[meteorite-list] Cox crisply comments; full text of "No evidence"; Comet theory carbonized, Rex Dalton, nature.com; fungus found abstract: Rich Murray 2010.08.31

Wed Sep 1 00:28:22 EDT 2010

Cox crisply comments; full text of "No evidence"; Comet theory carbonized, 
Rex Dalton, nature.com; fungus found abstract: Rich Murray 2010.08.31
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.htm
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
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http://cosmictusk.com/new-paper-greenland-ice-sheet-shows-diamond-rich-layer-at-younger-dryas-boundary#comments

Dennis Cox
August 31st, 2010 at 12:05 am

Pinter's work is immaterial. In the final analysis, the NDs will be seen as 
minor clues only. But don't be to quick to dismiss them. Even though it's 
turning into a circular case of 'we said, they said'. Who's correct? Are the 
NDs valid?

If, in fact, the NDs are really there, then they describe a violent set of 
minimum atmospheric conditions. We can test this easily enough if we work 
from the postulate that they can be thought of as a barometer and pyrometer, 
rolled into one. If such exogenic thermal explosive conditions were real, 
and they were directed downwards at the ground, then there was enough heat 
and pressure to make stone flow like water for a moment. The NDs are not the 
only blast affected materials of the powerful explosive events they formed 
in. Those explosions most certainly left their marks. And they aren't 
craters.

If they formed in airburst impact vortices, then the Boslough simulation 
predicts the temps, pressures, and rotation speeds of a single impact 
down-blast vortex. Working from the postulate that the events of the YDB 
were caused by the impact storms of the debris streams of the fragmented 
Taurid progenitor -- the YD impact hypothesis as it stands, describes tens 
of thousands of such airbursts in a little over an hour. And acompanied by 
clouds of particles down to the size dust grains falling into the atmosphere 
at something like 30 km/second.

Sounds too fantastic? Stay with me here. I'm on a roll.

Firestone and friends proposed destructive forces equivalent to as much as 
10^9 megatons of TNT -- or in ordinary English, a million, billion tons of 
TNT.  Temps hotter than the surface of the sun.

Is our comet predicted to have been big enough to account for such 
devastation? Judge for yourself.

Before its breakup, the Taurid progenitor is estimated at 10^15 gm total 
mass. Yeah, I know, using a gram scale to weigh a giant comet is like giving 
the distance to moon in inches. It works out to well over 1.1 billion tons. 
And between 50 and 100 km in diameter.

Since the YD hypothesis has become a fully fledged theory that gives a 
specific description of the exact nature of the impactors, then it follows 
that we can also predict the nature and severity of the blast affected 
materials. Only the first fragments to fall would have gone into cold 
atmosphere. The rest would have fallen into already superheated impact 
plasma and just cranked up the heat and pressure. We aren't looking for 
craters where a solid bolide hit the ground. We are looking for the 
signatures, whatever they might be, of a 'Perfect Storm' of thermal impact 
plasma. A full blown magneto-hydrodynamic-plasma storm, with winds gusting 
to supersonic, and the gusts hotter than the surface of the sun. The surface 
of the Earth didn't get smashed and broken. It was flash melted and blown 
away.

The overpressures of the blasts would have tossed whole mountain ranges like 
clumps of flour on a bakers table. And flash melted them like chunks of wax 
under a high pressure blowtorch. 10^9 mega tons TNT of destruction doesn't 
seem like such a stretch when you work out how big the comet was.

Extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary proofs. If the Younger Dryas 
Impacts were, in fact, the multiple airburst impact storms of the Taurid 
Progenitor, then there should be a hundreds of thousands cubic miles of 
flash melted rock and blast affected materials on this continent, as 
pristine as the day they first cooled -- with no giant volcanic system to 
blame for them.

Fortunately this is not a problem.

Trust and believe, that the world hasn't been shown all the lines of 
evidence yet.

http://craterhunter.wordpress.com

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36697955/no-evidence-of-nanodiamonds-in-Younger-Dryas-sediments-to-support-an-impact-event
6 pages free full text, click on Download, then go to your download file 
folder, and R click the document name to get to the Menu to then click Print

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/news.2010.441.html

Published online 31 August 2010, Nature,  doi:10.1038/news.2010.441
News
Comet theory carbonized
Sediment studies rule out impact as cause of ancient cold spell.

Rex Dalton

The idea that a comet impact triggered a widespread climate chill has taken 
another hit.
MIKE AGLIOLO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The controversial theory that a comet impact sent Earth into a sudden 
climate chill nearly 13,000 years ago has been dealt a serious blow, 
according to scientists who have analysed sediments from the time.

