Posted on 12/03/2008 4:12:12 AM PST by Mike Fieschko
The claims get ever-more inflated. Even the so-called end of the so-called Bronze Age has been attributed to the supposed Thera supereruption.
LOL!
I used to correspond with Zanngger until he left Basil. His field is Geo-Archeology he has a different view on a lot of things ancient.
Thanks. From his writing, I have to agree, at least in a couple or three areas.
That is what I was thinking, but SunkenCiv sure doesn't go for this approach.
Then you’ll be pleased to know that there’s no “hard science” to support A) tsunamis in the Aegean in the 2nd m BC, or B) a supereruption of Thera in 2nd m BC (or the 1st m BC for that matter).
I lava that statement!
Here ya go:
[snip] ...carbonized “fava” beans from a mining installation between the villages of Akrotiri and Meghalochori. The latter sample was found in a large jug buried beneath a layer of pumice at the edge of the preciptous side of the caldera. It dated to 1420 - 1400 ± 60 B.C. [end]
Pompeii, by contrast, was covered by thirty feet of ash.Santorini, GreeceSantorini is complex of overlapping shield volcanoes. Basalt and andesite lava flows that make the shield are exposed in the cliff below the town of Phira. Some of the cliff is thought to be a caldera wall associated with an eruption 21,000 year ago. Druitt and Francaviglia (1992) found evidence of at least 12 large explosive eruptions in the last 200,000 years at Santorini...
Akroteri, a Minoan city on the south part of Thera, is being excavated. About 3-6 feet (1-2 m) of ash fell on the city which had a population of about 30,000. The residents appear to have been successfully evacuated prior to the eruption. No bodies have been found in the ash like those at Vesuvius. Archeologists also reported that movable objects had been taken from the city...
The Kameni Islands formed after the caldera. Eleven eruptions since 197 B.C. have made the two islands. The most recent eruption at Santorini was in 1950 on Nea Kameni, the northern island. The eruption was phreatic and lasted less than a month. It constructed a dome and produced lava flows.
Identification of Aniakchak (Alaska) tephraMinute shards of volcanic glass recovered from the 1645 ± 4 BC layer in the Greenland GRIP ice core have recently been claimed to originate from the Minoan eruption of Santorini [Hammer et al., 2003]. This is a significant claim because a precise age for the Minoan eruption provides an important time constraint on the evolution of civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. There are however significant differences between the concentrations of SiO2, TiO2, MgO, Ba, Sr, Nb and LREE between the ice core glass and the Minoan eruption, such that they cannot be correlatives. New chemical analyses of tephra from the Late Holocene eruption of the Aniakchak Volcano in Alaska, however, show a remarkable similarity to the ice core glass for all elements, and this eruption is proposed as the most likely source of the glass in the GRIP ice core. This provides a precise date of 1645 BC for the eruption of Aniakchak and is the first firm identification of Alaskan tephra in the Greenland ice cores. The age of the Minoan eruption of Santorini, however, remains unresolved.
in Greenland ice core
challenges the 1645 BC date
for Minoan eruption of Santorini
Nicholas J. G. Pearce
John A. Westgate and Shari J. Preece
Warren J. Eastwood
William T. Perkins
The studies you cited were conducted in 1967 and 1977. By today's standards the accuracy or precision of the test methods used was primative. (What kind of computer did you use in 1977? I thought so.) Aside from significant improvements in the supporting analytical equipment there have been improvements in methodology. A breakthrough has emerged from recent research into the fluctuation patterns of the original 14C content of the Earths atmosphere over the past 50,000 years.
Science is not relying on radiocarbon dating and tree ring analysis alone. Since the studies you cited were conducted there have been dramatic developments in a range of other specialist dating methods. Some of these are more suited to dating rocks, ash and ejecta adjacent to your "fava" beans. Methods include potassium-argon dating, uranium series dating, fission-track dating, amino acid racemization, and archaeomagnetic dating. Of far more value with prehistoric archaeological remains are thermoluminescence (TL), optical stimulation luminescence dating (OSL), and obsidian hydration. The last of these is restricted to obsidian finds associated with volcanic activity, which form a surface hydration layer when exposed to air, the thickness of this layer corresponding with the length of exposure.
The RC dates were all conducted by the same lab. The fava beans (or as you put it “the ‘fava’ beans”, for no apparent reason) are a better example, because they had an origin obviously closer to the date of burial than, say, a tree. The main problem with RC dates on Thera has been that the soil is poor in C14 due to past volcanism (imagine that), such that stuff grown today will test hundreds of years too old.
All the rest of your reply is irrelevant to the dating of the *very small ash layer* that buried the town — supposedly during a super-eruption. And that’s what I thought we were discussing, apparently you were not. Goodbye.
I think your problem is that you do not observe scientific process. Rather than see where the data leads you have started with a conclusion and are seeking data to support it. Sounds like agenda driven junk science to me.
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