tidal wave that raced away towards Europe and Africa at 500 miles an hour.

Nine hours later the wave hit [Europe], 1,000 feet tall at
400 miles per hour, probably taking with it some of the survivors of
the first explosions. The wave broke over hundreds of miles inland,
devastating everything in its path. Anything living on the coast was
killed instantly.

Its momentum spent, the churning water paused briefly and then began its rush backwards
to the coast, pulling with it the battered remains of plants and
animals under its tow. The surge provoked, in turn, offshore landslides
in Europe and Africa, sending a second round of mega-waves back towards
North and South America. Miles of coast land was hit by the 100 foot
waves that triggered yet another wave of tsunamis that hit Europe and
Africa once again. But little was left to damage.

Within minutes of the impacts, the subzero air and rising water
vapour combined to produce heavy snow and sleet that reached as far
south as Mexico, the Caribbean, and Northern Africa. In the south, the
snow turned to rain and the northern hemisphere was under a steady downpour for months, a downpour of noxious water contaminated and deadly.
Anyone lucky enough to survive was now a potential victim of acid,
toxic metals, cyanide, formaldehyde, and arsenic, a combination that
would kill many and render the rest gravelly ill.

The melted water of the glaciers had another effect: flooding into the North Atlantic, it turned off the ocean conveyor that brought warm water to the northern climes.
Once shut off, coupled with the clouds of dust blocking the sun, the
temperature fell drastically. Within days or weeks after the impacts,
continental temperatures fell well below freezing, and a brutal ice age
chill once again spread across the land, remaining in place for another
thousand years.

And all of this in an instant, in less time than it takes to cook a meal or write an email.

©n/a

65 Million Years Ago A Dinosaur Meets Its Doom: Are We Next?

You will, of course, notice that "12,000 years ago" is just a rough
estimate because some of the dates of their data come back as old as 14
KYA and as recent as 10 KYA. When considering a 3600 year Comet Cluster
Cycle, this range could cover more than one event. But what is
important is that the main event did, apparently, happen in a single
day and based on the scientific data collected by Firestone et al, it
was one of the most horrifying events ever to happen on planet earth
since modern Homo-Sapiens appeared.

Why do I keep referring to a 3600 year cycle? Well, in addition to
having been explicated within the context of the Cassiopaean
experiment, it seems that this 3600 year period was important enough to
certain ancient peoples that it was the basis of their mathematics.

Around 3,200 BC, the Sumerians devised their numerical notation
system, giving special graphical symbols to the units 1, 10, 60, 600,
3,600. That is to say, we find that the Sumerians did not count in
tens, hundreds and thousands, but rather adopted base 60, grouping
things into sixties, and multiplying by powers of sixty.

Our own civilization utilizes vestiges of base 60 in the ways we
count time in hours, minutes and seconds, and in the degrees of the
circle.

Sixty is a large number to use as a base for a numbering system. It
is taxing to the memory because it necessitates knowing sixty different
signs (words) that stand for the numbers from 1 to 60. The Sumerians
handled this by using 10 as an intermediary between the different
sexagesimal orders of magnitude: 1, 60, 602, 603, etc. The word for 60,
geš, is the same as the word for unity. The number 60 represented a
certain level, above which, multiples of 60 up to 600 were expressed by
using 60 as a new unit. When they reached 600, the next level was
treated as still another unit, with multiples up to 3,000. The number
3,600, or sixty sixties, was given a new name: šàr, and this, in turn,
became yet another new unit.

So, they mystery is: why did the Sumerians enshrine the number 60 - and its multiple 60 X 60 - in their numbering system?

Zecariah Sitchin believed that it was because there was a 10th
planet in the solar system that had an orbit 3600 years long, and that
they based their numbering system on the cycle of this event. But the
evidence for the 10 planet - as a planet - and his related ideas, is
rather skimpy, while the evidence for bombardment of the earth by
masses of cometary debris is growing every day. Examining the hard
data, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if there is something
that returns every 3600 years, it is more likely to be a cluster of
cosmic bodies than a 10th planet.

And that is bad news.

©Dartmouth, Classics Department

Santorini. View East from Nea Kammeni Volcano to Phirï? on Crater Rim.

COMETS AND DISASTER IN THE BRONZE AGE




At a certain point in our history, the major civilisations of the
world collapsed, simultaneously it seems. The Akkadian Empire in
Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age
civilisation in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus
Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan
and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in
the world - all fell into ruin at more or less the same time. Not long
afterward, in archaeological time, disaster overtook the Myceneans of
Greece, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late Bronze
Age Israel, and the Shang Dynasty of China.




The reasons for these widespread and apparently simultaneous
disasters - which coincided also with changes of cultures and societies
elsewhere, such as in Britain - have long been a fascinating mystery.
Traditional explanations include warfare, famine, and more recently
'system collapse', but the apparent absence of direct archaeological or
written evidence for causes, as opposed to the effects, has led many
archaeologists and historians into a resigned assumption that no
definite explanation can possibly be found.




