Creationism, Myth and Catastrophism

[Lloyd]

180860

Previous post was yesterday.

KEN MOSS ON MAYA COSMOS & SATURN CONFIGURATION

* Asterisks indicate possible clues about the history or nature of the polar configuration.

1. (5,000-3000 BC?) The DARK AGE
2. (3,000-2,500 BC?) The GOLDEN AGE
2.3. (2,500 BC?) PANGAEA BREAKUP EVENT

The following are highlights of his Aeon article.

Maya Cosmos: A Saturnian Interpretation (Part II)
_From: Aeon VI:3 (Nov 2002) Ken Moss
_This essay is a continuation of my earlier paper about Maya beliefs of former world ages (creations) and some very specific imagery concerning those times, such as their sun gods and World Trees.[1] Freidel, Schele, and Parker's Maya Cosmos forms the major source of this essay, as it brings together some of the latest findings of Mayanists combined with excellent illustrative material. From this, it has been possible to augment what has become known as the Saturnian, or Polar, Configuration model. ... Besides the three planetary deities there was, at times, a mysterious structure that seemed to link them and Earth together. This was the polar column, variously referred to in myths as the axis mundi, or World Tree.[5] Its exact scientific nature is unknown but current theorists claim it may have been a huge tornado-like structure, a Rankine vortex (especially between Mars and the Earth) or entwined electrical structures of sustained Birkeland currents (especially between Mars, Venus, and Saturn). A Rankine vortex, as elucidated by Frederic Jueneman,[6] may have stretched between Earth and a north polar-positioned Mars. Developed from the "synchronous rotation and mutual attraction of the pair," various forces would have combined to produce an enormous tornado-like vortex that eventually extended upward into space towards Mars. The vortex would have contained "atmospheric gases and debris" and exhibited many of the electrical and mechanical effects that are found encoded in myths of the column. Such aspects as "colossal lightning discharges," "precipitous cooling," "a pillar of fire," and a huge range of interesting "acoustic tumult" would have been possible. All of this, and more, would have taken place within the column which could have *contained a blue core of "exquisite brilliance ... encased in a pale green envelope." This, then, could explain the ancients' "choice of precious minerals" such as "turquoise, lapis-lazuli, and even jade."
_The Olmec.
_Although our main focus will be concerned with the mythology of the Maya, a short preface about the Olmec civilization is in order. After all, "[t]he Olmecs were the first people in Mesoamerica to create a codified religious universe that we can recognize today through the surviving art."[8] The Olmec, from roughly 1500 to 400 B.C., are regarded as the precursors to the Maya who obtained and carried forward a great number of their most distinctive beliefs, rituals, and even construction techniques, which most people tend to attribute to the Maya themselves. ... One final Olmec artefact is the life size figure (Figure 4) which was found on top of the largest volcano in the area, San Martín Pajapán. This volcano apparently stood in for the Olmec's mountain of creation and the figure is said to represent either a ruler or god wearing a headdress decorated with a cleft-headed god and a maize plant. According to the insights of Olmec specialist Kent Reilly: "... this god is grasping the trunk of the World Tree, ready to lift it into an upright position. Like the Maya First Father[Maize God/Saturn], the Creator of the Olmec cosmological imagery raised the sky away from the earth by setting the World Tree upright."[14] By observing the position of the hands, one can see that it will be the quadripartite end that will be on top once it is raised up. If one could obtain a view of the split end of the Tree, I would not be surprised that it would look like a quincunx, or similar four-petalled flower-symbol, that we have already identified as a sign for the Saturnian sun. In a perhaps not too fanciful mood, I see in this *Olmec "doughboy" a personification of the configuration at the time of its dissolution. The lower head is the planet Mars. It is so close to Earth at this time that its moons, Phobos and Deimos, have been portrayed as earrings. *Above Mars is a prominent, maned Venus (in its comet-like phase), fierce and threatening Earth with destruction. Lastly, on top is a very distant, quartered, and vegetal, Saturn, already leaving us far behind. (If Wallace Thornhill is correct, Saturn was "pulled" toward the sun once it came within its influence, and this led to Saturn "running away" from the other smaller, less massive planets, even though simultaneously creating their linear configuration.)[15] Perhaps this statue reflects not the placing up of the World Tree but, rather, the desperate hope that it would be re-established.
_The Big Picture.
_To begin our journey, we zero in on a building in Chich'en Itza constructed in the twilight of Classic Maya kingdoms (Figure 5). It is the Upper Temple of the Jaguars and it is chock full of Saturnian imagery. *It shows the nested concentric circles - Saturn, Venus and Mars - of the early Saturnian age, along with feathered serpents looping over them (Venus in its later "cometary" phase). At the top there is the quartered Saturnian shield images of this same time. It depicts three entwined feathered serpent bands, relating to a later aspect of the configuration, encircling the building (forming linked "eyes"). ... Itzam Yeh (Seven Macaw, of the Popul Vuh), the bird avatar of Itzamna, the sun god (or the planet Saturn, according to this study), is at the top of the World Tree [polar column]. *The column of the configuration is like a tree trunk with a twisting vine wrapped around it, but with many other colourful objects swirling around. At the base of the column the celestial dragon (is it Venus or Mars?) reaches down to threaten Earth with finger-like roots. ... _The centre one of the three shown in the accompanying diagram includes a *Mesoamerican version of the Chinese yin-yang symbol within its disk, most likely a motif from the time when Venus and Mars "chased" each other around the column and in front of Saturn's face, as seen from Earth. ... One more general image of what the configuration may have looked like is that found on a special pot (see Figure 11) that Friedel, et al., call the "Pot of the Seven Gods." ... As Friedel, et al., state: "this remarkable vase begins with the Calendar Round date 4 Ahau 8 Kumk'u, assuring us that *we are, in fact, seeing the Creation."[18] The key phrases here are "to bring into existence," "to put into order," and "black (is) its center." "Remember that in these first moments of Creation the sky is still lying down on the face of the earth, so that there is no light. The black background of this vase is meant to express that darkness."[19]
_Mats.
_ *The mat was the undisputed symbol of authority and rulership in the Maya world. ... *It was, in my opinion, the entwined, woven nature of the configuration between the planetary gods that was preserved in the mat symbol. Through millennia, the mat retained its divine significance, and this power was taken over by, and used to legitimise, the earthly rulers' authority. As an aside, *the mat was important to another, even more ancient, culture - that of Egypt. As Marie Parsons relates: "From predynastic times as Petrie discovered, and probably earlier still, offerings were made to the gods and to deceased persons on small mats of woven reeds."[44] ... We know the Maya were aware of [Saturn] since *many of their monuments and ritual accession dates directly tie in with conjunctions of Saturn with other planets.[48] So ... if the Maya could see Saturn in the present sky, why would they not have seen it in the past when all the other planetary deities filled so prominent a place in their daily lives? The answer, of course, is simple. The planet Saturn, together with its gods and avatars, was the god of the Maya as it was with all early peoples but it was referred to as a sun. I would venture to say that most of the Mayan sun gods, creation gods, and gods of the Otherworld - virtually all the most important gods - actually reflect the planet Saturn at the time when it was Earth's polar sun. ... *A new identification, that Plumed Serpent/Quetzalcoatl was actually Saturn, was convincingly offered by Dwardu Cardona some years ago ....[49] And yet, to complicate the picture, ... near the end of the Popol Vuh [he] is presented as though he was a human ancestor of the Maya. Plumed Serpent's actions, however, clearly demarcate it as a planetary god. "... [On different occasions] Lord Plumed Serpent ... would climb up to the sky ... he would go down the road to ... (the Otherworld) ... he would [become] an actual serpent ... he would make himself aquiline, [or] feline; he would become like an actual eagle or a jaguar in his appearance [or he] would be a pool of blood.... The answer to Plumed Serpent's identity may [have] been applied to all three planets in the Saturnian configuration at different times, and might even have referred to the entire configuration at other times.
_Nets.
_Figure 18 shows a pier (pillar) painting from House D at Palenque depicting king Pakal dancing with a woman. He holds an axe in one hand and a rearing snake in the other. "[T]he dancers wear the *net costumes of First Father and First Mother, the deities whose actions enabled the final Creation and the birth of all the gods."[37] ... In Part I, I outlined the Popol Vuh story concerning Seven Macaw, the Cosmic Bird, the avian avatar of Itzamna. As I indicated there, it is my belief that this god stood for Saturn since *Seven Macaw was specifically identified by the Maya as the "false sun" of the previous creation prior to the rising of the present Sun and moon. I return to him here because of his wife Chimalmat. Popol Vuh translator Dennis Tedlock states that Chimalmat's Nahua name means "shield net."[42] The planet of the Saturnian configuration that is depicted in world myths as having been female while associated with a shield is Venus.[43] Chimalmat fits this role precisely. As the planet that radiates a shield pattern across the face of Saturn, Venus was considered by many ancient peoples as the consort of the foremost deity, the "sun" god, Saturn. *Later in time, when the intertwined column made its appearance, and Venus took up a separate position between Saturn and Mars, "she" was mythologized in a positive sense as a weaver of nets or, negatively, as being caught in the "net" of the Martian warrior hero. ... While the two topics of mats and nets might not appear downright convincing, the following tidbit should strengthen the case. According to Miller and Taube, *the earliest so far discovered Mesoamerican archaeological remains showing "concrete evidence of complex religious activity" have been found in the Tehuacan Valley of Puebla in the arid highlands of southern Mexico. "Excavations ... have uncovered two groups of human burials dating to approximately the 6th millennium BC. Wrapped in blankets and nets, the bodies were also accompanied by baskets. Some of these individuals were burned and partly dismembered, perhaps as an early form of ceremonial cannibalism. Although the actual significance of this ritual mutilation remains to be established, these Tehuacan burials clearly demonstrate an early concern and belief in the afterlife."[44] To repeat, the earliest known burials from this region contain three man-made objects and they are all woven materials - blankets, nets and baskets. Why would such common utilitarian goods be thought important enough to leave as final gifts to the departed?
_Crosses And Mirrors.
_"The Maya cross symbolized the world tree, the axis mundi, and was personified (which surely indicated that it had an inner soul) and clothed (in jewels and mirrors), and had a spiritual relationship to supernatural ancestors... Crosses and trees played central roles in the Maya vision from the earliest material manifestation of their symbol system until today."[45] One should not be surprised with that since the Saturnian configuration provided many kinds of crosses. At the radiant Venus stage, a four-armed cross appeared on the disk of Saturn.[46] *Saturn, with its rings and crescent at the top of the polar column, could look like a T cross or ankh. Later still, when Venus and Mars descended towards Earth, with interplanetary material twisting about, a tree-like structure seems to have appeared. Today, in the Yucatan, crosses are usually painted green and called "Our Mother." In Chiapas they are blue or green, decorated with pine tree tops and called, "Our Father." We find here the Father/Mother dualism noted earlier. The Maya classify blue and green as the same colour and it is associated with the centre of the world. "We now know that *the first act of Creation was to center the world by placing the [three] stones of the cosmic hearth. *The second {act} was to raise the sky, establish the sides and the corners of the cosmic house that is the sky. ... In addition to a general tree shape, coloured blue or green, the physical appearance of the structure was often said to be mirror-like. These characteristics have been maintained throughout Mesoamerican history. Ancient Maya crosses, like the famous Palenque World Tree images housed in buildings the Spanish called Temple of the Cross and Temple of the Foliated Cross, were often "outlined with reflective mirrors, and they wear jade necklaces and loincloths as if they were living beings... Modern Christian-Maya crosses ... too are considered to be living beings." ... Note that the twisted nature of the polar column is recalled in the cross-hatched net design at the base of the cross. The ubiquitous quincunx figure, that goes all the way back to the Olmec, stood for the four cardinal directions and the centre, the navel of the universe. *But, over time, "the quincunx symbol was replaced by the cross all over Mesoamerica." ... Mirrors, often decorated with net patterns (at least at Teotihuacan), conveyed god-like power because *Saturn and the configuration, the polar column, had a mirror-like quality at one stage. I presume this reflective quality was due either to water or ice crystals in the atmosphere of proto-Saturn or another compound with similar properties. *The twisted column between the Earth and Mars almost certainly contained water that was drawn up from Earth's seas by the polar vortex atop the World Mountain.[50] The Popol Vuh actually contains a remembrance of this era and the place where the first tribal kings of the Maya gained their authority. ... It was done at the boundary of Mirror Side."[51] *The northern sky must have been a tremendous sight with its cosmic blue-green tree of brilliant shimmering light.
_Cosmic monster.
_There is nothing substantive about the Milky Way, or the continuous routine motion of planets, that even hints at *themes of monsters and blood sacrifice {which mainstream mythologists assume is what the myths represented}. Instead, this figure probably represents the time near the end of the configuration when Venus was in its cometary, dragon-like phase and its tail of debris appeared to link it with Saturn, the old sun. Support for this view comes from the comet-like design of the three Cauac signs on the creature's body and the fact that they signify both day and sacred stones. They are commonly found on the body of the Witz Monster which is "the symbol of the living mountain," understood here as the World Mountain. Additionally, in Maya iconography, "the World Tree often emerges from behind the rear head[Saturn] of the Cosmic Monster. The front head [Venus] of the same creature can be depicted as its roots."[58] ... Figure 27. Netted Jaguar. In the words of Miller and Taube, "this poorly understood entity is a jaguar covered with interlaced cords, resembling a net." In addition to the entwined cords, this unusual jaguar (again, an animal often associated with sun gods) also has feathers at the back of its head and along the back, legs, and tail. The dripping object below the lolling tongue is a human heart, "suggesting a sacrificial role." So here, in this single highly unrealistic image, are details that relate to both the planets Saturn (sun jaguar) and Venus (feathered mane) {and the human heart as Mars?} as well as the corded configuration. *It even links to the post-configuration period when ritual human sacrifice was used to placate the gods
_The Sky Umbilicus.
_Once again, *the black background {of a Mayan object} depicts the time of creation, "the lightless time before First Father raised the sky," before the appearance of the present Sun. ... in the Paris Codex in the pages preceding the zodiac ... It shows the same black background where floating beings are linked by entwined cords. *Other pages have a red background, like page 21 as shown in Fig. 30. The colour red is also appropriate for depicting the very earliest times man remembers as that was probably the colour of the sky due to Saturn's red glow.[62] ... Figure 32. Venus Glyph. In the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology there is a carved stone from Izapa, Chiapas. In the lower right-hand section it shows a skeletal figure sitting on a platform. A thick line is shown coming out from below the ribcage. In the upper left there is a being in the sky that is holding onto this linear appendage. The Museum's caption to this stone, as related in the official exhibit book, reads: "Relief showing *celestial deity holding the umbilical cord of a skeletal individual, possibly the god of death."[69] When would a skeleton ever have an umbilical cord? Only Mayan myths of Venus fit this strange scenario. Part I of this article contained a picture of a statue of Hun-Nal-Ye, the "Raised-up Sky Lord" of Creation, whom I identified as Saturn. He is there shown wearing a necklace that Mayanists claim portrays a skeletal Venus. In Copan, the city dedicated to Venus worship, *the god of Venus as Evening Star was portrayed as the jawless skeletal head seen in Fig. 32. Not surprisingly, skeletal figures in the Maya world are identified by scholars as a personification of death. However, it is Venus as Morning Star that was the most feared and the most deadly to the Maya. Why this difference is a bit of a mystery. The Popol Vuh claims that *Venus was the "sun carrier" as it appeared before the real Sun dawned for the very first time - that is, following the demise of the configuration. This, however, was a benign sign, so the dichotomy is still not presently explainable.
_Sky Ropes - The Cords Of Heaven. As noted earlier, Part I of this essay ended with a simple and most profound memory portrayed by the Maya - three vertical circles that signified god. In my estimation, these stood for Saturn, Venus, and Mars at the time they formed the polar alignment. ... Figure 34, from the Madrid Codex, appears to be equally significant to the Saturnian configuration theory. The labelling is that of Friedel, et al.. ... These scholars say it is only a record of a solar eclipse, but they ignore the fact that there are two "suns" portrayed, and two cords attach these "suns" to [the three vertical circles]. ... the cords ... appear to be made up of a central core that is homogenous in nature, surrounded by separate particles. Could these particles represent solids or liquids? ... If the column ... was a Rankine vortex as suggested by Frederic Jueneman, wouldn't the larger boulders it would have dislodged be flung to the outside of the column just as this drawing shows? Or was the column a Birkeland current acting within a plasma? If so, would the larger boulders or meteorites tend to be repelled by, or absorbed within, the electrically active water-filled core? Perhaps the dots were only knots of denser plasma. ... But what of the "sun" in this same image? I say "sun" because Friedel, et al., regard it as one despite the fact that there are two of them. ... In my opinion, they represent Saturn when it was the one and only "sun" in the ancient Maya sky. Thus this "sun" (or "suns") is depicted with the central circle that is a well established symbol of Saturn, displaying the four-rayed pattern ...
*why two "suns" when there was only one Saturn? ... as Cardona and Talbott related, Saturn grew dim in the daytime, and brighter and, in my opinion, visually larger during the night.[Thus this] depiction of two Saturns, one larger than the other, is a good method for relaying this {cycle} in a single small image.
_Itz, Sustenance, and Sacrifice.
_The substance itz, which was personified in the sun god Itzamna and the Cosmic Bird Itzam-Yeh, was said to be many things: the cosmic sap or incense resin, bodily fluids like tears and semen, and edible substances like maize, dew, flower nectar, and honeycombs. It is also interesting to note that the most obvious substance that one would think of being represented by these dots {dripping from the K'an cross}, ordinary water and rain, is not alluded to. ... The concept of "food from the gods" is found in every corner of the world. Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision surprised many when he claimed that ambrosia or "manna from heaven" may have actually fallen to Earth. In his opinion, this manna was some kind of edible carbohydrate. His quotations from many sources described this manna as having an "oily taste," a "honey taste," as being the "corn of heaven," and "bread of the mighty." It also "had a fragrant odour, and served...as an ointment."[77] ... From the highlands of Guatemala, the Atiteko Maya still believe that: "... before there was a world ... a solitary deified tree was at the center of all there was. As the world's creation approached, this deity became pregnant with potential life; its branches grew one of all things in the form of fruit. Not only were there gross physical objects like rocks, maize, and deer ... hanging from the branches, there were also such elements as types of lightning, and even individual segments of time. Eventually this abundance became too much for the tree to support, and the fruit fell ... scattered their seeds ... The great tree provided shelter for the young plants, nurturing them, until finally it was crowded out by the new. Since then, this tree has existed as a stump at the center of the world. This stump is what remains of the original Father/Mother, the source and endpoint of life."[79] The idea that the gods nurture Earth and its inhabitants is, of course, commonplace, but the Maya have the complimentary and rather unique belief that the people can somehow provide sustenance to the gods in return.... Among most modern Maya, the usual method of feeding the gods is by ritual in the form of dancing, praying, or burning copal incense. (Bloodletting and human sacrifice, although still reported, is no longer common). ... One of the images of Maya art ... is the famous one, portrayed on walls and carved in stone, of the woman pulling a cord studded with thorns through a hole in her tongue. With all that we have considered above, it finally makes perfect sense. The gods gave the ancestors of the Maya their "blood" from the prickly "cords of heaven." So in return must man use the exact same technique to give blood back to the gods. ... The blood drips onto bark paper in a bowl placed beneath her. When later set alight, the smoke from the burning blood-soaked paper rises up to the gods.
_The Flood.
_Figure 40. Flood that destroyed the Last Creation. ... As noted previously, the recurrent theme of sky ropes filled with blood, equated with umbilical cords, and so providing sustenance, is found throughout Mesoamerica. But equally prevalent is the notion of ropes and cords in the sky filled with water. ... The k'an cross, mentioned earlier as a likely symbol for Saturn, has also been identified as representing both the colour turquoise (blue and green are Saturn's old colours) and, most significantly here, water.[85] ... As Cardona related in a recent AEON article, many ancient peoples tell of the time when *the cutting of Saturn's polar sky tree led directly to a catastrophic flood of water.[87] ... In 1907, Alfred Tozzer reported the following Creation myth that spoke of both blood and water: "... there was a road suspended in the sky, stretching from Tuloom and Coba to Chich'en Itza and Uxmal. This pathway was called the kuxan sum or sakbe. It was in the nature of a large rope [sum] supposed to be living [kuxan] and in the middle flowed blood. It was by this rope that the food was sent to the ancient rulers who lived in the structures now in ruins. For some reason *this rope vanished forever. This first epoch was separated from the second by a flood called Halyokokab."[88] To this very day, the Maya associate New Year ceremonies with a destructive flood. ... Fortuitously, one of the only four surviving Maya codices, the Dresden Codex, pictures the age-ending flood just prior to its New Year's pages. ... Attached to the skyband and bending down from the Venus sign is a celestial dragon belching down a huge volume of water. Just below the skyband are winged Saturnian sun and Moon signs that are also spewing out water. ... God L, a powerful god who destroyed the previous Creation by flood, sat on the first throne to be set up in the present Creation, and operated as a god of warriors and merchants."[89] {I'm guessing God L was Jupiter or Mars.} ... God L may in fact just be a version of Itzamna because, like him, God L is often portrayed as a frail wrinkled fellow with a large nose and toothless mouth. He is also one of the black jaguar gods who are associated with night and the Otherworld as well as the "sun." Although these features can be seen as contradictory in today's world, they perfectly fit into the age of Saturn, the *fanged "sun of night," and supreme god of the heavenly Otherworld.
_The Old Moon Goddess.
_Ix-Chel, Ixchel, or Chak-Chel ... is also known, in translation, as Lady, or Great Rainbow, as well as "She of the Rainbows." If that isn't enough, Ix-Chel is identified with spiders, while a possible avatar of hers is Ix Kanleom, or "lady spider web." The old moon goddess was the consort of Itzamna, the "sun" god, and "the patroness of weaving, childbirth, sorcery, and medicine." William Gates calls Ix Chel "the Isis of the Maya pantheon," while referring to Itzamna as "the Great Initiator, in a way corresponding to Osiris."[95] ... In Classic times, Ix Chel was portrayed as an old woman with toothless mouth, holding a serpent, or with snakes in her hair, wearing a skull-and-bone ornamented skirt. She was the "grandmother of the [Popol Vuh] Hero Twins and midwife of Creation." In other words, this old moon goddess was an important participant at the beginning of time. ... Like the Greek temple to Apollo at Delphi, *there was a famous Oracle of Ix Chel on the island of Cozumel off the coast of Yucatan.
_The Young Moon Goddess. ... There is a second prominent "moon" goddess in Maya myth ... depicted as a young woman and her real name is still unknown. ... This young moon goddess was an avatar of Xmukane (a name still untranslatable), First Mother, wife of the Maize God and, notably, often appears wearing a net skirt. Note that even the crescent glyph has a cross-hatched net pattern on it. In summary, these moon goddesses go back much farther in time than the present Moon as their attributes seem to have originally belonged to a different celestial body, most probably Venus. The association with the attributes of deities, such as weaving, skeletons, and Medusa-like snakes in the hair, is cogent and may be used to identify the planet behind the character. In support of this contention lies the fact that, in her role as midwife, her helper is none other than the Pauahtun, God N. These two deities, perhaps the male/female dualities of one and the same being (or, perhaps, Venus & Mars), assist in the destruction of the world by flood, following which they help initiate the *Fourth Creation which, it is said, we are presently enjoying. It can thus be seen that all of the symbols and figures depicted in association with the Flood in the Dresden Codex illustration are related. Additionally, they all seem to have complimentary roles that fit the Saturnian mythology. *The evidence of Venus' involvement in this world-ending flood is overwhelming and is contained in the picture (see Figure 40) in both an explicit and implicit manner. ... At the time *when the configuration was in the form of the World Tree, Venus was first in the middle of the Tree, hanging within the cords of the column. Later she was seen revolving off-centre from the column but still attached to it by a stream of material. Venus was acknowledged world-wide as the female god of this era. Later, *when the configuration broke apart, Venus terrorized the peoples of the Earth with her close encounters as a huge maned cometary-like warrior. In fact, a little of Venus' Saturnian era attributes are retained in this Codex image in her flowing tresses and her net skirt.[104] This image does not portray the Moon.

