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THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH

by Alfred de Grazia


EXOTERRESTRIAL FORCES
AND QUANTAVOLUTIONS IN THE EARTH SCIENCES

by
Alfred de Grazia
METRON PUBLICATIONS
PRINCETON, NJ, 08542,USA


Notes on the printed version of this book

Copyright (c) 1983 by ALFRED DE GRAZIA

No reproduction in any form of this book, in whole or in part
(except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews),
may be made without written permission from the author.


First Edition 1983

Metron Publications
Box 1213
Princeton, N.J., U.S.A. 08542

Note:

The word 'exo-terrestrial' is used in preference to 'extraterrestrial.' It is more exact
etymologically, less romantic and sensational, and easier to pronounce.

The design on the jacket is one of several drawings by Leonardo da Vinci of the
"Deluge." He portrays the cataclysm as a terrific downbursting of water and whirlwinds.

"Nihil difficile naturae est, utique ubi in finem sui properat."

* Seneca
De Quaestiones Naturae

* "Nothing is difficult for nature.





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THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH

TITLEPAGE

Foreword

1.Quantavolutions

PART I: ATMOSPHERICS
2.The Gaseous Complex
3.Hurricanes and Cyclones
4.Magnetism and Axial Tilts
5.Electricity
6.Cosmic and Terrestrial Lightning
7.Fire and Ash

PART II: EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS
8.Falling Dust and Stone
9.Gases, Poisons and Foods
10.Metals, Salt and Oil
11.Encounter and Collisions

PART III: HYDROLOGY
12.Water
13.Deluges
14.Floods and Tides
15.Ice Fields of the Earth

PART IV: CRUSTAL TURBULENCE
16.Earthquakes
17.Volcanism
18.Sinking and Rising Lands
19.Expansion and Contraction

PART V: RIFTS, RAFTS AND BASINS

20.Thrusting and Orogeny
21.Ocean Basins
22.Fractures and Cleavages
23.Canyons and Channels
24.Continental Tropism and Rafting
25.Sediments

PART VI: BIOSPHERICS
26.Fossil Deposits
27.Genesis and Extinction
28.Pandemonium
29.Spectres

PART VII: DIMENSIONS OF QUANTAVOLUTION
30.Intensity, Scope and Suddenness
31.The Recency of the Surface

Epilogue

Two Charts of Time




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THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER ONE

QUANTAVOLUTIONS

Clarence King was the first Director of the United States Geological Survey. He was
liberally educated at Yale University and spent years in field work thereafter.
According to the historian Bancroft, he "had acquired a reputation and a position second
to no scientist in America." When he returned to lecture at the Sheffield Scientific
School of Yale in 1877, he argued against the prevailing opinions in geology and
evolution, insisting on the basis of his experiences and visions as a surveyor that the
Earth had been lately devastated. The belief in catastrophism, he said, in surprising
pre-Jungian language, was a true grasp of what had happened to the World. "Catastrophism
is therefore the survival of a terrible impression burned in upon the very substance of
human memory." [1]

Because catastrophism is a word that excites emotion and connotes only destruction, the
present work and the series to which it belongs prefers the more general idea implied in
the word quantavolution. The concept allows a more peaceful invasion of the realms of
gradualism, uniformitarianism, evolution, and anthropology.

I do not mean this book to be violent and bloodcurdling. We have far too much of such
stimulus today on television, in movies and in other books and magazines. I even go so
far as to say that the Earth system has been settling down -this without conclusive
evidence. But facts must be faced. The Earth has been severely traumatized in the memory
of mankind. In words that I have used before, any place on earth can be viewed as a
Quantavolutionary Column:
Any tube of one kilometer diameter circumscribed anywhere on the surface of the Earth,
which reaches as high as the end of the magnetosphere hundreds of miles upwards, and as
low as the upper mantle some thirty kilometers down, will have endured within the past
14,000 years radical changes in its absolute and relative orientations, its atmosphere,
its rocks and its biosphere, including any long-lived human cultures.

Several principles characterize the theories of quantavolution: Every major feature of
the Earth's surface is an effect of quantavolution; hence every feature figured in
evolutionary theory is translated more realistically into quantavolutionary theory.

The dominant shape of the most determining events in natural history is a logarithmic or
exponential curve where, from a pre-existing state, sharp change occurs, followed by a
steep exponential decline in the effect. After a time the curve of the effect flattens
out, and an illusion may arise that the processes under scrutiny have always been as
they are now.

The several descriptive spheres of natural activity: atmosphere, lithosphere,
hydrosphere and biosphere, transact regularly, but most emphatically and completely
under catastrophic impulsion.

Partly because of the greater force of inanimate being and partly because its own basic
nature is identical with the inanimate, the biosphere is as subject to quantavolutionary
experience and interpretation as the physical spheres.

The theory of quantavolution depends upon the evidence that catastrophes really
happened, for it is upon such abrupt, large-scale natural events that the quick leaping
changes of quantavolution in the holosphere depend. By the same token, a
quantavolutionary theory must show either that large spans of assigned time in natural
history are fictitious, or, if they occurred, little of the natural world changed during
their passage. Every chapter of our book is dedicated to these tasks, but several
general comments may be offered in advance.

If our minds were still strapped to the ideological framework of the seventeenth
century, there would be less of a problem in these regards. For we should normally
believe that great floods, fires and earthquakes had happened in ancient times, and
operated on such a vast scale that many "miracles" were associated with them. By
miracles, I mean such phenomena as the falling of edible material, manna or ambrosia,
from the sky, and the specters of enormous brilliant comets to which the Earth around us
responded like a giant animal coming alive.

No mental gymnastics would be required to see in the Earth's behavior an abundance of
evidence of at least the one great Flood of Noah in which the whole world was deluged
and inundated. Indeed, we should see so many marks of catastrophe that we would have to
invent several such floods and conflagrations, and comets to explain the complex piling
up of ruin upon ruin, fossil upon fossil, and their bizarre collection and combinations.
Practically every extensive ancient document and legend known to us from around the
world would repeat the same kind of catastrophic history and lend support to the
testimony of our eyes and the voice of religious and social authorities.

We might have been granted different, or additional, heroes of science, too: the brave
Spanish priests who rescued from certain destruction the iconography and writings of the
original inhabitants of the Americas; astronomers like William Whiston who perceived an
exoterrestrial cause for the Noachian deluge; anthropologists like Nicholas-Antoine
Boulanger who recognized the symptoms of catastrophic fear in the history of religion;
paleontologists such as Cuvier who discovered the layerings of catastrophe;
anthropological-biological explorers like Humboldt who accorded respect to aboriginal
accounts. Charles Lyell and his supporters thereupon might have had less success in
dominating natural history --even allowing that they were riding on the crest of English
world power, political power always being consciously or unconsciously imperialistic in
the dissemination of ideas.

Admittedly there is a world history of science to be written from the standpoint of the
sociology of knowledge as a first step in the opening-up of thought upon quantavolution.
We must nevertheless still provide in the here and now the evidence of catastrophes
called for earlier. Fortunately and yet unfortunately, the here and now is prejudicial
to quantavolution. Fortunate it is that mankind up to the time of the atom bomb has had
a respite from cosmic catastrophes for over two thousand years. However, the respite has
permitted a thoroughgoing sublimation of memories of general disaster even in religion,
all of which are rooted in proto-historic disaster, not excluding the Judaeo-Christian-
Islamic faiths. The greatest secret of religion today is the ostensible fact, too
obvious for continuous attention, that religion is originally founded upon the
terrifying behaviors of its founding gods. Jesus and Mahomet originate in the Books of
Moses, in the frightful times of Exodus when Yahweh became God of the Jews. The history
of religion as the history of catastrophes is also to be written.

Once more we return to the quantavolutionary evidence in the here and now. If science,
politics, and religion are using the relatively peaceful natural world of today to cover
up ancient catastrophes, how are the catastrophes to be uncovered? So far as research
goes, one must read between the lines of natural science and politico-religious
arguments, picking up here and there bits of knowledge and threats of argument.
Ultimately, these can amount to many thousands of pieces and a strong line of argument.

The mills of conventional science, originally churning out milk and honey, are beginning
to grind stones and salt, as in the ancient Scandinavian myth of the end of the world.
This trend is faster than generally believed. I would guess that the leading scientific
magazines such as Nature, Science, and Sky and Telescope have carried since 1945 an ever
increasing number of quantavolution-oriented articles, minute proportion to the total,
to be sure. But this number has been increasing exponentially in the past several years
and by the year 1993, I would expect that fully a quarter of all publications in natural
history will treat of quantavolutions.

Going farther, in geology and geophysics a number of scientists are deliberately
hypothesizing catastrophes at the boundaries of several geological ages and adducing old
and new evidence, especially by chemical examination of sediments, to prove that they
occurred. The space programs of U. S. A. and U. S. S. R. have naively reported ancient
catastrophes and on-going explosiveness wherever their vehicles have gone -Venus, Moon,
Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. Astrophysicists and astronomers are edging into
catastrophic explanations of the surfaces of the inner planets and the asteroidal belt
between Mars and Jupiter. Whereas in Charles Darwin's youth many scientists disbelieved
in meteors striking the Earth, today certain scientists are advancing serious proposals
for a space project aimed at exploding meteoroids that might appear to be on collision
courses with the Earth. Where once the evolution of coal beds was supposed to have
occupied million of years in the ample time depots of natural history, today at least
one authoritative textbook adopts great fires and floods as the most possible
explanation of the origin of coal  [2] . Biology is moving swiftly, but biology (and in
the case of man -anthropology) as the history of life moves much more slowly, moves even
in reverse motion, sucking up ever greater draughts of time.

Still, Walter Sullivan, dean of science reporters, could declare in the New York Times
in December 1981 that serious challenges to the conventional tempo and mode of evolution
were arising; they came out of proof concerning links between catastrophe and
extinction/ genesis of species, out of the capacities of genetic engineering for
modeling new life forms, and from the growing tendency to interpret the rarity of so-
called missing links or transitional types as the non-existence of said types,
introducing therefore the alternative presumption that macroevolution (quantavolution)
introduced distinctly new forms suddenly. What Lyell wrote a hundred and fifty years
ago, "that no causes whatever have changed the earth except those that still do so under
the eyes of man," can be easily updated: today man's eyes are wider; they can see more
and can see into themselves.

The surface of the Earth that appears before our mind's eye is largely a crystallized
image, a set of snapshots of a whole too large to be embraced by a single thought -
valleys, plains, deserts, seas, mountains, clouds, jungles, islands, cities and more -
ten, twenty, thirty, until the mind tires and says 'enough' and that is our Earth image.
And, if we were quickly to call out words that we associate with each snapshot, we
should probably begin with a couple of descriptive terms like, 'tall' or 'dry' or
'water' or 'trees', but then somewhere in the early words of each list there would
perhaps be words like 'slow', 'long', 'evolving', 'the same', and 'old' that hint at
'long, slow processes in Nature. ' Without conscious awareness, we perceive and recite
the ideology of the prevailing science. Yet only when we imagine the cities of the Earth
are we describing a surface feature that is surely known to be very recent, because
these are manmade.

We mostly come from western countries whose dominating perspective on the Earth and its
history has been shaped by the victorious currents of scientific thought of the past two
centuries. Other peoples, and our own peoples in other times, and many of our own
peoples who do not participate in this phase of our culture, would not exhibit the same
responses. As they imagine the Earth's scenery, they would think in terms of 'creation'
and often use the very word. This would mean to them an animate god, the creative force.
And when they say 'long ago' they mean 'very lately' in geological terms, and the same
if they were to say 'in the beginning. '

Between the gradualists and the creationists are those whose outlook is
quantavolutionary, thinking that the Earth here and now presenting itself is both
natural and young. To them this Earth is a setting recently arranged by disasters.
Quantavolution has had a foot in both camps. Insofar as it claims the methods of science
and the empirical positivism of science, it is in the evolutionist camp. Insofar as it
adheres to facts and theories resembling the earliest stories of the great and small
religions, it is in the creationists camp.

The combination of ideas has never been given a full trial. When, in the early
nineteenth century, a few quantavolutionists were active, they were known as
catastrophists, or revolutionists, or saltationists. They were soon identified with the
enemy by the uniformitarian and gradual evolutionists and crushed in the same battles
that saw the defeat of the creationists. Let us identify ourselves as quantavolutionist
and, confronting the Earth's features, ask "How and when did what make what?" For
instance, "In the 1980's exploding and erupting magma rising under high pressure
fashioned the top of Mt. St. Helens as it appears today. "This is not much of an answer
but it suffices to introduce the complicated subject of this volcano.

If "what is made" has to be thought of as the whole surface of the Earth, large
categories are needed. So we adopt several arenas or spheres of activity, and place this
volcano under volcanoes in general, and volcanoes in general are part of the
lithosphere, inasmuch as what remains on the spot is now frozen into rock. Much of what
emerged from the Earth rose as ashes, and gases, as electric discharges, too, and water,
in a veritable cyclone.

For some purposes, then, Mt. St Helens could find a place under a second category, the
atmosphere, which was much affected locally by the eruption. The clouds of water vapor
ultimately fell upon the ground and the seas and circulated widely in the hydrosphere,
another principle arena for geophysical activity. Except for a few insects and plants,
the close-in biosphere was wiped out by the disaster. Some biosphere specimens of homo
sapiens cleverly moved to a safe distance and observed the events; a few persons were
killed. So in the instance, forces typical of the lithosphere changed a feature of the
lithosphere and affected the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere to a noticeable
extent.

There are not so many different crustal forms of the Earth that they cannot be
encompassed by the mind and by this book. The splendid and fascinating variety of nature
is in its details. We hope to treat the major features in a general way: volcanoes,
rifts, mountain ranges, ocean basins, etc. in the lithosphere; gases and electric
charges etc., in the atmosphere, but too, exoterrestrial intrusions by meteoroids,
electricity, gases and dust; further, the waters acting in the oceans, floods, tides,
rocks and rivers; and the biosphere of the plant and animal kingdoms. These spheres are
the general answer to the question: where does change on Earth occur? The features or
forms are the "what is made." As to "what makes them," we have to settle upon a
classification of forces or energies. Here we prefer a pragmatic approximation which is
close to the phenomena as experienced, so most of the terms are straight from the
newspapers: the volcano, though a feature, becomes also a force. Meteoroids as well, and
others, too. Most of the chapter titles convey an impression both of cause and effect.
Atmospherics are the workings of and in the atmosphere; hydrospherics of and in the
hydrosphere; and so on.

Had it seemed more useful, a highly abstract nomination of forces might have been
attempted; electromagnetic, inertial, 'weak' force, and the whole Earth described as
built from the working of forces beginning at the level of particle physics. Something
like this procedure is followed in an accompanying book (Solaria Binaria). But as
matters stand, here we have already enough abstraction for our needs and perhaps even
too much for the tastes of the reader.

The forceful phenomena that landscape the Earth and impress mankind go by a score of
names. Some surprising consequences attend even the seemingly ephemeral noises and
sights that attend natural operations; they are, to be sure, powerless effects in one
sense, but in another sense, as we shall see, they are forces in their own right. The
"music of the spheres" and "the wheels within wheels" are but ancient inherited words
fossilizing for us ancient phenomena of sound and sight. They help make man what he is
and this can be regarded as a criterion of a natural force; thus, what concerns us about
the atmosphere is partly that the air we breathe and the food we eat are governed by
atmospheric processes. Such are the homocentric beginnings of ideology, that which
inspires our curiosity about nature in the first place.

Otherwise, the categories of forces are commonplace enough and group themselves fairly
readily in the several spheres of natural operations. We name them as winds, hurricanes,
cyclones, lightning and other electrical flows; as meteoroids and fallouts of all kinds,
terrestrial and exoterrestrial in origin, including especially radiation. We call up as
forces too, the downpours of rain or cataclysms, the floods, tides, tsunamis, accretions
of ice, the ocean currents and chemical 'baths. ' And of the land we speak of
continental drift or rafting, of seismism, volcanism, the folding and thrusting of
mountains, erosion both fast and slow, the rising and sinking of land, the electrical
processes in the land as well as air. And, so far as concerns the biosphere, we are
interested in the mutational forces that speciate life forms and the human work that can
often transform the landscape and affect the atmosphere and oceans.

We may become most general in our language and conceive of a holosphere, all spheres
transacting among themselves. As in the case of Mt. St. Helens, effects of a natural
force are likely to be experienced in all spheres, immediately or with the passage of
time. An earth tremor will divert a stream, gather and discharge electricity, send the
animals fleeing in all directions, and set humans to praying. Seismism is neatly
numbered by intensity nowadays, and it is easy to test the holospheric principle by
observing effects in all spheres produced in association with a Richter scale 1 and,
say, 9, but allowing that this reading of 9 may have, in times before measurement and,
more, before conscious memory, reached hypothetical reading of 12 or 20. What would the
Richter-scale reading have been when the Indian sub-continent split off East Africa? Or
when the fabled island continent of Atlantis "sank in a day of furious trembling,"
according to Plato?

Now a criticism can be launched against quantavolutionism. India split from Africa, not
in a day, but by an exceedingly numerous series of a centimeters a year, as Arabia is
pulling away from Africa today -so it is argued. This might be measurable on the
ordinary reaches of the scale. So the event, as grand as it appears on maps, was not a
catastrophe; besides, the argument goes, it happened a hundred million years ago.

This kind of argument is bound to brew trouble. The "when" problem occurs in conjunction
with the "how" problem. The "when and how" are answered together. First, an up-strain
from below works gradually along a weak line of rock and slowly insinuates a crack which
lengthens and widens until India is separated from Africa and, impelled by mantle-
located forces of the same type, is slowly pushed towards Asia. Millions of years were
consumed in accomplishing the clear break, many millions more in rafting to Asia. In
such circumstances, the hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere would be hardly affected;
even the lithosphere would not be severely disturbed; there are always a few crumbs
falling when a slice is cut from a cake and slid across the table. All to the tune of
numbers 1 to 9 on the Richter scale.

Adversely, a catastrophe is asserted. India's separation from Africa was part of a
worldwide fracturing of the globe. It happened quickly, with a hard blow impacting
somewhere. Within hours, India was cut off and moving rapidly through watery wastes
lately occupied by other lands that, too, were dispersed and moving eastwards. Not only
was the event consummated suddenly, but it happened lately -thousands, not many millions
of years in the past. So goes the quantavolutionary argument. We shall join the argument
again and again in the chapters to come.

A classic case of holospherics is the much-studied and well-discussed theory of world-
disaster befalling about the year 1450 B. C. at the instigation of a great comet. Here I
shall repeat only the hypotheses, as I have stated them elsewhere, suggesting that the
reader may resort to my Chaos and Creation and God's Fire: Moses and the Management of
Exodus for a fuller account, or to the famed book of Velikovsky called Worlds in
Collision and the debates surrounding it  [3] . In regard to that fateful year, and
throughout the world, the quantavolutionary hypotheses may be stated as follows:

(a) No geophysical feature or process that manifested a sensible form then, and which is
capable of exhibiting the effects of discontinuous stress when examined by current
geophysical techniques, will fail to show that such stress occurred.

(b) No record of astronomical events available for the period around that year will
present astral, planetary, or solar movements as unchanged or uniformly changing from
before to after the year.

(c) No retroactive calculation or index (such as of carbon 14 levels) or historical
reference will fail to show atmospheric turbulence and atmospherically implicated
irregularities.

(d) No survey of biological history around this year can deny highly unusual animal and
human behavior and widespread destruction in the plant and animal kingdom, including
agriculture.

(e) No graphic, legendary, or archaeological account will produce a human settlement in
the world that escaped heavy destruction from natural causes.

(f) No religious temple that was constructed anywhere beforehand and rebuilt thereafter
shows the same astronomical orientation before and after.

(g) No god passed through this year without change of status, rites, family relations,
and serious personal incident, and, correspondingly, all religions changed.

(h) No culture complex can be shown to have avoided, with or without detectable hiatus,
significant changes in institutions, rulership, and artifacts.

(i) No institution, behavioral pattern, and natural setting existing today, if its
history is complete, will fail to recall the effects of the events of these times.

In brief, no sphere of existence escaped intense experiences and transactions with other
spheres in the quantavolution of the times. All quantavolutions imply heavy holospheric
events. For periods before human race had quantavoluted (the subject of my work, Homo
Schizo I), anthropological spheres of existence would, of course, be excluded.

It will be appreciated that, under evolutionary theory, holospherics tend to be less
stressed. When large effects are reduced by time to minute causes, the side-effects are
proportionately and even exponentially reduced. The more intense and sudden the event,
the more spheres will be transacting. The larger the scale of an event, too, the more
spheres will enter the action.

Suppose the Earth's rotational speed were to be slowed. This is a mighty event and takes
a mighty force; Earth's rotational energy is calculated at 10 36 ergs. Yet it has been
observed (by Danton) to happen recently, if only for a millisecond. No account of effect
has yet been rendered; perhaps the effects were immeasurably small, or perhaps the
reaction of scientists were too slow. If large solar flares caused the retardation, as
seems to have been the case, worse flares or other causes might produce a larger
rotational lapse, perhaps a second of time would be lost; perhaps then a minute; why not
an hour? -Hypotheticals are cheap. The effects of lengthening the slowdown would be
heavy. Every sphere of Earth, every force, would be activated in using up the energy
surrendered by Earth in the deceleration. One would have holospherics on a grand scale.
Ordinary language, the most archaic religious language, and scientific language could
each provide the description required.

Now the quantavolutionist reverses the logic as well. We say, "the more affected the
holosphere, the greater the force to be sought." The effects are proportional to the
original force. When the effects exceed (or are theoretically calculated as having
exceeded) a certain intensity, we must even go beyond the Earth into cosmic forces
drastically simplifying. Only in the supra-terrestrial arena, the planetary and galactic
systems, are to be found forces large enough to do the Earth what appears to have been
done. Only cosmically can truly great holospheric transactions be generated.

One can realize, then, the importance of the "when" and "how long." To say "speedy
reactions" is to invite ultimately the cosmos in to explain our terrestrial phenomena.
To say "slow reactions" is to keep the Earth within its cocoon in space, traveling
evenly and safely. If the Alps tower above Europe, some force must have pushed then up.
If the Alps are to arise suddenly, then something besides earthly forces are behind the
event. We move into the cosmic realm. If the Alps are to arise over a great many
millennia, then the force might be generated in energy measures conceivable from some
mysterious, but still earthly, internal force.



{S : Notes (Chapter One: Quantavolutions)}
Notes (Chapter One: Quantavolutions) 


1. Scientific American, Supplement N  80, 14 July 1877, 1276.

2. Wilfrid Francis, Coal, Its Formation and Composition, 2nd ed., London: Arnold, 1961,
625,

3. (a) Princeton, N. J.: Metron Publications, 198 1; (b) ibid.: 1982; New York:
Macmillan, 1950; and see the files of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Review
hereafter SISR, Kronos, and PensÚe magazine, passim.







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THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER TWO

THE GASEOUS COMPLEX

The atmosphere of Earth is so delicate that most sudden and violent transactions in
space or on Earth transform its constituents and their behavior. Considering what is to
come in this book by way of demonstrating terrestrial catastrophes, one may wonder how
it happens that life has survived five thousand, much less five billion years. The very
fragility of the aura around us bespeaks the recency of the atmosphere as we know it.

For example, in-coming cosmic particles collide with atoms of the atmosphere, giving off
neutrons that interact with nitrogen to make carbon 14. Then C14 couples with oxygen to
form carbon dioxide, and is often ingested by plants and passed along to animals through
the plants. When any plant or animal (living from plants) dies, it ceases to acquire C14
and the C14, which is radiogenic, decays at a constant rate into nitrogen. In the short
term, the process is fairly regular. The ratio, in a specimen, of C14 to C12, a non-
decaying type of carbon, can be used to date its decease. But lightning, smoke, dust,
explosions, vapors and cosmic particle flux can alter the density of C14 in the
atmosphere, hence in organic material.

Soviet investigators found C14 deviations in connection with galactic supernovas of the
years 1054 and 1700  [1] . Judging by the C14/ C12 ratio in annual tree rings in or
about the year 1908, when the Exoterrestrial Tunguska body exploded with heavy local
effect in Siberia, 1% less of the C14 was available in that year by comparison with the
year before and after  [2] . In another case, during a period called the Maunder
Minimum, 1645 to 1715, when the Sun exhibited no sunspots and the Earth was gripped by a
"Little Ice Age," the C14 found in tree rings of the period averaged 20% more than
before and after [3] . Grave events disturbed the atmosphere on other occasions. Between
3200 and 3700 B. C. and in the eighth and fifteenth centuries B. C. the quantity of C14
in the air fluctuated heavily  [4] .

A theoretical calculation by Cook that retrogressively computed the presence of C14 in
the atmosphere, basing itself on a presently observed slight built-up of the gas,
concluded that today's volume of C14 would have had to originate from a zero point
13,000 years ago. Why the rate would decrease to zero around that date has been
interpreted as an indication of an extremely short Earth history; we here regard the
hypothetical absence of C14 around that time as owing to several factors, most
importantly (a) the presence of a plenum of gases incomparably more impenetrable by
cosmic radiation that the present atmosphere, (b) a stronger geomagnetic shielding
produced by a stronger geomagnetic field than exists today, and (c) exoterrestrially
produced turbulence in the Earth's gaseous complex  [5] . The inference here would be
that major events before that time might have reconstituted the atmosphere, at which
time C14 would have begun to accumulate.

Obviously C14's history indicates that other atmospheric components would not have
escaped turbulent experiences. Carbon dioxide in the air fluctuates with industrial and
domestic combustion. The amount in the air is increasing (it is some .03% of the
atmospheric mass) and concern is expressed that the Earth's climate may change so as put
much of the biosphere in jeopardy  [6] . So also it has been surmised by students of the
ozone (O3) constituent of the upper atmosphere that its destruction as a particle shield
by aerosol discharges on Earth would engender high risks of biosphere damage  [7] . All
of this may happen within the next century or two.

Very similar types of blue-green algae live under the skins of rocks in the frigid
Antartic desert and in the heat of the Sahara [8] . Abyssal organisms live beyond the
reach of light. The limits of humans and their predecessors are much more narrow,
whether we speak of oxygen or a dozen other basic requirements. (Later we shall examine
the claim that simple organisms can traverse and inhabit space-conveyed meteoritic
vehicles even "on their own.") Humans have been known to acclimatize themselves to high
altitudes with low oxygen and low barometric pressure  [9] . But beyond 20,000 feet, the
human dies. Pure oxygen is, of course, a poison and an explosive.

There is little certainty about the history of the atmosphere, even during human times
[10] . The primeval air must have contained some molecular oxygen (O2) for the lung-
breathers. Not too much lest the air catch fire. Legends do report "world-burnings,"
that Donnelly and Velikovsky, for instance, attribute to hydrogen gas pockets of
exoterrestrial origin. Nitrogen might not be needed but the air must then also have held
much other gas; for terrestrial life forms are constructed to deal with outside
pressures. The diaphragm and chest muscles are made to operate as a bellows sucking the
oxygenated air into the lungs and exhaling it with carbon dioxide. A pressure gradient
must be accommodated between the external air and the internal metabolism. Yet if the
air had been too dense, creatures such as humans would be too burdened by it to move
about.

Considerable leeway is permitted for the amounts of inhalable oxygen, the mixes of gases
inhaled (barring poisonous gases such as carbon monoxide), the atmospheric density
(pressure) and degree of vaporization, the kinds and amounts of radiation such as
ultraviolet rays, temperature (from 40 to 100 Fahrenheit as a milieu), and luminosity of
the environment. Dew will suffice in place of other freshwater sources. Edible plants or
animals, including one's own species in extremis, must be available, and these, of
course, are atmosphere-dependent too. The present human cannot survive in the highest
mountain altitudes or underwater without artifices.

Given the prolific potential of human reproduction, the atmosphere might have been
severely ravaged and changed without destroying utterly the species. The human body is
built upon and functions with the basic elements of nature. It is catastrophised and by
the very fact catastrophe-proofed to some degree. Its incubating young are deeply
encased and easily transportable. What it cannot cope with internally it seeks to escape
by rapid mobility and exponential rates of reproduction. The atmosphere presently
consists of a changing mix of gases and vapors that moves from surface levels upwards to
where the magnetosphere ends at any moment of measurement. What is beyond may be called
outer space, where space plasmas, solar winds, cosmic particles, and meteoritic material
play about in some disorder.

The atmosphere itself is a model of disorder. It is continuously moving and
reorganizing. Everyday its pressure goes up and down. About 99% of its mass blankets the
globe at under 19 miles of altitude. This consists of the gases, molecular nitrogen(
78%), molecular oxygen (21%) argon (1%) and carbon dioxide (. 03%). Water vapors rarely
reach 1% of the total: normally, half of the globe is covered by clouds, which form,
reform, and discharge their vapors almost entirely within six miles of the surface.

Below the clouds hang most of the "pollutants" of industry, consumption, war, and
transportation. But some of this may rise so high as to threaten the layer of ozone, a
poisonous triple-atom oxygen molecule (O3), which, so long as it stays out of the animal
system, performs a vital function in stopping solar ultraviolet rays from reaching the
animals.

As one moves up the atmospheric column from ground-zero one passes successively through
"belts." These are statistical entities, not the usually discontinuous strata of the
lithosphere. The sixty-mile homosphere is divided into troposphere, stratosphere, and
mesosphere. Then occurs a heterosphere, and, at around 300 miles, an exosphere. The
homosphere is a molecular region where nitrogen and oxygen are the principal actors; but
at bottom are cloud and pollutant behaviors and at the top occur some vigorous
radiation, dissociation of molecules, formation of hydrogen compounds, and ionization.

In the heterosphere, atomic oxygen, helium and hydrogen are the abundant elements. Some
of the helium and hydrogen is on its way into farther space, but is replaced, it is
believed, to produce an equilibrium. However, Melvin Cook, a quantavolutionary
geophysicist, has asked, "Where is the Earth's Radiogenic Helium?"  [11] . Cosmic-ray
sources are alleged to generate helium at 3x10 9 g/ year. The same amount is estimated
to be generated from the uranium and thorium in rocks of the lithosphere. With an Earth
age of 5x10 9 years, about 10 20 grams of helium should have passed into the atmosphere
by now. The atmosphere contains 3.5x10 15 grams of helium-4; if a steady state, it must
have passed out through the exosphere the equivalent of the aforesaid 10 20 grams.

However helium-4 does not concentrate in the upper atmosphere significantly and "at the
escape temperature of 1500 K at the base of exosphere, the rate of escape of helium-4
would be only about 600 g/ year, or only about 10 -7 as great as the replenishment rate
from the lithosphere." Only by raising temperatures at the base of the exosphere by
thousands of degrees could the helium be allowed to escape in sufficient quantities to
permit equilibrium. This can be conceived as possible only by means of a number of
immense solar storms that would wreak havoc on Earth or, worse, by large-body encounters
wrecking the atmosphere. Cook suggests that the helium-4 is still increasing; the
atmosphere is not in equilibrium; and if retrocalculated, a recent beginning or
reconstruction of the atmosphere must be confronted.

Geophysicists and meteorologists nevertheless retain the concept of the atmosphere as a
whole being in equilibrium. This is probably not so, even in the short run of a thousand
years. The idea is difficult as commonsense, considering that all the way from sea level
into outer space the atmospheric column is in continuous flux. It is agitated and fed
from the bowels of the Earth with heat, vapor, etc. and bombarded topside by elemental
particles of all kinds. Motion is continuous, too, up and down the column and then
horizontally with winds produced by thermal changes, such as the seasons produce, and
rotational effect that, for instance, disturb the atmosphere via surface irregularities
such as mountains and basins.

Indeed, equilibrium of the atmosphere is probably more of a hope than a fact. What makes
the hope into a "fact" is, not surprisingly, the uniformitarian conviction that today's
actors and roles are unchanged from eons ago. Given hundred of million of years when
animals and plants have been surviving, then the mix of vapors, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon
dioxide, argon, ozone, and radiation must have been what they are today. And that spells
equilibrium.

The belief becomes so strong that meteorologists, possessed of the "fact" of atmospheric
equilibrium, can even take their turns at guarding the portals of uniformitarianism,
assuring other scientists that meteorology, too, proves the long-enduring stability of
present-day conditions. At the same time, ironically, meteorologists are leaders in the
campaign to save the world from the atmospheric ravages produced by a few years of
industrialism, atom bombs, and aerosol discharges.

A quantavolutionist may share heartily the meteorologists' fear of the poisoning of our
present atmosphere. The quantavolutionist would at the same time point out the extreme
improbability of the atmosphere's having been preserved intact-free from radical changes
and poisons over long periods of time. Unless, of course, there were, before the present
atmospheric system came about, some ancestral system that in its nature involved a true
long-term equilibrium.

It is generally admitted that the sources of nitrogen and oxygen of the air are
uncertain and disputed. Further, the sources of water and salt are unknown. Too, all of
the minor gases of the atmosphere are of mysterious origin: neon, helium, methane,
krypton, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, and xenon. And some has mysteriously "disappeared;"
neon "should be" far more abundant, for example.

Oxygen is supposed to have been exhaled from plants, permitting thus the beginnings of
animal life. Orthodoxy puts this "happening" at over a billion years ago. Perhaps the
only "hard" evidence for the event is the discovery of a non-oxidized core of uranium
and sulphur in Kenya, the presumption being that there was little or no molecular oxygen
with which the elements could react when the rock was formed. Yet by this kind of
reckoning, it is hard, too, to explain fossils of 3.1 billion-year-old bacteria  [12] .
It has long been permissible to speculate that the components of the air came from the
"primordial melt," a fiction of science performing very much the same role as the
fiction of "the end of the Ice Ages." One may as well speculate that they came from
space, since practically every element has been identified within the magnetosphere of
Earth.

There are indications that the Earth may have evolved in a binary system such as I have
described in Chaos and Creation and, with Earl R. Milton, in Solaria Binaria. An
electrical axis, carrying an arc or current between the Sun and its small and less
radiant binary partner, would be a more durable and gently changing source of radiation
and chemical energies than the direct glare of the sun today. A magnetic gaseous tube
rotating around the axis would provide a full complement of chemical elements, again in
a highly stable medium that so minor a product as aerosol sprays could not disrupt. It
would be making large quantities of all the substances whose manufacture in the small
atmospheric and petrological economy of "Spaceship Earth" has been hard to explain.
Atmospheric pressures, too, would be stable. Winds would be largely absent, illumination
fairly constant.

It should be permissible to speculate that the magnetic gas tube stretching between the
binary's two principals was the source of the Earth's atmosphere. Most of the binary
tube gases would have escaped into space with the decline and disappearance of the axial
current. The Earth then may be surviving upon the fragment of the gases that its
electric-gravitational field retained. The atmosphere now may be only a remanent halo.

The variety and abundance of the atmospheric gases are what would be expected according
to the gas tube model. A long-time continuity of the atmosphere and biosphere would have
been possible; life could have begun long ages ago (or recently) and enjoyed the same
relationships it now enjoys with oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and salts. The fragile
ozone layer was entirely missing, without ill effects, because the Sun and galaxy were
not striking directly upon the Earth. Indeed, there would be little need for a
stratified, local Earth atmosphere. The Earth could change position along the central
axis without losing its atmospheric and thermal equilibrium. In the early declining
period of the axial current, the pollutant of meteoroid or large-body contacts could be
dissipated into the gas tube environment, and important losses replaced from the same
source. Even the effects of an eruption of the Moon from the Pacific Basin would be
cushioned by the binary atmosphere.

The postulated magnetic tube would be randomly composed. Its gases would be arranged
with the lighter elements nearer the axial current, heavier elements in the middle;
simple compounds would occur toward the boundary of the tube, where the planets were
rotating. The heavy-bodied planets would accrete their special atmospheres within the
tube, even while rotating magnetically around the axial current. But the difference
between the terrestrial atmosphere and the tube atmosphere would be far less than
between the Earth's atmosphere and its heterosphere or outer space today.

It is understandable, under these postulates, how the Earth's atmosphere, so fragile,
might have existed for a considerable period of time. Given the evidences of
catastrophes on Earth, I do not see how the atmosphere could have survived without large
external atmospheric background. Still the Earth was lucky to escape the fate of Mars,
Mercury and possibly other inner planets, whose atmospheres were almost entirely
stripped; Venus, with an infernally hot and turbulent atmosphere, was an exception, but
a recent arrival from Jupiter. All of this is possible, and dealt with in Chaos and
Creation and Solaria Binaria. Scientific opinion has slowly liberalized in respect to
new models. By 1972 a scientist might write offhandedly in Nature magazine that "major
reorganizations of the solar system are no longer regarded as ridiculous." [13]

Recently, dendrochronologists, historians, meteorologists, radiocarbon dating
specialists, and astronomers combined in a most unusual enterprise. They delivered a
blow to the theory of the constant Sun. John A. Eddy of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research conveyed the message: "We've shattered the Principle of
Uniformitarianism for the Sun." [14] He presented evidence mentioned earlier, showing
that for 70 years between 1645 and 1715 A. D. sunspots were almost entirely absent. It
proved to be a period of bitter prolonged winters, when Londoners walked across an iced-
over Thames River, when the Northern Lights hardly displayed themselves, and when the
11-year sun-spot cycle was absent. Lapses of the same kind were uncovered in other
historical periods.

Other conditions may be expected to vary with sunspots -solar flares, ozone density,
radiation diminution, precipitation, magnetic fields, atmospheric turbulence, famines
and perhaps even human energy and inventiveness. No doubt the last will be among the
most difficult to prove. No simple search of the annals of culture will reveal a closely
related trend.

Stretching the uniformitarian thesis, more severe storms may be conjectured for pre-
historic times, in an attempt to keep the planetary bodies in place, eliminate cometary
encounters and still explain catastrophes upon Earth. Thus Harlow Shapley, who led some
scientists in an attack upon Velikovsky's catastrophism in 1950, himself had in 1935
proposed a solar nova as the explosive generator of space X-rays.

Hurricanes, volcanism, interrupted rotation, ozone destruction, ice ages, geomagnetic
field reversals, biological extinctions and even explosions of cometary and
meteorological material on Earth can be rationalized up to a point as effects of solar
misbehavior. Such a theory is possible, but it would be like hiring a thief to catch a
thief. For the Sun would then become sole factor in quantavolutions, in the effort to
exclude other bodies from trespassing upon Earth. As we shall see, there is too much
evidence of other operative factors to assign the whole job of quantavolutions to the
Sun, even though, as a matter of fact, the Sun is the original sire of quantavolution in
the solar system, according to the model of Solaria Binaria, mentioned above, which
begins history with a nova of the Sun.

According to the quantavolutionary theory here presented, solar behavior has exhibited
only effects of a moderate kind since its gradual emergence as a distinct bright image
some thousands of years ago. Before then, the Sun was hidden or a bright prominence in
the cloudy firmament. Its indirect influence was of course always paramount. But should
the counter-thesis be proposed that the Sun was responsible directly for earthly
catastrophes, it would have to be said that its "uniformitarianism," though spotty, was
nevertheless much greater than that of the planetary family descended from the Sun's
binary partner, which I have called Super-Uranus after the Greco-Roman first Heavenly
Father.

The sunspots may be a trailing-off effect of the exhaustion of the electrical current
and magnetic tube. That is, they may be fairly regular attempts of electricity to jump
the gap between the Sun and its binary. In such a case, the sunspots should become less
intense and more sporadic with the passage of time, like the plasmoids and bolts of
Jupiter.

Climate is the typical behavior of the atmosphere over any geological column during a
longish time. Every island, they say in the Caribbean and Aegean Seas, has its own
climate; "mini-climate" would be precise. More expansively, we can talk of a regional
climate or a global climate. Too, we shall soon have a "cosmic climate," since evidence
is fast accumulating of solar-planetary transactions on a continuing climatic basis.
Earthquakes, volcanism, winds, precipitation, magnetic fields, temperatures, electric
currents and the biosphere transact in climatic affairs.