Some decades ago, the hunt for clues passed largely into the hands
of natural scientists. Concentrating on the earlier set of Bronze Age
collapses, researchers began to find a range of evidence that suggested
that natural causes rather than human actions, may have been initially
responsible. There began to be talk of climate change, volcanic
activity, and earthquakes - and some of this material has now found its
way into standard historical accounts of the period.




Agreement, however, there has never been. Some researchers favoured
one type of natural cause, others favoured another, and the problem
remained that no single explanation appeared to account for all the
evidence.




Over the past 15 years or so, however, a new type of 'natural
disaster' has been much discussed and is beginning to be regarded, by
many scholars, as the most probable single explanation for widespread
and simultaneous cultural collapse, but not only in the Bronze Age but
at another times as well. The new theory has been advanced largely by
astronomers, and remains almost completely unknown amongst
archaeologists (a few notable exceptions include the dendrochronologist
Prof Mike Baillie of Queen's University, Belfast, and Dr Euan MacKie at
Glasgow University). The new idea is that these massive cultural
disasters were caused by the impact of comets or other types of cosmic
debris on the Earth. [...]



Yet what was the cause of these earthquakes, eruptions, tidal
waves, fire-blasts and climate changes? By the late 1970s, British
astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier of Oxford University had begun
to investigate cometary impact as the ultimate cause.. Then in 1980,
the Nobel prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues
published their famous paper in Science that argued that a cosmic
impact had led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. He showed that large
amounts of the element iridium present in geological layers dating from
about 65 million BC had a cosmic origin.




Alvarez's paper had immense influence and stimulated further
research by such British astronomers as Clube and Napier, Prof Mark
Bailey of the Armagh Observatory, Duncan Steel of Spaceguard Australia,
and Britain's best known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. All now support the
theory of cometary impact and loosely form what is now known as the
British School of Coherent Catastrophism. [...]



These scholars envisage trains of cometary debris which repeatedly
encounter the Earth. We know that tiny particles of cosmic material
penetrate the atmosphere every day, but their impact is insignificant.
Occasionally, however, cosmic debris measuring between one and several
hundred metres in diametre strike the Earth and these can have
catastrophic effects on our ecological system, through multimegaton
explosions of fireballs which destroy natural and cultural features on
the surface of the Earth by means of tidal-wave floods (if the debris
lands in the sea), fire blasts and seismic damage.




Depending on their physical properties, asteroids or comets that
punctuate the atmosphere can either strike the Earth's surface and
leave and impact crater, such as the well-known Barringer Crater in
Arizona caused by an asteroid made of iron some 50,000 years ago. At
least ten impact craters around the world dating from after the last
Ice Age, and no fewer than seven of these date from around the 3rd
millennium BC - the date of the widespread Early Bronze Age collapses -
although none occurred in the Near East.




Alternatively, comets and asteroids can explode in the air. A
recent example - known as the Tunguska Event - occurred in 1908 over
Siberia, when a bolide made of stone exploded about 5km above ground
and completely devastated an area of some 2,000 km' through fireball
blasts. The cosmic body, although thought to have measured only 60 m
across, had an impact energy of about 20 to 40 megaton, up to three
times as great as the Arizona example (about 15 megaton), and was
equivalent to the explosion of about 2,000 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs
- even though there was no actual physical impact on the Earth. [...]




Until recently, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical of
Clube and Napier's giant comet hypothesis. However, the crash of comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 has led to a change in attitudes.
The comet, watched by the world's observatories, was seen split into 20
pieces and slam into different parts of the planet over a period of
several days. A similar impact on Earth, it hardly needs saying, would
have been devastating.




According to current knowledge, Tunguska-like impacts occur every
100 years or so. It is, therefore, not far fetched to hypothesize that
a super-Tunguska may occur every 2000, 3000 or 5000 years and would be
capable of triggering ecological crises on a continental or even global
scale. In the past, skeptics have demanded the evidence of a crater
before they would accept an argument of cosmic impact, but it is now
become understood that no crater is necessary for disastrous
consequences to ensue. The difficulty this leaves scholarship, however,
is that in a Tunguska Event no direct evidence is left behind. It may
be impossible to prove that one ever took place in the distant past.




The extent to which past cometary impacts were responsible for
civilisation collapse, cultural change, even the development of
religion, must remain a hypothesis. But in view of the astronomical,
geological and archaeological evidence, this 'giant comet' hypothesis
should no longer be dismissed by archaeologists out of hand. [Dr Benny
J Peiser: BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY, December 1997, No 30, pp. 6-7. Dr Benny
J Peiser is a historian and anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores
University. With Mark Bailey and Trevor Palmer, he is editing "Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations" (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, in preparation) ]

Among the many side-effects of cometary bombardments is earthquakes,
tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. As it happens, there was a significant
volcanic event at the time of the collapse of the Bronze Age
civilizations that gives us a firmly fixed date: Thera. Recent
developments published in the April 2006 issue of Science fix the date
of the eruption between 1627 and 1600 B.C. with 95 % certainty. This,
of course, is rejected by many archaeologists because they have spent
their entire careers trying to date things according to the Bible, and
it really upsets the apple cart to realize that they've been chasing an
illusion.