2. (3,000-2,500 BC?) The GOLDEN AGE
2.2. (2,700 BC?) Venus & Mars wandered from the Saturn Configuration, then returned
2.3. (2,500 BC?) PANGAEA BREAKUP EVENT
2.3.7. Noah's Flood was caused by Continents sliding under and raising Ocean Waters & Tsunamis
2.3.12a. Saturn left the Saturn-Jupiter System at the Asteroid Belt
2.3.12b. Jupiter filled the vacancy on the Polar Column

[Lloyd]

182224

2.3. (2,500 BC?) PANGAEA BREAKUP EVENT
2.3.3. Pangaea broke up & Continents scattered rapidly

THERE WAS A THEORY THAT THE CHICXULUB CRATER IS THE REMNANT OF A SUPERVOLCANO ERUPTION

Why the Chicxulub-impact was an explosive supervolcano
http://www.b14643.de/Chicxulub_event/
_Since the results of biostratigraphic analysis of borehole Yaxcopoil-1 on Yucatan (2004) were published, began a controverse debate about the causal relations between Chicxulub event and K/T-boundary.
_The group Keller/Stinnesbeck/Addate doubt this context. They are convinced that they have detected in the core from the borehole Ya-1 above the ejecta (breccias) about 0.50 m Cretaceous sediments with foraminifera in situ. That would mean that the Chicxulub event has to do with the K/T-boundary nothing. The advocates of causal relations between Chicxculub event and K/T-boundary try to discredit these results.
_Apart from the K/T debate, the author doubts that the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan documents the impact of an asteroid with massive global effects. The detection of an andesitic melt in the center of the crater (with dioritic magma chamber in the underground) suggest the explosion of a supervolcano. It is absolutely inconceivable that an andesitic melt is compatible to molten dolomites or limestone as target-rocks by an impact. Gravimetric investigations on Yucatan, suggest that the former magma chamber is not limited under the center of the crater. Possibly a large magma chamber in the crust reach far to south. The presumed "peak ring" in the center of the crater is an illusion and was undetectable by drilling. Finally, the arguments of the advocates for an impact origin of the Chicxulub are not convincing, more shaky, because:
_Iridium is not only an indicator of "young" extraterrestrial material. It is been since the creation of the planet exists in its liquid core.
Planar deformation or shock-generated features are equal indicators of volcanic eruptions, or shock waves by magma movements.
As with other supposedly large impact structures, it was also in this case not possible to reach a geochemical correlation between target-rocks and "impact"-melt.
(therefore also the "Tektites" are of volcanic origin)
_The so-called impact-melt in the Chicxulub is clearly of magmatic origin (pure andesite in the depth of about 1400 m). The significance of this fact is completely ignored.
_The found glasses are either geochemically compatible with the andesitic melt or are a mix with molten bedrock.
Due to the andesitic melt in the crater there have been only a influences from inside to outward. Probably a huge overpressure explosion took place, by this the bedrock was destroyed and the debris were widely distributed. The strewn field extends to Belize, Guatemala and southern Mexico. The detected andesitic melt ascended after the explosion and is secondarily penetrated in parts of the breccia and the bedrock (Veins, Dykes). It is also likely that falling-back debris are sunken primarily in the melt and were partially melted.
_The occurrence of shock-generated features is not only an indicator for an impact event, because this is also proved by finds in volcanic structures. Very exceptional shock structures, that caused by volcanic shock waves, can you here seen: "Mysterious columnar sandstone"
__My opinion
_The spheroid-bearing clay layer (smectite) in the Albion Island quarry (northern Belize), immediately above the eroded Maastrichtian bedrock, are older altered volcanic deposits, and include a time gap to the following Chicxulub event. The clay spheroids are altered volcanic glass, and the dolomite spheroids are accretionary lapilli. The overlying >15-m-thick diamictite are falling-back material from the Chicxulub event. The breccias unit containing rare altered glass, large accretionary blocks, striated, and impacted cobbles. The localities in Belize are unique because here is documented a volcanic activity before the Chicxulub event (right). http://www.b14643.de/Chicxulub_event/Obregon.jpg

COLUMNAR SANDSTONE STRUCTURES ARE SAID TO BE VOLCANIC FEATURES, BUT I DON'T FIND THEM ASSOCIATED WITH CHICXULUB SO FAR
Mysterious columnar-jointed sandstones [formed by electric discharge?]
http://www.b14643.de/Sahara/Sandstone-Columns/index.htm
_Also for a geologist mysterious and up to now not seen are the discovered and photographed structures in the Jebel Uweinat by Andras Zboray, Hungary, in 2008.
Surprisingly, there are no columns of basalt or other eruptive material. The sandstone is splitted like basalt columns. But the columns have mostly a pentagonal cross section. They have a different diameter and it is to find not the root. They seem to be inclosed in the massive sandstone formation. Normal bedded sandstones were observed both above and below this peculiar structure. The internal structure of the sandstones is apparently unchanged.
_Basalt columns are usually of regular hexagonal cross section. The hexagonal cross-section of basalt is formed during the cooling due to shrinkage. So far it is known that columnar sandstones were found only in direct contact with basalts. However, then the sandstones are fritted and highly mineralized. This is here not to see at first glance (without pyromethamorphism).
_There were widespread subvolcanic activities (plugs, dykes) in this region (three-country corner Egypt/Sudan/Libya), but the columns had no contact with such structures, were not affected by heat, and are unchanged in their consistency. The columnar-jointed sandstones stand abruptly in the steep walls of valleys, apparently without roots on undisturbed sandstone. The creation of this kind of columns is mysterious. It is sure that no volcanic intrusions are in the vicinity. Such columns could created probably only by shock-like movements.
_There are only a few other locations worldwide with columnar-jointed sandstones. Strangely, there is also here no direct contact with volcanic structures detectable (see below). The question is what force has caused this parts of fragmented sandstones without roots (!?).
_On Dec. 2, 2019, Robert Hawthorne of Salt Lake Community College, Electronics Engineering, wrote me that such columnar-jointed sandstone could have caused by Electric Discharge of plasma. He refers to the so-called "Townsend Avalanche" theory.
[There are 80 images of such columnar sandstone formations on the page.]

COLUMNAR ROCK IS VISIBLE AT THE MISTASTIN IMPACT SITE IN CANADA, BUT I DON'T KNOW IF IT'S SANDSTONE OR BASALT....
IMPACT STRUCTURES
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/ea ... tter-cones
FIGURE 4.11. Some shock metamorphic effects at terrestrial impact structures. (a) Shatter cones in basalt at the Slate Islands structure, Canada. (b) Photomicrograph of planar deformation features in quartz from the Mistastin structure, Canada. Width of field of view is 0.5 mm, crossed polars. (c) Hand samples of shocked target rocks from the Wanapitei structure, Canada, which are beginning to melt to form mixed glasses and to vesiculate or froth. (d) Outcrop of coherent impact melt rock some 80 m high, with columnar cooling joints, at the Mistastin structure, Canada.
[This article suggests that the Mistastin rock is igneous, not sandstone.]
file:///C:/Users/lkind/Downloads/THE_GEOLOGICAL_RECORD_OF_METEORITE_IMPACTS.pdf
_For impact craters formed in crystalline targets, these crater-fill impact melt rocks display characteristic igneous textures and features (e.g., columnar jointing; Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Impact melt rocks at the ~28 km diameter, ~36 Ma Mistastin impact structure, Canada. Notice the well-developed columnar jointing on the ~80 m high cliff face.

SOME THOUGHT DECCAN VOLCANISM IN INDIA KILLED THE DINOSAURS
KT Mass Extinction: theories and controversies - extended version
https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/keller
_Prof. Gerta Keller, Princeton University
_Recent attempts by the pro-Chicxulub lobby to pretend that meteorite impacts are the only game in town when it comes to explaining the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction raise a smile from Gerta Keller* who here gives her view of the rise and fall of a theory.
_Geoscientist Online 5 May 2010
__Volcanism and KT Mass Extinction: 1980 – 2010
_Before the impact hypothesis was proposed by Alvarez et al. (1980), McLean (1978) advocated CO2 emissions from Deccan volcanism as the most likely cause for the KT mass extinction. This set the palaeontologist Dewey McLean on a direct collision course with the Luis and Walter Alvarez team. In addition, most dinosaur experts were highly sceptical and often critical of the impact hypothesis as they could not reconcile the gradual decline evident in the fossil record with a sudden death by impact. This resulted in one of the most bizarre and acrimonious personal attacks on the integrity of Dewey McLean and palaeontologists in general.
__Deccan Volcanism - Real Cause for the KT Mass Extinction?
_The results of ... studies strongly suggest that Deccan volcanism played a critical role in the KT mass extinction, which occurred after the last mega-pulse of the main phase of Deccan volcanism. Although the kill mechanism(s) and precise nature of environmental catastrophes due volcanic gas emissions remains to be determined, Deccan volcanism has emerged as a credible cause for the KT mass extinction and the most serious challenge to the impact hypothesis. Moreover, the discovery of rapid and voluminous Deccan eruptions at KT time suggests that Ir and other PGE contributions may have been far greater than originally assumed and could account for at least some Ir anomalies.
__Conclusion
_After 30 years of intense controversy and often unscholarly invective aimed at opponents of the impact hypothesis, KT studies may have finally reached the turning point where the sum total of scientific evidence overwhelmingly points away from a KT impact and strongly supports volcanism and associated climate and environmental changes as the most likely cause for the mass extinction. ... From the outset in 1980 to today, the strongest evidence in favour of an extraterrestrial impact was the Ir anomaly. All corollary effects, such as global wildfire, nuclear winter, shut off of photosynthesis and mega-tsunamis have remained hypothetical, enjoying no unequivocal support and for the most part negative evidence.
[NOTE: The "gradual decline" of the dinosaurs is an illusion based on the false assumption that sedimentary rock strata were deposited gradually over millions of years, instead of mere months.]

BUT THEN THE CHICXULUB IMPACT WAS THOUGHT TO HAVE CAUSED THE DECCAN VOLCANISM
Dinosaur-killing asteroid caused India’s Deccan Traps?
https://earthsky.org/earth/dinosaur-kil ... can-traps/
_Richards had proposed in 1989 that plumes of hot rock, called “plume heads,” rise through Earth’s mantle every 20-30 million years and generate huge lava flows, called flood basalts, like the Deccan Traps. It struck him as more than coincidence that the last four of the six known mass extinctions of life occurred at the same time as one of these massive eruptions.
_Richards and his team visited India in April 2014 to obtain lava samples for dating, and noticed pronounced weathering surfaces, or terraces, in one area. Geological evidence suggests that these terraces may signal a period of quiescence in Deccan volcanism prior to the Chicxulub impact. Richards concluded:
"This was an existing massive volcanic system that had been there probably several million years, and the impact gave this thing a shake and it mobilized a huge amount of magma over a short amount of time."
__Did dinosaur-killing asteroid trigger largest lava flows on Earth?
https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/04/30/di ... -on-earth/
https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/up ... ume400.jpg
_Illustration of a hot mantle plume “head” pancaked beneath the Indian Plate. The theory by Richards and his colleagues suggests that existing magma within this plume head was mobilized by strong seismic shaking from the Chicxulub asteroid impact, resulting in the largest of the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions.