One does not get this sense of a welter and complex of factors in going far back by
conventional chronology. Rather one has the sense that climates have swirled around in
multiform changes in the Quaternary period but then somehow climates withdraw into the
background while we are presented a broad succession of ages in the tens of millions of
years each, when life changed very slowly and conditions of biological survival and
adaptation must have been constant over long periods of time. One is privileged to view
charts in which paleontological developments occur at the slowest imaginable pace, with
only a dozen or so boundary lines where, certainly, it is given that climates changed
and new names are provided -Devonian, Carboniferous, and so on. Did climates, with all
the factors that engender them, stand still for these long periods in rigid constancy?
This would be unbelievable. If in between the major boundaries of epochs, climates
changed as they have in the brief recent past of the Quaternary, then the
paleontological and geological record is far too short, or contains very little
information. In sum, either the world has changed and the recent past speeds up wildly
in comparison with the remote past, or else the remote past is still quite unknown
despite its diligent study over two centuries by numerous disciplines and thousands of
scholars.

Hence climatology lends us a great doubt when we imagine it fitting to the long past
ages, and many doubts when we try to use it for the turbulent recent times. A great many
works on pre-history try to associate events with climatic changes. Considering that
geologists have failed to establish confidence in climatic boundaries and periods, the
pre-historian's failure is predictable.

For instance, classicist Rhys-Carpenter has endeavored to explain as a climatic
worsening over generations the end of the Mycenean (Greek) civilization and the
subsequent so-called "Dark Ages" (an invented period of several hundred years to evade
evidence of catastrophes in the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. and to accommodate
Greek to Egyptian chronology, the later itself wrong by centuries)  [15] . Cities were
abandoned in the face of desiccation; new hot, dry prevailing winds made impossible the
carrying on of their culture.

To believe him, however, one must have a reason why the flowering of Greek culture
occurred under the same climatic conditions later on. One must also discount the many
evidences of natural destruction by fire and earthquake of the Mycenean centers  [16] .
One must cling to a spurious Egyptian chronology, which gives 500 years to Greek and
Mediterranean history that, since nothing happened, are not needed  [17] . Further,
catastrophic changes in winds and precipitation have a cause; that cause can only be
celestial changes, whether by introduction of new Earth motions and land forms, or by
solar-system particle-outputs. If the Alaskan musk contains the swept-in plant and
animal life of large areas and the species it contains are modern, then one should
suspect that sooner or later, as Hibben has opined, humans, even clothed and deep-
frozen, should turn up by accident or deliberate excavation. Already, several pre-" Ice
Age" settlements have been uncovered within the arctic circle by Americans and Russians.
Rodents and mammoths froze quickly while eating warm-weather plants. How abrupt was the
climatic change that killed them is unreported, if known. The polar regions were
recently near-tropical in climate and ecology  [18] .

The bafflement of archaeologists over climate is understandable. They follow the
evolutionists. But the attic of climatic evolutionism is stuffed with junk. When a
modish dress does not suit the facts, an old-fashioned one is tried on.

For example, the heat of the Earth has been described in numerous ways over the past two
hundred years; hence, without ostracism, one may propose that the Earth has an enormous
internal heat or is cool -whichever advances one's theory of climates. Too, the ages of
the Earth and its geological periods have been estimated with tens and hundreds of
millions of years of variance and leeway, so that evidence of climatic shift can often
be placed in time wherever it will fit the theory at hand. And the melting of the ice
sheets can proceed rapidly or slowly, as needed for a particular job of explanation.

Uniformitarians employ typically six mechanics of climatic change :

(a) a cooling of the Earth's interior over eons of time. (Since this should have ended
long ago, with the Earth's interior stabilized, a radioactivity of deep rocks is now
believed to be an incessant source of heat from below.)

(b) a crawling up and crawling back of ice owing to pronounced cyclical solar activity
(which has lately received some support by the aforementioned "Maunder Minimum" and
sunspot studies.) (c) a reorientation of prevailing winds due to a manmade or artificial
desiccation of lands, or to ice movements or Earth cooling (as above.)

(d) the "inches-per-century" drift of the continents from cold to hot places or vice-
versa.

(e) heavy multiple volcanism, called upon to supply the heat for the vaporizing of
waters that then proceed northward and drop upon the polar areas as snow and ice.

(f) changes in solar activity, whereby a period of diminished or augmented sunspots will
produce cold weather or stormy weather.

That all of these are explanations inadequate to explain even holocene climatic change
is evident in the controversies and the contradictions continually appearing. Geologist
Vita-Finzi practically abandons his search for climatic benchmarks in his authoritative
work on the holocene. Lacking the engine of a general theory and a time-table to run it
on, freightcars may be switched around at will. In one place he is driven to remark: "On
the assumption that every yodel in the Alps had its echo on the coast, pebble bands are
equated with glacial episodes, truant beds are eroded away, and the uplift of mountains
is delayed to justify the absence of glacial features." [19]  He prays that the
radiochronometrists will rescue the situation. But I have already concluded in my
analysis of tests of time, published in Chaos and Creation, that a rescue must come from
elsewhere.

Perhaps a quantavolutionary scheme may do better. It is not written in some law that
enough time must be allowed to let humans get away, bag and baggage, from the changing
air. Every catastrophe which they underwent would demand a climatic response as one of
its effects. Hence there may have been a score of global shifts in climate within a
14,000 year holocene period.

Certainly the boundaries of the ages would point to climatic change. The onslaughts of
the early holocene mark a paramount boundary. There came destruction of a worldwide
greenhouse regime and the beginnings of mountain ranges, huge deserts, stripped shield
rock, high plateaus, oceans and their currents, and biosphere revolution.

This Pleistocene-Holocene boundary climax is euphemistically carried in the logbook of
the sciences as "the end of the Ice Ages". I treat it as the Lunarian climax in Chaos
and Creation, because of its apparent connection with the advent of the Moon. Hundreds
of titles from many fields are dedicated to it. In oceanography, Emiliani extracts from
Gulf of Mexico bottom cores the information that a fresh water avalanche descended upon
the basin some 11,500 years ago and he wonders whether this was from a cataclysm such as
sank the legendary continent of Atlantis. Tree pollen changed abruptly in the Great
Lakes region about 10,000 years ago, according to J. G. Ogden III. "The only mechanism
sufficient to produce a change of the kind described here would therefore appear to be a
rapid and dramatic change in temperature and/ or precipitation." [20]

Oceanographers Broeoker, Ewing, and Heezing gather ocean-bed "Evidence for an Abrupt
Change in Climate Close to 11,000 Years Ago." [21]  Vita-Finzi reports that a group of
geosols, or weathering profiles, ended their development about 12,000 years ago; the
date is proposed as the holocene beginning for the U. S. A.  [22] . From Israel, paleo-
zoologist Joseph Heller writes of the faunal remains of a Kebaran Site on Mount Carmel
[23] :

     What then was the cause of the post-Natufian size crash? (9000-10,000 B. C.) The fact
     that the crash occurred in certain carnivores and rodents simultaneously suggests that
     it was not causally related to phases in the evolution of human cultures. Rather this
     simultaneous dwarfing favors climatic interpretation. Drastic climatic changes occurred
     in various parts of the world towards the end of the Pleistocene about 12,000 years ago.
     In tropical Africa, India, South America and Australia, conditions that were extremely
     arid before 12,500 B. P. suddenly gave way to increase in humidity.

It is generally accepted by pre-historians of Europe that the end of the Pleistocene Ice
Ages brought disaster to human races and cultures. The finding is surprising,
considering that the warmer the climate, the more abundant the biosphere should be. But
if catastrophes were involved, the reduction and retardation would be understandable,
indeed demanded.

Ruins of cultures are found in many a harsh climate of the world, in deserts, on high
plateaus, amidst perma-frost, and in steaming jungles. (Let us exclude, under the seas,
which, after all, involved a climatic change, one which we shall discuss later on.)

When archaeologists and pre-historians cannot explain the death of a culture by enemy
invasion, plague, or economic decline, they are prone to seek out a change of climate.
But what they seek out is a uniformitarian or gradual change of prevailing winds,
rainfall, and temperature. Centuries, if not millennia, are invoked to pursue the death
agonies of a culture.

The quantavolutionist tackles the same problem with a markedly different concept,
catastrophic climatic change. With the images in mind of an aboriginal greenhouse world
afforded by many sources, he sees in every desert a likely disaster, every tall plateau
another one, under frozen arctic shores still another.

For the quantavolutionist, too, the mechanisms of explanation are available, they are
high-energy forces as provoked possibly by changes in the Earth's motion, a change of
its orbital path around the Sun, a shift of its angle of inclination to the plane of the
ecliptic (axial tilt), and a movement of its crustal shell (continental displacement).
They include, further, a bombardment or discharge of particles, including cosmic
electricity, affecting the atmosphere and magnetosphere that stretches even now beyond
the Moon. And deluges of salt, oil and other dense material that spoils the land.

With all of this, it would seem that the quantavolutionist would necessarily bungle more
than the uniformitarian in describing the natural history of climatic change. He is
using, it seems, many more variables, and the more the variables, the more complicated
the solution of a problem. However, the quantavolutionist has two sources of
encouragement, he can see how futile are the explanations of the conventional
climatologists of the natural history of climate. And the evidence appears to fall into
the line of this theory with surprising ease.

The uniformitarians, in attempting to explain climate by reducing chances of natural
catastrophes to a near-zero constant, become bogged down in a morass of special
climates; every way they turn they discover new and different climates. They cannot cope
with the possibility that in the sudden prelude and aftermath of disaster, short-term
climates by the hundreds are created around the world; deserts are deluged, jungles are
desiccated, lands are flooded, lands rise, winds change sharply, soils are turned over,
the biosphere is transformed; if late in time, cultures terminate, or spring up, or
react eccentrically. Nor can they allow that, if several global catastrophes may have
occurred in four billion years, several might have occurred in ten thousand year, each
transforming atmosphere and climate.

A Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution team reported in the Scientific American of March
1982 a set of discoveries which threatens the prevailing theory that oceanic waters are
regionally stable, that regional bottoms reflect this aquatic stability, and that world
climates can be determined by fossil and chemical balances of the bottom content. Eddies
of the great oceanic currents such as the Gulf Stream occasionally break off from these
gigantic oceanic flows and set up columnar rings of water that can reach 300 kilometers
in diameter, even in this relatively placid age, and endure for 18 months or more. The
ring-waters differ significantly in salinity, oxygen content, and temperature from their
surroundings. Biological assemblages follow suit. Sedimentation rates are also a
function of current velocity. Under such conditions, given several thousand, let alone
several hundred million, years false climates can be expected to be inferred practically
everywhere. Misleading strata will be exceedingly numerous. Once more, we must warn
against the many theoretical structures of climate, hydrology, chronology and
paleontology that interlock in varying degrees of poorness of fit. These findings by the
Woods Hole scientists may effectively administer the coup de grace to the whole lot of
them.

But we must not be carried away with the holistic interplay of factors before we have
explained them. We may content ourselves at this point with three tentative, even
sceptical, remarks. The atmosphere is not stable and has not been for long in its
present state of equilibrium. When subjected to quantavolutionary hypotheses, the
history of the atmosphere becomes full of mystery and potentiality. The study of
climates has been vigorously pursued, but perhaps with the wrong conceptual instruments.
Climates, the benchmarks of atmospheric history, seem to us to disintegrate under
analysis into ephemeral signals of catastrophic events.




{S : Notes (Chapter Two: The Gaseous Complex)}
Notes (Chapter Two: The Gaseous Complex) 


1. B. K. Konstantinov and G. E. Kocharov, "Astrophysical Phenomena and Radiocarbon," 10
Sov. Physics 11 (May, 1966), 1043-4.

2. C. Cowan, C. R. Atluri, and W. F. Libby, 206 Nature (1965), 861.

3. Science News, March 6, 1976; Astronomy (March 1979), 58; J. A. Eddy, P. A. Gilman,
and D. E. Trotter, "Solar Rotation During the Maunder Minimum," 46 Solar Physics (1976),
3-14.

4. A. F. M. de Jong, W. G. Mook and B. Becher, "Confirmation of the Suess Wriggles:
3200-3700 B. C." 2180 Nature #5717 (July 5,1979) 48-9; I. U. Olsson, ed. "Radiocarbon
Variations and Absolute Chronology," (12th Nobel Symposium, 1969; Alqvist and Wiksell,
Stockholm and New York: Wiley, 1970) esp, H. E. Suess; Alfred de Grazia, Chaos and
Creation, 48-52.

5. Melvin Cook, "Carbon 14 and the Age of the Atmosphere," Creation Res. Soc. Q., June
1970. Reuven Ramaty (U. C. L. A., Calif) has studied extensively geomagnetic effects.

6. Gilbert N. Plass "Carbon Dioxide and Climate," Sci. Amer. (July 1959), 3.

7. S. W. Tromp, Biometeorology (Philadelphia: Heyden, 1980), 12, 16-17, 19.

8. George W. Gray, "Life at High Altitudes," 193, Sci. American (Dec. 1955), 58;
"Respiration and Respiratory Systems," Ency. Britannica (1974), 763.

9. E. I. Friedmann and R. Ocampo, "Endolithic Blue-Green Algae in the Dry Valleys"
(Antarctica), 193 Sci. (24 Sep. 1976), 1247.

10. L. V. Berkner and L. C. Marshall, "A History of Major Atmospheric Components," 63
Proc Nat'l Acad Sci 6( 1965) 1215; John A. Eddy, "The Sun Since the Bronze Age," Int.
Sym. on Solar-Terres, Phy., June, 17, 1976; J. S. Sawyer, ed., Proceedings Intl Sym on
World Climate: 8000 to B. C. (London: Royal Meterological Soc., 1966; Donald W. Patten,
The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (Seattle: Pacific, Meridian, 1966), Chapter. 9.

11. 179 Nature (26 Jan. 1957) 213.

12. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: Dell,
1966), 223-4.

13. A. G. W. Cameron, 240 Nature (1 Dec. 1972), 229

14. Supra, fn. 3.

15. Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard U., 1966)

16. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie CornparÚ... (London: Oxford, 1948).

17. I. M. Isaacson (pseud.), "Applying the Revised Chronology." 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall). 5.

18. This has been known since O. Heer in the 1860's. See Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval
(New York: Doubleday, 1955), 44 et seq. Cf. H. H. Lamb, "The Earth's Changing Climate,"
180-5 in Encycl. Britannica Yrbk, 1975; Frank Hibben, Treasure in the Dust (195 1).

19. Claudio Vita-Finzi, Recent Earth History (New York: Wiley-Halstead, 1973), 106-7.

20. See below, Chapter 31

21. 258 Amer. J. Sci.. 429.

22. Op. cit., 42-3.

23. The Faunal Remains of Iraq es Zihhan, a Kebaran Site on Mt. Carmel; cf. Livingstone,
1975 "Late Quaternary Change in Africa," Ann. Rev. Ecology and Systematics 6: 249-81;
Williams, M. 1975 "Late Pleistocene Tropical Aridity Synchronous in Both Hemispheres,"
253 Nature 617-18; Hamen, Wunstra, and Zagwin "The Floral Record of the Late Cenozoic of
Europe," in Turekian, K, ed. The Late Cenozoic Glacial Ages (Yale U. Press); Farraud,
"The Floral Record," Ibid







{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART I: }
{Q ATMOSPHERICS: }
{C Chapter 3}
{T Hurricanes and Cyclones}
{S - }

THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER THREE

HURRICANES AND CYCLONES

An explosion of Mt. St. Helens recently blew down thousands of trees. An exoterrestrial
explosion at Tunguska in 1908 blew down million of trees. The Fens of East Anglia
contain millions of felled trees. Here the trees were knocked down facing northeast and
were buried. They were sheared off a meter above the ground and their stumps remain
rooted. Many were tall and thick trees. No volcano is to be located as the source of the
blast. What kind of a wind was this?

Winds find a minor place in textbooks on earth features. They erode rock by polishing
and pitting it, by making grooves, by shaping and faceting. They make various alcoves
and niches in rock walls. They also form sand dunes in deserts, and blow the sand and
silt of stream beds hither and yon. A sandsheet in Libya, over a meter thick, rests on
bedrock over many thousands of square kilometers and is supposed to have been laid down
by winds of the desert. There are others like it around the world. Such aeolian activity
is allotted millions of years to help shape the landscape; the number of millions, one
or a hundred, is calculated from estimated past climatic conditions working against
various constraints, such as whether landforms exist nearby to provide the material of
erosion.

Tornados, cyclones and hurricanes now and then wreak havoc upon soil and settlements.
Part of the climatic complex of this age, these storms are localized -the "tornado belt"
of the south-central United States, the Japan and China Seas, and so on. Of course,
bearing in mind the "many changes of climate over the ages," most places on earth would
have suffered such storms in turn. When they occur, part of the biosphere is blown away
with some of the natural landscaping. Paleo-anthropology and archaeology debate the
relative contributions of the Orient and the Eur-African world to the earliest American
cultures, for example, without proper attention to the possibilities afforded travelers
by changing winds that come with changing climates, now pushing things one way and then
again another way. So that even when the possibilities of cataclysmic changes in early
human times are ignored, changing climates would carry culture both East and West  [1] .

Tornado effects are discoverable in some places where sedimentary beds are interrupted
by poorly sorted mixtures of rock which evidence by their shape, fragmentation, and
positions a sudden displacement and replacement. Ager calls these storm deposits
"tempestite," after a word that he ascribes to Gilbert Kelling, when he observes them,
for instance, on the heights of the Atlas Mountain of Morocco  [2] . Similar deposits
have been identified in a few other places. Missouri, Virginia, the English Channel, the
Paris Basin, in rocks of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic. Carozzi and Gerber consider that
"such an early generation of cherts in carbonates is more common than generally
assumed." [3]

We cannot figure how often such high energy local events have occurred, until the world
is better surveyed with this idea in mind. But one can "think big". With a thousand
tornados a year (300 in the U. S. A.) tearing up two thousand square kilometers of
sediments and breaking down surface features, an area equal to the total land surface of
the world (240 million square kilometers) would be superficially pulverized in about
120,000 years. If a conventional age of 3.6 million years is accorded the Earth's crust,
the whole of it would have been scoured, not once, but 30,000 times by cyclonic action.
In the short term, not all land would be affected equally, but in the long-term, given
changing climates and drifting continents, an assumption of randomized strikes could be
tolerated. Where then are the scars of 30,000 tornados in every geological column? Or
even in any single one anywhere?

From this we might conclude that we have a great deal of field research to do in
geological history so as to obtain a realistic estimate of the number of events. This is
also the situation, we may as well say, in respect of meteoroid falls, volcanism, and
other high-energy events to be discussed. The quantavolutionary approach to history
comes naked as a neonate, without systematic hypotheses, data, or applicable
mathematics.

If few such effects are discoverable, it may be because catastrophes acting on a large
scale have obliterated almost all localized indications of damage. For instance, if
great earthquakes have shattered rock strata, lesser violence to the rock would be
hardly visible. The schist dropping deep below the city of Athens is infinitely
fractured. Is this tempestite, thermotite, seismotite, hydrotite, turbotite, or what? If
the wind god, Aeolus, blew at once all around the world, many sediments would be
displaced, losing their local cyclone scars in the process and letting no new strikes
penetrate deep into the new strata.

But perhaps the Earth's surface has spent 99.9% of its time in a peaceful state with a
quiet atmosphere. Such quiescence contradicts uniformitarianism as much as it does
catastrophism; that is, I have used above the present "quiet" state to reconstruct the
past, as Hutton and Lyell recommended. Yet even so, estimates resulting therefrom would
be much more impressive than present conventional history gives one to understand.

A final possibility is that the sedimentary rocks of the Earth are much too young to
have experienced all that is supposed to have happened. That is, if the Earth were
100,000 years old, much of its surface would perhaps not have been scarred by tornados
(or meteoroids).

Ancient legends speak of a large role for winds. The sacred book of Buddhism, the
Visuddhi-Maggia, says that when world collide the winds "turn the ground upside down.
Large areas crack and are thrown upwards. The winds pulverize the ground and it
disappears into space, never to return. Thus ends a cycle of the ages." [4]  It is the
extreme catastrophic typhoon.

The ancient Meso-Americans said that the former world was brought to an end by the great
wind god, Huracan. Probably the origin of the word "hurricane" is here. Huracan is also
a manifestation of the great god Quetzalcoatl, who is also identified with the god and
planet Venus  [5] . Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, fathered a large number of people, who
he then destroyed in the darkness of a storm amidst black rain that fell day and night.
So records the Quiche book of Popul Vuh. Then animal gods mangled the bodies  [6] .

"Air" is rarely missing in the legendary and early scientific classifications such as
"earth, air, fire and water." The idea of world destruction by wind is, of course, quite
disregarded by modern scholars. One hears the term "marine transgressions" but not "wind
transgressions." It is surprising how few pages have been devoted to the winds by
catastrophists, too. Again, perhaps the effects of hurricanes and typhoons are quickly
concealed by other forces operating. Or the effects may be interpreted as tidal wave
deposits.

The splintered bones of some fossil assemblages would indicate aerial rather than water
transport. Although he does not follow through, F. Hibben provides a rare passage
dealing with the immense deposits of bones that he witnesses. "Throughout the Alaskan
mucks, too, there is evidence of atmospheric disturbances of unparalleled violence." [7]
The Cumberland Cavern catastrophic life dump shows no evidence of water transport  [8] .
Probably as many collections of animals and vegetation have been gathered and flung in
heaps by winds as by water. In seeking the origins of some coal deposits, catastrophic
winds are a prime suspect, along with rock and water thrusts.

What can create deposits can remove them. Heavy winds, operating tidally or
cyclonically, can blow away pre-existing structures. Contemplating the early ages of
human settlement, one may wonder at the frequent absence of primordial sites. Here, as
everywhere in the mythicized realms of science, there is a vision that is perhaps false,
of excavating sites layer upon layer until arrival at bed rock, and thereupon
pronouncing the last ruins to be the first settlement. But the god Huracan is able
quickly to erase settlements down to bed rock one and more times. The typical absence of
human vestiges before the neolithic age is usually taken to signify that human
settlement began with the neolithic. There is small reason to believe this to be the
case. In fact, there is a hint of aeolian morphology in the near absence of paleolithic
remains except in caves and abris in the Dordogne of France and elsewhere.

The power of winds to push, pull and lift is great. The Hiroshima nuclear fission-bomb
explosion is assigned an energy of 7.9x10 18 ergs. The measured energy release of a one-
megaton fusion bomb explosion is in the range of 10 22 ergs. This is about the same
energy as exploded in the Berringer meteoroid crater in Arizona. "In one day a large
hurricane releases as much energy as a 13,000 megaton nuclear bomb. Some hurricanes take
a week to reach such intensity, others mature in a day or so. And during the time
another may be at full blast a thousand miles away." [9]  Some hurricanes last three
weeks and travel 1,000 miles. (One can bear in mind the immediate transport of resilient
living species around the world by such means.)

An ordinary Kansas tornado will approximate 4x10 18 ergs of kinetic energy. Its power in
kilowatts is 10 18 , "which is in excess of the capacity of all the generating stations
in the United States." (ca 1959) [10] . The wind velocity at the center of its funnel
theoretically may achieve 2000 miles per hour. By the Fujita scale, an F-5 wind, indexed
at combined forward and rotating speeds of 261-318 mph causes "incredible damage."

Electrical activity is so vigorous that Peltier's words of 1840 can be used as a model
for an electrical cyclone theory. "Everything proves that the tornado is nothing else
than a conductor formed of the clouds which serves as a passage for a continual
discharge of electricity from above." [11]  Observers have been inside of this "enormous
vacuum tube, somewhat similar to a geissler, neon or fluorescent light tube, conducting
very low density electric current whenever there is a sufficient accumulation of
electricity in the clouds to make the jump to Earth." [12]  Typhon, the cosmic spectral
dragon felled by a thunderbolt from Jupiter, was anciently described by Apollodorus as
"rushing at heaven" with hissing and screams, spouting a great jet fire from his mouth.
This same Typhon is probably the origin of the word "typhoon." [13] Cyclones and water
spouts (water-bearing cyclones) often appear in groups. An outbreak of 148 tornados was
registered in the United States and Canada on April 3,1974. Sometimes associated with a
tornado are a number of downbursts of high-velocity winds that blow down whatever they
strike, whether groves or houses or aircraft. Ted Fujita of the University of Chicago
compares the downbursts with giant garden hoses aimed downwards upon circles kilometers
in diameters; often they end their work in two minutes.

What might cause a vast number of cyclonic events to appear? A meteoroid bombardment, an
interruption of the Earth's motion, a tilt of the Earth's geographic axis, magnetic
axis, or sidereal axis: these would do, and also a large meteoroid impact, and a large
body passing nearby, the latter, however, being tied almost inevitably to other changes
in Earth's motions. Too, a deluge of waters might form into many ribbons, mushrooms, or
funnels in descending. The winds and other effects of a heavy meteoroid impact would be
simulated if a large number of nuclear missiles were trained upon a single spot and
exploded at the same moment.

The atmospheric turbulence accompanying such impacts must include more than a blasting
power. Its heat can provide the circulating system for a natural instantaneous chemical
factory. The turbulence generates disturbing sounds and sends them over long distances
and brings intolerable changes in barometric pressures. Volcanic explosions produce
similar effects: whether a crater is a volcanic or meteoric effect is often contested,
and both produce tornado and hurricane effects.

During the Krakatoa volcanic explosion of 1883, winds stripped all the surrounding area
of its lush vegetation before burning it  [14] . People heard noises of anchors being
hauled up and dropped, of thunder and beating drums: the winds carried the explosions
across the Indian Ocean where they were heard as distant cannonading. The barometer on a
ship nearby jumped up and down an inch at a time. The air was sucked up so that people
could not breathe. The gases were sulfurous, choking and blinding. The sun was obscured,
and slightly so around the world for years. In the pitchblack day, a Dutchman groped for
a knife to despatch his family.

So cyclones darken abruptly the sky, and bring ear-bursting and chest-bursting drops in
barometric pressure. They explode houses by creating vacuums into which the inside air
must burst. They lift boulders and cows, carrying them off, and they dig up the earth.
There is a hint in cyclonic action of what may have happened to some of the mammoths and
other large-animals that were exterminated a few thousand years ago: suffocation;
lifting and dropping; followed by quick freezing; thence to be discovered in the same
position today.

Winds act faster than water and have the same exponential effect upon the bodies which
they may encounter as their speed increases. Wind pressure, that is, increases as the
square of wind velocity, up to the velocity of sound at least. A 500 km/ hr wind exerts
25 (not 5) times the pressure of a 100 km/ hr wind; gravel then begins to behave like
fusillades of bullets. Kelly and Dachille calculated that the winds created by a large
meteoroid impact will move laterally and vertically with the speed of sound  [15] .
Their effect has to be measured, too, in terms of the amount of debris that they
transport. A single such blast, moving horizontally, can strip its area of passage bare
down to bed rock, or below, especially if it is loaded with detritus, and may continue
its major effects for a thousand kilometers. Only a mountain can stand against it and
it, too, will be defaced; an instant ablation corresponding to millions of years of
ordinary aeolian erosion will occur. Rivers would be wiped out and set up elsewhere.
Valleys would be filled with debris. Great vegetable and animal dumps would be
established in many places.

Waterspouts have been known to hoist and drop far away the water and biosphere of large
ponds; since these events happen under meteorological conditions ordinary to our age,
they must be hundreds of times less powerful than the waterspouts (and land spouts) that
would arise from large-body impact explosion or related events involving catastrophic
energies  [16] . The turbulent atmosphere of the planet Venus rotates in six days as
contrasted with the 243 days that the body of the planet takes to rotate. Its normal
wind velocities of 10 to 100 meters per second are comparable to those of the jet stream
that races through the upper atmosphere of the Earth  [17] . The surface heat of Venus
is of course in the hundreds of degrees Celsius. The mechanism has not been solved.
Several effects of a perpetual firestorm might be considered, granted that free oxygen
is absent. One is reminded of the firestorms that were engendered in the Chicago fire,
the Tokyo earthquake, the Pestigo forest fire, the firebombing of Dresden, and the
atomic bomb-burst over Hiroshima. Large areas can become like giant tornados; perhaps a
planet can suffer the same fate.

Winds can operate like tides. Thus, if the Earth's rotation is altered, the atmosphere
will be subjected to the same influences that cause the alteration and will in effect
act turbulently, that is, out of phase with the lithosphere. They will sweep over the
globe like a tide of water. The atmosphere, if electromagnetically affected by a
conjunction of planets and Sun, will help to disturb the lithosphere and engender
seismism.

Differential atmospheric pressures define the existence of a wind; two clouds of gas,
essentially isolated but lacking an effective "bag" to contain their isolation,
interact. Electric potentials are established. Electrical forces thereupon flow
throughout the transacting systems laterally and vertically. It is perhaps axiomatic
that where there is wind there is an electric current and discharges. And where there is
an electric current there is bound to be a magnetic field. And, lacking a better
container, an electric current is contained by its magnetic field.

More than one observer has confirmed the testimony of a man who was caught in the open
as a tornado passed above him by a few meters. He was beneath a tunnel whose walls were
composed of whirling clouds, in the manner of a magnetic field as this is pictured in
drawings of a textbook. He looked up into the tunnel for at least half a mile; brilliant
lightning flashes illuminated the tube. Where he crouched, the air seemed calm; the
gases stank suffocatingly; screams and hisses could be heard. The tornado, having deftly
raised itself to pass over him just as gently dropped down upon his neighbor's house,
exploding it and its objects  [18] . This small tornado may function very much on the
same principles as the cyclonic effect of a large meteoroid explosion, and again like
the great tube of gases that envelops a binary star system, such as I outlined for the
solar system in Chaos and Creation and discussed at length with Earl R. Milton in
Solaria Binaria.

In the Uweinat section of the Great Sand Sea of Southwestern Egypt, a number of possible
meteoric impact sites have been reported. One, positively identified, is of 4 km
diameter; another is of 14 km diameter. Many extinct volcanos are also evident in this
desolate area of sand and sand dunes, which was occupied by humans until at least the
neolithic period  [18A]. A great climatic change must then have occurred lately.

The region is part of the Sahara Desert, which is also marked here and there by human
traces. The Gobi Desert, greatest in Asia, bears human relics as well. So do the Mexican
and U. S. deserts, and the Peruvian. The great deserts of the world are recent, it
appears.

The astroblemes and volcanism of Uweinat may have been associated with the events ending
civilization and creating deserts. The wind-blown dunes are long, wide, and tall; yet
the same winds have not erased the meteoric or volcanic craters, even though these are
often not so deep as the dunes are high; not enough time may have passed. Aeolian dunes,
astroblemes, volcanos, climatic switching, and culture extinction together can entertain
an hypothesis of holospheric quantavolution, pending the establishment of a chronology
that would prove the hypothesis or temporally sunder apart the events.

The largest deposits accorded to winds are not those of the Lybian peneplain mentioned
earlier, nor those of Egypt, but the huge areas of the Earth covered by loess. The term
itself was invented for glacier deposits of the Rhine and Danube valleys and elsewhere
in Europe. It found itself connected with the "drift", the glacial pebbled clay of North
America, where vast stretches of the buff and porous earth, compacted but frangible to
the fingers, were found distributed. Here transportation by ice sheets and rivers
forming from their melts was imagined. Then, west of Peking, an area larger than France
exposed its loess to geological inquiry.

Loess can occur at high elevations as well as on great plains. It breaks down into
excellent thick soil in China and its cliffs degrade into natural terraces  [19] . Old
roads cut through it, sometimes passing through the Chinese countryside thirty meters
below the houses and farms on the loess above. In Indiana, the highest lands and ridges
in particular have the thickest yellow clay (called drift or loess) and it is free of
sand and gravel  [20] . The loess is not stratified, nor does it contain marine fossils,
and land fossils of shells and mammals are only occasionally found in it.

Sedimentation from lakes and rivers seems to be an impossible explanation. Adequate
sources of glaciers and ice are often absent, as for example near the loess that occurs
inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The favored theory of loess formation stands upon the
transporting power of winds that would carry the material from distant high places or
deserts, operating over long periods of time. But where are the loess heaps on the
fringes of great deserts? There are none. And why should stratification and cross-
bedding not then have occurred? Nor can the chemical composition of loess be assigned to
the mountains of its supposed origins. And the loess grains are not rounded by wind or
water but are angular, as if exploded, and are settled in vertical lines through which
rain readily percolates.

Ignatius Donnelly, in Ragnarok (1882), was already ascribing till, drift and loess to
fall-out from a great comet, going so far as to deny the very existence of past ice
ages, to which most scientists then and still today ascribe these materials. He read
many distinct legendary sources and intercepted many sedimentary strata as stories of
great winds that picked up the detritus of Earth, whirling it around wildly and
depositing it in "intercalated beds." [21]  Donnelly's denial of the ice ages in favor
of exoterrestrial deposits by comet does not appear so outrageous today. As we shall
see, ice age theory has been used (and abused) to the point of exhaustion of the subject
and of the geologists working in the field; it has been made responsible for many
geological forms and events that might more readily be assigned to other forces.
Velikovsky, in a note of the 1940's, before he had himself been subjected to ridicule,
commented that Donnelly had been called "the Prince of Cranks" for his books on several
difficult and controversial subjects  [22] . Donnelly was in fact a superior writer and
lecturer, an intense student with a sensuous affinity for the palpability of the ground,
a political and social hero, and a precursor in fundamental ways of later writers such
as Velikovsky.

Fifty years after Donnelly, Penniston was advocating the thesis of an exoterrestrial
origin for loess  [23] . Citing Shapley (later a violent critic of Velikovsky) and Belot
for having proposed a solar nova as the cause of the ice ages, he reasoned upon this as
a possible source of the material, which, experiencing high temperatures for a period of
time, had its silicates metamorphosed in part to quartz, thus arriving at the loess.
That stony meteorites have differed in composition from loess has stood against his
theory. The source of meteorites has probably been mainly from the asteroid belt in
contemporary times, however, and cannot be well compared with either the solar or the
cometary origins hypothesized. Not unnaturally, geologists faced with a choice of wind
or exoterrestrial fall, would prefer the wind. Wherever possible, as in middle America,
they introduce " glacial sluiceways." Yet we would prefer to discuss the matter once
again when it comes time to ask what can and does fall to Earth from outer space.

Let us rest content here if we have but established several points: The force of wind
rises with the square of its velocity, with correspondingly large effects upon the
landscape. Hurricanes must be associated with every abrupt and intensive geological
event. Cyclones convey major electrical and fire phenomena. In large-scale catastrophic
events, a great many typhoons could originate to accommodate changed atmospheric and
lithospheric motions or multiple meteoroidal instrusions. Finally, if the sediments of
the world do not reflect adequately cyclonic effects, the reason may rest in their
continuous erasure by more forceful events which themselves require identification.
Furthermore, assigned geological times may be too long; maybe not enough events have
happened to flesh out the skeletal ages.




{S : Notes (Chapter Three: Hurricanes and Cyclones)}
Notes (Chapter Three: Hurricanes and Cyclones) 


1. Cf. C. L. Riley et al, Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts
(Austin, Tex.: U. of Texas, 1971) 302 et passim.

2. Derek W. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (New York: Wiley-Halsted,
1973), 39.

3. A. V. Carozzi and M. S. Gerber, "Late Paleozoic Tornados and Synsedimentary
Brecciation of Chert Nodules."

4. Warren, Buddhism in Translation, p. 328 quoted by Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision 70.

5. William Mullen, "The Mesoamerican Record," 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall), 34-44.

6. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya (Norman, Okla.: U. of Okla.
Press, 1950), 90.

7. Op. cit.

8. I. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 60.

9. Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965), 6.

10. Ibid., 45.

11. 38 Amer. J. Sci. and Arts (1840) 73, cf. William Corliss, compiler, Strange
Phenomena (Glen Arm, Md.: Corliss), GLD052-G2-105.

12. Ibid., G2-104-5.

13. Velikovsky, World in Collision, 68-70.

14. Rupert Furneaux, Krakatoa (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), 34.

15. Allan O Kelly and Frank Dachille, Target: Earth, The Role of Large Meteors in Earth
Science (Carlsbad, Calif.: Box 335, 1953), 203, 66 et passim.

16. Ibid., 202; Hans Oersted, 1 Amer. J. Sci. 37 (1839) 250-67, quoted in Corliss, op.
cit., G2-233.

17. Andrew and Louise Young, "Venus," 233 Sci. Amer. (Sept. 1975), 73.

18. Alonzo A. Justice, 50 Monthly Weather Review (May 1930) 205-6, quoted in Corliss,
op. cit., G2-105-7.

18A. Faraouk El-Baz, 213 Science (24 July 1981) 439-40.

19. Frederick W. Williams, "Loess Deposits of Northern China," 22 Popular Sci. Mon.
(1882) 243-8, quoted in W. Corliss, compiler, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md. 21057:
Sourcebook Project, 1978), ESL001-E2-161.

20. J. T. Campbell, 23 Amer. Naturalist (1889) 785-92, quoted in Corliss, ESL004-E2-167.

21. I. Donnelly, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton, 1883), 53.

22. "Precursors," 7 Kronos 1 (1981), 53.

23. J. B. Penniston, 39 Pop. Astro. (1931) 429-30 and 51 Pop. Astro. (1943), 170-2,
quoted in Corliss, ESL-003-E2-165.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART I: }
{Q ATMOSPHERICS: }
{C Chapter 4}
{T Magnetism and Axial Tilts}
{S - }

THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER FOUR

MAGNETISM AND AXIAL TILTS

The Earth has two axes of concern here, its axis of rotation between the geographical
north and south poles, and the warped axis of its magnetic field lying between the
north magnetic pole and the south magnetic pole. It is easier to imagine the axis of
rotation; the imaginary equator divides the globe into two equal halves and this
equator marks a circle around the spinning globe which, every 24 hours, completes a
turn.

The magnetic poles are distant by some hundreds of kilometers from their corresponding
geographic poles. They are denoted by the behavior of a compass needle which assumes a
vertical position when at or near the magnetic pole; the nearly global distance that
lies between the north and south magnetic poles witnesses a continuously changing dip
of the compass needle which reverses itself as it passes approximately half the globe
and again turns to the vertical (in reverse) as it approaches the opposite pole. The
magnetic poles are in perpetual motion, seemingly traversing a kind of oval figure. In
the north, the pole is just south of King Chirstian Island (1980, 77 19 N; 101 49W) and
is moving north by 24.4 km per year and west by 5.4 km per year  [1] .

Apart from a certain usefulness in navigation, its extreme weakness may let one think
such magnetism to be quite unimportant. But it indicates the presence of several
important processes of the atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere and cosmosphere. An
entertaining book might be written concerning the effects on life of the loss of the
magnetic field. How will wild geese navigate? Will there be less heart attacks or more?
Cox says that the removal of the dipole magnetic field will reduce the total shielding
of the biosphere from cosmic rays by 10 to 12%, no more than is involved in a person's
moving from the equator to Alaska. Waddington is of the same opinion "unless it is
assumed that these periods are associated with greatly increased particle radiation
from some external source." [2]  This last point stresses the atmosphere-exosphere
relationship, and may serve later on to solve some reversal perplexities.

In 1989, NASA's Magnetic Field Satellite confirmed that the field, already weak, is
decreasing in strength. The trend indicates a zero strength in about 1200 years  [3] .
Relying upon studies begun in 1830 by Gauss, Barnes made the same prediction earlier
[4] . Theorists are divided, some saying that the field hits zero, then reverses, and
then returns to zero, and so on over great periods of time. A few, the present author
among them, say that the field is a once and for all thing: it began at higher
intensity, endured for a long time, then began to diminish, meanwhile from time to time
reversing its direction.

Assuming a continuously increased strength reading backwards in time, however, implies
an enormous intensity eons ago; there is a hint here, to our way of thinking, that the
field was created and sustained at a constant level, and then abruptly was cut off from
its source, and began to decline. Barnes declares, too, that "This magnetic decay
phenomenon could not have been going on for more than a few thousand years, as the
magnetic field would have been implausibly large for a relatively neutral body such as
the earth." [5]

The magnetic field constitutes a magnetosphere which is much larger than the Earth
itself; [6]  it can be imagined as a kind of giant electric globe enclosing the Earth
which is perceptible even as one descends into the deepest rocks and which may only end
in some kind of an electric current which may be running through the core of the Earth
at about the geographical spinning equator, very roughly perpendicular to the
geophysical poles.

It is important, too, to appreciate that these two features, the magnetic electric
current and the geographical spinning equator may be largely independent of one
another. That is, one can conceive of the magnetic and geographical systems operating
even at right angles to one another. We have discovered no natural law that says the
two equators and sets of poles must be close together.