©n/a

Rendering of a comet about to hit the planet Mars

Yoshiyuki Fujii and Okitsugu Watanabe demonstrate that "large scale
environmental changes possibly occurred in the Southern Hemisphere in
the middle of the Holocene." [Microparticle Concentration And
Electrical Conductivity of A 700 m Ice Core from Mizuho Station
Antarctic, published in Annals of Glaciology (1-, 1988) pp. 38-42]
(Within the last 10,000 years). Their depth profiles of microparticle
concentration, electrical conductivity and Oxygen 18 at circa 1600 BC
indicates a spike in readings for all of these elements. The evidence
shows that this disturbance covered this designated period, but with a
"huge spike" at c. 1600 BC.

Similar evidence exists at 5200 BC. This period shows less severe
but similar climatological stress. The oxygen 18 profile is close to
normal, but there is a visible volcanic dirt band. The dating of this
segment is less close because it is clear that nobody is really looking
for this cycle, but it appears to correspond to the ash band from the
Byrd station core. [ cf. G. Cope Schellhorn, Ph.D.:Evidence of Cyclical
Earth Changes, from When Men are Gods] In an article in Nature,
November 1980, C.U. Hammer, H. B. Clausen and Dansgaard date a
disturbance from the Camp Century ice core to 5470 BC +/- 120 years.
This compares to the proposed Hekla eruption which was radiocarbon
dated to 5450 BC +/- 190 years. There is an appreciably high acidity
signal at these sections of the core which indicates a high level of
volcanic activity - again, right at the 3600 year cycle mark.

It is conjectured that the cycle goes unnoticed because of long-term
after-effects, such as cooling climate, as well as the fact that each
cycle has greater or lesser effects on the earth depending on the
particular dynamical interactions within the solar system at any
disruption.

What is clear is that something happens at 3600 year intervals as
shown by the ice cores, and is capable of setting off prolonged periods
of earth changes that are above the levels of ordinary uniformitarian
geologic and climatological changes.

Looking further: Michel R. Legrand and Robert J. Delmas of
Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l'Environment published an
article "Soluble Impurities in Four Antarctic Ice Cores Over the Last
30,000 Years" [Annals of Glaciology (10, 1988, pp 116-120)], in which
they graphed the Oxygen 18 variations and the ionic components Na,NH 4
and Ca2 and H and Cl and NO3 and SO4. The time scale for each ionic
component level as well as the O18 levels stretches back 30,000 years.
The graph shows correlations to spikes at 5,200 BC, 8,800 BC, 12,400
BC, c. 16,000 BC, c. 19,600 BC. All of these were times of great
geologic stress.

When looking at the data and taking into account the acknowledged
dating inaccuracies (some of the ranges of dates can go 100 years in
either direction of the spike, even though the spiking is regular and
rhythmic) for the more recent dates, and 3 to 600 years variance for
the older dates - especially when one considers that these are broad
analyses and nobody was really looking for anything specific - they
just said "wow! look at that wavy line!" - we find that the southern
ice cores do not always register the same as the northern ones. The
1628 BC event that really slammed the tree rings in the northern
hemisphere shows almost no registration in the Antarctic cores in terms
of volcanic activity. But the northern cores show the activity
beginning 1644 BC.

The evidence for the 5200 BC event is strong in the Dome C core. The
8,800 BC event is well marked - in fact, seems to be the strongest of
them all. Keep in mind that this was 10,800 years ago - exactly within
the range of dates reported by Herodotus and Plato. The oxygen 18
isotope variation is noticeable, the rise in sea-salt, elevated levels
of C1 and C1/Na. There is an extreme spike in SO4 and H readings
suggesting widespread volcanic activity - great earth changes were
happening at that time, and they registered in the climate, the oceans,
and were preserved in ice.

The 12,400 BC event is also extremely pronounced in the cores. The
graphs show a quick, vast change including the end of the Wisconsin Ice
Age. There is a great Oxygen 18 isotope variation as well as peaks of
Na and very pronounced spikes in Ca, SO 4 and H.

There is absolutely no question that the Santorini event occurred.
The acid signal in the ice core is very strong. Which means that there
is very little question about when it occurred. Something very unusual
and specific happened then, starting in 1644, and culminating in a
major cataclysm, and it seems that it walked all over the Aegean and
Anatolian area, leaving tracks that are impossible to miss. Impossible
for anyone, that is, except Egyptologists and their kin.

All over the Mediterranean there were kingdoms and cultures that
communicated and traded with one another. Reading the many books on
each region, produced by the various experts on the different cultures,
again and again one encounters the fact that a period of severe
disruption was noted in the historical and archaeological record.
Somehow, such an event in one region is not necessarily connected to a
similar event in another region. The idea that all of the disruptions
in a given general time period may be simultaneous cannot be considered
because it would disrupt the carefully constructed chronology that is
based on endless acts of tetraphyloctomy. [Splitting a hair four ways;
coined by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum].

