A deep dive into the strength of the hypothesis that a comet hit the earth 12,800 years ago and wiped out megafauna and human societies.
Introduction: What is the YDIH?
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for regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations Please Subscribe I've been making videos for
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this channel since 2019 and from the very beginning I've looked into evidence presented by those
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who wish to establish that there existed a lost Advanced civilization in the last ice age that was destroyed in a
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worldwide cataclysm because my area of interest and expertise is in ancient
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historical times beginning with the Advent of writing around 5,000 years ago
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I focused chiefly on the evidence relating to ancient artifacts and archaeological sites commonly dating to
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that time but I've received countless requests for me to consider evidence relating to what is commonly called the
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younger dest impact hypothesis abbreviated yd which is used by many if
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not most proponents for the existence of A Lost advanc Civilization as evidence
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for the cataclysm that they believe destroyed it I've avoided getting into it because this is a huge and complex
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topic that is outside of my own field and to be honest evidence for a cataclysm is not evidence for a lost
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Advanced civilization it doesn't change the dates of ancient artifacts so it really hasn't been a priority but I'm a
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curious fellow and the repeated int treaties that I do a video about it finally persuaded me to wade into the
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waters and look into the subject more deeply so I have contacted various
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experts in the field relating to this question to get their thoughts on the matter so that I can determine whether
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there is something to this hypothesis this video is about this research it's a
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long one but if you're interested in matters relating to this proposed cataclysm stick around
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welcome to the myths of ancient history series in which I examine widely believed misinformation about ancient
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history on the internet and in popular literature does the younger dest impact
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hypothesis fall into that category is this impact a myth well most subject
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experts seem to think it is they haven't found the hypothesis persuasive and I
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wanted to find out why do they have good reasons or are they just resistant to new ideas let's dig in I guess we should
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start by going over some of the key Concepts involved here what is the younger dras it's a period of time in
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the earth's geologic history and it ran from about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago or
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I should say years before present BP in scientific terms before present means
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before the year 1950 the younger dras is notable because it was a colder period
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than what had come before or after it began with a relative L fast cooling and ended with a relatively fast warming but
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this happened only in the northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere warming occurred it's interesting
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because in the preceding time period the opposite was occurring the Northern Hemisphere had been warming while the
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southern had been cooling but from what I understand this seesaw effect is
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natural however the younger dras impact hypothesis yd proposes that at the beginning of the
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younger dest period there was a c MC event of some kind the exact kind of
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event has changed in the papers over time but the current view is that a
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giant equal or greater to 100 km diameter Comet entered an earth Crossing
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orbit in the inner solar system and began a Cascade of disintegrations numerous commentary
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fragments from the debris stream entered Earth's atmosphere about 12,800 years
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ago and detonated above in or collided with land
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ice sheets and oceans across at least four continents in the northern and
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southern hemispheres these are proposed to have triggered extensive wildfires as well as massive flooding sufficient to
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alter major ocean currents leading ultimately to the younger dest cooling
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many megaphon extinctions and significant changes to human populations
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and cultures as you might imagine alternative history enthusiasts who believe in a lost Advanced civilization
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have latched onto this Theory and indeed several of the people contributing to the papers on the yd are sympathetic to
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Alternative history you see if a mass extinction event occurred then we have an explanation for why there is no
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archaeological proof that the Lost Advance civilization existed mind you the theory doesn't fit perfectly with
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their ideas for example the yd does not propose that there was a single mass
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extinction event but rather that there was a ripple effect that caused Mass extinctions over time during the younger
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dest period the ancient myths about a great flood that we find In some cultures which occurred in one day or in
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one month or in one year according to the stories which alt history proponents want to associate with the yd do not
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line up that well with a ripple effect when these myths provide dates for the event these also do not line up so for
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example Plato's date for the destruction of Atlantis is a thousand years after
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the date for the impact event so alt history proponents have to fudge a bit to make it work and that's why it's
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ancient apocalypse because because we know that there was a global cataclysm a
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slow one 1,200 years long between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago called the younger
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dryers that's a 1200 year Gap go go slow
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catastrophe well no no goly Tey we to be very clear about about the younger Drass
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one of the puzzling things about it is that you have C CSM at the beginning and This Global temperature slump is surely
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cataclysmic by any standards and you have cataclysm at the end you have uh a
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massive spike a huge increase in global temperatures and you have meltwater pulse 1B you have a lot of water going
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into the ocean at that time so both ends of the younger drus are cataclysmic and it's at the recent end of the younger
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drus 11,600 years ago that we see gobec tee mysteriously popping up the focus of
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the science has been on 12,000 800 years ago but there's a lot of interest in the 11,600 years ago as well and the
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strongest suggestion of what caused that that sudden rise in temperatures
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accompanied by meltwater pulse 1B was a second encounter with more fragments of
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the debris of the Comet this time the impacts not being on the North American ice cap but in a major ocean probably
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the Pacific and that that then put puts a huge plume of water vapor into the upper atmosphere and shrouds the Earth
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and creates the greenhouse effect that accounts for the radical rise in temperature that occurred 11,600 years
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ago more science needs to be done on that an additional difficulty for alt history purveyors is that when we are
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talking about a series of Extinction events rather than one big one there's the problem of having to explain how a
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lost Advanced civilization that was spread around the globe could not have survived this series of Extinction
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events would need to have happened in relatively quick succession otherwise wise there would have been time for the
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civilization to bounce back but even though the impact hypothesis doesn't fit their story all that well they still are
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enamored with it and one reason is because it is a rare thing when they can use actual published science papers to
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back up their claims most of their evidence can be found only on the internet and in pop books so when there
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are actual scientific studies this is something to put up on a pedestal but we cannot forget that the impact hypothesis
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has no direct bearing on whether a lost Advance civilization exist existed this is even admitted by some they are not
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saying that it also wiped out a l Advanced civilization of prehistory I'm saying that yeah the only way to know if
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there was an advanced civilization back then is to find it but I think we should still look into the matter of impacts if
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there was a series of mass extinction events then this could explain why evidence of the Lost advanc Civilization
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is lacking maybe I just got these new earbuds
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Uniformitarianism vs Catastrophism
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it one of the criticisms of modern geology that you will hear alternative history proponents give is that today's
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geologist do not give enough consideration to the idea that catastrophes have shaped Earth's
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geological history many many scientists have got a vested interest in what is called uniformitarianism or gradualism
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and they they don't like to hear about C Ms having any major impact on the story of life on Earth there's a denial um of
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the role of cataclysms in the human story and there there is even a word for that in in science and it's called
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uniformitarianism and and this is a particular philosophy of science where the view is that everything as we see it
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in the world today is how things have always been so if we don't see cataclysms today and they're not playing
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a major part in our story today then there weren't cataclysms and they didn't play a major part in our story in the
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past Adam sedick Roderick merch we could go through the list of those they all
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were almost to a man catastrophist they believed that the features and things
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that they were seeing in the landscape could only be explained by means of catastrophic outsize type events what
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happened when you get sort to the mid 19th century is you had Playfair Lyall and Hutton were the three who
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essentially codified the uniformitarian interpretation of Earth history and again like I said it was very potent
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very powerful for understanding sedimentary processes understanding erosional and depositional processes all
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of these things but it came became codified as Dogma by the time you get to
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the establishment of theology as an academic discipline in the late 19th century they wanted to basically come up
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with this textbook framework that could be codified and taught as Dogma I always
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thought that today's geologists accept the ideas of both uniformitarianism and catastrophism so the first thing I
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wanted to do was to consult with a geologist to talk about the idea of catastrophes and mass extinction events
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in general so I reached out to Rachel Phillips a geologist and professor at the University of South Carolina she has
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a great YouTube channel called Geo girl that you should check out Rachel Phillips thank you so much for joining
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us today I just have some questions I want to ask you and I'm hoping that you can clear a few things up for us uh
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because this area is not really uh Forte so I I wanted to know from someone who
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actually knows geology knows about mass extinctions and what they could tell us
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about this so thanks again for joining us yeah absolutely in my travels uh I
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hear people talking about this um sort of rivalry between two different ways of approaching geology
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uniformitarianism and catastrophism and uh well first of all can you tell us a little bit about the
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difference between the two and how they play into geology and then uh as I I
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want to ask you the question if there's any truth in the claim that some people make that uh catastrophes aren't really
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considered by modern geologists today they don't really think about catastrophes and what their effect on
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the geological record are yeah of course so for the first
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thing the uniformitarianism versus the catastrophism um basically uniformitarianism is kind of like
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fundamental thing that geologists think about which is you know the geological
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processes that occur on Earth today like sedimentation deposition just rock
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formation the rock cycle basically uh those have occurred throughout Earth history that's the idea and that
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basically helps us understand I mean the way people summarize it is the present is the key to the past so with the
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knowledge that you know these processes have been occurring throughout Earth's history about the same rate and you know
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the same way uh we can reconstruct kind of how Earth has been shaped over time
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geologically and that's kind of how we can use uniformitarianism and and it works really well um but then you know
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catastrophes the catastrophism part of it is kind of instead of gradual slow
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you know geologic time scale processes taking place and slowly forming Earth um
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you know it's this idea a that you know rapid abrupt catastrophes kind of have
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punctuated our history and those have largely caused you know how Earth has
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ended up I think early on more so than now these two ideas were more so Rivals
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and now um I think the PE the mo the geologists that I surround myself with
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in modern geology we tend to think that both of these things played a big role and and continue to play a big role in
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shaping Earth um over geologic time of course and you know I think that if
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anywhere the idea that catastrophes don't um you know can be dismissed or
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don't play a role and it's just uniformitarianism if anywhere that idea I guess in my you know the way that I
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think about it that might have come from kind of just a fuzzy line between the two definitions because you know when we
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first thought about these ideas they seemed you know radically contrasting each other but um when you think about
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it you for example mass extinctions uh I you know I talk a lot about mass
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extinctions on my channel and I think of them as catastrophic events but um you
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know if you think about it they've happened so regularly throughout Earth's history that one could argue that
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there're this regular patterned process that occurs on earth that could fall
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under the category of uniformitarianism because there this uniform kind of almost predictive type thing that will
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happen and has Contin happen so catastrophes happen sort of at at intervals throughout Earth's history so
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they're they're not um unusual is that what you're saying no
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not at all and and yeah they might be you know abrupt and punctuated and not
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predictable per se but they happen I mean they've happened throughout Earth history over and over again there's a
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few very famous mass extinction events in Earth history that get a lot of attention but there's been hundreds I mean
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probably thousands that have occurred so it's not you know thousands of
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catastrophes yeah yeah I mean there's like background Extinction which is one thing and then there's big spikes and
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and those are the mass extinctions and of course there's local mass extinctions there's Global it depends what you're
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talking about but there's been I mean it's 4.5 billion years there you know millions of years apart but they happen
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all the time on geological time scales you know the way you hear some people talk like oh those geologists all they
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all they seem to think about is everything's uniformitarian it's all gradual there's never any
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catastrophes um but you're saying that's not true I'm not in the circles that I
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you know heard that it may just be that there's a particular catastrophe that
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they want to promote and because that one isn't accepted then they have to have a reason oh well it's because they
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they are all gradualists over there ah yeah yeah I I do think that sometimes people get so wound up in their
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hypothesis they kind of get blinded to other data but all right well and I want
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to talk about then some of these mass extinctions and and catastrophes in history um can you tell us a little bit
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about the ones that have happened in the past uh the big ones especially yeah of the ones that we have recorded and and
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well defined in the fossil record in the last 500 million years there's five big ones that people talk the most about um
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that were seemingly according to our current data the biggest five and these
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include the Endor division mass extinction which occurred around 445 million years ago and this was caused
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you know spoiler alert all of them have been caused by climate change the
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triggers for that climate change have differed for each event but all of them ultimately the extinctions were caused
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by climate change the Ovis one specifically was caused by a cooling trend that initiated because of
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biological evolution actually which basically the evolution of land plants for the first time in our history caused
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an increased cooling because they were taking up carbon dioxide which is greenhouse gas and they led to more
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carbon burial which I won't get into but it caused Cooling and this major and
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sharp rapid climate change caused extinctions and likewise the rest also
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were um caused by climate change the late ionian is the next one and that happened around 365 million years ago
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that one was also caused by a sharp cooling Trend again caused by evolutionary advancement of plants um
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the or divition was nonvascular plants like mosses and stuff and then the devonian was caused by huge big trees
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and forests evolving for the first time and so that again caused this big the appearance of new types of Life are
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affecting the climate oh yeah big time I mean that's kind of early Earth history um that's kind of
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just the way that things were happening because biology was making these huge advances and when those are so
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beneficial that they spread globally like plants did then that causes major
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change I mean can you imagine going from no trees to trees covering the world so it it did it caused really you know
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extreme climate shifts and that is never good for um for life because life
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doesn't like Fast Change um the next three and the big five are all not
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caused by cooling they were caused by global warming uh shifts I mean either way you go anything that's rapid is
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harmful to life but the next one was actually the biggest one in the last 500 million years which was the in perian
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mass extinction around 250 million years ago that one was caused by Major vulcanism that one and the in Triassic
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so the third and fourth one were both caused by Major vulcanism that led to a sharping so uh Mr Spock and a bunch of
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people were coming from uh no this is a terrible Tad
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joke okay volcanism Oh you mean volcanoes okay yeah yes yes volcanoes um but yeah
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so both the end perian and the ENT Triassic so 250 and then again at 200ish
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million years ago uh those two mass extinctions were both caused well caused by global warming which was triggered by
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major vulcanism and you know a lot of people think like oh big massive
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volcanic eruption could cause you know mass extinction yes but when we're talking about volcanism that caused
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these events we're talking about like not just one volcano like a big field of volcanic activity that erupted for like
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two million years so huge amounts of Volcan vulcanism leading to huge amounts
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of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere and very sharp Waring and that you know is what caused those
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extinctions the last of the five is the kpg mass extinction around 65 million
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years ago which took out the non-avian dinosaurs and that one at the end of the Cretaceous was also caused by sharp
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global warming but instead of being triggered by vulcanism alone uh it was triggered by an impact so like
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vulcanism an impact of you know big asteroid impact could cause similar
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climate changes so if you think about a volcano or many volcanoes going off they
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might initially cause um kind of a a ash blocking sunlight winter type scenario
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um whereas you know in the long term the greenhouse gases will take effect and it'll cause longer term warming the same
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thing is true for impact it throws up all this Ash and dust and initially there's a very intense heating period of
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the terrestrial environment where Heat beting upon the immediate impact and the
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re-entry of material through the atmosphere um causes just you know intense burning and and you know at the
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surface and then longer term several months to years after the kpg impact we
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had the impact winter so blocking of sunlight because of the dust that was still in the atmosphere and then longer
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term after that we had the warming caused by all the carbonaceous material
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that it impacted which was released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide sulfur
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dioxide all these greenhouse gases that led to a longer term warming Trend which
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caused the most the majority of extinctions at the time so common trend
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is climate change but triggered by other things I see yes triggered by volcanism or
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impacts mostly okay okay now the most recent you said was 65 million years ago
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right uh there are some people who are are arguing for a more recent mass
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extinction uh it's usually in the context of of arguing that there was a great Advanced civilization that got
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wiped out by a combet impact and this would be uh during the Stone Age um so I
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wanted to ask you is it theoretically possible that a comet impact could cause
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a mass extinction from what you've been saying it sounds like yes but I just wanted to get your thoughts on that yes
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absolutely I think the crous kpg boundary is a great example I will say
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that again you know I think a lot of people initially might have misunderstood that Extinction or even
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other events that were quote unquote impact caused to be due to the impact
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directly but again it's not the impact per se but the climate changes that it causes but in terms of indirect causes
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yes an impact could 100% theoretically cause a mass extinction okay okay um so
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let's say we wanted to determine whether there was a comet impact on Earth in the
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past how would we go about ascertaining that yeah of course so you know aside
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from the obvious which is an impact crater um you know a lot of times you
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can have an impact and an impact crator can even though it's huge be eroded so that's not unheard of but there are
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other things that are less easily erased that we can look for and these things include you know in the rock where we go
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and we you know take big sections of of rock and we look for things like shock
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metamorphosed rock or shocked quartz often it's called um basically this is
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when so metamorphism in geology is the process where rocks are altered by high temperature and pressure and this can
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happen upon impact because the impact is you know in the rocks that it's impacting causing really intense heat
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and really intense pressure at that moment and that kind of immediately
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melts and and partially melts and Alters a bunch of the Rocks both in structure and composition and the way that impacts
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occur kind of Alters or Metamorphoses those rocks in a way that's distinct
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from other metamorphic you know alterations so we can sometimes see these things and we call that structure
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that it forms shock structure or shocked rocks and times when we see these in the
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Rock record we can say that that was caused by an impact um another thing is
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um well similar to that would this be just where where the impact would have occurred or would it be more
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widespread no this would be local you know in proximity to the impact it would
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be kind of you know you could you should be able to see a gradual shift toward
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less metamorphosed rocks going away from the proposed impact site um there's of
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course you know after things solidify there's of course like tectonics and erosion and weathering
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that can cause them to move out of the place they were originally but you know they shouldn't move across the globe so
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you should have it relatively in proximity to where you think the impact occurred um oh I probably should have
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asked this before but um would would um could a mass extinction occur uh if the
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U the Comet or whatever Heavenly Body there was but if it broke up in the atmosphere and impacted in in uh in more
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minor ways all over the planet yeah I I think again you know
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every answer in Sciences it depends but but it does because one it depends on
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the size of the object and um you know how many fragments how large the
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fragments are you know when they broke up in the atmosphere and of I think
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mostly where they impact um whether it's in water whether it's on land whether it's you know at the
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equator or toward the poles because that greatly affects then how you know they
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affect climate oh and especially whether so one example with the Cretaceous impact was that it impacted rocks that
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were really rich in um you know a type of rock called evaporite rocks which are
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basically rocks that have a lot of carbonates and sulfate minerals and those carbonates and sulfates upon
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impact immediately like vaporized into carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide so those gases are then greenhouse gases