2017 CREATIONIST ARTICLE UNDERMINES THE IMPACT THEORY
Chicxulub Crater Theory Mostly Smoke
https://www.icr.org/article/chicxulub-c ... stly-smoke
_The Chicxulub crater isn’t visible on the surface because it is covered by younger, relatively undeformed sediments. It was identified from a nearly circular gravity anomaly along the northwestern edge of the Yucatán Peninsula (Figure 1).2,3 There’s disagreement on the crater’s exact size, but its diameter is approximately 110 miles—large enough for a six-mile-wide asteroid or meteorite to have caused it.
_Although some of the expected criteria for identifying a meteorite impact are present at the Chicxulub site—such as high-pressure and deformed minerals—not enough of these materials have been found to justify a large impact.1 And even these minerals can be caused by other circumstances, including rapid crystallization4 and volcanic activity.5
_ Iridium, a chemical element more abundant in meteorites than on Earth, is a primary marker of an impact event. A few traces were identified in the cores of two drilled wells, but no significant amounts have been found in any of the ejecta material across the Chicxulub site.6
_In addition, secular models suggest melt-rich layers resulting from the impact should have exceeded a mile or two in thickness beneath the central portion of the Chicxulub crater.7 However, the oil wells and cores drilled at the site don’t support this. The thickest melt-rich layers encountered in the wells were between 330 and 990 feet—nowhere near the expected thicknesses of 5,000 to 10,000 feet....

A TSUNAMI CAME FROM CHICXULUB, BUT WAS IT FROM AN IMPACT OR A SUPERVOLCANO ERUPTION?
52-foot-tall 'megaripples' from dinosaur-killing asteroid are hiding under Louisiana
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/DaiQd ... 970-80.jpg
_The 52-foot-tall (16 meters) megaripples are about 5,000 feet (1,500 m) under the Iatt Lake area, in north central Louisiana, and date to the end of the Cretaceous period....
_The megaripples' size and orientation suggest that they formed after the giant space rock, known as the Chicxulub asteroid, slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula....

PANGAEA BREAKUP EVIDENCE: THE BREAKUP OBSCURED THE IMPACT?
https://www.newgeology.us/presentation17.html
Mike Fischer shows that the Chicxulub crater may have formed when the Americas were just breaking away from Africa, so the Cape Verde Islands which are still close to Africa likely formed at the same time. Central America would have been in that location then and he thinks an impact bored all the way through the American continent's crust and into the underlying magma which became ocean floor. As Central America moved rapidly away from Africa, magma from the impact formed the Cape Verde Islands. It seems possible that there could have been a supervolcano under Cape Verde and Chicxulub which formed both, but maybe it's more likely that it was an impact that formed both. Above, it was stated that there isn't nearly enough melt rock under Chicxulub to account for an impact, but if the impactor ended up under Cape Verde, while the American plate slid away, that may account for the shortage of melt rock under Chicxulub.

[Lloyd]

182743

PAST POLE SHIFTS AS EVIDENCED BY SUNDIALS, WATER CLOCKS ETC

_Readers here may have noticed that I've been putting in quite a bit of effort to try to sort out what ancient cataclysms occurred when and how. On May 23rd, after coming across an Aeon article by Peter James, I posted on DATING EARTH WOBBLES at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... =660#p6919
_Lately I remembered that Velikovsky had discussed not only the orientation of ancient structures and buildings, but also other possible indications of pole shifts. So now I've perused some of the literature on sundials and water clocks to see what they might have to tell us. It looks like one thing may be that there were some pole shifts or wobbles after the Younger Dryas event, even as late as ca. 700 BC. The last cataclysms that seem well established are the ~1,600 BC Thera eruption in the Mediterranean Sea, the ~1,400 BC Dead Sea area airburst, possibly the ~1,300 BC Exodus event, and the ~1,200 BC MidEast (Claude Schaeffer) conflagrations. I've long known of Velikovsky's idea about close approaches of Mars ca. 700 BC, but the Thunderbolts team doesn't seem to have found any confirmation of that aspect of Velikovsky's thesis. I agree with the team that Venus and Mars likely did not have close encounters with Earth after about 2,300 BC, but it kind of looks like something may have caused pole shifts or wobbles around 700 BC. Below is some evidence of that, although I'm mainly looking for evidence of earlier pole shifts. The last excerpt below on Magnetism seems very suggestive and I wonder if there are any similar cases of pottery etc that date to earlier times that have anomalous magnetism. I'm highlighting sundials and water clocks below.

FORMER POLAR CONSTELLATION GREAT BEAR; LONGEST DAY 3X SHORTEST DAY
_(It seems like that could only happen at high latitudes, i.e. where longest days are 3 times longer than shortest days. Okay, here's a chart that shows day lengths each month for all latitudes { https://twitter.com/neilrkaye/status/12 ... 21/photo/1 }. And I was right. 60 degrees has shortest day of 5.9 hours and longest of 18.9 hours. That's a little over 3 times. So ~58 degrees is probably closest. That's an extreme latitude, nearly in the Arctic/Antarctic Circle/s. However, the Great Bear is the Big Dipper and the polar constellation now is at the top end of the Little Dipper. If or when the pole was in the Big Dipper, Earth's tilt would have been ~35 degrees lower, I think. I subtracted the Big Dipper's celestial latitude 55 degrees from Polaris' latitude 90 degrees.)

Venus. Supplement: Astronomy And Chronology Ch.3 (Peoples of the Sea) [Velikovsky]
____Sundials of Egyptian antiquity do not show proper time in the latitudes in which they were found;
____water clocks are not functional either, though intact;
_the Babylonian and Egyptian inscriptions alike refer to a time when the longest day in the year was three times as long as the shortest day, a ratio which changed in various periods;
_the North Celestial Pole was once in the Great Bear, but since the eighth century the North Celestial Pole has been in the Little Bear - the change was sudden;
_the vernal and autumnal equinoxes were transferred once by 30.4 days and on another occasion by 9 days;
_the orientation of the temples in Greece, in Palestine (Shechem), in Egypt, and the Sudan was altered;
_the length of the month repeatedly changed, as did the number of days in the year (the Palermo Stone refers to a year of 320 days during the Old Kingdom),[12] as well as the length of the day;
_the calendars were again and again reformed and the beginning of the year was transferred in most civilizations of antiquity, always following great global upheavals.
[Same at] Astronomy and Chronology [Pensee]
__From: Pensée Vol. 3 No 2: (Spring-Summer 1973) "Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered IV". Immanuel Velikovsky. Copyright 1973 by Immanuel Velikovsky. The sources of error in the conventional chronology.

Chapter 14. Agronomy and Climatology [Journal] [Velikovskian]
_Sometime after the eighth century B.C., all these regions would have been moved to their present latitudes and the great desiccation would have set in, creating the problem of salinization. In this respect, Velikovsky has presented evidence from astronomy, temples and obelisks, and a ____water clock, to prove that prior to the eighth century B.C. the conditions just described actually occurred.
_He presented this evidence in his chapter "Poles Uprooted" in Worlds in Collision: "According to Seneca the Great Bear had been the polar constellation. After a cosmic upheaval shifted the sky, a star of the Little Bear became the polar star. Hindu astronomical tablets composed by the Brahmans in the first half of the first millennium before the present era show a uniform deviation from the expected position of the stars at the time the observations were made (the precession of the equinoxes being taken into consideration).3 Modern scholars wondered at this, in their opinion inexplicable, error. In view of the geometrical methods employed by Hindu astronomy and its detailed method of calculation, a mistake in observation equal to even a fraction of a degree would be difficult to account for. In Jaiminiya-Upanisad-Brahmana it is written that the center of the sky, or the point around which the firmament revolves, is in the Great Bear.4 This is the same statement we found in Thyestes of Seneca. In Egypt, too, "the Great Bear played the part of the Pole Star."5 "The Great Bear never set."6 ... If the earth moved all the time as it moves now [by precession], four thousand years ago the star nearest the North Pole [would] have been a-Draconis.8 The change was sudden; the Great Bear "came bowing down."9 In the Hindu sources it is said that the earth receded from its wonted place by 100 yojanas,10 a yojana being five to nine miles. Thus the displacement was estimated at from 500 to 900 miles.

STAR TABLES & WATER CLOCKS
3. The Ramesside Star Tables [Journal] [SIS Review]
_Style of Compilation. To be able to make any viable interpretation at all, it is essential first to be reasonably confident of how the tables were compiled. The Asyut coffin lids (POGO 1932; Neugebauer & Parker 1960) display not dissimilar star patterns, but they are invariably "perfect", at least in the sense that each star produces a straight and vertical line on a plot of this type. The reason is clearly that the hours of the night were defined at that era by the positions of particular stars: the "hours" may well have been unequal and uneven in any absolute sense, but they cannot but come out "right" on a diagram of this sort if the interval between the rising (or setting, or any other transit) of two named stars is the only recognised definition of an "Hour". The present tables obviously do not follow this pattern and an "hour" must therefore have been defined (and measured) in some independent manner at the era when the present tables were compiled. The only independent timing device which we know of as being available to the ancient Egyptians is the ____water clock, and we must therefore suppose that the time of transit of these stars was recorded with the help of such a clock. No doubt the ____water clock was itself originally calibrated by observations of intervals between stars (probably the sun, moon and planets as well); what the present tables principally show, therefore, is that the calibration was no longer working as it once did. It was evidently still working during much of the first two to three months of the year, however ... one can establish from this that stars Jd to Na were genuine hour stars; careful averaging of the intervals between them ... shows average intervals of 61 minutes, 121 minutes, 55 minutes, 62 minutes, 62 minutes, 57 minutes, 60 minutes and 61 minutes [4 ]. Thus, though the individual stars were evidently slightly erratically spaced, the accumulated time error after nine stars had passed (= 9 hours) was only 1 minute. Clearly, some of the stars may have had to be quite minor ones to make this degree of precision possible, and one should not be too surprised if it turns out to be all but impossible to identify individual stars with certainty.
_Egyptian water clock. Passage of time was measured by the fall of its water level against scales inside the vessel as water trickled from a hole in the base. Illustration by Rosemary Burnard. As yet, however, we are barely at the start of the problem, for water clocks do not appear to have been designed to run for more than twelve hours or so. They could he kept going indefinitely by topping them up with fresh water of course, but it is very questionable whether their accuracy was such that they could keep good time for twelve hours let alone twenty-four hours or a 1-year period (as these tables appear to require). A good dissertation on the time-keeping characteristics of Egyptian water clocks is that by R. W. SLOLEY (1931): it should be consulted by anybody who wants to try to draw precise conclusions from observations recorded in these tables....

BABYLON & EGYPT - PRECESSION JUMPS
Psychology and Ancient Astronomical Discovery [Journal] [Kronos]
_Egyptian obelisks (gnomons), for example, used from at least the time of the 4th Dynasty,(98) should have "enabled man to measure the [tropical] year with an error of less than 1 part in 40,000." But it is not until the 7th Century B.C. that the "ancient astronomer, by watching the varying length of a vertical column or gnomon [shadow] concluded... that the tropical day [sic] was equal to 365.25 days."(99) Around the ancient world neither the calendar, nor the celestial charts, nor the ____sundials, nor the ____water clocks of the time before-687 were adequate for their purpose after that time. Values subsequently established in different parts of the terrestrial globe have remained practically unchanged down to the present....(100) It appears to have taken historical cultures millennia to determine correctly the number of days in the year....

The Water Clock, Part 2 Mars Ch.7 (Worlds in Collision)
__From "Worlds in Collision" © 1950 by Immanuel Velikovsky. The ____Water Clock. Besides the gnomon, or ____sundial, the Egyptians used the ____water clock, which had the advantage over the former of showing time during the night as well as during the day. A complete example was found in the Amon Temple of Karnak (Thebes), 25.5 [degrees?] north of the equator. This ____water clock dates from the time of Amenhotep III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, father of Ikhnaton. The jar has an opening through which water flows out; marks are incised on the inner surface of the jar to indicate the time. Since the Egyptian day was divided into hours, which changed in length with the length of the day, the jar has different sets of markings for the various seasons of the year.

San Francisco, February 25, 1974 [Journal] [Pensee]
_Reference to Worlds in Collision discloses that Velikovsky's statement about Babylon moving southward by 2½ degrees of latitude - not "250 kilometers" - follows a statement that "gnomons or ____sundials" -- not "clocks" -- can be built with great precision. And the basis of the statement concerning Babylon is a series of documented sources ranging from Claudius Ptolemy to Kugler - not an assumption of any kind, much less one involving clocks.

The Reforming Of The Calendar, Part 2 Mars Ch.8 (Worlds in Collision) [Velikovsky] [Velikovsky Worlds in Collision]
_"All Toltec histories mention an assembly of sages and astrologers that was convoked in the city of Huchue-Tlapallan for the purpose of working on the correction of the calendar, and the reforming of the computation of the year, which was recognized as erroneous and which had been employed until that time."43 Half a meridian away, across the Pacific Ocean, a calendar was introduced in Japan in -660, and the reckoning of years in that country starts from that year. In China, the astronomer Y-hang in the year -721 announced to the Emperor Hiuen-tsong that the order of the sky and the movements of the planets had changed which made it impossible to predict eclipses; and he referred to other authorities who asserted that in the time of Tsin the planet Venus used to move 40 degrees to the south of the ecliptic and eclipse the star Sirius. Y-hang explained that the course of the planet Venus changed in the days of Tsin.44 All around the globe the years following -687 saw activity directed toward reforming the calendar. Between -747 and -687 the calendar was in a chaotic state, the length of the year and of the month, and probably also of the day, repeatedly changing. Before the eighth century there was a comparatively long span of time when the year had 360 days and the lunar month consisted of almost exactly thirty days. Neither the calendar, nor the celestial charts, nor the ____sundials, nor the ____water clocks of the time before -687 were adequate for their purpose after that year. Values subsequently established in different parts of the terrestrial globe have remained practically unchanged down to the present save for very small improvements resulting from the more precise calculations of modern times.

Velikovsky and his Critics by Shane Mage [Book]
_It is left to Mulholland to call into question the second class of evidence, that dealing with changes in the inclination of the Earth's axis of rotation. Velikovsky cites, among many sources, the "strange riddle" posed by Kugler: "The Babylonian astronomical tablets of the eighth century provide exact data, according to which the longest day at Babylon was equal to 14 hours 24 minutes, whereas the modern determination is 14 hours 11 minutes" (Worlds in Collision, p. 315), which indicates an axial inclination at the epoch of those calculations significantly greater than the present angle of 23.5 degrees. He also cites the Theban ____water clock of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, dating from the ninth century. This clock agrees exactly with the present length of day and night on the equinoxes, but gives drastically different values for the solstices: "The difference between the present values and the values of the day for which the clock is adjusted is very consistent: on the winter solstice the day of the clock is 52 minutes longer than the present day of the winter solstice at Karnak, and the night is 52 minutes shorter; on the summer solstice the day is 53 minutes shorter on the clock and the night 53 minutes longer." (lb., p. 324) This of course requires a ninth-century axial inclination very much less than 23.5 degrees. Mulholland's response to this evidence is to state (Sc. V, p. 108) that "Velikovsky's interpretation of the clock error requires Thebes to have moved 1,000 kilometers northward while the other Near Eastern cities moved southward," which he says is absurd, geometrically impossible without tearing the Earth apart. The objection is totally devoid of merit, because Velikovsky insists that the Earth repeatedly changed its axial inclination in the eighth century. The Babylonian and Theban observations, a century apart, had to reflect this change: "As we find from the present research, the clock of Amenhotep III became obsolete in the middle of the eighth century; and the clock that might have replaced it at that time would have been made obsolete in the catastrophes at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, when once more the axis changed its direction in the sky." (Worlds in Collision, p. 324)

Ninsianna And Ramesside Star Observations [Journal] [SIS Workshop]
_The present analysis does not suggest any omission or mix-recording of intercalary months on the Babylonian tablets; however, quite the contrary, and this is in itself rich in consequences, for the Ramesside tables also contain an as yet uncited anomaly, namely that they show the stars as repeatedly rising earlier than expected, yet by the end of the year they have suffered a drift in right ascension which is in the wrong direction for it to be attributable to this cause. The only possible explanation appears to be that there was a "precessional jump" - that is, a discontinuity in the precession of the equinoxes - which resulted in a more or less abrupt shift in the position of the vernal equinox, such as is forecast as a side effect of a "Tippe-Top" type precessional disturbance (Warlow 1978). The magnitude of the jump is not easy to assess from the Ramesside tables themselves, as the effects of axis tilt and spin rate acceleration are not easily separable with any degree of certainty. The jump will certainly be greater than the 1 hour which is indicated by the diagram which accompanies the "Ramesside Star Tables" article (SISR IV:2/3), as this diagram does not take the spin acceleration component into account at all, and it does also appear to be more than the additional 20 minutes or so which might be found appropriate for a change from a 360 day year to a 365.25 day one (from the average slopes of the "star tracks" which are included on the diagram). If we were to go by the markings on the ____water clock of Amunhotep III (cited in Appendix V of the SISR Ramesside article), we would expect a "jump" of 4 hours R.A. (= 2 calendar months) and if we accept the proposed parallelism of the Ninsianna and the Ramesside records, we would also expect about 4 hours R.A. (from the adoption of two intercalary months, though the computed dates of conjunction can also be applied so as at least partly to correct this intercalation, which is clearly a not unreasonable one). It will also be well known that Dr Velikovsky has cited a possible 1 month jump in the precession of the equinoxes during this era (SISR III:2 , 40; in KRONOS III:2 , 21 he wrote "more than a month"). It should be noted that all the data so far quoted indicate the jump as being a backward one, bringing the vernal equinox back to its present day position (that is, its present day position after correction for the known precessional drift since 750 B.C.).

PYRAMIDS LATITUDE UNCHANGED
Letters [Journal] [SIS Review]
_The latitude of Babylon is said to have moved 2.5 degrees towards the equator, and the latitude of Thebes apparently moved in the opposite direction [see I. Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision (1951), Chapter VII]. The latter event depends, of course, on how one interprets the ____water clock of Amenhotep III. The clock might have been moved to the Karnak Temple for safety reasons while building work was in progress at its own temple and never returned. However, assuming that it does record a movement of Earth's crust, that movement must have been local since the latitude of Gizeh has remained unaltered since the pyramids were built.

THE MOON IS ORBITING NEAR ECLIPTIC INSTEAD OF OVER EARTH'S EQUATOR
9. The Ocean [Journal] [Kronos]
_The Earth was, for some agonizing moments of its past, in a vise; and its coupling action wrenched the Earth and welled up the ridge and split it with a deep rift. The mid-Atlantic ridge known from before is but a segment of the entire serpentine formation. The area of the ridge is so great that it was estimated to equal the area of the five continents. In Earth in Upheaval (1955), I wrote of the shearing action to which the Earth's crust was subjected when caught in force fields of extraneous origin. In Worlds in Collision (1950), I described the same occurrence as reflected in the ____sundials and ____water clocks of antiquity that certify to a changed length of the day on solstices, and thus to changed latitudes and a changed inclination of the terrestrial axis to the plane of the ecliptic (Chapter 7). The fact that the Moon does not circle the Earth on its equatorial plane and that this plane is inclined by over 23 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic - whereas the plane of the lunar orbit almost coincides with the plane of the ecliptic - made H. Jeffreys (The Earth, 2nd ed., 1929) speculate that the Earth was once, or several times, in a vise that turned its axis in a new direction; and I quoted him in the chapter "Axis Shifted" of Earth in Upheaval.

MAGNETISM OF POTTERY ETC
20. Zetetic Scholar Nos. 3 & 4 April 1979 [Article]
_For example, the year consisted of 360 days between the fifteenth and eighth centuries B.C., changing to the present system of 365¼ days at the beginning of the seventh century B.C. There are shadow clocks and ____water clocks from ancient times which do not keep time the way we observe it today.15 The astronomical records of Babylonia, the Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga, which are neither myths nor legends but precise scientific observations, portray a solar system which did not operate the way it does today.16 Furthermore, there exist numerous rocks magnetically polarized to a much greater intensity and in an opposite direction from the way they should be in light of the magnetic field of the Earth as it is today. While it is generally assumed that reversals of the terrestrial magnetic field occurred only during geological time, Velikovsky points to magnetic dip studies on pottery which show a reversal in the eighth century B.C.17

[Lloyd]

184992

700 BC CATACLYSM

In recent posts I found interesting evidence that some major cataclysms occurred as late as ca. 700 BC. I saw a video lately about Sennacherib's army destroyed at Jerusalem, which reminded me what Velikovsky had written about it. So I started looking into that. I got the following excerpts, except for the first one, by looking up "Sennacherib's army" at Catastrophism.com. There are about 70 such excerpts in all. These below seem to be the most useful ones.

SENNACHERIB'S ARMY WAS DESTROYED OVERNIGHT
https://religion.fandom.com/wiki/Sennac ... with_Judah
The Biblical account of Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem [ca. 700 BC] begins with the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and its capital Samaria. This is how the ten northern tribes came to be known as the Ten Lost Tribes, because as recorded in II Kings 17, they were carried off and settled with other peoples as was the Assyrian policy. II Kings 18-19 (and parallel passage II Chronicles 32:1-23) details Sennacherib's attack on Judah and capital Jerusalem. Hezekiah had rebelled against the Assyrians, so they had captured all of the towns in Judah. Hezekiah realized his error and sent great tribute to Sennacherib. But the Assyrians nevertheless marched toward Jerusalem. Sennacherib sent his supreme commander with an army to besiege Jerusalem while he himself went to fight with the Egyptians. The supreme commander met with Hezekiah's officials and threatened them to surrender; while hailing insults so the people of the city could hear, blaspheming Judah and particularly God. When the King Hezekiah heard of this, he tore his clothes (as was the custom of the day for displaying deep anguish) and prayed to God in the Temple. Isaiah the prophet told the king that God would take care of the whole matter and that [the invader] would return to his own lands. That night, the angel of the Lord killed the entire [probably just part of the] Assyrian camp consisting of 185,000 troops. Jewish tradition maintains that archangel Gabriel (along with Michael in the Targum's version) was the angel sent to destroy the Assyrian troops, and that the destruction occurred on Passover night.[2][3][4] Sennacherib soon returned to Nineveh in disgrace. Some years later, while Sennacherib was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, two of his sons killed him and fled....

2.5 MILLION TROOPS?
__Philologos: The Legends of the Jews: Volume IV [Book]
_God granted Hezekiah a brilliant victory over ____Sennacherib. This Assyrian king, who had conquered the whole world, (51) equipped an army against Hezekiah like unto which there is none, unless it be the army of the four kings whom Abraham routed, or the army to be raised by God and Magog in the Messianic time. ____Sennacherib's army consisted of more than two millions and a half of horsemen, among them forty-five thousand princes sitting in chariots and surrounded by their paramours, by eighty thousand armor-clad soldiers, and sixty thousand swordsmen. The camp extended over a space of four hundred parasangs, and the saddle-beasts standing neck to neck formed a line forty parasangs long.
[COMMENT: Maybe some of the 2.5 million troops went to fight Egypt while the rest prepared to attack Jerusalem. Or maybe the number is wrong. 185 thousand killed would have been a small percentage of 1 or 2 million or more.]

POLE SHIFT OR WOBBLE, LIGHTNING, CONFLAGRATION
__The Subjective Interpretation Of The Events And Their Authenticity, Part 2 Mars Ch.6
_From "Worlds in Collision" © 1950 by Immanuel Velikovsky.
_The following is a tale told by the Menomini Indians, an Algonquin tribe.3 "The little boy made a noose and stretched it across the path, and when the Sun came to that point the noose caught him around the neck and began to choke him until he almost lost his breath. It became dark, and the Sun called out to the ma'nidos, Help me, my brothers, and cut this string before it kills me.4 The ma'nidos came, but the thread had so cut into the flesh of the Sun's neck that they could not sever it. When all but one had given up, the Sun called to the Mouse to try to cut the string. The Mouse came up and gnawed at the string, but it was difficult work, because the string was hot and deeply embedded in the Sun's neck. After working at the string a good while, however, the Mouse succeeded in cutting it, when the Sun breathed again and the darkness disappeared. If the Mouse had not succeeded, the Sun would have died." The story about snaring the sun associates itself in our mind with one of the occasions when the sun was disrupted in its movement across the sky. The story contains an important detail and enables us to understand a natural phenomenon.
_In a previous section we discussed the various versions of the annihilation of Sennacherib's army and the physical phenomena which caused it. According to the Scriptures, in the days of Isaiah the sun was interrupted in its course, turning back ten degrees on the sundial. That night the army of Sennacherib was destroyed by a blast. In Egypt this victory over the common enemy of the Jews and the Egyptians was observed in a festival at Letopolis, "the city of the thunderbolt"; the holy animal of the city was a mouse, and bronze mice inscribed with the prayers of pilgrims are found in its soil. Herodotus saw there a statue of a god with a mouse in his hand, commemorating the annihilation of the army of Sennacherib. The story he heard gave as the cause of the event an invasion of mice that gnawed the strings of the bows. He also told the story of the changed movements of the sun directly following the record of the destruction of the Assyrian army. We recognized that the image of the mouse must have had some relation to the cosmic drama. The best we could do was to interpret the mouse as a symbol of a simultaneous plague, exemplified by the illness of King Hezekiah. The tale of the Indians that combines the snaring of the sun with the deed of the mouse explains the relation of these two elements to each other. Apparently the atmosphere of the celestial body that appeared in the darkness and was illuminated took on the elongated form of a mouse. This explains why the blast that destroyed the army of Sennacherib was commemorated by the emblem of a mouse.
_The Indian tale grew from the picture on the celestial screen where a great mouse freed the snared sun. Thus we see how a folk story of the primitives can solve an unsettled problem between Isaiah and Herodotus. A four-legged animal in the sky approaching the sun was visualized as a mouse by the Egyptians and the Menomini Indians. In the tale of the southern Ute Indians, the cottontail [rabbit] is the animal that is connected with the disruption of the movement of the sun.5 He went to the east with the intention of breaking the sun in pieces. There he waited for the sun to rise. "The sun began to rise, but seeing the cottontail, it went down again. Then it rose slowly again and did not notice the animal. He struck the sun with his club, breaking off a piece, which touched the ground and set fire to the world. The fire pursued Cottontail, who began to flee. He ran to a log and asked if it would save him if he got inside. No, I burn up entirely. So he ran again and asked a rock with a cleft in it. No, I cannot save you, when I am heated I burst.... At last he got to a river. The river said, No, I cannot save you; I boil and you will get boiled. On the plain, Cottontail ran through the weed, but the fire came very close, the weed burned and fell on his neck, where cottontails are yellow now. From everywhere he saw smoke rising. He walked a little way on the hot ground and one of his legs was burned up to the knee; before that he had been long-legged. He walked on two legs, and one of them burned off. He jumped on one till that also burned off."
_In this version of the attack on the sun, two points worthy of mention are the world fire following the disruption in the movement of the sun, and the change in the world of animals accompanied by strong mutations. In the section, "Phaëthon," we wondered how the Roman poet Ovid could have known of the relation between the interrupted movement of the sun and a world fire unless such a catastrophe had really occurred. The same reasoning applies to the Indians. The story of snaring the sun or attacking the sun is told in many variants, but the world fire is a consistent result. Forests and fields burn, mountains smoke and vomit lava, rivers boil, caves in the mountains collapse, and rocks burst when the sun peeps above the horizon and then disappears and again comes over the horizon. There is one instance more in the Indian story of the sun being impeded on its path and the ensuing world conflagration. Before the catastrophe, "the sun used to go round close to the ground." The purpose of the attack on the sun was to make " the sun shine a little longer: The days are too short." After the catastrophe "the days became longer." The ancestors of the Shoshonean Indians, a tribe of Utah, Colorado, and Nevada, appear to have lived in the days of Sennacherib and Hezekiah at such a longitude that the sun was just on the eastern horizon when it changed its direction and went back and then came up again.

MORE ON LIGHTNING
__Sword-Time, Wolf-Time, Part 2 Mars Ch.4 (Worlds in Collision) [Velikovsky]
_But if for some reason the charge of the ionosphere, the electrified layer of the upper atmosphere, should be sufficiently increased, a discharge would occur between the upper atmosphere and the ground, and a thunderbolt would crash from a cloudless sky. The planet-god Shiva, Kalidasa says, "deposited his seed in fire" and gave birth to Kumara who battled the great demon named Taraka that "troubled the world." The Babylonian astrologers ascribed to their planet-gods the ability to emit the sounds of different animals - lion, pig, jackal, horse, ass - and of two species of birds.9 The ancient Chinese likewise asserted that planets emit animal sounds when they approach the earth with a rain of stones.10 It is fairly probable that on some occasion the crash of the discharge "from the cloudless sky" sounded like Ta-ra-ka, the name of the demon who battled the planets. The Ethiopian king who went up against Sennacherib called himself Taharka or Tirhakah.11 In many places in the Near and Middle East this or similar names suddenly became very popular at the close of the eighth century before the present era; before that time it was unknown. Taraka troubled the world so that The seasons have forgotten how to follow one another now; they simultaneously bring flowers of autumn, summer, spring. The night when ____Sennacherib's army was destroyed, he survived, but according to rabbinical sources, was badly burned.

MEGALIGHTNING KILLED HIS ARMY
__Response to Critique by Leroy Ellenberger [Journal] [Catastrophism & Ancient History]
_From: Catastrophism and Ancient History XII:1 (Jan 1990) Donald W. Patten.
_Isaiah described this final flyby of the "Angel of the Lord" (Mars) and its effects in a variety of ways. We have already mentioned the new shortfall of the Jerusalem sun dial. Another description was interplanetary lightning that struck, in Jerusalem's vicinity, the 185,000 (iron) lightning rods of ____Sennacherib's army, parked just outside Jerusalem, preparing for a final assault. A third change came later, when the Jews realized the old 360-day calendar could not be made to work. A five-day intercalary period, Veadar by name, begins to appear in the literature. It was tacked on to the twelfth of the Hebrew months, Adar....
__The Cyclic Nature of Ancient Catastrophes [Journal] [Catastrophism & Ancient History]
_From: Proceedings of the First Seminar of Catastrophism and Ancient History (1983) Donald W. Patten.
_Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. This suggests that a __ __cosmic, interplanetary discharge of lightning hit the bivouac of ____Sennacherib's army, waiting to pounce on Jerusalem. Velikovsky does well to cite Assyrian texts indicating that while ____Sennacherib himself survived, it was as if he had been burned.24 Isaiah had apparently seen and reported an outside fly-by.25 We shall deal with the fire falling from heaven shortly.

LIGHTNING BURNED THEIR FLESH, NOT THEIR CLOTHES
__On "the Year -687" [Journal] [Kronos]
_From: Kronos Vol. VI No. 4 (Summer 1981) Sean Mewhinney.
_Part Two of Worlds in Collision delineates a series of close encounters between Earth and Mars [Saturnists disagree about Mars at such a late date] thought to have taken place in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. To the last of these events, the author attributes the destruction of ____Sennacherib's army by a fiery blast in the year 687 B.C. "Their souls were burnt, though their garments remained intact."(1) This seemingly nonsensical detail has a ring of truth. Some of the victims of the terrible and uncanny fires that swept across the countryside around Peshtigo, Wisconsin on October 8, 1871 were found in a similar condition.(2) Jewish traditions record that coincidently with this event the day was unnaturally lengthened, on the first night of Passover, near the beginning of spring.(3) Identifying this account with the Chinese report of a meteor shower, Velikovsky gives us the exact date: March 23rd. A whole chapter is devoted to various ancient traditions in which he finds other descriptions of the same events. On what is this date based and how securely connected are these various other traditions? MARCH 23rd. Velikovsky's sources for the meteor shower, the Catalogues of Abel Rémusat and Édouard Biot, agree on this date.(4) Both authors took their information from Chapters 291 and 292 of Ma Tuan-Lin's thirteenth-century Wên Hsien T'ung K'ao, being a compilation of Chinese records of meteors and meteorites from dynastic histories and ancient books.(5) It is the earliest observation in the list.

EARLIER DEAD SEA EVENT ALSO INVOLVED MEGALIGHTNING
__The Archangels [Journal] [Kronos])
_From: Kronos Vol. VIII No. 2 (Winter 1983) Copyright (c) 1982 by Dwardu Cardona. Editor's Note: The present article is meant to be read immediately after "Jupiter - God of Abraham", Part III which appeared in KRONOS VIII:1. It is also somewhat independent of that series. - LMG 1. The Cities of the Plain Immanuel Velikovsky was of the opinion that the thunderbolt which struck the Biblical Cities of the Plain, as described by Josephus,(1) resulted from an interplanetary discharge originating from Jupiter that occurred at the time.(2)
_It is strange that Velikovsky opted for Jupiter, for which he presented no direct evidence, in favor of Mars as the agent of the Sodomitic destruction. Having accepted Gabriel as Mars in the annihilation of ____Sennacherib's army,(17) his omission of Gabriel's role in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah smacks of inconsistency and selectivity.

