The Sky Is Falling - Whoops, Too Late
It already did. A group of maverick scientists are seriously challenging the conventional wisdom that says massive comet or meteor strikes on the earth are fairly rare events that only happen every 500,000 to one million years. Instead they have some fairly strong evidence that a mind-numbingly large meteor strike hit as recently as 4,800 years ago. Oddly enough, numerous flood myths exist from that precise time period. But the geological record is written for all to see write on the face of the earth say the scientists.
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.
The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.
Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.
Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.
The article goes on to explain how compelling the data is. The chevron deposits contain deep sea fossils of microscopic creatures that happen to have splashes of iron, nickle and chrome fused to them. That these fossils have no business being located four miles or so from the ocean and show evidence of having been tossed about with molten metal says that something is very wrong with the consensus science.
I think that is one thing to take away from the article: sometimes the consensus is wrong. So when people tell you a subject is settled, you really need to recall things like this. Keep in mind that there were physicists who went to their graves believing Albert Einstein's theory was wacky.
By See-dubya, Wednesday, 15 November , 2006 @ 12:28 pm
Consensus, after all, was that Saddam had oodles of WMDs everywhere.
He had some, yeah, but it wasn’t quite the “slam dunk” everyone thought.
By Quilly Mammoth, Wednesday, 15 November , 2006 @ 7:35 pm
And then that damn Chimpy McBusHitler released those Saddam documents whcih were really cookbooks for nukes!