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and so if it had impacted an area where there was less carbon and sulfur then
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maybe it wouldn't have caused such you know extreme global warming you know so it really depends on the composition of
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the Rocks too that it's it's in impacting so you know yes but but it depends I see okay what a um what an an
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impact in um uh in certain areas cause
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enough warming where it could like melt the ice caps and cause major floods yeah yeah that would be it could
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um yeah I'm trying I mean you know all my knowledge comes from like things that have happened um well specifically uh I
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mean like um there are some people who say that um all the world's flood myth
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uh about you know catastrophes with floods are relating back to this event
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this is one of the the theories out there relating back to this event um when uh the comet impacted the Earth or
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fragments of a comet and this melted the ice caps and C caused um a worldwide
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flood I want to know geologically how likely that would be
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worldwide I don't I mean the thing is with comets even if they fragment I mean
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it's still a localized event I mean unless literally it's all happening at once Sur Earth which I wouldn't at that
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point you wouldn't get a flood you would get like massive like magmatism and I
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mean you'd be back in the hadian like when Earth was molent it just if it's localized which it has been since but I
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mean what about the overall climate change could could the warming of the globe cause major
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um it would cause a rise in sea level right what if it would cause a rise in sea level um but this would be gradual
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or or quick no gradual oh be gradual thing is with the impacts is all of the
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immediate effects are relatively local so like the metamorphism or the intense heating everything there is relatively
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local because that's all associated with the impact and its ejecta that is all
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proximal to where it landed and then the impact when would also kind of hinder the process of any melting because that
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would lead to Cooling and then over the long term which is much more gradual you would get warming but that wouldn't be a
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quick thing you know so you know it' be on geologic time scales if we're talking
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about so the Cretaceous for example which is the one you know that I know that one was over millions of years so
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so no not not with thousands or hundreds MH okay okay um so again uh uh I don't
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know if we finished this but as far as what Clues we would look for in the geological record to show that there had
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been uh well first of all there had been a common impact but also that there had been uh uh climate change that could
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cause a mass extinction what Clues would we find yeah so again with the impact so
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things like shocked you know rocks and um other impact you know hinting rocks
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would be things like uh ejecta which are kind of these glass balls or teardrop
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shaped rocks that form by the immediately melting upon impact and then being thrown through the atmosphere and
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cooling while they're traveling through the atmosphere so things like that um and also a big one that we talk about at
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the Cretaceous boundary is aridium so idium is something that's really it's a common uh or it's not common it's very
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rare metal on Earth but it's very much more common in extraterrestrial material comets asteroids Etc and um it you know
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there's a big layer of it around where the Cretaceous pale Gene boundary is because after impact that was all laid
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down um after everything the dust settled per se um and then another kind of then you have instead of immediate
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impact evidence you have like contextual evidence which is like you know were there fires or tsunamis which you'd
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expect proximal to the impact um it landed in or near water it probably
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caused tsunamis the intense heating around it would have caused fires so you you expect to see those things preserved
32:36
in the Rock record if you have a good rock section from that area um and so
32:42
those would kind of give you an idea of the impact um the climate I mean you know this comes to
32:51
like are you looking for climate are you just looking to reconstruct paleo climate in the rocks
32:57
or are you looking for impact specific climate change if you're looking for impact specific climate change you would
33:04
probably look for some sort of order of events like hints of warming and the the
33:10
immediate you know time after very shortlived intense warming by the way GE
33:17
geologically how do you determine uh whether warming is fast and or slow is well that would just be the
33:26
measure of the section kind of so you know the thicker The Rock deposit the longer you know something was the case
33:34
you know whether those rocks indicate a cooling Trend or a warming Trend you know they you know the thicker it is the
33:41
longer it happened but um yeah the the immediate intense warming right after impact would almost be just I hardly any
33:49
thick just no thickness but you get like a tiny little layer maybe in some areas proximal to impact where you might see
33:56
evidence for um iridium or fires or tsunami deposits which are a little bit
34:02
thicker but you have to also have the context of this is a tsunami so a lot more is deposited than in terrestrial
34:10
environments where dust is just settling so sometimes thickness isn't exactly you know related to timing but you have to
34:17
also have the context of what you're looking at as in the geological record um but then you know thereafter you'd
34:25
expect to see evidence of impact winter um and and Cooling and then longer term
34:32
warming um and and there's I mean I don't know there it's hard to list one thing we look for when we talk about
34:39
cooling or warming evidence because there's so like hundreds of proxies that we look for most of it not visible to
34:45
the naked eye we look at the chemistry the composition of the Rock and that tells us a lot about you know whether it
34:52
was cooling or warming so that's kind of harder to go into detail because there's nothing physical really you'd see but
34:59
the more the more evidences that you have the stronger the case that it occurred oh yeah there's you know
35:05
there's no case made when there's only like one of these things found they kind of all have to overlap for then there to
35:12
be like a really good case for an impact caused climate event okay since we had
35:18
this conversation Rachel has done a ful length video on the younger drias impact hypothesis called what caused the
35:24
younger dest cooling megaphon extinctions and Clovis disappearance which covers points I do not cover in
35:30
this video so be sure to give it a watch over at the geog girl channel anyway it sounds to me like today's geologists do
35:38
incorporate catastrophes in the geological history of Earth but hypothesis about catastrophes need to be
35:44
judged on a caseby casee basis according to the geological
Impact Evidence
35:54
evidence now I want to get into the younger drias impact hypothesis is specifically this theory is the special
36:00
interest of an organization called the comet research group who have been organized specifically to promote the
36:06
hypothesis and to research Comet impacts in General on their website they offer
36:11
this description of themselves think our last space attack was 65 million years ago from the dinosaur killer asteroid
36:19
think again killer comets are more common than you've been taught at crg
36:24
our mission is to find evidence about Comet impacts and raise awareness about them before your city is next they have
36:31
a convenient overview page where they describe the yd in detail and speak in very positive terms that it actually
36:38
happened why should we care they ask because they can change climate suddenly
36:44
because they often cause great tsunamis because more will hit us in the future they provide funding for research on the
36:50
yd listing 63 scientists whose work they have supported but noting that some
36:56
scientists listed support the younger Dy impact hypothesis and some do not they
37:01
don't say how many there have been a plethora of papers published on various aspects of the yd so for someone just
37:07
waiting in it can be confusing especially if you're not familiar with all the jargon but there are some papers
37:13
that we can go to to get the basics laid out for us perhaps no one has been a bigger defender of it than Martin
37:19
swatman a professor of chemical engineering at Edinboro University do you remember him he's the fellow who
37:24
came up with the theory about pillar 43 at Quebec teepe being a time stamp that records the younger dest comet impact on
37:32
it I've already done two videos examining that idea which you can check out later if you're interested he wrote
37:37
a defense of the impact hypothesis called the younger drias impact hypothesis review of The Evidence which
37:43
was published in earth science reviews in 2021 and is a handy reference guide to the state of research at least up to
37:50
that year mind you Sweatman is not a specialist in comets or planetary impacts or geomorphology or gey ology
37:58
and he has a vested interest in this topic because his proposal that pillar 43 at gbec Lee records the impact event
38:05
depends on there being an impact event but his paper conveniently lays out all their arguments for you people who are
38:11
specialists in the science involved have written a lengthy reference guide as well a team of 13 wrote a paper in 2023
38:18
called a comprehensive reputation of the younger D impact hypothesis also
38:24
published in earth science reviews we'll be talking to two of the authors in this video if you are waiting into this topic
38:31
these two papers are probably the first two you should read the pieces of evidence usually given for the impact
38:36
include these impact markers consisting of microscopic debris magnetic iron-rich
38:42
spals glassy silic spheral high temperature melt glass Nano diamonds
38:49
soot ainor carbon ferin containing helium 3 you might wonder about craters
38:56
as far as I've been able to to tell proponents of the yd have not been able to positively identify any craters
39:03
saying that airbursts would not have made craters and if there were any ground impacts this would have been on
39:08
the ice sheets and would have melted away as far as this list goes my understanding is that not all of these
39:14
are generally accepted by scientists as evidence of impacts but I had to talk to someone about that to get details and
39:21
find out for sure so I reached out to Mark bosow research professor of Earth and planetary science at the University
39:27
of New Mexico he is a physicist and an expert in planetary impacts and catastrophes he is one of the authors of
39:34
the comprehensive reputation paper here's what he had to say okay everyone I have here with me Mark
39:40
baslo uh from uh UNM and he is going to tell us all about planetary impacts and
39:48
catastrophes so uh Mark thanks for uh taking the time to be with me today to answer some of my
39:55
questions sure happy here uh can you tell me a little bit about your area of
40:01
expertise what and what Drew you into this discussion about the possible comet impact during the younger dras period
40:07
yeah well good question i' I've been interested in impacts actually since I was a kid um we used to camp out in the
40:15
backyard and watch meteors during the persed meteor meteor shower every August
40:21
um I almost experienced a major Fireball on a family vacation
40:28
1972 probably seen the movie the home movie of it flying over the Tetons we
40:35
were there at the time and we didn't know what it was of course that was pre-
40:40
interet pre YouTube pre everything and I didn't even read about it for several years until I was in college um and
40:48
there was an article about it um and it was actually observed by space based
40:53
sensors um which turned out to be something that I worked on many years later at sanyia National
41:00
Laboratories um and and actually knew the guy that designed the centers that were aboard you know these satellites
41:07
that were there to observe possible nuclear explosions um and rocket launches and
41:13
other things that that generate light and then I got very interested in Impact
41:19
cratering I went to Caltech um started working in a Jew
41:25
physics lab with a two-stage light gas gun that fires projectiles at very high speed and did experiments high pressure
41:33
experiments both impact cratering and shocking minerals to very high pressures
41:39
um to determine how they behave at very deep depths in the Earth's
41:44
mantle um and I got to do some experiments at the NASA AMS Research Center two-stage light gas gun that aims
41:51
vertical gun making craters and then I got a job at Sandia and spent spent my
41:57
time as an experimentalist doing more impact and explosion experiment before I
42:02
switched in the mid 90s uh to doing computational impact physics so my
42:09
interest switched to the Computing side but I was very interested in remained
42:16
interested in the experimental part because that's how we validate you know check to make sure our
42:23
computational simulations are right so I was very grounded in actual experimental data wow well it
42:31
doesn't sound like you have anything against impacts in general uh so not at all no I I took you know one of my
42:39
favorite professors when I was at celtech was Jean Shoemaker who you know he basically was the guy who you know
42:47
LED what was the time or prior to when I was there but during his time pretty
42:53
much of a paradigm shift in you know the importance of impacts and impact
42:59
cratering on the moon other planets and even the Earth okay all right well about
43:05
this younger dras common impact hypothesis is it your position that it it definitely did not happen or that it
43:13
could have happened but they just haven't presented sufficient evidence for it well uh you know their hypothesis and
43:22
it's not just one hypothesis they've got multiple versions of the hypothesis that
43:28
actually contradict one another but none of the ideas that they published um
43:35
could have possibly happened because they're physically impossible what they describe as physically impossible
43:40
explosions in outer space Comet explosions 500 kilometers above the
43:45
surface of the Earth that created these firestorms in North America impacts and
43:51
airburst just don't work that way it's it's just not a physically viable hypothesis
43:57
well like are you saying like breaking up in the air that doesn't happen or it doesn't happen the way that they're saying it happened it doesn't happen the
44:04
way they say and and their original Firestone 2007 paper described a 5
44:12
kilometer diameter Comet breaking up in outer space and exploding in outer space
44:17
and that doesn't work now other versions yeah they describe things exploding in
44:24
the atmosphere but that's something different and a different physical
44:29
process that is viable but now they're you know they're claiming that there were thousands of
44:36
these things and I don't really see any evidence for that I mean something like
44:41
that less than 13,000 years ago the evidence would be obvious and undeniable
44:46
and it wouldn't have taken until 2007 for people to figure that out Jean Shoemaker would have figured it out and
44:54
probably somebody before him well as I understand you've done some research on the comet research group um yes and I I
45:02
want to hear a little bit what you found can you tell me a little bit about you know how it came together and uh and
45:07
what your assessment of this group is yeah so that I mean they didn't create this comment research group until
45:15
I think it was 2016 um you know they started publishing
45:20
this group started publishing and and their first you know publication in the
45:25
scientific literature was this 2007 paper but they had already published some stuff going back to 2001 there was
45:33
a paper by the lead author was Firestone Firestone and topping and it was in a newsletter um called the mammoth trumpet
45:40
and they first started putting their ideas out there at that time and then they published a book in 2006 but the
45:48
scientific Community wasn't paying they published a book before they published a scientific
45:54
paper yes yeah and it Firestone West
45:59
and some other guy whose name I can't remember who was like the public their publicist and I think who worked for the
46:06
