[meteorite-list] Re:Comet hit Britain in mid sixth century, AD?

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun Jul 23 12:15:45 2006
Message-ID: <20060723153535.2760.qmail_at_web36907.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hi all -

Keys simply threw out the Javanese records, which
indicated the eruption occured in the 400's CE.

It appears the ensuing climate collapse led to an
outbreak of plague in Eastern Africa, which then
rapidly spread along Roman trading paths.

That seective depopulation accounts for the appearance
of the Angles in Britannia in 418 CE.

As always, what's needed here is more data, that from
the eruption zone, ice cores, and tree rings. Anybody
on the list got a couple of million dollars to spare?

Good Hunting -
EP


--- "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb_at_sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The scientist you're referring to is Michael
> Baillie,
> an Irish dentrochronologist (not Bailey). His
> evidence
> of remarkably sharp climatic deviations ("years
> without
> summers") is striking and solid. Dentrochronologists
> have no trouble with his evidence and indeed a
> considerable
> body of other evidence of sharp dramatic "drop-outs"
> of
> 1 or 2 years has been found in many locations by
> other
> dentrochronologists. The argument is all about why,
> not
> what, It's really hard to argue with a tree...
>
> The suggestion of comet airburst or other such
> event is
> not new to the time period you're talking about
> (530's
> and 540's AD) and Baillie has only taken up previous
> hypotheses and refined them with dentrochronological
> data. Napier and Clube first suggested something of
> the
> kind in the 1970's, so it's a case of an hypothesis
> that
> is acquiring more physical evidence as time goes by.
>
> 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.
>
> There are many collateral lines of evidence for
> SOME
> extreme phenomenon in the 530's, whether a cometary
> airburst, a chondritic airburst, an oceanic strike,
> an immense
> episode of vulcanism. Distinguishing between such
> events
> by either by the contemporary accounts or physical
> evidence
> of today is just not as easy as it sounds.
>
> The 535 AD "catastrophe" seems to have been much
> worse in south China than anywhere else (or perhaps
> just
> better documented?), so it has been suggested that
> an earlier
> and much vaster eruption of Krakatoa is responsible
> for
> the event.
>
> I quote the estimable Wikipedia: "...an eruption
> in 535 CE,
> also referred to in the Javanese Book of Kings, and
> for which
> there is geological and some corroborating
> historical evidence.
> David Keys and others have postulated that the
> violent eruption
> of Krakatoa in 535 may have been responsible for the
> global
> climate changes of 535-536. Keys explores what he
> believes
> to be the radical and far ranging global effects of
> just such
> a putative 6th century eruption in his book
> Catastrophe:
> An Investigation into the Origins of Modern
> Civilization.
> Additionally, in recent times, it has been argued
> that it was this
> eruption which created the islands of Verlaten and
> Lang
> (remnants of the original) and the beginnings of
> Rakata -
> all indicators of early Krakatoa's caldera's size.
> However,
> there seems to be little, if any, datable charcoal
> from that
> eruption, even if there is plenty of circumstantial
> evidence."
> (Note: there is NO datable material for this earlier
> eruption of Krakatoa, which could nave been any time
> between 300 BC and 900 AD.)
>
> There's lots of "circumstantial evidence" for
> many
> hypotheses, because something big and nasty
> happened,
> only what? The variety of catastrophe is broad and
> not
> all (any?) big nasty events are well understood.
>
> List member E. P. Grondine has done an amazing
> amount of research on this very topic, and I'm
> surprised
> he hasn't jumped in here already! Go to Google and
> type in "E. P. Grondine" and "comet" or
> "catastrophe"
> or "impact" or "Cambridge Conference" and read the
> results that he posted in the Cambridge Conference
> on these topics. And, no, I'm not his press agent...
>
> Also, you should not imagine (none of these
> theorists
> suppose) that a catastrophe kills all the British
> Celts
> nor all the Anglo-Saxons! Crop failures, famine,
> darkness,
> fires, black days, ill luck, plagues, bad times
> a-plenty!
> Folks move on, look for a happier spot, with better
> living conditions and fewer big nasty events to deal
> with or having another way to survive... Like
> ancient
> Okies in a Super Dust Bowl... Put Gramma on top
> of the ox cart full of house goods and the plough
> and
> head for California or the ancient equivalent
> thereof.
>
> 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).
>
> Some things are just not worked out yet. In the
> longer
> term, there is the unexplained history of eustatic
> sea level
> changes. "Eustatic" sea level changes are the rise
> and
> fall of sea level on a timescale too rapid to be
> caused by
> the elevation or subsidence of continents or the
> displacement
> of water by growing mid-oceanic ridges. 50 years ago
> and
> more, most geologists worked for oil companies and
> their
> data was "secret." In the 1970's, the great
> geologist Vail
> talked his oil company into letting him divulge
> their vast
> records of eustatic sea level changes to other
> geologists.
> To get eustatic changes you have to radically change
> the amount of water in the oceans, pretty difficult
> to do...
>
> There are great sharp drops in the Earth's sea
> level, as
> great or greater than those of the severest ice ages
> (when
> water is tied up in glaciers miles thick covering
> vast swathes
> of continents) that only lasted a few years to
> perhaps 500-1000
> years, far too short for an "ice age" (which takes
> many thousands
> of years). They have never been "explained," because
> the only
> plausible cause would be a vast world-wide
> glaciation in
> which most of the planet froze over instantly and
> caused
> the atmospheric water to fall out as snow or ice but
> only for
> a very few years, then took up to centuries to melt
> all that ice
> after the climate returned to normal. These odd,
> potentially
> "super-cooling," events are NOT associated with
> extinctions
> nor any other known phenomenon (vulcanism, magnetic
> reversals, etc.). They are completely out of the
> blue
> (and fortunately quite rare) and very difficult to
> explain.
> They are sometimes called "false" ice ages, a
> totally ridiculous
> term. At least for the last 35 years, they have been
> impossible
> to explain. I got no theory, except that I tend look
> up at the
> sky for big nasty unexplained events.
>
> After-thought: Ever hear of the form of ice
> called
> "diamond dust?" Google that, too. Now, there's a
> really
> nasty possibility...
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ---------------------------------------------------
> meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 11:59 AM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Re:Comet hit Britain
> in mid sixth century, AD?
>
>
> >> Baileys comet impact hypothesis is
> >> quite contested, it certainly is not an
> >> accepted main stream hypothesis. So I
> >> quite surprised by the tone of that
> >> newspaper clipping that suggested so.
> >> The astrophysicist supporting it are, by
> >> the way, astrophysicists with a known
> >> fetish for impacts as a source for every
> >> historical change.
> >
> > Thanks Marco,
> > In general, I think the theory is very dubious.
> The guy was trying to
> > explain how small numbers of Anglo-Saxon migrants
> replaced a much larger
> > indigenous Celtic/British population both
> genetically and linguistically.
> > But if the Britons were dying off in the 530s
> because of poor crop yields
> > and cold nights or whatever caused by cometary
> dust in the atmosphere,
> > then the Anglo-Saxons would too.
> >
> > Unless of course somebody postulates an actual
> impact which wiped out a
> > large part of the (British) population on the west
> side of the island, but
> > was survived by larger numbers on the east which
> is where the
> > Anglo-Saxons were. But then that's not a good
> model either,
> > because Ireland is where it
> > would have hit... and there is no evidence of such
> an event from there.
> >
> > Just as a matter of interest if someone has time
> to fiddle with it, what
> > parameters would such a hypothetical body have to
> have to kill people
> > within a radius of 300 km (so along the whole
> western coast of England
> > and
> > Wales) but leave those beyond still alive? [I
> could not get the Arizona
> > Earth
> > Impact Effects Program
> http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/ to give
> > the > result I wanted - just curious].
> >
> > Paul Barford
> >
>
>
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Received on Sun 23 Jul 2006 11:35:35 AM PDT