701 BC METEOR BOMBARDMENT
[NOTE: Ancient meteor streams were likely populated by many more and larger meteors & comets than they now contain. The swarm of ca. 700 BC apparently has not encountered the Earth since then.]
__The Years 763 and 687 BC [Journal] [SIS Review]
_From: SIS Review Vol V No 4 (1984) (c) JOHN BIMSON 1984. Dr John Bimson, biblical archaeologist and lecturer in Old Testament Studies at Trinity College, Bristol, is a consultant and regular contributor to the Review. The case for a major catastrophe having occurred in the year 687 BC is briefly reviewed and the idea that the 687 date is dependent on Assyrian chronology is shown to be in error. The date actually derives from Chinese evidence.
_In an article now in preparation I hope to show that all the evidence is best satisfied if ____Sennacherib campaigned only once against Jerusalem, in 701 BC (this date depending, of course, on the current scheme of Assyrian and Biblical chronology). It follows, as I will argue in detail, that the sudden destruction of ____Sennacherib's army, and the retreat of the sun's shadow (II Kings 19:35; 20:9-11), both occurred in 701; the implication is that in 701 the earth experienced a global catastrophe which Velikovsky overlooked, because he misdated the relevant Biblical evidence to 687. Turning to the Chinese evidence: the relevant record is found in the Chou text Chhun Chhiu (Spring and Autumn Annals), and states that in the night of sin mao, in the fourth lunar month, "the fixed stars did not appear, although the night was clear. At midnight stars fell like rain". Two questions deserve attention: whether the date of 687 is correct, and whether the record really attests a global catastrophe.
_However, it is questionable whether the Chinese record really constitutes evidence for a global catastrophe at all. Taken alone, it is evidence for nothing more than a prodigious meteor-shower, and this is how it is commonly understood. Velikovsky links this record with a passage from the Bamboo Books which states that "the five planets went out of their courses. In the night, stars fell like rain. The earth shook". This does, of course, indicate a more catastrophic event; unfortunately, this record cannot possibly be dated to 687. The event in question is dated by the Bamboo Books themselves to the time of an emperor who reigned in the second millennium BC! [13] We must therefore confine ourselves to the passage from the Chhun Chhiu when discussing the year 687. It may be that in that year (if the date is correct) the earth simply passed through a trail of debris resulting from earlier interplanetary encounters, producing a spectacular display of meteors [14]. In short, there are more fundamental questions to be tackled concerning the events of 763 and 687 than those raised by Marx. Not only the dating, but also the nature of the events, requires careful reassessment. My own view, held provisionally on the basis of the evidence I have examined so far, is that Velikovsky overlooked evidence for catastrophes occurring in 763 and 701 BC, and that the latter was probably the last of the "Mars" disasters, i.e. that no global catastrophe occurred in 687.

700 BC CATACLYSMS OF IRELAND ETC
__Earthquakes in the Early Irish Tradition [Journal] [SIS Workshop]
_From: SIS Chronology and Catastrophism Workshop 1987 No 1 (Sep 1987) Emmet J. Sweeney.
_Throughout the world, scientists have noted similar effects around the 8th century BC. In some places beaches were raised, on occasion by hundreds of feet; in others, land was submerged[18]. Volcanic activity too was very much in evidence during this epoch, whilst all over the world the effects of water, probably resulting from tidal waves, has been observed. Taken all in all, it seems that the evidence from Irish tradition provides yet more detailed support for Velikovsky's historical cosmology. Indeed, the extent to which the Irish material agrees with Velikovsky is quite astonishing. For example, the Irish annalists placed most of the "eruptions" within an 80-year period after the invasion of the Gaels. If the migration to Ireland was precipitated by the catastrophe of 776 BC, then the last of the great disasters, during the reign of the High King Tighernmus (in whose time three-quarters of the "men of Ireland" were mysteriously killed in one night), would have occurred in 687 [or 701] BC, and would synchronise with the destruction of ____Sennacherib's army outside Jerusalem. After the time of Tighernmus the "eruptions" rapidly grow less frequent, but are still recorded intermittently for another six generations. Again, the agreement with Velikovsky is striking. One of the points stressed by him was that earthquakes, caused originally by the disruptive gravitational pull of other heavenly bodies, would have continued well after the offending planet or comet had departed from the immediate vicinity of Earth - though with progressively decreasing strength: "On the basis of the material offered in the foregoing pages, the assumption is made here that earthquakes result from torsion of the crust following a change in the position of the equator and the displacement of matter inside the globe caused by the direct attraction of a cosmic body when in a close contact. Pull, torsion, and displacement were responsible for mountain building, too. If this conception of the causes of earthquakes is correct, then there must have been fewer and fewer earthquakes during the course of time since the last cosmic catastrophe. The regions of the Apennine Peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia, for which we have reliable records, can be compared in this respect with the same regions today. "Earthquakes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome are described or mentioned by many classic authors. For the purpose of comparison with earth-tremor activity of the present-day, it is enough to point to fifty-seven earthquakes reported in Rome in a single year during the Punic Wars (-217)."[19] But it would now appear that Italy and the Near East were not the only areas to keep records of earthquakes; exactly the same phenomenon is recorded in the Irish annals. The "eruptions" grew less and less frequent after the time of Tighernmus, until, perhaps two or three centuries later, we hear the last of them. The last Irish tremors would therefore probably date from the 4th century BC. Italy is in a more seismically active part of the world than Ireland, so it should come as no surprise to find that Rome was still being afflicted by such a large number of tremors as late as 217 BC.

POSSIBLE SIMULTANEOUS EVENT IN INDIA
__Dating the Great Mahabharata War: A Previously Neglected Clue [Journal] [Kronos]
_From: Kronos Vol. II No. 3 (Feb 1977) Artur Isenberg.
_I. The Mahabharata is India's longest epic poem, consisting of some 220,000 lines.
_Immanuel Velikovsky, who has examined the sources with painstaking care, writes: "The rabbinical sources state in a definite manner that __ __the disturbance in the movement of the sun happened on the evening of the destruction of ____Sennacherib's army by a devouring blast."(7) In other words, according to the rabbinical sources cited by Velikovsky, the sequence of events was 1) a disturbance in the apparent diurnal orbiting of the sun by ten "ma'alot" [degrees]; and 2) the strange events of the ensuing night when a mysterious heavenly blast destroyed ____Sennacherib's army.
_VI. Did something equally unusual occur during the Great Mahabharata War during the night following the slaying of King Jayadratha? Until the day of King Jayadratha's death, the warring sides in the Great Mahabharata War had restricted all their fighting to the daytime: there was no fighting at night. This customary state of affairs changed during the night following Jayadratha's slaying, and did so with a vengeance; pandemonium reigned all through that night. What is more, the leading part in the struggle was played not by human beings, as before, but by rakshasas, demonic creatures whose leader was a hybrid, half human, half demon, named Ghatotkacha, son of one of the five Pandava brothers (Bhima) and of a demoness. The account of the doings of the rakshasas that night is nothing if not graphic: "Terrified by the leonine roar uttered by Ghatotkacha, elephants began to eject urine and kings began to tremble. Then, thrown by the rakshasas who had become more powerful in consequence of the night, there began to fall on the field of battle a thick shower of stones. And a ceaseless shower of iron wheels and Bhundis(*) and darts and lances and spears and Sataghnis(*) and axes also fell there."(8)
_Still later, we are told of some demonic combatants assuming the shape of an entire mountain flying through the air and of veritable downpours of rocks and stones.(11) There was much more to come before that strange night was over. The human armies on both sides hastily equipped themselves with lamps, five to each chariot, three to each war elephant, one to each horse. The spectacle of the terrestrial armies thus blazing with lights inspired the celestials to illuminate the heavens in a like manner: "With thousands of lamps blazing all around, and with the more dazzling lamps of the gods ... set upon golden stands decked with jewels and fed with fragrant oil the field of battle looked resplendent like the firmament bespangled with stars. With hundreds upon hundreds of blazing brands, the earth looked exceedingly beautiful. Indeed, the earth seemed to be in conflagration, like what happens at the universal destruction. All the points of the compass blazed up with those lamps all around and looked like trees covered by fire-flies at an evening in the season of rains.... The battle that took place on that night was so terrible and so fierce that its like had never previously been witnessed by ourselves or those gone before us."(12)
_Accounts of falls of thick showers of stones, downpours of rocks, mountains flying through, cascades of iron wheels - such accounts are decidedly the exception rather than the rule, and that observation applies with equal force to double sunsets on a single day. If both accounts - of a disturbance in the length of the day and of an ensuing night of a catastrophe involving heaven and earth - refer to the same natural events, the Great Mahabharata War must have been synchronous with Sennacherib's ill-fated campaign in the Holy Land, i.e., it must have been fought in 687 [or 701] B.C. ... such a date is rather more recent than the dates usually assigned to the Mahabharata War by modern scholars....

[Lloyd]

186860

Nick, or anyone, the following video was uploaded today or yesterday and it's an interview of Dave Talbott.

When the Gods Were Planets… Why & How the Saturn Controls Humanity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW_v-bH36N4

Is that an old interview, or is Dave recovered from his stroke?

[Lloyd]

186938

DAVE TALBOTT'S INTERVIEW
In the video of the previous post he says 2000 was almost 15 years ago, so I assume the interview was in 2014.

ONE OR TWO GREAT FLOODS

I made a transcript of this video:
Noah's Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (from Pangea to Today)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd5-dHxOQhg&t=1013s
_It contains a lot of good data that I plan to analyze. It follows the usual Creationist assumption that there was only one Great Flood, but some of the data suggest that there were two Great Floods. I.e., one Flood occurred many years before Pangaea broke up and another Flood occurred during the breakup. The first Flood could easily have flooded all of the land, because it was all lowland. The second one flooded only the lowlands. If Noah's ark was real, it must have been in the second Flood, if it landed on mountains, since mountains formed during the breakup. Mythology suggests that the ark was a celestial apparition, but there seems to be pretty good evidence that there was a real ark as well.

ARK PROVES ADVANCED CIVILIZATION BEFORE THE SECOND FLOOD

The REAL Noah's Ark FOUND by Archaeologist Ron Wyatt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQwfU7DvUyE
_This video has pretty good evidence that Noah's Ark was real and that most of it was preserved by a covering of lava, which fossilized it, making it into petrified wood. The wood was laminated and riveted with apparently somewhat advanced technology rivets made of iron alloy. The structure has the dimensions given in the Bible, including a length of 515 feet = 300 Egyptian cubits. This is evidence of advanced civilization before the second Great Flood, if there were two Floods. That would mean advanced civilization developed during the Golden Age, the time between the two Floods. The Great Pyramid and Sphinx were likely built after the breakup, so the ark would predate them by at least a few years. It's not certain what the ark was used for, but it could have been to preserve animals and maybe plants too. It's very possible that Moses, or Egyptian scribes who preceded him, knew about the location of the ark.

[Lloyd]

187002

TRANSCRIPT OF A NOAH'S FLOOD VIDEO

I discussed this and another video in my previous post. The following transcript is nearly complete. I only left out some of the religious discussion. I added headlines in caps to help navigate for focusing on topics of interest. I plan to compare this with my findings from other sources and add comments in a later post.