publishing company that they they published in which was known for publishing sort of pseudo scientific
46:13
stuff um uh uh bar uh new tradition
46:19
inner Traditions Baron company and if you go to their website you can see all sorts of kind of alternative stuff death
46:28
um not scientific so that was their entry into this um and and most of the
46:36
content of the Firestone 2007 paper which was in the proceedings in the National Academy of
46:42
Science that research was done in support of this book for our inner
46:48
traditions and and so it didn't really have it never really had a scientific basis peer-review papers have come out
46:56
by them right several of them have passed peerreview surely that must count for something they got actual scientists uh publishing
47:04
peer-reviewed papers that's right and and we were unaware of this but or at least I was
47:10
unaware of this when the Firestone paper came out in 2007 we all assumed that it had been
47:18
peer-reviewed by the normal process but it you know somebody at some point started looking into this and realized
47:25
that no uh proceedings of the National Academy of of Sciences has more than one track for
47:32
peer review and if you are a member of the academy you can kind of Bypass or end run the normal review process get
47:40
one of your pals to act as a pre-arranged editor and send out your paper to some
47:46
pre-selected friendly reviewers and so it appears that that's what happened with all their early papers at least
47:53
seven papers went through a process that was either that or something very
47:58
similar to that with the same pre-arranged editor or or communicating um member in in every case
48:06
somebody who had actually expressed um the opinion that it was their job to get this stuff published
48:13
which is not normal peerreview normally an editor it's not their job to get it
48:19
published it's their job to make sure that it's right that it you know doesn't violate any principles and that it's l
48:27
peer-reviewed so I don't think any of these early papers were properly peer-reviewed I see um more recent ones
48:35
perhaps have been or no well yeah yeah there were papers published in the journal geology
48:42
and scientific reports uh and and several other journals GL Journal of glaciology but
48:50
but here's the problem I see I think by the time it got into being submitted to
48:56
those journals you know the reviewers and the editors saw these pnas papers and they they
49:02
hadn't been clued into the fact that those weren't properly peer-reviewed so they assumed that like a lot of the
49:09
evidence that was presented in those papers or the claimed evidence really didn't have any true evidence to back
49:15
them up so in some sense I think the you know the evidence was laundered into
49:21
peerreview it was never properly peer reviewed and then once it was perceived
49:26
to to have been peer-reviewed it became accepted and repeated and through
49:32
repetition started thinking that it was yeah that it was legitimate evidence and I mean one
49:39
example of this is their very one of their very first major claims and that was the discovery of ferin with
49:46
extraterrestrial helium they have never published any evidence for that they
49:51
made a claim in the Firestone 2007 paper it's been repeated and repeated again
49:58
and again but they've never coughed up the actual evidence nobody I know has ever seen it and I'm guessing that most
50:03
of the co-authors have have never seen any evidence they're taking it on faith what in your opinion are the biggest
50:10
weaknesses of the evidence for the younger dest comet impact well the biggest weakness is they
50:18
haven't let us see it oh it's like that's not normal in
50:24
science when people ask can can I see the your your what is your evidence for
50:30
ferins with extraterrestrial helium and it's like they either ghost you you know
50:36
they they won't reply or they get angry that you would dare ask them like you
50:42
would challenge their their honesty or but we we haven't seen the evidence
50:49
and the evidence we have seen is more consistent with more mundane
50:55
explanations like they found what they call scoria like objects scoria and slag
51:02
are basically indistinguishable they use it you know in in candidacy you know
51:09
oral exams for candidacy for to allow graduate students to become PhD
51:15
candidates you know that's one of the tricks it's like bring in a piece of slag and ask them what it is what kind
51:20
of rock it is you know it looks like a rock and and and so scoria is the
51:25
natural version slag is the is the you know human made version and they have
51:33
found this stuff like right next to Historic railroad tracks and they've been told this is railroad slag this is
51:40
not you know you're calling it scory likee and you you know you think it's formed by some mysterious airburst
51:47
process it's railroad slag I mean that that is repeated over and over
51:54
for a lot of what they are identifying as created by some kind of mysterious
52:01
airburst process that even people who model and study airbursts and have
52:07
published on airbursts don't really understand because it's not consistent with the way we understand how airbursts
52:13
work oh okay all right there are there's there's
52:19
mundane things like carbon spirals those those are you know you burn coal you
52:25
burn wood you get get that kind of stuff coming out of smoke stacks and that's a probably the simpler explanation for
52:33
carbon spals with anomalously young ages is that the ages aren't anomalous they
52:38
really are only a couple hundred years ago and they came out of locomotives that were burning wood in the Firebox so
52:46
there's simpler explanations for everything they're finding I see um uh
52:52
so in a nutshell um you're saying that where you need evidence to show that it
52:59
was actually an impact that's where they don't have it but the other evidence they have that they say it's for an
53:04
impact could be evidence for something else yeah and and then you know they
53:10
always interpret everything this isn't nor the normal way people do science you
53:15
know most of us who do science are always asking what could we be getting wrong is there a simpler explanation are
53:22
we misinterpreting this but for example when the hawaa crater was covered under the ice in
53:28
Greenland you know all their money was on this is going to be 12.9 th000 years
53:33
ago this is our impact crater and all of us the Skeptics were saying you know the
53:39
probability that there was an impact you know it it it's in one it's inconsistent
53:44
with anything that young and the pro probability that there would be that big of a crater that was that young or
53:50
infinitesimal it's got to be older and it turned out to be older way older I
53:56
think 58 million years old or something like that nothing to do with the younger
54:02
dasas and you know some of it some of them have moved on it's like well that just me you know that just proves that
54:08
it really was an airburst it didn't hit the ground and others are saying oh they got the dates wrong so you know there's
54:14
a lot of special pleading that goes on too yeah you could when I when I read uh
54:21
their material I get the impression that they just really really really want it to be true
54:27
you know they really want it to be true they want to be doing Paradigm changing research but ironically you know they
54:34
appeal to Shoemaker they appeal to Alvarez as having done Paradigm changing
54:40
research you know involving impacts and it's true they did but now that's the
54:47
Paradigm that they're now overthrowing it's like well Shoemaker was wrong you
54:53
you know if they're right Shoemaker was wrong Alvarez was wrong impacts and
54:58
airbursts are nothing like those guys are you know were claiming thought and
55:04
in fact Carolyn Shoemaker who discovered Comet Shoemaker levy9 is one of or was
55:09
she passed away recently she was one of their biggest critics and and very vocal about
55:15
it do you do you think any part of their research uh has been valid or increased
55:22
our understanding of this period you know that's a good question and and there's
55:29
one element and and a lot of my colleagues will disagree with me on this
55:35
um and that is the possibility of a resonant swarm so there's this idea and
55:41
and in my opinion they carry it by orders of magnitude to the extreme and
55:46
but the idea that there was an object a comet that was in orbit around the sun
55:54
and it shed pieces pieces broke off and those pieces got trapped in a resonance
55:59
so there's a cluster of this stuff that's in an orbit that occasionally
56:05
crosses Earth's path path and and and there can be an increase in the Flux Of
56:13
impacts or Air Bursts and I think that could be true but at a at a much smaller
56:21
scale it you know if it if it's true then it for a short period of time in on
56:28
certain years and certain times of year the increase in the probability of a tungus like explosion and that was the
56:35
1908 explosion in Siberia there's an increase in the probability of events like that and
56:42
there may be Fireballs you know an increase you big meteor showers with
56:47
exploding Fireballs but up high in the sky that don't do any damage that may be
56:53
true some of my colleagues even reject that I don't think we have the evidence to say that that is wrong but the idea
57:00
that you know every so often there's a shower of kilometer 5 kilometer size
57:06
objects like they're claiming for the younger dras that's that can't be true because
57:11
we would have seen them we're doing you know uh Sky surveys and have been doing
57:16
for decades looking for potentially hazardous objects Comet fragments
57:23
asteroids whatnot that are in orbits that could intersect the Earth we would have found those by now so those do not
57:31
do not exist and they if they didn't if they don't exist now they didn't exist
57:36
13,000 years ago because where would they have gone they didn't all collide
57:42
with the Earth if if that's the idea so so that would be the grain of truth but
57:47
a lot of you know falsehoods and big stories have a have a grain of Truth at
57:53
the center and if there is a grain of truth it's that and and the airburst you know the the idea of air burst airbursts
58:00
are a real thing and things do explode before they hit the ground tunguska is
58:05
our prime example of that there are other um there's some evidence in the geologic record and as there should be
58:13
that other Air Bursts have and bigger Air Bursts have happened in the past and one example of that is the Libyan Desert
58:21
uh glass um there's this strange I have some I can grab some out my file cabinet
58:26
behind me right now and show you um that I collected in Egypt I went there for
58:32
shooting of a documentary in 2006 which is kind of when we figured out that it was from an airburst oh interesting so I
58:40
published that idea and that you know that came out right about the same time as firestone's
58:47
paper um now uh right after the the comprehensive reputation paper came out and I mean like right after um actually
58:56
M them come out slightly before it was finally published was a reputation uh of
59:02
your reputation or rebuttal I guess you could say by Martin swatman James Powell and alen West uh I think one of whom was
59:10
maybe um somebody that could really comment on this but uh it was in their own well there was a small a shorter
59:16
version in earth science reviews but then they had the full version in their own paper airburst and cratering impacts
59:22
I think they are also the editors of that Pap paper which they yeah
59:28
anyway yeah I do want to bring up some of the objections just a few that were maybe per to what you study and to see
59:36
what your thoughts are about them so the first thing that they complained about was that uh the comprehensive reputation
59:43
paper that you wrote ignored the fact that the hypothesis has been updated and
59:49
you were attacking old ideas okay and that the current idea is that there was
59:54
a giant uh great G than 100 km diameter Comet that entered the an earth Crossing
59:59
orbit in the inner solar system and began a Cascade of disintegrations numerous cometary fragments from the
1:00:06
debris stream entered Earth's atmosphere and detonated above or collided with land and ice sheets and so forth um and
1:00:13
uh that this caused um megap fonal Extinction events and human depopulation
1:00:20
events um that's the current theory and you didn't really talk that much about
1:00:25
that one well I mean we already have I mean we've talked about that I mean numerous times
1:00:32
and we did talk about maybe not the specifics but I mean this this 100
1:00:40
kilometer diameter object that entered the solar system inner solar system in I
1:00:46
guess an earth Crossing orbit broke up into pieces some of which hit the earth
1:00:52
and that involves Comet eny which is a real Comet but it's I think five
1:00:57
kilometers in diameter or something but you know they're talking about a swarm of air burst type objects but you know
1:01:06
think of a 100 kilometer diameter Comet that broke up okay how many pieces would
1:01:14
it have to break up to you know where if the biggest ones were kilometer in
1:01:19
diameter I mean that's easy math it's like a million 1 kilometer diameter
1:01:25
objects where are they did they all hit in the younger dras if so where are all
1:01:31
the craters those are crater forming events if they didn't all hit we should see them they'd still be in orbit but
1:01:38
there's only like we've only found about a thousand one kilometer and greater
1:01:44
diameter objects that cross Earth's orbit and and we're running out we're
1:01:50
you know if they were out there we would have found them we would have found a lot mean 1000 just in for any period is
1:01:57
that what you mean or yeah and they're not correlated yeah they're not correlated with any particular orbit
1:02:02
they're pretty much just random um so yeah the you know that can't be true
1:02:10
because they couldn't have just disappeared they couldn't have all run into the Earth or the Earth would have a
1:02:15
lot of really fresh steaming craters right now and they'd still be they some
1:02:21
of them wouldn't have hit yet because this is a you know random process in space is really big and if they if they
1:02:28
broke up if they broke up in the atmosphere and burned up then they wouldn't leave a crater right yeah but
1:02:35
they don't do that I mean a one kilometer diameter object is not going to burn up get used up before it hits
1:02:41
the ground I see I mean that just doesn't work that way I mean that doesn't conserve momentum you know
1:02:47
there's there's there's no way that can happen the next thing I wanted to mention and maybe it's a side point but
1:02:53
um uh they took is isue with the fact that uh your paper called coherent
1:03:00
catastrophism uh a speculative hypothesis uh a Preposterous Fringe idea
1:03:06
but you cite no evidence to support this View and fail to acknowledge that the giant Comet origin model for the torid
1:03:13
meteor stream is the working model for cometary scientists and that's consistent with
1:03:19
not catastroph okay I know a lot of commentary scientists and no that's not
1:03:25
the except working model there are a few people who who think that and they're
1:03:30
all in the comment research group and or associated with with that idea what is
1:03:36
coherent catastrophism just for the audience everything is on a on a timer
1:03:41
is that the idea that it's not random but it's it comes back at certain times kind of yeah yeah so yeah so so it's
1:03:49
kind of all in this resonance so there's there's like a 3.3 year resonance that's
1:03:55
associated with commet Inky and it's in resonance with Jupiter's orbit so Jupiter keeps kind of pumping it and
1:04:02
keeping it constrained in this orbit and it comes around occasionally and there's some orbital Dynamics effects that you
1:04:10
know changes its its relationship to the Earth so every once in a while the Earth
1:04:16
passes through this swarm and gets hammered and that's what they are claiming happened um at at the the
1:04:22
beginning of the younger drives um but the but those would be observable there would be you know it wouldn't be based
1:04:30
on finding like you know railroad slag or or you know pollutants coming from
1:04:37
Smoke Stacks it would be there would be stronger evidence than than that so you
1:04:43
don't have anything against the uh general idea of it but that they're
1:04:48
taking it to the extreme yeah and they took it to the extreme from the very beginning but the
1:04:54
the mathema a guy named David Asher who who actually did the the comput the
1:05:00
orbital computations you know he had something right there really is a
1:05:06
resonance there you know a mathematical resonance and it's really possible that
1:05:12
stuff could be trapped in it but probably not to the ex I mean certainly
1:05:17
not to the extent that they say and probably not to the extent that it adds significantly to the risk but it could
1:05:24
be there and there is some evidence evence that it is there there have been occasions where there have been
1:05:29
bombardments of very small objects that don't make it deep enough into the
1:05:34
atmosphere to do damage at the surface but there have been swarms of fireballs there in 1975 there was seismic activity
1:05:42
on the moon that seemed to correlate with the time that this resonance came
1:05:48
around which would be objects hitting the moon and being picked up by the seismometers that were placed there by
1:05:54
Apollo Astronauts so so I I hesitate to call that coherent catastrophism though
1:06:00
because there weren't any catastrophes there's no Global catastrophe associated with that and it's possible that even
1:06:07
the tunguska object was one of these and yes that would be a catastrophe if you
1:06:12
were an aink uh person living in the area near Siberia hurting reindeer at
1:06:18
the time if your family members were killed or if your reindeer herd was killed that would be a catastrophe but
1:06:25
not in the sense that those guys are using the word catastrophe they're talking about global catastrophes so and
1:06:32
I think when you know when Duncan steel coined that that term he was talking
1:06:37
about kind of global catastrophe level stuff so I would call it a coherent you
1:06:43