In his book Stratigraphic Comparée et Chronologie de l'Asie Occidentale,
[London, Oxford University Press, 1948] Claude Shaeffer's lifelong
archaeological investigations led him to propose that a great natural
catastrophe brought about the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, and
also devastated by fire and earthquake almost every other populated
region of Crete, Cyprus, the Caucasus, Syria, Palestine, Persia, and
Asia Minor in general. That's one heck of a "local event." It is only
logical to conclude that the Santorini event and the end of the Middle
Bronze Age are one and the same event.

And it happened a little over 3,600 years ago.

In other words, we are overdue.

Now, let's come back to what I mentioned above about being half-way
through a 26 million year Companion Star orbit. We really have no idea
where the theorized critter is or what it is up to, but we do have some
clues. But the first question we want to ask is what is the relation
between this companion star - Nemesis - and extinction? How can a star,
way


out beyond the solar system, have an effect on the third rock from the sun?

Far beyond the orbit of Pluto lies the Oort


cloud.

©N/A

The Oort Cloud

The Oort cloud, alternatively termed the Öpik-Oort Cloud, is a
postulated spherical cloud of comets situated about 50,000 to 100,000
AU from the Sun. This is approximately 2000 times the distance from the
Sun to Pluto or roughly one light year, almost a quarter of the
distance from the Sun to Proxima Centauri, the star nearest the Sun.

Click on the above image to study the larger copy. The solar system
is engulfed by this cloud comprised of billions of comets. Imagine what
would happen if a star passed through that cloud, knocking the comets
in the same way a bowling ball sends bowling pins scattering in all
directions. Imagine then a certain number of those comets heading
towards the centre of the cloud, our sun and its solar system. The sun,
being the largest object in the neighbourhood, would be the attraction
point. The comets in the incoming cloud would be pulled into an orbit
around the sun.

Although no direct observations have been made of such a cloud, it
is believed to be the source of most or all comets entering the inner
solar system (some short-period comets may come from the Kuiper belt),
based on observations of the orbits of comets.

So far, only one potential Oort cloud object has been discovered;
90377 Sedna. With an orbit that ranges from roughly 76 to 928 AU, it is
much closer than originally expected and may belong to an "inner" Oort
cloud. If Sedna indeed belongs to the Oort cloud, this may mean that
the Oort cloud is both denser and closer to the Sun than previously
thought.

So, we have a mechanism which can hypothetically trigger the
launching of a swarm of comets into the solar system. The orbit of the
proposed binary twin of our sun conforms to the cycles of major
extinctions on Earth. But it is still a hypothesis. More importantly,
you might ask, even if we assign a high probability to the truth of the
hypothesis, if these cycles happen every 26 million years, what
evidence do we have that we are alive during one of the, shall we say,
unlucky periods?

One of the corollaries of the Nemesis theory is that the dark
companion might well become visible as a second sun in the sky when it
was closest to the sun. Is there any evidence that might suggest that
people have ever seen a "second sun"?

In her book Comets and Popular Culture and the Birth


of Modern Cosmology, Sara J. Schechner writes:

The sunny disposition of the weather during the
coronation (of Charles II) was seen as the fulfillment of a prophecy.
In 1630, at the time of Charles' birth, a noonday star or rival sun allegedly had appeared in the sky. [...]

Aurelian Cook in Titus Britannicus explained its import: 'As soon as Born, Heaven took notice of him, and eyed him with a star, appearing in defiance of the Sun at Noonday....'

For Cook, the extra sun announced that Charles ruled by divine
right. Moreover, the timing of Charles' entry into London on his
birthday was politically calculated to fulfill what had been portended
at his birth. Abraham Cowley, poet, diplomat and spy for the court
wrote: 'No Star amongst ye all did, I believe, Such Vigorous assistance
give, As that which thirty years ago, At Charls his Birth, did in
despight of the proud Suns' Meridian Light, His future Glories, this
Year foreshow.

Edward Matthew devoted an entire book to the fulfillment of the
prophecy declaring Charles "ordained to be the most Mighty Monarch in
the Universe..."

Charles' return was seen as a rebirth of England and duly recorded
by a special act in the statute book, which proclaimed that 29 May was
the most memorable Birth day not only of his Majesty both as a man and
Prince, but likewise as an actual King...

Well, that certainly sounds like it fits the bill:
377 years ago a second sun appeared and no one, so far as I know, has
ever linked this to either a comet or a supernova. Interestingly, it
was followed thirty years later by the sighting of several comets.

But the 17th century was interesting for another anomaly involving our sun: the Maunder Minimum. Between the years 1645 and 1715, our sun stayed in a period of solar minimum.

During one 30-year period within the Maunder
Minimum, for example, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as
opposed to a more typical 40,000&-50,000 spots. The Maunder Minimum
coincided with the middle -- and coldest part -- of the so-called Little Ice Age,
during which Europe and North America, and perhaps much of the rest of
the world, were subjected to bitterly cold winters. Recently published
research suggests that the Sun's rotation slowed in the deep Maunder
minimum (1666-1700).[1] At our current level of understanding of solar
physics, a larger and slower Sun necessarily implies a cooler Sun that
provides less heat to Earth.

