This kind of catastrophism.
Posted on 06/04/2003 3:39:25 PM PDT by blam
Mammoth herds 'roamed fertile Bering Strait in Ice Age'
Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests.
Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region.
The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait.
Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants.
Grant Zazula, from Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, and colleagues analysed plant fossils from three sites in Canada's frozen Yukon territory.
During the Ice Age, the area would have had vegetation similar to that in eastern Beringia.
The scientists concluded that the region would have borne a grass-dominated ecosystem known as "mammoth steppe".
They wrote: "This vegetation was unlike that found in modern Arctic tundra, which can sustain relatively few mammals, but was instead a productive ecosystem of dry grassland that resembled extant (present) subarctic steppe communities."
Story filed: 18:40 Wednesday 4th June 2003
This kind of catastrophism.
Did Asteroids And Comets Turn The Tides Of Civilization?
You can speed it up by concentrating a lot of the material in a small space. Half-life is dependent on each atom by itself, though, and represents the lowest rate of natural decay.
Suprise. Those are called Carolina Bays, there are 500,000 of these along the east coast of the USA.
Mike Baillie
Discovering Archeology, July/August 1999
Moses called down a host of calamities upon Egypt until the pharaoh finally freed the Israelites. Perhaps he had the help of a comet impact coupled with a volcano. A volcano destroyed the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea (between today's Greece and Turkey) around the middle of the second millennium B.C. Researchers Val LaMarche and Kathy Hirschboeck suggest the volcano might be associated with tree-ring evidence for several years of intense cold beginning in 1627 B.C. Could that form the basis for strange meteorological phenomena recorded in the biblical book of Exodus?
In the book of Exodus, which describes events a few hundred kilometers from Santorini, we read of a pillar of cloud and fire, a lingering darkness, and the parting of the Red Sea. An enormous column of ash must have hung in the sky over the eruption (the Israelites’ “pillar of cloud by day and fire by night?”), and the volcano doubtless caused a tsunami, or tidal wave (which could have drowned a pharaoh's army). The Exodus story is traditionally dated to either the thirteenth or fifteenth century B.C. Those dates, however, depend ultimately on identifying the “Pharaoh of the Oppression,” and historians have never proven to which ruler that infamous title referred. Many biblical scholars will disagree, but I suggest that a seventeenth-century B.C. date is not impossible.
The argument can be bolstered. Equally catastrophic meteorological conditions are recorded in the Bible for the time of King David. Psalm 18, in reference to David, speaks of terrifying events: “Earth shook and trembled. The foundations of the hills moved and were shaken. ... Smoke ... fire ... darkness ... dark waters ... thick clouds of the skies ... hailstones and coals of fire.” On some chronologies, David is placed 470 years after the Exodus. The spacing between the two disastrous events recorded in Irish tree rings at 1628 and 1159 B.C. is 469 years. The Exodus story includes dust, several days of darkness, hail, dead fish, undrinkable water, cattle killed by hail, water breaking out of rocks, the earth opening, the sea parting as in a tsunami, and so on. Someone looking at the Exodus story and knowing descriptions of other distant volcanic effects might offer the possibility that the Israelites escaped from Egypt under the cover of a major natural catastrophe. There may be veiled references to comets in the biblical narrative, leading to the possibility that the Santorini eruption itself may have been triggered by a bolide (comet or asteroid) impact. David Levy, co-discoverer of the comet that bears his and Jean Shoemaker's names, has argued that the description of the “angel of the Lord in the sky over Jerusalem with a drawn sword” (1 Chronicles 21) could be a reference to a comet. The Angel of the Lord was, of course, also present at the Exodus, as it was “traveling in front of Israel's army.” Further, there are indications that as the Israelites left Egypt, the night was as bright as midday. The nights over Europe were reported to have been daytime-bright after the only known modern bolide impact, the Tunguska explosion over Siberia in 1908.
These stories raise the question of whether comets recorded by the Chinese at the start and end of the Shang Dynasty, at very near the same dates, were the same as the comets that may be recorded in the Old Testament. I believe that we know the answer: In the last five millennia, several dynastic changes and dark ages have been the direct result of impacts and/or volcanoes. The consequences of such events must have been devastating, leading to apocalyptic imagery in religious writing and predictions of the end of the world. Zachariah of Mitylene lived through the environmental disaster that began about 540 A.D. In the mid-550s, he wrote in his twelve-volume records of the trials the world had survived: “In addition to all the fearful things described above, the earthquakes and famines and wars, ... there has also been fulfilled against us the curse of Moses in Deuteronomy."“ The curse included pestilence, consumption, fever, fiery blasts from the skies, mildew, a rain of powder and dust, and darkness. The curse of Moses must have seemed an appropriate description of life after the impact of a piece of a comet.
Let's look at Venus. It allegedly was expelled from Jupiter. Now Jupiter rotation period is about 10.5 hours, the shortest of the principal planets. It is beyond reason to assume that an expelled Venus would have a near zero rotation rate. Yet that is what we observe today. The alleged changes in Earth's rotations would not absorb all of Venus' angular momentum, so where did it go? What mechanisms exist to transfer angular momentum from Venus to Earth? Both Venus and the Earth have insignificant magnetic fields, nowhere near strong enough to repel a collision, as described in Worlds. Imagine defending yourself from steel jacketed bullets by waving a refrigerator magnet around.
And Venus now has the least eccentric orbit of any body in the solar system. How? It would require the application of considerable force at it's aphelion to change it's orbit from "earth crossing 50 year eccentric" to "near perfect circle" ("sort of eccentric" for Mars).
I'm not going to calculate the forces needed, but I do believe it would require changing the speed of the planet by approximately 7 miles per second or so. I don't think any body could survive the impact needed to effect that large of a change.
No, you won't see much debunking going on here. The "anomalies" Velikovsky noted certainly cannot be explained by presuming bumper car planets. Nope.
Earth's history, and that of all planets, is one of slow geologic events interspersed with eruption and impact and flood. Neither the model of "all change is caused by catastrophe" nor the "gradual changes are all that happens" model acurrately depicts all of geolgoic history. It's a superposition of the two.
Any more on the possible origin? There are a lot of those features on the Alaska North Slope. Any chance they were formed by some kind of permafrost?
See the crater in post #16. This crater became visible only after Saddam drained the water from the habitat of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq.
Click on the link in post #48, theres a discussion about the origins.
Maybe.
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