[blam]

I just saw an (new) hour long documentary last week about Thera and the tsunami that destroyed the civilization on Crete. I sat and waited (baited-breath) for their date. I almost clapped when they said it happened in 1645BC.

And, Professor Mike Baillie, in his excellent book Exodus To Arthur using tree-rings, makes a compelling case for a 1628BC date for the Thera explosion. On page 58 of that book he says:"In 1987, data regarding a new acid layer at 1645+/-20 BC, in the important Dye 3 ice core from Greenland, was published. Claus Hammer and his co-workers suggested that this new date might be Santorini..."

Also, I think the ancient Egyptian dates are highly suspect.

[SunkenCiv]

Baillie works with tree rings, including (perhaps not directly) old ring samples from Anatolia and the Aegean. There's literally no proxy traces of any such eruption in tree-ring data (granted, it would be unlikely to be there).

Zielinski (et al)'s paper, actually papers, on the Thera question (which I don't have, but I think the abstract is online), show that there is no connection with the ice cores. Baillie used 1987 data, however the Zielinski work is not so new that he shouldn't have been aware of it when he wrote.

On Thera itself, and analogous to what my previous post quoted about limestone lakes, currently living small plants growing in the volcanic soil -- which is loaded with "old" carbon (C12), have radiocarbon dates centuries old.