Perhaps the close approach, astronomically speaking, of the dark
companion was the cause of this dampening. The lower solar activity
during the Maunder Minimum also affected the amount of cosmic radiation
reaching the Earth. The resulting change in the production of carbon-14
during that period caused an inaccuracy in radiocarbon dating until
this effect was discovered.

In total, carbon 14 analysis as well as tree rings and ice core
studies indicate there seem to have been 18 periods of sunspot minima
in the last 8,000 years, and studies indicate that the sun currently
spends up to a quarter of its time in these minima. We can only
speculate at the moment whether these cycles have a relationship to our
dark companion and/or its cometary children.

Returning to our hypothesis, if we are correct, the dark star was
seen 377 years ago. If it was in fact the companion, Nemesis, then the
comets heading to the inner solar system should be heading our way.
Depending on their locations and orbits in the Oort cloud, there would
be variable groups - variable both in size and arrival time. Is there
any evidence for this?

The third edition of the university textbook Exploration of the Universe, by George O. Abell, published in 1975, informs us that Jupiter has 9 moons as of 1974. It says:

The outer seven, however, have rather eccentric
orbits, some of which have a large inclination to Jupiter's equator.
The four most distant satellites revolve from east to west, contrary to
the motions of most of the other objects in the solar system. They may
be former minor planets captured by Jupiter. [p. 324]

Please note that Abell is suggesting that some of Jupiter's moons have been captured by Jupiter's gravity.

Now let's time travel back to the future, and see what the latest information tells us about Jupiter's moons:

Jupiter is now given 63 satellites. Forty-seven of those satellites
have been discovered since 1999. What if they weren't there before?

What about Saturn. Our 1975 text tells us that Saturn has 10 satellites. In 2007? Well, there are so many that one source declines to give a precise number!

However, counting the named satellites on the Timeline of discovery of solar system planets and their natural satellites gives us a count of 62, with 41 being discovered since 2000 and another ten in the 80's and 90's.

Moving outward, we come to Uranus, given five satellites in 1975, it
now has 28, with ten being discovered in the 1980's, six in the 90's,
and 7 since 2000.

Neptune had two satellites in 1975, now it has 13.

Planet	1975	2005
Jupiter	9	63
Saturn	10	62
Uranus	5	28
Neptune	2	13

Table 1. Number of moons

The explanation given most often to explain this surge in the
numbers of satellites for these planets is that telescopes have gotten
better. That is, we can see further, with greater detail, and can
therefore find things that we couldn't see before. It is an explanation
that makes sense. One small problem with this theory is that the "new"
moons of Neptune and Uranus showed up before the new moons of Jupiter
and Saturn. One would think that powerful telescopes capable of finding
moons as far away as the seventh and eighth planets would have found
the hard to see moons of the fifth and sixth first.

Another possible explanation, and one which fits with new moons
appearing around Neptune and Uranus prior to appearing around Jupiter
and Saturn, is that these new moons, or some of them, are objects that
have been trapped into orbits around these planets only recently, that
they were captured by the gravity of these planets and removed from the
incoming comet cloud. Passing the orbits of the outer planets first,
they would arrive at the inner planets afterward.

We also note that the much derided Immanuel Velikovsky, in his book Worlds in Collision,
gives a time frame of nine years as the time it would take for a comet
to cover the distance between Jupiter and Earth. The new Jovian moons
were discovered beginning in the late nineties.

Do the math.

©Space Channel

Raindrops keep falling on our heads

Which brings us to a series of local stories that give impact a less than metaphoric meaning.

Friday, February 16 SOTT page brought us this story: Strange noise might have been meteor

By JIM SABIN


City Editor

NEWARK -- Something happened at around 9 p.m. Wednesday that a lot of people heard, or even felt.

What it was, though, might forever remain a mystery.

"It" was a loud bang, something loud enough to be heard across
southern and central Ohio, and loud enough to make small objects move
in houses. Reports have rolled into The Advocate from Hanover to Heath,
from Buckeye Lake to Granville, and NBC4 heard reports from Muskingum,
Fairfield and Pickaway counties.

Rumors range from an earthquake to a meteor strike, a sonic boom to something ice-related. [...]

Jeff Gill, of Granville, said he saw a meteor with a relatively long
trail, with red, green and gold coloration. It was headed east to west
and lasted about three seconds; after it faded, the sonic boom washed
over him, he said.

"I saw it first. It was the most eerie, cool, scary, wonderful
thing. You just see this dragon tail going across the sky," said Gill,
who also writes a religion column for The Advocate. "All of a sudden,
everything goes boom." [...]

The reports came in from Ohio to New Jersey.

Notice the reference to the dragon tail. Could reports of meteorites
be the basis for some of the ancient myths about dragons fighting in
the sky? Check out Mike Baillie's book Exodus to Arthur for more on that subject.

Some weeks ago, while much of the United States was watching the XLI
Super Bowl, some people in the Midwest were being treated to a
different type of spectacle: Local residents witness meteor's flaming flash.