know a coherent swarm or a coherent uh addition to the risk or something like that but I wouldn't even
1:06:50
call it coherent catastrophism and they do they they you know the comment Search
1:06:55
Group and their supporters the GM Hancock followers and so forth they're always talking about catastrophism
1:07:03
versus uniformitarianism and that is you know
1:07:08
that is so old it's like we're not stuck in uniformitarianism those of us
1:07:14
especially who study impacts understand that there are very
1:07:19
rare catastrophes and that is what I would call what Duncan described a CO
1:07:26
I'm sorry stochastic catastrophism catastrophes do occur they're rare there's a kind of a power law
1:07:32
distribution but they do occur that's true in volcanoes too and tsunamis and earthquakes you know every once in a
1:07:39
while there's a big catastrophe floods you know there's really big events that happen that somehow sometimes dominate
1:07:47
what you see in the geological record but that doesn't negate The uniformitarian View it's in in a way
1:07:54
it's completely consistent it okay yeah um now uh another thing
1:08:01
that they complain about um is that uh they say or you guys say uh that um the
1:08:10
radio carbon dates don't match up for these various things that they're trying to line up at one particular time and
1:08:17
they say you don't take into account the uncertainty principle of the radiocarbon
1:08:22
dates and they it's possible that they match up if you take into account uh you
1:08:28
know that we have a range of possible dates for the radiocarbon uh so that it it's
1:08:33
possible sure yeah you have a bunch of you have a bunch of big sets of air bars
1:08:39
and you can draw any line through it you want and they drew the line that they wanted but there's you know who knows
1:08:46
how many other lines that you could draw through at different dates or you could
1:08:51
just say you know the the simplest explanation is when they find a layer of
1:08:57
of stuff you know for one thing they don't look throughout the entire stat
1:09:02
statgraphic column they only look where they think it is right and you know if
1:09:08
they looked up a meter or down a meter they might find another layer of this stuff because Cosmic spals Cosmic stuff
1:09:15
is always falling from the sky so it's not always industrial but in some cases it is industrial like in sediments that
1:09:22
are bioturbated they've got roots or you know they've been in fields that have
1:09:28
been farmed or construction or they're Rock qu you know you you look at the
1:09:35
list of their sites where they've actually um collected their samples from a lot of them have been Disturbed so so
1:09:42
there's a problem with the dating and so they're they're finding the one the one
1:09:47
layer that they think might be younger dras boundary but they don't know and
1:09:54
then you know they date it and there's huge uncertainties on the age and then it's like oh well it must be because
1:10:00
this is our hypothesis so they're putting the hypothesis um before their interpretation of the age of of the
1:10:06
layer that they find and and they basically admitted this I mean I've been told this by co-authors of these papers
1:10:15
they don't know and so one you know you know one analogy would be you know
1:10:20
somebody who does like me who doesn't have very good eyesight and they they're doing Target shooting and they're
1:10:26
claiming you know that they're hitting the bullseye every time because they can't see the Target that well and it's blurry and so it's like well you know
1:10:34
it's like within the uncertainty of the blurriness of my vision so it has to be in the bullseye because that's where I
1:10:41
wanted to be yeah yeah um the the argument almost seems to be like they're saying well you haven't proved it's
1:10:49
impossible therefore you know uh it still stands you haven't refuted it like
1:10:54
you said refuted it uh sure it might be unlikely but it's still
1:11:02
possible that seems wrong about a lot of other things too like how our our
1:11:09
understanding about how how much air heats up when you compress it that would have to be wrong too and there's a lot
1:11:16
of evidence that we know how much air heats up when you compress it yeah the
1:11:23
other thing they have is um they say in your paper that you claim that microsphere evidence alone cannot be
1:11:31
used to establish an extraterrestrial impact event but they say this contradicts a paper by French and cobber
1:11:37
in 2010 and they say that it is possible uh it is can be used as evidence of a of
1:11:43
a ET impact event what do you have to say about that well I mean you said French and
1:11:51
cobal but cobal was a co-author of this paper this reputation
1:12:01
so I I I I I trust that he knew what was in his own paper ah okay but they even
1:12:08
if they you know claim that okay these spirals also have other evidence
1:12:13
associated with him like these unambiguous signatures of high pressure
1:12:20
impact you know the mineral coside or shock zircons or or whatever
1:12:25
show us just let us see them you know distribute I mean if you're finding if this stuff is so abundant then you
1:12:32
should have enough to share with your Skeptics or some neutral Independent
1:12:38
party who can look at these and say oh yeah the you know these are definitely
1:12:43
come from a shock event but even then it doesn't mean it came from a bombardment of thousands or however many comets
1:12:50
their latest version says hit the earth um you know because we do know there are
1:12:56
impacts on Earth and there there are shocked minerals on Earth so it does
1:13:02
happen it just doesn't mean that it did what they claim that it did I see yeah
1:13:08
um they uh they say that um your papers uh claims that a Sudden Impact winter
1:13:14
can be ruled out through analysis of low-resolution paleoclimate data however
1:13:20
they say only high resolution subannual data can be used to investigate this issue
1:13:26
um holiday at all's argument that the suggested impact winter must have lasted for several years is based on an
1:13:32
understanding of volcanic eruptions not extraterrestrial
1:13:39
impacts yeah I think there's a lot of wrong stuff in there one it's like why would aerosols or greenhouse gases
1:13:48
caused by volcanos act differently in the atmosphere than aerosols or greenhouse gases generated by impact I
1:13:54
don't I don't understand that I mean there's an analogy there and and my colleagues in the planetary defense
1:14:00
Community who do risk assessment and publish about impact generated climate change do compare it to volcanoes and
1:14:08
second I didn't realize that their impact winter lasted less than a year that you know that's not you know that I
1:14:17
don't know if they published that anywhere until now I I don't know um I I
1:14:22
haven't seen yeah I mean if I mean we had a volcanic
1:14:29
winter I mean the the year without a summer um which was what year
1:14:35
1812 or some or somewhere there about I mean that La that that wiped out you
1:14:43
know a summer of Agriculture and a lot of people died but as far as I know there weren't any mass extinctions I
1:14:50
wanted to ask where do you think this is going like in the next 20 years where do you think the Y the IH will
1:14:57
be I think it'll be pretty much where uh The piltown hoax is now I mean I think
1:15:03
it's inevitable so and I'm not the first to have said that okay so you think it's
1:15:11
not only it's not going anywhere you think it's gonna Crash and Burn yeah I'm surprised it hasn't yet
1:15:18
and crash and burn in this context is an excellent good
1:15:23
words yeah to sum up what I've learned so far here are the issues we have with each of the
1:15:29
evidences presented by impact proponents magnetic iron rich spheral and glassy silica Rich spheral the peer reviewers
1:15:36
argue that micros ferals alone are not diagnostic evidence for impact events
1:15:42
because similar objects can form through various natural and anthropogenic processes they emphasize that the
1:15:48
identification of these ferals as impact products requires additional evidence
1:15:53
such as high- press minerals siderophile element anomalies or isotopic ratios
1:15:59
without this context spheral cannot reliably indicate a younger dous impact high temperature melt glass the peer
1:16:06
reviewers acknowledge that high temperature melt glass like ladite can form during impact events however they
1:16:13
caution that melt glass is not unique to impacts and can also result from volcanic activity or anthropogenic
1:16:19
processes they cite multiple studies demonstrating that such glassy materials can be misinterpreted without clear
1:16:26
geochemical and geological contexts Nano Diamonds the peer reviewers are critical
1:16:31
of Nano diamonds as evidence for an extraterrestrial impact they argue that Nano diamonds are not unique to shock
1:16:37
induced processes and can form in other conditions including biological
1:16:42
diagenetic and anthropogenic environments studies claiming Nano diamonds as impact markers often fail to
1:16:49
demonstrate their exclusive association with impacts soot ainor carbon the peer
1:16:55
reviewers reject soot as conclusive evidence for an impact explaining that soot and carbon-rich materials are
1:17:00
common in sediments and cannot be linked definitively to a cosmic impact they argue that widespread biomass burning
1:17:08
has many potential causes such as natural wildfires triggered by lightning or human activity there's no compelling
1:17:14
evidence that the soot observed at the younger dest boundary was globally synchronous or caused by an
1:17:20
extraterrestrial event while proponents of the younger dri impact hypothesis claim black black mats resulted from
1:17:26
catastrophic fires the peer reviewers describe black mats as common stratagraph features that form under
1:17:33
diverse environmental conditions including Wetlands or organic Rich
1:17:38
sedimentation and argue there is no definitive link between black mats and impact processes radiocarbon dating
1:17:45
inconsistencies further weaken this claim ferin containing helium 3 the peer
1:17:50
reviewers say that ferins with extraterrestrial helium 3 have not been sufficiently demonstrated as evidence
1:17:56
for an impact ferin are highly controversial as impact markers as they can form in non-impact environments such
1:18:04
as through industrial or natural chemical processes the authors note that claims of extraterrestrial helium 3
1:18:10
within ferin often lack robust supporting evidence or independent
Extinctions
1:18:21
replication when I began this study I was most interested in the evidence that impact proponents have provided for the
1:18:28
extinction of the megap and the extinction of human populations they focus on The Disappearance of the Clovis
1:18:35
culture in North America what did the peer reviewer say about that I rung up Vance Holliday retired professor of
1:18:41
geosciences from the University of Arizona he is one of the authors of that second paper I mentioned and he
1:18:47
specializes in the anthropology and archaeology of North America in this period here's what he had to say thank
1:18:53
you for joining me today advance I really wanted to uh pick your brain a little bit if that's okay sure thing
1:18:59
yeah good to be here uh first let me ask you this um what were your specific contributions to this paper I know
1:19:05
everyone kind of put uh put in a little you know of their own expertise in here well there's a lot of people put in a
1:19:12
lot of time and a and a lot of expertise uh well my and everybody had something
1:19:19
to say pretty much I mean some of the geochemistry was a bit beyond me but um
1:19:26
the aspects I guess the main things what I know the most about in the context of
1:19:32
this is is archaeology um the issue of
1:19:38
extinctions uh climate paleoclimate and climate change uh I'm I'm not a
1:19:44
paleoclimatologist and and we had some of those folks involved as well but I'm because of my other interest I've I know
1:19:52
enough about paleoclimatology to weigh in uh uh radiocarbon
1:19:57
dating uh soils stratigraphy basic late Pine
1:20:04
stratigraphy so it it touches on a lot of things I have interest in and
1:20:09
experience in is which I guess is the reason why I followed it since since it's first sort of appeared in in in the
1:20:17
news Science News anyway in 2007 okay all right just generally
1:20:24
speaking uh do you think an impact of this kind is possible and just simply
1:20:31
not demonstrated or would you go so far as to say say that it is unlikely to have
1:20:38
occurred I've seen no evidence for it let's put it that way I I just I don't
1:20:43
think there's a case one of my colleagues years ago at a conference made a comment that if if there was an
1:20:50
extraterrestrial impact it had no terrestrial impact in other words maybe maybe something hit
1:20:58
the Earth but it if it did there's precious little
1:21:05
evidence that I've seen just based on what I know about these these topics you
1:21:11
know maybe it happened and but I don't if it did I don't think it had the it wasn't catastrophic and that's that's
1:21:16
the issue because it's described over and over and over as a catastrophe as
1:21:22
catastrophic absolutely not okay based on who I know how how would
1:21:28
you characterize the level of scholarship and scientific robustness of
1:21:34
the papers proposing this
1:21:40
hypothesis they vary um depends on who's writing and what the topic is
1:21:47
um it's sort of stunning to me that that some of the the comments about archaeology about the key issue
1:21:54
Extinction of this uh artifact type called the Clovis point and and and and
1:22:01
archaeologists are are guilty of this but too but we often conflate the term Clovis with people versus artifacts when
1:22:08
you get right down to it we're talking about the appearance and disappearance of an artifact style and the argument is
1:22:14
oh this artifact style quit being made at 12,800 years they must have been
1:22:20
wiped out they must have been extinct forgetting completely ignoring that artifacts come and go you know as well
1:22:27
as yeah the people can remain yeah right they all come and go and you can never
1:22:32
find the exact Endo of when a particular artifact style evolves another I mean
1:22:38
and and and you know why do they vary I always bring up a bit factiously but you
1:22:43
know Tail Fins appeared on cars in the late 50s and then they
1:22:48
disappeared yeah Styles evolve you know that's what that's what you and I deal
1:22:53
with culture it went extinct right yeah so uh but anyway that's even more
1:23:00
complex because some some of the the best dating for Clovis shows that kis persisted after so the thing boy you
1:23:08
know that's a really good question that you ask but it's a really difficult one to answer um because um what I don't
1:23:16
understand is why why the people and and most of them from what I could tell they good
1:23:22
Scholars they don't they don't deal with the questions that we keep raising for example there's
1:23:31
recent dating on Clovis that shows clis persisted after the time of the supposed
1:23:36
impact they haven't confronted that uh relatedly extinctions now the late Pine
1:23:43
extinctions is a very complicated topic and people have been debating it for decades and we still don't know why it
1:23:50
happened but that their their argument would have you believe all these megap
1:23:56
Mammoth and all these others all went away all disappeared exactly at 12,800
1:24:01
years and that's that's just blatantly not true there's there's paper after
1:24:07
paper after paper that showed the extinctions were stagered different species became extinct at different
1:24:13
times in different places continent to continent it varies so yeah in in North
1:24:19
America Mammoth did in fact become extinct at about that time but lots of other animals were extinct beforehand
1:24:26
and they they they we've brought this up over and over and over in our papers and it's it's ignored or in fact they just
1:24:35
keep persisting with this notion that it happened and I I don't understand and
1:24:40
that's the frustration is and normally you would not expect it from uh from uh
1:24:46
Scholars of this caliber yeah I guess that's a good way to put it yeah I it it's beyond me I
1:24:52
don't I don't understand it uh why why do you think your paper the comprehensive reputation paper uh needed
1:24:59
to be published well it started as a commentary on a a paper that was
1:25:07
published in 2021 it was we were bunch of us were working on a commentary because the
1:25:13
paper had a lot of problems and we spent about a year which paper was that Well
1:25:18
swatman swatman published a paper in 2021 I I didn't know who he was first time he came on the scene in this
1:25:26
context uh he's an engineer as far as I know and this paper was just it
1:25:32
was let's put it this way it was not from my perspective it was not well informed and uh uh quite a few of us
1:25:40
decided in variety of fields how many authors are there 12 or something and cover all sorts of fields from
1:25:46
archaeology to impact physics so we started writing a commentary and and you
1:25:52
know we all had other things to do and after about a year and we had this big paper and we finally thought well this
1:25:58
is this is crazy to spend our time writing a commentary let's refocus it as
1:26:04
a an uh the other side of the argument and that's the that's the argument I to
1:26:09
the journalist is look you guys published this big comprehensive paper it's got a lot of problems we think we
1:26:14
should have equal time and so then it just evolved as the dozen or so of
1:26:20
us was it a was it something that one person uh invited other people to join
1:26:26
in on or was it kind of uh it just kind of formed uh naturally
1:26:32
well both initially see there are several of us that have co-authored
1:26:37
these sorts of papers before um I I was part of a big one in
1:26:42
2014 uh I was part of a big commentary in 2016 and and this and it keeps coming up
1:26:50
that was the thing is the frustration we all see that the same issues keep coming
1:26:55
up over and over and we thought okay look Let's gets a lot of press too right and what was that it gets a lot of press
1:27:01
as well yeah exactly there's there's that that too the popular press and so uh we just a number of us must have been
1:27:10