Noah's Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (from Pangea to Today)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd5-dHxOQhg&t=1013s
_SEDIMENTARY ROCK MAP. Over 1,800 oilwell boreholes from four continents have all been compiled and mapped. The newly emerging map tracks the thickness and extent of each rock type as they were laid down by the Flood.
_MEGASEQUENCES. This research reveals the same six megasequences of sedimentary rock deposits across multiple continents. Each megasequence contains a huge stack of rock, often with coarse-grained sandstone on the bottom, then finer-grained deposits like shale, then topped by limestone. Each megasequence is bounded above and below by flat eroded surfaces called unconformities.
_FLOOD DEPOSITS. A few places on Earth have layers that represent all six megasequences. How did they get there? What do they say about Noah's Flood? Catastrophically water-deposited sedimentary layers top most of the world's continents. Would Noah's Flood bring lots of water and lots of mud? Geologists agree on the six megasequences, but they differ on the time scale in which they happened. If they took millions of years, then they have little to do with the Flood. But if they were all deposited rapidly and recently, then the Flood should come to mind.
_PANGAEA BREAKUP. Many also question when a larger landmass, such as a Pangaea-like supercontinent, broke into continents that moved to their current configuration. For the first time ever, new megasequence maps allow us to see how the Flood shaped our entire planet, just like the Bible said, including reconfiguring the continents.
_EDEN. According to Genesis, the Garden of Eden was a lush paradise, one that was set up for eternal life, worldwide vegetarianism and harmony with our Creator. ...
_BIBLE RECORD. Then came the fall. ... God instructed Noah to make an ark.... Then, in the 600th year of Noah's life, in the second month, the 17th day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up and the windows of heaven were opened. These two events ... began the first day of a 371 day long calamity that resurfaced the Earth and killed everything that moved on land.
_RIFTING. Hot magma mixed with steam pierced the Earth's crust. Giant rifts or tears ran thousands of miles across the planet. Scalding hot magma vaporized massive amounts of water that jetted into the atmosphere. The water fell back to Earth as intense global rain along with torrential rain from heaven for 40 days.
_TSUNAMIS. Worldwide catastrophic rifting caused massive mud-filled tsunamis to speed across deep ocean floors, then onto shallow ocean floors, killing everything in their path.
_MARINE FOSSILS. The first megasequence wipes out mostly shallow marine habitats.
_VOLCANISM. The bursting fountains of the great deep spew out megatons of magma and carbon dioxide. Sure enough the first megasequence rocks show a spike in volcanic activity and massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
_MARINE FOSSILS. During these first 40 days intense water currents over-topped most of the flooded continents. Water-laden sediment travels at hiway speeds. Thick sediment blankets start covering low regions of the continent. Fossils show that the first three megasequences buried the shallow seas that were filled with marine life, as these deposits have almost no trees or land animals. All three megasequences covered similar environments across North and South America and Africa, the three continents mapped so far. One global cause, Noah's Flood, best explains this one worldwide effect.
_ABSAROKA. Then, by the 40th day of the Flood, the Absaroka megasequence began hitting. The map showed that this is when things got much worse. Something shoves the water over the tops of even the highlands from that ancient world.
_SUBDUCTION. The newly forming ocean floor offshore is so hot that it starts very thick pushing up the ocean waters from beneath. Sea level rises dramatically. Molten magma rises and fills the widening gaps, pushing the mid-ocean ridges wider. The hot ocean floor shoves against the continents, then slides beneath it, like giant conveyor belts, deep beneath the Earth in some places. Rather than the conventional model that has the seafloors spreading slowly, this runaway subduction actually happened quickly, moving at about five miles per hour, due to the heat caused by the friction and pressure of the rapidly subducting plates.
_PULSING TSUNAMIS. As the diving ocean plates subduct under the land, they push down the continental edges and then release them, creating tsunami cycles that blanket the continents, just how tsunamis happen today, only more intense and frequent.
_MODERN EXAMPLE. For example, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the fourth largest in history was a magnitude 9.1 earthquake that occurred in 2011. This earthquake was caused by an undersea megathrust about 45 miles east of the Japanese coast. At the center there was a 160 foot slip between the overriding plate that was part of Japan and the underlying Pacific plate. The sea bottom rose about 23 feet when the fault unlocked and the resulting earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami that was 133 feet above sea level and traveled inland for six miles.
_TSUNAMI CYCLES. The tsunamis occurring during the Flood however were different, much different. With the ocean ridge bursting open rapidly and pushing ocean floor under land continents on a worldwide scale, tsunamis were happening in cycles, several every hour and with long stretches of subduction zones active at the same time. The incoming phase of a tsunami has a much higher speed and is highly turbulent, which keeps the sediment in suspension, but it leaves behind layers of sediment as it slows down in the retreating phase.
_FOSSILS. This cycle repeats several times every hour during the 150-day inundation stage of the Flood, first entombing the shallow marine life followed by land creatures in different habitats and elevations, leaving behind what we see today in the fossil record.
_1700 TSUNAMI. These types of tsunamis have even occurred in recent history, such as the tsunami caused by slipping ocean plates that hit the coast of Washington in 1700 and left behind multiple layers representing each wave of the tsunami.
_SUBDUCTION EVIDENCE. Recent seismic technology actually allows us to investigate whether this type of rapid subduction occurred. Sure enough, these scans reveal a ring of unexpectedly cold rock at the bottom of the mantle beneath the subduction zones that surround the Pacific Ocean.
_LAND-DWELLING FOSSILS. The severity and elevation of this stage of the Flood is why the first land creatures and plants start showing up in the fossil record laid down by the Absaroka megasequence.
_COAL. Entire ecosystems are buried in enormous deposits that later turn into coal, such as the extensive Appalachian coal beds. In fact, the U.S. has over seven trillion tons of coal reserves. Where did it all come from? While we know that coal is formed by dead plant material being sandwiched between sediment layers, we only have enough vegetation on the Earth's surface today to produce just a fraction of the existing coal reserves.
_PREFLOOD VEGETATION. This shows that the pre-Flood world was mostly covered by lush vegetation. The rising Flood waters and tsunamis that were necessary to sweep over the land and bury vast amounts of vegetation that turned into coal are best explained by a catastrophe of worldwide proportions.
_DINOSAUR PENINSULA. The fact that over a dozen states in the U.S. are filled with dinosaur fossils buried under heaps of mud also attest to the Flood. In fact, geologists have found a temporarily exposed dinosaur peninsula where the dinosaurs made their last stand, now buried there along with lake and sea life transported by the massive waves. The earlier Flood deposits, the first three megasequences, do not seem to have deposited much material over this dinosaur peninsula. Only a few hundred yards of sediment remain along the margins and in many places no deposition is left at all. Deposits thousands of feet thick occur east and west of this temporarily exposed peninsula that extends from Minnesota to New Mexico. Now buried across it are pre-Flood wetland plants and animals including dinosaurs, turtles, frogs, fish and many birds.
_DINOSAUR TRACKS. Thousands of dinosaur trackways up and down this peninsula, plus similar temporarily exposed low areas on other continents suggest that dying dinosaurs and other hardy track makers floated, waded and walked on freshly deposited mud trying to find safe ground.
_ZUNI. Next the massive Zuni megasequence hits. The Absaroka and Zuni megasequences are the most severe because the continental plates began to move more quickly from the original Pangaea-like supercontinent configuration to where they are today.
_SEDIMENTATION. With oceanic rifting and plate subduction increasing dramatically and the continents traveling apart quickly, the tsunami-like waves begin washing acrosss western North America, while virtually no sedimentation is occurring in the east.
_JURASSIC BONEYARDS. When coming up over the dinosaur peninsula, the Zuni catastrophically buries dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation, a thirteen state area encompassing over 700,000 square miles. This Jurassic unit includes at least 141 massive dinosaur boneyards where dinosaurs like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus and Allosaurus are found.
_CRETACEOUS BONEYARDS. The Cretaceous layers, like the Hill Creek Formation, are found on top of the Jurassic and hold hundreds of mass boneyards, containing several different types of dinosaurs, such as T-Rex, Triceratops, Centrosaurus and Edmontosaurus that had been living in a different ecosystem, also buried by the Zuni.
_DINOSAUR TISSUES. The Zuni was so massive and fast that it engulfed entire regions with mud flow, burying giant creatures like this T-Rex under 50 feet of muddy sediment, entombed so quickly that preserved blood cells, blood vessels and bone cells were found just recently. How much water does it take to pile 50 feet of mud on top of a dinosaur?
_NATIONAL MONUMENT. The Dinosaur National Monument in Utah contains thousands of visible bones from 11 kinds of dinosaurs that were buried in a jumbled mass in the Morrison Formation, together with crocodiles, turtles, lizards, frogs and clams. What type of event would it take to bury all these different land animals with millions of clams?
_DINOSAUR HERDS. When the dinosaur peninsula floods over completely, large herds of dinosaurs are entombed in massive fossil graveyards in the upper Cretaceous system, found in northern Wyoming, Montana and Alberta, Canada. The dinosaurs had tried to escape by fleeing northward up the peninsula as waters advanced from the south.
_MAIASAUR STAMPEDE. This explains this massive graveyard in northern Montana, that's over 1.2 miles long and contains 30 million fossil fragments representing over 10,000 adult Maiasaurs, that were simultaneously buried. In this entire collection of bones not a single baby was found. Every one of these Maiasaurs was between nine and 23 feet long. Does this seem like the adult dinosaurs were stampeding away from the raging Flood waters with 100% of their young falling behind and being engulfed in a different part of the peninsula?
_CENTROSAUR GRAVEYARD. Just 170 miles northeast of this location is one of the largest dinosaur graveyards in the world, one that even secular scientists admit was caused by a watery catastrophe. Here thousands of centrosaurs are buried in 14 megabone beds over an entire square mile, which is nearly 500 football fields. Looks like a massive herd of these creatures, thousands of them, were simultaneously buried in mud by Noah's Flood.
_MIXED GRAVEYARD. Just 45 miles west from this location is yet another massive Flood deposit and this one even has 49 different species of dinosaurs, buried along with turtles, crocodiles, fish, flying reptiles, birds and small mammals. What type of disaster could bury nearly 50 species of dinosaurs and many other types of animals, including marine life, together in mass graves?
_GRADED BONEBED. These mass burial sites are common in the U.S. as well. For example, look at this dinosaur dig site in Wyoming where a one meter thick layer of mudstone stretches for 80 acres with over a million bones in a graded, sorted bed where big bones are found at the bottom and little bones on top. The only way to develop a graded bed like this is by a catastrophic process that transports these bones and deposits them during a single event.
_FLYING CREATURES. Large flying creatures like pterosaurs were able to fly to escape the rising Flood waters, delaying their demise until the later stages of the Flood. The fossil record shows they are buried in many different layers all over the world.
_VOLCANIC ASH. There is no doubt that widespread volcanism was also involved in finishing off the dinosaurs, as many of these mass graves are literally packed with volcanic ash, ash that in many cases was mixed with water when it emplaced the dinosaurs in their tombs. One section of the Morrison Formation, called the Brushy Basin member spreads across five states and includes four thousand cubic miles of volcanic materials. Without a single volcano in the Morrison Formation, geologists believe this material had to be carried all the way from volcanoes on the west coast, volcanoes created by the magma rising from the subducting ocean crusts plunging under the land. Today these subduction zones form the ring of fire, responsible for over 90% of our earthquakes.
_BIBLE RECORD. The Bible records that on the 150th day of the Flood, God mad a wind to pass over the Earth. The waters started to recede. The fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped and the rain from heaven was restrained.
_TEJAS REGRESSION. Now enters the final megasequence, the Tejas. Here, after the water peaked over the top of the highest remnant of the pre-Flood world, it began to rush off the continents, eroding and reworking some of the deposits laid down in the previous megasequences, especially carving away at the Zuni deposit. This final sequence appears to have been different than the others, because there was a reversal in flow direction as the waters began to sheet off the continents. This flow reversal transported much of the fossils deposited earlier off the highest uplands, spreading them towards the edges of the continent. The evidence points to the Tejas draining the Flood waters southward off of the U.S. towards the Gulf of Mexico with a sheet wash pattern all at once.
_GULF OF MEXICO. This is why we find massive sand deposits in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico. Billions of barrels of oil have been discovered there with much of it found within a massive 1,100 foot thick bed of pure sand in over 7,000 feet of water over 200 miles offshore.
_MORE COAL. In addition, plants swept off the pre-Flood lands formed massive coal beds, such as in the Powder River basin of Wyoming and Montana. These Tejas layers contain the largest coal deposits in North America that currently supplies over 40% of the coal in the U.S. Some of these stacked coal beds are up to 200 feet thick and cover areas that are 60 miles long by 60 miles wide. The sheer volume of plant material required to form such a massive layer of coal testifies to catastrophic circumstances.
_HUMAN REMAINS. The massive runoff that began with the Tejas may also explain the lack of human fossils in the rock record. Any residual human remains left buried in earlier deposits were totally destroyed by the erosive retreating Flood waters. ... Any residual remains were ground up and likely spread in all directions over great distances by the Tejas, lessening the likelihood of finding any human fossil remains. Because humans were impacted earlier by the Flood's violence, they were destroyed and thus not buried whole, deep in the sediments, leaving no fossil traces. Erosion in the Tejas sequence would have affected the strata beneath, wiping away even traces of human remains buried in earlier layers. ...
_REGRESSION. On day 150 the new ocean surface began cooling and sinking, allowing the Flood waters to lower as they sheeted off the continents into the new ocean basins.
_OROGENY. Psalm 104 describes the mountains being raised at the end of the Flood and waters draining down valleys and off the emerging new land surfaces.
_HIGH ELEVATION MARINE FOSSILS. The seafloor rifting process and the resulting mountain forming process explains why sea creatures are found on mountain tops all over the world high above current sea levels.
_FLOOD END. For the remaining 220 days of the Flood the water recedes from the Earth and it dries out, allowing time for Earth to be replenished with vegetation for the animals to eat, when they eventually come off the ark.
_SEDIMENTARY ROCK. This year-long catastrophe left behind a vast number of proofs that quite frankly make its occurrence obvious. First, we have the staggering volume of fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks around the world, over one mile thick on average, billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the Earth, and the sediment they're found in lies above sea level. What sort of water process could emplace so much sediment above sea level on top of the land surface?
_THIN, FLAT STRATA. Another clue is the vast horizontal extent of individual sediment layers with little to no erosional channeling between successive layers. What sort of transport and depositional process could conceivably generate such uniform layers over such vast horizontal distances? Many of these layered beds are separated by bedding planes on the scale of inches to feet, a feature so common that few stop to think about how it happened. It's as if the sediment is being deposited in pulses in a repeating manner with each pulse producing a thin layer commonly found around the world. The Flood tsunamis provide a perfect explanation.
_NO BURROWS. And it happened so quickly that there was no time between deposition of the layers for surviving critters to burrow into the layers and turn them over.
_LATE OCEAN FLOORS. What has been discovered both from a Creationist as well as from a secular understanding is that much of the continental fossil record was already in place before any of the present-day ocean crust had come into existence at a rift zone. For example, all of the trilobite fossils had been deposited, plus all of the older coal deposits had already been formed before any of the present-day ocean crust had formed. Since in Creationist understanding the presence of fossils is a completely trustworthy indicator of the action of the Flood, this means that much of the Flood cataclysm had already unfolded and it generated fossil-bearing sediments on the continental surface before any of the present-day ocean floor had appeared. It further implies that all of today's ocean floor formed since the onset of the Flood, during roughly the latter half of the cataclysm.
_SUBDUCTION. It also means that all of the pre-Flood ocean floor, plus the ocean floor formed during the earlier portion of the Flood, must have been recycled into the Earth's interior during the cataclysm. These considerations indicate in a compelling way that rapid plate tectonics must have been a major aspect of the year-long Flood catastrophe.
_ICE AGE. This six megasequence worldwide flooding process perfectly sets the stage for the subsequent ice age. The oceans had been tremendously heated by the rifting that had taken place across the 45,000 mile ridge system and the creation of a completely new seafloor of hot lava as a consequence. This caused an abnormal amount of evaporation and thus continuous rain that was likely worldwide.
_VOLCANISM. The volcanic activity created by the subduction zones that created the ring of fire would have spewed volumes of ash and aerosols high into the atmosphere, resulting in cooling, especially in the higher latitudes. These factors combined to produce an ice age that lasted a few hundred years, but ended as the conditions that caused it waned.
_ARK. The ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat in the 7th month on the 17th day of the month.

Again, see also: The REAL Noah's Ark FOUND by Archaeologist Ron Wyatt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQwfU7DvUyE

[philalethes]

I drop in periodically to see Whazzup, what's new.

I am astonished by the volume of research by Lloyd! You are to be commended for pumping out so much research.
I'm pleased to see stuff from Kronos and other older works, which IMHO should be digitized and put up online.
This stuff is rare and the insistence to hang onto it to maybe sell a few copies will ensure that all of it is lost since it was hoarded.

Thanks Lloyd!

[jackokie]

@philalethes Amen. Lloyd is amazing. He has got to be a fast reader or never sleeps.

I really appreciate his efforts.

[Lloyd]

187438

Thanks for the appreciation, guys. I'm retired now and have even more time than before, except for time for prepping for survival. I agree that all the catastrophist literature needs to be made more accessible. Should we raise funds to buy what Catastrophism.com has? I spent all day yesterday to come up with the following followup to my previous post.

SAUK VOLCANISM MYSTERY
_Section 10 [VOLCANISM] of the video transcript of the previous post said: The first megasequence (Sauk) shows a spike in volcanic activity and massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The video authors thought the Pangaea breakup began with the beginning of the Great Flood, thus starting subduction and accompanying volcanism along Pacific Ocean shores and depositing volcanic fallout in the Sauk megasequence. But they don't seem to have any good suggestions about the cause of the breakup.
_Mike Fischer's theory, though, which I favor so far, is that Pangaea didn't break up until some centuries after the Great Flood. And he has a very sensible idea of how the breakup occurred, i.e. via a huge asteroid impact. So there would have to be some other cause of the volcanism during the Great Flood. The only other cause I can think of is impacts. I think only extremely large impacts would be likely to cause volcanism. I'll try to search to see if any volcanism is associated with impacts. I already know that Mike has good evidence that the Chicxulub impact in Mexico caused volcanism which formed the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of west Africa. I think he also found or suspects that the Seychelle Islands off the east coast of Africa are also volcanic and that's where the biggest impact of all occurred.
_Impacts appear to have been occurring since before the Great Flood. I posted a fairly up-to-date list of craters at http://funday.createaforum.com/3-12/2-47/?message=453 . I got the list of craters from Wikipedia and I got the megasequence conversions from Figure 2 at https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j29 ... _16-25.pdf . I then added the megasequences to the list of craters.
_Here's a summary of the data, showing the numbers of known small, medium and big craters in each megasequence. Small is under 10 km diameter. Moderate is 10 to nearly 50 km. Big is over 50 km diameter. More details are posted at http://funday.createaforum.com/3-12/2-47/?message=454 .
--- POST-TEJAS (7 Craters: 6SM, ........ 1BIG==53km)
--- TEJAS (58 Craters: 39SM, 16MOD, 3BIG==52, 85, 90km)
--- ZUNI (41 Craters: 19SM, 18MOD, 4BIG==60, 65, 70, 180km)
--- ABSAROKA (27 Craters: 14SM, 11MOD, 2BIG==80, 85km)
--- KASKASKIA (14 Craters: 7SM, 3MOD, 4BIG==50, 52, 54, 110km)
--- TIPPECANOE (14 Craters: 9SM, 5MOD)
--- SAUK (18 Craters: 11SM, 6MOD, 1BIG==90km)
--- PRE-SAUK (19 Craters: 7SM, 8MOD, 4BIG==60, 70, 130, 160km)
_Before the Sauk was deposited there were 4 big impacts and 8 moderate, all of which could possibly have caused volcanism. The biggest occurred in the Pangaea regions of Africa, N.America, Australia & again N.America. The two big ones in Africa and N.America were nearly as big as Chicxulub, which latter occurred during the breakup.

IMPACT BASINS
_Michael Oard has suggested that many basins on the continents formed from impacts. Flood basalts may also have been caused by impacts. But I don't know yet if any of the basins or flood basalts occurred before the Sauk megasequence. Most or all of the flood basalts may have formed during the Pangaea breakup, which would be after Sauk. But basins may have formed before Sauk. Oard had an article in 2013 called "Large cratonic basins likely of impact origin" at https://creation.com/large-cratonic-basins . He said, " I will give several examples of likely impact basins from the approximately 600 examples on the continents.6 About 200 of these basins have diameters greater than 300 km.7" "The South Caspian Basin, in the southern part of the Caspian Sea, is a very deep basin filled with sedimentary rocks." "This basin has collected probably the world’s thickest sedimentary rocks, estimated at 26–28 km thick!53 Seismic profiling shows that the sedimentary layers are generally horizontal with some volcanic rocks.52" So one of the largest basins has volcanic rocks, but he later said, "But in the case of the large cratonic basins, volcanism seems unlikely because of the basin sizes and paucity of volcanic rocks." Some, if not many, of these basins likely were formed before Sauk, so they could have been sources of volcanism found in Sauk sediments, but there is apparently not strong evidence that impacts would have accounted for the volcanic material found in Sauk. I need to find out exactly what the evidence is of volcanic material in Sauk.
_Now here's more from the video transcript.

VOLCANIC ASH ALSO KILLED DINOSAURS?
[Section 37. VOLCANIC ASH.] "There is no doubt that widespread volcanism was also involved in finishing off the dinosaurs, as many of these mass graves are literally packed with volcanic ash, ash that in many cases was mixed with water when it emplaced the dinosaurs in their tombs. One section of the Morrison Formation, called the Brushy Basin member spreads across five states and includes four thousand cubic miles of volcanic materials. Without a single volcano in the Morrison Formation, geologists believe this material had to be carried all the way from volcanoes on the west coast, volcanoes created by the magma rising from the subducting ocean crusts plunging under the land. Today these subduction zones form the ring of fire, responsible for over 90% of our earthquakes."

PANGAEA BREAKUP DURING GREAT FLOOD?
_The dinosaurs are found mostly in the Absaroka and Zuni megasequences, i.e. the 4th and 5th. Since the Absaroka is not found in the Gulf of Mexico or in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean basins, the Pangaea breakup must have begun after the Absaroka. The Zuni and Tejas are found in those ocean basins, so the breakup must have occurred between the Absaroka and Zuni. But that makes it look like there was possibly only one Great Flood. But that would mean the Golden Age would have to be moved to before the Great Flood: 1. Dark Age, then 2. Golden Age & Advanced Civilization, then 3. Great Flood & Pangaea Breakup, then 4. Ice Age & Megalithic Civilization, then 5. Younger Dryas Impacts & Meltwater Flooding, then 6. Rebuilding Civilization. I'll try to get Mike Fischer's comments.

[Lloyd]

188986

SAUK VOLCANISM MYSTERY POSSIBLE SOLUTION

I'm still looking for ways to determine if there was one Great Flood or two. In my previous post I discussed the SAUK VOLCANISM MYSTERY, by which I meant I don't know where the volcanism came from that deposited material in the Sauk. I said "the video transcript of the previous post said: The first megasequence (Sauk) shows a spike in volcanic activity and massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The video authors thought the Pangaea breakup began with the beginning of the Great Flood, thus starting subduction and accompanying volcanism along Pacific Ocean shores and depositing volcanic fallout in the Sauk megasequence." I showed in that post that there were likely some big impacts before the Sauk deposit, which could have caused the volcanism. The literature I quoted indicated that impacts don't seem to produce much volcanism, although I mentioned that the Chicxulub impact and the much larger Shock Dynamics impact (which broke up Pangaea) very likely did produce considerable volcanism. But those occurred after the Sauk. Now, I just remembered that Mike Fischer found that the East Pacific Rise apparently existed before the Pangaea breakup event. That Rise is a ridge, similar to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and was likely produced in a similar way by a major impact on a former continent. He explains his idea at https://www.newgeology.us/presentation44.html . In this image https://www.newgeology.us/Ridge.jpg he shows the East Pacific Rise as a pinkish line which extends from Alaska to the south Pacific and curves west to the Indian Ocean. The image also shows a few lines of seamounts in the Pacific. In the next image at https://www.newgeology.us/Megatrends.jpg he has arrows to indicate that most of Antarctica left behind the trail of seamounts when it was pushed across the Pacific to near its present location. That means the East Pacific Rise could have been producing volcanoes before the Great Flood, which the Sauk megasequence shows traces of. Mike seems to think that the Pacific Rise was formed maybe millions of years ago, but creationists have found that the granite in the continents likely formed within the last 8,000 years, although they probably haven't checked Antarctica. The seamounts in the Pacific may have produced volcanism, but the Pacific Rise likely did too. Charles Chandler found that volcanoes are likely produced electrically, via telluric currents, which he explains at http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=10527 .