If you saw a bright light with a flaming tail
plummeting to earth Sunday night, you may have seen a minor meteor
shower, according to reports in Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa.

James T. Luedke of Ripon said he was driving in Green Lake County
between 7:30 and 8 p.m. Sunday when he saw a "half-dollar sized flaming
ball falling at a rapid speed to the earth" in the southern sky.

He described it as a round, orange flaming ball with a blue/green tail.

Kay Diederich of St. Cloud was driving out of the village about 7:50
p.m. with a friend when they saw a "ball of fire" shooting to the south.

"It almost looked like a plane crash," she said. Her friend is an EMT and she listened to her scanner, but no reports came in.

People across the Midwest reported seeing balls of fire streaking across the sky Sunday night, according to state news reports.

A preliminary report does indicate the objects came from a meteor.
Most reports described the objects as bright lights with a flaming
tail. Several of the objects were seen exploding when they hit the
ground, according to WEAU. [...]

Sightings were reported from Minnesota through Missouri and east through Illinois.

Then we have this report on February 7, 2007 from the United Kingdom: Meteor lights up the sky.

By Rachel Pegg


The Argus

A meteor has been spotted falling to the Earth.

The shooting star was engulfed in bright flames as it shot towards
the ground over Hangleton, Hove, at about 8.15pm yesterday. [...]

Not to mention a report from Turkey: Meteorite lands in Didim

Friday, February 02


Voices

POLICE were inundated with calls from scores of people from Didim to
Bodrum after they heard a big bang and a flash of light across the
skies.

Despite officers being unable to explain the flashing green, yellow and red lights, Voices has solved the phenomena.

It was not a UFO but a meteorite which crash through the earth's atmosphere and landed in Yeşilkent.

A startled Abdullah Arıtürk revealed that the rock had smashed a
hole in the ground at the Green Park Complex, at Yeşilkent, narrowly
missing him by ten metres.

Police reported that people from Bodrum, Milas and Didim had heard a
bang and seen the flashing light across the skies at about 5.30pm on
Thursday (Jan 31).

Mr Arıtürk said: "I thought this was it. I thought it was the
apocalypse. I saw the bang and the flashing lights and this rock
smashed into the ground quite near me. It was very frightening."

After telling the Voices of his story, Mr Arıtürk is now awaiting
scientists from Aegean University, in İzmir, to take the meteorite away
for closer examination.

Fortunately, no one was hurt with these meteors, but people in India weren't so lucky: Three Killed In Suspected Meteorite Fall In India's Rajasthan

February 8th 2007

Three people were killed and four injured in a mysterious blast in a
village in India's northern Rajasthan state Thursday that villagers
claim was caused by a meteorite, news reports said.

Residents of Banchola village in Bundi district, about 200
kilometres south of Rajasthan capital Jaipur, said the victims were
sitting with some iron scrap in an open field when an "object" fell
from the sky and hit them, IANS news agency reported.

"The matter is under investigation. We know that there was a blast
but looking at the crater it does not seem that it happened due to a
meteorite," a Bundi police official was quoted as saying by IANS.

He said the crater was just 8-10 inches in diameter and two inches
deep. A team from the state-run forensic science laboratory in Jaipur
was collecting evidence from the site, the official said.

Then there was the meteorite that crashed into a house in New Jersey recently and embedded itself in the wall: Possible Meteorite Crashes Through New Jersey Roof

By Chris Newmarker


Associated Press


posted: 4 January 2007

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) -- Authorities were trying to identify
a mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a house
in eastern New Jersey.


Nobody was injured when the golf-ball sized object, weighing
nearly as much as a can of soup, struck the home and embedded itself in
a wall Tuesday night [image].

Federal officials sent to the scene said it was not from an aircraft.

The rough-surfaced object, with a metallic glint, was displayed Wednesday by police.

"There's some great interest in what we have here," said Lt. Robert
Brightman. "It's rather unusual. I haven't seen anything like it in my
career."

He said he hoped to have the object identified within 72 hours, but
declined to name the other agencies whose help he has enlisted.

Approximately 20 to 50 rock-like objects fall every day over the
entire planet, said Carlton Pryor, a professor of astronomy at Rutgers
University.

"It's not all that uncommon to have rocks rain down from heaven,"
said Pryor, who had not seen the object that struck the Monmouth County
home. "These are usually rocky or a mixture of rock and metal." [...]

And the cottage destroyed by a meteorite in Germany in October 2006: German cottage destroyed by meteor .

Reuters


October 20, 2006

BERLIN (Reuters) - A fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and
injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor and witnesses
saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday.

Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn,
said the fire gutted the cottage and badly burnt the man's hands and
face in the incident on October 10.

"We sought assistance from Bochum observatory and they noted that at
that particular moment the earth was near a field of meteoroid splinter
and it could be assumed that particles had entered the atmosphere," he
said.

"The particles usually don't reach the surface because they
disintegrate in the atmosphere," he added. "But some can make it to the
ground. We believe this was a bolide (meteoric fireball) with a size of
no more than 10 mm."