five or six who who are in touch fairly regularly on this and let each other
1:27:16
know when papers come out and then we got some other people involved so it was a little of both um or it sort of
1:27:22
evolved organically because several of us have been commenting on this for a long time MH and it seems to no avail it
1:27:31
seems um so would you say that the uh the general um approach of the paper is
1:27:36
to analyze the strength of the uh others arguments rather than presenting
1:27:43
evidence of your own that it didn't happen probably more the former you know
1:27:51
you can't prove a negative right right no that it's a what we're doing is testing
1:27:58
the hypothesis with the data that is already out there and and I guess that's the
1:28:04
thing is is all the that most of the data that we cite in the papers is available it's been out there with
1:28:11
extinctions there's there's a huge literature on extinctions and so we're pointing that out there's a big
1:28:17
literature on archaeology that's one of the things very early on in the 27 in
1:28:23
the 200 seven paper the first well-known paper but there was some other Publications that preceded it I was just
1:28:29
stunned uh at some of the comments authors are making about archaeological sites that I've worked on that I've been
1:28:36
to that I know intimately and they they're saying stuff that is it isn't
1:28:43
true they're not paying attention to the published literature and so that's what
1:28:48
raised the my skepticism initially because I was seeing these comments about Clovis archaeology in the Clovis
1:28:54
site there's archaeological site in Clovis New Mexico or near there called the Clovis site I've worked there and I
1:29:01
know that story and I know the extinction story pretty well and it's just was it was very
1:29:08
frustrating so a lot of what we've written is Raising all this information
1:29:13
bringing it up synthesizing all this information that's for the most part already out
1:29:19
there okay yeah as a as a way of testing the hypothesis which is that's as far as
1:29:26
I'm concerned that's what you do in time in science if there was an impact as I said
1:29:31
I we haven't I don't see the evidence uh it's very poorly as far as
1:29:37
I'm concerned it's it's remains very poorly presented okay what would you say are the biggest weaknesses of the hypoth
1:29:46
okay uh well in part no there was no Extinction of cloest people uh the the
1:29:53
the animal exp Extinction is very complex and varied as I was just saying
1:29:59
uh another issue that again we've brought up the dating to make this case
1:30:05
you have to you you should have accurate High Precision dating mostly it for this
1:30:12
time period it's based on carbon 14 right there there's some other dating methods have been used but carbon 14 is
1:30:18
the main one and so they should have uh the proponents should have accurate
1:30:24
precise dating of exactly the time period involved but also throughout
1:30:31
their stratagraph sequences and then the other part we haven't even gotten into are the indicators there are a variety
1:30:38
of of chemical and geochemical and particulate indicators that are supposed
1:30:46
indicators that are that are proposed as as being the result of comet impacts and in fact there is no single indicator
1:30:54
that's a Smoking Gun for an impact that's that's a weakness uh that that's
1:31:01
that issue has been debated endlessly and um and finding those in
1:31:08
the field and dating them and when you dig into the different sites literally and
1:31:16
figuratively uh go into the literature the dating is not very good in most cases uh
1:31:25
it's rarely related directly to the zones where these indicators are coming
1:31:33
out in these archaeological sites so the and the whole argument is there was this
1:31:40
event at 12,850 years ago or 12,800 so the whole issue is proving
1:31:47
that these indicators occur at exactly that same time period And The Dating the dating isn't that good uh
1:31:56
there there are over 50 sites now that have been proposed that have supposedly
1:32:01
have these markers and the the the dating is at most of them in some cases it is
1:32:08
literally non-existent it's just asserted and in other cases it's it's a very poor
1:32:15
stratagraph provenience you know just like iological provenience which you're familiar with you know geological
1:32:20
provenience is the same thing um there are at most a half a dozen sites
1:32:26
where they have decent dating for their The Zone where they're getting these
1:32:32
impact supposed impact indicators so that that for me that's one of the wor and they've never the the the proponents
1:32:41
this has been going on for years we've keep re raising this issue one article one of my colleagues published in
1:32:48
2014 um they went through all the sites at the time very extensive
1:32:55
discussion of the dating at every site that was then proposed showing how how
1:33:01
poor the age control is and the the impact uh proponents have never dealt
1:33:08
with those criticisms they've never countered and said oh you know you're wrong or we have better dating they
1:33:15
frankly they just ignore it I see and you know the Sweatman paper that came out 2021 just accepted all the dating as
1:33:23
as proven to go back to something we were talking about before proving that all these
1:33:29
indicators line up uh using using
1:33:36
statistics we're accused of not understanding error in statistics and the problem is
1:33:44
what we're talking about is error in radiocarbon statistics which is anyway U
1:33:50
we don't have to get into that but well I do want to get into it a little little bit um because uh Martin swatman on his
1:33:57
blog made some responses to your the paper oh yeah yeah uh and I want to if you if you don't mind I'd like to bring
1:34:03
up he said about it and I I'd love to hear what you have to say about it he
1:34:08
says uh that there are eight sites uh consistent with the yd impact date with
1:34:14
a 95% uncertainty that's less than 200 years 10 more sites with an uh 95%
1:34:22
uncertainty of less than 400 years and nine sites uh under 1600 years I don't
1:34:29
know if that's right but this is what he says it's I have to look okay
1:34:35
um but again that that's low Precision that's the that's part of the
1:34:40
issue the early on several of the key players in this debate were the ones
1:34:47
that said you've got to have high quality dates a low very high Precision
1:34:54
less than 100 years standard deviation directly from the Zone with
1:35:02
the impact markers this was this was impact proponents making this argument
1:35:07
and they're correct that's what it takes accurate High Precision dates and and a
1:35:12
lot of the dates going back to what I was saying earlier a lot of the dates that he's citing H either have problems
1:35:19
in their stratagraph context or other problems of accuracy and quite a few of
1:35:25
the sites um that are dated oh I counted them up once
1:35:34
um very few have standard or have a the radiocarbon dating has standard
1:35:41
deviations of within a 100 years you know plus or minus 100 quite a few of them as you just read out like 400 years
1:35:48
standard deviation yeah that means now it depends on whether it's one
1:35:54
or two standard deviations but that means uh a 400 year 800 year time span
1:36:01
well if you're trying to approve that event happened at 12,850
1:36:06
years having a 400 year or or more standard deviation isn't proof for most
1:36:13
of us he uses a a probability argument he says that um since these are caused
1:36:20
by tongus like events and those events are so improbable uh that it is more likely
1:36:27
that it would all be caused by the same event than that there would be many tunguska like events well he's assuming
1:36:35
that all these indicators are produced by extraterrestrial events and we don't know
1:36:40
that we don't know that in fact there's a site that I've worked on it's probably the site I know best in love of Texas
1:36:48
and swatman even accepts the data from this site there's a huge Spike in Nano
1:36:54
diamonds and a hugee spike in micros ferals at less than 11,000 years well
1:37:01
after the supposed impact and no indicators at
1:37:07
12,800 and we're only 100 miles from clobas New Mexico and and so
1:37:14
it's are these are there multiple impacts that we all missing and aren't showing up in the geologic record I mean
1:37:20
again the the argument they're proposing this so the burden of proof on is on
1:37:27
them to demonstrate the uniqueness and to demonstrate that all of these indicators are in fact telling us that
1:37:34
there supposed indicators are telling us that there was an impact and that hasn't been shown yeah he's making a
1:37:40
statistical argument but you know 400 years you know U again the burden of
1:37:47
proof is on them to show that all these things are lining up yeah they don't they just don't any other uh closing
1:37:54
thoughts about this or what you'd like to tell the general audience about it
1:38:02
um you know it would be one thing if this argument was being made over uh uh
1:38:08
back back and forth about specific kinds of evidence and the the the responses we
1:38:15
invariably get are focused on little bits and pieces of the issue and they
1:38:21
have the impact hyp is people have yet to deal with all the criticisms all the
1:38:28
problems all the things that you and I just talked about all the problematic dating the issue of extinctions the
1:38:35
archaeological record uh well another thing too is the uniqueness of the younger dras is a
1:38:41
climate shift and I I think in what I just read
1:38:47
I believe that's swatman said in this reply or and other people that it was
1:38:53
near return to near glacial conditions no it wasn't return to near glacial conditions had not
1:38:58
remotely but it was probably the last gasp of the last ice age and there were
1:39:04
a lot of these very dramatic flip-flops cooling at high high
1:39:10
latitudes and high altitudes but not the younger D was not even a global cooling
1:39:16
event and and also another thing uh is on the landscape there's just no
1:39:22
evidence for any kind of cast rophy you don't see it in glacial records you don't see it in stream records um you
1:39:28
know you should see if there was this Global catastrophe I would expect some evidence of some
1:39:35
dramatic changes and it's just not there to sum up the peer reviewers reject the
1:39:41
claim that the megaphon extinctions were abrupt synchronous or caused by a single catastrophic event like the proposed
1:39:48
impact they note that the extinction timelines for many species were staggered with some disappearing before
1:39:54
the onset of the younger dras and others persisting well into or beyond the younger dras for example mastadons in
1:40:01
the Great Lakes region and some South American megap survived into the early holine this variability contradicts the
1:40:08
notion of a singular impact induced Extinction event or series of Extinction events in a narrow time period the
1:40:15
peer-reviewers also argue that there's no evidence for widespread human population decline linked to the younger
1:40:20
drias impact hypothesis claims of a post post Clovis population decline are based
1:40:25
on flawed analyses such as misinterpreting gaps in the archaeological record or radiocarbon
1:40:32
plateaus they emphasized that most paleo Indian archaeological sites reflect natural sampling limitations rather than
1:40:39
evidence of population collapse so it would appear that the younger D impact hypothesis fails to provide robust
1:40:46
evidence for a direct cause a link between an impact event and the extinction of megap or disruptions in
1:40:52
human population ations these extinctions and cultural shifts could very well have been caused by a
1:40:57
combination of environmental changes climate variability and human
Catastrophic Floods
1:41:08
activity there is one more subject related to all this that I needed to examine in more detail and that is
1:41:14
matters related to the pieces of evidence given by people like Randall Carlson for catastrophic flooding in
1:41:20
North America around the time of the proposed impact event here are some of the things he has said about it we did a
1:41:27
fantastic research trip across the channel scaps of Washington state which Randall has been walking the walk on for
1:41:34
decades and he just showed me the absolute irrefutable evidence of cataclysmic flooding in that in that
1:41:41
area what we did was we traveled from Portland to the Twin Cities and what we did was essentially followed the
1:41:46
southern margin of the great ice sheet for the most part and what we were looking at was this evidence that the
1:41:53
whole ice sheet had undergone this massive catastrophic sudden meltdown and
1:41:59
basically what we could what we saw in the landscape was evidence that was Oceanic level currents flowing off the
1:42:08
ice sheet I reached out to an expert in North American Ice Age flooding to see if there's any truth to what Carlson has
1:42:13
been saying his name is Vic Baker and he is Regent professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences geosciences and
1:42:21
planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona if anyone is going to know something about this subject it will be
1:42:27
him can you tell uh everyone a little bit bit about what your area of research is and what you've been studying
1:42:32
particularly in relation to the Ice Age floods okay
1:42:39
um this is always a tricky question because uh my uh career is long and uh
1:42:49
it uh went in many different directions I basically finally decided on what kind
1:42:56
of geologist I wanted to be in graduate school back in the late
1:43:03
1960s and the problem that I got to that
1:43:09
uh led me into basically all my subsequent science was the problem of
1:43:18
the origin of the channel scab land in Washington State uh which had been
1:43:25
proposed by a uh scientist who fortunately was still alive and be began
1:43:32
his intensive work on that problem uh just about a hundred years ago his name
1:43:38
was Jay harand bretts and uh I got I I had this idea that that was the
1:43:46
right kind of science for me to do be involved in so I got involved in that
1:43:51
problem uh br had uh tried to argue against many
1:43:59
critics in science for the merits of this idea that cataclysmic flooding had
1:44:06
produced the landscape in Eastern Washington and as I subsequently learned
1:44:12
from him and from studying how he did this he was absolutely and totally
1:44:18
invested in this investigative approach to science I mean for him this was
1:44:25
something he would defend but only because the facts were overwhelming for
1:44:34
this regard and he had a long history of
1:44:39
arguing his point but it was not because his theory was so great a actually he
1:44:45
had huge doubts about his theory as he went along it was just that every time
1:44:51
he looked at it more and more new facts came about and these new facts that were
1:44:57
completely surprising to him were consistent with this idea that in some
1:45:04
sense he was worried was crazy and so he stuck to it he had a
1:45:10
kind of stubbornness but he felt his stubbornness was
1:45:16
being uh made it was just being shown by Nature itself and so he assisted and
1:45:24
finally when I got involved he had uh achieved uh kind of respect for this
1:45:31
idea but the there were those who thought oh well this is so immense these
1:45:37
floods there's no way that they could it could physically work well I had been
1:45:43
studying as a hydrologist and as a uh person interested in uh engineering
1:45:50
applied science the technique that you use to evaluate the mechanics of erosion
1:45:57
and deposition so that was my thesis I I applied those techniques and they were
1:46:03
completely consistent with what Bretz was saying the uh other scientists had
1:46:09
ignored doing that so that uh kind of was an impetus to my career I got a
1:46:16
faculty position even before I had finished grad school I was an assistant professor University of Texas at Boston
1:46:23
to work in this area of applied science and studying U mechanics and things like
1:46:30
that but then something completely unexpected happened a spacecraft Mariner
1:46:38
9 returned images from the surface of Planet of the planet Mars and the images
1:46:44
showed immense channels that had been cut into the surface of Mars billions of
1:46:51
years ago well those channels had aspects that were like the channel scale
1:46:57
plan that I had just been studying so I started working in planetary geology
1:47:04
particularly the planetary geology of Mars and I also continued my studies of
1:47:09
floods well ultimately my planetary work uh induced me to move to the University
1:47:16
of Arizona in 1981 which has arguably the best
1:47:22
planetary science department the best hydrology Department one of the best geology
1:47:28
departments so it was a perfect place for me to go I left Texas I went to Arizona and I continued working in these
1:47:36
diverse areas but with a focus on understanding what nature presents to us
1:47:44
about the most extreme kinds of floods that have happened anywhere Earth Mars if they were on
1:47:52
other planets I would be studying them so in a sense uh I didn't have a
1:47:58
particular plan for my program what I have done was
1:48:05
basically nature presented it and I just followed where that went and that so I
1:48:11
became um a a scientist of uh studying
1:48:17
the biggest floods that have happened including ones that are damaging to human beings and I studied the tohoku
1:48:25
Oki tsunami in Japan because that was just a fantastic uh example of a flood it was a
1:48:34
flood of seawater coming across the land that had incredible impact on human
1:48:39
beings uh so my whole career has been about
1:48:45
studying these kinds of extreme phenomena particularly associated with flooding now you might be familiar with
1:48:53
Carlson um one of his things is to look at the scabs he even takes tours to the
1:48:58
scablands um and he says this all shows um proof of some kind of
1:49:04
massive single event cataclysm which wiped out uh the
1:49:11
megap uh in all in North America basically reset culture there
1:49:18
um it wiped out the Clovis culture things like that I wonder what what the
1:49:24
evidence actually points to in regard to that uh was there a single event that we're talking about here well one one of
1:49:31
the problems is the the timing here here we have to talk about multiple lines of
1:49:38
uh sort of technical evidence about the ages of the flooding we we
1:49:44
have multiple techniques that show that this flooding did not occur at least the most
1:49:52
massive kinds of flooding in the time frame that uh is being claimed by uh
1:49:59
Carlson it it there were some larger flows than uh exist today during the
1:50:06
younger dest time but they were incredibly smaller than the really big
1:50:12
flows which occurred much earlier and there is so much evidence for that
1:50:19
relationship that it is completely unproductive to think about it in a way
1:50:25
that relates to the younger D completely unproductive scientifically that's why
1:50:30
scientists don't uh uh really pay much attention to that relationship because
1:50:36
there's there you know nature would have to be incredibly perverse and
1:50:43
intentionally misleading us to have produced all the kinds of evidence that shows that that time frame is different
1:50:51
it isn't just evidence in terms of various radiometric techniques and things that have been criticized by
1:50:57
creationists and others this is actually things where something is in placed on
1:51:04
top of or eroded into something else ah so you know the order of events the
1:51:10
order of things is completely inconsistent with that idea also we know
1:51:18
that there were big cataclysmic floods in many parts of the world associated
1:51:25
with the uh late Pine large ice sheets now those I sheets reached their maximum
1:51:33
at about 18 to 22,000 years ago a little bit different in different parts of the
1:51:40
world and uh associated with those near
1:51:45
maximum times we had many different ways that cataclysmic flooding was generated
1:51:51
in different parts of the world uh but they didn't all occur at the same time they had different ways that they
1:51:58
occurred some of them we understand fairly well like uh ice Stam Lakes which
1:52:04
is uh one of the let's say best uh
1:52:09
understood mechanisms for the channel scab land uh Mega flooding not
1:52:15
necessarily the only mechanism but really one that has been well documented
1:52:20
is the failure of an ice damp Lake and that as I said many kinds of evidence
1:52:26
show that U that definitely occurred 16,000 years ago but even the flooding
1:52:33
at 16,000 wasn't the biggest uh new work only partly documented in papers but
1:52:42
which I am you know part of teams working on it suggests that the really big flooding was a little bit earlier
1:52:48
than that maybe 18,000 maybe 19,000 years ago uh and anything that was occurring in
1:52:55
younger D's time and there were uh situations that led to larger
1:53:02
flows than we have today was incredibly smaller than uh than that and the same
1:53:08
kind of story is uh shown in other parts of the world uh in in many ways the scab
1:53:15
lands being an early area of study Brett's taking it back a 100 years uh
1:53:22
has received more attention but there's many places that have had these cataclysmic floodings some some of them
1:53:30
would surprise people like the English Channel was carved by catastrophic flooding but it wasn't carved by
1:53:36
catastrophic flooding 12,000 years ago the English Channel was carved by catastrophic flooding much older than
1:53:44
the last it was carved in an earlier glaciation uh and the evidence is pretty
1:53:50
clear for that even in the scab lands there was phases of uh catastrophic
1:53:56
flooding that occurred as much as a million years ago and uh in fact I just
1:54:02
two weeks ago I was leading a one-week uh field course for advanced graduate
1:54:10
students from the University of Arizona where we were out looking at all of the evidence and one of our stops was uh uh
1:54:19
had to do with some of this uh very ancient flooding that occurred in the channel scab land and the evidence for
1:54:27
that is that the flood deposits uh are rather different in some
1:54:33
ways they're clearly catastrophic flood deposits because they include big boulders they're in settings that showed
1:54:39
the water had to be very deep to produce them but they are deeply weathered and
1:54:45
that weathering uh the alteration of the chemistry of the rocks from the surface
1:54:51
the development soils and profiles on that uh that all showed that the uh the
1:54:58
deposits are very old uh radiometric dating on the uh calcium carbonate
1:55:05
deposits showed that these are at least hundreds of thousands of years old paleomagnetic studies of the uh polarity
1:55:14
of the Earth's uh uh you know magnetic field was reversed and that reversal
1:55:20
occurred uh 790,000 years ago so those flood deposits which are in the scab
1:55:28
land area they're much older now we don't have as much data on those older
1:55:36
deposits but uh and all of this is work that is currently in
1:55:42
progress but to claim in absolute terms the even the age of the flooding
1:55:51
and then to try to relate that to all of this other kinds of evidence that may be
1:55:56
completely independent of uh of that is telling it a appealing story but it
1:56:05
isn't Nature's story so scientists don't take it
1:56:10
seriously because of this that's one of the issues here um what it is to be a
1:56:16
careful scientist yeah how would you how would you uh differentiate between a
1:56:22
care scientist and a not careful scientist well
1:56:28
ultimately a scientist is not someone
1:56:35
who should be absolutely claiming Authority and absolute claiming the
1:56:42
truth of things that is inconsistent with
1:56:47
science science um you know EX exactly what their attitude should be is under
1:56:55
discussion I I actually had uh discussions about this with the late Carl Sean because I also work in the
1:57:03
planetary science area and Carl was a an advocate of what's called skepticism
1:57:09
that one should always be exceedingly skeptical of things now I your own ideas
1:57:16
right yeah it well including your own ideas and that's the key part
1:57:23
uh my view is that the important an important element of science is called
1:57:30
fism fism which people don't um maybe haven't really heard about it's a
1:57:36
philosophical idea and I'm as you may know I'm into philosophy of science uh
1:57:42
it it is the recognition that it's exceedingly exceedingly difficult to
1:57:49
know in absolute terms that you are completely correct that you always have
1:57:54
to be willing to admit there may be a possibility that you are
1:58:00
wrong and that's absolutely essential to science because science is not about
1:58:07
claiming that you have absolute truths science is about the process the
1:58:14
absolute dedication to searching investigating seeking the truth and to
1:58:22
do that with the sense of humility
1:58:27
before the entity that has that truth
1:58:32
and the entity that has that truth is nature reality whatever you are studying
1:58:40
the reality of that is where the truth lies and ultimately whether you are
1:58:47
somebody who is a a theorist and trying to say the best things you can say about
1:58:54
nature things that sound good to others you have to go to Nature to see
1:59:01
if that's correct but the other kind of Science and it's the science that I
1:59:06
ultimately came to uh invest my career in is the one that starts with nature
1:59:13
itself it tries to interpret what nature is presenting to us it's more like an
1:59:21
investigator an investigator doesn't go to a crime scene and say I've got a
1:59:26
theory about how this works and I'm going to see if my theory is right that gets investigators into a lot of trouble
1:59:34
investigators go there looking for Clues looking for evidence looking but if you
1:59:42
know who did it you could just plant evidence you know and then it'll make your of course you have to be careful of
1:59:47
that but nature and Einstein said this nature is subtle but not
1:59:56
malicious nature may make it difficult but it the truth is always there nature
2:00:04
doesn't have a uh agenda to be evil or uh it it is magnificent wonderful
2:00:13
beautiful human beings have a sense of that and that sense unfortunately is
2:00:20
manipulated by those who don't have the kind of attitude that I've talked about
2:00:26
yeah now you know talking about people's attitudes is a bit
2:00:32
psychological uh we we have to uh understand their motivations and it's
2:00:38
and it's uh tricky to do that with regard to individuals
2:00:43
but when one is in the community of people of
2:00:49
scientists what one has a sense of is that the people in that Community the
2:00:57
ones that you can trust the ones that you uh have experience with are the ones
2:01:05
that have this sense that it's the world that's ultimately going to give us the
2:01:11
answer and that we have a kind of humility relative to that not an
2:01:18
arrogance that we can actually find the truth but a kind of optimism that it's
2:01:24
there and that ultimately we will make progress in the process of looking for
2:01:31
it and that's why the science Community is important it's it's not like it's a
2:01:37
uh evil cohort that's preventing new ideas from coming into uh existence uh
2:01:45
this is something manipulated by those who feel that they have this Grand
2:01:51
theory that uh the rest of the science Community isn't paying attention to it
2:01:56
is much more subtle than that uh and that's a reason why uh the What's called
2:02:04
the scientific consensus is important not because the scientists have the
2:02:10
absolute answer but we can trust that the people who have this ethic of
2:02:17
looking for the truth of things that if they are members of the community that does that that's the best thing we can
2:02:25
trust because people can always go to sources that claim absolute truth uh we
2:02:33
we are in a crazy political world now where such things are being talked about
2:02:40
that's not science it is it is completely uh different that but it feels good you know it feels good yes it
2:02:48
feel wild ideas feel good extravagant ideas that when someone says
2:02:56
they've got all the an you know they've got this model you know and oh you know this is and it it makes it uh history or
2:03:03
prehistory more exciting it's uh you can understand why people might like it yeah
2:03:10
but I know it there's definitely an appeal and there is also an appeal and
2:03:18
some scientists like the late Carl Sean uh tried to uh convey the uh The Wonder
2:03:27
of uh of the natural world the the absolute Wonder in what Nature has to
2:03:36
present which is in many ways much more magnificent than what people can invent
2:03:44
but we're in a terrible State now where people have a misunderstanding of
2:03:52
science it it's it they have a misunderstanding that science is this monolithic thing of
2:04:00
absolutes unfortunately manipulated by those that want to claim Authority they
2:04:06
claim science as an authority um Einstein once said all my life I have
2:04:13
questioned Authority but in my old age uh in punishment for this I have become
2:04:19
an authority it you know the authority in science is
2:04:25
not the people who are saying it the authority is nature the author nature as
2:04:31
the Absol is the absolute so the truth
2:04:36
of one's dedication to searching that uh
2:04:42
that in an honest way is the truth that science has to convey the answers are
2:04:50
provisional but they are trustworthy and I would say they're more trustworthy than the uh people who claim
2:05:00
Authority and claim to speak in absolute terms even if those are great sounding
2:05:07
stories human beings uh love stories they you know there's there's something
2:05:13
you know in The evolutionary genetics of people that has led to uh their Rel
2:05:21
relationship to stories as ways they cope with the world yeah that's definitely there speaking of that that
2:05:29
fallibility what better story is there than what has really happened and what is the case and that is magnificent it's
2:05:37
a true story right yeah yeah yeah um some people have come to me and and uh
2:05:43
talked about how the fallibility of science is a mark against it you know like well science has been wrong before
2:05:50
look at they changed their mind about this you can't trust them and actually do you want to do you
2:05:58
want to trust anybody that claims an absolute Authority where does that come
2:06:03
from do they have some special insight into nature have they done the hard work
2:06:11
of trying to get nature to reveal herself uh they make a good story they
2:06:19
make money off of it they they get a claim U all of these are they can use
2:06:27
logic in their story they can cite facts in their story they can cite lots of
2:06:32
scientific work facts uh citing knowledge that is not
2:06:38
science unfortunately in our education system uh people are are being told that
2:06:46
science is uh a collection of facts it's a collection of truths about the world
2:06:52
or it's a methodology a kind of you pose hypothesis you do experiment and you
2:06:58
discover the truth because you match your model to the world the world is consistent with your model and that's
2:07:04
correct I won't get into it but there's logical problems in Spades with all of
2:07:12
that that is not science by itself more important than that is this
2:07:20
what I've called f iism which is this honest openness but incredible hard work like a
2:07:29
incredible detective in figuring out what's going on because nature is subtle
2:07:39
nature uh isn't uh sort of advertising her facts the S the the proper scientist
2:07:47
has to work exceedingly hard with many techniques and much modern technology to
2:07:54
extract what is really going on and what has really happened Nature's not on
2:08:00
social media right oh no social media is
2:08:05
propelling uh stories H and people are looking for the best sounding story yeah
2:08:13
well sounding good is not the same as being good being good is what nature
2:08:20
presents and that is what science is really about what do you say what do you
2:08:26
say to people who uh say well we're just saying keep an open mind you know maybe
2:08:32
our idea could be right and you know the Graham hancocks of the world the Randle Carlson that say we're just saying keep
2:08:38
an open mind we're just questioning Authority that's all uh we're not saying
2:08:43
we have absolute truth of course but if you are going to
2:08:48
be a scientist you want to have a protective a a uh a not protective a uh
2:08:58
productive inquiry into the possibility of finding the truth yes you are open to
2:09:06
facts but you are also not looking at every possibility just because it sounds
2:09:13
good you are looking into things that are leading you on a productive pathway
2:09:21
way toward truth if the and this is very important science is a process that is
2:09:29
trying to productively seek truth we sometimes talk about our ideas being
2:09:35
fruitful there's an even more uh obscure word for what we are trying to do the
2:09:42
idea is having a kind of U ousness to it
2:09:48
this is an Old English word and it is not just that the idea is simply
2:09:55
productive but it's part of a whole uh line of inquiry that is uh telling us as we go
2:10:05
along that we are on the right path and that's an attitude that you
2:10:12
take not that the story sounds good but that in the process of doing it you
2:10:19
discover things that are leading you more productively along that path so you
2:10:26
have to be open to those discoveries but you also have to be able to evaluate
2:10:34
them relative to whatever is being discovered and has gone before so that
2:10:40
you have a whole body of things that are consistent and leading productively on
2:10:47
this path if you ever think oh I have the answer now it's so wonderful all these aliens came and did it and uh
2:10:55
and I have all these things uh you know um I've been uh kind of interacting with
2:11:01
people telling those stories for a long time uh one of the early ones I
2:11:06
encountered my career was uh Eric vanan oh yeah who published quite a few books
2:11:13
on um sort of Ancient Aliens and how they were uh coming to the Earth in the
2:11:20
time of the dinosa SS and you know mixing up all kinds of things that geologically we knew were completely uh
2:11:28
inappropriate but one thing I will say for danan is he was very honest he uh
2:11:34
pointed out that he was yes he was writing about these things but he was he was an Entertainer that he was doing
2:11:42
this to make a good story uh I remember uh one of my paleontology colleagues at
2:11:49
University of Texas where I was uh many years ago before I was at uh uh Arizona
2:11:56
he took me out in the field to look at some of the uh dinosaur tracks in the
2:12:01
Glenn Rose formation Cretaceous in Central Texas where Von Gan had a
2:12:07
picture in his book of um human Footprints he claimed human footprints
2:12:12
that were uh along a pathway adjacent to these three-toed dinosaur footprints
2:12:20
that probably a Bill dinosaur they they swam in shallow water and there's other
2:12:25
indications in the deposits that this was shallow water so comparing What
2:12:30
dayan's photograph showed and the footprints it was very clear what was going on because the actual marks on the
2:12:38
uh on the rocks that had been preserved were singular uh linear traces they
2:12:46
weren't three to they weren't five toed Footprints what
2:12:51
danan had done was he had wet the marks so they would be more visible but he added five little dots at the end of
2:12:58
them his picture yes uh and U he would say well you know this is uh to make the
2:13:05
story good but but it's very likely that what was going on is these three-toed
2:13:11
dinosaurs were swimming and they have a longer toe in the middle and as they pushed themselves along one of these
2:13:18
these would uh scrape the water bottom and these would go along a bit at another scrape just about in the same uh
2:13:26
sort of distance as human Footprints would be and the track had the same distance as human Footprints but it was
2:13:33
it was formed in a completely different way now this is an investigation that
2:13:39
you do to figure out what was really going on and and you use all the tools
2:13:46
you can to figure that out it's not about finding things that are consistent
2:13:52
with a story that you were trying to tell that that's called uh sham
2:13:57
reasoning where you know the answer and you are piling up a lot of you know good
2:14:04
sounding evidences logical argument Etc that is uh going to look like it's
2:14:12
consistent with your story that kind of reasoning is uh
2:14:18
easier to find as I said V again there's another kind of defect in reasoning that
2:14:25
is a little more difficult to deal with called fake reasoning this word has been
2:14:30
thrown out and used improperly but fake reasoning is when your motivation and
2:14:37
now we're talking a psychological motivation is not to find the truth of
2:14:42
what nature presents your motivation is to make money to be on uh podcasts or
2:14:49
you know to get uh attention uh it's not a scientific
2:14:54
motivation so it's you know not up to me uh to know the motivations of the people
2:15:01
who are uh doing this kind of stuff uh but one has to be somewhat
2:15:09
suspicious that maybe uh this is a uh a motivation problem uh and like bonan you
2:15:19
know if it's entertaining and it's uh you know people can enjoy the story just
2:15:25
like a fiction book there's nothing inherently wrong with that it but it
2:15:32
should not be claiming to be science the claim to be science has to
2:15:38
do with the things I've talked about and unfortunately what I've been saying
2:15:44
about the nature of science even by many scientists isn't how they convey it this
2:15:50
is this is something I've uh in a very long time because I I
2:15:59
probably you know became a scientist as
2:16:05
soon as I was walking and and talking uh because I was curious about things and
2:16:11
the things I was curious about were rocks uh I like as a you know
2:16:17
kindergartner I told my parents in Connecticut that I wanted to be a
2:16:22
geologist so it kind of crazy but um I've had now
2:16:30
uh you know close to to uh eight Decades
2:16:35
of U experience with this and I'm kind of reflecting on it not just the the
2:16:42
process but also my experience with many many
2:16:48
individuals so are you seeing like some scient uh they they weren't trained properly
2:16:53
they went to the wrong school or why are they like this uh they are dedicated to this
2:17:03
process of doing science uh they would like to be taken seriously they're
2:17:08
they're human beings like other human beings and as individuals thinking about it they have
2:17:15
their own motivations as well they you know they have to have money they have
2:17:20
to you know live their life uh but as I
2:17:25
said science an important element of it is not just that these are isolated
2:17:33
individuals they are part of a community a whole sort of you
2:17:40
know whole bunch of people that are absolutely dedicated to the same sort of
2:17:46
thing when some of those people get into trouble like the falsification of data or
2:17:54
whatever like that that Community instinctively they come down
2:17:59
on bounces on them and they suffer science is a very special thing and uh
2:18:07
so this is why scientists are you know it it might be said that that the
2:18:15
scientists are concerned that these people with these um ideas like
2:18:21
uh Hancock and uh and others uh that they're stepping into the role of
2:18:28
scientists and that scientists don't want them to take take over uh there may be some that feel that way I don't I you
2:18:37
know I I think they are you know they have their motivations but in terms of what I was
2:18:45
saying they just aren't scientists they they can be like denigan um you know
2:18:54
entertainers purveyors to uh public interest in in a way though they
2:19:00
are creating a misrepresentation as to what science
2:19:05
really is and what it really is about and that that's a problem that that I see but it's a
2:19:13
bigger problem it has to do with public understanding and this gets into the
2:19:19
relationship of science to many public issues like climate change and uh you
2:19:25
know all of the issues that get talked about a lot there's a huge body of
2:19:31
scientific evidence that is not being uh you know
2:19:39
considered they're not being fists they're not thinking
2:19:45
seriously that they could be wrong they may be showing a a kind of G
2:19:51
of presenting Alternatives acting as though they have
2:19:56
considered those but at least as far as the science Community is
2:20:02
concerned there's no indication that they have have done that seriously and
2:20:08
therefore they're not going to be taken credibly by the science Community notice I'm not saying the science Community is
2:20:14
claiming they have an absolute truth the absolute truth is in nature itself all the scientists can claim is that they
2:20:22
are absolutely and totally dedicated to this search for the truth and they are
2:20:28
using the best techniques and everything they can to get to it while also being humble enough to admit that they don't
2:20:35
really have the final answer one could say that this is something we need more of in our
2:20:42
society but uh it's certainly something that is a part of science it's something
2:20:47
that made me uh feel that uh I have always wanted to be a scientist I just
2:20:54
intrinsically uh you know haded a kind of affinity toward this whole way of
2:21:01
looking at the world yeah uh I don't know if this is an area that you you you
2:21:07
studied all that much but um do these floods would they have contributed at all to extinctions of of uh animal
2:21:15
species and things like that they certainly would have had huge
2:21:21
impacts on the local area where they occurred uh we we have uh you know the
2:21:29
the um remnants of carcasses of mammoths that were
2:21:34
probably you know uh in the flooding uh and these are being excavated from flood
2:21:42
deposits so the those that were there uh certainly were impacted but mammoths
2:21:49
were all over North America around the ice sheets and not all the margins of the ice sheets had catastrophic flooding
2:21:56
nor were the floods all at the same time in fact mammoths survived until a few thousand
2:22:03
years ago this is a fact there were on islands
2:22:09
off of the uh off of Siberia pygmy
2:22:14
mammoths that were the relatives of the
2:22:20
big mammoths that had uh existed during the ice AG now obviously something
2:22:26
happened where most of the mammoths were exting went extinct but there were
2:22:34
probably genetically smaller mammoths that were able to survive in this isolated Place
2:22:42
uh one of the theories that for the extinction which was developed by a uh
2:22:48
now deceased colleague of mine at the University of Arizona Paul Martin was
2:22:53
that human Hunters who developed Advanced Technologies at this time that were
2:23:01
capable of killing mammoths the so-called Clovis culture uh were a big factor in uh the
2:23:09
extinction of the late PL toine meapa now that's a was a kind of outrageous
2:23:15
idea when it was presented but it was pursued in a very powerful scientific
2:23:23
approach Vance holiday can tell you more about that because he's very closely
2:23:28
involved with it but it's it's an example of an idea when Martin proposed
2:23:34
this it was an outrageous idea that human beings you know it created the extinction but it was a productive idea
2:23:43
regardless of whether it was right or wrong pursuing it and looking at it in
2:23:48
detail in different places around the world led to new discoveries some of
2:23:54
which were inconsistent with that idea but others that were and and we do have
2:23:59
examples of extinctions uh let's say in uh Australia
2:24:05
where uh Aboriginal the ancestors of Aboriginal people arrived I think they
2:24:12
now think about 50,000 years ago we had massive extinctions of certain marsupial
2:24:18
that were readily able to be uh you know accessed by these human
2:24:23
hunters and the the animals had never had that before so there there are
2:24:29
productive ideas about these issues and I'm I'm not the person to talk to about
2:24:38
the uh all of the archaeological and Geo archaeological
2:24:43
evidence there are others to talk to about that but the general idea is back
2:24:49
to my original point about what what is an
2:24:55
authentic uh way of doing science and that uh that
2:25:02
way which is a little complicated and not as well understood by the general public is what seems to be at the heart
2:25:10
of this problem we have with uh some of the ideas that are you know floating on
2:25:16
the internet and getting lots of attention uh uh to me it's it's sad
2:25:23
because there's much more fascinating and interesting things that do have a
2:25:28
close relationship to our uh approach to understanding the world that could be
2:25:34
talked about uh and would be as interesting as these fanciful
2:25:39
extravagant ideas that I think are motivated by things other than uh this
2:25:46
uh absolute and true search for the truth it's interesting because um you'll
2:25:52
hear them often complaining that oh geologists they don't believe in
2:25:57
catastrophes you know they they're gradualists everything's gradual uh but they don't believe in cat cat
2:26:05
catastrophism um but actually uh you're one of the big proponents of cataclysms
2:26:11
you believe in more cataclysms than they do they want to combine them all into one right
2:26:17
so it was a big mistake by some geologists to think they needed
2:26:24
a unifying principle for Geology that principle uh was called
2:26:32
uniformitarianism even most geologists don't know that uniformitarianism is a
2:26:37
word invented by a Critic of the idea a
2:26:43
philosopher who understood geology he invented the word uniformitarian ISM for
2:26:51
this idea that the only processes that we could know about for certain were the ones
2:26:58
that we observe today and today we don't
2:27:03
see Ice Age floods we don't even see an Ice Age today we see a limited sample of
2:27:11
what the world is about the most common planetary surface
2:27:17
modifying process in the universe including in the history of Earth is
2:27:22
impact cratering it is totally catastrophic impact craters are created
2:27:28
by processes which can be hundreds or thousands of times more energetic than
2:27:35
thermonuclear bombs okay they are more catastrophic than catastrophic floods
2:27:42
that is a common process the whole surface of the Moon is evidence for that
2:27:47
and the Moon is as old as the Earth that happened on the early Earth so
2:27:53
catastrophism we know it there's so much of it that it
2:27:59
isn't even a an an issue uh no geologist
2:28:04
today would be a uh and and I've studied the history of this there were reasons
2:28:11
why geologists embrac this because they had a kind of a worry that their science
2:28:18
didn't seem as uh absolute and authoritative and this is a
2:28:24
big mistake as safe physics you know Isaac Newton came along in the 1700s and
2:28:31
he had models that could be absolutely predictive about forces and energy and
2:28:38
that and one of Newton's ideas was well to have this uh model we have to be
2:28:46
absolutely sure of our assumptions about not just that we have the right
2:28:52
equations to figure things out but we're applying the equation to the right thing
2:28:58
and he he had a word from Latin of how we have the right thing he called it Veri that we know the true causes of
2:29:05
things so how can you know the true causes of things you can do an experiment where you manipulate the
2:29:12
causes and you get certain results that are follow from those causes in geology
2:29:18
do you do an experiment on the whole earth do you do an experiment on a whole
2:29:24
river that is Flowing from the interior of North America to the ocean or a
2:29:29
glacier that is covering an entire continent you can't put that in a laboratory and do that so uh a very
2:29:36
famous geologist uh Charles lyel said okay what can we be certain about we can
2:29:41
be certain if we see it today okay if we see it today then we can be certain and
2:29:47
the process is we don't see impact craters we don't see catastrophic floods so
2:29:53
he stupidly he wasn't stupid but he made a big logical mistake and he generalized
2:30:02
this to a method to tell geology that they should be doing this that was highly controversial at
2:30:10
the time and the person as I said the guy who invented the word
2:30:15
uniformitarianism used it not to ridicule but to point out the flaw of it
2:30:21
and uh this is this is tied to the story of Jay Harem bretts which I'm lecturing about now at the University and a uh
2:30:29
program for uh people from the general public uh
2:30:35
so the pendulum has swung back the other way in more recent times right no
2:30:40
geologists realized what I have been saying it is it's all about what nature
2:30:47
presents and nature is filled with catastrophic processes so there's no
2:30:53
dispute anymore uh it's a red herring that is being uh promulgated by those
2:31:01
yeah they can go to Old literature and say that uh you know geologists are you
2:31:07
know stuck in the mud over this thing and and there have been others who've done this Emanuel velikovsky um who was
2:31:16
kind of a interesting character he uh you know promoted uh uh catastrophic
2:31:23
ideas he he had a fascinating approach where he felt that these things had all
2:31:30
been sort of embodied within ancient uh texts like the Bible and uh certainly
2:31:37
there's descriptions of uh things in the Bible uh that look very catastrophic
2:31:44
and there probably are phenomena that were being described by the sages that
2:31:52
were the source of writings one of my favorites is uh is uh uh immense Flames
2:31:59
that are emerging from the interior of the earth shooting up into the sky uh
2:32:05
and uh you know this is thought well uh there's no examples of this uh-uh that
2:32:13
has happened geologically we know that Flames shoot shot up in the sky from the
2:32:20
New Madrid earthquakes in the early 1800s and there's a completely logical
2:32:27
physical reason why these big Flames shot up in the sky because the uh
2:32:33
organic material in the uh sediments in placed by the Mississippi River uh Decay
2:32:39
and produce a combustible gas called methane and during the earthquakes there
2:32:46
were explosions of the methane that threw logs into the air and pillars of
2:32:54
fire that came out of the ground uh so there are phenomena that have actually
2:33:01
occurred that lead to uh to descriptions but the important thing in science is to
2:33:09
understand these things and that requires using the best techniques we can to see how nature brings certain
2:33:17
things about so it's not about the initial explanation it is about the
2:33:24
investigation and the absolute dedication to to honestly investigate
2:33:29
that problem which is not what these people do they as I said it you know I'm
2:33:37
not the one to judge but it certainly has the appearance of a lot of fake and
2:33:42
Sham reasoning that is motivated by something different than what I've been
2:33:48
talking about which I think is intrinsic to science notice that I am not being a
2:33:56
skeptic if things are noticed that are odd and are not explained there is
2:34:04
possibility of doing important science on that these are called anomalies and
2:34:10
they are absolutely critical to doing science but just to say that science
2:34:17
does not you know is skeptical about this that's not an appropriate thing if
2:34:23
they are worth pursuing some scientist will pursue them and as in the case of
2:34:29
Jay harm Bretz and the channel scabland the science Community will come to the
2:34:36
conclusion that he was absolutely correct it may take a little while that
2:34:42
tools may have to be developed to do this but it will AB it will definitely
2:34:48
come come into play so it's a it's a much more subtle and
2:34:54
interesting in some ways line between this non-science that has to do
2:35:02
with attitude and real science much more uh subtle and interesting than how the
2:35:08
public thinks of it as science as Authority so the verdict on the scab
2:35:14
lands is that much as is the case with the purported evidence for an impact there is no synchron ity there were
2:35:21
catastrophic floods all right but these floods simply do not line up in time so that they can be referred to as a
2:35:27
universal catastrophe not even in North America now I just want to address a possible objection that impact
Conclusion
2:35:33
proponents might have about synchron which we touched on earlier recently they have fallen back to a position that
2:35:40
asserts synchrony is not necessary if we assume that the catastrophe was prolonged maybe there was an extended
2:35:47
series of events and in such a case things don't need to line up exactly but
2:35:52
all that really does is water down the hypothesis to make it less falsifiable
2:35:57
the more nebulous your proposal the easier it is to get the evidence to fit into it it seems like a cheat but at the
2:36:04
very least it makes the hypothesis less clear specific and testable which is what all hypotheses should be and this
2:36:11
watered down hypothesis unfortunately is not great for Lost Civilization proponents because it makes the complete
2:36:17
destruction of a continent spanning Advanced civil Iz ation less likely so where does that leave us well the
2:36:23
impression I get overall is that the people who are advocating for a younger dest comet impact and an accompanying
2:36:30
worldwide catastrophe that resulted in the extinction of megap and human populations simply don't have the
2:36:36
necessary supporting evidence to put any faith in it is it possible that more evidence will be forthcoming and that
2:36:43
these researchers will one day be Vindicated if that happens I am more than willing to accept it but it does
2:36:49
seem unlikely from what I have gathered anyone who truly believes in science and the scientific method would never
2:36:56
believe in something until after sufficient evidence was gathered if you already believe in it ask yourself why
2:37:04
and even if the impact however unlikely ultimately gets proven it's a whole different Enterprise altogether to argue
2:37:11
that this event wiped out an advanced continent spaning civilization for anyone to believe that you would need to
2:37:17
find evidence for the civilization and that would require more than just going around the world pointing at artifacts
2:37:23
attributed to other civilizations and claiming that they are actually from this Advanced civilization on the basis
2:37:29
of the argument that in your opinion the known civilizations were too primitive
2:37:34
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