1 inch thick layer of comet impact debris near Sandusky

[AD]

Greetings...

Looking ahead in my PBS TV schedule, I see that on 31 March Nova will present "The Last Extinction", on the controversial claim that bad things were caused "by the massive breakup of a comet over the Great Lakes region".

AD
http://www.daysknob.com

[Minimalist]

Thanks for the heads up, AD. That program should get its own thread, here.

[kbs2244]

While it doesn’t seem to be very Earth oriented this shows that the idea of things out there bumping into each other is gaining ground.

http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/exhibit ... tml#cosmic

The Adler Planetarium is one of the Chicago Lakefront Museums and a common school field trip destination.
It can be an educational experience for the teachers as well as for the kids.
Maybe the idea of impacts with the Earth will gain some traction from this kind of thing.

My feeling as to why it is hard for people to accept the concept of impacts is that it is a hangover from the feeling of superiority and a “we are in control of our destiny” that is a result of the “Age of Science.”
The idea that a mindless hunk of rock can come out of nowhere and destroy all our wonderful things is hard to accept.

E P, we have had or differences of opinion in the past, but I do want to say I have finished your book and found it convincing.
You obviously wrote it to prove a point and I think you did a pretty good job.
I don’t think you wrote half of the words in the book.
You just have done a very good job of tying together a tremendous collection of references.
Congratulations.

[E.P. Grondine]

My feeling as to why it is hard for people to accept the concept of impacts is that it is a hangover from the feeling of superiority and a “we are in control of our destiny” that is a result of the “Age of Science.” The idea that a mindless hunk of rock can come out of nowhere and destroy all our wonderful things is hard to accept.

Yes, recent massive fatal comet and asteroid impacts are hard facts to accept. In sum, while archaeology has been used to track diseases, earthquakes, volcanoes, and climate disasters, we now need the information it can provide to help us deal with a new hazard, the impact hazard.

On the bright side of this we now have the science and space technology to prevent these catastrophes from happening, if we can just get NASA focused in that direction. See the professional engineering reports at :

http://www.nss.org/resources/library/pl ... /index.htm

or my first seat of the pants guess in 1998 about the required detection systems at:
http://www.geocities.com/epgrondine

This was not simply a delusion of grandeur on my part, as you can see from the engineering reports linked to above. I was a space journalist, and could at least form some rough seat of the pants first order estimates.

All of this impact research has consequences far beyond archaeology, as it involves the direction of the expenditures of billions of dollars in space; it will effect billions of dollars spent by the space programs by every space faring nation living on planet Earth. Even small rocket launches cost tens of millions of dollars, and their payloads hundreds of millions of dollars, and we'll need them to deal with these things.

E P, we have had our differences of opinion in the past, but I do want to say I have finished your book and found it convincing.

Thank you. Please be sure to recommend my book to your friends - I desperately need the sales right now, and since my stroke it would be wonderful if I could get a major publisher to see the book through to a much improved second edition - others will have to carry on the work now.

I don’t think you wrote half of the words in the book.

Thank you, I didn't.

I always say that I did not write my book so much as assembled it, from the first peoples' traditions and the archaeological record.

When I started my own research, impact traditions globally were pretty much lumped altogether and tied to extremely rotten archaeology and physics. My task was to tie the separate traditions to the separate archaeological discontinuities and also to the geological remains of the separate impact events.

You obviously wrote it to prove a point and I think you did a pretty good job.

My goal was not simply to prove one point, it was to arrive at an accurate estimate of the impact hazard, in order to get space money spent to save lives. There were going to be three books, "Man and Impact in the Americas", followed by "Man and Impact in the Ancient Near East" (using the Oriental Institute's collection of texts) and "Man and Impact in Europe" - but I got hit with a stroke after finishing the manuscript for "Man and Impact in the Americas".

They say that every good book takes on a life of its own, and in the case of "Man and Impact in the Americas" that was certainly true. As I assembled "Man and Impact in the Americas" the realization came to me that the first peoples' traditions which I was repeating were generally not available. Using the impacts, I could locate the peoples and their traditions accurately in time and space.

Thus in addition to being a catalogue of impact events in the Americas to be used for estimating the hazard, "Man and Impact in the Americas" became the only reliable proto-history for the peoples who lived east of the Mississippi River.