And the falling ice that hit a car in Florida: Mysterious, Large Ice Chunk Falls on Tampa Man's Car.

©n/a

Car dented by falling ice in Tampa.

1/28/2007 11pm report

TAMPA, FL (AP) -- Raymond Rodriguez was changing a tire when an
18-inch chunk of ice plummeted from the sky with a piercing whistle,
then a metallic crunch. The ice chunk crushed the roof of a nearby Ford
Mustang on Sunday morning. No one was hurt.

"I was scared," Rodriguez said, who was only feet away. "It's crazy, man."

The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing flight schedules to
see if the ice fell off a plane. The ice did not have a blue tint that
would indicate it came from a plane's lavatory. The National Weather
Service said conditions in Tampa were not favorable for the formation
of large balls of ice, known as megacryometeors.

"It's not an act of God," said Carlos Javage, whose son's car was wrecked by the mystery ice. "This came off an airplane."

So, what are we to make of this sudden appearance of so many "once
in a lifetime" meteors across the globe? Anything? Coincidence? Or
something else?

Let's put together an overview of the data we have been collecting
and outline the working hypothesis that we have to explain it. It isn't
very hopeful, we'll tell you that right at the start. It may well make
Tunguska look like a firecracker in comparison. The blast at Tunguska has been described thusly:

The explosion was probably caused by the air burst of a meteorite or
comet 6 to 10 kilometers (4-6 mi) above the Earth's surface. The
energy of the blast was later estimated to be between 10 and 15
megatons of TNT, which would be equivalent to Castle Bravo, the most
powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated by the US. It felled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi).

The Binary System

We look out at our sky and we see only one sun. We naturally conclude that our star system includes only the sun. However, binary star systems are very frequent.

There is an hypothesis that argues that our sun is part of such a
binary system. The sun's hypothetical companion has been named, as
mentioned above, "Nemesis".
The projected orbit of Nemesis is 26 million years, give or take the
time necessary for the rising and falling of several civilizations.

Studies of the fossil record by Dave Raup and Jack Sepkoski have shown that there is a cyclic repetition to periods of extinction. The Nemesis theory was drawn up to explain the extinction cycle.

©Raup & Sepkoski

Chart of the 26 million year extinction cycle

We can offer no proof for the working hypothesis outlined above. We
are working on a limited data set. The most that we can say is that an
argument can be made suggesting the following scenario:

The sun's dark companion, on its 26 million year orbit, came
close to the solar system 377 years ago, showing itself and pushing in
front of it comets, a few of which appeared thirty years after the 1630
showing of the dark star itself. The passage of the companion through
the Oort cloud dragging hundreds of thousands of other bodies in its
wake, swung around in its orbit, and flung a swarm of them our way,
travelling now for nearly four hundred years. Members of that swarm
have been picked off by the gravitational fields of the outer planets,
increasing the numbers of moons in recent years. If the swarm has
passed by Jupiter, then it may be arriving here very soon.

Are the articles pulled from papers around the world over the last few months the announcement of their arrival?

One final point. There have been reports that Earth is not the only
planet being hit by "global warming". Might it be possible that this
apparently widespread change of "climate" in the solar system is linked
to an incoming comet cloud? We do not know and are sorely lacking in
the means to acquire data to refine or reject the working hypothesis.
Perhaps someone else out there does have the means. Whatever the
explanation for a generalized warming of several planets, it is clear
that we know very little about the fundamental mechanisms behind it. We
are a speck in the universe, a drop in an ocean more vast, more
complex, and more mysterious than we can imagine.

To close, I want to quote from the final pages of The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization because the words there should have meaning for all of us.

©???

NOT-SO-HARMLESS SHOOTING STARS




If you want more evidence for what happened to the mammoths, you need only to look up at the clear night sky.
In almost any month, you can see shooting stars from one of many meteor
showers. Nearly every fiery streak you see is the tiny remnant of some
giant comet that broke up into smaller pieces. Of course, most of those
pieces are microscopic, but their parent comet was not - it was
enormous. Astronomers know that, even today, hidden in those cosmic
clouds of tiny remnants, there are some huge chunks of comet pieces. We
pass through their clouds every year like clockwork, so eventually we
will collide with some of bigger pieces.




In 1990, Victor Clube, an astrophysicist, and Bill Napier, an astronomer, published The Cosmic Winter,
a book in which they describe performing orbital analyses of several of
the meteor showers that hit Earth every year. Using sophisticated
computer software, they carefully looked backward for thousands of
years, tracing the orbits of comets, asteroids, and meteor showers
until they uncovered something astounding. Many meteor showers are
related to one another, such as the Taurids, Perseids, Piscids, and
Orionids. In addition, some very large cosmic objects are related: the
comets Encke and Rudnicki, the asteroids Oljato, Hephaistos, and about
100 others. Every one of those 100-plus cosmic bodies is at least a
half-mile in diameter and some are miles wide. And what do they have in
common? According to those scientists, every one is the offspring of
the same massive comet that first entered our system less than 20,000
years ago! Clube and Napier calculated that, to account for all the
debris they found strewn throughout our solar system, the original
comet had to have been enormous.