The cool period, known as the Younger Dryas, coincided with the 
disappearance of the Clovis culture of North American humans and the large 
mammals they hunted. Most scientists think that the cold snap was triggered 
by a flood of fresh water from a breaching lake that disrupted the northern 
Atlantic ocean circulation.

But an alternative theory claims that sediments from that time contain a 
host of evidence -- including carbon spherules and iridium -- implicating a 
massive comet impact as the culprit (see Nature 447, 256-257; 2007). The 
proposition was attractive, as it claimed to explain both the rapid climate 
change, and the sudden die-off of humans and animals at the time.

A series of publications has since challenged each piece of cometary 
evidence, save one - nanodiamonds, supposedly created by the comet's impact 
shock.

Stony silence

Materials scientist Tyrone Daulton of Washington University in St Louis, 
Missouri, and his colleagues now say that these nanodiamonds are actually 
aggregates of the carbon materials graphene, graphane and their oxides 1. "I 
believe the earlier reports are in error," says Daulton. "If you don't pay 
close attention, you can fool yourself to think something is a diamond when 
it is not."

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 
(PNAS), "is a very convincing analysis by a world expert", says Peter 
Heaney, a mineralogist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, 
who was not involved in the research.

But the lead author of two earlier comet-impact papers, Douglas Kennett, an 
archaeologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, calls the study 
"fundamentally flawed science". "The claim we misidentified diamonds is 
false, misleading and incorrect," he adds, although he declined to specify 
his objections.

Daulton's paper comes hot on the heels of work by Nicholas Pinter, a 
geoarchaeologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and a 
co-author on the PNAS study.

Pinter and his colleague Andrew Scott of the Royal Holloway, University of 
London in Egham went to three of the sites where Kennett's team had found 
nanodiamonds. As well as providing samples for Daulton's study, they also 
looked for carbon spherules.

What they found instead was hardened fungal material and faecal matter from 
arthropods that looked similar to carbon spherules 2.

Kennett and his team also dispute this finding, and he says that they will 
be writing to PNAS to "expose the major flaws in the Daulton paper".

References

Daulton, T. L. , Pinter, N. & Scott, A. C.
Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA
doi:10.1073/pnas.1003904107 (2010).

Scott, A. C. et al.
Geophys. Res. Lett.
doi:10.1029/2010GL043345 (2010).

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL043345.shtml

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS,
VOL. 37, L14302, 5 PP., 2010
doi:10.1029/2010GL043345
Fungus, not comet or catastrophe, accounts for carbonaceous spherules in the 
Younger Dryas "impact layer"
Andrew C. Scott
Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK
Nicholas Pinter
Department of Geology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, 
USA
Margaret E. Collinson
Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK
Mark Hardiman
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK
R. Scott Anderson
School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, Northern Arizona 
University, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA
Anthony P. R. Brain
Centre for Ultrastructural Imaging, King's College London, London, UK
Selena Y. Smith
Museum of Paleontology and Department of Geological Sciences, University of 
Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Federica Marone
Swiss Light Source, Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, Switzerland
Marco Stampanoni
Swiss Light Source, Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, Switzerland
Institute for Biomedical Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

A claim attributes the onset of the Younger Dryas climate interval and a 
range of other effects ?12,900 years ago to a comet airburst and/or impact 
event.
One key aspect of this claim centers on the origin of carbonaceous spherules 
that purportedly formed during intense, impact-ignited wildfires.
Samples from Pleistocene-Holocene sedimentary sequences in the California 
Channel Islands and other sites show that carbon spherules and elongate 
forms are common in samples dating to before, during, and well after the 
12,900-year time horizon, including from modern samples.
Microscopic studies show that carbon spherules have morphologies and 
internal structures identical to fungal sclerotia (such as Sclerotium and 
Cenococcum).
Experimental charring of fungal sclerotia shows that their reflectance 
increases with temperature.
Reflectance measurements of modern and late Pleistocene spherules show that 
the latter indicate, at most, low-intensity burning.
These data cast further doubt upon the evidence suggesting a catastrophic 
Younger Dryas impact event.

Received 25 March 2010; accepted 1 June 2010; published 20 July 2010.
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3 times more downward energy from directed force of meteor airburst
in 3D simulations by Mark B. E. Boslough, Sandia Lab 2007.12.17:
Rich Murray 2010.08.30
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.htm
Monday, August 30, 2010
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excellent Google Earth and ground views of shallow oval craters worldwide,
Pierson Barretto: Rich Murray 2010.08.22
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.htm
Sunday, August 22, 2010
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Rich Murray, MA
Boston University Graduate School 1967 psychology,
BS MIT 1964, history and physics,
1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505
505-501-2298 rmforall at comcast.net

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