[CREATIONISTS SAY ONE GREAT FLOOD]
__Evidence for a Late Cainozoic Flood/post-Flood Boundary
https://dl0.creation.com/articles/p077/ ... nozoic.pdf
_For modeling purposes, where necessary in the following discussions, the Flood is dated at about 4,500 years ago. The basis for this is as follows:
(1) It is reasonable, if not appropriate, to take the genealogies of Genesis 5–11 as accurate and complete;
(2) The genealogies of Genesis place 1,656 years between Creation and the Flood; and
(3) a straightforward reading of genealogies in Scripture indicates the Creation of the world occurred around 6,000 years ago. This places the Flood at about 4,344 years ago; rounding to 4,500 years for simplicity.
_A few creationists have suggested that the Flood occurred from 7,000 to over 12,000 years ago. This places the date of Creation even further back in time. I do not accept these suggestions because they (1) significantly harm the biblical chronology by introducing thousands of years into the genealogies of Genesis, (2) are based on questionable dating methods or presumed geophysical process rates, and/or (3) rely on the less accurate Septuagint.
[BIBLE IDEAS]
_[COMMENT: I don't consider the preflood patriarchs to have high probability so far. I'm not a creationist, but I think the older Septuagint Old Testament is likely more accurate than the Masoretic Old Testament. I've previously stated that the Septuagint may date the Great Flood more accurately, while the Masoretic may date a different Flood, that of the Pangaea breakup event. In a recent post I quoted evidence that Noah's ark was real, an example of preflood advanced civilization, and has been preserved on a highland in Turkey. Since the evidence for the ark looks very good, it's more plausible now that the Biblical account of the Great Flood may be fairly accurate too. Moses wrote the first 5 books of the Bible. He probably got the account from the Egyptian records and he was probably an Egyptian. Charles Chandler found that his name was probably Ramose and he shortened it because Ra was a false god that Moses repudiated.]

[WERE DINOSAUR EGGS LAID & HATCHED DURING THE FLOOD?]
(This is more from the above article. I ask this because it looks like the eggs were possibly laid on previous Flood sediments.)
_In view of the Scriptural account, subaerial evidence should not be accepted as conclusive evidence for post-Flood activity. Cited evidences of post-Flood subaerial activity include upright trees (assumed to be in the growth position), dinosaur nests, [supposed] desert sands, unsorted volcanic ash and tuff, etc. One published claim35 that an upright tree grew in place was not supported by excavation of tree roots. Evidence presented did not eliminate the possibility that the tree was deposited upright by water as has been observed at Mt St Helens,36 and elsewhere over a century ago.37 Dinosaur nests are usually considered evidence for continued subaerial activity. However, there is important evidence that dinosaur nests did not remain on dry land long before they were buried catastrophically. The different nests in Montana have been described as eggs buried in mud inside a mudnest, and a ‘salad’ of baby dinosaur bones jumbled in three dimensions in green mudstone.38 One nest had been made ‘in the floodplain of a stream’ and Egg Mountain is described as ‘a peninsula or island in a lake’.39 Dinosaur eggs were found standing vertically in an unstable orientation, that is, on the small or pointed end.40 This orientation is characteristic of eggs submerged in muddy or mineral laden water, not a nest that remained on dry land.41 Dinosaur nests could date from the first 150 days of the Flood while waters were still rising.42
[COMMENT: The last sentence implies that dinosaur eggs could have been laid some months before Flood waters reached their nests, presumably on preFlood land. It may have been enough time for some of the eggs to hatch. So I figured I should try to determine about how long dinosaur eggs likely needed to incubate before hatching. So here are some excerpts.]
__Preserved dinosaur egg reveals kinship to birds
https://earthsky.org/earth/preserved-di ... ptorosaurs
_The few brooding oviraptorosaur fossils that have been discovered so far are all from smaller species at around 220 pounds (100 kilograms) or less, no bigger than the size of an ostrich. The species to which Baby Yingliang belonged would also have been about this size: the 6 1/2 inch (17 centimeter) egg weighed 1 pound (1/2 kilogram) in life and was from an egg cluster just over 1 1/2 feet (1/2 meter) across. Giant oviraptorosaurs, which are quite rare, were considerably larger, as were their eggs and nests. In 2017, I was part of a team that studied another embryonic skeleton, known as Baby Louie. The skeleton was found with a group of eggs belonging to a new species of giant oviraptorosaur, which we named Beibeilong. As the largest known dinosaur eggs, they were over 17.7 inches (45 centimeters) long and weighed more than 11 pounds (five kilograms) each.
__A Theropod Dinosaur Embryo and the Affinities of the Flaming Cliffs Dinosaur Eggs
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sci ... 6.5186.779
__Abstract. An embryonic skeleton of a nonavian theropod dinosaur was found preserved in an egg from Upper Cretaceous rocks in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. Cranial features identify the embryo as a member of Oviraptoridae. Two embryo-sized skulls of dromaeosaurids, similar to that of Velociraptor, were also recovered in the nest. The eggshell microstructure is similar to that of ratite birds and is of a type common in the Djadokhta Formation at the Flaming Cliffs (Bayn Dzak). Discovery of a nest of such eggs at the Flaming Cliffs in 1923, beneath the Oviraptor philoceratops holotype, suggests that this dinosaur may have been a brooding adult.
[MORE COMMENT: I find online that "Hatching time varies from 36–45 days for ostrich eggs, 46–56 days for emu eggs, and 36–44 days for rhea eggs." Ostrich eggs are said to be the biggest bird egg at 6 in. or 15 cm. long. That's about the same size as the above dinosaur eggs. So dinosaur eggs probably required about the same hatching time of 50 days or so. The largest dinosaur eggs were said to be about 3 times longer, so they may have required longer incubation time, but maybe that's why those hatchlings are not found.]

DINOSAUR PENINSULA DROWNED EARLY
_They previously described Dinosaur Peninsula as highlands stretching from Minnesota to New Mexico. In the maps at https://ibb.co/ZcmCxPH you can see on the left that most of the megasequences covered nearly all of the Dinosaur Peninsula. The video transcript above gave the impression that the peninsula was not covered until the Absaroka. So, either the maps are wrong, or the video is wrong, or the first 4 megasequences were deposited nonviolently, so dinosaurs were able to wade, or swim, or float with debris, while the water was high, and maybe it wasn't too high for very long. It seems unlikely that many dinosaurs could survive long in deep water or that much sediment could be deposited with a gradual rise of water. The maps show that small areas of New Mexico, Wyoming, South Dakota and Minnesota were above water the longest, so maybe dinosaurs congregated in those places during high water. The white areas on the maps tend to show where sediments weren't deposited or were later washed away as the Flood receded. This map shows more clearly where all sediments were washed away. They're called shields and they're colored brown on this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_%2 ... vinces.jpg

[Lloyd]

192035

1. SOME RADIOHALO EVIDENCE FOR CATASTROPHISM

See also Gentry's video: Young Earth and Strong Evidence That Noah's Flood Laid the Sedimentary Layers (which shows how coalified wood can form rapidly)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuZJAcdIus
NOTE: This video starts out with a quote from a 1977 issue of Research Communications Network, written, I believe, by Steve Talbott, brother of Dave Talbott, who had published Pensee' magazine for the previous 2 years. That's when I first heard about Gentry's radiohalo findings.

THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM: Tiny halos in coalified wood tell a story that demolishes ‘long age’.
by Steve Taylor, Andy McIntosh, and Tas Walker
https://creation.com/the-collapse-of-geologic-time
_there is spectacular, but little-known, evidence that is completely inconsistent with the evolutionary timescale, but entirely consistent with ... a young Earth and a catastrophic global Flood.
_The evidence is provided by radio–halos in coalified wood. This work has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed scientific journals, and its strong case against evolution’s millions of years is so far unanswered by the evolutionary community.
_Radiohalos have also been found in logs recovered from uranium mines on the Colorado Plateau of Western USA. The logs, partially turned to coal, were found in uranium-rich sedimentary rocks from three different geological formations.
_Most of the halos found in the wood had only one ring, indicating that the radioactive cores once contained polonium-210 — the last radioactive isotope in the uranium-238 decay chain (see Radioactive decay series). Clearly, the wood had been saturated in uranium-rich solutions, and certain spots attracted polonium atoms (also present in these solutions), allowing small cores of polonium-210 to form. As they decayed, these cores left the characteristic polonium-210 halo.
_But the solutions must have penetrated the logs relatively quickly, certainly within a year or so. How do we know that? Because the half-life of polonium-210 is only 138 days. That is, within 138 days, half the polonium-210 present would have decayed into the next ‘daughter’ isotope in the chain. In other words, the solution had saturated the wood within two or three half-lives, about a year. It could not have taken very long, because in 10 half-lives (less than four years) virtually all of the polonium-210 would have gone.
_Only one of the three radioactive isotopes of polonium was deposited in the tiny radioactive specks in the logs. We know because only one ring formed. The other isotopes from the decay chain (polonium-214 and polonium-218) were missing. Why? Because they had already decayed away. Their half-lives are very short (164 millionths of a second and three minutes respectively). So all polonium-214 would have disappeared within a thousandth of a second, and all polonium-218 would have gone in an hour—long before the uranium-rich solutions could saturate the logs.
_Significantly, the halos were mainly elliptical, not circular (Figure 2). Obviously, after the halos formed, the wooden logs were compressed, squashing the originally-circular halos into ellipses.
_Sometimes a circular halo could be seen together with an elliptical halo (Figure 3). This indicated that radioactive polonium-210 continued to decay from the same core after the wood was compressed. Thus, because of the 138-day half-life of polonium-210 as discussed above, there was less than four years between when the solution first infiltrated the wood and when it was compressed. (The presence of the second halo at the same spot shows that much less than four years had passed before the compression event, as there was still time to produce another halo afterwards.)12
_The wood in which these tiny elliptical halos were found speaks of a devastating flood that uprooted and smashed huge trees, depositing the debris with an enormous volume of sediment over a large area. The halos themselves tell the story of an unusual geologic event. They speak of uranium-rich solutions saturating the logs in less than a year or so, forming tiny specks of polonium, which decayed to produce circular radiohalos, which were, in much less than four years, compressed and deformed.
_The story is one of exceptional geological conditions — a highly unusual sequence of events. For one thing, in the usual ‘slow and gradual’ scenarios, it would take much longer for sufficient sediment to accumulate on top to deform the wood in this way. What is really amazing and significant, however, is the fact that this elliptical halo situation has been found in three different geological formations in the same general region. Evolutionists say these formations represent three different geological periods ranging from 35 to 245 million years.13 To believe this millions-of-years timescale, we would need to believe that this amazing sequence of events (with all its precise timing) occurred three different times, separated by more than 200 million years. Clearly this is an incredible scenario. It makes more sense to believe that the sequence occurred once and that all the sedimentary formations were deposited in the same catastrophe, followed by the same earth movement causing deformation. ... Also, by the same reasoning, these halos leave little room for numerous layers of post-flood sedimentation as suggested by some authors.14
_Further confirmation of this spectacular collapse of geologic time is provided by careful analysis of the tiny cores of some uranium halos found in the same wood samples.15 This revealed a large amount of uranium-238 but almost no lead-206.16 If the halos were millions of years old, much more ‘daughter’ lead should have been present. The scarcity of the daughter element, using the same assumptions upon which radiometric dating is based, would indicate that the halos are only several thousand years old, not millions. Similar results were obtained for halos from all three geological formations, indicating that all are approximately the same age. Again, the supposed millions of years of geologic time collapse into only a few thousand.17
_Fossilized dinosaur footprints have been found in these Colorado mines. In Cyprus Plateau Mine (Utah), a fossilized dinosaur footprint was found in the coal seam next to one of the many coalified logs of the plateau. In Kenilworth Mine, eight different types of dinosaur tracks were found.
_The pattern of tracks suggests that the animals were fleeing from an imminent catastrophe. Nearby, a huge dinosaur graveyard has been found at Dinosaur National Monument (Vernal, Utah) in Jurassic sediments.
_Obviously, the dinosaurs that made these tracks didn’t escape. The catastrophe got them. The collapse of geologic time and the young age for the rock formations confirm that these dinosaurs lived on Earth, at the same time as man, only a few thousand years ago.
_Constancy of decay rate ... implies that a parameter which scientists have been measuring for only a century has been constant for millions of alleged years of Earth’s history. This is of course not only unproven but also unprovable. Decay rates (which can vary greatly today under special conditions {such as high ionization as per Walter Brown}) may have been much faster in the past; evidence suggesting this is now being analyzed by a creationist consortium.1 A good summary of the documented inconsistencies and inaccuracies of radiometric dating is given by Woodmorappe.2

2. RADIOHALOS NOT IN BASEMENT ROCK

EXCERPTS FROM: Gentry's Tiny Mystery Unsupported by Geology
https://ncse.ngo/gentrys-tiny-mystery-u ... ed-geology
_So, the "basement rocks" in which Gentry found his halos turn out not to be "basement rocks" at all. In fact, they appear in rocks that formed much later than Earth's oldest rocks. This fact alone tells us that the rocks bearing Gentry's halos, even if instantly created, have no bearing on the origin and age of Earth.
_Realizing how serious this problem is, Gentry has been forced to turn the science of geology upside down [Quotin Gentry]:
"... just because geologists designate something as Precambrian doesn't automatically mean it has any connection with the primordial events of Day 1, or for that matter of creation week. In the case of the Precambrian granites it does have a connection; in other cases it may not. Investigation on a case-by-case basis is needed before it can be decided whether something called "Precambrian" can be connected to the events of creation week."
_So, the rules have been changed. Gentry has attempted to establish new criteria for determining the oldest rocks. But his new criteria fail at every point. Furthermore, he is forced to invoke the supernatural to explain away physical evidence that points to a tremendous amount of geological activity over a long period of time in this region where he found the halos. Since Gentry's God can do anything, he concludes that God created the region to have the features of age and activity that it exhibits and that he made "Genesis rock" look for all the world like a recent intrusion, thereby fooling thousands of geologists.
_And, as if making an untestable claim were not enough, Gentry has bolstered his position with a circular argument: "Primordial 218Po halos imply that Precambrian granites, pegmatitic micas, and other rocks which host such halos must be primordial rocks" (1979, p. 474). In short, rocks that contain his halos are by definition the oldest rocks. Since he elsewhere argues that it is only in the oldest rocks that one finds these halos, he is using his halos to date his rocks and his rocks to date his halos.
_I have deliberately omitted, because of space limitations, several arguments Gentry uses to support his premise, such as the halos in coal, lead and helium retention in granite, and the artificial synthesis of granite. I have left these items for later discussion, perhaps by others. Any attempt by Gentry to avoid my previous arguments because I left out these latter items or because I have not explained the halos would be irrational and would clearly be a smoke screen to divert attention from the real root of the situation — the specific geology of the sites themselves. Let him answer this directly.
_Still, we must give Gentry his due. Nothing in geology fully explains the apparent occurrence of the polonium halos as described by Gentry. They do remain a minor mystery in the field of physics. But this does not mean that no explanations are possible or that it is time to throw in the towel and invoke the "god of the gaps." The generation, preservation, and alteration of the radioactive halos involve complex physical processes that are not yet well understood, and it is quite possible that they are not primordial polonium halos at all. Other explanations include the erasure or modification of the inner halos by the alpha radiation from other isotopes, the migration of uranium-series elements through the rock by fluids or by diffusion accompanied by precipitation of polonium at inclusion sites shortly after it is formed, and the modification of halos by heat and pressure and chemical changes during metamorphism. The very fact that Gentry's halos at these sites occur in areas of unusually high uranium mineralization and metamorphism suggest that halos may be connected with the migration of uranium-bearing fluids through or within the rocks.
_What is interesting is that in 1939 Henderson wrote a small paragraph about how these radioactive inclusions got into the biotite:
"To provide such a mechanism there seem to be two possible alternative hypotheses, which may be termed magmatic and hydrothermal. On the magmatic hypothesis it is supposed that the constituents of the halo nucleus, including the radioactive parent, crystallized out first from the magma to form the nucleus, and that the biotite later crystallized around it, following the normal order of crystallization from a magma." [p. 252]
_It seems that the magmatic mechanism is the most likely way that radioactive inclusions can get into the biotite without conduits. It satisfies both the rock type locations. As mentioned previously regarding the Silver Crater Mine, the biotite can be shown to have grown in the solid calcite vein dike matrix, engulfing the small radioactive granules. The pegmatite at the Faraday Mine may have been the product of the magmatic process Henderson mentions.

3. See also: “Polonium Halos” Refuted at http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/baillieul.pdf

__COMMENTS. 1. The first article shows good evidence that coal formed rapidly during a Great Flood when dinosaurs hurried along through dense water-logged vegetation likely seeking to escape.
_2. The second article suggests that the radiohalos were not found in basement rock, but later rock, which I would say is from the time of the Flood. Creationists try to prove that basement rock is young in order to support their interpretation of the Bible, which they assume is infallible. I'm not a Creationist and I don't care if Earth is young or old. So far, I don't know of anything that can date the Earth accurately, although Charles Chandler calculated via heat loss that it's likely no older than 400 million years.
_3. The third article, for which I've provided no excerpts as yet, seems to offer one or more alternative explanations for the radiohalos, in order to refute Gentry's claim that the coal they're found in could only have formed within a few years. I haven't looked closely at what those explanations are, due to lack of time.

[Lloyd]

192171

RADIOHALOS WERE FROM RADON 222, BISMUTH 210 & POLONIUM 210

3. EXCERPTS FROM: “Polonium Halos” Refuted (continued from previous post yesterday)
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/baillieul.pdf
_Polonium isotopes are produced in the radioactive decay chain of naturally occurring 238uranium, 232thorium, and 235uranium. Gentry’s studies identify concentric ring structures correlated with each of the three polonium isotopes in the 238uranium decay series. Ring halos correlated with polonium isotopes from the 235uranium or the 232thorium decay series are not reported, although they would have to be present under Gentry’s primordial origin hypothesis. Gentry does not provide a conclusive argument for demonstrating the relationship between concentric halos and polonium decay. Brawley (1992) and Collins (1997) note, however, that many concentric ring halos line up along visible fractures within the host mica. Such fractures are very common in mica crystals. Microfractures and cleavage planes could provide conduits for the rapid movement and concentration of 222radon, a gaseous daughter product of 238uranium which forms part way along the decay chain leading to polonium. 222Radon, itself an alpha emitter, has a half-life of 3.82 days and is produced continuously in the decay of the parent uranium. Radon, one of the noble gases, is chemically inert and is known to migrate rapidly through large thicknesses of rock. Indeed, radon emanometry (measurement at the surface of radon being released from buried rock formations) is a well-developed technique in the exploration for uranium ore bodies.
_Migration of radon along fractures with hold-up points at tiny structural traps would result in exactly the same concentric ring pattern assigned by Gentry to polonium alone (because polonium is an immediate daughter isotope of radon decay). Assigning a halo diameter to radon is difficult since the radon alpha decay energy is very close to that of 210polonium; where measured accurately, the two ring structures commonly cannot be distinguished (Moazed and others 1973). The development of fractures in the grains of mica after crystallization has occurred, and the migration of radon along these fractures over the course of millennia, are much more in keeping with current geologic models of rock formation. Thus, the radon hypothesis is more attractive than Gentry’s model since it fits the observed evidence and does not require supernatural occurrences.

COMMENT. (FLATTENED HALOS) It looks like Gentry et al. were wrong that the radiohalos (discolorations in mica, coal etc) were formed by alpha decay of polonium 210. Instead, they were surely formed by alpha decay of radon 222, a gas that can migrate away from its source U238 rather easily through rock microfractures (and cleavage planes). So the radiohalos don't seem to be evidence of young sediments, but there is plenty of other evidence that sedimentary rock was deposited rapidly during one or more Great Floods between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago. Some of that evidence is provided in Gentry's video which I linked to in my previoius post yesterday. Actually, come to think of it, the halos that were flattened by the sudden great weight of sediments above them and then continued to form spherical halos over the flattened halos does indicate rapid burial as by a Flood, since the half-life of Radon 222 is also just a few days (3.8 days). The radon forming the halos would have turned to lead within about 6 months and stopped forming halos. The decay chain from Radon 222 goes to Bismuth 210 then Polonium 210. There are other steps in between, but they're very brief. Those 3 have half lives of a few days each. Complete decay of each element can take about ten half-lives, which would be 40 to 60 days each, about 140 days for all 3.
_Next I want to check out this article which also discusses radiohalos: Response to Geochronology: Understanding the Uncertainties at https://creation.com/geochronology-uncertainties

[Lloyd]

192376

2 posts today

GREAT FLOOD MUD, SAND & FOSSILS

__EXCERPTS FROM: Internal oceanic waves and sedimentation
https://creation.com/waves-and-sedimentation
_Although an individual mud particle settles very slowly, it has been discovered that mud particles commonly coagulate or flocculate due to electrostatic forces. The larger the floccules (or flocs — the individual aggregates of the mud), the faster they settle.7 With a little turbulence (but not too much as that would break up the floccule) individual particles come together and floccules become larger.8 Floccule size increases with higher organic content, higher salt content, and lower pH.9 Flocs have even been observed that can settle around 100 to 200 m/day [That's in depth, I believe].
_internal waves have wavelengths up to 350 km.... Internal waves are ubiquitous in the oceans today, being more common than surface waves! They also occur in lakes.
_The perturbation that causes internal waves can be the result of surface waves generated by storms, such as observed with WESGFs, or from a current flowing over an underwater barrier.17
_Internal waves cause sediment erosion, transport, and re-deposition, even in the deep ocean.20 Internal waves are believed to have significantly impacted the sedimentary record, although sedimentologists have been unaware of them
_the Genesis Flood ... had orders of magnitude more sediment available [than today], much stronger currents at times, multiple tsunamis, huge ocean waves, a large amount of organic matter to cause larger flocs, and multiple underwater barriers. Of course flocs would not form in highly turbulent floodwater, which would be expected early in the Flood, but as the Flood progressed and the currents and turbulence slowed, flocs would more easily form and sedimentation would be rapid.
__COMMENTS. In my recent post about a TRANSCRIPT OF A NOAH'S FLOOD VIDEO at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... 3fcb#p7193 it said: "The Zuni [megasequence of sedimentary strata] was so massive and fast that it engulfed entire regions with mud flow, burying giant creatures like this T-Rex under 50 feet of muddy sediment, entombed so quickly that preserved blood cells, blood vessels and bone cells were found just recently. How much water does it take to pile 50 feet of mud on top of a dinosaur?"
_I guess the water would be at least twice as deep as the mud. Remember the description in that transcript of thousands of other dinosaurs and other animals in a large area of the West similarly buried under mud during the Zuni stage of the Flood? Now we see how the Flood was able to deposit thick layers of mud over them. When the Flood currents were not too fast and not too slow, the mud flocculated by electrostatic attraction and was deposited I guess somewhat like a huge mud avalanche, similar to a snow avalanche. Avalanches of snow can bury people and animals and the weight presses on them so tightly that they can't move in any direction. That's likely how the Flood mud avalanches behaved as well, immobilizing and suffocating or drowning them. Ian Taylor had a book about the Flood in 1984 called In the Minds of Men, in which he described a large school of fossilized mudsharks in Ohio that were still in swimming positions and the weight of the mud over them smashed them down to only a quarter inch thick. In my previous post I mentioned Gentry's finding that some coalified wood with radiohalos was similarly smashed, making some of the radiohalos in the wood initially elliptical instead of spherical.

__(CONTINUING.) With the stronger internal waves in the Flood compared to today, sand would commonly be transported, as well as mud. Moreover, wave-enhanced sediment-gravity flows (WESGFs) would not be confined to shallow water, as observed today, but can occur in water of any depth. It is well known that internal waves stir up and redeposit sediments in the deep ocean today.
_Such internal waves can potentially explain many features observed in sedimentary rocks. They can explain multiple bedding planes that are sharp....
_Internal waves can explain multiple, thin layers, such as between silt and clay or sand and mud couplets22 that are often interpreted as varves....
_Many silt/clay, sand/mud, or any other types of oscillating rhythmites can be deposited very rapidly in one internal wave, but with a huge number of internal waves, tens of thousands of couplets can potentially be deposited in a short time.
_Such thin layers are abundant in the sedimentary rock record, for instance the 6.5 million couplets in the Green River Formation....24
_Internal waves are capable of laying down thicker rhythmites such as common sand/shale couplets seen in sedimentary rocks.
_Rhythmites may have regular features or sedimentary layers in ‘packages’ showing several scales of oscillations by internal waves....
_Internal waves may be able to explain the data of sequence stratigraphy, ‘transgression/regression events’, and other features of the sedimentary rocks that are used either to date rocks or to support ‘deep time’. Supposed transgressive/regressive sequences can be simply explained by waning and waxing current velocity, either from an internal wave or a Flood current.
__WIKIPEDIA SAYS. The Green River Formation is an Eocene geologic formation that records the sedimentation in a group of intermountain lakes in three basins along the present-day Green River in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The sediments are deposited in very fine layers, a dark layer during the growing season and a light-hue inorganic layer in the dry season. Each pair of layers is called a varve and represents one year. The sediments of the Green River Formation present a continuous record of six million years. The mean thickness of a varve here is 0.18 mm, with a minimum thickness of 0.014 mm and maximum of 9.8 mm.[1]
__COMMENT. Is Wikipedia ever wrong, as usual. So it didn't take a year or more for each thin layer to be deposited; it only took minutes or hours. By the way, the Green River Formation is near where many dinosaurs congregated and were drowned together.

[Lloyd]

195101

DID MID CONTINENT RIFT FORM BEFORE THE GREAT FLOOD?

(>_I'm using this symbol >_ to indicate my own writing.)

MCR = MID CONTINENT RIFT = MID NORTH AMERICAN RIFT
__REF. 1. FROM: Tectonic Issues for the Midcontinent Rift: http://www.largeigneousprovinces.org/14apr
_The MCR, one of the most prominent features on gravity and magnetic maps of North America, is a 3000-km-long band of buried igneous rocks extending from Lake Superior (Figure 1). These rocks outcrop from Minnesota through Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. To the south the rift is deeply buried by younger sediments, but easily traced because the igneous rocks are dense and highly magnetized [Hinze et al., 1992, 1997; King and Zietz, 1971; Ojakangas et al., 2001]. Its west arm extends at least to Oklahoma, and perhaps Texas and New Mexico via similar-age diffuse volcanism [Adams and Keller, 1996]. The east arm goes through Michigan and extends southward along the Fort Wayne rift and East Continent Gravity High (ECGH) to Alabama [Keller et al., 1982].
__REF. 1a. MID CONTINENT RIFT MAP: http://www.largeigneousprovinces.org/si ... -fig-1.png

IS THE MCR PRE-FLOOD?
__REF. 2. FROM: Can ‘megasequences’ help define biblical geologic history?
https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j29 ... _16-25.pdf
[MEGASEQUENCES]
_Clarey reported on the results of his analyses of transcontinental Sloss stratigraphic sequences, which he also defines as ‘megasequences’:
_“Using data from over 500 stratigraphic columns, I examined megasequences across North America to document the sedimentary evidence for the Flood’s catastrophe. At each site, the megasequence boundaries were identified, along with the thicknesses and extent of individual rock types.”51
[MIDCONTINENT RIFT FIRST MEGASEQUENCE?]
_A new seventh megasequence was identified by Clarey at the Midcontinent Rift of North America:
_“Preliminary results demonstrate the presence of a seventh megasequence below the six common fossil-bearing megasequences. It lies just below the Sauk Megasequence in what secularists [i.e. naturalists] call the late Precambrian or Proterozoic Era. However, this newly delineated pre-Sauk sequence may be instrumental in documenting the onset of the Flood.
_“In part, the pre-Sauk megasequence was created by a tremendous outpouring of basaltic lava that split open central North America and caused the Midcontinent Rift.
_It should be noted that Reed previously published an extensive review of the Midcontinent Rift from a young earth creationist perspective and proposed rift initiation at the onset of the Genesis Flood. However, because it occurred in the interior of North America, far from any transgressing ocean, there would have been a period of tectonism/volcanism and rainfall-induced sedimentation (from local flash floods infilling basins) prior to the initial Flood marine transgression, when broader-scale marine transgression as floodwater moved into this area....

OROGENY STOPPED THE RIFT?
__REF. 3. MCR VIDEO: Evolution of the Midcontinent Rift: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WfCecxMEhXA This 2017 video has a uniformitarian model for the rift.
>_At 2'25" it says the rift began to form, but the Grenville orogeny apparently stopped it.
>_Since the Grenville orogeny event was due to the Pangaea asteroid impact, the rift must have occurred just before that impact.

RIFT DESCRIPTION; NO FOSSILS
>_What caused the Midcontinent Rift? It's in the shape of an up-side-down U, going from Oklahoma to Lake Superior and back south to northern Alabama.
>_I don't see why Clarey called it a Pre-Sauk megasequence. It's a Large Igneous Province, so it seems to be flood basalt like in other places, except that it has sedimentary rock on top and, according to the video, the lower part of the sedimentary rock is interbedded with volcanics.
>_The video says the sediments in the rift area are called the Oronto Group and is dated about 1 billion years. I think it said there are no fossils in it. How can there be no fossils? If the sediments were deposited by the Flood, there should be fossils.
__REF. 4. SUDBURY IMPACT VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ycQexghR61w
>_In this video about the Sudbury, Canada impact at 3'15" it implies that there are phytoplankton fossils in the Oronto Group strata.
>_It also says ejecta from the Sudbury impact is 130 feet thick on the upper peninsula of Michigan nearly 300 miles from the crater, and the crater is 200 km across.
__REF. 4a. Sudbury Basin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin

METAMORPHISM DESTROYS FOSSILS
__REF. 5. FROM: Precambrian rocks at https://creation.com/creationist-geology-precambrian
_Precambrian organic matter. The main reason more fossils are not found in the so–called Precambrian rocks is that many of these rocks have been altered, particularly by burial and tectonic pressure, and temperature (that is, they have been metamorphosed), and so the contained fossils have been destroyed. But these same rocks often contain graphite. Whereas most Cambrian–Recent graphite deposits occur in readily identifiable metamorphosed coal–bearing sedimentary rocks, Precambrian graphite deposits are commonly found in medium to high–grade regionally metamorphosed schists and gneisses “of controversial origin”.14
>_Since the sedimentary strata, called the Oronto Group, were deposited on the rift magma, maybe the magma was still hot when the sediments arrived and the heat destroyed many of the non-microscopic fossils in them.

RIFT CROSS SECTION RESEMBLES BASIN CROSS SECTIONS
__REF. 3a. MCR CROSS SECTION: https://ibb.co/T1zrg0G
>_This is an image from the video at REF. 3 showing a cross section of the Mid Continent Rift across Lake Superior & Isle Royale.
>_The strata are U-shaped which suggests that they were deposited by a flood, as is the case with U-shaped basin strata.

GREAT LAKES REGION GEOLOGY: GREAT FLOOD; IMPACTS; RIFT; GLACIATION
__REF. 6. Great Lakes Region Map https://project.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/geology.html
__REF. 6a. Great Lakes Region Geology https://project.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/im ... ol-map.jpg
__REF. 6b. Michigan & Lake Superior Cross Sections https://project.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/im ... nsects.jpg
>_The lower peninsula of Michigan is a basin, probably an impact basin, that was filled with sediment, probably during the Great Flood. Lake Superior formed over the Rift, possibly due to later glaciation. Notice in Ref. 1a that the Rift goes through the center of lower Michigan, which would be the center of Michigan Basin. This may mean that the Rift opened up there due to the impacts that formed that basin and maybe other impact basins as well.
__REF. 6c-d. Michigan Basin Strata bottom to top: Cam, Ord, Sil, Dev, Mis, Pen
- https://project.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/im ... rdrock.GIF
- https://project.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/im ... rdrock.GIF
>_Michigan Basin likely formed from an impact. The sedimentary strata likely filled the basin during the Great Flood. The strata at the surface resemble a target with concentric circles starting from the outside with "Cam" and ending in the middle with "Pen". Lake Michigan and Lake Huron formed by erosion of Devonian sediments, the 3rd ring from the center. These two lakes almost form a circle around Michigan, because Michigan Basin is circular, due to the impact. Green Bay, WI and Georgian Bay, ON formed by erosion of Ordovician sediments on an outer circle of the impact basin. The Devonian and Ordovician were apparently softer sediments. My guess is that glaciation eroded all of the Great Lakes and many smaller ones during the "Ice Age" after the Pangaea breakup.

NEARBY BASINS
__REF. 7a. Hudson Bay Basin & Michigan Basin: https://ibb.co/wRnsJZ1
>_Hudson Bay Basin is less than 2 km deep. Michigan Basin is about 4.5 km deep.
>_There are salt deposits in the Silurian & Devonian strata in both Basins. I think that means the flood waters had time to evaporite each time salt was left behind.
__REF. 7b. Sudbury Basin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... da_map.png
>_Sudbury Basin is 15 km deep, that's quite deep, and it's squeezed together into an ellipse shape, apparently from orogeny from the southeast. This means the basin formed before the orogeny.
>_I thought Hudson Bay Basin may be shallow due to an impact on the Ice Sheet during glaciation, but the strata in the basin seem to have come from the Flood. And there doesn't seem to have been glaciation before the Flood.

CHRONOLOGY
_>It looks like Michigan Basin and some other impact basins must have formed first from impacts. Then the Rift opened between some of the impacts (Or would Rifts not open up until the Pangaea breakup?). It seems the Rift preceded the Flood if Flood sediments covered the Rift, as it says under Ref. 1 above that "To the south the rift is deeply buried by younger sediments". Then the Flood filled in the basins and the Rift and the Rift heat destroyed fossils in the Rift sediments. Then the Pangaea breakup occurred when it was hit by the SD asteroid, which produced orogeny, which stopped the Rift from spreading further. Then glaciation covered the far northern and southern latitudes, which eroded the Great Lakes etc.
_>This suggests that the breakup of Pangaea occurred during the Great Flood. But the Siberian and Alaskan megafauna, including mammoths, must have lived before glaciation occurred. And glaciation was due to the continents breaking up, with some moving closer to the poles, and volcanism and impact dust causing cooling. But, if the Flood and the Breakup occurred at about the same time, the megafauna would have lived before the Flood, but their fossils are found on top of Flood sediments. At least I think they are. I don't think dinosaur fossils are found with megafauna fossils.
>_If anyone has a solution to this conundrum, feel free to let me know where the evidence is for the solution. I've been working on this problem all week and I'm not finding a solution so far. There's at least one flaw in my chronology reasoning somewhere there. I'll probably have to try another angle and also get Mike's ideas.