So was this our megafauna killer? All the known facts fit. The
comet may have ridden in on the supernova wave, [or was knocked into
the solar system by the Companion Star - LKJ] then gone into
orbit around the sun less than 20,000 years ago; or, if it was already
here, the supernova debris wave may have knocked it into an
Earth-crossing orbit. Either way, any time we look up into the night
sky at a beautiful, dazzling display of shooting stars, there is an
ominous side to that beauty. We are very likely seeing the leftover
debris from a monster comet that finished off 40 million animals 12 to
13,000 years ago.




Clube and Napier also calculated that, because of subtle changes in the orbits of Earth and the remaining cosmic debris, Earth crosses through the densest part of the giant comet clouds about every 2 ,000 to 4,000 years [or 3,600 years?].
When we look at climate and ice-core records, we can see that pattern.
For example the iridium, helium-3, nitrate, ammonium, and other key
measurements seem to rise and fall in tandem, producing noticeable
peaks around 18,000, 16,000, 13,000, 9,000, 5,000, and 2,000 years ago.
In that pattern of peaks every 2,000 to 4,000 years, we may be seeing the "calling cards" of the returning mega-comet.




Fortunately, the oldest peaks were the heaviest bombardments, and
things have been getting quieter since then, as the remains of the
comet break up into even smaller pieces The danger is not past,
however. Some of the remaining miles-wide pieces are big enough to do
serious damage to our cities, climate, and global economy. Clube and
Napier (1984) predicted that in the year 2000 and continuing for 400
years, Earth would enter another dangerous time in which the planet's
changing orbit would bring us into a potential collision course with
the densest parts of the clouds containing some very large debris.
Twenty years after their prediction, we have just now moved into the
danger zone. It is a widely accepted fact that some of those large
objects are in Earth-crossing orbits at this very moment, and the only
uncertainty is whether they will miss us, as is most likely, or whether
they will crash into some part of our planet.




That may seem like bad news, but there is a glimmer of good news
too. For the first time in human kind's known history, we have ways to
detect those objects and prevent them from hitting us again. One such
effort is Project Spaceguard, a multinational cooperative attempting to
locate those Earth threatening objects, and other similar programs
include the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) telescope and the
Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona. Unfortunately, not one of them is funded nearly well enough to complete the job for many years, bur they are working at it steadily.




No one knows exactly how many dangerous comets and asteroids are
out there, but astronomers are certain that hundreds to thousands of
them remain undiscovered. The worst part is that many of those space
objects are so dark and difficult to see that they are nearly invisible
until they come very close, and by then it is too late. It is certain
that one of these monsters is on a collision course with Earth - we
just do not know the details. Is it days from now or hundreds of years
from now? Even if we were sure one was coming, there is just very
little that we can do about it currently.




We are years away from being able to control our own destiny as it
relates to supernovae and giant comets and asteroids, but scientists
are working on solutions. This is not a high priority with the world's governments, however, which typically prefer to confront terrestrial threats rather than cosmic ones. To
prevent one of those giant objects from smashing into us, collectively,
we spend about $10 to $20 million annually, an amount less than the
cost of one or two sophisticated fighter jets. Almost no money is spent trying to detect imminent supernovae [or comets].




Our politicians are seriously underestimating these severe threats, which are capable of ending our species,
just as they snuffed out the mammoths a mere 13,000 years ago, only an
eye blink in cosmic terms. There are few threats of that magnitude
facing us today. The survival of the human race is not
seriously threatened by the avian flu, Al Qaeda attacks, the end of the
Age of Oil, monster hurricanes, giant earthquakes, or enormous tsunamis;
if any of those occur, most of us will continue with our lives.
Furthermore, nothing on that list is broadly accepted as having caused
worldwide extinctions in the past. The same cannot be said about supernovae and massive [cometary] impacts.
Those two cosmic events are implicated in many of the largest
extinctions on our planet over the last millions of years. Fortunately,
we survived them, but many of our fellow species did not. Humankind
might not survive the next one. It seems reasonable to forgo
several of our military fighter jets each year to decrease our chances
of being" nuked" from space by a supernova or a comet.

So, indeed, humanity has passed its "extinct by" date and, as it was in the days of Noah...

They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they
were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
and the flood came, and destroyed them all.

Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they
drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same
day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from
heaven, and destroyed them all.

©Beloit University

Somehow, we don't think it was a boat....

Comment: We posted an article yesterday from Ivan Eland where he said:

Spending all that money to combat a threat that is
as rare as a catastrophic comet hitting the United States makes little
sense. If NASA were able to use the same scare tactics as DHS, perhaps
the space agency could persuade a reluctant Congress to give it the
paltry $1 billion (by comparison) for its equally absurd Spaceguard
Survey program, which tracks asteroids and comets that have an equal
probability of killing Americans as terrorists do.

As you can see from the article above, Mr Eland knows not of what he
speaks. But how many people on the planet do? How many of your fellow
citizens have any idea that the human species has passed its due date?
Think about that the next time you see a shooting star or read about a
fireball in the newspaper...