Fw: [meteorite-list] Re:Comet hit Britain in mid sixth, RE-POSTED

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun Jul 23 03:36:44 2006
Message-ID: <006f01c6ae2a$da2a1bd0$7f45e146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, List (and Marco)

    [Re-Post of previous post. No idea why my
    email program decided to space the message
    out the way it did. It's hard to read, so here's
    (I hope) normal text.]

    Marco, I seem to have a talent for annoying you.
I apologize for annoying you. However, I would like
to point out that my posting was addressed to The List
and to Paul Barford who asked the question in the
first place. I did not even copy you. Could I point
out that not every posting to The List is directed at
you, personally. True, you had also answered him,
and I referred to your reply because I disagreed
with it.
>
> Don't lecture me that condescendingly man.

> Who's got the PhD in prehistoric
> archaeology here?
>
    However, disagreement is not condescension. If you
read what I wrote, you might see that I was addressing
The List generally, and presenting the historical background
of the hypothesis. I narrated what Napier and Clube
thought (and wrote) when they first suggested it in the
1970's. (At least I think they were first.) I made no
evaluation of their notion, nor gave my own personal
opinion of it.
>
> Which is a naive "Pompeii Premise" about general
> taphonomic processes and ignores that in the 19th century, taphonomic and
> post-depositional processes were concepts still completely ignored. And
> catastrophic thinking reigned those days.
> Have you ever been to a peat excavation?
> It looks like Tunguska allright, fallen tree trunks everywhere. Only it
> isn't.
>
    I have not read the original they cited for this discovery,
so I can't evaluate it, either. I don't even know if it WAS a
peat excavation. Are you familiar with the citation, or are
you just making the assumption that it was a peat bog?
    I would also point out that Britons have been digging
in peat bogs for millennia and are probably pretty familiar
with what one looks like... If that's what it was. If they
thought this excavation, peat or not, was different, they
could probably tell. Anglesey has peat bogs, and they
have been dug for fuel since prehistoric times, and
Anglesey has lots of prehistory, so I assume a familiarity
with peat on the part of Anglesey excavators.
>
> Large impact phenomena come with a suit of
> identifiable things. If there was such an event in Britain as recent as AD
> 540,
> then where are the ejecta layers, the dust layers, the spherule layers,
> the impact
> glasses, the shocked quartz, the impact craters, the extinction events in
> flora and fauna? There is no reason why these should have vanished from
> the
> geological record in this case.
>
    You should really become familiar with the hypotheses you
are ridiculing. Neither Napier and Clube nor Baillie nor anyone
else that I am aware of have ever suggested any impact like that
(or any impact), with an accompanying cratering event, ejecta,
spherules, glasses, shocked quartz -- none of that, for which
there is no evidence. Dust, yes, and climatic change, and effects
on flora and fauna (but not extinctions) for all of which there
is evidence. What you put forward in this remark is a "straw
man" argument, in which you grossly mischaracterize a
hypothesis, then proceed to demolish your own
misrepresentation of it very effectively.
    The term "cometary impact" could, in this context, refer to
a series of atmospheric entries and disintegration of many
low-density objects which would load the Earth's atmosphere
with dust to the extent of reducing solar input and causing
sudden and irregularly distributed "coolings." No objects
would ever get within 20-40 miles of the Earth's surface.
And large, very high-altitude airbursts could produce loads
of catastrophic results and leave little physical evidence
except its extremely disruptive effects. There would be surficial
damage to flora, "years without summers," dustfalls, crop
failures, ecological disruptions which could include sudden
outbreaks of diseases due to the forced migration of their
vectors. This last happened in 541 AD with the first known
pandemic of bubonic plague in Europe.
    We have seen here on The List in many exciting news
flashes of huge fireballs and the hope for object recovery,
how rarely that happens, but every one, in fragmenting, dropped
dust into our atmosphere. There are Hiroshima sized airbursts
every year in the upper atmosphere, sometimes two or three
a year. Just increase the frequency to where there are
Hiroshima sized airbursts EVERY DAY and dozens of huge
fireballs somewhere on Earth EVERY NIGHT. There would
be 100's of meteorite falls a year, and still no "impacts" or
craters, perhaps for years, and even then, likely only small ones.
