(11) DOUBTS ABOUT VOLCANIC CATASTROPHE AD 536
From Steve Zoraster
Benny:
Although I enjoyed David Key's "Catastrophe: A Quest for the Origins of the Modern World," I ended up doubting the volcanic eruption explanation at the end of the book. Among the scientific "facts" I had trouble with were:
1) The claim that "Up to ninety-six thousand cubic miles of gas, water vapor, magma, and rock were hurled into the atmosphere." (Page 267 of the American edition.) This sounds more like a Chicxulub scale event than a larger Tambora.
2) The lack of reported tsunami impacts recorded in already literate China, Japan, or India. Krakatoa killed mainly through a tidal wave, and it is hard to understand how an event so much larger, which supposedly sundered Java from Sumatra, would not have caused a much larger tsunami, with results recorded across vast distances in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
3) Fixing the date of the eruption at 535 when the calibrated C14 dates are between 6600BC and 1300AD. (Note 1, Chapter 32. Page 316 of the American edition.)
By the way, I would like to ask Mr. Key about these issues, but don't know his e-mail. Can you or one of your readers help?
Steve Zoraster
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(12) SIXTH CENTURY "COMET" VECTOR
From Leroy Ellenberger < c.leroy@rocketmail.com >
Dear Joel,
I read your comments in 5 April CCNet and offer the following remarks:
1. I've read Saunders' review in New Scientist, but not Keys' book, and cannot imagine how Keys could go so far down the "volcano road" in face of the fact that there is no major volcanic acidity signal in the Greenland ice cores at ca. A.D. 540 as there is a corresponding acidity signal in Greenland for every other known major volcanic eruption in the past 2000 years, while Baillie makes a good case in Exodus to Arthur (1999), which was reviewed by New Scientist in their first issue for 1999, for a cosmic vector associated with the climate crisis in the sixth century.
2. The cosmic vector is NOT the close passage, or even an impact, of a comet, per se, but the cumulative effects of successive atmospheric accretion events over a number of years as Earth repeatedly intercepts large amounts of cometary debris from the dense portion of a meteor stream (in the case the Taurids, if Clube and Napier's model is on point, as I believe it is), whose most spectacular manifestation would be a succession of Tunguska-like detonations high in the atmosphere which greatly attenuates surface-level insolation. Baillie makes the case that much of the sixth century "dragon" lore associated with Arthur and Beowulf was inspired by such events, at which time accounts from China refer to dragons fighting at night and leaving the forests trampeled as they passed, which is not too bad for a folk-impression of a Tunguska-like event.
Clube has documented the fact that every period of millennial or eschatological concerns in the past 2000 years prior to the 19th century, marked by portents in the sky, occurred at times when Chinese records tell us the Taurid firefall flux was enhanced.
Cromwell rode the Taurid stream portents to fame and lost favor when the payoff did not turn out as he predicted. But this aspect of Cromwell's career is not dwelled upon recently nor evident in the 1960s film "Cromwell". I invite you to read my "Are Comets Evil?" at the end of the file < http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html > for more of the flavor of Clube & Napier's model and how its impact on culture has been largely overlooked, if not ignored.
Cheers,
Leroy Ellenberger