This implies, however, that the two sets of poles are not stable, that their present
positions are a historical accident. But, then, to think so introduces worrisome
possibilities: that the axis of spin of the Earth may be changed, too. Both of these
possibilities have increasingly occupied the minds and studies of scholars and
explorers. Have there indeed been occasion on which the globe has tilted,
geographically and magnetically? The answer today is yes, that the axis of spin has
shifted and also the magnetic axis has shifted.

But before we consider these two probabilities, it is well to mention yet a third
change in the Earth's behavior that would possibly occur without magnetic or geographic
shift. Suppose that the Earth simply tilted in space.

On this phenomenon, Peter Warlow reports that both Needham and Dodwell found
oscillatory change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, on the basis of ancient
astronomical records. Dodwell concluded that three factors were operative in the
movement, the linear drift conventionally ascribed, a decaying oscillation with a
period of 1200 years, and a logarithmic-sine decay. Dodwell saw in the exponential
decay (quantavolutionary exponentialism that I mentioned earlier and in Chaos and
Creation) a drastic occurrence some 4500 years ago  [7] .

Could the Earth have even turned over completely without interrupting (interrupting
very little) its spin or its magnetic field? The geographic poles would be reversed,
and along with them the magnetic field. The Earth could not perform such a movement
without an external assist, whether from an upsetting explosion of gases from the Sun
or from the attraction or repulsion of a large passing body.

According to Warlow, who has however been challenged by Slabinski, the transaction
could be relatively delicate; it would amount to the drawing of a force along the
Earth's path that would cause it to tip over while containing its spin, in the manner
of a tippe-top, a toy that is weighed on top and set to spinning on the board; the top
turns completely over continuing to spin all the while in the same direction, North
becomes South and East becomes West  [8] . The motion performed is technically a fast
precession.

A moment's reflection will rid us of any notion that the action would be harmless. The
atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere would be agitated and produce effects that by
any measures would have to be called quantavolutionary. For instance, it appears most
likely that the widespread sudden destruction throughout the northern regions of the
mammoths and other large mammals occurred in conjunction with a tilt of the Earth's
axis in the presence of the exoterrestrial entity causing the tilt. We can say this
because a sudden deep vacuum freeze, asphyxiation, thrusting of masses of gravel and
bones, and permanent cold ever thereafter, such that the animals are sometimes found
still fleshed-out and diagnosed in certain cases as heart-failures or with blood-
clotted lungs, must indicate a holospheric event comprising an atmospheric and aquatic
withdrawal, the descent of an extreme coldness, and upon the passing of the body,
returning tides of water and wind to accomplish quick burial under muck, ice and
tundra.

Yet, according to Warlow's theory, the tilt, which might have been complete to 180  and
would change East to West and North to South, would require only thousandths of the
energy to be disposed of if, by contrast, the Earth were largely cease or reverse its
rotation. If such were to happen, it would be most unlikely that the two bodies, Earth
and the intruder, would achieve just the mode of encounter and passage that would avoid
direct electrical and material exchanges or that would bring about a full 180 
reversal; the Earth, unlike the tippe-top, could cease its tilt at any angle not
excluding a full 360  circle with its intruder acting momentarily as its binary, and
performing a "loop-the-loop."

Should the intruder collide with the Earth, the Earth might tilt, also, and the damage
to it would be much greater. Dachille estimates that a body 320 km in diameter,
impacting tangentially at a velocity of 12 km/ sec would produce an axis shift of a
mere 0 32'  [9] . Many forms of energy disposal are available, it appears, besides
reorientation of the global axis. One is led to suspect that non-colliding encounters
involving heavy electrical differentials might more effectively produce axis tilting
than would collisions.

Lest the idea be considered quite fanciful, it should be recalled that several ancient
sources refer seriously to a reversal of directions. Herodotus and Plato cite Egyptian
sources of occasions when the Sun changed directions and arose in the West instead of
the East. A ceiling in the tomb of Senmut of Egypt also pictures a reversed sky tableau
such as would occur were the Earth turned upside down. In fifteen spectacular pages
[10]  Velikovsky searches out and orders rationally other indications in legends and
writing of a reversal of directions that could only come with the Earth turning upside
down. The contexts scarcely permit the alternative, a cessation and reversal of the
Earth's rotation.

Thomas Gold once remarked that, if the Earth were a perfect sphere, an insect alighting
upon it might turn it over. In revising Warlow's calculations, Slabinski assumes that
the Earth has to be turned over in a single pass-by at two Earth's radii distance in a
parabolic approach trajectory. He emerges with a requirement for a body with the mass
of 62 Suns. Even if the crust of the Earth is shoved around independently of the
underlaying layers, a body of the mass of 68 Jupiters is needed [11] . We expect that
such an action will be totally catastrophic." Furthermore, "any appeal to
electromagnetic forces that does not give a quantitative analysis of how such forces
produce the required torque is equivalent to saying..." a miracle occurs."

Ellenberger, although a stout Velikovsky supporter, agrees: "Since motions occur along
the path of least resistance, the possibility that a spin reversal has occurred would
appear to be greatly reduced and that interpretation of Senmut's ceiling (and other
evidence cited) may be in need of a raison d'etre other than evidencing a spin
reversal. If a spin reversal is a viable alternative, where are there discussions and
quantifications of its mechanism?" [12]  Yet Velikovsky, arguing the case for axis
displacement, had earlier discussed a calculation by Weizacker demonstrating that an
Earth transaction with a strong magnetic field would affect its axial inclination much
more readily than its rotation  [13] .

Presently, the evidence for sidereal tilts is considerable, for geographic tilts also
some, for upside down tilts little, for stop-and-reverse rotation very little. There is
no way in which astronomical assurances can be lent to geologists on this account.
Conversely, there is enough doubt on all scores to let geologists be open to the
possibility of several catastrophically effective maneuvers of "Spaceship Earth". A
moment's consideration of Slabinski's calculation leads to the suspicion that he may be
employing a rate in his formulas that soars to wild heights and casts doubts prima
facie on his procedures: if it would take the gravitational force for 62 Suns to turn
the Earth around at a distance of less than 15,000 km, how does a single Sun lock the
Earth into fixed orbit at 150 million kilometers? Also, evidence of a geographical
shift of the poles is abundant; if this is not to be denied, then we should have to
supply the force to do the job; if not 62 Suns, then how many Suns at 15,000 km
distance are needed?

The possible occurrence of reversals in proto-historical times may suggest additional
reversals in pre-human ages. However, Milton and I have presented in Solaria Binaria
(Chap. 8) a theory according to which the Earth was in grip of a huge external magnetic
field of the solar binary system until perhaps eight thousand years ago; during almost
all of geological time, it could not reverse its field. In fact, it is argued that this
same magnetic field and its reciprocal electrical current are the present geomagnetic
field and current within the Earth, which have been steadily undergoing decay since the
grip of the external magnetic field was released. This theory permits us here to
explain the principal geological problems connected with terrestrial magnetism.

We would have to assert that the numerous alleged reversals of the Earth's magnetic
field in geological history simply did not occur. Obviously there is no evidence to be
obtained one way or another by atmospheric testing of the field; any number of
reversals (or none at all) might have occurred without leaving discernible evidence.

The geophysicist, however, can search for evidence of the magnetic field in rocks  [14]
. Igneous rocks have often been imprinted with magnetism when in a molten state; hence
they hold myriads of tiny compasses, pointed towards the magnetic pole. If for one set
of rocks the compasses point north and for another adjoining set they point south, it
is conceivable that the magnetic field had reversed itself on an occasion between the
melting and hardening of the first set of rocks and the melting and hardening of the
second set.

Magnetic mapping of rocks is almost entirely of this century but has burgeoned swiftly
and, some say, chaotically. Persuaded that they can tell the ages of rocks by
radiometry, explorers have used time as a reliable indicator of the change in the
magnetic field of the Earth. Since the rocks of the world have exhibited a bewildering
variety of magnetic directions, many "dated" strata of differing magnetic direction
have been assigned to the different magnetic periods, usually forced into a
preconceived mold of "normal" and "reversed" magnetic field.

Depending upon the angle of declination, not only have such fields been noted, but they
have been asserted to pertain to shifting magnetic poles. Some students have supported
the idea that hundreds of field reversals have taken place in the several billions of
years allotted to the Earth's history. One catalogue reports 433 paleomagnetic poles
for 3 to 4 billion years of Pre-Cambrian time, an average of one new pole per 7 to 9
million years  [15] . Since the Cretaceous, says Heirtzler, 171 reversals of the
magnetic field have been identified  [16] . Others have perceived certain intervals of
time to elapse between reversals, 700,000 years, fifteen million years, and so on;
several studies claim that the farther back in time one goes, the longer the period
between reversals.

Some observe much more frequent reversals; they can claim that a reversal occurred 2600
years ago, 3500 years ago, a dozen times during the Pleistocene, and so on. If, they
say, we cannot perceive so high a frequency in times more ancient, it is because the
reversal is not accompanied by a general melting of rocks and therefore cannot be
detected, or it is too faint to be recognized because of disturbances or contamination
of the strata. Magnetic reversals may be concealed because sedimentation is too slow to
capture its duration, when samples are not closely spaced in time and the reversals are
brief, when turbulence and contamination affect samples, when the sediments are dumped
or shifted, and when biological activity is high at the level being searched for
magnetism  [17] . Still indications are strong in favor of heavy magnetic disturbances
in the mid-first and mid-second millennia B. C., with ceramic, clay, rock,
biostratigraphic, legendary, and historical contributions.

As early as 1907, P. L. Marcanton, using Folgheraiter's method, demonstrated magnetic
reversal and intensity changes by studies of the magnetic inclinations imprinted upon
Bavarian and Etruscan vases of the period 600-800 B. C., a period that in Chaos and
Creation I called "Martia." [18]  In 1981, K. Games reported upon a similar
investigation of Egyptian pottery over a 3000 year period, concluding: "Clearly, the
geomagnetic field in Egypt has varied rapidly and by large amounts. The greatest rate
of change, which occurred around the maximum at about 1400 B. C. was about 140
manoteslas/ year... and lasted about 300 years either side of the maximum  [19] . He
did not study directional changes of the field; further, his date of 1400 B. C. is more
likely to have fallen in the 8th century, since he was using an unreconstructed
chronology which is backwards by 500 years.

One important off-shoot of this enthusiastic age of magnetic pole discovery is the
belief that the discovery of a new magnetic pole means that a new geographic pole has
been discovered. If so, and if what is being discovered are true magnetic reversals,
the Earth would have suffered thousands of devastations. A shift in a true geographic
pole (as opposed to a purely celestial or sidereal tilt) must involve a shift in the
axis of rotation, the worst kind of disaster. Apparently some geologists are runaway
catastrophists as long as they can run on free time long past. Munk's title, "Polar
Wandering: A Marathon of Errors," [20]  deserves sober thought.

The significance of this chaos of findings also lies in the association of magnetic
reversals with atmospheric, biospheric and lithospheric turbulence. The magnetic field
or magnetosphere, even though it is remarkably weak in the farthest stretches of the
atmosphere, nevertheless blocks and deflects a host of incoming particles. It acts thus
like the ozone layer and atmosphere in general, as a protective shield. If it is
removed, or temporarily "shut off" because it is shifting, or overwhelmed or shunted
aside by great blasts of gases and charged particles, species extinctions may occur.
Kennett and Watkins claim, on the basis of deep-sea drilling, that volcanism was at a
peak in coincidence with changing geomagnetic polarity  [21] . Wollin, Ericson and Ryan
have noted by faunal and oxygen indicators at various sedimentary levels that cool
climates may be associated with high magnetic intensity  [22] . These may be short-term
indicators, since at least by the Solaria Binaria theory, magnetic intensity was stable
and high until recently and has since been declining.

A sampling of Siluro-Devonian sedimentary sections from the Arctic Archipelago of
Canada reveals a common magnetic reversal. The magnetic inclinations suggest a low
equatorial latitude. The rocks were apparently laid down under equatorial conditions,
and they magnetized rapidly. Unfortunately, if the globe's axis rotation has since
tilted or the continents have shifted or a plenum of clouds then covered the globe, the
findings of such studies must be discounted; all three probably occurred. That is, the
Devonian has long been thought to have been a warm world; the arctic rocks, whether
drifted by conventional modern theory or by quantavolutionary theory, would give false
paleomagnetic readings, and the geographical poles may well have shifted as late as the
end of the ice ages.

Also, field reversal is an indicator that worse things may be happening. An incoming
giant meteoroid may dislocate the magnetic field in the course of destroying life and
blasting rock. Whatever it lays down or heats to melting point will be stamped with a
deviant magnetic imprint as it cools, provided the field has not sprung back into its
original figure.

The complex picture is liable to so many contradictions and misinterpretations that one
is tempted to discard it completely. If the magnetic field is due to an original source
of electrical current deep in the Earth, can such a current be so fickle, breaking down
and resetting itself in a new pattern time after time, so as to mark new orientation
upon the rocks and atmosphere above? Runcorn has written that microsecond daily changes
in Earth's rotation (one report gives 1 second slowdown every 600,000 years) may cause
variations in the shape and intensity of the current; he adds that sudden changes in
rotation would produce radial changes in the currents  [23] . Michelson argues that the
energy required to interchange the Earth's magnetic poles is about that of a moderately
strong geomagnetic storm resulting from an intense solar eruption  [24] .

Meteors have pronounced magnetic effects. Studies to this end by Jenkins, Gilmor,
Campbell and Green are summarized by Corliss, and Dachille has also insisted upon the
phenomenon [25] . Passing cometary trains exhibit strong electrical disturbances and
can cause the same in transacting bodies as in the space plasma. A large meteoroid,
whether impacting or passing close by, will disorder the Earth's electromagnetic field.
Also, were the Earth to change its orbital position, it would behave like a comet, with
a flaring electric tail representing electrical transactions with the unaccustomed
medium of passage.

The most enthusiastic students of terrestrial magnetic changes are the exponents and
developers of continental drift. Prof. Billy Glass once told the author that what
convinced him of continental drift was paleomagnetic measurements. These generally are
held to correlate positively bands of rock, moving away from the central Atlantic
ridge, with time; the older rocks are farther from the ridge. Not only do the magnetic
measurements depend upon geochronometry but also upon uniformitarianism, because it is
assumed that the lava flood extending from the ridge has been of the same volume-to-
time ratio for many millions of years. More on this last point will be brought forward
later.

To conclude these pages on magnetic and geographical tilts, we can state our position:
the geographical figure of the rotating Earth can tilt or reverse north and south, with
moderate applied exoterrestrial force and with large holospheric damage. It has done
so. The magnetic figure of the Earth will tilt or reverse in general accord with a
change of geographical figure, but can also tilt or reverse independently depending
upon a large electrical exchange between the Earth and a massive agglomeration in
space. It has done so repeatedly. The damage is much less. Both types of change -of
geographical and magnetic axes -could not have occurred, by the theory of Solaria
Binaria, until the binary system was collapsing, which has been placed in time by the
present author and again by Milton and myself at less than 14,000 years ago. There
remains a more devastating change, whereby the Earth not only tilts but also emplaces
its poles upon a new geographical location. The physical force needed to accomplish
such a change is many times greater than that required for the tilt alone, because the
rotation of the Earth is both interrupted and altered in orientation. It is known that
the Sun changes differentially the rotational speed of its several sections and some
sharp movements may occur in connection with solar storms  [26] .

Too, on Earth, an interrupted rotation is likely to be ramified latitudinally and
stratified internally. T. Gold has given attention to such problems; in one place he
has demonstrated that the polar positions will change owing to crustal movements and
distortions  [27] . In another place, too, he insists upon the alteration of the
Earth's shape that must accompany a displacement of the geographical poles  [28] . He
points to the evidence of paleomagnetism as indicating numerous different polar
locations over geological time, evidence that we must largely discount.

But hard geophysical evidence, as presented by Hapgood, Velikovsky and Cook, for
instance, supports belief in a recent ice-age finale that shifted the north
geographical pole from a position presently denominated by Baffin Island, 20  south of
its present location. There is a measurable spring-back occurring all the way from
Scandinavia to the Hudson Bay area, a rising area that may be due to a new rotating
figure of the Earth, involving a new equator, and possibly to collapse and sudden
removal of a burden of ice that had been weighing down the region. (Inasmuch as the
great global cleavage passes through the center of this region, one has to introduce
the probability of a forcing apart and expansion of the area between the two rising
elements of continental rock.)

Surely, if the Moon were to have erupted from the Pacific Basin, the Earth's shape
would have been altered, the crust would have been half removed, and the conditions
Gold sets for a shift of geographical poles would be satisfied. A great force moving
southwestwards would have tilted the globe, removed the crust, cleaved the globe, set
the continental fragments into motion, slowed the speed of rotation, and established a
new figure of spin, with a new equator and new geographical poles.

This occasion may have been the one and only time that the Earth changed its true axis
of spin, as opposed to a number of other occasions in which the geographical and
magnetic axes tilted. All the historical and legendary allusions to the world "turning
like a potter's wheel," to celestial dizziness, to changing constellations, suns
standing still, and so on may relate only to tippe-top behavior of the globe. Moderate
changes in time, that is, of orbital and rotational motion, are not excluded, involving
deceleration of the Earth's rotation, whether momentary (the Gibeon phenomenon)  [29] ,
or permanent. Claims of heavy deceleration, even so, are suspect; with a tilt, the sun
may be visually retarded but the Earth's rotation very little affected.

The full range of possibilities in tilts has not been completed yet. Two additional
ideas remain to be presented. The first concerns crustal slippage. The Earth's shell or
crust, contributing about 1% to the Earth's radius, lends about one-thirtieth to the
moment of inertia of the whole Earth. Apparently, then, if the shell can slip without
an identical movement of the mantle and core, the energy required to change celestial
and geographical orientations on the shell would be less than that required for a total
reversal or retardation of Earth motions.

There are signs that this stratified slippage has occurred in the overwhelming evidence
of crustal destruction around the globe as, for example, in the outpourings of lava
found everywhere. Even so, the energy required for total shell slippage (following the
attraction of a passing body) is formidably high, and where it would be applied is
crucial, so that this idea appears, initially at least, to be as totally destructive as
any other means of moving the Earth about.

However, if this crustal slippage were to occur at the moment when over half the crust
was being blasted into space, then obviously the problems of slipping and venting would
be greatly lessened, especially with the assistance of fracturing, rifting, and
expansion. These topics cannot well be delved into here, and are reserved for treatment
in later chapters.

Archaeology affords support to the proposition that the Earth has changed position
relative to the Sun and the planets in recent antiquity. In connection with the human
drive to build settlements according to the prevailing cosmological observations and
beliefs, the compass orientation of the constructions presents highly important issues
in regard to changes in the Earth and the sky. That the earliest humans felt compelled
to address their dwellings and public places to astronomical occurrences is generally
granted. No one has yet found an ancient settlement capable of taking some shape that
is not sky-oriented.

The mind of today's scientist turns first to the Sun, then the routines of the current
Sun -the rising and setting, the solstices and equinoxes -to answer all problems of
ancient civilizations. When the ruins do not confirm to these directions, then Polaris,
the current fixed star of the north, is assumed to guide the primeval builders. One
preplexed writer suggested that the Mesoamerican Olmecs aligned their structures with
the Big Dipper. When neither the north-south axis nor the solar behavior nor a
constellation fits the orientation, then it is that the ancients could not tell
directions well, or that the matter in any case was not important to the builders.

What is absent from such reasoning? First, there is a failure to appreciate that the
desire to orient to the skies was an obsession, a compulsion, an inescapable tradition,
a sacred obligation, a proud duty. Second, the ancients, as far back as we can discover
their humanity, could calculate readily and exactly the course of heavenly bodies and
orient themselves thereto. Many examples of this are presented in G. de Santillana and
H. von Dechend's book, Hamlet's Mill  [30] , indeed this is the book's theme.

Third, not only the Sun, the North Star and the constellations, but also and especially
the Moon and the planets were often objects of sacred (which is to say, all-important)
architecture. This point has been stressed in numerous works on many cultures. The
ancient pyramids of several countries, the design of Greek temples, the Hebrew
Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon -these and all other ancient masterpieces were
like wedding rings uniting Earth and Heaven.

Fourth, when the heavenly bodies deviated from their customary paths or when the Earth
shifted its position with respect to them, then the plans of temples, buildings, and
settlements were shifted to conform to the new order of the skies. That is, celestial
and mundane catastrophes of the past can explain many deviations from present "true"
orientations.

Controversy naturally is engendered by any claim that the planets and Earth have
shifted their axes in million of years, if not billions. Still, every oriented edifice
or monument built since about 2600 years ago (after the last of the catastrophic
shifts, as argued by Velikovsky) [31]  seem to have remained fixed in relation to the
present skies, while those built before then appear to have moved.

Certain claims of "fixed" structures warrant study. The most famous is the Great
Pyramid in Egypt. Recently, the Stonehenge megalithic "astronomical observatory" has
also been widely discussed. The age of the Great Pyramid of Ghiza is in question. It
has been ascribed to around 3200 B. C. and to other times. But no one suggests that it
was built after 687 B. C. or for that matter after 1450 B. C. that is, after the end of
the Middle Bronze Age. The West face of the Great Pyramid, which Stecchini believes was
drawn first and is the basic face, is oriented 2'30" west of true north  [32] .

This slight discrepancy, claims Stecchini, may be attributed to the precession of the
equinoxes, which occurred from the time at which the plans were drawn to the
commencement of work. He thinks that the Egyptians knew of the precession and
deliberately allowed this discrepancy. I doubt this thesis, also, which is based partly
upon the work of de Santillana and von Dechend, and ascribe the deviation from true
north as an increment of continental drift and other seismic movement of the area.

A more important question concerns whether the almost perfect north-south orientation
means that no tilt or change of poles has occurred since the Great Pyramid was
constructed. The following possibilities ensue :

1. The Pyramid was imperfectly oriented to true north.

2. The Pyramid was perfectly oriented to true north but the continuing drift of the
African land mass or at least northeastern Africa has amounted to minute disorientation
since the Pyramid was built  [33] .

3. The Pyramid was oriented to a pre-existing true north, marked by another star. The
axis of the earth shifted celestially. But an abundance of stars can be used to mark
true north; Polaris is the most recent star and naturally the Pyramid points to it.

4. The Pyramid was oriented to a pre-existing true north, which coincided with the
present true north. The Earth's axis tilted on one or more occasions and then tilted
back to its former position when it was built.

5. The Pyramid was oriented to the north-south. Subsequently, the rotation of the Earth
changed direction, meaning that a new geographical (not celestial) true north was set
up, but the rotation was either changed by 180  and therefore south became north, or
alternatively, accompanying or subsequent land mass thrusts coincidentally brought the
area around Cairo to rest pointing at the true and original north-south axis.

Of these five possibilities, the third appears most acceptable within the framework of
this book. It would permit a number of axial tilts but only a minimum land-mass
movement affecting Egypt since the Pyramid was constructed. This seems to be in accord
with the theories advanced in Chaos and Creation that catastrophes subsequent to the
great Pyramids construction did not cause major crustal slippage or a changed axis of
rotation even though they caused heavy electrical, flooding, hurricane, and volcanic
events. Earlier catastrophes involved the major changes in the geographical existence
and location of the Earth's land masses.

At least so far as the Egyptian area is concerned, Velikovsky's descriptions in the
Venusian case (ca 1450 B. C.) especially may be exaggerated; any implication that the
geographical masses moved, or the Earth's axis of rotation changed, would have to be
discounted. His evidence that the Pyramid shows signs of great seismic stress should be
recalled, however. The most resistant material ever sculpted and fitted by mankind was
affected visibly by earthshocks that must have been beyond the present limits of the
Richter seismic scale.

The huge stones placed in circles and lines at Stonehenge, England, can be proven to be
only generally oriented to observe solar solstices of the present age. Otherwise they
display actual rearrangements of stones, done with immense labor, which can best be
accounted for by an axial tilt, that is, by catastrophe.

Here, as at other magnetic settings, the earth scientist needs to take into account
human motives, asking oneself: is it likely that the stupendous collective labor
required to build these great structures, admittedly astronomical, would have been
mobilized if the Earth (and hence the skies) were not exhibiting strange and terrifying
changes of motion? Was the human urge to control the sources of his terror implicated?

Attempts have been made at dating Stonehenge by C14 on organic objects found in
association with it. MacKie is of the opinion that the dates of Stonehenge and other
megalithic astronomical sighting locations would not permit one to claim reorientations
of the Sun after 1500 B. C  [34] . Hence, in Joshua's time or on later occasions,
reports of the Sun altering its route would have to be considered false.

Still, Stonehenge, like the Pyramid, is a catastrophized artifact in the first place,
and bears also the marks of catastrophic changes in its settings. The C14 dates are not
abundant and consistent, nor generally reliable within the span of centuries.

The Mesoamerican sites magnify the uncertainty. There are many of them. All are thought
to have been set up after 1500 B. C. Macgowan, (1945), and now we quote Anthony Aveni
extensively [35] ,

     ... seems to have been the first person to suggest that the plans of a large number of
     Mesoamerican cities exhibited an east of north axiality. Among those sites which
     evidenced some orderly arrangement, he observed that the orientations fell into three
     groups: true north, about 7  east of north, and about 17  east of north; he noted that
     few sites were oriented west of north. In the 17  group were Teotihuacan, Cholula,
     Tenayuca, Mexican period buildings at Chichen Itza, Tula, and the pyramid adjacent to
     the Zocalo in Mexico City. A number of sites of the Peten District seemed to belong to
     the 7  group. Macgowan suggested that a historical pattern might emerge in the sense
     that early structures such as Cuilcuilco possessed a nearly true north axiality while
     the 17  east of north orientation showed up in the later buildings.

Aveni found by transit that fifty of the fifty-six sites surveyed align east of north;
the 17  orientations seems to be prevalent in the valley of Mexico.

Yet Carlson, working on centers carbon-dated between 1000-1400 B. C. says that "Olmec
culture is well-characterized by ceremonial centers, which are generally 7  to 12  west
of north..." [36] . This would suggest that tilts of different ages are represented in
the two regions, or that the Olmecs, who invented the magnetic compass, may have
oriented their buildings to a magnetic north. Almost all of them deviate from true
north orientation.

According to sacred scripture, the four gods who were born of the creator gods govern
the four cardinal points of the Earth's compass, and struggle with each other. It would
appear from the chart that, while north-south was the way human construction should be
engineered, by present direction lines, frequent changes have occurred.

A few years ago, Mesoamerican civilization was considered recent and crude. Today the
view has changed and the same respect is given the early Mesoamerican as is accorded to
other world civilizations.

In 1976, a lodestone compass was claimed for the Olmec civilization at 1000 B. C. or
earlier, before the earliest demonstrable Chinese compass. In this case, it cannot be
argued that the Mesoamerican were incapable of planning their settlements and public
buildings with accurate reference to north or any other cardinal point. In a letter
describing a study trip to Central America, Patrick Julig writes: [37] .


     ... I observed changes in the orientation of the foundations of Mayan buildings between
     the Archaic and Classical periods. Sometimes there were changes within the same
     building by as much as 10  in later additions to the structure such as in the Palace at
     Palanque. This could possibly be a way to date the structures, or at least the
     foundations, as being pre-687 B. C.

One must tentatively conclude that at least Middle America suffered serious crustal
slippages. Or, axial tilts occurred frequently and the Mesoamericans were employing a
method of determining true north (the Earth's axis of rotation) by a means not
dependent upon a star. And, if this technique existed, the alternative presents itself
that the object defining true north itself moved on occasion.

A second study by Aveni leads us also to believe that astronomical settings have
altered in proto-historical times. He and his associates traced and surveyed the
orientations of "The Peaked Cross Symbol in Ancient Mesoamerica" in many places [38] .
These peaked crosses are not monuments of the highest level, but remind us in some ways
of the frequent crude religious sculptures that are to be found at crossways in many
places on Earth, dating up even to the present day. The cross represents the
application of the Sacred Year to the four quarters of the world, the cardinal
directions, the highly significant merging of time and space that the ancient
Mesoamericans achieved.

Teothihuacan was probably the religious center of ancient Mesoamerica, like Rome of
medieval Europe. The fundamental Teotihuacan grid as excavated is oriented 15.5  east
of north. Of the some 30 symbols that the Aveni group have assembled from elsewhere in
Mexico, the orientations of 19 are given. Of the 19, nine are oriented with in 2  of
the Teothihuacan grid. Of the nine, all except one (carved on an outcrop) are on a
floor. Of the remaining ten with known orientations, all range between 35 42 and
80 24'; all are incised upon outcrops except one that is on a broken flat stone whose
"axis points toward Teothihuacan"( TEP3), and another (TUI) that is "pecked on
horizontal floor of lava field." Most of these are considered as pointing towards the
summer solstice sunrise, which is rather insulting to the intelligence of the humblest
pecker. Are we to believe that they could not find the point of farthest advance of the
Sun? And why should outcrops be carved east and floors to the north?

It would appear that either (a) the carvers were inexact amateurs with biases towards
the east, or (b) the larger part of Mexico shifted its axis by 15.5  to the west of
north in response to seismism and/ or a tilt of the Earth's axis in reference to the
solar and sidereal system, or a geographical transfer of poles implying a changed axis
of rotation, or (c) the axis of Teothihuacan shifted at an early time eastwards from
true north and its new position was assigned sacred and ritual meaning, a Holy North to
be imitated, just as the 260-day Sacred Year was tenaciously preserved, without a
celestial referrent, until modern times, alongside the 360 and 365-day calenders. In
the case of (b) and (c), the extreme eastern orientations of the peckings might have
been memorial, without special orientation, to Teotihuacan's gods upon the occasion of
faulting, fracture and exposure of new rocks. The geology and the relative dating of
the peckings are important in considering these alternatives. Especially, the
hypothesis can be entertained of a deliberate attempt to follow a fault line
(especially if an electrical current were running) in the outcroppings. (If the
Etruscan priests took possession of and catologued all aspects of a spot struck by
lightning, similar obsessions may be expected among the equally obsessional
Mesoamericans.)

So long as north-oriented axes were to Holy North, they would be consistent. But east-
oriented axes, if there is no "Holy East", would wander with tilt of the Earth's pole,
that is perhaps from 30  to 80 , whether in the wake of the Teotihuacan shift or upon
some later occasion. The association of the peaked cross symbols with outcroppings must
have some significance. If a desperate speculation may be permitted, new outcroppings
might have become thereby "holy" too, just as fallen meteoroids have become holy, and
perhaps the outcrop orientations might be attempts at affixing the eastern risings of
that vagabond planet, Venus.

A research of deviating Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Mycenean, Greek and other structural
orientations may suggest dates for the construction of earliest Teotihuacan-a subject
of some controversy -as well as point to causes of the phenomena of the peaked crosses.

Finally, one may observe that the Teotihuacan orientation 15.5  to the east of north
could have indicated a transfer of the geographical north pole of the Earth by that
amount at some point of time. This shift is not far from the degree of shift in the
north pole from a location at Baffin Island to its present location northwest. A number
of students believe such shift to have occurred at the "End of the Ice Ages."




{S : Notes (Chapter Four: Magnetism and Axial Tilts)}
Notes (Chapter Four: Magnetism and Axial Tilts) 


1. Paul H. Serson, "Tracking the North Magnetic Pole," Geos (Winter, 1980)

2. II S. I. S. R. 2( 1978), 45.

3. "Magsat down: Magnetic Field Declining", 117 Sci. News (1980), 407.

4. Thomas G. Barnes, 8 Creation Res. Soc. Q. 1( 1971) 24-9; 9 C. R. S. Q. 4 (1973) 322-
30; 18 C. R. S. Q. (June 1981) 39-41; II. Soc. for Interdisciplinry Stud. R. 2 (1978)
42-5, 4( 1978), 110-11.

5. Allan Cox, "Geomagnetic Reversals," 163 Sci. (17 Jan. 1969) 237-45; C. J.
Waddington, Sci., 17 Nov. 1967; Cf. J. Eberhart, "Of Life and Death and Magnetism,"
Sci. News (Mar. 27, 1976), 9.

6. R. Juergens, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," 2
PensÚe 3 (Fall, 1972), 6-12.

7. Geoffrey Gammon, "Focus: Catastrophism Old and New," V SISR 2 (1980-81), 34.

8. Peter Warlow, The Reversing Earth (London: Dent, 1981).

9. 198 Nature (13 April 1963), 176.

10. Worlds in Collision, 105-20. See also, A. W. Perrins, (tr., 3 S. I. S Workshop 1
(July 1980) 27-8, on the reversed burials of Pharaohs, the inscription of Horemheb's
tomb that the Sun rises in the West, and Rameses II at Abu Simbel facing East rather
than the orthodox western way to where, with his false beard, he should be oriented.

11. VII Kronos (Winter 1982), 86-94, 92.

12. V. J. Slabinski, "A dynamical objection to the inversion of the Earth on its spin
axis," 14 J. Physics A. (1981) 2503-7.

13. "Straka: Science or Anti-Science," I PensÚe (Fall 1972), 16.

14. S. Matsushita and W. H. Campbell, eds. Physics of Geomagnetic Phenomena (New York:
Academic Press, 1967).

15. P. L. Lapointe et al., "What happened to the High-Latitude Paleomagnetic Poles,"
273 Nature (22 June 1978), 655.

16. J. R. Heirtzler, "Seafloor Spreading," 219 Sci. Amer. (1968), 60-70.

17. Thomas McCreery, "Krupp and Velikovsky," VI Kronos 3 (1981), 44-5.

18. 112 Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles (1907), 467-82.

19. New Scientist (11 June 1981); cf. Brian Moore, note in V S. I. S. Rev. 2( 1980-1),
38, and 4 S. I. S. Workshop 2 p. 17.

20. W. H. Munk, 177 Nature 4508 (24 Mar. 1956).

21. J. P. Kennett and M. D. Watkins, "Geomagnetic Polarity Change, Volcanic Maxima and
Faunal Extinction in the South Pacific," 227 Nature (29 Aug. 1970), 930-4.

22. G. Wollin, D. B. Ericson and W. B. F. Ryan, "Variations in Magnetic Intensity and
Climatic Changes," 232 Nature (20 Aug. 1971), 549-50.

22a. P. Lapointe and P. Dankers, "L'arctique Canadien sous un climat equatorial?" Geos
(Summer, 1982), 12-6.

23. S. K. Runcorn, "The Earth's Magnetism," 193 Sci. Amer. (Sept. 1955). 152.

24. Irving Michelson, "Mechanics Bear Witness," 4 PensÚe (Spring 1974), 15-21.

25. A. W. Jenkins, et al., 65 J. Geophys. Res. (May 1960), 1617-19, and in Corliss,
compiler, op. cit., GMM-001 to 4 in G2.

26. "Solar Rotation," 202 Science (8 Dec. 1978), 1079.

27. "Irregularities in the Earth's Rotation," in two parts, 17 Sky and Telescope,
(March 1958) 216-8 and (April 1958), 284-6.

28. "Instability of the Earth's Axis of Rotation," 175 Nature (26 Mar. 1955), 526-9.

29. J. Gribbin and S. Plagemann, "Discontinuous Change in Earth's Spin Rate Following
Great Solar Storm of August 1972," 243 Nature (4 May, 1973), 26-7; AndrÚ Danjon,
Comptes Rendus des SÚances de l'AcadÚmie des Sciences, series B, 250: 1399 (22 Feb.
1960), 254: 2479-82 (2 Apr. 1962), 254: 3058-61 (25 Apr. 1963).

30. Boston: Gambit, 1969.

31. See Velikovsky, "The Orientation of the Pyramids," 3 PensÚe 3 (fall), 20-1.

32. L. C. Stecchini, Appendix to Peter Tompkins: Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971), 380.

33. Cf. G. S. Pawley and N. Abrahamson, 179 Science (2 Mar. 1973), 892.

34. Euan W. Mackie, "Megalithic Astronomy and Catastrophism," 4 PensÚe 5 (Winter), 5-
20; "Megalithic Astronomy: Neolithic Stone Circles," I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1976), 2-
4.

35. Anthony Aveni, ed., Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America (Austin, Texas: U. of
Texas Press, 1975).

36. John B. Carlson, "Lodestone Compass: Chinese or Olmec Primacy?" 189 Science (5
Sept. 1975), 753-60.

37. To William Mullen, 1974 n. d. Julig studied the famous Nazca earth lines of Peru
and concluded that they might represent lines of meteoritic falls from which the
(sacred) burnt stones were removed.

38. A. Aveni. H. Hartung and B. Buckingham, 202 Science (20 Oct. 1978), 286-79.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART I: }
{Q ATMOSPHERICS: }
{C Chapter 5}
{T Electricity}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER FIVE

ELECTRICITY

Tertullian, an early Christian apologist, came to the attention of a contemporary
physicist delving into the occult, and he, J. Ziegler, has supplied us with this
quotation which can introduce this chapter and the next:

     The philosophers know the distinction between common and mysterious fire. The First that
     serves man's use is one thing. The fire that ministers to the judgement of God is
     another, whether flashing the thunderbolts from the heaven or rushing up from the earth
     through the mountain tops. For it does not consume what it burns, but, even while it
     spends it, repairs the loss. So the mountains remain, ever burning; and he who is
     touched by fire from heaven is safe -no fire shall turn him to ashes.

Lightning expresses only a small fraction of electrical processes. Electricity is
everywhere. It presents itself in the smallest particle and, some of us believe,
commands the behavior of every remote galaxy of stars. It is part and parcel of every
natural transaction. Perhaps it is the hunger of protons for electrons that initiates
all natural behavior, whatever the scale or intensity.

Earth scientists have been reluctant to admit electricity to their domain. There is a
confined interest in "hard" lightning, taken over by metereologists now, and geophysics
must trespass upon nuclear physics in connection with chemical bonding and
radioactivity. Historically, earth scientists have led the parade of debunkers when
meteoroids were reported to fall or when lightning took unusual forms. Of course, when
geologists stood upon mountain tops and St. Elmo's fire flowed from their beards and
hammers, they could not well deny this "god's fire" of the ancients  [1] . But one
searches in vain for a treatise on St. Elmo's fire, one of the oldest and most
fascinating phenomena continuously reported.

In fact, there exists no treatise on the full range of electrical behaviors related to
geology. This universal presence of electricity in geological events does not excite
systematic attention, no more than it has in astronomical events up to the present. If
one seeks a rational explanation for this neglect, it may lie in the unreadiness of the
lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere to display their electrical history, letting
the electrical be considered transient and superficial.

If one seeks non-rational explanations of an ideological or psychiatric sort for such
avoidance, it may be in the quixotic or miraculous appearances of electrical phenomena.
Bordering upon the religious and the occult, these set up psychological resistances
among "hard" scientists. As we shall see, even the famous subject of lightning, which
can hardly be ignored, is little understood. The latest literature on lightning is still
at the state of trying to survey its extent and intensity, and not even its forms are
classified.

The ancient Etruscans thought that they could discern eleven different types. So wrote
Pliny, but a modern Etruscan expert, Rilli, says that they recognized thirty kinds of
lightning  [2] . Ancient sources that refer to fire often are speaking of electricity,
"god's fire." Applying the modern meaning of "fire" as combustion and conflagration, one
cannot comprehend their outlook. To early theologians and philosophers," fire" meant a
set of qualities exhibited by the "aether", loosely translated as "air", and when "air"
was considered a basic element of existence, electrical phenomena were deemed to be
integral with it.

The large importance given to electrical phenomena in ancient times, drives us to
believe that their manifestations were much more in evidence. Furthermore, although
there are a few indications that the Egyptians may have employed wire on occasion to
transmit electricity, unquestionably they were preoccupied with electrostatics, the
exploitation of the generous and ready electrical potentials of the ground atmosphere.
This I have discussed in my study of Moses.

Lately, the ionization of the atmosphere has come to be studied. Even the ground beneath
our feet has come to be conceived as a conveyor of waves of numerous types, ranging from
the gross seismic tremors that topple whole cities to the delicate motions of the wire
in the hands of dowsers in search of underground water  [3] . Ions are electrified
particles; they affect the growth, fibres and nervous system of plants, animals, and
humans in ways mostly unknown  [4] . Many students think that an abundance of negative
ions in the atmosphere produces a sense of well-being, but that "excessive" positive
ions provoke depression, irritability, and illness.

The Earth's surface contains a charge; it too is unknown in extent and effects  [5] .
The charge is called negative originally because it is of the kind that comes from
rubbed resin, and conventionally because it comes from the ground. On a clear day an
electric potential of about 100 volts per meter of height occurs. The charge of Earth
tends to persist in the absence of exoterrestrial intrusions, employing the lower
atmosphere as an insulator. The charge in our opinion, will have varied greatly over the
human past. Then its variation, as well as its constancy, must have had significant
effects upon human behavior and ecology.

The Earth may have presumed once to have been in the grip of a constant heavy charge,
for reasons that will unfold below and are also treated in Solaria Binaria. It began to
lose this charge, both gradually and in series of catastrophic discharges. Today, solar
flares excite large surges in the flow of charge from upper atmosphere to ground. Too,
thunderstorms may be principally a method of balancing the atmosphere-lithosphere
equation by releasing ground electricity  [6] .

There persist certain phenomena that may reflect this decline of charge. All over the
world there are pathways that were worked out mysteriously (part instinctively and part
deliberately) by ancient men and that are followed today. Michell has sought out the
English paths especially. He shows that they are often not the shortest way between two
points  [7] . Rather they have seemingly pursued geodetic "power lines" which thereupon
developed as religious routine, ritually followed. As with many customs, people follow
behavior that originally had a perceived and sound meaning.

Waterlines have been explored successfully by following the cues provided by traditional
water-dowsers. It may well be that underground water moves along paths which are
electrically distinctive. In other cases, it may emulate the course of lightning that
once travelled along root networks and also fractures formed by lightning. Seismic
fractures also are important conduits of water.

Lightning has been used as a kind of naturally-provided instrument for studying the
electrical nature of the ground. Aside from numerous ancient observations along these
lines, a few modern studies exist  [8]  to indicate that soils of high conductivity (e.
g. marshes) are lightning-prone; that ironstone outcrops attract lightning; that strata
discontinuties attract lightning. So do underground springs; so do areas of high
negative ion concentrations. Masts, lightning conductors, and buried metal pipes invite
strokes.

Experiments by Stekolnikov showed that soils attracted sparks depending upon their
conductivity. Certain trees are stroke-prone, the oak, for example. The variety of
effects is scarcely understood -the fancy dendritic patterns sometimes displayed
underground, the killing of flocks of sheep, the escape unimpaired of a girl enveloped
in lightning flames, the subsequent death of a man seemingly unaffected at the moment of
stroke, and so on.

In 1977 an American physicist, J. Ziegler, published a study of the knowledge and uses
of electrostatics among the ancient Hebrews and other peoples of the Near East and
Greece  [9] . His thesis, elaborated shortly thereafter by the present author in a book
on the period of Moses, maintained that these ancient peoples possessed devices for
inducing and displaying electrical effects in their religious practices. The most
spectacular of the devices was Moses' Ark of the Convenant, which G. C. Lichtenberg, a
German Electrician of the 18th Century, termed a form of Leyden jar.

The Leyden jar is called an electric capacitor. A metal rod based upon a metal lining
within an insulating (e. g. wood) vessel will store a charge from the air. When the
outside of the vessel is also lined with metal that is in touch with the ground, an
opposite charge is induced. The potential between the two poles may accumulate to a
level at which a spark will jump the gap between them. The frequency, brilliance, and
power of the spark or arc (Ark = box = Aron in old Hebrew) depend upon the size of the
gap and the voltage differential that is generated.

The condition of the atmosphere and ground are critical factors. The higher the box and
the wetter its grounding contact, the greater the electrical effects. That is, the
effectiveness and potency of the devices depends upon local conditions that can to some
degree be manipulated. Aside from this, the general electrical state of the Earth and
atmosphere (including exoterrestrial influences affecting these bodies) determines the
overall effect.

In an atmosphere where electrical and dust turbulence were prevalent, as in times of
Exodus and other periods that I have identified elsewhere, and the Earth was discharging
at an effectively higher level than it is today, the incitement of electric displays
without motors, pumps, and wires was easy: large potential differences continuously
presented themselves for exploitation. Electrical effects became essential to political
and religious roles and were subjects of jealous contention within and between
governments. A full social analysis is presented in my treatise on Moses; what may be
stressed here is that the existence and activity of such devices evidences that the
Earth was then in a state of heightened electrical activity relative to modern times.

With the settling of the skies, the intensity of electric phenomena diminished. The
divine spark manifested itself less and less; the arks were carried more and more up to
the mountain temples (e. g. both the Temple of Solomon and the Temple of Jeroboam). The
angels, demons, and mountain gods manifested themselves in electrical demonstrations on
high with the aid of crosses, trees, and poles  [10] . These, too, could not be
maintained. Empedocles, when discussing the four elements, fire, earth, air and water,
says that fire has ceased to "travel", and no lower forms of fire remain  [11] .
Plutarch wrote at the end of the pagan age an essay on why the highly placed Delphic
oracle had lost its influence; he gave the vaguest of references indicating a failure of
electric current, but the question itself is significant  [12] . By late classical
times, the knowledge of arks and of the exploitation of "god's fire" was largely
defunct.

Yahweh became "invisible", who before, declares the Bible, could be seen in flaming
display upon the Ark of Moses. So later philosophers gave new meanings to words:
realities became metaphors and abstractions; thus, the "word" and "presence" of the
divine became thoughts, rather than the noises and signs of electrical divinity. The
profuse electrical references in the Bible, in ancient Near East documents and Greek
Mythology, in the Hindu Vedas -all were reduced to metaphors, generalized into ordinary
meanings ('fire' becomes 'conflagration'), and metaphysical abstractions (the
commandment to worship no other God nor image is interpreted philosophically rather than
realistically). The obelisks whose points once lit up as the eyes of the hidden god Amon
(Amen) came to be variously interpreted as giant sundials, emblems of royal power,
phallic symbols, or sign boards for vainglorious inscriptions. As Ziegler suggests, the
Greek word "obelisk" itself might have meant "ob-el-ish," or "serpent-light-fire."

Von Fange recounts a century-old report on a Babylonian ziggurat, which may have been
the Tower of Babel. The structure can be placed several centuries earlier than Moses but
also in a highly electrical epoch.

     It appeared that fire struck the tower and split it down to the very foundation. In
     different parts of the ruins immense brown and black masses of brickwork had changed
     into a vitrified state. At a distance the ruins looked like edifices torn apart at their
     foundations. Evidently the fiercest kind of fire created the havoc. The most curious of
     the fragments found several misshapen masses of brickwork, black, subjected to some kind
     of heat, and completely molten.

     The whole ruin has the appearance of a burnt mountain. On one side, beneath the crowning
     masonry, lay huge fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcined and vitreous surface
     of the brick had fused into rock-like masses. It is difficult to explain the cause of
     the vitrification of the upper building. Great boulders were vitrified, and brickwork
     had been fused by fire  [13] .

Here possibly was cosmic fire. Another effect deserves mention. A major electrical
discharge in which a number of humans are stimulated, as in a town on an eminence, may
proceed slowly and without killing. It leaks rather than blasts. It might affect
people's minds. Today, a fearful side-effect of electroshock therapy, which is used to
treat persons suffering from depression, is amnesia; whole sections of the person's
store of memories will be erased.

The Tower of Babel was probably erected at a time when electrical perturbations were
attributed, if my analysis in Chaos and Creation is correct, to movements of the planet
Mercury [14] . The arrogance of the builders in attempting to reach the sky was
punished, recites the Bible, but in a peculiar way. They who spoke the same language
when they began their work were caused to "babel" in many tongues. The Earth shook long
beforehand; the tower partly sank into the ground, so say Jewish legends; but also much
of the tower was destroyed by fire from the sky. The work had to be abandoned and
afterwards the nations spoke different languages.

I offer a scenario for consideration. The Tower of Babel was being built in terror and
hope of appeasing sky-bodies, possibly Jupiter-Marduk or Mercury. Conscripts or slaves
of many countries made up a work force of 50,000 men. They put together a rough lingua
franca from the language of the area to communicate on the job. The approach of a large
body (there were actually many adoring and frightened references to planet Mercury
around this time) occasioned the build-up of charge and then a flowing discharge through
the structure, creating a confusion in administrative orders and a linguistic amnesia
especially in the lingua franca. No longer could people understand each other. And then
the whole edifice was stuck by immense cosmic bolts, partly fractured, and exploded.

"Slow lightning" is the geologically and biologically effective discharge of terrestrial
electricity. A "slow lightning flood" may be conceivable, too. The curious vitrified
forts of Scotland may be a case in point  [15] . They remind us of the Ziggurat of
Babylon. Their stone and mortar are fused solidly with the clifftops to which they
adhere.

The forts are much in need of study. The early interpretations of them as cattle pens is
uncomplimentary to a people that lived in hovels that experienced no such fusion. The
idea of brush being heaped outside the precipitous walls, and then burning them with an
intense heat, would require a mobile ceramics oven and vent.

We would argue that the lightning here was not "bolt-thin" and "lightning-quick" but
poured upwards over seconds, diffusing through its medium, ferruginously-mortared stone.
There would have been an approaching unequally charged great body or gas cloud that had
pierced the electrically balanced plasma and drawn away or brushed aside the magnetic
space sheath of Earth. The Earth below would have collected on its highest surfaces a
charge to meet the incoming charge. This would begin to flow upwards. Heavy leader
strokes descending would have collapsed the roofs of houses. A tube of ionized dust
would arise and descend, make contact from both ends and set up a fierce heat that would
scorch its "vessels." A final flash, and then the body would pass or the cloud
dissipate, and a rain of dust and vapors would fall back upon the ground, calcinating
it.

It is probable that many thousands of burnt eminences exist around the world whose tops
have seen the fusion of rocks, perhaps even Troy IIg, the "Burnt City" so-called  [16] .
The famous site, whether or not it was the real Troy, is on an eminence. While not high,
the city would have had many small reservoirs of water, whereas the ground outside might
already have been dried out. In Troy IIg a sulphurous color suffuses all outdoor spaces
and passageways of the town. A deposit of lead and copper melted and flowed around the
town. (It is possible that this melt had been scavanged after Schliemann reported it in
the 1880's and the discoloration was all that was discoverable when the Blegen
expedition re-excavated the site in the 1930's).

No human hand could have or would have set such a fire. The heat was fierce. The ash was
far too abundant for a deliberate fire from local materials, and carried a red color. In
places it was like calcinated rock, a meter or more in depth, perhaps like the vitrified
Scottish forts. No one would have wanted to destroy precious metals (not so mention even
more precious metal left in abundance in the scorched houses and the Treasure of Priam,
found on a Wall). Noteworthy is the absence of human and animal skeletal material in the
ruins. Either they turned to dust from the heat, or the electrical build-up was sensed,
as it is by animals before earthquakes for example, and they fled from the hill onto the
plain where the sensations were absent.

Perhaps a heavily charged cosmic body was approaching or was near the Earth with an
opposite charge or inducing one to collect on Earth; this would cause numerous
discharges. Every eminence, one might imagine, would offer an exit for lightning,
especially if it held the slightest metallic component, and were not surrounded by damp
lowlands. Buildings are not needed.

If settlements seem to have been affected by slow lightning flood, unsettled eminence
should often have endured the same experience. I have explored as a candidate a conical
hill of Stylida, Naxos, Greece (Alt. 152m)  [17] . The top is a hard silicate with bits
of ferruginous rock in the eroded (burst?) rubble. It nests among loose, hardly
consolidated rocks that have fast fallen away from the columnar core. This phenomenon is
usually seen as an ancient metamorphosis. Somehow the temperature of water-laden deep
limestones and granites mounted and caused them to nearly melt and to rise. Limestone is
a common environment of silicification. Silification is abundant around igneous
metamorphism. In a hot and fast reaction, siliceous fluid is introduced hydrothermally
and replaces the host rock, such as limestone, into which it intrudes.

Such is the case where an electric charge is seeking an exit from far below. With or
without water, a hot electric discharge current can assemble and proceed quickly up the
core of a hill, heating and silicifying as it move. On top of the hill, it forms a cap
just as caps will form on the sparking end of a discharging rod. The charge, that is,
uses the plastically flowing rock as a conductor and then builds a deposit from which it
may discharge more easily.

The taller the mountain, the less time and chance for the siliceous fluid to reach and
cap its peak. At the same time, electricity of this type may even build mountains.
Juergens has suggested that mounds may have been formed on the planet Mars by the same
process. An electrical process may also be involved in the vigorously erupting mountains
of Io, satellite of Jupiter. These are casting material to heights of several hundred
kilometers from caldera-like structures. Unless Io is newly emplaced, all water or
carbon dioxide would have long ago been exhausted as propellent media. Spectroscopy
evidences no water on Io, moreover. Sulfur would be too heavy to gain the speed of
eruption required for such lofty explosions.

Therefore, Thomas Gold turns to the electric current of 5x10 6 amperes that cyclones
upwards from the Jovian surface arguing that it is "largely conducted through the body
of Io  [18] . The current contracts along a narrow tube of passage which is kept hot and
therefore more conductive. As it emerges into cold space, the current encounters
conductive resistance and, hence, forms heat spots of several thousands of degrees
kelvin. "Most current spots are likely to be volcanic calderas, either provided by
tectonic events within Io or generated by the current heating itself." The electric
volcanism is steadied by the "accurately repeating" electric arc from Jupiter. So now we
find here a model for processes that may once have occurred on Earth as well, supposing
a sufficiently intense terrestrial discharge were occurring at a weak spot for even a
few days.

The "slow lightning" may shape not only eminences but also subterranean cavities. Von
Fange writes that "The same phenomenon has been observed in the mounds and barrows of
the British Isles. Some have at one time been filled with an intense heat. Their walls
are melted and their contents fused. The stones of the innermost cell of a long barrow
near Maughold on the Isle of Man have been fused together like the mysterious vitrified
towers of Scotland and elsewhere." [19] Many Egyptian tombs and the interiors of
pyramids are scarred by intense heat. Caliche (CaCO3) adhering to bones and rock
undersides in a California burial cairn provide radiometric dates of 19,000 to 21,000
years, whereas archaeological estimates of the many such cairns give 5,000 B. P. or less
[20] .

The famed caves of Aquitaine (France) [21]  whose primeval users carved and sculpted
images upon the walls, may surprise the naive visitor. One expects to find a general
similarity of the interiors. Not at all. Each interior is unique. Some are serpentine,
others like grand ballrooms; some have magnificent silicate columns and startling
naturally formed shapes; others are plain and dull, save for the signs of human
occupancy. All are of limestone; all are elevated, if only slightly, above the flat
river and stream valleys around.

Why are they so different? Caves are said to be formed by the percolation of water
through weak stone, cracked stone, or interstices of layers of stone. The filtering
drops become trickles, and then streams. The cavity is enlarged. The river deviates or
dries up and the interior is prepared for occupancy. Time elapsed may be "millions of
years."

However, Worrad reports that limestone caves can be rapidly formed by water -"that in
one year a cave of 3ft. x 6ft. cross section x 120ft. long would be formed per square
mile of the surface," and opines that the Deluge [not to mention other floods] provided
huge amounts of water for limestone solution and cave foundation  [22] . Dripstone would
be formed rapidly, too. A National Geographic Magazine photograph (1953) carried a
picture of a bat "entombed" inside a stalagmite, which, therefore, could not have formed
at the "0.001 inch per annum or so rates " usually assumed  [23] . In Brixham caves
(Devonshire), the bones of fossil mammals, of the types drawn in the Caves of Dordogne,
are stuck in the ceiling -so writes a correspondent, U. E. Ramage, to this author -as
well as in the sides and floor. In as much as these species' extinctions were quite
recent, this shows that it may not take long to hollow out a cave. Furthermore, the
small cave is "prettily ornamented with concrete growths." [24]  So we would appear to
have a very recent catastrophic bone assemblage of animals, then or soon extincted as
species, followed by a geologically instant cave-making, and prompt furbishing with
stalagmites and stalagtites.

Although water may quickly hollow out caves, the role of electricity is not to be
ignored. Electric fields, as Asakawa has demonstrated experimentally, enhances heat
transfer in nearby gases ( up to 1.5 times); liquids (up to 2.0 times) and solids (up to
1.6 times), depending upon the positioning of electrodes and the strength of the applied
fields  [25] . Perhaps caves are ancient hotspots, electrical calderas, where creation
time is shortened by the blasting impatience of electrical arc currents.



{S : Notes (Chapter Five: Electricity)}
Notes (Chapter Five: Electricity) 

1. Cf. 44 abstracts of such experiences in Wm. Corliss, Sourcebook GLD-001 to 044, GI-81
to 110.

2. Pliny, Natural History, Rockham tr. (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967), II. LIII; N.
Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Florence: Giuntina, 1964).

3. Guy Underwood, The Pattern of the Past (London: Abacus, 1972) Treats dowsing,
electricity, geodetic lines, and cultural associations all together.

4. Fred Soyka and Alan Edmonds, The Ion Effect (Toronto: Seal Books, 1978); S. W. Tromp,
op. cit., 112-5.

5. Fernando Sanford, Terrestrial Electricity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U. Press,
1931), Chapter 4.

6. "Solar Activity and Terrestrial Thunderstorms," 81 New Scientists (1979), 256.

7. A View Over Atlantis, (1969).

8. See the survey of unusual ground effects by B. L. Goodlet, J. Inst. of Elec. Eng. 81
(1937), 1-26.

9. Jerry Ziegler (pseud. Zeromiah II), YHWH, Princeton: Metron Publns., 1977.

10. Ibid., 53ff.

11. Hock, God in Greek Philosophy, 99, cited in Ziegler.

12. "Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers," IV, 56. See Ziegler, Chapter 19.

13. Erich A. von Fange, "Strange Fire on the Earth," 12 Creat. Res. Soc. Q. (Dec. 1975),
132.

14. Op. cit., 210 ff.

15. James Anderson, 5 Archaelogia (1777), 241-66; ibid., (1980), 87-99. and see the
materials reprinted in W. R. Corliss, Strange Artifacts (Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook
Project, 1974) vols. M-1, M-2, under "Forts."

16. A. de Grazia, "Paleo-Calcinology: Destruction by Fire in Pre-Historic and Ancient
Times." I Kronos (April 1975), 25-36; II Kronos (August, 1975), 63-71.

17. The author thanks geologists Dr. Gerd Roesler and Dr. Poul Andriessen, who aided me
notwithstanding their scepticism.

18. "Electrical Origin of the Outbursts of Io," 206 Sci (30 Nov. 1979), 107 1-3. On
sulphur as the medium, cf. Guy J. Consolmagno, "Sulfur Volcanos on Io," 205 Sci (27 July
1979), 396-7.

19. Op. cit., 132.

20. P. J. Wilke, "Cairn Burials of the California Deserts," 43 Amer. Antiquity (1978),
444-8.

21. Inter alia cf. J. P. Rigaud and B. Vanderneersch, eds., Sud-Ouest (Aquitaine et
Charente): Livret-Guide de 1' Excursion A4, IX CongrÚs U. I. S. P. R. Paris, 1976.

22. Worrad, Creat. Sci. Res. Q. 197; see also letters by D. Cardona and B. Raymond in 3
PensÚe (Winter, 1973), 48-50; and E. L. Williams and R. J. Herdklotz "Solution and
Deposition of Calcium Carbonate in a Laboratory Situation," 13 Creat. Res. Sci. Q.
(March 1977), 192-9.

23. Ltr. of Felix Fernando, III PensÚe (1973), 50, citing Nat. Geog. (Oct. 1953).

24. 8 Sept. 1967 from Ceylon; Villey Aellen And P. Strinati, Guide des Grottes d'Europe
(Paris: Delachaux, 1975), 130.

25. Y. Asakawa, "Promotion and retardation of heat transfer by electric fields," 261
Nature (20 May 1976), 220-1.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART I: }
{Q ATMOSPHERICS: }
{C Chapter 6}
{T Cosmic and Terrestrial Lightning}
{S - }

THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER SIX

COSMIC AND TERRESTRIAL LIGHTNING

A powerful, highly developed and mysterious people of ancient Italy, the Etruscans,
believed in the strictest set of relationships between the small Earth and the great and
divine Universe  [1] . They planned their cities astronomically, as did all early
peoples, but, more specifically, worshiped lightning and gave "the thunderbolting god"
Jupiter to the Romans. They founded a College of Lightning Arts (ars fulminum) at Visul.
When a bolt of lightning struck, the ground became at that instant hallowed; no one
might disturb it until priests made a site inspection and had concluded which of thirty
types of lightning it was and what should be done about it  [2] .

They dug wells to receive lightning and marked the wells with the bidental symbol of
Jupiter (Zeus), a two-pronged spear. Zeus has been variously portrayed as the hurler of
cosmic lightning, with a two or three-pronged spear, and even hurling a bolt whose shape
was not forked lightning but like an American football, a plasmoid perhaps, a kind of
lightning bomb  [3] .

All mountains were sacred to thunderbolting Jupiter. Seneca, the Roman stoic and
dramatist, has him dissolving mountain ranges with his bolts  [4] . The Bible says the
same of Yahweh, all this and more.

Psalm 97 gives us :
     
     "His lightnings lighten the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like
     wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth."

The Babylonians speak so of Marduk, the Indians of Shiva, the Persians of Mazda. Other
gods played with lightning and fire -Hephaistos, Apollo, Hermes, etc. but Jupiter was
the overwhelming lightning god. Giambattista Vico believed that lightning was less on
Earth in the damp age of Saturn, before Jupiter, because of deluges. It is noteworthy
that satellite maps of terrestrial lightning published this year (1981) by Orville and
Vonnegut show a dearth of discharges upon oceanic surfaces [5] . Satellites have also
shown that a realm of lightning bolts a thousand times more powerful than the ordinary
terrestrial bolts dominates the upper atmosphere  [6] .

The Etruscans said that their great city of Volsinium, by what is now Lago Bolsena, was
destroyed by a thunderbolt of Mars. They believed that a portent or an inducement to the
awful act came from rituals performed by their King  [7] . This was about the time that
Rome was founded, likely by near descendants of fugitives from grave disasters in the
Near East  [8] . The famous Seven Hills of Rome themselves may be a set of extinct
volcanos, according to an early French geologist. Since few scientists believe in cosmic
thunderbolts, this report of Lake Bolsena has never been thoroughly investigated. The
Italian anthropologist-geologist Leonardi assured me that the lake basin is a typical
extinct volcano. Velikovsky accepted the lightning thesis  [9] . Geographer Donald
Patten calls it a meteoric crater-lake because it lacks a volcano talus, is oval shaped,
7x9 miles, and is bottomed by lava and ash  [10] . Until an intensive investigation is
made, Leonardi's expertness must weigh heavily in our judgement.

J. E. Strickling has guided the author to a passage in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews(
I, 240) where, it is said, " the day whereon God visited him (Abraham) was exceedingly
hot, for He had bored a hole in hell, so that its heat might reach as far as the
earth..." Was this hole dug by a meteoroid impact, a lightning stroke (downwards or
upwards), or a volcanic outburst? That it would have been a sudden occurrence, and that
other studies indicate probably exoterrestrial (hence volcanic) disturbances in
Abraham's time and that Abraham's God was a God of lightning are bits of fact to
consider with the larger mosaic being pieced together here.

Archaeologist Nicola Rilli dug in one location at Prato (near Florence) and found three
distinct heavy ash layers defining three distinct periods of prehistory  [11] . He found
a small silo grain, intact but carbonized, a fact that he ascribed to a great fire that
had been suffocated. Lightning fires may have played a role in the burnings.

Recent astrophysical opinion regards Jupiter as a hot hyper-active planet that exchanges
bolts with its satellite Io over a distance of 50,000 miles. The bolts are frequent
enough to be an arc or current. Strangely, Pliny described great thunderbolts as the
"fire of the three upper planets," not to be confused with terrestrial lightning  [12] .
Today lightning could not discharge over the great distance between Jupiter and Earth,
not unless Jupiter were to explode, a great cloud of gases that would drift between the
planets and provide a conductor for the electric spark. Something akin to discharge can
affect the Earth and Sun, though, when the great planet is in conjunction with Earth and
Sun, as Gribben and Plageman have propounded  [13] .

However, according to the theory of Solaria Binaria which we have advanced in another
book, the two bodies were once nearer, there were remnants of a gaseous envelope between
Sun and Jupiter, and there were sporadic efforts to push through discharges along the
defunct axis of an electrical current that had once connected the bodies. Since Earth
was descending upon this axis, which became the ecliptic plane it may have experienced
the reported Jovian bolts. These would still be discharging from time to time, seeking
to make contact with the Sun and being short-circuited by Earth and probably other
intervening bodies.

It may be surmised, too, that, upon the nova and fission of Super-Saturn (Saturn-
Jupiter), not only would water and debris be discharged into interplanetary space, but
also gases that would temporarily afford Jupiter its chance to earn its reputation as
the discharger of interplanetary thunderbolts. Not until the arc flashes had quite
disappeared, the gaseous medium had been quite dissipated, and the Earth drifted out of
its binary-locked, conjunctive orbit with Jupiter would the cosmic lightning cease to
threaten the Earth with a bolt from the blue.

Replacing the binary current and magnetic gas tube were two contemporary phenomena: the
solar winds and the space plasma. The solar winds are not a current, but are unfocussed
particle flows and blasts. They diffuse into space rather than concentrate upon the
planets. Earth receives only a very small fraction of the solar radiance.

The space plasma that surrounds the planets is composed of dissociated ionized atoms
that generally do not assemble in electrical charges  [14] . It protects the Earth and
other planets from inducing and suffering repeated cosmic discharges. And it prevents
leakage of the remaining charge of Earth, which may indeed be building up.

However, the space sheath or magnetosphere of the Earth cannot suffice as a buffer when
large or fast erratic bodies approach. In the Venusian catastrophe, cosmic lightning
played a heavy role. Cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky's reconstruction,
encountered the Earth in the spring of 1453 B. C. and followed roughly its orbit for
some days. The comet with its millions of miles of tail appeared and reappeared as the
Earth continued with interruptions its rotation. On the second approach, after six days
had passed, a gigantic column towered into the sky, a pillar of smoke by day and of fire
by night, as Exodus 14: 19 describes it.

     This stage was accompanied by violent and incessant discharges between the atmosphere of
     the tail and the terrestrial atmosphere. When the tidal waves rose to their highest
     point, and the seas were torn apart, a tremendous spark flew between the earth and the
     globe of the comet, which instantly pushed down the miles-high billows. Meanwhile, the
     tail of the comet and its head, having become entangled with each other by their close
     contact with the earth, exchanged violent discharges of electricity. It looked like a
     battle between the brilliant globe and the dark column of smoke. In the exchange of
     electrical potentials, the tail and the head were attracted one to the other and
     repelled one from the other. From the serpentlike tail extensions grew, and it lost the
     form of a column. It looked now like a furious animal with legs and with many heads. The
     discharges tore the column to pieces, a process that was accompanied by a rain of
     meteorites upon the earth. It appeared as though the monster were defeated by the
     brilliant globe and buried in the sea, or wherever the meteorites fell. The gases of the
     tail subsequently enveloped the earth." [15]

I would depart from the scenario mainly to suggest that the column of smoke seen
everywhere was probably a mixture of the comet's tail and the "catastrophic column" (as
Kelly and Dachille picture it). The main contact between Earth and Venus occurred at
this point were the main discharge left Earth carrying upwards surface material and
building then and there a "great chemical factory" of Venusian and Earth raw materials
[16] .

Legends from around the world describe this engagement. It is the battle between Marduk
and the dragon Tiamat, between Isis and Seth, between Vishnu and the serpent (or Krishna
and serpent), between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between the Lord and Rahab and, the most
widely known of all, between Zeus and Typhon.

Velikovsky proceeds, after citing these legends, to place the comet Typhon in the mid-
second millennium B. C., at the time of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Bimson has
established the pharaoh of Egypt just then as the first Hyksos King by the name of
Typhon  [17] . Typhon is related to Typhon (South Seas), Toufan (Arabs), and is another
version of the legend of Phaeton. Legends, myths sacred scriptures, and ancient
historians have been mobilized to support the theory of the encounter. That Venus also
suffered is logical; it still faces Earth "respectfully" in "resonance", upon its near
passage  [18] .

Electrical phenomena akin to lightning are associated with volcanism, earthquakes, and
meteoritic phenomena, including atmospheric pass-through and impact explosions. They may
also be an independent "instrument of the gods," as strong or stronger than gravitation
in their effects when two dense bodies approach one another closely. Further, cosmic
electricity may traverse a whole star system or planetary system.

C. E. R. Bruce of the British Electrical Association for many years sought recognition
of the place of electricity and lightning in the creation and destruction of whole
galaxies of the universe  [19] . He described lightning discharges of 6x10 11 miles in
width and ten times as long generating temperatures of 5x10 8 degrees Celsius and
lasting for 10 6 years or more. The discharges occur amidst accumulations of cosmic
dust.

Bruce's colleague, Eric Crew, who shares his views, has given more attention to cosmic
lightning within the solar system and particularly in encounters involving earth. How he
handles electrical problems of large-body encounters can be exemplified in the following
passages:

     If a charged body B (such as a large comet) approaches a planet A which has an
     atmosphere, opposite charges are induced and the atmosphere will be pulled out towards
     B. This increases the voltage gradient between B and the extended atmosphere very
     rapidly and violent discharges may take place even though the two bodies are separated
     by a considerable distance. The effect is intensified if both A and B have atmospheres,
     and even more so if they have opposite charges.

     The effect... is to cause jet of compressed material to form and for the substance to be
     ejected on to the negatively charged body, or the induced negative charge.

     Charges induced in the solid surface of A as B approaches will cause a ground current to
     flow and the resistance of its path will cause the induced charge to lag behind the line
     joining A and B. The electrical force will produce a turning moment on A and B and the
     resultant motion will depend on the direction of the force in relation to the axis of
     rotation of A and B. The displacement may be increased if B has a crust floating on a
     molten interior, as the moment of inertia of this would be much smaller than that of a
     completely rigid sphere, even if the possible tilting of the axis is ignored  [20] .

That is, in the case of the several large body encounters of the Earth, which we think
may have occurred, strong lightning exchanges took place, atmospheres exchanged in
varying proportions, debris flew into space, powerful ground currents of electricity
followed the point of closest contact, and these currents assisted inertial forces to
push crustal sections of the Earth over its plastic mantle.

Ralph Juergens' theories of cosmic electricity have been close to the historical events
proposed by quantavolutionary theorists. Intimately acquainted with the experiences and
ideas of Velikovsky, he worked for many years upon the basic astro-physical problems
posed by the Venus-Mars-Earth scenario, specializing in the application of electrical
theory.

His primary theory deals with the source of solar energy  [21] . It is in one sense non-
catastrophic. It is also quite new and unaccepted; yet, as he says "the modern
astrophysical concept that ascribes the Sun's energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in
the solar interior is contradicated by nearly every observable aspect of the Sun."
Whereas the conventional theory is that the Sun derives its energy from a hydrogen-
fusion nuclear reaction continuing over millions of years, Juergen's theory is that the
Sun's surface bears a negative heavy electrical charge, which it has gathered mostly
from galactic winds and from a great many bodies brighter than the Sun, and which
discharges itself upon the solar system bodies. The solar radiance that strikes Earth
and causes heat is as nothing compared with the galactic radiance that strikes the Sun.
The Sun's bloated atmosphere is the anode; its highest levels are of the highest
temperatures, which go down, rather than up, as the surface of the giant gas bag of the
Sun is approached. Hence, elaborate attempts to catch neutrinos from the Sun's "solar
furnaces" as they traverse the Earth must fail; if no nuclear fusion, then no neutrinos.

The Sun's radiance, varying only slightly as its total charge varies, penetrates the
electrically neutral plasma of interplanetary space, passes through the positively
charged outer magnetosphere, enters a neutral zone and then a negatively charged inner
zone, and finally strikes the Earth's atmosphere with warming and radioactive effects.
(Jupiter does not "need" the Sun's heat; it radiates several times as much energy as it
receives from the Sun.) A great proportion of all the craters and many fissures of the
Moon and Mars, and, though less visible, of the Earth, are explained by Juergens as the
effects of cosmic lightning, occurring during the holocene period that we are studying.

The "plasmoids" which I referred to earlier are a type of lightning conducted to Earth
as "pieces of plasma." These balanced "things" of positive ions and electrons retain
their identity and appear as luminous objects of missile-like proportions. They would
cause impact craters or above-ground explosions that leave little trace. A second type
of primeval lightning, like that known best to us, would give clear evidence of electric
scarring, whether as a crater or as a jagged crack in the ground.

The jagged cracks of clefts are called rilles and are found by the thousands on the
Moon. The principal candidate for the most recent creation of rilles is the planet Mars,
which, following Velikovsky's reconstruction of events, would have happened in the
period 776-687 B. C. Electrons has to be torn from the lunar crust in numbers sufficient
to trigger an interplanetary discharge. The Moon becomes the cathode, Mars the anode. As
the charge mobilizes quickly on the Moon, it probes along lines of weakness and explodes
the surface in traveling to its discharge point. It blasts a crater as it exits into
space.

Again Juergen's theory is exceptional. More favored as agents are running water (now
gone), erosion by dust winds, an explosion of underground gases, and the collapse of
lava tubes through which liquid lava had passed. That these alternatives to the agency
of eruption of a breakdown channel raise severe problem is documented by Juergen's table
presented below. It may be seen that the lightning channel eruption, not entirely
unknown even today on Earth, provides a better explanation of rille characteristics.

Competence of Various Theories to Explains Sinuous Rilles of the Moon

Proposed Rille-Origin Theory Rille Characteristic
 	 							Erosion by Ash-Gas Cloud		Formation by Gaseous Outburst		Formation by Gaseous
Outburst		Formation Lave-T Collapse		Eruption of Breakdown Channel
1.	 Width greater at higher end					C					C					O					B					A
2.	 Channel sinuous						A					C					O					C					A
3.	 Irregular crater at upper end					B					B					O					B					A
4.	 Ends of rille at different elevations				A					A					O					A					A
5.	 Outwash deposits lacking at lower end				C-X					B					A					C-X					A
6.	 "Bridges" lacking along channel				A					A					O					B-C					A
7.	 On-channel cratering frequent					O					O					A					O					A
8.	 Channel may traverse high ground				X					X					B					X					B
9.	 Channel may stray from dip of surface				C-X					C-X					B					C-X					B
10.	 Channel may follow crest of ridge				X					X					A					B					A
11.	 Channel may expose numerous strata				B					B					A					C-X					A-B
12.	 Surface strata upturned at rille margins			X					X					A					X					A
13.	 Clustering of rilles						C					C					B-C					B-C					A-B
14.	 Young rilles may cross older rilles				C-X					C-X					A-O					C-X					B
15.	 Secondary rilles in rille bottoms Erosion by Running Water	B					C					C					C
B


Symbols :

A. Predictable on basis of theory,
B. Permissible in terms of theory,
C. Permissible, but difficult to explain,
O. Apparently irrelevant in terms of theory X.


Evidence precludes theory. Probably the main focus of the electrical battle between Moon
and its assailant is the huge crater Aristarchus. It expresses its recency by a bare
uncratered floor, by giving off light and by being intensely radioactive. The greatest
concentration of lunar rilles is also located at and near Aristarchus. The light bolt
was estimated by Juergens at 2x10 21 joules of energy, "a few million times as energetic
as ordinary lightning."

The likely partner in catastrophe, Mars shares gases with the Moon.

     As things stand, the situation is this: Lunar finds are rich in argon, neon, other rare
     gases, and carbon dioxide None of these gases is known to be present in the solar wind,
     nor is elemental carbon a known constituent of that medium... Precisely those gases
     known to be present in the atmosphere of Mars -the great bulk of which has been
     mysteriously "stolen" away in the not-too-distant past -are also found tenaciously held
     in superficial crystalline layer of the Moon's outermost blanketing materials. This
     would be a most incredible coincidence if the interplanetary discharges described by
     Velikovsky never took place  [22] .

We are only in the early stages of fulminology. Edward Komarek has discovered that the
effects of modern lightning are extensive. When a tree is struck, surrounding trees and
vegetation are affected by structural, biological, and chemical changes for a long time
to come. Lightning also may fuse the Earth around. Fused sand tubes caused by lightning
and called "fulgurites" are common around the world. "In one sand-dune patch of 5,000
acres at Witsands, on the southeastern border of the Kalahari Desert, Lewis estimated
that there were not less than 2,000 fulgurites. Since lightning is at the present time
very infrequent in this area, some of the tubes must have been formed thousands years
ago  [23] . The fulgurites often followed bush and plant roots. Perhaps they occurred
simultaneously and were one of the causes of the desert. That all deserts, whatever
their origin, may be indeed new is a question worth considering. Lightning may descend
in showers. Lightning may instantly fossilize trees; a high tension wire did so too in
Alberta, Canada, E. R. Milton reports. Lightning alters C14 content in trees, hence
their "age" for dating purposes  [24] . Recently various theories have been offered to
explain the mysterious kimberlite tubes of South Africa and similar tubes in Utah. The
former are like fulgurites and are found near the great diamond fields. Probably the
same electrical flows that dug the kimberlites produced the diamonds. Whether this
should be called "slow lightning," and discussed in the preceding chapter, or should be
discussed here is perhaps immaterial at this stage of research. The Moses Rock dike of
Utah is about 4 miles long at the surface, in the shape of a hook, and about 1000 feet
wide. It was forced up from possibly 200 kilometers below the surface.

Komarek has come to believe that "lightning is ecologically fully as important as such
better known factors as temperature, rainfall, soils etc  [25] . He does not estimate
past incidences. If present lightning effects must be exponentially retrojected into the
past, the world would have been significantly remolded therefrom.

Juergen's theory of Moon and Mars belongs to Earth as well. The Earth must have lunar
rilles in large numbers. An unknown but considerable number of craters, "river" valleys,
fractures and ravines must owe their origin not to ice, water, volcanos, or meteoroids,
but to cosmic lightning. In the absence of well-directed field work, not only are their
indications misinterpreted, but usually their very existence remains a surmise. The
present level of electrical activity on Earth does not excite research except in
imaginative minds, like Ralph Juergens, Nicola Tesla and Frank Dachille.

It is well for geologists to consider meanwhile the promise of such theories. Take, for
example, the consequences of the concept that the Earth's global electric potential has
not been uniform throughout its history, an idea that I repeat in this book several
times; consider its consequences for another insistent idea of these pages, that
geological time may be grossly exaggerated.

Juergens argues that the Earth's surface potential is highly negative and low  [26] .
Suppose that it is lowered further. Rampant radioactivity would occur. The half-life of
every radioactive atom would be drastically reduced. Radiochronometric time would be
largely erased. In the opposite case, if Earth's potential became higher and less
negative, polonium, for instance, which has a short life as evidenced in the geological
record by the halos it inscribes upon rock, would acquire a much longer half-life and so
would other radioactive isotopes.

Nikola Tesla's work is acclaimed for its genius. But some of it was unfortunately cut
short by a lack of funds and his growing madness. It went largely unreported and,
especially because it was so astonishing, it was and is difficult to describe and
appraise. Around the turn of the century, after his dramatic successes in designing and
building alternating current electric motors in the East, Tesla went West to Colorado
Springs and built an extraordinary electrical apparatus  [28] . He set up a 200 foot
tall mast with a metal ball on top nested in a 10 foot diameter coil. At a diameter of
80 feet he provided a second surrounding coil. These were affixed to banks of
condensers. A 300 volt line from a nearby power plant supplied initial impetus to the
oscillator. The magnetic field created by the current in the large coil set up an
alternating current in the central coil. Over 150,000 times per second, a charge was
sent through the Earth and back up and out into the atmosphere, discharging as bolts of
lightning.

Tesla thought that such a machine oscillating through the Earth might be tapped at a
number of place through local receivers to supply energy for local consumption. It would
be a wireless electrical power distribution system. This naive and astounding project
has not to my knowledge been seriously considered by geophysicists and electrical
engineers in these years of energy crisis. Nor, for that matter, has the idea of
Juergens, that "once the curtains of thermo-nuclear theory are drawn aside, electrical
engineers will quickly discover that the controlled-fusion reaction they have been
seeking in vain for a quarter of a century have actually been within their grasp for at
least twice that long - that a relatively small throughput of electrical energy will
release the pent-up power of matter on a scale far beyond the most fanciful prediction
of the late 1940's."





{S : Notes (Chapter Six: Terrestrial and Cosmic Lightning)}
Notes (Chapter Six: Terrestrial and Cosmic Lightning) 

1. Nicola Rilli, Gli Etruschi a Sesto Fiorentino (Firenze: Tipografia Giuntina, 1964),
92.

2. Ibid., 94-5.

3. Ralph Juergens, "Of the Moon and Mars," 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974) 21-30; 4 PensÚe 5
(Winter 1975), 27-39; A. de Grazia, Chaos and Creation, 203 for illustration. On ball
lightning see A. Wittmann, 232 Nature (27 Aug. 1971), 625.

4. In Thyestes, a drama remarkable for its catastrophic images.

5. R. Orville and B. Vonnegut, "Patterns of Thunderbolts," 92 New Scientist (1981), 102.

6. New Scientist (20 Oct. 1977), 150.

7. G. P. Pliny, II Natural History (trans. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1967) II: LIV.
The translation of Rackham is questionable, if only because he has no idea that the
Etruscans and early Romans, like the Hebrews and Greeks of the age, were using
electrostatic machines to produce divine image and oracles.

8. A. de Grazia, critique of Enea Nel Lazio (Rome: Palombi, 1981) on the Virgil
Bimillennial Celebration, in The Burning of Troy (in press).

9. Worlds in Collision, 273.

10. Donald W. Patten, R. R. Hatch and L. C. Steinhauer, The Long Day of Joshua and Six
Other Catastrophes (Seattle: Pacific Meridian Pub. Co., 1973), 18-9.

11. Op. cit., 88-91.

12. Patten et al., 92.

13. The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes (New York:
Vintage Books, 1974).

14. Juergens, "Moon and Mars," loc cit., 37 et passim.

15. Worlds in Collision, 77-8.

16. Target Earth, 189ff.

17. "Rockenbach's 'De Cometis' and the Identity of Typhon," I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring
1977), 9-10.

18. C. G. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Fort Worth, Texas: LAR Co., 1976), 117
interprets several studies.

19. His basic work is A New Approach to Astrophysics and Cosmogony, (London: Unwin
Bros., 1974); cf letter of Dec. 1958 in 4 Electronics and Power, 669-70, "Cosmic
Electric Discharges."

20. "Electricity in Astronomy," S. I. S. R. (1976-7) I: 1,2,3, II: 1.

21. 2 PensÚe (1972) 3 (Fall), 6-12.

22. Juergens, "Moon and Mars," loc. cit., Winter 1974-5, 33.

23. "The Natural History of Lightning," Proc. Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conf. (9-10 Apr.
1964), 150.

24. L. M. Libby and H. R. Lukens, "Production of Radiocarbon in Tree Rings by Lightning
Bolts," 78 J. Geophy. Res. 26 (10 Sept. 1973), 5902-3.

25. Op. cit., 171.

25A. 98 Sci News (11 July 1970), 33 on the work of T. R. McGetchin; I. D. MacGregor,
"First Kimberlite Conference," Rep. S. A. F. Geol. (Mar. 1974), 151-2.

26. "Radiohalos and Earth History," III Kronos I (Fall, 1977), 3-17.

27. J. J. O'Neill, Chapter 2.

28. 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974), 30.



{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART I: }
{Q ATMOSPHERICS: }
{C Chapter 7}
{T Fire and Ash}
{S - }

THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part I: Atmospherics

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER SEVEN

FIRE AND ASH

"A 'universal conflagration' (if possible) would certainly not last long enough to
leave any sort of recognizable stratigraphical record, whereas a few centuries or
millennia of occasional heath or forest fires, during a particularly dry spell, would
probably do so without requiring any special mechanism." [1]

Even to speak of a universal conflagration gives a geologist cause to blush, as Derek
Ager, the author of these lines, remarks in another context. Without the "special
mechanism", forest fires, started by lightning, and volcanos, started by hot spots in
the deep crust or mantle, must do the full job of whatever we see as signs of burning
on Earth and whatever the ancient voices are fearfully asserting. If this were all, and
it certainly is not all, we would still have to ask about lightning and hot spots;
neither is a simple autodynamic mechanism, as we have seen already in the case of
lightning and will see in regards to hot spots.

The legendary and early historical record is replete with assertions that global
burning has occurred. Writing apparently about historical experiences, Seneca, the
Roman stoic philosopher, gives a common ancient view of the holocaust:

     And when the time is come when the world destroys itself to be renewed, then (Earth,
     seas and life) will destroy themselves by their own strength. Stars will fall upon
     stars. And when all material things are in flames, everything which now shines
     according to a planned distribution will rise up into a single fire  [2] .

Of course, Seneca does not declare that a stratigraphical record will be thereafter
available; the Earth is "renewed," which implies that few marks would have been left
upon the rocks and no bed of ashes would have formed and persisted. Where are the ashes
of single or multiple events, for that matter? Sometimes they are present, sometimes
not. In certain parts of the world, extensive beds of ashes of possibly local type can
be found. They are thin. We can find the ashes of Troy, on several levels of
destruction, but can the ashes of the countryside around be found? If not found, does
that means that Troy alone was burned, or that ruined Troy alone preserves its ashes?
Paleocalcinology -such a science hardly exists -will help us someday to measure the
words of Ager and Seneca.

The "ordinary" fire mechanism of volcanos and forest fires sometimes incite rains, but
these are hardly conspicuous. On the other hand, the legendary coupling of fire and
water is so flagrant as to pass notice, except when a progressive rabbi, for example,
finds it easy to explain to his children why the heavens are of fire and water; ish-
vamayin (fire and water) make up shamyin (heaven) because the ancients thought of
sunlight as fire, and the rains, of course, come from the sky  [3] .

G. R. Carli, writing in 1780, was already asserting that "the idea of a deluge of fire
and a deluge of water was present among all peoples... This idea of fire and water...
seems to recall tradition of an event of which the memory has endured. It is certainly
odd that the indications manifested by a seaflood should have suggested the idea of a
deluge of fire  [4] . Carli cites Clement of Alexandria for the observations that
Stenelas, father of the king of the Ligurians, lived at the time of the fire of Phaeton
and the flood of Deucalion. So fire and flood occurred together. Reasoning from effect
to cause, Carli then assigns the coal deposits of the world to burning and water acting
in quick succession, a theory now coming into prominence again. He argues that only a
comet could burn up the world, drop vast amounts of water, and bring great tides at the
same time. Probably this line of argument will stand up: a large body encountering
Earth, even if it were not dropping water or ice, would bring both conflagration and
flood. Whether it crashed or not, the effects would still be similar. Donnelly produces
an abundance of legendary accounts of the world in flames: from Druid mythology,
Hesiod's Greek account, the Eddas of Scandinavia, Ovid's Roman account of Phaeton, the
meso-American Toltecs' Codex Chimalpopoca, the Persians' Zend-Avesta, the Hindus' myth
of Ravana and Sita, and the legends of the Tupi, Aztecs, Tacullies, Ute, Peruvian,
Yurucares, Mbocobi, Botocudos, Ojibway, Wayandot, and Dog-Rib Indians, that is from one
end of the Americas to the other, and across both continents. He quotes the Gothic Surt
of the flaming sword, "He shall give up the universe a prey to the flames," and also
the Algonquins, whose god "will stamp his foot upon the ground, and flames will burst
forth to consume the habitable land." [5]

Job of the Bible hears from a retainer that "the fire of God is fallen from heaven and
hath burned up the sheep [to the number of 7000], and the servants, and consumed them,
and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." (In our days cases of a score or more
animals being electrocuted by a lightning bolt are recorded.) There begins then the
woes of the stubbornly patient Job against frightful divine tests. It is only one of
many references to naturally caused combustion in the Bible. The story of Job may be
exceedingly old; there Elohim (Heavenly One) is addressed; it happened in full
Neolithic times, perhaps at the ending of the age of predominantly Saturn worship  [6]
.

Later in reference to fire is the "flaming sword", east of the Garden of Eden, "which
turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life." This was after the "Fall from
Grace." [7]  The image of a sword in the sky may refer to the Great Central Fire of
early Greek Philosophy and, as we elaborate in Solaria Binaria, to a then intermittent
arc between Jupiter and the Sun. (We treat the image in detail in Solaria Binaria.) The
seasons begin; it must be now the period of the gods Jupiter-Jehovah, the Jovean Age I
have elsewhere termed it. In a later incident, the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah
are destroyed by a fall of fire and brimstone and swallowed up. Then, as earlier
described, the Tower of Babel succumbed to fire in part. During and after the Exodus,
repeated references to the heavenly fire are encountered. It comes in all its forms;
lightning, gas blasts, burning naphtha falls. These are elaborately treated by
Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision and by the present author in God's Fire: Moses and
the Management of Exodus. In all, von Fange quotes 37 different passages from the Bible
referring to, or prophesying, destructive fire from heaven  [8] . Both Donnelly and
Velikovsky claim the myth of Phaeton -the one writer for a Great Comet of an earlier
age, the other for the events of the mid-second millennium, where we too have decided
to place it. The Latin author, Ovid, is the principal source of Phaeton. The Babylonian
cuneiform expert, Kugler has explained Ovid's as a true history of a comet  [9] .
Phaeton is the inexperienced son of Phoebus who demands to be let to drive the chariot
of the Sun one day. He prevails, but loses control of the steeds and burns up sky and
earth. The constellations are disturbed. The flames turn whole nations into ashes. The
ground bursts asunder, the rivers dry up. Smoke billows bring darkness to the world.
The ocean shrinks. Ashes cover the Earth.

Mother Earth trembles and sinks below here usual place. She pleads with Jupiter. "If
the sea, if the earth, if the palace of heaven, perish, we are then jumbled into the
old chaos again. Save it from the flames, if aught still survives, and preserve the
universe." Jupiter responds by demolishing Phaeton and the chariot; Phaeton, his yellow
hair streaming in flames, is hurled to the earth like a falling star.

The Sun, Father of Phaeton, mourns as in an eclipse. The earth was lit only by its own
flames. He would not resume his daily journey until all the gods supplicated with him.
The days appeared once more, and Jupiter restored order and life to the heavens and
earth.

No one disputes the fact that the earth has been badly burned. Provided, of course,
that the statement is properly qualified. The ocean basins are of melted rock; they are
fashioned almost entirely of basaltic lava. Ocean abyssal sediments are thin and loose,
and composed of organic and dust fall-out for the most part, including some products of
combustion. Of the continents, part of the surface that is exposed to view is igneous,
a product of old or new melting. Another portion is metamorphic, a word meaning rock
transformed mostly by heat and pressure, both old and new; this emerges from both
sedimentary and igneous rocks. (It is significant that whereas observers are compelled
by the sight of volcanism to say that some lava beds are new, they are reluctant to
name any metamorphosis of rock that has taken place very recently.) Igneous rock, if
not witnessed as it forms, is also invariably given old dates.

A Phoenician vase of around 1500 B. C. was found embedded in the copious lavas of the
Jezreel Valley of Palestine, where volcanism had supposedly ended in prehistoric times 
[10] . At Nampa, Idaho, in 1889, a well-worked human image carved of pumice stone was
found amidst coarse sand of an old lake bed beneath 300 feet of alluvium, lava and clay
[11] . The lava had been and still is classified as late tertiary or quaternary, a
million or more years before mankind is supposed to have arrived in America. The Nampa
image, now lost, is disregarded; given the strong testimony concerning it, one may
wonder how much of natural and human history would be erased under the same strict
rules of appraisal.

Granites are the continental structure: nearly all come from an ancient cooling of
molten rock. They rest below the recent igneous rock, metamorphic rock and sedimentary
rock on all continents. We have direct information downwards only on a couple of miles
of crust; it is considered that granites carry on down to a basalt not unlike that of
the ocean bottoms. When and how the granites formed is unclear; their chemistry is
distinctive.

A final part of the continents is covered by sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock is
formed from transports of materials by wind, water, and ice. Donnelly argued that much
of the clay, gravel, and till that composes it descended from a cometary train recently
in " the age of fire and gravel," rather than from other rock being ground up and
spread around by moving ice. From the standpoint of human primevalogy, the uppermost
layers of rock and debris are highly important. These are usually termed
unconsolidated, or loosely consolidated, or aggregated, or conglomerate. High energy
expressions of "earth, air, fire and water" will produce large quantities of this
material and their origins, dating, and relation to the biosphere are hard to discern.

Everywhere one is likely to find soil, a catch-all work for any layer from the thinnest
film up to a few meters in which life forms take hold or dwell. Fossil soils often rest
between layers of the several types of rock.

Besides the soil, too, exist metals, soda ash, peat, various ashes, coal, oil, natural
gas, salt, and other deposits. Some of these are thermal products. Billions of tons of
glassy microtektites are strewn over the globe; whatever their origin, they may have
fallen in as hot rain on land and sea. Layers of ash are found over vast stretches of
the oceans bottoms, perhaps everywhere, since the searches have just begun. Ash is
fairly distinguishable; it is more difficult to detect whether the much more profuse
sedimentary clays are not themselves in part the products of combustion, carried over
and dropped upon the sea or drained off the continents onto the slopes and shelves.

On the land, too, ashes mix readily with soils and detritus to form clays. It is not
impossible to detect calcination in soils and clays, but the subject has attracted few
geo-chemists. Soils and young marine sediments of northeastern and offshore America
reveal, under chemical analysis, evidence of a fiery origin in that they contain
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons  [12] . These are carcinogenic and mutagenic. It is
possible that their incidence is world-wide. If so, it would indicate that the whole
world suffered one or more fall-outs of burning or burnt material. The burning could
have been caused by super-terrestrial impact explosions or gases. Or the products of
atmospheric fire (burning naphthas and brimstone or sulphur, as the Bible would have
it) descended. Or both might have happened. The authors of the report cited here
considered the effects to have been possibly produced by giant forest fires and air
transport, and unfortunately, did not consider exoterrestrial origins of the widespread
combustion products, or for that matter, of the fire that consumed the biosphere. T. M.
Harris [13] , in describing "Forest Fire in the Mesozoic," found much fusain in many
layers at many places, including the deltas of Greenland and Yorkshire. The admission
that cosmic lightning and cosmic fire were prevalent at quantavolutionary points is
avoided by placing layers of time between layers of ashes.

We cannot readily separate ash from human, at least not without chemical tests of a
degree of sophistication hitherto undeveloped because of the theory of gradual
accumulation of soils over long eons. Commenting upon Ager's search for ash, Hans
Kloosterman speaks of a "black horizon" of soil "that seems to have been covered with
sediments immediately after its formation," this in Derek Ager's work; and despite
Ager's retreat into what Kloosterman calls "crypto-uniformitarianism," the latter
defends the idea that there might be identified only" one enormous forest fire, which
is moreover correlatable from Southern England to the Great Lakes of North America.
Doesn't that sound somewhat like a universal conflagration? [14]

Kloosterman goes on to discuss the "dark bank" he witnessed in Brazil. Despite
deliberate tropical burnings that are regular and go back hundreds of years, "no
charcoal-rich layer is formed anywhere; the ash is incorporated into the human layer or
washed away."

Whereupon, this author adds evidence by Wendorf, Said, and Schild that in Egypt, at
claimed dates around 10,550 B. C. a burnt layer appears over a large region of the
Upper Nile Valley, which the investigators guess to have been caused by brush fires,
but which to de Grazia seemed to have been associated with holospheric catastrophe and
world-wide conflagration and/ or incredibly heavy ash fall-out.

J. Lamar Worzel of Lamont Geological Observatory (Columbia University) published
important findings in 1969, entitling them "Extensive Deep Sea Sub-Bottom Reflections
Identified as White Ash." [15]  The analyzed deep sea cores came from the east-central
Pacific, from Mexico to Peru, an area of a million and a quarter square kilometers. The
piston-corer was not long enough to probe the nature of echoes, possibly representing
other ash layers, obtained from below 78 feet.

The layer of ash measured differently in the various drilled cores but ranged from 5 to
30 cm of thickness. "Since the layer is fairly near the surface and is not discolored
and contains nothing but the glassy ash material, it must have been laid down fairly
quickly." At depths of 1000 to 3000 fathoms, the ash was under great pressure, also the
original atmospheric and hydrospheric conditions might have dissipated and
disintegrated some of the initial deluge.

The fall was so heavy and quick, "that it may be difficult to ascribe it to the
Andes... Perhaps sub-bottom echoes from other areas can also be correlated with this
white ash layer. If so, it may be necessary to attribute the layer to a world-wide
volcanism or perhaps to the fiery end of bodies of cosmic origin."

In a critique of "The Significance of the Worzel Deep Sea Ash," Maurice Ewing, Bruce C.
Heezen and David Ericson, also of Lamont Geological Observatory, advanced reasons why
the white ash layers might be found elsewhere: citing the sounding of the vessels
Albatross, Galathea, and Verna from different part of the world, they conjectured that
the same sub-bottom echoes and possible ash layers existed over much of the globe  [16]
. Sedimentary mixing would often subdue or annul the echoes.

     The ash deposits observed by Kuenen and Need and Bramlette and Bradley were mixed
     through a column of sediments several times the thickness of the original ash bed. In
     addition to this mechanical mixing, solution may vastly alter the sediment before
     permanent burial is accomplished. Devitrification and alternation, proceeding at rates
     dependent on the environment, may transform an ash bed into products whose origin is
     not readily recognized.

"Extensive ash layers are now recognized in continental areas throughout the geological
record," they point out, citing C. S. Ross. They declare too that "ash of similar
composition has been logged in boreholes in many of the dry lakes of the western United
States." (These dry lakes are all very young, post-glacial.) As mentioned, Wengret and
others showed extensive ashes and calcination in the Nile Valley to which they assigned
fairly recent ages; one can only wonder, for similar reports simply are not registered
generally, how many cuts and profiles around the world reveal such calcination and why,
as has been observed, the older rock-strata show almost no calcination -except that
metamorphics, granites, igneous rocks, and perhaps limestones themselves are sign of
heavy thermal activity.

Until very recently, geologists, like archaeologists, have been incurious about thin
beds of ashes. An alerted surveyor, Heladio Agudelo, wrote this author (Oct. 4, 1977)
saying, "In my work... while helping build a new street I noticed a black line in the
gravel formation." It was a "one inch thick black line in otherwise homogeneous
alluvial(?) formation." Within several weeks it became invisible due to erosion "but it
will take no bigger a tool that a hand shovel to expose it again. This is in
Londonderry, N. H., no more than an hour's drive from Boston Airport." Thin beds of
ashes represent enormous fire, the effects of ordinary forest and construction fires
disappear quickly.

The Ewing group, quoted above, comments that "Murray and Renard identified volcanic
particles in practically all of the Challenger surficial samples of deep sea deposits,
demonstrating that volcanic detritus is an important component of modern deep sea
deposits throughout the world. They suggested that the abyssal clays are largely the
result of alternation of volcanic ash." Later on, the authors themselves conclude: "It
is necessary to study the alterations of fine pyroclastics in the sea and to set up
criteria for recognition of the alteration products formed under the full range of
environmental conditions." (I proposed such procedures for heavy combustion products in
many archaeological levels, exemplified in the "Burnt City" of Troy IIg). The Worzel
ash consists of colorless shards of volcanic glass without sorting by particle size.
"In all important respects it is similar to material which has been classified as
volcanic ash in the deep-sea deposits of the world." Analysis of the surrounding
sediment in the Worzel cores indicates that the bottom waters "must have contained some
oxygen" and that the sediments "probably represent no more than 100,000 years and
conceivably far less." Whatever the date, mankind was very much present and concerned.
Certainly years of darkness, disease, distress and terror occurred around the world
with this deluge.

"The ash is entirely unlike material described as meteoritic dust. Only the wide
geographic extent of this layer suggests any source other than volcanic eruptions. "To
this proposition, with which Worzel might differ, given his quoted remarks, one might
take exception. "Meteoritic dust" is too imprecise a term to use in argument,
considering that we may have to consider lunar material and the 50 to 150 million mile
tails of comets. If, as the authors grant, there is a need to examine and re-examine
numerous types of sediment, there is also a need to distinguish, if at all possible,
"cosmic dust" from "terrestrial dust". If world-wide volcanism can only originate from
an externally interrupted motion of the Earth, or from a titanic large-body encounter,
then "terrestrial dust" is also an effect of exoterrestrialism.

Heezen and Hollister write that the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 "produced an
insignificant sprinkling of ash" by comparison with six great eruptions of the past
"million" years that blanketed thickly the ridge and basin of the Java Trench. "Indeed
how great must have been the earlier eruptions if the greatest known to man was too
small to produce significant record. Powerful eruptions in the Japanese, Kurile, and
Aleutian arcs have produced so much ash that these airborne volcanic products dominate
the scenery of the Northwest Pacific in a belt almost 1000 km wide  [17] . (We note
again that human were already present during these great ash storms and presumably
coining legends.) Heezen added elsewhere the Mediterranean Sea bottom as a depository
of several heavy ash layers.

Walter Sullivan describes " a succession of ash layers" encountered on the edge of the
continental slope before striking the lava basalt of the true ocean bottom. Might this
not indicate that the continental slope was laid down subaerially, collected its
sedimentary and ash layers and was then inundated by the ocean? Drilling in the
Atlantic "has begun to paint a picture of the awesome events that accompanied the birth
of that ocean [18] .

To all of the ash layers referred to, and much more exist, one must accredit
exponential ash storming that has dropped to relatively tiny amounts during historical
times. Max Blumer led the discovering and detailing of paleochemicals in soils. His
group found polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon from pyrolysis in many places and wondered
at the great conflagration of ancient times.

Blumer even suggested that these carcinogens and mutagens played a role in the mutation
of species  [19] , Beadle has explained the origins of a peculiar ancient Mexican corn
as a case of thermal polyploidy, genetic gigantism brought on by subjection to
environmental heat, a feat he duplicated in the laboratory  [20] . Gigantism, and
possibly dwarfism, and associated polyploidy in plants and animals have, then, as a
possible contributing cause, heat stress.

The work of Edward Komarek Sr. on fire and lightning stresses the role of these agents
in prehistoric as well as modern times. He regards many species of plants and animals
as fire-prone, including mankind. They have become adapted at some time in the past to
naturally caused fires and are inclined to make the best of it. Komarek has been active
in instituting controlled forest fires to imitate natural fires which strengthen
growth, rather than weakening it as is popularly believed; the observed quick recovery
from fire is one more indication that the great conflagration can occur without
citation in the geological record.

Fires in prehistory may have been much more extensive than they are today and their
part in animal adaptations may have been considerable. He quotes Harris on "Forest Fire
in the Mesozoic," where the author describes vast fusain deposits, identifies them as
fossil charcoal, and says "the objection usually used against accepting fusain as
charcoal produced by fire is that there is too much of it and in too many layers. It
would make the past a 'nightmare. '" Fusain is intimately associated with coal beds and
thus reinforces the Carli and Velikovsky thesis, seconded by Francis and Cook, that
coal is what remains of a bulldozed burning biosphere, buried deeply and tamped down
promptly by successive waves of other material.

Animal fossils are sometimes found amidst ashes. "Ancient Ashfall Entombed Prehistoric
Animals," heads an article by M. H. Voorhies  [21]  where a Middle Miocene prodigious
ashfall over hundreds of square miles snuffed out over 200 species at one waterhole
alone. When geologist Louis Lartel was excavating Cro-Magnon man (fragments of 15
individuals) near Les Eyzies-de-Tayec (Dordogne, France) in 1868, he uncovered five
archaeological layers that had been covered by ash. The Upper Paleolithic was an age of
ashes too. The glacial ice, where such great sheets existed, must have been covered
with ash, if today ice drilling reveals no heavy ash fallouts it must mean that the
caps are exceedingly young.

Erich von Fange has come upon many a recent report of burnt sites. He mentions towns
whose calcinated ruins resemble strikingly what one can read of Troy IIg, "The Burnt
City," when reexamining the extensive records of its excavation. His cases come not
only from the Near East but also from Western Europe and Britain, Central Africa, the
Gobi Desert of Central Asia, the Mohave Desert of the American Southwest, India, Cusco
(Peru), and Cete Cidades (Piaui, Brazil). The "Cities of the Plain," including Sodom
and Gomorrah, flourished in an area that became a scene of utter devastation to this
day, over four thousand years later. All that grew in this Dead Sea Rift area, all who
lived there, all that was built there, were wiped out by falls of fiery debris and an
upheaval of the earth; asphalt, salt and sulphur are abundantly displayed now. The
prophet Isaiah (2: 10,2: 19) has people rushing into holes and caves when the Lord in
his majesty "ariseth to shake terribly the Earth." The lowland Indians of Peru put pots
on their heads and run for the hills when the earth quakes. So do Kamchatka Siberians.
Against softly reasonable explanations of such behavior stand grimly reasonable ones,
that in times past, earthquakes and fall-out and heavy tides came together.

Boiling seas have been observed near subterranean volcanos. That large stretches might
boil is arguable. Velikovsky adduced legendary accounts around 1450 B. C. Thus, quoting
the Zend-Avesta, "The sea boiled, all the shores of the ocean boiled, all the middle of
it boiled," when heated by the star Tistrya (Venus)  [22] . Carl Sagan claimed a total
boil-off if the Earth abruptly stopped rotating  [23] , but a slowdown would bring
limited surficial boiling.

Perhaps the oldest radiocarbon dates of a burnt city come from Dilmun (modern Dahrein)
at the North end of the Persian Gulf [24] . There the lowest level is calcinated. It is
located below a thick wall. The burning occurs over the whole area of settlement. The
debris contains burnt bitumen and "black masses," producing radiocarbon dates of 19,000
to 36,000 B. P. (in my opinion, valueless). There are "strange" sand "fill" intrusions
at this level that carry various artifacts and bits of copper. Below the calcination
occurs a meter of sand with shards, and below that, bedrock.

The ruined mysterious city of Tiahuanacu, 18000 feet high in the southern Andes
mountains, is believed to have once rested upon the shores of the ocean, now hundreds
of kilometers distant. It seems to have had port installations and to have been
connected with Lake Titicaca, to the north, which contains living species of oceanic
type. Tiahuanacu stands on strange ground. The climate is dry, the foliage is scanty,
the weather is cold, the neighboring people wretchedly poor and few in number. The top
soil of the plateau is a two-foot dry deposit, now soft stone. Below it stands the
lignite of charred tropical plants. Next come a layer of ash deposited amidst rainfall,
and then appears an alluvial deposit. All can be considered short-term deposits of the
lowlands. Combustion obviously played a large part in the happenings. In such a place,
one would normally expect merely a scanty soil, windwept, on rocky ground.

Poznansky, the major investigator, detected three cultures and three natural
destructions  [25] . He allows Tiahuanacu a very old age, calling it the oldest known
city in the world. Bellamy believed it to be a city that dwelt beneath a terrible sky,
with first a satellite that closed into Earth and crashed later, and then a newly
captured moon circling above  [26] .

I argue elsewhere for a single event, that the Moon erupted from the Pacific Basin to
occasion the destruction of Tiahuanacu; at the same time it was elevated, but not to
its present height. Another elevation might have followed in the second millennium B.
C. whereupon the city was left in ashes and ruins. That is, an early Tiahuanacu might
have flourished before the new-born Moon. Peruvian legend has it that before the Sun
and Moon were made, Viracocha, the White One, rose from the depths of Lake Titicaca and
presided over the erection of the cities on its islands and Western shores.

The conventional view classifies Tiahuanacu as pre-Inca and places it therefore in the
present era. It was never an important Inca site and its resemblances to Inca culture
are no more than its resemblances to the earliest Ecuadorian or Mexican cultures or to
the Easter Island complex for that matter. Its astronomical observations carved upon
stone gates were magnificent  [27] , the Incas were underdeveloped by contrast.
Tiahuanacu may then be the oldest of fire-devastated ruins.

Examples of the latest possible world conflagration can be found in Greece. These would
be in the -776 to 687 B. C. period, by Velikovsky's chronology, which I accept; owing
to a major shift in time reckoning, most of the great destructions in these areas that
has been assigned to around 1200 B. C. is now scaled down to the eighth and seventh
centuries. The new great destructive sky god was Mars in many forms  [28] . It was now
that King Nebuchadnezzar ravaged the Near East believing himself to be the
personification of the planet-god Mars-Nergal: " I am Nergal. I destroy, I burn, I
demolish, leaving nothing behind me." (He was, of course, not nearly so effective as
his model, and was ultimately killed).

The same age began with the downfall of the Mycenean culture. The evidence of the
destruction of Mycenean culture by fire has been available for a long time, but put
aside for lack of a cause. A. H. Frickenhaus, a German excavating long ago at Tiryns,
described how he had located a burnt Mycenean palace with a new Greek-style temple
built right over it  [29] . At Pylos, not far away and of the same period, fire was
manifest everywhere, burnt rooms, burnt oil, fused metallic implements, scorched pots.

In his analysis of the Pylos event and others, Isaacson has substantially proven the
correctness of the revised dating  [30] . Apparently, the Mycenean (Greek) Age changed
into the archaic Greek period amidst general conflagration. But so did age upon age
before, both geologic and cultural.

I have not mentioned thus far the catastrophes that ended the Old Bronze Age around
2300 B. C. According to Schaeffer: "There is not the slightest doubt that the
conflagration of Troy IIg corresponds to the catastrophe that made an end to the
habitations of the Old Bronze Age of Alaca Huyuk, of Alisar, of Tarsus of Tepe Hissar,
and to the catastrophe that burned ancient Ugarit in Syria, the city of Byblos that
flourished under the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the contemporaneous cities Palestine, and
that was amongst the causes that terminated the Old Kingdom of Egypt." Egyptian Old
Kingdom tombs are generally marked by signs of conflagration, Emery has discovered
[31] . A great many places elsewhere must have become heaps of ashes as well.

At Anemospilia, Crete, a small north-watching hillside temple was excavated  [32] . Of
four skeletons unearthed, one was identified as a priest, a second as a youth of 18 who
had just been sacrificed. (" The only remains of Minoans heretofore unearthed had been
recovered from tombs.") He had been trussed and laid upon the altar. The sacrificial
knife lay on his bones. The priest sprawled in an agonized posture nearby, intimating
death by sudden collapse of the stone structure. The other persons were perhaps
attendants and killed simultaneously. Earthquake was presumed. The youth, an analysis
of his bones revealed, had died just before the disaster, half his body had been
drained of blood, the upper-most half. Then a fire had swept the premises before the
bottom half was drained.

The fire is attributed to tipped oil lamps, but, following the logic employed in my
study of Trojan fires, I would suspect an external source, possibly drifting flammable
gas pockets, for an ordinary fire would consume the bones, in the unlikely event it
could start up in the first place. Perhaps it was not fire, but a scorching blast, that
preceded or succeeded a seismic shock. Why, also, were there only three persons in the
temple? Were all other people in hiding while the heroic priest and his staff went to
offer the sacrifice? Why did not the people return to dig out the bodies and restore
the temple? Burial was a holy obligation; an unburied priest would be a holy horror. A
presumption of total desolation and death over a considerable area arises.

John Bimson, describing the recently famous Ebla excavation in Svria, finds that the
proto-Syrian culture datable sometime after 2300 B. C. by Schaeffer's scheme was
destroyed by seismism and fire  [33] . As I stated on several occasions, this finding
was predictable, for all known settlements of the time were similarly struck. It would
fit among the Mercurian disasters described in Chaos and Creation.

The specific origins of burning are usually in doubt. Catastrophic combustion is a
product of earthquake-caused fire, of fissure and cone volcanism, of lightning, of
phaetonic atmospheric penetration, of typhonic impact explosion, of fall-outs of
combustible materials that are ignited in flight, including gases and naphtha.
Donnelly, a century ago, speculated convincingly upon the fall-outs of gas clouds from
the tails of comets. His Age of Fire and Gravel, the culminating devastation of all
human time, was pictured as a burning of great patches of the world from carbureted
hydrogen. Some kind of exoterrestrial gases are often to be suspected in great
prehistoric and ancient fires. A combination of gases and lightning, if the gases are
not too concentrated, will bring masses and sheets of flame, rather than explosions. I
have read few convincing reports of gas and fire explosion -the Pestigo Forest Fire and
the Tunguska blast, both modern, being the type of event to look for, nor have I read a
report of excavation revealing an exploded city, unless some of the settlements that
seem to have been wreaked simultaneously by fire and earthquake do not in fact involve
earthquakes. Probably a strict investigation would discover any such explosion
affecting human settlements, but the geologic causes would have to depend for evidence
upon legends. A gas explosion and flash fire would leave practically no traces within a
few years of occurrence.

Volcanos are more obvious sources of fire. Many a volcano has claimed its Pompeii and
Herculanum. It has worked its way with mud and lava flows, ashes lofted nearby and
afar, and noxious gases. It may be fissure or cone, extinct or live. One of the oldest
pyramids, that of Quiquilco in America, stands almost buried in lava. It is probably as
old as the oldest pyramids of Egypt.

When a great may volcanos erupt simultaneously, the effects upon settlements are more
than proportionate to the effects of a single eruption. Inasmuch as layers of ashes
have been discovered over millions of square kilometers of the ocean bottoms, it has to
be granted that the same ashes fell upon the land and the biosphere, and upon human
settlements, if such existed.

Ashes are apparent to an alerted observer when they lie in belts and heaps. But
material dissolution occurs, the destruction and effacement may involve additional
forces that remove the ash, incorporate it, or dissolve it. Ash may be washed away by
tides, blown away by hurricanes, or subjected to these forces gradually. It may turn to
clay, impervious to all but the most exacting chemical analysis and electron-scanning
microscopy. The tephra of Thera-Santorini, falling from the plinian explosion of 3000
B. P. (a less likely date is 3500 B. P.) is found in heaps, but also in miocroscopic
form amidst debris that may or may not have been of the same occurrence, in widely
separated locations. In Thera itself, one bluff is composed of pumice, the next one,
higher, contains none. In Kos( Greece) at one place, 40cm of Thera ash is visible; at
many other outcroppings of subsoil in Kos, no ash is visible. So in Crete, so also
Anafi. Common clay is abundant on land and on sea bottoms. It contains not only the
material of slow erosion and ice age drift but of sudden exponential erosion and ice
cap avalanche, of volcanic ashes, and of meteoritic and other exoterrestrial fall-out.

To conclude these pages of fire and ashes, we may assert once again that the gradual
processes of today were preceded very recently by quantavolutionary processes. More and
greater fires burned more widely in the world than during the past two thousand years.
More blankets of ashes were laid down. More settlements were ruined. That the fires and
ashes may often have had ultimate exoterrestrial causes is probable. Until the basic
issue of geological chronology is settled, we are not prepared to affirm that the 85%
of the exposed Earth's crust which is of igneous rock is all nearly as young as the ash
levels, but the possibility is real. From the standpoint of theoretical mechanics, the
Earth's ash layers and all the components of soil and clay originally containing ash
may have been the fall-out of global volcanism which produced the igneous rock. But we
have yet not covered enough ground in our tour of the Earth's features to determine the
matter. And perhaps in the end, we shall still be uncertain.




{S : Notes (Chapter Seven: Fire and Ash)}
Notes (Chapter Seven: Fire and Ash) 

1. letter, 2 Catastrophist Geologist, 1( June. 1977), 13.

2. "Consolatio ad Marciam"

3. L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, p. 7: 15, 76; cf. H.
Tresman and B. O'Geoghan," The Primordial Light," II S. I. S. R. 2 (Dec. 1977), 40, fn.
102.

4. II Lettres Americanes (Paris: Buisson, 1788), 309.

5. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (New York: Appleton, 1883) p. 428.

6. Martin Sieff, "Cosmology of Job" I S. I. S. R. 4 (Spring 1977), 17-21, 32.

7. Genesis 4: 24.

8. Op. cit., 136-7.

9. L. C. Stecchini in A. de Grazia et al., The Velikovsky Affair, 2nd ed. (London:
Sphere, 1978), 120ff.

10. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 197-8.

11. See W. R. Corliss, ed., Ancient Man (Glen Arm, Md: Sourcebook Project, 1978), 457-
60, from G. F. Wright, 11 Am. Antiq. (1889), 379-81.

12. Blumer and W. W. Youngblood, "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydracarbons in Soils and Recent
Sediments," Science (4 Apr. 1975), 53.

13. 46 J. Ecology 2 (1958), 447-53.

14. 2 Catas. Geol. (1977), 14.

15. 43 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (15 Mar. 1959), 349-55.

16. 45 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 351-61.

17. B. Heezen and C. Hollister, Face of the Deep, 476-8.

18. Walter Sullivan, Continents in Motion, (N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 147-8.

19. 234 Sci. Amer. 3 (1976), 45.

20. Cf. New Scientist (12 Nov. 1981), 433.

21. Nat. Geogr. Mag. (Jan. 1981), 66.

22. In Asimov et al., Scientists Confront Velikovsky, (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1977);
but see Shulamit Kogan, ltr. Physics Today (Sept. 1980), 97-8, repr. VI Kronos 3
(1981), 34-41.

23. Worlds in Collision, 92

24. G. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun (N. Y.: Mentor, 1969), 167-9.

25. Arthur Posnansky, Tiahuanaco, The Cradle of American Man, (N. Y.: Augustin, 1958).

26. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1951); Built Before the Flood
(London: Faber and Faber, 1947), especially on Tiahuanacuo.

27. Cf. H. S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco (1959) and The Great
Idol of Tiahuanaco, both published by Faber and Faber, London.

28. Worlds in Collision, Part II; Chaos and Creation, 235-46.

29. August H. Frickenhaus, I. Tiryns (Athens, 1972).

30. In 3 PensÚe 2 (Spring-Summer, 1973), 26-32 and 4 PensÚe 4 (Fall 1974), 5-20. See
also my study: The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars (1983).

31. Arhaic Egypt (Penguin Books, 1961), 71-3, 92, 97.

32. Y. Sakellarakis et al., "Drama of Death in a Minoan Temple," 159 Natl. Geog. (Feb.
1981), 208-23.

33. "Ebla Reconsidered," V. S. I. S. R. 2 (1980-1), 37-9; Matthias, Ebla: An Empire
Rediscovered (London: Hodder, 1980). 







{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART II: }
{Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: }
{C Chapter 8}
{T Falling Dust and Stone}
{S - }



THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER EIGHT

FALLING DUST AND STONE

When Alexander the Great asked some Celtic leaders in 325 B. C. what they most feared,
expecting them to reply Alexander himself, they said it was that the skies might fall.
Somewhere along the line of history, this story lost Alexander but became attached to
the Celtic Gauls; the schoolbooks universally read by French children until lately
began by telling them that their earliest ancestors were the Gauls whose eyes were
blue, who feared nothing but that the heavens would fall on their heads, and whose huts
had holes in their roofs to let out the smoke. Were the Gauls known for nothing else?
The naive, simplistic image lets the children be amused. But the insistence with which
this particular canard is purveyed says something about the fear of falling skies,
which absurdly seems to grip even the savants in their obsession with foisting it upon
their perceived ancestors and their descendents.

In the most ancient legends it is common to find references to more than comets and
deluges of water. Deluges from the sky consist also of dust, loess, stones, glass, tar,
oil, salt, gold, iron, ashes, carbohydrates -all of them sometimes hot and sometimes
aflame. They are invariably tied to catastrophes.

Donnelly collected some of the stories:

     We read in the Ute legends... that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats struck the sungod
     full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the
     earth, causing a general conflagration." [1]

     [One is cautioned to read "sun" with reservations; foreigners who pass along legends
     are likely to make the word "sun" out of any brilliant great body in the sky. That the
     Sun is only one of such historically manifested bodies is the thesis of a number of
     studies.]

Further :

     It is a belief in many races that the stone axes and celts (chisala) fell from the
     heavens. In Japan, the stone arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits,
     who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil,
     China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal etc.  [2]  (And the Greek Apollo is famed for
     discharging clouds of arrows and plagues from afar).

Also from the Aztec prayer to Tezcatlipoca :

     Hast thou verily determined... that the peopled place become a wooded hill and a
     wilderness of stones?.. Is there to be no mercy nor pity for us until the arrows of thy
     fury are spent? Thine arrows and stones have sorely hurt this poor people  [3] .

And, of course, the Bible (Deuteronomy xxviii)

     The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come
     down upon thee, until thou be destroyed..."

Thus, in Deuteronomy; but more too in Joshua x:

     And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to
     Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and
     they died: There were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of
     Israel slew with the sword.

This, it may be recalled, was the day when the Sun "stood still", a swing-back of
cometary Venus, according to Velikovsky, 52 years after Exodus, and at the least he
shows that this hail was not ice but of stone  [4] . The student of geology today is
realizing that what falls from the sky is not only nickel, iron or stone fragments.
There is a continuity of materials. P. M. Millman writes:

     ... physical theory, applied to the observed heights, velocities, deceleration, and
     luminosities, indicates that in most cases the mean densities of the meteoroids may be
     below that of water and that they have a fragile structure with a tendency to crumble
     and fragment. A small fraction, probably 1 or 2 percent, consists of denser, compact
     particles corresponding more closely to meteorites. These latter are either nickel-
     iron, with densities about eight times that of water, or heavy stone, with densities
     between three and four times that of water [5] .

Where does all the dust and stone rest today? It may be, as Donnelly said it, the main
constituent of the so-called glacial till and in heaps called mistakenly glacial
moraines. It may be in much of the clay of the Earth, in red loams of many countries,
in abyssal clay of varied red and blue hue. The geologist Johan Kloosterman tells a
story from Brazil :

     Early this year, Professor Doeko Goosen in Enschede, Holland, told me that there was
     something odd about the iron content of the early-Holocene coversands of the
     Netherlands. These sands are thought to have been formed through a combined fluvial and
     aeolian activity. But in many of their soils, the amount of iron is much too high for
     such an origin. Moreover, the present loss of iron by seepage water, observable along
     many ditches, demonstrates that the original iron content must have been higher still.
     Weathering of minerals (loss of Silica and relative accumulation of iron) does not
     satisfactorily explain this anomaly. Could the iron have come from above, as a sort of
     ferruginous loess?

     A few months later in Mato Grosso, Goosen's remark led me to look more closely at
     laterites profiles. I noticed an inch-thick layer of hard laterite between two layers
     of unconsolidated gravel; its undersurface was smooth: it had obviously been formed
     prior to the deposition of the top gravel. I traced the layer for several kilometers,
     and later found it in places tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, on different
     deomorphological levels. The only possible explanation for these observations seemed
     aeolic precipitation on a barren, moist surface [6] .

Doeko Goosen has gone well beyond the ordinary unsatisfying explanations of soil
formations commonly employed." Not so long ago soils were considered to form in
materials derived by weathering of the underlying rock. Over several decades there has
been a growing recognition that much of the mantle of soil is allochtonous." [7]  But
where does it come from? Few are the regions where soil can be shown to have aggregated
as humus from the vegetation above. The large areas of Europe and Asia covered with
loess are now considered all or in part by Russian scientists as non-aeolian. This is
conveyed forcefully to their minds by the presence in the loess of numbers of angular
stones. Promptly we are recalled to the pages of Donnelly's old book where he insists
on the exoterrestrial origin of the angular stone typical of "glacial till" and of
loess.

Now Goosen advances the argument with respect to the soils that sit atop the loess. He
claims that humus does not form except in waterlogged area, presently and historically
unlike the Kazakhstan (U. S. S. R.) area he discusses. Furthermore, the "Chernozems,"
the aforesaid soil, is rich in hydrocarbons. Presumably, some of it was combusted, too.
The incident of its formation was most likely a cometary encounter.

Goosen goes farther, in what approaches in fact a general theory of soils formation.
Slickensides (common in cracked vertisols and related to mass movements of ash and
clay), and latosols, along with much other soil with a high iron content are assigned
catastrophic origins, with tides and floods in the first case, and heavy hematite
exoterrestrial fall-out in the second as the mechanism.

"Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." From dust to dust, goes the pathetic
saying about man's fate. "To dust" we know from experience. "From dust" -what does
geology say? Nothing, of course. Does mythology have something to say? Yes. One of the
most popular creation legends has man being made from clay, Hebrew Genesis, for
example. The Greek Promethean creation, for another. Moreover, the "Cree Indians
believe that the flesh of those who perished in the waters of the Deluge were changed
into red pipe-clay. Similar myths or echoes of myths are found in the tales of almost
every nation. "So reports Bellamy  [8]  "We are all made from common clay," say
egalitarians.

Why clay? Because, according to ordinary surmise, clay is malleable; early people would
made images of clay and, projecting their desire for omnipotence onto the gods, would
imagine that the gods could fashion real people from clay. Is this adequate reason? Is
there additional reason to believe so?

Bellamy also asserts that the enormous and unfamiliar loess deposits, which must have
formed such a striking feature of the new Earth, were regarded by the survivors as the
dissolved bodies of their unfortunate brothers and sisters  [9] . It is noteworthy that
loam deposits do surround the remains of Peking man at Choukoutien and human tools of
the Lower Paleolithic in Europe and Tadzhik (U. S. S. R.) The loess is a fine
undifferentiated loam of brownish or reddish color that makes eerie standing images by
its vertical pipe structure when eroded. The logical divine action, in magical theory,
is to create people from the same material, especially if its origin is celestial.

To conclude our reasoning, the myth and the magical reasoning press a hypothesis upon
the geologist. The origin of loess may be in an immense fall-out of dust from a comet
or an explosion of Earth material into the highest atmosphere whence most of it fell
back to form loess and clay covering many hills and valleys to this day. Since humans
seem to recall such an event, the time might not be far off.

Donald Cyr, a California amateur and devotee of the Canopy Theory of Isaac Vail, has
studied loess. He has a story to tell too.

"Loess is mixture of silica and clay, with particle size ranging from 0.1 mm down to
0.005mm . Where loess in unoxidized, it has a greyish color, but may also be yellow,
orange, or brown because of presence of ferric oxides. Deposits of loess occur in North
America, Europe, Russia, Siberia, China, and also in Argentina and New Zealand...."
[10]

The State of Kansas is estimated to be overlain by more than 50,000 cubic miles of
loess. There is little glacial outwash in Kansas, Cyr writes, and he does not see how
glaciers had the power to grind down sufficient rock within the Pleistocene age,
wherein it is placed, to supply the loess. He estimates the worldwide deposits at 7,000
cubic miles per degree of longtitude per hemisphere. And he suggests that the ocean
"blue" mud may be part of it.

A few more words are owing on the origins of the drift or till, before letting the
abused author Donnelly stand in his solitary majesty. Many accounts of stone falls are
acceptable; Corliss has compiled and introduced some of them. Velikovsky has analyzed
several cases, while rejecting Donnelly as to the cometary origins of the drift. For
instance, he points to 28 fields of blackened, sharp-edged and broken stones (harras)
in Arabia in strewn fields of many thousands of square miles; they are not igneous;
they are referred to in ancient Arabic and Hebrew literature; they originate from the
sky in early historical times  [11] .

Till is a stiff clay full of stones varying in size up to boulders; conventional
science says it was produced by abrasion and carried along by the ice sheet as it moved
over the land. So Geikie said in 1863, and the definition is still useful. Donnelly
pointed out that this till, which he called drift, is not in all places where the ice
was said to be and exists in other areas where no ice was supposed to have been. Till
is common "over much of the most important mineral producing terrain of the northern
hemisphere. Till occurs ubiquitously in Canada and Scandinavia and is present as well
over significant areas of the United States, U. S. S. R. and United Kingdom."  [12]

But why, argued Donnelly, was there a "driftless region" is Wisconsin, Iowa, and
Minnesota  [13] . And why is very little found in Siberia; there exist " the great
river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now
obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface." So wrote
James Geikie  [14] . And why are "glacial" pebbles and a "terminal moraine" found on
hills and in valleys of the Southern Appalachians, and where the ice was not supposed
to have reached in Eastern Kentucky  [15] . Why do glaciers today not produce true
ancient-type till, that is, striated stones, drift clay, mountain-top till, and how
could glaciers form sheets over 30% of the Earth's surface a million years ago, not to
mention pushing boulders up thousands of feet in elevation  [16] .

Crossed trains of drift occur, and are rationalized into successive advances and
retreats of ice under different climate and morphological conditions. The till is not
fossiliferous. Where drift and till have been found in Australia, India, and deep beds
of older rock in Scotland, they were attributed to more ancient ice ages, thus scholars
might conveniently dispose of all material appearing to be till. It is not difficult in
historical geology to use time freely to make place for anomalies and to create events,
even the greatest types of events, such as ice ages.

Using the ordinary theories of glacial geology, even though he is an exoterrestrial
catastrophist, the Soviet geologist Salop has pointed out "that the Precambrian
glaciations occurred under very unfavorable physical-geographical conditions. The
glacial deposits are interbedded between strata indicating a hot climate, such as red-
beds, dolomites, phytolite-bearing limestones (at present only found in warm, usually
mineralized waters along the seashore or in tropical lagoons and hot springs),
evaporites, kaolinitic sandstones and bauxite." This association of tillites with
formation of warm and hot climates is typical of the Paleozoic Ice Ages too  [17] .

But Salop also demonstrates that nine ice-age pre-cambrian "intervals vary from 40 to
125 (or 180) MY and no evident periodicity can be observed." He then associates
"biologic revolutions with the epochs of excessive climatic cooling usually resulting
in glaciation." Tillites are taken as the signal of an ice age; whatever the climate
above and below the till, whether cold or hot, the till is supposed to designate cold.
Some association may be found among tillite beds and a) low sea-water temperatures as
measured in the differing gas and mineral concentrations of stratified sea-shells, and
b) "coeval strata" that "attest to the influence of a cold, almost glacial climate."
All correlations are subject to variations and even to possible basic flaws in
radiometric dating. The association is loose enough to permit the argument that
tillites may not be associated with cold climates, hence the tillites are not deposits
of ice sheets and glacier, and, further, that tillites may be exoterrestrial deposits
occurring in both hot and cold climatic period, wreaking quick destruction upon the
biosphere.

Cyr and Sun point out that tektites are chemically similar to loess. This would suggest
a possible exoterrestrial origin for loess and a coincidence of the two substances.
Tektites are jets of fused silica. They range from microscopic size to large chunks.
They are strewn around the world in enormous fields. They are found in the waters and
soils of Central Europe, West Africa, Australia, Indochina, Thailand, the East Indies,
the Philippines, Japan, China, and the Caribbean  [18] . Heezen and Hollister estimated
an Indian Ocean deposit of a billion tons that they think occurred upon a reversal of
the Earth's magnetic field 700,000 years ago.

Billy Glass and R. N. Baker of the University of Delaware, with D. Storzer and G. A.
Wagner of the Max Planck Institute of Heidelberg, studied intensively the Caribbean-
North American strewnfield  [19] . They estimated the total tektite field at 10 17
grams of material, dated stratigraphically at Middle Upper Eocene. Some 6000 such glass
microspherules were found in the sediment of one thin core at a depth of some 250
centimeters below the Caribbean Sea Bottom. The falls apparently came either at
different times, or from different phases or portions of a gigantic single incident,
because there are chemical differences among the tektites coming from different
strewnfields of the world.

The writers claim different times, for they hold few reservations about their dating
techniques. If from different times, a Moon origin is suggested, for there could have
been large meteoroid explosions upon the Moon that would have splashed debris onto the
Earth. Or, since the tektites are of a material akin to the Earth's crust, they might
have been a fall-back from large explosive impact encounters with Earth.

Glass and Heezen differentiated three forms of tektites found in the Far East. One was
melted twice, one melted once, and a third little melted. They deduce a massive cosmic
body breaking up upon atmosphere entry into two or several pieces. Of these, one would
explode in the upper atmosphere, another closer to the ground and a third close to the
ground  [20] .

Faul says "it is an established fact that tektites fell from the sky," but show too
little cosmic-ray interaction to have spent much time in the sky  [21] . Although he
allows a possible lunar origin for some tektites, he shows that some tektite fields are
too concentrated spatially to have been flung from the Moon and that, in Germany and
the lvory Coast, a similar composition can be ventured for large astroblemes and nearby
tektite fields.

No writer has considered the possibility of an origin from the fission of the Moon and
Earth. If the present author's theory of lunar fission were postulated, then the
composition, distribution and occurrence of the specified forms of tektites would be
consonant with the event.

I think that legendary streams of cosmic arrows shot by the gods upon hapless but
offensive mankind might refer to the glassier kinds of fall-out. Tektites resemble
somewhat obsidian, a popular igneous stone for fabricating arrowheads. Tektites may
fall like showers of needles, or arrows, or as arrowheads in size, weight and hardness.

The same tektites are called "Dragon Pearls" in China. Carter Sutherland in 1973 traced
dragon art in China back to its apparent origins around 1500 B. C  [22] . That
reinforcements of the horrendous (but sometimes beneficent "Lucky Dragon") image have
been supplied by various comets through the ages was documented by Dwardu Cardona
(1975)  [23] .

Invariably the Chinese dragon is chasing a "chuh," or globe, or sphere, and "chuh" also
means "pearl". "Huoh chuh" is "fiery sphere" and "fire pearl." Moreover the Chinese
also call the tektite "huoh chuh". Indians, Javanese, and Tibetans also call the
tektite "fire pearl". Long before modern science became interested in tektites, the
ancient Chinese (the T'ang Annals) knew that these 'fire pearls' originated in space."
They were esteemed by priests and emperors.

The tektites fell from the sky  [24] . Aerodynamic ablation experiments with tektite
glass have simulated their shaping upon entry and passage through the atmosphere. They
are found in recent sediments and on the surface. The tektites were not long in space,
they display no cosmic-ray interaction. They are easily eroded  [25]  but still exist
in abundance and cannot be found in fossilized beds, another sign of youth. But other
tektites have received old ages, 20 to 45 M/ Y, as reported by Barnes  [26] . Many are
around the million-year mark (Heezen Glass, Chaprian) [27] . and ages of 5000 years
were found by George Baker and Edmund Gill  [28] . Gentner's dating by fission-track
suggests a million years or less for certain groups, much longer times were assigned to
others.

The tektite falls have been associated by Billy Glass and others with magnetic
reversals and faunal changes  [29] . A syllogism emerges: a heavy-body impact explodes
tektites high into the sky; it causes reversal of the Earth's magnetic field; as the
EMF hits zero point, cosmic particles, ordinarily deflected, pour down and cause
mutations and extinction. Contrasting with this theory are opinions such as
Lyttletons's that tektites fell from a passing comet train. However, Urey and Spencer
argue that they reflect a splash from a cometary or meteoroid impact on the Earth.
Moreover E. A. King: "the answer is now clear: tektites are produced from
extraterrestrial rocks melted by hypervelocity impacts of large, extraterrestrial
objects." [30]

Erratic bits of an exploded planet from the Mars-Jupiter interregion often fall to
Earth. Some of them may also be surviving, uncaptured, terrestrial material. The
tektite fields on Earth could also be fall-back from the lunar eruption. Rittmann
writes : "The chondrites (of meteoric falls) correspond genetically to the terrestrial
sima, and the tektites to the protosialic upper crust of the primeval earth." [31]
James Sun proposes that half a million years ago, a snowball comet laden with flammable
gases approached Earth from the Northwest  [32] . It shattered by gravitational force,
and part crashed while part continued on. Loess was thus laid down, and in some place
melted by impact into glass. Loess has a chemical composition very much like the
tektites, as I have mentioned above. Aerial explosions created innumerable small glass
blobs that fell to Earth.

The investigators generally agree that tektites are earth-like and moon-like in
composition. Probably, the loess and tektites arrived within the same time span after
passing into the upper atmosphere following their explosion from the Earth. Either a
passing large body exploded the Earth's crust to make them or a meteoroid impact did
the job.

John O'Keefe links the North American strewn field of tektite and microtektite falls
with the terminal Eocene (Tertiary) event, when radical climatic change can be
perceived in floral abundances and radiolaria were devastated  [33] . His theory calls
for the tektites to assume, before final descent, a ring-like structure around the
Earth. The ring might have lasted a million years and cast a blighting shadow over the
biosphere.

It is apparent here, once more, that earth scientists are becoming ever more daring in
their suggestions of mechanisms to satisfy the resultant state of geological facts.
Just under a century ago, Issac Vail received short shrift from academicians for
proposing a Saturnian ring canopy system for the globe and arguing that it was known to
early civilized man and fell apart before his very eyes  [34] .

Reporting systems on natural phenomena have gradually become more complete, regular,
and valid. Nevertheless, the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819 issued an
enchanting list of "meteoric stones, masses of iron, and showers of dust, red snow, and
other substances, which have fallen from the heavens, from the earliest period down to
1819." [35]  Among the exotic items were: a great fall of black dust at Constantinople
on November 5-6, 472 B. C. accompanied by burning heavens; a kind of red matter like
coagulated blood in the middle of the 9th century; a burning body that fell into Lake
Van, Armenia, turning the waters red and cleaving the Earth in several places (1110 A.
D.); gelatinous matter in India with a globe of fire; and a mixture of red rain and
snow whose dust contained silica, aluminum, lime, iron, carbon and loess and was
coincidental with a shower of meteoritic stone over central and southern Italy in 1813.
Red rains, often associated with meteors, were common. William Corliss, in his
compilations, has educed much additional literature on peculiar fall-outs. Peter James 
[36] , Donnelly, Velikovsky and others have demonstrated the frequent occurrence of red
falls in proto-history.

Much meteoritic dust falling upon the Earth is invisible and immeasurable. Meteoritic
falls have been estimated at 4000 tons per year by Saukov  [37] . Hughes (1976) arrives
at a figure of 16,000 tons per year. Schmidt gives an average for all of geological
time at 8x10 11 tons per year, very much larger and based upon an exponentially
leveling off of initially vast drops of material  [38] . At the last rate, with a
geological age of 5x10 9 years, one would have a total of 40x10 20 tons dust dropped on
Earth from space. This is not far from the total mass of the Earth, 6x10 21 tons. But
if Pettersson is correct, the rate of accretion of cosmic dust may be about 10,000 tons
per day [39] .

Micrometeorite dust has been estimated by Fred Singer [40]  to fall at a median rate of
1250 tons per day or 456,250 tons per year (the rate may actually be 10 times more or
less, he estimates). The calculation is from the detection of aluminum 26 abundance
ratio in Pacific Ocean bottom cores. This is 4.5x10 11 grams per year today, but
Schmidt's estimate is only 400 tons per year today.

If any exponentialism is part of Singer's scheme and it should be, a fairly
considerable portion of the Earth's crust should be composed of gathered-in planetary
dust, achieved in a fairly short time. If, for example, we had a measure showing this
figure to have been 10 20 grams per year in 500 B. C. and 10 25 in 2500 B. C., the
subsequently plotted curve would give us the mass of all of the continental crust
except for the basic granite within a few thousand years. We do not have such figures,
but if we consider the obsession of ancient voices with days and years of darkness and
ascribe half of this to fall-out of dust, the required substantial deposits would be
quickly forthcoming.

Between 1956 and 1964, W. D. Crozier collected exoterrestrial black magnetic spherules
from atmospheric fall-out at two New Mexico stations, of a type noted around the world
and in sedimentary rocks of great ages. These were accreting at an average annual rate
of 1.04x10 11 grams for spherules in the diameter range of 5 to 6. David Hughes
considers the interplanetary dust to originate with comets and arrives at a figure of
16,000 tons per year of all sizes.

Hans Petterson, reporting upon the oceanographic expedition of the Albatross, disclosed
a high nickel content in the Pacific Clays. Since basalt, the bottom material contains
little nickel and meteoritic dust, meteoritic showers hundreds of times greater than
presently observed were required to explain the abundance. The nickel abundance is also
5.5 times that in continental igneous rock; hence an exoterrestrial source is invoked
[41] . Assuming the average of nickel in meteoritic dust to be 2%, he arrives at the
aforesaid figure of 10,000 tons of dust per day, 3,650,000 tons per year (3.6x 10 6 ),
hence, especially if any kind of exponentialism is introduced as we go back in time, we
should have the sediments of the ocean receive their quota of nickel laid down in a few
thousand years.

McSween and Stolper, in their study of basaltic meteorites, which were definitely not
of earthly or lunar origin, abstracted a type of shergottite meteorite. This material
they assign originally, not to comets, or asteroids, but to the planet Mars, which has
many extinct structures and surface rocks with a known resemblance to the shergottite
[42] .

The electrician, Eric Crew, has analyzed confirmed reports of ice and stone falls
associated with lightning; many such were collected by Charles Fort (1874-1832) who
wrote once, "we shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded... a
procession of the damned." [43] . Crew ascribes both pick-up and fall-out phenomena
sometimes to high-speed jet occurring in and about air-to-ground fast electrical
discharges  [44] . Dust storms and volcanism greatly augment the fusion of particles.
There may be posited that in large meteoroidal and cometary encounters, the Earth will
be subject to considerable material exchanges by the electrical discharge channels
occurring between Earth and the intruder.

The "White Cliffs of Dover" and other immense chalk beds elsewhere are a mixture of
tiny spheres, a formless chemical mass, and organic debris, which contains some
marvelously unattrited marine skeletons. How were they formed? Conventional science
pleads continuing longtime deposits, but the stratification and water-current markings
attesting to such are missing, nor can the preserved shapes admit to this mechanism
[45] . A great updraft and precipitation is suggested, or else a dust-laden electric
discharge penetrating the waters, followed by an upheaval or expansion of the bottom
terrain.

A study by L. and W. Alvarez, Asaro and Michel describes a fall-out of dust 1000 times
that of Krakatoa from a meteoroid crash, which, they claim, darkened the Earth for
years  [46] . The crash was deduced from the presence in Italian, Danish, and New
Zealand limestones of the fossil break between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods of
iridium, 30,160 and 20 times its normal background level in terrestrial rocks but
characteristic of meteoroids. Spain and Holland were added by Ganapathy to the
locations bearing the tell-tale chemical signals. Fish-clay analyses by Kyle and others
in Denmark agreed with the limestone findings. A number of additional rare elements
were also in long supply, 5 to 100 times their normal abundances.

The correlation of a fossil index set with a distinctive chemical element marks an
important advance in geological investigation. A sure layer is now presumed to exist
worldwide; even were it not to signal an age boundary, it would permit a tightening of
identifications of relative and absolute dates of strata and species. We know that we
are dealing with a uniform world-wide event, something that is only hoped for when
correlating fossils and rocks. We know that the event is limited in time.

We know further that if the event is not denoted in the strata, the reason is not that
the event did not occur. That is, some stratum capable of containing the iridium (or
other element) must at the stipulated time have existed everywhere. Where not found,
conditions for its prompt removal must have existed, or later removal must have
occurred. Alternatively, the fall-out was erratic and initially directed only to
certain spots by the presumably catastrophic winds and tides of the moment. Despite all
this, with a dozen such exoterrestrial chemical markers, historical geology and
paleontology would undergo a quantavolution.

What conclusions can be drawn from the material of this Chapter? At the least, a
considerable part of the Earth's crust is exoterrestrial and has fallen as dust and
stone not long ago. There is reason to accept in general terms the multitude of legends
speaking of heavy falls. Even the most bizarre material has descended during historical
times and every indication points to an exponential increase in the quantity and
perhaps the variety of matter with the regression of time from the present. All the
seas and continents contains heavy deposit of suspected exoterrestrial origin.

Yet there is also some indication that the time of heavy falls may have been
concentrated in a catastrophe or set of catastrophic climates. The "ice ages," for
instance, may have been a period of combined ice and stone deluges from outer space,
explaining thereby a number of inconsistencies in the terrestrial pure theory of a
central focus and outspreading therefrom. The absence of fall-out stratigraphic
formations in older rock formations bespeaks a primeval peace.

A question arises as to what constitutes outer space or exoterrestrialism for dust and
stone falls. Under certain conditions of large meteoroid or cometary impact, and heavy
multiple volcanism, exploded material can achieve extreme heights and even be lost into
space. Such would be the case, for instance, were the Moon to have been exploded from
the Pacific Basin. In such a case, a prolonged fall-out period of a great many years,
perhaps centuries, might result. Pebbles, dust, loess, tektites and other types of
matter might separately collect in orbit and shower down homogeneously, while
simultaneously, volcanism would pave large stretches of the globe.

Once more, we find the gradual fall rates of the present and the more credible
exponentially higher fall rates of the recent past so productive of mass and volume for
the Earth's crust that a young age for the Earth or a very young age for the
catastrophized Earth suggests itself. Whatever the properties of fully exoterrestrial
falls to explosion and fall-back, the fall-out even will wreak havoc: darkness,
lightning, winds, possible interruption of Earth motions, and biosphere destruction,
plus excitation of seismism and volcanism; holospheric transactionism, that is.





{S : Notes (Chapter Eight: Falling Dust and Stone)}
Notes (Chapter Eight: Falling Dust and Stone) 

1. Op. cit., 258.

2. Ibid., 258-9.

3. Ibid., 186-90.

4. Worlds in Collision, 42-3, 51-3.

5. "Meteor," 12 Ency. Brit. (1974), 36.

6. I Catas. Geol. (1976).

7. Unpubl. mss., 1980, Soil Dept., ICT, Entschede, Netherlands.

8. H. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 241, 243.

9. Ibid.

10. D. A. Cyr, Annular Space Dust (Thousand Oaks, Calif. Annular Publs., 1968).

11. Earth in Upheaval, 96.

12. W. W. Shilts, "Glacial Till and Mineral Exploration," in R. F. Legget, ed., Glacial
Till (Ottawa, Royal Soc. Can., 1976), 205; Also Dreimanis, Ibid., II, 14-5, 42.

13. Op cit., 28-31.

14. ibid., 121-2.

15. John Bryson, 4 Am. Geol. (1889), 125-6; W. R. Jillson, 60 Science (1 Aug. 1924),
101-2.

16. Chester A. Davis, 19 New World Antiquity (Mar-Apr. 1972), 27-43; Donnelly, op.
cit., passim.

17. L. J. Salop, "Glaciations, Biologic Crises, and Supernovae," 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec.
1977), 24-5.

18. John A. O'Keefe, "The Terminal Eocene Event..." 285 Nature (1980), 309-11; Heezen
and Hollister, op. cit., 254; O'Keefe, ed., Tektites, (U. of C. Press, 1963) and
Tektites and Their Origin (N. Y., 1976).

19. B. P. Glass et al., "North American Microtektites from the Caribbean Sea" 19 Earth
and Plan Sci. Ltrs (1973), 184-92 (N. Holland).

20. 217 Sci. Amer. (1967), 35-6.

21. 152 Science (3 June 1966), 1341-5.

22. C. Sutherland, "China's Dragon," 4 PensÚe 1 (Winter 1973-4), 47-50.

23. "Tektites and China's Dragon," I Kronos 2 (Summer 1945), 35-42.

24. 152 Science , loc. cit.

25. G. Baker, "Origin of Tektites," 185 Nature (30 Jan. 1960), 291-4.

26. Gill, 75 J. Geophys. Res. (1970), 966-1002 finds ages of only 4830 to 14600 years.
B. glass et al. find end of Eocene deposits, 10 Lun. Plan. S. (1979) 434-6.

27. B. Heezen, B. Glass, op. cit., and 112 Science News (1977) 408 on Ivory Coast
tektites.

28. Op. cit.

29. John Lear, Sat. Rev. (6 May 1967), 57.

30. E. A. King, 65 Amer. Sci. (1977), 212-18.

31. Rittmann, Volcanoes and Their Activity (New York: Wiley, 1962), 284-5.

32. James M. S. Sun, 56 Trans. Am. Geophys. U. (1975), 389.

33. 285 Nature (1980), 309-11.

34. Selected Works (Santa Barbara, Ca: Annular Pubns, 1972).

35. Edinburgh Philos. J. (1819), 221-35.

36. I. Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5.

37. In D. I. Shcherbakov, ed., The Interaction of the Science s in the Study of the
Earth (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1968).

38. R. A. Schmidt, "Extraterrestrial Dust as a Source of Atmospheric Argon," 151
Science (14 Jan. 1966), 223.

39. "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoric Dust," 202 Sci. Amer. (Feb. 1960), 123-32.

40. S. Fred Singer, "Zodiacal Dust and Deep Sea Sediments," 156 Science (26 May 1967),
1080-3.

41. "Exploring the Ocean Floor," 183 Sci. Amer. (Aug 1950), 42-4.

42. Sci. Amer. (June 1980), 44-53.

43. Book of the Damned, repr. (London: Abacus, 1974). See also the compilations of W.
Corliss (Glen Arm, Md., 21057, Sourcebook Project).

44. "Electricity in Astronomy," I S. I. S. R. 1-4 (1976-7), esp. # 4.

45. W. A. Tarr, "Is the Chalk a Chemical Deposit," 62 Geol. Mag. (1952), 252.

46. Luis Alvarez et al., "Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary
extinction," 208 Science (6 June 1980), 1095-1108.






{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART II: }
{Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: }
{C Chapter 9}
{T Gases, Poisons and Foods}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER NINE

GASES, POISONS AND FOOD

That "all things come from heaven" may be untrue, yet even in these last peaceful
centuries the quantity and variety of things reported to have fallen upon Earth is
astonishing. For two hundred years, scientific establishments sought to resist the flow
of accounts, making out those who appeared with such claims to be culturally retarded
and childish, clowns, cranks and religious fanatics. Now the door is open to claims,
and some scientists are tripping over each other's footnotes in their eagerness to go
to through it. Since most chemical elements and compounds can be either found beyond
the Earth or conjectured to have once formed from the thermal and electrical conditions
that occur exoterrestrially, scenarios of past events to explain present processes are
becoming as common, prolonged, and disastrous as the "soap operas" of radio and
television.

Contemporary man is motivated to come to grips with the sky by economics, politics,
militarism, and the need to survive. Poisonous hydrocarbon, radiation, aerosols, carbon
dioxide, acid pollution, radio microwaves, ion disturbances, acoustical turbulence,
supersonic stresses in flight, and civil and military thrusts into outer space amount
to a major challenge to human modes of existence. To cope with such developments, ever
more scientific knowledge is required and this in turn leads to discoveries of
processes occurring in outer space that influence the Earth, and thereupon present new
problems and possibilities -solar energy, weather control, incursions of hitherto
unrecognized chemicals and particles, and even, say some, life forms contributing to
evolution and diseases. A modern pragmatic preoccupation with the skies, it would
appear, is now being laid on top of the age-old preoccupation with the forces and gods
believed to dominate the celestial sphere.

The gases that we discuss are mainly effective in the biosphere. We address not only
their chemical qualities but their behavior in mixtures and their propulsion by winds.
The poisons we discuss are cell destroying chemicals. The food consists of the rare
occasion of the descent of digestible cell-building chemical compounds. Hydrocarbons
are considered here as poisons; petroleum deposits are dealt with in a chapter to come.
Radiation is treated as a poison, though it may be a creator at times. Electricity, as
was said earlier, is everywhere and can go onstage with a number of the processes
involving gaseous behavior.

Comets and meteoroids, like volcanos, can emit gases. Explorer and scientist Humboldt
thought it probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere
in the years 1819 and 1823. When, on March 24,1933 a fireball of six miles diameter
sped across the American South, it trailed a tail one mile wide that carried a thousand
cubic miles of dust. The people who were beneath its passage smelled a peculiar
sulphurous odor for hours and for several days suffered from throat irritation  [1] .
If the intruder is admitted, one may grant the occurrence of gases. An actual impact is
not necessary.

Can a gas cloud descend through the atmosphere without exploding or burning? It would
have to be charged oppositely to the Earth's surface and buffered during descend by a
plasma. Even under normal conditions, the positions of light and heavy gases are
sometimes reversed in the disorderly atmosphere. The Great Chicago Fire, and forest
fires which burned out millions of acres of land in Wisconsin, Michigan, Western
America and Canada broke out on the same day in the fall of 1871. E. K. Komarek speaks
of a peculiar fire weather and cites this case; Donnelly claimed that all were due to
gas drifts from the tail of Biella's Comet which had not been seen on its expected
three previous visits but was glimpsed without its tail in 1872, a year later, at which
time a spectacular meteoritic display occurred [2] . Donnelly offered a number of
testimonials that the fires referred to leaped incessantly from different locations
above the houses and forests and behaved as electricity in some ways (fusing without
burning) and as a gas in others (asphyxiating people away from the blaze).

A few years later another comet neared Earth and the Earth passed through its tail. The
comet broke up on September 9, 1882. Krakatoa exploded on August 26, 1883, after months
of eruption. A great many people were burned, smothered in the choking gases, and
nearly blinded. We should recall how the Krakatoa ash is negligible in the sea today
when compared with the layers described in earlier pages. Mass asphyxiation would be a
logical deduction from the conditions cited.

Just as research has shown sunspot gaps to be connected with climatic disaster, and has
correlated planetary-solar conjuctions with earthquakes, it may establish that cometary
passbys have occasioned violent volcanism -all of this during the uniformitarian
Solarian period. All the more may have happened, then, during ancient periods of
catastrophes.

Cosmic dust can be struck by particles from the Sun or stars and emit gases. David
Tilles explains only 20% of the argon 36 and 38 on Earth as an effect of the solar wind
upon space dust and debris. The balance he believes to be derived from an unquiet sun
of long ages ago acting upon then larger dust clouds surrounding the Earth  [3] .
However, argon has been unexpectedly detected in the thin atmosphere of Mars, and if
Mars has been recently in gaseous exchange with Earth, as Velikovsky wrote in 1950, it
would have given argon to the Earth or taken it away  [4] .

Gibson and Moore, investigating subsoil samples from the Moon, found so many
differences in volatile elements between North Ray Crater and other sampled locations
that they concluded it to be the site of a cometary impact. They agree with Kopal that
"the total amount of gas which can be acquired by the Moon in a catastrophic encounter
with a comet is far from negligible." [5]  The Earth is a bigger target for comets than
the Moon. We would expect the Earth, then, to have also picked up many elements from
foreign sources. Traces of gases and hydrocarbons were found some distance from the
crater. Gases emitted by an impacting body would probably cause significant surface
phenomena on Earth as well.

In the year 687 B. C., at a time when natural phenomena, attributed to Mars, were
verging upon the catastrophic in many places on Earth, the great army of the Assyrian
king Sennacherib was destroyed as it was preparing to assault Jerusalem. "The angel of
the Lord" is credited with the deliverance from the enemy by the Bible. The angel is
identified as the Archangel Gabriel. He is connected with divine fire, with the
founding of Rome, with the planet Mars. It was "a consuming blast" that rabbinical
sources say burnt the souls of the Assyrians but not their bodies.

An analysis is contained in Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (230-41) in several fine
passages. The grotesque incident was coincidental with several other documentable
events around the world, and with a probable interruption in the Earth's movement. As
happens when a mega-force is operating, one force incites another: the destruction
might have been occasioned by gas and "celestial fire" acting together.

A charged gas would have descended, possibly lured by the concentration of metal
weaponry and myriad campfires. The gas cloud would have sent an electrical leader to
the camp grounds and the subsequent exchange of potentials would have killed the
Assyrian host. Sennacherib the king escaped, he was probably camped high and far from
the multitude of soldiers. Even in modern times of untroubled skies, verified reports
of flocks and herds being annihilated by a lightning blast occur.

The destructive meteoroid in this case would have been a plasmoid, preserving its
integrity as it passed through space and the atmosphere by the repulsion of its
surroundings, but driven down to Earth's surface by decrease in the repulsion, until
ultimately a "soft explosion extinguished the oxygen available to human and replaced it
by methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or these together.

We turn next to the famous case of the mammoths, not waiting for the chapter on
extinction  [6] . One almost should say the "deathless" case, for it has endured the
whole battle between catastrophists and uniformitarians, two hundred years -except that
now it may even become the case of the "deathless" mammoth, for a late news report
tells us that certain Russian experimenters are seeking to unfreeze and clone a mammoth
cell with an existing elephant to give birth to a live mammoth. Were the original
mammoths gassed into extinction? Instant death, fractured limbs, destroyed sometimes in
herds and sometimes alone, discovered on hills (not in river channels), some found with
their skins and innards intact, several found with food in their stomachs, even their
mouths, often associated with an incongruous assembly of other species, they lived and
died where they were found, several still standing, one with a rooted tree buried with
it. The mammoth and almost all other large animals of the same period were extincted
between 5,000 and 30,000 years ago over the face of the globe. The extinctions occurred
from over practically the whole arctic area and down to the southern part of the United
States, Europe and Middle Asia, where their close relatives, the mastodon, now-extinct
elephants, and modern elephants browsed. It is strange that no human skeletons have yet
been found, since we have their drawings of the mammoth.

Obviously if the date of each specimen were to be taken seriously, we would have, as
one writer argued, a series of local catastrophes. All over the world, he might have
added. Nor were the frozen elephants found encased in ice, but rather in a muck of
pebbles and clay, which is the same kind of muck that is widespread over hundreds of
thousand of square kilometers in the frozen arctic regions and contains the mangled
remains of millions of animals and plants. It is hard to dispute claims of a sudden,
widespread, simultaneous, and single catastrophe.

The assigned dates are hardly defensible. In the preliminaries of such a catastrophe,
valid carbondating would be extincted along with the large animals. The supplemental
dating is provided by the complicated ice age series, of which more later, but which,
we can say, is something of a muck itself. With the unreliable dating shunted aside, a
global scenario can be provided, an extravaganza, to be sure, but one is driven to it
by the facts.

One may speculate that a large body passed by the Earth perhaps 6,000 years ago. It
drew up tides of water and air below its path by hundreds of meters. It drew along and
up, then, water and atmosphere from the extreme northern and southern latitudes. It
tilted the globe at the same time. Most animals were asphyxiated during the hours of
the withdrawal of air. Simultaneously they were deep-frozen by temperatures reaching in
directly from outer space in the range of -150 F.

The intruding body departed. The columns of air and water collapsed, and rushed up to
the north and south. The winds and tides collected most of the dead animals, tore up
the ground, and finally deposited the remains in a muck that sometimes reaches to 1,000
feet of depth, even to 4,000 feet in one that the Soviets have excavated. Much of the
air never returned; the supply from the larger envelope around Earth was depleted and
the immediate atmosphere was thinned. As the legends say, it was now the bitter, cold
age of the "God of the Bright Skies", Jupiter. The mammoths, dry frozen in a vacuum,
rested in their packages of muck until the present day.

After relating so dramatic a story, it would be excessive to speak of the dinosaurs and
other mass extinctions, and these shall be saved until the appropriate chapter. Other
issues remain to be discussed here relating to gases and poisons.

One has to do with human experiences with atmospheric pressure, not only in moments
such as asphyxiated the great mammals, but time and time again in primeval history.
Sudden electrical events, not encounters alone, must have raised and lowered the air
pressures under which humans lived. At times, mankind must have endured miserable
headaches. Anthropologist Kennedy once referred briefly to "certain ritual practices
like trepanation (which also developed obsessive proportion in Late Neolithic and
Beaker time in Western Europe)." The practice extended in North Africa from the Canary
Islands through the Berber lands at least as far as Egypt. It was performed in
Mesoamerica as well. George Sarton writes in his history of science of prehistoric
skulls that have come down to us with evidences of trepanation (trephination) performed
upon them in life. The trepan is a saw for cutting holes in or removing pieces from the
skull. It is a dangerous operation, hardly on a plane with piercing the nostrils to
hold decorative devices. (But why are these devices so near the sinuses, too?) Extreme
headaches and fury can thus be relieved. Trepanning, we surmise, was an indication that
some considerable part of the population could not cope with a periodical fluctuation
or definite change in atmospheric pressure.

A second issue has to do with ozone. Having discovered that aerosol devices and
supersonic transports might destroy the ozone layer, several scholars have ventured to
say that such events have occurred in the past. Ozone, or atomic oxygen, exists in a
thin layer in the upper atmosphere, where it blocks solar and cosmic particles from
penetrating to the Earth's surface, here to cause innumerable mutations and cancers.
Ozone, too, is a poison in itself.

Associating ozone layer destruction with the periods of a reversal in the Earth's
magnetic field and these with the extinction of a number of species, discoverable in
ocean bottom drilling, Reid, Isaksen, Holzer and Cruzen theorize " that current concern
about possibly anthropogenic destruction of stratospheric ozone may be well-founded
since it is possible that major depletions occurring in the distant past have had
profound effect on the development of life as we know it." [7] Anticipating again what
is to be developed later, we can give credence to the theory, but would add that the
destruction of the ozone layer will have occurred during any catastrophe involving
turbulence in the stratosphere, especially with the passage of a large body.

Furthermore, the authors say, "the harmful effects accompanying polarity reversal,
whatever they may be, form only one component of the total environmental stress on a
given species." Beland and Russell point out that solar flares of extreme power, of a
kind never observed and perhaps occurring once in 200,000 years by probability theory,
would have to coincide with the reversal of GMF in order to account for a large number
of species extinctions  [8] .

The Sun might well have become agitated by changing movements of large bodies within
its field and add a heavy dose of radiation to what might be occurring on Earth in
reaction to an intruding body or bombardment of meteoroids. Ozone problems would have
to take their place among many disturbing chemical and radiation changes. As Waddington
pointed out in 1967, particle radiation increases inversely with magnetic shielding
[9] .

Presently one speaks of background radiation, or low-level radiation, and a pressing
problem of the future is how to keep radiation at the same low level at least.
Sternglass finds even now indications of birth defects, infant mortality, and old-age
respiratory problems traceable to low level radiations  [10] . Evidently both long-term
increases of level and single bombardments can cause damage to most people. Latest
medical reports (1983) are more ominous.

Prehistoric cases can exchange ideas with future cases. J. W. Gofman has predicted that
"a nuclear-based (U. S.) economy with 99.9% perfection in plutonium containment could
mean a 25% annual increase in total death rate from this source alone," amounting to
over 25 million extra cases of lung cancer over 50 years  [11] . One must evaluate
prehistoric indications of abnormal radiation and high-energy explosions in this light.

Vera Rich, reviewing knowledge of the Tunguska (Siberia) meteor of 1908, brings forward
evidence of scabrous infection of the local reindeer in that year, a great acceleration
of tree ring growth beginning then, and an increase in the radioactivity of surrounding
trees  [12] . Another report has it that certain plants mutated as well. The event was
exoterrestrial in origin and probably is of the category of "gas-bag" explosions, since
scarcely a ton of exogenous particles has been recoverable from the immense scene of
destruction.

Perhaps the body entered the Earth's atmosphere with great speed, electrically
attracted as well as driven by inertial differences, and thoroughly ablated until it
became a gas projectile without a casing, that exploded before striking. Or perhaps it
was a "Sennacherib plasmoid" from its inception. Generally speaking, the radiation
effect of a single meteor or cometary train passing through the atmosphere would be
heavier than many hydrogen bombs (unless these latter are deliberately "dirtied" by
cobalt or other chemicals) because of its great heat, its compression of the ambiant
air, its wide path of fall-out, and deep and large explosive cratering. During the
disasters of Exodus, several documents give indications of radiation effects. The
widespread "leprosy" effect may denote radiation disease, as I have explained in my
study of Moses. Eating fallen quail killed many persons, reports Jewish legend. The
manna, too, had to be eaten under supervision; to argue that it was" holy" and thus had
to be treated ritualistically is a modern sociological notion overlooking that it might
have become "holy" for several reasons, one being that priests, the savants, were
called upon to distinguish the edible from the poisonous manna. The Egyptian Ipuwer
papyrus conveys the impression that women became barren and that people lost their
hair. The cattle herds died of scabrous diseases. The most substantial theory of Exodus
times regards them as part of a much larger, a global, event, involving the close
passage of a comet, so that radiation effects are logically to be expected.

Recent studies have discovered high levels of radiation in fossil flora and fauna,
going back far in conventionally dated geological time. Kloosterman writes of "
anomalous high radioactivity" in a fish from the same Old Red Sandstore beds in which
the Pterichtyades occur, "fishes often invoked by catastrophists..." and quotes Hugh
Miller (1841) on a quiet but potent agency of destruction erasing "innumerable
existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles at once, and yet the medium in
which they had lived left undisturbed in its operations." [13]  We mention the case
again when discussing extinction; electric shock probably accompanied the poison, and
was succeeded immediately by great tides of slurried water. In 1975, Bramlette
described deep fossil beds a plankton in the sea bottom that he tied to cosmic
radiation storms  [14] .

Radiology is a new field of knowledge, whose development is producing a new attitude
toward what can be transformed, in biology, geophysics, meteorology, and geology.
Oparin some time ago began to call upon it to explain the long chain of chemo-
biological events leading up to The Origin of Life. He wrote of inorganic meteoric
material suffering far-reaching transformation from inter-stellar radiation before
arriving upon the Earth, of transmutations, for instance of iron and nickel into
aluminum and silieni and of these into magnesium, sodium, and helium.

An instance of how rapidly old problems can be tendered new solutions by seemingly
remote scientific developments occurs in the case of perhaps the most famous of fall-
outs , that of manna, ambrosia to the Greeks, soma to the Hindus, and other names to
other peoples. The insistent claim of the ancients takes on enhanced validity in the
context of operations of modern technology.

The bits of suggestive evidence come from all quarters. We begin with a famous 1945
experiment of S. L. Miller (in consultation with H. Urey) and ask Bernard Newgrosh to
describe it for us:

     On the suggestion of H. C. Urey he took a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane and
     ammonia (which were then thought to be the constituents of Earth's primordial
     atmosphere but which are now known to be the constituents of cometary matter), boiled
     the water and ran an electrical discharge through it continuously for a week. The end
     products were an assortment of organic compounds, including some sugars, cyanides and
     small quantities of amino-acids. It was the latter which evoked the most interest and
     sparked off a whole new avenue of research into "the creation of life on Earth." Miller
     had boiled his liquid only to prevent the growth of (and therefore contamination by)
     micro-organisms. Later experiments used far less energy, and it transpired that the
     shorter and smaller the amount of heat used, the greater the yield of amino-acids
     obtained since these are denatured by heat. Other workers tried different mixtures of
     gases including, in some cases, oxygen and hydrogen sulphide. As long as the mixture
     was basically reducing in nature, the organic compounds and aminoacids were produced
     [15] .

M. G. Reade and Wong Kee Kuong have more recently discoursed theoretically upon methods
by which carbohydrates, such as the manna which fed the ancient survivors of the Exodus
disaster, could be produced with the aid of cosmic lightning  [16] . Formaldehyde (a
compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) is a partially combusted gas, of which "there
will be no shortage.. in a burning fiery cloud, almost whatever its origin." In
mixtures of free oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, this is the only product. It
has to be synthesized into sugar in an alkaline environment (already done) which is not
poisonous and can be converted into starch, rolled into "coriander seed" sizes and
dropped at dawn. So goes the argument of Reade, himself a confectioner and engineer.
The necessary procedures and formulas are presently at the threshold of laboratory
chemistry, he asserts.

On the processes required to produce edible carbohydrates in the form described by the
ancient sources, all are present in the environmental setting described by the same
sources, although without making the scientific connection that present knowledge
affords. The analysis of Reade is especially literal in matching edible product and the
natural "chemical apparatus" within the Bible.

In a yet unpublished manuscript on the Vedas of India, Ziegler brings forward many
ancient statements about dust and gases pervading the skies, including the fact that
the dust was falling and carrying the dew of heavenly waters (soma) with it.

In Hindu rite, the soma-devi are celebrants of sacrifices using soma. As a libation to
Agni, soma is now superseded in India by ghi. Now the deva is a goddess practically
identical with Venus, and the devi are her cohort. Venus, east and west, is worshiped
at times in the form of a cow, the sacred cow of India, for instance. Ghi is clarified
butter. The "golden calf" of the Hebrews in Exodus is the equivalent Baal-Venus image.
These few (from a great many) observations are made solely to point out and complete
the coincidence of a great celestial presence (a cometary body), a turbulent atmosphere
full of dust and lightning, the availability of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen,
methane, formaldehyde, and water in large amounts, the presence too of many enormous
laboratory vessels from which would fall not one but several products, and, of course,
the desperate survivors who would eat anything (regardless of its nutritional value)
and reverence the imagined donor.

At the same time as the Hebrews, Hindus, Mexicans, Greeks and others were munching
manna, they were vitally concerned with a certain redness in their environment. The
most astonishing and fearful color had fallen out of the skies and penetrated the
surface. Again we take leave to quote copiously from Newgrosh:

     Dr. Velikovsky has produced numerous citations from ancient sources to show how falls
     of a blood-like substance occurred when a "new" comet (later to become the planet
     Venus) came into catastrophic contact with the Earth: the Manuscript Quiche of the
     Maya, the so-called Papyrus Ipuwer from Egypt and the Book of Exodus all record the
     fact that the water in the rivers was turned into "blood". In addition to these
     examples, Dr. Velikovsky refers to the Greek myth of Zeus and Typhon, the Finnish epic
     Kalevala and the lore of the Altai Tartars. However, a more exhaustive survey of such
     legends would include the Sumerian myth of Inanna (a Venus goddess) who filled the
     wells of Sumer with "blood", the Egyptians story of the goddess Hathor (also Venus)
     whose visits to Earth were associated with the covering of the land with a blood-like
     "beer", and the Norse legends of the "raining of blood" associated with the Valkyries.
     These myths are widespread and all tell the same story. There can be little doubt that
     something looking like blood fell from Venus during its close contacts with Earth.

     What was its nature? Dr Velikovsky noted that it was a soluble pigment: "In sea, lake
     and river this pigment gave a bloody coloring to the water. These particles of
     ferruginous or other soluble pigment caused the world to turn red." Moreover, the
     accounts of Exodus 7: 24 and of Ipuwer lamentations agree that this bloody colored
     water was unpleasant and maybe poisonous. It is recorded of the Nile that "the river
     stank" (Exodus 7: 21). There was disease among the cattle which, Dr. Velikovsky
     claimed, was due to dust of an irritant nature.

Another writer, Peter James, asks whether legends of red falls from periods before
3,500 years ago might not refer to geological occurrences that deposited red sands or
ferratites around the world  [17] .

     In Greek myth the Sky-god Ouranos, the first ruler of the universe, was castrated by
     his son Kronos and his blood fell to the Earth, impregnating it with a number of
     dreadful deities. To turn to Roman literature, we have a very graphic description of
     fall of blood in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in his account of the fall of the Giants. "The
     terrible bodies of the giants lay crushed beneath their own massive structures, and the
     Earth was drenched and soaked with the blood of her sons." Egyptian myth tells a tale
     of the Sungod Re similar to the Greek myth of Ouranos -it was said that Re mutilated
     himself and that new deities sprang from his blood as it fell. In another Egyptian
     myth, Re decides to punish mankind by sending down the Goddess Hathor/ Sekhmet. She
     performs her task enthusiastically, gorging herself in the blood of men, but Re does
     not want Man utterly destroyed, and he has to devise a stratagem to stop here in her
     path of destruction. He mixes red ochre with beer, and pours a vast quantity over the
     Earth during the night, to a depth of three palms (about nine inches). The goddess
     sates herself on this "blood", and intoxicated she returns to heaven having forgotten
     her task.

Newgrosh refers back to the Miller experiment, for a crucial detail that has long gone
unnoticed.

     Miller wrote: "During the run the water in the flask became noticeably pink after the
     first day, and by the end of the week the solution was deep red and turbid. Most of the
     turbidity was due to colloidal silica from the glass. The red color is due to organic
     compounds absorbed on the silica."

To conclude, electric discharges between the intruder and Earth synthesized organic
compounds in the cometary gases, including an edible component and an inedible red
silicate that showered down to color the Earth and water a turbid red. Newgrosh adds,
"being organic compounds, they would be speedily denatured, leaving no trace -except,
that is, in the memory of mankind." Also, an iron compound of partially hydrated FeCl2
has been reported present in heavy concentration in the clouds of Venus today  [18] .
Considering that a possible source of Venus is the "Great Red Spot" of Jupiter,
together with the material already mentioned, if this analysis remains valid, this is a
significant quantavolutionary indication, perhaps a better test than the hotly debated
question of hydrocarbon clouds.

On many occasions in the past several centuries, falls of gelatinous material have been
reported in connection with meteors. The literature in part has been compiled by
Corliss [19] . Luminous and therefore probably electrified while falling, the stuff is
transparent and colorless, texturally a jelly, stinks when disintegrated, and dissolves
into a few grains of residue after some hours. One may guess that the Earth's reducing
hydrogen-rich top atmosphere is carried into contact meteorically with an oxidizing
lower layer, gathering dust particles and vapor, including metallic catalysts, to form
a semi-solid type of formaldehyde glob the size of a drinking cup. These are certainly
poor imitations of manna, but a similar process is entailed.

To portray its relation in volume to a smallpox virus, a single crystal of salt would
have to be enlarged to a five-meter cube, on a ratio of one centimeter to 1 micron (10
-4 cm) for the virus to be visible  [20] . There is certainly room for viruses to ride
on cosmic dust. There is not yet a definite answer to the question whether meteoroids
and comets do now carry or ever have carried organic molecules and primitive life
forms. Brigham, in 1881, following Hahn and Weinland, reported a collection of some six
hundred specimen of fossil life obtained by analysis of meteorites  [21] . Their work
was discarded as imaginative to the extreme, for they were discovering corals, sponges,
and crinoids. In the thirties, Lipman and Roy debated the former's findings of rods and
ovoid cells in meteorites  [22] . Recently, Claus, Nagy, and others have discovered
inherent organic compounds, carbonaceous chrondrites, in meteoritic material.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have tackled the problem vigorously over the past few years
and emerged with two relevant hypotheses: one that life forms originated in space and a
second that plagues also descend from space. Comets carry the appropriate chemicals and
can carry on the necessary varying experiments naturally, over millions of years, until
"photosynthetic bacteria, able to oxidize hydrogen sulfide anaerobically," emerged.

     If a cometary impact led to the start of life, the question arises: would subsequent
     arrivals of cometary material carry biological or prebiological material which might
     affect terrestrial biology? The boldest answer must be yes; that is to say,
     extraterrestrial biological invasions never stopped and continue today. These invasions
     would take the form of new viral and bacterial infections that strike our planet at
     irregular intervals, drifting down onto the surface in the form of clumps of meteoritic
     material probably similar to those studied by Dr. Rajan and his colleagues  [23] .

The authors propose a perpetual vigil and a screening of stratospheric contents for
microbes. If their theory is correct, one might expect veritable plagues to have had a
hand in the great extinctions of species that have marked geological history. The
causes of death would not only be mechanical -flooding, wind, hailstones etc. -and
radiation, but also should include "biological warfare" against the Earth. Actually
there is yet another dread possibility, chemical poisons, such as cyanide.

Iridium, osmium and arsenic occur in quantities hundred of times above the normal in
strata of the cretaceous-tertiary when the dinosaurs and many other species, both
terrestrial and marine, extincted. Kenneth Hsu discerns at the same time a double blow
to the biosphere in the form, first, of heavy atmospheric heating owing to a cometary
pass-through and explosion, which killed off large terrestrial animals, and cyanide
poisoning that wiped out calcacerous marine plancton [24] . The cyanide effect would be
stressed by a catastrophic rise in calcite-compensation depths in the oceans after the
cyanide was detoxified.

During these disastrous events, which may have happened on several or more occasions,
not one alone, the ground forces would be highly energized. Velikovsky found it
impossible to determine whether, in the plagues of Exodus, "the comet Venus infested
the Earth with vermin," or "the internal heat developed by the Earth and the scorching
gases of the comet were in themselves sufficient to make the vermin of the Earth
propagate at a very feverish rate." That many forms of life are comfortably buried
below ground surface is well-known. But a thermal rise, flooding, earthquake,
volcanism, and electrical discharging, will bring them out in incredible numbers. Thus
the frogs of Exodus, the locusts, and the vermin also. One need only retroject modern
reports, and raise the scale of intensity, to imagine the succession of events. In the
area of the Krakatoa explosion, the nether world of animals was stirred up even while
the gases burned, choked, blinded, and smothered people.

There is normally more in the soil than the erosion of terrestrial rocks: this has
become apparent. Equally, new elements are discoverable that convey surprise, mostly
unpleasant. The Dow Chemical company of Midland, Michigan, has been for several years
in a quarrel with local authorities and environmentalists. The latter claim that Dow
has manufactured chemicals that deposit dioxins, a carcinogen, in the soils. Dow says "
we now think dioxins have been with us since the advent of (fire). It is perhaps
uninformed to discount the company's research, that is apparently discovering dioxins
everywhere. Adding more dioxins to the ground, of course, makes matters worse.

A parallel can be cited from the research into "Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons is
Soils and Recent Sediments," conducted by Blumer and Youngblood, on behalf of the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution  [27] . Samples were drawn from "depositional and
chemical environments ranging from continental and coastal soils to marsh and subtidal
marine deposits, and from high to low oxidation-reduction potentials." The PAH
component is significant; PAH is carcinogenic; ancient burning may be producing some of
today's cancers; it would be well to perform statistical correlations on populations,
cancer incidences, and "background PAH" of soils. PAH are formed at elevated
temperatures by incomplete combustion.

     Our interpretation would imply that carcinogenic and mutagenic hydrocarbons occurred on
     the earth's surface during geological times spans. This raises the question whether
     these compounds might have contributed significantly to the processes of natural
     selection of mutation, and to the evolution of species.

The scientists assess the possible origins of the PAH deposits. They exclude
weathering, seepage and spills, they exclude biosynthesis; they doubt early diagenesis
in process of formation; they settle upon pyrolysis. This burning might be thought to
occur on the site, but "the consistency in the PAH distribution among our samples
suggests a predominant single mode of origin;" the sites are distant from one another.
The chemistry does not permit regarding the PAH as "urban air particulates." Forest
fires are "possible but unproven:" low temperature burning could provide the homology
among the samples and air transport of PAH carbon ash from a great central fire
somewhere might preserve the similarity. The ash layers are not noticeable, however.

The authors do not consider typhonic meteoric explosions and fall-out. This could raise
to great heights the combustion residue of large vegetal areas and drop it around the
world. Nor do they consider a cometary pass-through with a burning hydrocarbon tail
that could deliver the PAH where and how found today. The time would be recent, for the
PAH are in surficial sediments.

In sum catastrophes, especially if exoterrestrially invoked, display much chemical
creativity. Great typhonic explosions on Earth, probably exoterrestrially induced, will
behave more modestly, but similarly. Numerous gases, poisons, and foods have fallen out
in natural history, and very recently. Precarious life situations have been widely and
abruptly generated. Multiple reports of gaseous and fall-out processes in space and
atmosphere challenge the credibility of radioactivity rates that have been established
under guidelines consistent with presently observable rates.






{S : Notes (Chapter Nine: Gases, Poisons, and Food)}
Notes (Chapter Nine: Gases, Poisons, and Food) 

1. F. W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Phila: Chilton, 1965), 179.

2. Donnelly, op. cit., 102-6.

3. David Tilles, "Atmospheric Noble Gases...," 148 Science (21 May 1965), 1085-7.

4. L. M. Greenberg, "The Martian Atmosphere," II PensÚe I (1976), 5-9.

5. 179 Science (5 Jan. 1973), 69-71.

6. W. R. Corliss has compiled and reprinted numerous extracts from the scientific
literature, Strange Planet (Glen Arm, Md.; Sourcebook Project, 1975), section EBM. An
important update and new material is contained in L. Ellenberger, et al.,
"Catastrophism and the Mammoths," VII Kronos 4 (Summer 1982), 62-96.

7. G. C. Reid et al., "Influence of ancient solar-proton events on the evolution of
life," 259 Nature (22 Jan. 1976), 177-9.

8. 263 Nature (16 Sept. 1976), 259.

9. Science (17 Nov. 1967)

10. E. J. Sternglass, Low Level Radiation (NY: Ballantine, 1972).

11. Report prepared for the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (Yachats, Oregon).

12. 274 Nature (1978), 207.

13. J. B. Kloosterman, 2 Catas. Geol. 2 (Dec. 1977), 49.

14. 187 Science (17 Jan. 1975). 4172.

15. 4 S. I. S. Workshop 1 (July 1981), 2-3.

16. Wong, Kee Kuong, "The Synthesis of Manna," 3 PensÚe (Winter 1973), 45-6; M. G.
Reade, "Manna as a Confection," I S. I. S. R. 2 (Aug. 1977), 9-13, 25.

17. I Catas. Geol. (Dec. 1976), 5.

18. G. P. Kuiper, "On the Nature of the Venus Clouds," Planetary Atmos., Intl Atmos
Union, Symposium 40 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971).

19. See W. R. Corliss, Strange Phenomena, (Glen Arm, Md., 1974), 2v.

20. Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (NY: John Day, 1957).

21. F. Brighan, 20 Pop. Sci. (1881), 83-7.

22. Work by C. B. Lipman; S. K. Roy; E. Anders et al. and R. L. Levy is extracted by W.
R. Corliss ed., in Strange Universe (Glen Arm, Md.: Sourcebook Project, 1977), 2v.

23. "Does Epidemic Disease come from Space?" New Sci. (17 Nov. 1977), 403.

24. 285 Nature (22 May 1980), 202.

25. Worlds in Collision, 192-3, 268.

26. R. Jeffrey Smith, 202 Science (15 Dec. 1978), 1166-7.

27. Science (4 Apr. 1975), 53; see also R. A. Hites, Laflamme and Farrington,
"Sedimentary Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons...," 198 Science (25 Nov. 1977), 829-31.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART II: }
{Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: }
{C Chapter 10}
{T Metals, Salt and Oil}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER TEN

METALS, SALT AND OIL

Iron-working is siderurgy, a word out of ancient Greece and Rome. It translates
properly as the working of star-iron. The Greek word for anvil, on which iron was
worked, was close to the word for a meteoric stone. The Eygptians called iron "the
bones of Typhon" and "a gift from Seth," both names corresponding to bodies crashing
into the Earth, devil-monster and devil-god. Meteoritic iron was known to the early
dynasties. "The Jews called iron ore nechoshet, which literally means the 'droppings of
the (cosmic) serpent, ' a nonsensical term unless our interpretation of it is allowed."
[1]  The Jews forbade the use of iron in chiseling stones for the construction of an
altar. "A similar taboo was observed in Greek and Roman cults, it was and still is
widespread." [2]

But, whereas the Egyptians held an especial taboo of iron, the Assyrians did not, and
M. Sieff has described how Egyptian power waned when it lacked iron and waxed, on
occasion, when foreign workers and allies such as the Greeks and the miners of Zimbabwe
brought in iron and worked it. The Assyrians achieved their greatest conquests at a
time of grave natural disasters (the Mars-associated events between -776 and -487) [3]
. South and north of Egypt, iron in large quantities was found and used; in Egypt it
was neither found nor used. Query: why was no distinction made between meteoritic
sacred iron and mined iron? Possible answer; because all iron was known to be
meteoritic. Much may have fallen in association with the activity of the great war god
Mars-Ares-Nergal. Adequate metallurgy was known for thousands of years before the iron
age; increased temperatures could have been devised if the will--and the material--were
present.

In conventional works of human history, iron is placed as a late discovery. The "iron
age" comes after the "bronze ages" which follow the "Stone-ages." These terms and
divisions now only perpetuate confusion in anthropology, history, philosophy, and
perhaps even in geology. Thus, a common reference, the Columbia Encyclopedia, thinks
that meteoric iron beads existed in Egypt as early as 4000 B. C. but iron smelting not
until 1900 B. C. and later  [4] . Some confusion is admitted on the matter and
Velikovsky's reconstruction of Egyptian chronology has added dismay to confusion  [5] .
Some even say that iron may have been used before bronze, since isolated iron artifacts
of very early dynasties have been recovered. By the end of the second millennium, iron
was in general use in Palestine and probably also to the North. A Soviet excavation has
reported a metallurgical industry between 3000 and 2000 B. C. in Medzamor  [6]  with
steel tweezers dated at about 1000 B. C. Several experts now assert that there was no
clear functional superiority of iron in the first centuries of its use; bronze was
adequate even for weapons.

This all would signify a concurrent use of iron, lead, tin, copper, gold and silver by
2500 B. C. in the Mediterranean and Middle East, also perhaps elsewhere in the world.
The question arises why mankind did not use metals and invent metallurgy earlier. Could
all the workable surface metals of the world have arrived from exoterrestrial sources
within a brief period of late proto-history, and so vividly that the ancients even
could assign separate periods for their arrival, as Hesiod and Ovid did when reporting
a golden age, succeeded by a silver age, and ending in an iron age? I cannot attempt a
full answer here, but would support the case for human-witnessed exoterrestrial falls.

     Bellamy can again be quoted  [7] : Gold, platinum, uranium, radium, mercury, bismuth,
     and other heavy metals are not detected in the surface layer of the Sun, nor of any
     other star. As we cannot suppose that they do not exist in those bodies they must
     logically be present in their cores--and hence also in the cores of the smaller cosmic
     bodies, planets. Therefore the presence of heavy metals on, or near, the surface of our
     Earth points to strewing from without. Without such cosmic strewing no ores would
     probably be found on, or near, the surface of our Earth at all.

     In the south of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) there is a zone, about 180 miles long by
     25 to 30 miles wide, which contains great deposits of ores--chiefly copper, iron, tin,
     uranium, and cobalt. In Angola and Rhodesia, as well as in South Africa, there are
     smaller deposits.

     Indeed, many geologists are of the opinion nowadays that the great rich ore deposits at
     least must have been brought into being through strictly localized, exceptional, and
     briefly operative causes.

Iron, the ancients believed, was meteoritic in origin. What would they have believed if
they had seen the now exposed great iron mountains of Minnesota or Venezuela? Could
such mountains have fallen from the sky? Unquestionably. Asteroids exist in the size of
iron mines and contain as much iron. Would they not have exploded and dissipated into
dust upon landing? Some would and some not.

A not-well-understood feature of meteoroid falls is that they can accomplish soft
landings as well as hard crashes. In hard crashes, such as at Campo del Cielo
(Argentina) where a number of meteoroids fell, "large masses of meteoritic iron and
shale have been found in its vicinity." [8]  Heide writes, "the 60-ton meteorite from
the Hoba farm near Grootfontain, South West Africa, the heaviest of all known
meteorites, imbedded itself in friable limestone at a depth of only 1.5 meters. The
iron meteorites of Cape York in Greenland, weighing up to 30.875 tons, lay on solid
gneiss rock, or were barely imbedded in moraine rubble, without any trace of an impact.
Here we may guess that they fell on a thick layer of ice or snow and sank to their
final location as the snow or ice melted  [9] .

However, as the Mass and Velocity of the meteoroid increase, its Energy of impact
increases, according to the formula E = 1/ 2 mv 2 . The atmosphere cannot brake the
body in time. Therefore, no iron masses of over 100 tons have been deemed to be of
exoterrestrial origin; where such have actually fallen, and few doubt this, they have
been vaporized by the impact.

In the face of this formula and the visible facts of meteoritic iron, it would appear
that the large iron ore masses on Earth cannot have originated exoterrestrially. The
negation, if any, depends upon variable velocity. If the falling iron mass is
electrically charged, or gathers a charge, so as to render it less attractive to the
Earth its velocity would diminish. Theoretically, it could waft down in a soft landing
in one piece. If it crashed upon landing, it would possibly assemble itself into the
form of an iron ore deposit as deluges of water and dust would fill the interstices.
Strange objects have been found in the midst of iron ores being mined, such as wood of
recent date  [10] .

Much that is meteoritic may not be discovered. On an Antarctic ice field, Japanese
explorers found over 1000 meteorites, of which only one was composed of iron  [11] .
Were the field of stone, instead of ice, the stone meteorites would probably go
undetected. Obviously we could not test all the Earth's rocks for exoterrestrial
origin, especially since the tests themselves might beg the question.

Masses of iron were found lying upon a Disco Island (Greenland) shore with a great
gneiss erratic boulder and associated with the talus of a basalt cliff which itself
contained similar bits of iron. All the iron was termed meteoritic which led the
investigators to wonder, especially since the basalt fragments were found even embedded
' inside the iron of the beach, whether the meteorite shower "occurred while the basalt
was in a state of pasty eruption." [12]  But, too, the range itself, though immense and
tall, might have been the rim of a great impact collision and was permeated by and
interacted with the exploding body.

Suppose all known meteoritic material in the world were assessed for its proportion of
iron. Suppose then that one calculated the proportion of iron ore to the amount of
drift, loess and homeless clay. If the two ratios were similar, the exoterrestrial
thesis would be expanded to embrace the materials of both ratios. Iron in one form or
another composes about 5% of the Earth's surface rocks; here is a thoroughly
homogenized relationship of iron to rock. This ratio turns out to be closer to the
ratio of iron to stone in meteoroids. Both ratios would be far removed, no doubt, from
the ratio of iron ore to drift and loess, which would probably be one in thousands. We
can imagine, as have several scientists, that the meteoroids fallen upon Earth are
those of a late planet explosion in the region of the belt of asteroids and therefore
we have been sampling a planet composed as the Earth is supposedly composed, with iron
and nickel core, sima mantle, and sial crust. Calculations, given this simple idea, are
complex but not enough. There is too much evidence of exoterrestrial dumping upon Earth
by other bodies, more of the nature of Jupiter and Saturn, to carry out this algebra of
ratios with confidence.

Generally, "terrestrial" iron bodies are distinguishable in composition from meteoritic
iron in that they contain either smaller amounts of nickel (about 3 per cent) or larger
amounts (about 35 per cent). The meteoroids also contain some cobalt. The distinction
is hardly foolproof. Generally, too, the meteoroids have encrustations attributable to
their experiences in space, although this is statistically discoverable and not an
absolute distinction.

Perhaps somewhere in the literature, unknown to the present writer, exists a systematic
examination of the boundaries of a very large metal body demonstrating a lack of
exoterrestrial experience. Nor is there a great iron body embedded in precambrian rock;
nor has anyone come upon intrusive pipes of iron ore that would have conveyed metal
from the core or mantle, by some combination of electrical and volcanic force.

If an alternative to an electrically-assisted soft landing were sought, one might
better conceive of a welding process; gigantic lightning strokes from iron bodies in
space lasting for a minute would cast molten iron ore down their path to where they now
rest in heaps. Again, a study of ore body boundaries is needed. Schaeffer has written
of the layers of ashes and cinder scories close in to a huge pure copper mine of Cyprus
[13] . One recent theory has the same copper distilling from a hot spot of a northern
fork of the great African rift. To this author, the exoterrestrial notion is as
convincing.

Like Bellamy, I am impressed by the fact that "there are, scattered over the Earth, a
number of ore-mountains which are evidently foreign to their surroundings. At Eisenerz,
in Austria, there is a huge mountain, consisting altogether of iron ore .... On the
island of Elba, in Sweden, in Russia, in India, and elsewhere we find more or less
considerable hills consisting of pure iron ore, mineral wonders of the world. In
Orissa, India, in the jungle near the village of Sakchi, is a hill consisting of iron
ore which is so rich that it yields almost 65 per cent of pure metal." Elsewhere he
writes that such mountains would, upon investigation, probably prove to be 'rootless. '
He describes others.

"At Gellivara in Sweden there are enormous deposits of iron ore whose special
characteristic is that they are found in floelike masses, as if they had been
'pancaked' down. At Kirunavaara and Loussavaara, in Lapland, there are similar deposits
of iron ore. The 'Kursk Anomaly' in Russia consists of a mass of iron ore estimated to
contain about a cubic mile of high-grade material. In the Ural area there is Gora-
Blagodat, the 'Blessed Mountain, 'an iron ore mountain 520 feet high, situated in a
plain. In Russia too is the Wyssokaya Gora, a deposit of rich magnetite ore, littered
over a strip 40 miles long by 9 miles wide."  [14]

As with iron, so with other metals: many legends have them falling from heaven. The
Chinese sky dragon's "breath descends as a rain of water or of fire. Gold is the
congealed breath of a White Dragon, but a Purple Dragon's spittle turns into balls of
crystal; glass is regarded as solidified dragon's breath." (The tektite allusion is
plain). "The dragons of mythology are often described (among the Teutons, for example)
as guardians of hoards and givers of wealth." The dragons are wise in metallurgy  [15]
.

Donnelly says the same. He describes "Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster,
rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's
death."  [16]  Further, now Humboldt writes, the Scythians had a sacred gold which fell
burning from heaven. "The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell
from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover
bronze coins."  [17]  An image of a rattlesnake with a tail of gold, and descended from
heaven, was worshipped by the Inca as the god of riches. In the Bible (Job 21) it is
said of the horrendous dragon Leviathan, "he shall strew gold under him like mire." And
Chan reports that in ancient Mesoamerica "yellow was the color of gold, the teocuilatl
or excrement of the gods." [18]  The dragons that are the substance of most ancient
myths and of children's fairy tales today tortured and enriched both the Earth and the
minds of men.

Cores drilled from Antarctic sediments of pleistocene age contained iridium and gold in
anomalously high proportions. "A sizeable fraction of the noble metals is contained in
vesicular, millimeter-sized poly-mineralistic grains that closely resemble ablation
debris from chondritic meteorites, and there is little doubt that the noble metals
resulted from the accretion of a large extra-terrestrial object."[18A]

About the same time as this expedition, the largest American gold strike in a century
was occurring on the Thornton-Ash ranch in Nevada. The gold was not in nuggets, but in
microscopic sizes like the Antarctic find. It is extracted by crushing and leaching its
host rock. Large tracts of land are being scooped out and many millions of tons of rock
processed to obtain the gold. In the absence of a comparative examination of the Nevada
and Antarctic discoveries, one may suspect an exoterrestrial origin of the Nevada gold
as well.

Conventionally, studies of the origins of metals and their cultural recognition do not
mention any exoterrestrial contribution to their chemistry, appearance or use. Instead,
they are looked upon as components of igneous intrusions. Speaking of gold, silver,
copper, lead and tin, Clair Patterson in his exceptionally important study of "Native
Copper, Silver, and Gold accessible to Early Metallurgists,"[18B] declares:

     The primary igneous minerals of the 5 anciently used metals were generally mixed with a
     large number of unwanted minerals in the vein or lode. Useful igneous minerals of the 5
     different metals were not generally mixed together, however. Except for close relations
     between lead and silver, deposits of the 5 metals were more unrelated than related in a
     specific region (Noble 1970). The different metals were generally successively
     deposited over a period of time in adjacent regions (Noble 1970). The common
     characteristic which bound the deposits of all 5 metals together was the fact that they
     were emanations derived from igneous intrusions in mountainous belts, sometimes
     occurring together, or nearby, or not at all.

He reports that the ratio of copper to silver to gold mined from all types of deposits
in the entire world from 3800 B. C. to 1925 A. D. was 3,000 to 11 to 1, and believes
the ratio not to be far removed from their natural incidence as ores. These are largely
surficial, he says, even though he expects the same metals to be found in highly
dispersed, fine grains throughout the crust, where their bulk would be perhaps seven
million times that of the ores. "The lower the grade of ore, the more there is of it,
until finally we include the entire earth's crust in our consideration."[18C]

     It is likely that the greatest masses of copper, silver, gold, tin and lead ores were
     emplaced in the upper several kilometers of the earth's crust rather than throughout
     the total 35 km thickness of the continents or the thicker upper mantle. Governing
     agents in this vertical distribution were abrupt decreases in temperatures and
     pressures near crustal surfaces. It is unlikely that there are any large deposits of
     the kind we commonly recognize as ores at great depths in the crust, although there are
     very large amounts of copper, silver, gold, tin, and lead dispersed down there.

It seems that ores are found in a highly confused and diversified state that does not
let one assume any neat intrusion of pure metal. Nor even is the intrusiveness
manifest; the term seems to define itself, as simply something differing from its
surroundings, not a clean belt or stratum, but as a conglomerate chemically,
physically, and morphologically.

Ore is the valued part of minerals, including metals. The modern processes used to
isolate ore are imitations of nature. Crushing is first, where the pressures and
grinding of water, wind, and rock movements are emulated. Mineral separation follows.
Minerals of different sizes are shaken through sieves. A hydrocyclone may be used to
segregate particles by their response to varying winds. Flotation is employed to
separate the crushed particles according to their density. The material may be conveyed
along jigging tables under running water so that high density, then afterwards lower
density material, settle. A magnetic wheel can collect from poured minerals the
magnetic ores and cast off the less-magnetic ores. Minerals that accept water-proofing
can float in a froth while non-proofed minerals and rock sink. Once minerals have been
chemically created, by high-energy forces, the same or a varying mix of
quantavolutional forces can segregate them.

Under these circumstances, a person of our persuasion is likely to see exoterrestrial
intruders smashed, crushed and exhibiting metal here and there; or, secondly, rims of
hardly discernible craters containing segregated elements of the Earth's rock mixed
with exoterrestrial elements that have been subjected to the immense heat and pressure
of a crash; or, thirdly, effects of massive electrical discharge plus fall-back of
exploded earth. (Regarding this last, and considering the unusual conductivity of
metals, have they been prepared for conductivity, like quartz semiconductors? Are we
dealing with homeopathy or homology?)

The distribution of metals in the world is associated somewhat with folding and
thrusting, but this may be a finder's help, not a random sample of ore distribution.
More significant is the lack of correlation of these metals with volcanism or even with
great faults. Why should metals congregate near circular features and basins,
suggestive of astroblemes?

Flint is found that has undergone controlled heat treatment, with pressure retouching
as revealed by spectroscopic experiments; this is at least Solutrean in age, 22000 B. P
by conventional dating  [19] . The skill is as complex as and less enjoyable than
metalworking by heat; why then did man wait another 15,000 years to begin his work with
copper, tin, lead, gold, silver, and iron? Perhaps they were not available. Or, perhaps
the dating is too long and, soon after the flintworking, metalworking began, which is
one logic for preserving the conventional origin of metals by casting aside the
conventional chronology.

Before the ages of the metals, so-called stone age man existed. He used many different
kinds of stone, bone, wood, and grasses. He designed, cut, heated, and molded them. He
domesticated animals, grew cereals, performed anatomical operations with stone knives.
He built cities and great monuments. He painted, danced, and sang. Coal and peat were
burned. Obsidian and flint were mined; Greek myth portrays Saturn castrating his father
Uranus, using a jagged-edged sickle of flint. If any amount of terrestrial iron had
been present on the surface and outcroppings, why would it not have been employed?
Gold, silver, copper, tin and lead were mined and used.

Mankind was ready to work and even to melt and purify iron, it seems, long before it
was available. If only in order to supply the type of hypothesis that may lead usefully
to historical research on the subject, I would suggest that most metals occurred around
the period of the great Deluge and in the transition from Saturn to Jupiter worship,
about 4200 B. C., and may be connected to a cosmic explosion that I have in Chaos and
Creation assigned to a planet with the legendary traits of Apollo. It is noteworthy
that the ancient metal mines of Attica had two favorite names, Artemisiakon and
Hermaikon, both siblings of Apollo  [20] .

John Saul drew circles corresponding to rounded features, possibly ancient exploded
craters, on a topographic map of a portion of Arizona. He independently marked the
location of mineral deposits on a similar map. When one overlaid the other, there
appeared a significant relationship between craters and mines, with the deposits
generally occurring on the rims of the circles. One circle was abundantly supplied with
minerals, indicating that a certain small percentage of craters, and hence their
originating body, may be heavily mineralized  [21] . R. S. Diez is cited by Pauwels for
arguing the origination of the immense Sudbury (Canada) nickel mines from a meteoroidal
impact of pre-Cambrian times.

One can conjecture, then, about a possible ratio of large stone meteoroid impacts to
large mineral meteoroid impacts corresponding to the experienced ratio of small stone
to small iron-nickel meteoroid impacts. Since historical experience has been limited
(explainable by the negative exponential principle), one would hardly expect
historically the fall of the rarer metals such as gold, silver, and copper. Walter
Sullivan has presented in the New York Times of Nov. 2, 1966 a map of the world's most
productive gold field below Johannesburg, which shows a large primary "bulls-eye-
formation" rimmed by gold-bearing formations and a much larger 200-mile-diameter,
secondary, cratered, rim-like area, also bearing gold, and asks "Did a comet create a
South African gold field?" Unless the gold was alchemized on the spot, it might have
been part of the meteoroid that crashed.

Most metals, in conclusion, may originate exoterrestrially. If an alternative must be
found, it may be suggested, although hardly discussed directly here, that special
thermo-electric events might produce the metals. This would constitute electrolysis on
a huge scale, in a dense catastrophically formed atmospheric plasma, before or after
striking.

The metal, manganese, is exceptionally terrestrial in origin. Its growth out of
underseas volcanos is particularly explosive and rapid. Pure manganese is found in
cones near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Hot water and steam percolate through lava
segregating the metal and depositing it in molten pools where it cools shortly. The
French-American Mid-Ocean study, "Project Famous," found manganese geysers along the
Ridge in the 1970's.