In as much as my grandmother was Thewighili Shawnee, by right the tradition keeping division of the Shawnee, this now has particular meaning for me, and importance in terms of Shawnee access to ceremonial sites in Ohio and elsewhere, what you may know as "Hopewell Hopewell".

You just have done a very good job of tying together a tremendous collection of references. Congratulations.

Thank you.

You may want to read the updated collection of Holocene Start impact traditions which I passed on here:
http://forum.palanth.com/index.php/topic,1093.0.html

When I started work on this Firestone was going on about supernova with no impact, while I was working trying to clear up some of the archaeological confusion in Clube and Napier's cometary impact work. While Firestone had a stack of money from Lawrence Livermore to work with, Firestone was blessed to gain Kennett's help. I had no help, and worked entirely alone, financing it all out of my own pocket, and got hit with a stroke before I could get it in final form.

My book is better than Firestone's team's in some ways, as all of the impacts in the Americas were documented, not just the Holocene Start impacts. On the other hand, because it covers so much time and so many impact events, it is far far weaker. Now if some major publisher would just pick it up...

If any of you here want personally signed first edition copies of "Man and Impact in the Americas" at the special archaeologica price, pm or email me.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[Beagle]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/clovis/

A Nova presentation this coming Tuesday on PBS. This show will present evidence for the Holocene Comet.

Check local listings.

[Minimalist]

My initial reaction to the program was that they were overly fixating on the complaints of one nay-sayer for whom no amount of evidence was ever going to be good enough. HOwever, on watching it a second time it seems that the method of the producers was to use that guy as a foil to enable the comet theorists to present their evidence.

Iridium in the layer and micro-diamonds there and in the ice cores are powerful evidence for an impact event and the "just say no" crowd is very unconvincing in creating scenarios to explain the evidence away.

One thing I did note was the underlying Clovis-First element of the show and the fact that they seem to have quietly ignored the fact that the Clovis people disappeared along with their alleged hunting targets.

[E.P. Grondine]

My initial reaction to the program was that they were overly fixating on the complaints of one nay-sayer for whom no amount of evidence was ever going to be good enough. HOwever, on watching it a second time it seems that the method of the producers was to use that guy as a foil to enable the comet theorists to present their evidence.

Sadly, no Min, that was not simply a dramatic device. NASA is deeply committed to avoiding dealing with the impact hazard, and in particular with the cometary impact hazard. Consider the following:

David Morrison's reply to Firestone:

Richard:

Thanks for the long note. Unfortunately, I think you are confusing two issues — the evidence that something happened 12,900 years ago (including extinction of magafauna, the decline of the Clovis culture, climate change, and the “black mat”) and the quite different issue of evidence for an impact.

You begin by stating that “the evidence that an impact occurred is broad and inescapable.” I work with a sophisticated international group of scientists who study impacts from a variety of perspectives, geological and astronomical. None of them would agree with this statement. I don’t think your diatribe against the geological community is relevant; the people I am talking about have been leaders in establishing the role of impacts in Earth history, including the KT. They are not part of a “long discredited scientific establishment”. You conclude with the statement that “I'll leave it to impact experts to test the viability of my hypothesis.” What hypothesis? I have not seen a testable impact hypothesis. The burden of proof is upon you. If you can’t find any collaborator who can work with you to develop a reasonable impact hypothesis that can pass peer review for publication, there is perhaps a message here. If you do, then I am sure that
the community of impact scientists I deal with will be happy to see it and examine the evidence.

David

Iridium in the layer and micro-diamonds there and in the ice cores are powerful evidence for an impact event and the "just say no" crowd is very unconvincing in creating scenarios to explain the evidence away.

NASA would rather spend $100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion flying a few men to Mars for a couple of days

One thing I did note was the underlying Clovis-First element of the show and the fact that they seem to have quietly ignored the fact that the Clovis people disappeared along with their alleged hunting targets.

None of the First Peoples' accounts of this event were used in the show, an notice that SANDUSKY GOT NO RESPECT.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[curious01]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/clovis/

A Nova presentation this coming Tuesday on PBS. This show will present evidence for the Holocene Comet.

Check local listings.

This program can be watched in full here:

http://www.ninjavideo.net/video/20949

To play it, open the video helper ( javascript:newWindow('/applet.php')
file before you start the selection, by running this (approve it in settings when asked).

I haven't watched it yet, but will be getting around to it by tonight, hopefully.

[E.P. Grondine]

The Sheridan Cave segments were "lost" in editing.

Oh well..

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas