[meteorite-list] Another news piece on Holocene Start impacts

From: Jerry <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:25:26 -0400
Message-ID: <877BD7F13FFE426BB057C54B47D55B4E_at_Notebook>

"...a lot like urban renewal" Stupendous analogy as always.
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
To: "E.P. Grondine" <epgrondine at yahoo.com>;
<meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 6:06 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Another news piece on Holocene Start impacts


> Hi, EP, List,
>
> It's this kind of wobble that makes so many people
> dubious about the various and varying hypotheses
> advanced by Firestone & Co. I put Firestone at the head
> of the list because he has been the chief driving force
> behind all this, to his credit.
>
> Over twenty years ago, he uncovered evidence he
> interpreted as a sign of an intense neutron event over
> several states in the upper Midwest USA. The question
> has always been: evidence of what?
>
> Firestone is a physicist at Berkeley and a specialist
> in isotopes, editor of the standard work on all the nearly
> isotopes (8 editions), 130 publications, etc. He knows
> what he knows; the evidence is real.
>
> He is not an astronomer, a geologist, an anthropologist,
> a climatologist, nor any of the other things needed to
> answer the question: evidence of what? He has other
> work to do, but he is the legal guardian of an orphan
> fact.
>
> When the evidence was restricted to a three-state
> region, it was easier to explain. As it "spread" to a wider
> continental basis and seemed to coincide with an "extinction,"
> Firestone himself advanced completely silly explanations:
> a comet formed from a supernova cloud blasted out at a
> fraction of lightspeed hit the Earth, driving particles into
> the bones of the mammoths, etc. etc. It was pitiful.
>
> A really lousy hypothesis does not invalidate the
> evidence. The Phlogiston Theory is crap, but there really
> is such a thing as oxygen... Fire happens.
>
> So, back when it was iron particles and supernovae,
> I sent Firestone an email asking if he or anyone was searching
> the particles for atoms of 60Fe, a iron isotope that is ONLY
> produced in supernovae. He answered that it was a logical
> thing to do but "was not easy." That is an understatement.
>
> Knie, a German researcher, went through a (relatively)
> huge amount of dated ocean sediments from the times of
> a minor marine extinction 2.3 million years ago, using
> a mass spectrometer. It took him 3 years. He found 23
> ATOMS of 60Fe. You have to understand; he shouldn't
> have found any. It can't be contamination; nobody keeps
> a supernova handy in the lab. It was hailed for what it was,
> a stupendously difficult achievement and an utterly
> unexpected result.
>
> Knie said innocently, well, we have to have been very
> close to a supernova a few million years ago. Everybody
> screeched in horror, so he shut up. Supernovae, as we
> all know, leave a terrible mess behind, and there's none
> of that. They're rare, they're scattered, we're safe,
> absolutely safe -- go away, go away.
>
> Well, now there's no mention of supernova iron particles
> because of the new purely local asteroidal/comet hypothesis
> advanced to fit the data. Firestone has gotten people to
> help with it, and those people are impact-minded, the
> paradigm du jour. I sneer and ask, "How does a comet
> over North America explain the big spike in supernova-
> produced 10Be in Antarctic ice cores at the same time?"
>
> Firestone also found evidence of a similar event 34,000
> years ago, and another 41,000 years ago, but mention of
> that is gone from all the current foo-frah -- it's hard enough
> to get folks to swallow one comet, much less two or three.
> I had a link to his original data which showed the multiple
> events, but -- guess what? -- it's a 404. But thanks to the
> internet, nothing ever really goes away. Complete with nice graphs:
> http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/NSD-mammoth-extinction.html
>
> Turns out we ARE closer to a whole bunch of supernovae
> than we thought: a cluster of them, producing 20 supernovae
> in 10 million years, that passed within 120 light years of us
> only 2 million years ago (60Fe don't lie). Still, 120 light years
> is a long, long way. It was considered a comfortable distance
> until the 60Fe was discovered in conjunction with a minor
> marine extinction. Something doesn't add up. Here's the
> original paper on the Sco-Cen OB Association of stars by
> Benitez and Maiz-Apellaniz:
> http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0201/0201018v2.pdf
> and a simpler description here:
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-01/jhu-asm010702.php
>
> And here's a really complete discussion of this whole idea
> of supernova effects on Earth, with good explanations of
> the problems, and specifically those associated with the
> Benitez and Maiz-Apellaniz proposal:
> http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-55/iss-5/p19.html
>
> Tracking the movements of stars through million of years
> has possibilities of errors (in both directions), but all the worry
> about being close to a supernova misses the point that the
> debris from a supernova is a very considerable danger all
> in itself. Those debris can travel, often at a high rate, typically
> 3% of the speed of light at the time of their formation, but
> getting slower all the time (due to gravity).
>
> Were we to pass through a dense dust globule of these
> supernova debris, it could easily produce a disaster: loss of
> all or part of the ozone layer, effects on, even temporary loss
> of, the Earth's magnetic field, greatly enhanced radiation exposure,
> sudden dimming of sunlight, abrupt climate shifts, a short nasty
> and brutal ice age, all kinds of bad things -- it's a long list.
>
> This why I'd like to get straightened out whether this
> collection of evidence is under the mats or distributed through
> it. The evidence itself could point to either event, but if it's
> an impact, it should be under the mats, not scattered through
> 100, 500, or 1000 years of mat accumulation, whereas an infall
> of dust accumulating in the mat could take place over a variously
> prolonged time. Everything they claim to have found as proof
> of the high pressure and temperature of an impact could be the
> products of a much more energetic event: a supernova.
>
> There was a long discussion of this on the List in Sept.-Oct
> of 2005, with lots of back and forth. Probably still in the Archives.
> There are a lot of dark (dust) globules in the Galaxy, all produced
> by supernovae. We tend to dismiss them because we live in a
> little dust-free zone called the Local Bubble which was, surprise!
> created by a recent supernova that blew the then-existing dust out.
> A lot like urban renewal... The moving globs represent a major
> hazard nobody seems to worry about.
>
> Yes, what we need: one more thing to worry about...
>
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "E.P. Grondine" <epgrondine at yahoo.com>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 12:28 PM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Another news piece on Holocene Start impacts
>
>
> Hi Sterling, list -
>
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-09/nau-rts092407.php
>
> This time the black mats are accumulators for the
> impact debris.
>
> I also want to remind everyone here that some of the
> First peoples accounts of these impacts were given in
> my own book "Man and Impact in the Americas". It is
> nice to see field data confirm one's analysis of
> traditions.
>
> PS - while looking at spherules, I found that some of
> the KT layers were nicely exposed and easy to sample.
> I still think that there is going to be a market for
> these impactite samples, but I how they will be
> packaged is still not clear.
>
> good hunting,
> E.P. Grondine
> Man and Impact in the Americas
>
>
>
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Received on Tue 25 Sep 2007 06:25:26 PM PDT