[meteorite-list] Periodicity of Extinctions

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 19:24:45 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <1312511085.16650.YahooMailClassic_at_web36904.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hi Sterling, Richard, all -

First off - Why should this be the "Great Dismal Swamp"? Why do some people have a hard time talking about cometary injection mechanisms?

Second - Why do the impact hazard charts NASA provides to the Congress show a 100 year random average occurrence, instead of the actual 26 million year periodicity? As far as smaller impacts go, why did NASA not fund the determination of cratering rates from the data for other bodies, data which NASA had for years?

Third - why the hell isn't NASA funding YD comet impact studies?

Now to the academic side of things. When I called this process "periodically chaotic" a few folks did not like it. I see you are stuck for words as well. Have you graphed out the residuals between periodic and actual time of occurrence?

This 26 million year periodicity should be showing up on other planets (see my comment on NASA's total lack of work on this above).

In particular, say, on the walls of Valles Marineris on Mars.

Since WISE has pretty much shown that Nemesis does not exist, isn't far past the time when the Nemesis Hypothesis should be rejected?
(And Morrison update his Sceptical Inquirer article?)

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

PS - Richard, I'd love to go on Coast to Coast AM and talk for a couple of hours about the Contempt of Congress shown by former NASA Administrator Griffin in his deliberate failure to comply with the George Brown Jr amendment. Please email George Noory and ask him to have me on.

The data is what it is.


--- On Thu, 8/4/11, Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>> From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
>> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Periodicity of Extinctions
>> To: "Meteorite List" <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> Cc: "E.P. Grondine" <epgrondine at yahoo.com>, "Richard Kowalski" <damoclid at yahoo.com>
>> Date: Thursday, August 4, 2011, 5:23 PM
>> Richard, E. P., Listoids,
>>
>> OK, into the Great Dismal Swamp...
>>
>> First we have to make sure everyone is talking about
>> the actual Nemesis hypothesis, not the universal
>> misconception of both scientists and science writers.
>> The idea was that we were originally a double star
>> with a normal dim companion (more of them then
>> solo stars in our neighborhood) in a mildly distant
>> but circular orbit. Then, less than a billion years
>> ago, maybe only half a billion, a passing star greatly
>> perturbed our little buddy into a new crazy, highly
>> eccentric orbit that can't last from which it generates
>> showers that produce extinctions now, but didn't
>> until 500-700 Ma ago.
>>
>> So, Periodicy very Yes, Nemesis... Naaaah, not so much.
>> Melott and Bambach, "Nemesis Reconsidered," accepted
>> by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
>> http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1007/1007.0437.pdf
>>
>> "Hut (1984) was specific that irregularity of the period
>> of revolution of such an object [Nemesis] over the past
>> 250 My should be about 20% due to perturbation from
>> the Galaxy tidal gravitational field and by passing stars,
>> and sharp peaks should not be expected in Fourier
>> analysis. Torbett & Smoluchowski (1984) reached the
>> same conclusion, but with a somewhat larger estimate
>> of the fluctuations from the Galactic tide alone,
>> dependent on the inclination of the Nemesis orbit with
>> respect to the Galactic disk. Hills (1984) estimated a
>> period change of 4% per Nemesis orbital period from
>> the effects of passing stars. Using a t1/2 amplitude
>> scaling expected from a random walk, the orbital
>> period should drift by 15 to 30% over the last 500 My.
>> This change in the period will broaden or split any
>> spectral peak in a time series frequency spectrum,
>> so Nemesis as an extinction driver is inconsistent
>> with a sharp peak." Melott and Bambach say their
>> new enlarged data set raises the likelihood of
>> periodicy to 99%.
>>
>> Of course, nobody agrees with anybody else. That's
>> science. Oddly, the very regularity of the extinction
>> timing argues against its being the result of Oort
>> Cloud perturbations caused by a Nemesis-like object
>> because Nemesis' orbit couldn't be that stable.
>>
>> MIT's Technology Review (07/12/2010)
>> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25420/?ref=rss
>> "The periodicity is a matter of some
>> controversy
>> among paleobiologists but there is a growing consensus
>> that something of enormous destructive power happens
>> every 26 or 27 million years. The question is what?"
>>
>> A fascinating example of parallax: the Solar System
>> looks difference from the East Coast and the (near)
>> West Coast!
>>
>> J. John Sepkoski, one of the co-discoverers of the
>> apparent cyclic nature of mass extinctions says that
>> "here is an intriguing observation that no one knows
>> how to explain. Researchers formulated a number
>> of very interesting astronomical hypotheses" but none
>> convince. It is an hypotheses does not suggest tests.
>> "This situation is not conducive to scientific effort or
>> to intellectual curiosity, so interest in the question
>> of periodic extinctions has died down." In other words,
>> the idea is an orphan fact that no one wants to take
>> home
>> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-ever-happened-to-the
>>
>> The Earth does pass back and forth through the galactic
>> plane in a sinusoidal fashion of poorly constrained
>> period.
>> That has also been suggested as the cause of the
>> periodicy:
>> http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1996EM%26P...72..441R
>> The full PDF can be downloaded from here:
>> http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1996EM%26P...72..441R&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf
>> This article does contain some very "spikey" plots and
>> nice Fourier plots of periods for those who "don't see
>> it."
>>
>> Predicted Extinctions (27,000,000 period):
>> 11 mya: Miocene, Serravillian
>> 38 mya: Eocene, Bartonian
>> 65 mya: KT Extinction
>> 92 mya: Cretaceous, Turonian
>> 119 mya: Cretaceous, Aptian
>> 146 mya: Jurassic, Tithonian
>> 173 mya: Jurassic, Aalenian
>> 200 mya: Triassic-Jurassic Boundary
>> 227 mya: Triassic, Carnian
>> 254 mya: Permian, Wuchuapingian
>> 281 mya: Permian, Artinskian
>> 308 mya: Carboniferous, Moscovian
>> 335 mya: Carboniferous, Visean
>> 362 mya: Devonian, Famennian
>> 389 mya: Devonian, Givetian
>> 416 mya: Silurian-Devonian Boundary
>> 443 mya: Ordovician-Silurian Boundary
>> 470 mya: Ordovician, Dapingian
>> 497 mya: Cambrian, Furongian
>>
>> Actual Extinctions:
>> 14.5 mya: Middle Miocene Disruption (off by 3 my)
>> 33.9 mya: Late Eocene Extinctions (off by 4 my)
>> 65 mya: KT Extinction.
>> 93.5 mya: Cennomanian-Turonian (off by 1.5 mya)
>> 117 mya: Aptian Extinction (off by 2 my)
>> 145 mya: End Jurassic: often considered regional only (off
>> by 1 my)
>> 183 mya: Toarcian Turnover (off by 10 my)
>> 200 mya: Triassic-Jurassic Extinction (spot on)
>> 228 mya: Carnian Extinctions? Questionable, supported,
>> iirc, by Benton
>> (off by 1 my)
>> 251 mya: PT Extinction (off by 3 my)
>> 260 mya: Guadelupian Mass Extinction (off by 6 my)
>> Devonian extinctions: one damned thing after another,
>> for a perdiod of 20 to 30 million years...
>> 360 mya: Carboniferous-Devonian Boundary/Hangenberg Event
>> (off by 2 my)
>> 375 mya: The Frasnian-Famennian/Kellwasser Event (off by 13
>> my)
>> 420 mya: Lau event (off by 4 my)
>> 423 mya: Mulde event (off by 7 my)
>> 426 mya: Irevikean event (off by 10 my)
>> 443 mya: Ordovician Mass Extinction (spot on)
>>
>> How do I explain the temporal irregularities?
>>
>> The process of perturbing the Oort Cloud is very
>> slow. It can take ip to a million years to stir it and
>> inject a body into the inner system, where it may
>> persist for up to a million years before it hits
>> anything at all, and it may not hit the Earth but
>> disrupt a lesser body (asteroid) that takes more
>> millions of years for a big enoug fragment to hit
>> the Earth and do damage.
>>
>> It's a mixture of the Periodic and the Stochastic.
>>
>> I am not bothered by a few million years of "slop"
>> in so contingent a process. It's not like an Oort
>> resident hops on a high-speed rail line that says
>> "Next Stop: Earth." Oortie can take the scenic route.
>>
>> As for the "missing" or "extra" extinctions... Well,
>> hate to tell you, Apocalypse Fans, sometimes big
>> impactors MISS. If you draw a straight line that
>> passes closer to the Sun than the Earth, going
>> through the solar system like a bullet from any
>> random angle, the odds of it intersecting the Earth
>> at any given moment is 1 in 1,363,000,000. If you
>> restrain the impactor to the general plane of the
>> solar system, the odds improve, but the Oort Cloud
>> is a sphere (we think).
>>
>> As for, "extra" extinctions, like my grandmother
>> used to say, "It's Always Something..." There could
>> be other, less common causes, couldn't there?
>>
>> Interestingly, the bio-believers in Periodicy don't
>> like impacts, just as the paleontologists hated the
>> Chicxulub Hypothesis when it WAS an hypothesis.
>> Jim Bakker said the dinosaurs all died from bad
>> colds... Some blamed the extinction on parasites;
>> some on climate change (cooling of course; we didn't
>> have warming yet); some favored supernovae; and
>> on and on, and nobody liked astronomers sticking
>> their nose in where it didn't belong!
>>
>> The Missing and the Extra increase dramatically
>> as you go back in time. The crater evidence vanishes.
>> These time wobbles are more likely artifacts of a
>> planet that keeps itself tidied up geologically. If
>> there really were no periodocy, there would be as
>> many bad data points in the last 200 million years
>> as there are in the 200 million years before that.
>>
>> Not so. Human Error and Aggressive Tectonics do
>> the rest.
>>
>>
>> Sterling K. Webb
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Kowalski"
>> <damoclid at yahoo.com>
>> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 3:17 PM
>> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Periodicity of Extinctions
>>
>> My last comment on this ongoing non-sense. The radio
>> program Coast to Coast AM is a much better venue for it.
>>
>> Unlike you, I am not obsessed with my colleagues. I know
>> them too well! :)
>>
>> Morrison's article you cite was publish more than 14 years
>> ago. I'd be very interested if anyone can see a 26my
>> periodicity in that plot. I can't
>>
>> The second plot you cite is older still, 1984.
>>
>> Science moves forward with time as we learn more.
>>
>> I stand by my statements that there is no Nemesis or
>> periodicity.
>>
>> --
>> Richard Kowalski
>> Full Moon Photography
>> IMCA #1081
>>
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Received on Thu 04 Aug 2011 10:24:45 PM PDT