    Increase the frequency again ten-fold or more, but hypothesize
it's all from a swarm of small weak objects -- never a crater,
never a tsunami, never an overt "disaster." Increase it ten-fold
again if you want it. And again... What's happening? Countless
millions of tons of dust are raining into the atmosphere, persisting
for years, the sunlight is dim and watery, there's ice on the pond
in July. As the dust accumulates, it just gets worse and worse, a
progressive disaster. Human functioning societies and agriculture
at 50 degrees N. and S. become impossible, then at 40 degrees
N. and S., then 35... Populations begin to migrate, societies
break down, nations become fictions, order disintegrates.
We all know the scenario, if we've seen enough bad movies,
except of course, they're never bad enough... Mad Max just
isn't crazy enough, much too elegant and well-fed for reality.
    We don't even need that swarm of small weak bodies.
Just the dust is enough all by itself. It's hard to get people to
take this seriously, it's so UN-spectacular. Big deal, dust...
    One might doubt how much dust could be dumped in the
atmosphere by "cometary" (or other) bodies, and ask where
is the evidence, the layers of deposits, but it would all
be washed into the oceans and their sediments are in fact
fat with interplanetary and cometary dust, untagged as to
origin and method of dispersal.
    And then the eposide would be over, the swarm out of
the way, or the interstellar dust stream passed, and we start
to recover. The eposide might be minor, might be severe,
might return in a few decades, might vanish for a century.
There would be little physical evidence left behind but the
reports of the damage, hence the interest in old chronicles.
    On to history...
>
> Complex societies are inherently instable. There's no need
> for a clear-cut external prime-mover to make such a society
> collapse.
>
    Since the Roman empire (E. Division) under Justinian was
virtually as complex as Western Civilization over most of the
past half millennium, why, I expect we'll go under any day
now, then? Western Civilization has managed to avoid this
"inherent" potential for destruction for at least 500 years.
We ought to be ready to just go "poof!" any minute now...
Should have already done it. Wonder why not?
>
> DON'T NEED TO HAVE a clearly identifiable prime-mover.
> Thinking in prime-movers only to explain (pre-)historic change
> is utterly simplistic.
>
    What you call "prime-movers" is what we call "cause," as in
that familiar duo of "cause and effect." I realize that you regard the
notion of "cause and effect" as "in my opinion... pseudo-science,"
etc., etc. At the risk of labeling myself as an intellectual dinosaur,
as insufficiently post-modern, hopelessly naive, as un-hip, as
definitely not-with-it, I will confess that I ACTUALLY BELIEVE
that events HAVE causes! Gasp! What an archaic idea.
    Oh, wait a minute...
>
> That's why the whole neo-catastrophic movement of
> primarily ASTROPHYSICISTS who bring up cosmic impact as a prime-mover in
> far too many cases of (pre-)
> historic change is just a too simplistic look on (pre-)history
>
    I see, it's only "cosmic impacts" that can't be causes. Any
other cause or causes is OK with you. Now I get it. I thought
you just denied all causality as a philosophic principle (like
Hume), but it's just one particular cause that you object to.
>
> Clube, Napier, Steel and such have their own agenda to see
> "impacts" in history and recent pre-history everywhere. It ties
> in with their idea's on the evolution of the Taurid meteor
> complex as being derived from the arrival and breakup of a
> giant comet a few millenia ago...
>
    You gotta read'em before you stomp on'em: that "few millenia"
is 20,000 to 60,000 years ago, possibly 100,000 years ago,
says N & C. That is a FEW millennia. It is a strong hypothesis
because this kind of progressive breakup and evolution of bodies
is exactly how objects get supplied to orbits of limited lifetimes,
like Near-Earth and Apollo orbits, something we did not understand
well in the middle 1970's and that they helped to highlight. Remember,
in the 1970's there were still many Ph.D geologists who ridiculed
the idea that the craters on the Moon were from impacts, a silly
American notion, they said, when it's obvious they're volcanic.
They had to be right; they had Ph.D's, didn't they?
    Impact was a struggling new idea when N & C wrote. It's not
an agenda; it's an hypothesis, and they not hiding it.
    OK, astronomically, their notion about the breakup of the
Comet Encke parent body is not bad, really well-done. But
(like you, I suspect), I thought the Von D?niken tone of their
books was silly and their reading of most of the history in those
books silly and childish. I can see how it would more than
annoy you. Since their astronomy is good and the rest of their
writings are ridiculous, I like to imagine an editor at their
publishing house pushed them to accept that best-seller
style crap as filler for the sake of sales...
