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

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:40:02 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <446806.64922.qm_at_web36908.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hi Sterling -

As always, thoughtful comment.

My first guess - Your supernova elements (10Be etc.)
were likely incorporated into the comet.

My next guess - specifically, Comet Encke.

My next guess - Comet Encke fractioned while
performing a plane change near the Sun shortly before
10,900 BCE.

An alternativve guess - perhaps that 10Be was produced
by impact of a comet fragment with our Sun. I seem to
remember a link of 10Be with ozone, but since my
stroke...

We went through the mats just a few weeks ago here on
the meteorite list, and spherule collecting, and
that's why the impactites immediately under the mats
are important. The objection that the mats simply
accumulated spherules, etc., is now headless.

Kenneths' work is Kenneth's work - he was brought into
this by his father, who was asked by Firestone.
As you note, the data is the data; and theory is
something else.

In this case we also have multiple traditions which
preseved memories of exactly what happened.

The USGS Atlantic coast cores will be in soon.

Speaking of firestones, I have some Canyon Diablos
that I am going to be grinding smooth by hand soon for
firemaking - I'll let everyone here know how it comes
out.

And don't worry about Griffin blowing off the
Congress's instructions in the George Brown Amendment,
as it appears that China intends to build CAPS.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas
if you're one of the few here who do not yet have a
copy, contact me off list for the special


--- "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> 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 06:40:02 PM PDT