    See, I like to think the best of everybody. Maybe it was
their idea. Maybe they needed the money. Maybe they
wanted, politically, to worry enough people to get the
notion taken seriously... Their history is goonish,
wherever it came from.
    You've got to separate the good idea from its all-too-human
context. Kepler was a famed and money-making astrologer,
yet equal areas are swept out in equal times, nevertheless.
>
> As far as short-term climatic fluctuation is concerned,
> there is much more cause to look at variations in solar flux
> as a possible explanation .
>
     I want to stop and savor this moment when we agree
almost perfectly. That's obviously not a frequent event.
What better way to explain SHORT-TERM solar flux
variation than the short but intense dumping of opaque
(or reflective) particulate matter into the Earth's atmosphere?
It would settle on a time scale much shorter than what we
know of innate solar variation.
    You see, I think you, and perhaps some "neo-catastrophists,"
think of the term "impact" in a much too restricted sense. A dust
grain stumbling into the Earth's atmosphere and getting stuck there
is a kind of cosmic impact. Enough dust in a short enough time
could be more catastrophic than anyone imagines.
    We just don't appreciate the role of dust, but we're learning.
I reference the recent discovery of supernovae iron isotopes in
sediments only 2.3 million years old, the heavy dust layer deposited
on the Earth 8.3 million years ago by the breakup of the Veritas
asteroid family. The 2.2-2.3 mya dust event has been proposed
as the cause of a marine mass extinction at that time.
    And then, there's even more recent isotope anomalies
discovered by Firestone, over which we disagreed, I recall.
His hypothesis was utterly ridiculous, a "comet" formed in
a supernovae. OK, he's an idiot (outside of his expertise)
with a perfectly idiotic explanation of how these materials
got here, mammoths being shot with interstellar particles and
becoming extinct. Because it was so silly, you questioned totally
the validity of their presence and dating on "depositational"
arguments, wanting to dump the whole thing, dismissing
the isotopic evidence as irrelevant and proving nothing, but
these isotopes have since been found and similarly dated in
Antarctic ice cores, where "depositational" issues are moot.
They fell out of the atmosphere. They're almost certainly the
dust from supernovae, possibly the Scorpius-Centaurus
supernovae complex, possibly a closer former supernovae
as yet undiscovered.
    Not all catastrophes are Hollywood-style. If you insist on a
Hollywood spectacular, Google up HR 8210 (aka IK Pegasi B).
Could it find an extra 0.15-0.27 solar mass in dust or a stray
super-Jupiter-body and let go tomorrow? It would certainly be
spectacular, during the interval when we were still alive, that is.
    Granted, wisps of interstellar dust or sudden effusions of
asteroidal or cometary dust or even a swarm of small weak
bodies breaking up in the Earth's upper atmosphere are not as
picturesque nor as suitable for Hollywood movies as big
splashy impacts, but they can deliver as much or more
disruption as all but the best of the planet crashers. Of course,
direct exposure to a nearby supernovae is a spectacular
possibility, but interstellar drifts of supernova dust can
be almost as bad, not only unspectacular but hardly
noticeable... until it's too late.
    Since I've disagreed with you (and extensively), I'll
apologize in advance for annoying you again, Marco.
Isn't strange how everybody doesn't agree on everything?


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Marco Langbroek" <marco.langbroek_at_wanadoo.nl>
> To: "meteorite list" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2006 5:54 AM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Re:Comet hit Britain in mid sixth, century, AD?
>
>
>> Sterling K. Webb wrote:
>>
>>> The scientist you're referring to is Michael Baillie,
>>> an Irish dentrochronologist (not Bailey).
>>
>> Too many Bailey'/Baillie's around, sorry... And its dendrochronologist,
>> not
>> dentrochronologist.
>>
>>
>>> Their suggestion arose from uncovering a 19th century
>>> account of an excavation on the island of Anglesey (which
>>> is the least forested portion of the UK, less than 0.5%)
>>> of an ancient forest which had been flattened and crushed
>>> wholesale and apparently instantaneously and which to
>>> them greatly resembled a naive description of the flattened
>>> forest on the Tungus River caused by the Tunguska object,
>>> only much larger.
>>
>> Which is a naive "Pompei Premise" about general taphonomic processes and
>> ignores that in the 19th century, taphonomic and post-depositional
>> processes were concepts still completely ignored. And catastrophic
>> thinking reigned those days.
>> Have you ever been to a peat excavation? It looks like Tunguska allright,
>> fallen tree trunks everywhere. Only it isn't.
>>
>>
>>> Yes, Marco, History is Change. But there are also
>>> those "with a known fetish" AGAINST impacts or any
>>> other physical event as a source" for any historical change.
>>> The sudden collapse of the "Byzantine" or eastern Roman
>>> Empire after 534 AD is without known social, political,
>>> economic, military nor other human cause. It is the sudden
>>> commencement of the Dark Ages for no apparent reason.
>>> Dark Ages are rare, and always without apparent explanation
>>> (1200 BC to 800 BC is another, and there was another
>>> about 4000 years ago, too).
>>
>>
>> Don't lecture me that condescendingly man. Who's got the PhD in
>> prehistoric
>> archaeology here?
>>
>> The point is that many (pre-) historic events indeed DON'T HAVE and DON'T
>> NEED
>> TO HAVE a clearly identifiable prime-mover. Thinking in prime-movers only
>> to
>> explain (pre-)historic change is utterly simplistic. That's why the whole
>> neo-catastrophic movement of primarily ASTROPHYSICISTS who bring up
>> cosmic impact as a prime-mover in far too many cases of (pre-)historic
>> change is just a too simplistic look on (pre-)history, and in my opinion
>> is pseudo-science.
>>
>> Complex societies are inherently instable. There's no need for a
>> clear-cut
>> external prime-mover to make such a society collapse.
>>
>> Volcanic super eruptions, cosmic impacts and other natural disasters
>> happen. And
>> when they happen, they can have a profound impact on human society in the
>> affected area, no doubt (an appendix to my own dissertation explores the
>> possible effekts of the Australasian impact for early Asian Homo erectus,
>> in fact). And there are some good historic examples of that too (for the
>> case of volcanic eruptions at least).
>> But some people use them as Dei ex Machinae to explain everything we
>> don't
>> readily understand.
>>
>> Large impact phenomena come with a suit of identifiable things. If there
>> was such an event in Britain as recent as AD 540, then where are the
>> ejecta layers, the dust layers, the spherule layers, the impact glasses,
>> the shocked quartz, the impact craters, the extinction events in flora
>> and fauna? There is no reason why these should have vanished from the
>> geological record in this case.
>>
>> A set of narrow tree rings that can have multiple causes is not enough to
>> see an impact evidenced. And its all we have here. A very meagre set of
>> proxy data by all means. I do not doubt Baillie's tree ring analysis, but
>> the whole hypothesis attached to it I do doubt for it is founded on very
>> flimsy multi-interpretable proxy data.
>>
>> As far as short-term climatic fluctuation is concerned, there is much
>> more cause to look at variations in solar flux as a possible explanation
>> than to impact.
>>
>> Clube, Napier, Steel and such have their own agenda to see "impacts" in
>> history
>> and recent pre-history everywhere. It ties in with their idea's on the
>> evolution
>> of the Taurid meteor complex as being derived from the arrival and
>> breakup of a
>> giant comet a few millenia ago. They believe this showered the earth with
>> impact
>> fragments. As a result, they have a strong tendency to see everything
>> which in
>> their perception is "odd" in the history of the past few millenia as
>> "evidence"
>> for their theory. Even Stonehenge is a giant memorial to celestial Taurid
>> displays in e.g. Steels opinion. In my opinion, this conceptually is very
>> near
>> to Von D?niken seeing Alien influence and references to Alien visitors
>> everywhere as its the result of a similar simplistic and biased idee-fixe
>> look
>> at (pre-) history.
>>
>> And please note that "Dark age" is an often misused and misunderstood
>> concept. It says more about our inability to access the character of that
>> period, than about that period itself.
>>
>> - Marco
>>
>> -----
>> Dr Marco Langbroek
>> Dutch Meteor Society (DMS)
>>
>> e-mail: meteorites_at_dmsweb.org
>> private website http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek
>> DMS website http://www.dmsweb.org
>> -----
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> Meteorite-list mailing list
>> Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com
>> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
>>
>
Received on Sun 23 Jul 2006 03:37:29 AM PDT