Manganese is also found in nodules on the ocean floors. These, by contrast with the
geyser type, are supposed to have required much time to grow. Scott and his colleagues
estimated that nodules grow at rates of 1 to 10 mm/ million years. They are supported
by Ku, Burnett and Morgenstein, using both radiometric and nonradiometric techniques of
dating. But Goldberg and Arrhenius reported finding a 50-year old naval shell with a
ferromagnesium oxide coating 30 mm thick, indicating a rate of 60,000 mm/ m years
[21A]. Heezen and Hollister point out that the rate of accumulation of manganese is a
function of its concentration in water and the availability of a nucleus in the water
[21B]. Conventional gradualist theory cannot explain the "mystery" so well as
quantavolution.

Nodules abundantly litter the deep abyssal hills. They form around a particle, tephra,
a pebble, an animal tooth, a bone, or on the surfaces of volcanic or drifted rocks. The
nodules should require a very short time to form, if supplied with nucleus, warm water
and a manganese rich soup emerging from fast flowing and erupting volcanos. The
manganese adheres to any object and rafts to its ultimate destination far from its
birth place with fast-spreading lava, which also boils out manganese accumulations as
it spreads, and by swirling currents of newly forming seas around it, the same currents
that hold the nuclear objects in suspension for a time. The process 'proves itself as
turbulent and swift by the nuclei, which would otherwise sink in the abyssal muck if
there were such and by the availability of manganese only at the hot spots of the
ridge. Thus, contrary to the long-time theory of manganese formation, the very presence
of the manganese nodules goes to demonstrate how rapid was the paving of the ocean
basins, a topic to be treated later on.

Sodium chloride is of course a mineral compound, and not a metal. The salt domes of the
world, averaging 30 cubic miles each, may carry 100,000 cubic miles of salt, about
three-tenths of all the salt of the seas. Salt is not found in pre-cambrian rocks,
which are said to embrace most of the time since the Earth was created. Basalt of the
ocean bottoms contains no salt and salt could not have been precipitated from the
melting of mantle rock  [22] . Granite is also deficient in salt.

The presence of salt, like the metals, in living tissues, and therefore the need of it,
does not prove its terrestrial origin. Nor should one gullibly receive the story that
since salt is in our tissues, it must be part of the ancient waters that bore the first
life, hence giving us proof of most ancient salt oceans. Life digests salt-free water,
even ocean life. If all the water of the world were to receive all the salt deposited
in domes, life as we know it might become precarious--except insofar as we constructed
desalification factories to sustain it. The miracle is that salt has not killed life
already, like many ancient settlements had their land sown with salt by their enemies,
and thus were extinguished. Species closely resembling one another are to be found both
in oceans and freshwater lakes and rivers. Salmon live in both oceans and rivers during
their individual lifetimes. Paleontology may not be able to demonstrate the precedence
of saltwater over freshwater life forms. Too, the medium of early marine life may have
been brackish.

There is no apparent earthly source for salt. A Head Curator of Geology at the U. S.
National Museum, George P. Merrill, long ago wrote that sodium chloride (at least the
latter) must have come like meteorites from outer space and been caught up first in the
atmosphere and then dumped in the oceans. By the atmosphere is implied a canopy sky.
From the canopies, salt would descend with water deluges, which we shall be considering
later as a quite recent event. The canopy or set of rings may have been a momentary
affair or endured for centuries. The rings and body of Saturn may contain sodium
chloride or its elements; the rings contain millions of small mineral objects.
Legendary evidence exists on this account.

Once salt in solution strikes the ground it must run off into the basins that have
water, making it salty, and also contribute with its host water to new seas. If it
sinks into the ground in solution it will form a reservoir, either exposed or folded
under or trapped in a cavity. In these cases, the water will boil out as steam: or it
will percolate into underground and above-ground branches flowing to the sea. The salt
residue will then form domes.

Cook argues that the salt domes were created in the same set of events as the deep
burial of organic material of which petroleum is composed, for many salt domes act as
oil traps, keeping oil from dissipation. Avalanching ice from collapsing ice caps, and
sediments pushed by these, suddenly thrusted and folded salted waters that were
swirling around the great movements, containing them under high heat and pressure. The
trapped waters were squeezed out of insoluble sediments into their own cavity. There
they evaporated quickly, leaving salt deposits. But it is unlikely that the waters of
the Earth were so salty as to provide, via tides, the salt domes and still leave the
run-off waters with the present heavy component of salt in solution. Furthermore, as
later chapters here will argue, the bulk of the ocean waters and ice came
exoterrestrially and the salted waters mostly arrived later.

The salt may have descended both as a solid and in acqueous solution. Salt domes exist
beneath the sea floor as well as below the land. Salt domes containing oil have been
discovered beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico at 12,000 feet of depth (2000
fathoms)  [23] . Great salt domes have been discovered below the Mediterranean floor as
well, giving rise to an idea that the Mediterranean once, 12 million years ago, became
a dry basin. Why salt should not then be evaporated and laid in even layers of
sediments rather than in intrusive pockets is unanswered.

In South and East Texas many cylinders of salt (with nearby anhydrite, gypsum, oil and
sulfur deposits) penetrate the Earth to depths of a thousand meters and more. Kelly and
Dachille ask "What could have caused these tremendous beds of practically pure rock
salt?" And they write: "Our inevitable answer is the same, collision-flood. We should
guess that this pan of the earth was struck by a body or bodies of sufficient size to
evaporate great quantities of ocean water, both by the Kinetic energy released by the
impact and by the great pool of molten lava that must have been formed in the crater.
This evaporation of ocean water would have left the salt provided that it was not
connected directly with the main ocean, otherwise the salt would have gone back into
solution." [24]

The Gulf of Mexico does seem to have vague characteristics of a gigantic meteoroid
impact. Since other salt domes have been also discovered beneath the gulf itself, one
may wonder whether the meteoric body itself may not have been composed largely of salt
and injected its own salt tubes into its crater basin. This would seem a more realistic
scenario than the Kelly-Dachille vision of a typhoon lifting salted waters into the
air, evaporating the waters, and having the salts precipitate in favored sequence and
locale in a pure state. The fact, as they recall it, that salt is so free from
contaminants (less than 0.4%) argues for the solid integrity of the salt from its
initial appearance on Earth.

Legends imply my theory. Saturn was the first Lord of the Mill, a grindstone round like
the revolving vault of the sky. It ground salt into the sea and was sunk in the ocean
during the great maelstrom and deluge that brought the golden age of Saturn to an end.
In Hindu myth, the gods churned the celestial ocean and the mill ground out salt into
the sea. Norse myth has the heavenly mill churning out gold, then salt, then, sunk in
the sea, sand and stones. The unhinging and failing of the Mill implies, too, a tilting
of the axis of the globe, a likely accompaniment of the cataclysm.

A South American legend supplies significant detail. "The Arawak of Guyana call the
Galaxy 'the Tapir's Way. ' This is confirmed in a tale of the Chirignano and some
groups of the Tupi-Guarani of South America." According to Cuna tradition, "the Tapir
chopped down the 'Saltwater Tree', at the roots of which is God's whirlpool, and when
the tree fell, saltwater gushed out to form the oceans of the world." [25]  The Cuna
cosmology thus unites the idea of the tree-of life found in many places, including
Genesis, with a Tapir-god, Saturnian-Elohim divinity, and, as the tree of life is
destroyed (the old order ends), saltwaters deluge the Earth. (In Solaria Binaria, Earl
R. Milton and the present author identify this tree of life with the legendary and
philosophical axis of fire and this with the presence, until a nova of Saturn, of an
electric arc-current flashing between a then-larger Saturn and the Sun, and visible to
man.) In sum, various legends independently agree that the salt of the oceans came with
an aquatic cataclysm in a time when mankind was an intelligent witness.

That salt came down upon the doomed "Cities of the Plain" at a later time as well is
argued by Dwardu Cardona. Yahweh threatens his people with "sulphur and salt and
burning, so that its whole land will not be sown... like the overthrow 3f Sodom and
Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which Yahweh overthrew in his anger and in his wrath;...."
[25A]

In the same work, Milton and I propose that the Noachian Deluge occurred in cyclonic
form, with the salty waters hosing or jetting down at thousands of locations. If this
were correct, some of the characteristics of salt deposits would be explained, such as
their common cylindrical shapes and great depth below the surface of land and
seabottom. The saltwater would bore through the surface rocks under great pressure and
with enough time to penetrate deeply. The water would vaporize promptly in the ambiant
heat and what was left of it would leak through a multitude of fractures on the margins
of the deposits.

In Manchester, England, a process of making petroleum from garbage has been announced
(1982). "We can do in ten minutes what nature has taken 150 million years to do,"
asserts a proud engineer. The oil costs half the prevailing price of natural crude oil.
This price does not consider the original devastation of the biosphere that occurred
with the natural production of oil. Conventional belief interprets oil resources
according to an idyll, that organic rot was deoxidized, accumulated over long periods
of time, roasted slowly at a deep warm level in the rocks until it turned into oil,
then seeped into rock reservoirs where it was trapped to await the oil explorer of
today. There is little use in our discussing this story, inasmuch as the reader will
have ready access to it in many books. Here it is argued that oil is a catastrophic
product and the major questions concern the catastrophic mechanisms of its formation.

The "ten-minute oil" suggests that there may be no inherent guarantee that natural oil
is old. Recently discovered hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California are producing
from sediments a petroleum that is close to commercial standards. Several C 14 dates of
oil offshore California and from the Gulf of Mexico range from 5000 to 20000 years.
Still petroleum generally is dated from two to six hundred million years; a common age
given is fifty million years. One group of scientists suspects that solar ultraviolet
polymerized the methane atmosphere of primeval Earth to form an oil slick of one to ten
meters' depth all over the globe  [26] . T. Gold believes that methane, composed of
carbon and hydrogen, erupts from primeval reservoirs in the mantle; they sometimes
explode from electrostatically induced sparks  [27]  However, the presently continual
explosions would indicate to this writer a recent origin of the methane, probably from
biomass deep-buried by catastrophe. A. T. Wilson produced hydrocarbons out of
electrical discharges on methane and ammonia, and claimed in 1962 that the Venus
atmosphere held hydrocarbons  [28] . Oro and Hart maintain a case for current
hydrocarbon production on Jupiter from methane; they manufactured hydrocarbons from
methane in their laboratory  [29] . Libby has theorized that oil is raining down upon
Jupiter today  [30] .

Max Blumer, a pre-eminent paleo-geochemist, lately of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, used the conventional age estimates given above in making a calculation of
some social significance. Reminiscent of the Dow Chemical Company's claim about natural
dioxins mentioned in the previous chapter, oil shipping interests have protested that
only half the ocean's petroleum content comes from polluting practices and the other
half comes from natural leaks and seepage. In 1970, Blumer, following this logic,
estimates the amount of seepage at 5 x 10 6 tons. Quoting then high estimates of
offshore oil resources at 100,000 x 10 6 metric tons, he points out that all of this
would have leaked out in less than 20,000 years. But, taking the average age of oil as
above, 50 million years, and the claimed seepage rate, "the average offshore oil-field
would have lost to the ocean 2500 times the free flowing oil or more than 1500 times
the total oil existing in situ before commercial offshore oil production started." [31]

Obviously, in Blumer's view, and the publicity attendent upon the brief article
indicates a wide acceptance of it, the estimate of natural seepage is ridiculously
high; the polluters are responsible for the oil in the oceans. The same is true on
land. Seeps are negligible because "oil reservoirs are well sealed even on the
continents where uplifiting and erosion should have bared oil-bearing strata more
extensively than on the ocean floor." Oil leaks are frequently sealed by natural
asphalt.

The quantavolutionist can address three comments to Blumer's line of argument. First,
the age of oils in the sea may be grossly overestimated. Possibly the oil resources of
the world are under 20,000 years old; in this case, the allegations of the seepage
advocates would have to be disproven by other evidence, if at all. Second, Blumer does
not deny seepage, but wishes it reduced. But he does not estimate seepage, or else, I
guess, he would have to name a figure, such as one-tenth of the seepage claimed. In
this case, the age of the "average oil" would drop by a factor Of ten; all oil
resources would be exhausted by leakage in 200,000 years. Surely he would not insist
upon the fifty million years age and therefore be compelled to argue that true seepage
is hundreds of times less than claimed. In other words, he is walking right into the
quantavolutionary door; no significant seepage is satisfactory if conventional oil ages
are to be defended. This is especially so, given that strict uniformitarian rates are
not likely; no matter how oil is made, early seepage must have been at a faster rate
than today's seepage. Even just the transfer from factory to reservoir cannot occur
without large losses. Again the age of oil must drop. And of course if a
quantavolutionary theory of oil formation is adopted, the exponential principle come
into play: oil is made, not in ten minutes, not currently in submarine hydrothermal
factories, but in very short times nevertheless.

Two quantavolutionary theories, requiring very short times, offer themselves, one best
enunciated by Melvin Cook, the other by Velikovsky. Cook hints that a great deluge may
have precipitated the lateral break-out of the ice caps. The vast ice avalanche
bulldozed the biosphere long distances and folded it into the Earth in a heated state.
Velikovsky argues for the origin of petroleum from the tail of a great comet, which he
identified as an erratic Venus. Both offer short-term explanations, Cook placing the
production of oil around 10,000 years ago, Velikovsky around 3450 B. P.

Cook reconstructs the oil production process as follows: around the old ice cap of the
north grew a heavy biosphere. The towering ice cap, triggered by deluges, exerted
fracturing radial pressures that sent great bulldozers of ice and rock in all
directions to sweep up, ignite and bury deeply the vegetation and animal life. The
organic matter stewed under high thermal and pressure conditions. Some became coal;
some became oil and natural gas. Here is a quick "Cook's Tour" of the world's petroleum
[32] .

      The most prolific oil basins of the world are those associated with the postulated
      major long-thrust systems described previously, namely the Mississippi valley--Gulf of
      Mexico system and the extensive and complicated overthrust systems comprising the great
      oil fields surrounding the Red, Mediterranean, Caspian and Black seas and the Persian
      Gulf. The southwestern USA thrust system responsible for the fragmentation in the Basin
      and Range province possibly contributed to the California oil basins. Another similar
      thrust system apparently generated the oil and coal provinces of Borneo, Sumatra, Java
      and New Guinea. These great oil and gas regions are most likely associated with sudden
      deep burial of marine and vegetal matter in (1) spoke-like radial thrusts from the ice
      sheets that began with the flood and eventually triggered continental drift, (2)
      continental drift itself, and (3) the Subsequent catastrophic effects of readjustment
      (ocean ridge and related systems). The greatest oil fields in the world, those in Iraq,
      Iran, Arabia and Kuwait, are apparently the result of all three of these mechanisms of
      sudden deep burial. The Gulf of Mexico system is postulated here to represent
      tremendous, sudden and deep burial thrusts contributed largely in the pre-continental
      drift stage, but with great contributions from both the north and the south such as to
      insure deep burial of sediments all along the coast and shelf of the Gulf of Mexico.
      The west coast of North and South America represent regions showing perhaps all of the
      deep burial effects: that due to welting and overthrusting in the pre-continental drift
      stage being strong in this region, the welting at the front of the thrust blocks during
      continental drift itself and the tremendous upheavals strongest here in the final
      readjustment stage. Perhaps the great (bathylithic) uplifts associated with the earth-
      circling ridge and rift system, particularly that part that cut into the continent in
      the western side of the Americas, contributed mostly to the deep basin structure in
      California, accounting for the youngest pools of the world.

Cook, then, must provide a force sufficient to initiate the break-out of an ice cap of
enormous size; then a thrusting and folding of crustal rock over large distances,
burying a whole biosphere of vegetal and marine life; then a cracking of the globe,
sending the continents skittering from the great Atlantic and southern ocean cleavages
in a complex pattern, with a major fracture moving through most of the world along the
old Tethyan sea belt. He concludes as follows:

     The physical chemistry of oil, including its formation from marine raw materials, its
     conditions for cracking, its observed composition and physical properties as a function
     of depth of the reservoirs are, apparently, better accounted for by the sudden, deep
     burial mechanism than by the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Oil reservoir temperatures
     are too low to permit appreciable cracking during all of geologic time even assuming
     existence of the best known catalytic cracking conditions. The observed changes of oil
     grade with depth may be explained instead on the basis of the physical chemistry of
     decomposition of green marine and vegetal raw materials in their sudden burial at
     various depths in the oil basins  [33] .

But Velikovsky's theory of petroleum Origins introduces a frightful deluge of oil. He
cites references in legends and scriptures to the fall of naphtha, sometimes blazing,
and of brimstone, often rendered otherwise as a rain of hail. The Abkasian, a people
famous for their long life-spans, convey a story about a fall-out of cotton, which
caught fire and burned the Earth; perhaps it was "cotton-candy" mixed with hydrocarbon
[34] . The ancient bible of Mesoamerica, the Popul Vuh, tells of the fate of the people
of that age:

     And so they were killed;
     They were overwhelmed.
     There came a great rain of glue
     Down from the sky.  [35]

The "glue" is still found in the land of the Olmecs. William Mullen comments on the
work of the pioneer excavators: radio-carbon samples are contaminated by asphalt. "Much
of the Early Tres Zapotes level was sealed with volcanic ash. Coe reports that lumps of
asphalt were found everywhere at the San Lorenzo excavation." [36]  I consulted with an
expert on the area. As expected, he said that the area practically floats on oil. I
visited the area. He spoke truth. But the question is: Which came first, the culture or
the oil? Here, as throughout the world, the ancient voices give precedence to the
people.

Velikovsky's concept can be summarized to a degree in his own words  [37] :

     The tails of comets are composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen gases. Lacking oxygen,
     they do not burn in flight, but the inflammable gases, passing through an atmosphere
     containing oxygen, will be set on fire. If carbon and hydrogen gases, or vapor of a
     composition of these two elements, enter the atmosphere in huge masses, a part of them
     will burn, binding all the oxygen available at the moment; the rest will escape
     combustion, but in swift transition will become liquid. Falling on the ground, the
     substance, if liquid, would sink into the pores of the sand and into clefts between the
     rocks; falling on water, it would remain floating if the fire in the air is
     extinguished before new supplies of oxygen arrive from other regions...

     The descent of a sticky fluid which came earthward and blazed with heavy smoke is
     recalled in the oral and written traditions of the inhabitants of both hemispheres...
     All the countries whose traditions of fire-rain 1 have cited actually have deposits of
     oil: Mexico, the East Indies, Siberia, Iraq, and Egypt ....

     The rain of fire-water contributed to the earth's supply of petroleum; rock oil in the
     ground appears to be, partly at least, "star oil" brought down at the close of world
     ages, notably the age that came to its end in the middle of the second millennium
     before the present era....

     In the centuries that followed, petroleum was worshipped, burned in holy places; it was
     also used for domestic purposes. Then many ages passed when it was out of use. Only in
     the middle of the last century did man begin to exploit this oil, partly contributed by
     the comet of the time of the Exodus.

Definite legendary, archaeological, and geological evidence of a holospheric
catastrophe in Mesopotamia was provided by J. V. K. Wilson for a period tightly
connected with Inanna (identifiable as Venus)  [38] . Large-scale mesolithic rock
displacements are displayed, and accounts of rains of oil, the poisoning of the land,
and falling sheets of fire are described in the ancient documents. Lion-headed pillars
are associated symbolically with mushroom-shaped clouds (our typhonic cyclones) in the
legend and architecture of the times.

The Soviet geologist Levin asserts that the hydrocarbons in cometary heads must have
played a part in forming petroleum and in the origin of life." [39]  Velikovsky wrote
once: "Actually, if we can believe numerous testimonies bequeathed to us by ancient
sources, the ancients had already what we intend some day to obtain from Venus--samples
of its dust, ash, atmosphere, and rocks." He believed firmly that "Venus must be rich
in petroleum gases," which, because of the planet's great surface heat, "will circulate
in gaseous form."

Fred Hoyle, in Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), argued for less heat and therefore oceans
of oil on Venus. The historical and geological evidence led Velikovsky to argue that
Venus was hot and cooling measurably, that it was comparatively flat, with a dense
atmosphere, an anomalous axial rotation, and the aforesaid hydrocarbon gases. The other
predictions having been generally fulfilled, it seemed for a moment that hydrocarbon
gases had also been detected; if so, the theory of the historical encounter and the
dropping of Venusian oil on Earth would be strengthened.

However, the NASA scientists involved in an early statement favorable to hydrocarbons
withdrew their support, and a controversy ensued, to no final end. The clouds of Venus
appear definitely to be mainly of carbon dioxide. Whether this is compatible with an
existing component of hydrocarbon or can have resulted from chemical transformations
that resulted in the disappearance of hydrocarbons is disputable. Furthermore, organic
compounds seem to be present, and also indications of iron and sulfur, possible sources
of pigment for the red fall-out phenomenon mentioned earlier.

Blumer, in a path-breaking article on organic paleochemistry, pauses to reflect that
"man has long been curious about the origin of these materials," coals and oil. "On
occasion, early speculations approached the truth in a colorful way; thus, the Triassic
Tyrolian oil shales, which are rich in vertebrate fossils as well as in chlorophyll and
haemin derivatives, were thought to have resulted from an impregnation of the local
rock with the blood of a slain dragon." [40]

Perhaps he should have reflected longer. The dragon, in many a myth, has poured its red
blood, metals, dust., and oil upon the Earth, and the dragon is often identified with
destructive sky bodies, comets, no less. That silicates and oil should descend and
emplace themselves in oil shales should hardly cause surprise; we have seen that the
color of red-brown to blue-black oxidized heme, blood red, is often reported in myth as
falling in dust or in the gore of a slain dragon. The shale could be formed quickly,
baked by a moderate heat.

How could the organic matter be injected into shales and oil from above? As related
earlier, the presence therein and a fall-out of a biomass from a comet is not at all
impossible. Furthermore, the distinction between living and non-living structures is
not clear in the hydrocarbons of oil. "Trieb's isolation of pigments related to
chlorophyll and haemin marks the origin of organic geochemistry... The fossil
prophyrins of ancient sediments and of petroleum are chemical fossils; just as the more
commonly known morphological fossils, they represent surviving evidence of ancient life
processes that had achieved an increased structural order on the macroscopic and on the
molecular level and inorganic as well as in organic structures."

It seems Blumer is claiming the unprovable, that in their beginnings these
morphologically unrecognizable organic chemicals were in living organisms. Yet he
declares, "in organic geochemistry, the distinction between chemical fossils and
artifacts has not always been sharp." And he says, after defining geochemistry as
ultimately based upon the molecular remains of ancient life, that thousands of changes
occur: "chemical fossils are far more abundant than their better known morphological
analogues. Contrasted with 90,000 (some say 110,000) species of fossil animals known
presently, are millions of fossil chemical derivatives." Then, further:

     Research on the constitution of crude oil and of oil shales has revealed severely
     altered biochemicals and numerous structures which occur neither in living organisms
     nor in recent sediments... Also crude oil and sediments contain polymers (asphaltenos,
     kerogen) of a type not found in living organisms.

For pages, Blumer struggles to trace the complex descent of petroleum hydrocarbons from
living organisms while insisting upon the intrusion of many non-organic chemical
processes, only to admit that "we are virtually ignorant of the reaction mechanisms
and. reaction rates." He proceeds to establish that depth, deposition rate and
temperature control the chemical chaos during the critical moments of oil formation.
Still, "we remain uncertain of the extent, the rates and the mechanisms of geochemical
reactions and of the composition and role of the sedimentary polymers."

We shall certainly not be contradicting him, if we conclude that the chemical
transformations producing oil are as likely to occur in space as below ground, probably
more likely, if we wished to argue the point. Further, we do not see how it can be
asserted either that organic biomass capable of forming oil does not exist in
exoterrestrial bodies or, if it does not, that its absence precludes space gases
constituting or contributing to the constitution of the oils that are present on Earth.

Most metals, salt, and oil, we conclude, are more likely than not to have originated
exoterrestrially or in exoterrestrially precipitated transactions at the Earth's
surface.




{S : Notes (Chapter Ten: Metals, Salt and Oil)}
Notes (Chapter Ten: Metals, Salt and Oil) 

1. Bellamy, op. cit., 84.

2. Velikovsky, Ramses II and His Time (N. Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 221-47.

3. "The Road to Iron: 8th and 7th Century Metallurgy and The Decline of Egyptian
Power," (In press: Catas. and Anc. Hist. M.)

4. R. Maddin, J. D. Muhly and T. S. Wheeler set a date between 1100 and 900 B. C. .,
"How the Iron Age Began" 237 Sci. Amer. (Oct. 1977), 112.

5. See fn 2, p. 5.

6. L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, Eternal Man (Herts, Eng.: Mayflower, 1972), 58, 160; and
also their Morning of the Magicians for many suggestions of prehistoric discoveries.

7. Op. cit., 197-8.

8. Fritz Heide, Meteorites (Chicago: U. Of Chicago, 1969), 44.

9. Ibid., 16.

10. Melvin A. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models (London: Max Parrish, 1966).

11. 52 Sky and Telescope (1976) 429 citing a report by Walter Sullivan, NYT.

12. 2 Sci. Am. Supp. (1876), 510.

13. Stratigraphie ComparÚe... (London: Oxford, 1945). 580.

14. A Life History of Our Earth (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 196.

15. Bellamy, Moon... 87, 89.

16. Op. cit., 16.

17. Cosmos, I, 115. 18. R. P. Chan, A Guide to Mexican Archaeology (Mexico City:
Minutiae Mexicanae, 1971), 75, 78.

18A. F. T. Kyte et al., Nature (30 July 1981), 417-20.

18B. 36 Amer. Antiquity 3 (July 1971), 286-321, 288, cf. 294.

18C. Ibid., 291.

19. 276 Nature (14 Dec. 1978), 7013-4.

20. Advice of Prof. Merle Langdon, then of Am. School Class, Studies; Athens.
"Artemisiakon" was a favorite name, the "kon" ending meaning "under the protection of,"
"owned by" or "discovered by."

21. 271 Nature (26 Jan 1978), 347.

21A. P. A. Smith, 265 Nature (1977), 582-3 reporting Scott et al., I Geophys Res. Ltrs
(1974) 355 and Golberg and Arrhenius, 13 Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta (1958) 153; Corliss,
op. cit. ESS-005 doc.

21B. Op cit., 424, 440.

22. Cook, op. cit., 87.

23. Oscar Wilhelm, Geol. Soc. Am. Bull (March 1972).

24. Allan Kelley and F. Dachille, Target Earth, 211; cf. 205.

25. G. den Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 247,
cf. 146-7.

25A. Deuteronomy 29: 22 (Watchtower Edition); Cardona "Jupiter--God of Abraham (Part
III)," VII Kronos (Fall 1982), 66. Fire evidence is copious in the settlements
excavated at the sites.

26. A. C. Lasaga and H. D. Holland, "Primordial Oil Slick," 174 Science (10 Oct. 1974),
53-5.

27. See K. S. Lewis, 78 New Sci. (1978), 277 and Walter Sullivan in NYT (24 Dec. 1977),
1.

28. A. T. Wilson, "Synthesis of Macromolecules." 188 Nature (17 Dec. 1960), 1007-8.

29. J. Oro and J. Han, "High Temperature Synthesis of Aromatic Hydrocarbons from
Methane," 153 Science (16 Sept. 1966), 1393-5. Cf. J. Oro, "Comets and the Formation of
Biochemical Compounds on the Primitive Earth," 191 Nature (29 Apr. 1961), 389-90.

30. C. J. Ransom, The Age of Velikovsky (Glassboro, N. J.: Kronos, 1976), 80-2.

31. "Submarine Seeps," 176 Science (16 June 1972), 1257-8.

32. Op. cit., 241 ff.

33. Cracking is the process of breaking up large molecules of heavy hydrocarbons into
smaller ones of lighter type, accomplished by heat, pressure, and catalysts.

34. Sula Benet, Abkasian (NY: Doubleday)

35. Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the ancient Quick Maya (Norman; U. of Ok., 1950
trans.).

36. Ibid.

37. Worlds in Collision, 53ff.

38. The Rebel Lands: An Investigation into the Origins of Early Mesopotamian Mythology
(Cambridge, Eng.: Faculty of Oriental Studies, 1979), reviewed in IV S. I. S. R. 2(
1981), 64.

39. B. Y. Levin, "The Interaction of Astronomy, Geophysics and Geology in the Study of
the Earth," in The Interaction of Sciences in the Study of the Earth (Moscow: Progress
Publ., 1968), 178.

40. "Chemical Fossils: Trends in Organic Geochemistry," Contrib. 2898 of Woods Hole
(Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, n. d., 592. See also W. W. Youngblood and Blumer,
"Alkanes and Alkenes in Marine Benthic Algae," 21 Marine Biol. (1973), 163-72.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART II: }
{Q EXOTERRESTRIAL DROPS: }
{C Chapter 11}
{T Encounter and Collisions}
{S - }



THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part II: Exoterrestrial Drops

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER ELEVEN

ENCOUNTERS AND COLLISIONS

"Even heaven, despite the orderliness of its movements, is not inalterable." So wrote
Laplace  [1] , who has been freely used to attest to the security of the celestial
order. Nothing in his unparalleled mathematical and physical achievements kept him from
soberly portraying the effects of collisions of the Earth with comets, and expressing
the view that these had occurred and would probably again occur. He warned of movements
that he could not take into account in his calculations, and mentioned the forces of
electricity and magnetism whose effects were then unnoticeable. The gravitational
balance of the solar system, he proved, however, was near perfect, an empirical
demonstration that became a shibboleth to astronomy and thence to progressive mankind.

The present trend to accommodate ancient cometary and meteoroid encounters in the earth
sciences and biology cannot but bring about a revolution in thought. A large body
impacting on Earth is the most versatile mechanism of quantavolution: so everyone will
admit. Its effects begin upon approach, increase upon passage through the atmosphere,
reach a climax in its explosion, and continue to spread from the point of impact until
the whole world and all its spheres are affected. Too, the effects may continue for many
years in an active form and then go on in the 'genetics' of the holosphere.

During a period, which Nininger has well described, when scientific dogma forbade the
serious discussion of exoterrestrial interference in the affairs of Earth, when even
light meteoritic falls were ignored, students were denied the use of this marvelous
theoretical construct in explaining what lay before their eyes. Finally a scientific
commission was dispatched from Paris in 1802 to the countryside to investigate a
reported fall. It returned with evidence of several thousand meteorites. So "America was
discovered." Still in 1933, a Smithsonian Institution report by L. J. Spencer could
declare, "the problem of meteorite craters is quite a new one." Only several were
listed, and of these only the Barringer crater of Arizona and the Wabar Craters in
Arabia had been well described, both lately.

Yet, to continue the litany of this book, it appears now that enough meteoroids and
comets have struck the Earth to deface it throughout. Moon, Mercury and Mars evidence
telescopically tens of thousands of large astroblemes. Dachille (1962), projecting the
Moon's apparent experience onto Earth, estimated a round million of heavy impacts here
[2] . He assumes five billion years of uniform falls and applies weathering rates for
the continental masses from wind, tide and vegetative erosion, ending up with somewhat
over a thousand craters that are potentially identifiable.

Of this thousand, 750 are below water and ice; of the remaining 250, "in the last few
years a staccato tally of meteorite scar finds or recognitions has raised the total to
42-50 at this writing." He offered an independent survival rate calculated by Krynine
that would be in the neighborhood of 10,000.

He pointed also to new diagnostic methods, such as the discovery of coesite, a silica
mineral that forms under high pressures in the laboratory and has been found in craters
suspected of exoterrestrial origin. Meanwhile the space shuttle Columbia has
photographed beneath the sands covering the eastern Sahara to reveal fractures, dried-up
rivers, and probable paleolithic settlements. The U. S. Geological Survey confirmed the
radar penetrations. Craters can be discerned as well, and they will probably be promptly
mapped over the globe. Many bodily and electric encounters of Earth with exoterrestrial
bodies will one day be counted, measured, plotted for concentrations, and assigned to
temporal episodes.

The difference between a meteoroid and a comet may be an artifact of biased experience.
Lately no comet has fallen to Earth. Perhaps, too, most or all comets come from a
special source today; Jupiter has been suggested. Perhaps the meteoroids come from the
asteroid belt; such is generally believed. The major distinction may come from their
manner of flight; with highly elliptical and often eccentric orbits, comets must forever
change their appearance in transacting with their electrical and material environment;
the asteroids are generally in regular orbit. Too, we know the size of many asteroids,
but not of comets.

Once, to ridicule Velikovsky, a renowned astronomer claimed that comets were filmy and
insubstantial bodies. A more acceptable theory of Whipple of the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Laboratory (he was by no means a supporter of Velikovsky) sees comets
typically as bodies of ice and other frozen gases cementing together rock and dust. It
may be of significance to note the presence of water in recently examined meteorites,
from studies by Hughes, Ashworth and Hutchison  [3] ; if water, then a watery planet
once upon a time: so the reasoning goes.

Gravitational anomalies on the Moon and Mars have been interpreted to signify dense mass
concentrations, hence "mascons." They are associated with large circular basins,
therefore probably with meteoroid impacts  [4] . The Earth has not yet registered
mascons. Because of its heavier atmosphere, more intense magnetosphere, and greater
electrical charge, it may be that the Earth has means of ablating and retarding the
velocity of meteoroid falls. On the other hand, gravitational anomalies have begun to be
detected in circular areas of the Earth and shortly we may expect mascons in the Earth's
morphology as well.

With the aforesaid "soft frills," one can expect the Earth to exhibit hills and
mountains, as of iron ore and erratic isolated hills, which are then surficial mascons.
Concerning the "abrupt" extinction of Cretaceous life forms, Smit and Hertogen, like
Alvarez and his associates, see in a general distribution of two trace elements, iridium
and osmium, at this stratum of the phanerozoic record a proof of meteoroid impact  [5] .
Soil and rock everywhere, it would seem, are in need of chemical tests in search of
exoterrestrial influences during their deposition.

A decade after his estimates were published, Dachille would report that the number of
identified craters had risen to "60 well-documented craters, 25 very likely candidates,
and another 20 hopefuls." [6]  The greatest of these are the Ishim, Kazakhstan, USSR,
(7000 km diam.), the Nastapoka Island arc of Hudson Bay (440 km diam.) and the Gulf of
Saint Lawrence opening onto the Atlantic Ocean  [7] . The Ishim crater is estimated as
initially of 350 kilometers in diameter, 12 kilometers in depth. "The subsequent rebound
of the central region and the collapse of the surrounding area enlarged the crater to
700 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than the average lunar mare. The area of
this impact structure is a little greater than the combined areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio,
New York and Maryland. The kinetic energy of the collision can be shown to have been at
least one billion times as great as the energy in any one of the largest earthquakes of
recent history." [8]  And these quakes, of course, much exceed the greatest hydrogen
bomb blasts in energy output.

In a work of 1953, Dachille, together with Alan Kelly, offered the circular Bermuda Deep
as an astrobleme. By all odds the largest candidate for craterdom so far, this feature
might be held responsible for Bermuda Island, as its typical central peak. The hundreds
of Carolina Bays were conjectured as the splash-down sites of successive meteors in the
same train or later on. The Appalachian mountains would become the westward-thrusted,
outer rim displacement from the crater. Significantly, in 1982, claims were voiced that
a Northeast to Southwest belt of the Appalachians was once an offshore island chain
rammed into America in the course of continental drift and, after the growth of the
Eastern plain, the two continents split once more to create the Atlantic. More
persuasive to this writer is the Kelly-Dachille view that would let the mountains be the
Bermuda crater rim, let the plain be the crater debris and sediments and let the
Atlantic cleavage be abetted by the Bermuda impact.

The authors of the Bermuda theory proceed to discuss the dozen high-energy expressions
that must necessarily accompany so stunning an impact--global hurricanes, eruption of
hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava, darkening of the globe for years,
deluges of water and debris, destruction of most of the Earth's biosphere--terrestrial
and marine--poisoning of the atmosphere and fall-outs of many kinds of material, a giant
set of electrical typhoons centered at and around the impact and moving radially
outwards, earthquakes and volcanism in many places including the antipodes, and vast
tidal waves sweeping across America, the Caribbean, and the oceans to the north, east,
and south. Large tracts of land would be sunk and others elevated. Minerals would be
formed, elements transmuted, species extincted and new forms created in the radiation
storms. They assigned an axis tilt of 30   to the blow, shifting the north pole from
near Akpatok Island, in the Hudson Strait, to its present location.

The diameter of the Bermuda crater appears to vary between 2200 and 2500 kilometers as
its limits are drawn, the western being more marked than the eastern, which disappear
into the oceanic abyssal bottom. The western arc extends from the Grand Banks of
Newfoundland down around the East Coast of America to Puerto Rico. The diameter of the
original comet or meteoroid is estimated at 400 to 700 kilometers, greater than the
possible Hudson Bay crater (440 km). The relative speed before impact of the meteoroid
with Earth is given at about 100 km/ second, with an approach from the northeast. The
collision would involve an energy approximately equal to that of the Earth's rotation
(1.2 x 10 37 ergs) and would readily provoke an interruption of the rotation, an axial
tilt, a slippage of the crust above the mantle, and an immediate orogeny around the ruin
of the blast crater.

The scenario includes many details that need not be repeated here. For instance, the
hypothetical Bermuda intruder would theoretically account for all the coal, gas and oil
of Appalachia and the North American continental shelves by instant burning in passage,
deep burial and dampening upon impact folding, and tidal land thrusts and water
flooding. Even cutting back its diameter to 280 km, the intruder upon impact

     would raise a column of vapor and debris that easily could measure one thousand miles in
     diameter at the base, and possibly larger at the top after the fashion of the atom bomb
     explosions. This column might tower something like five thousand miles above the earth,
     the higher particles doomed to float out beyond the reach of gravity for all time... the
     energy of the collision we have pictured is so great, that but 2 to 3 per cent of the
     total would be required to evaporate completely the meteorite and its equal in weight of
     the earth's crust. Therefore the column above the collision area may take on the
     function of a fractionating column for these mineral vapors, refining minerals to
     varying extent  [9] .

Streams of speciated minerals, metals, rocks and salts would pour down to form deposits.
Large areas would be melted and magnetized by electromagnetic fields arriving from
intense brief currents of electricity formed of the electron and ion plasma. In all of
this, it should be noted that the colliding intruder partly or largely provides for its
own concealment, by cross-winds, cross-tides, rain, volcanism, debris fall-out, and
differential diastrophic effects, some of them called forward from remote areas.

Moving about the global map, Kelly and Dachille could suggest numerous candidates for
their meteoroid inventory. Wherever an arc appears on a coastline--they noted five large
ones off the west coast of North America, two off of West Africa, two off of Brazil and
Argentina, plus the great island arcs of the north and east Pacific Ocean--a crater is
implied. Norman elsewhere suggests "that any large-scale crustal feature which exhibits
an arcuate outline is deserving of special scrutiny--for example, the curve of the Coast
of China, the curved mountainous coast of eastern Australia, and the magnificent sweep
of the Himalayas bordering northern India. Smaller-scale versions exist bordering the
southern parts of the Caspian and Black Seas, and eastern Korea. We must also think of
examining concave arcuate coasts such as the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Australian
Bight." [10] In 1981, Fred Whipple suggested Iceland as the site of the giant meteor
impact which, striking the volcanically active ocean ridge, initiated the finale of the
Cretaceous period, its dinosaurs, and its marine life  [11] . A year later, Sky and
Telescope  [12] reported the discovery of a double ring of magnetic anomalies of 60 and
180 kilometer diameters, in Yucatan. The anomalous magnetized rocks are about 1100 feet
deep and assigned to Late Cretaceous which makes it, too, a candidate for extincting
dinosaurs and decimating the biosphere. But other candidates can be named, for instance
an astrobleme feature beneath the disturbed ice of Wilkes Land, Antarctica, to which
Weihaupt ascribes hypothetically the origin of the tektite strewn fields of Australia,
calling the collision of "Recent geologic time." [13]

I might, too, suggest the Pacific Basin as a possible impact site, though here the size
of the feature is so great as to imply the total destruction of the globe, and I have,
for this reason and many others, elsewhere defined this area as the escape basin of the
Moon, following G. Darwin, Osmond, and other writers. Notable in this case is the set of
great transform fractures, pictured by Norman  [14]  which point from south, east and
north like arrows to an "impact" or "escape" point in the central Pacific Basin. The
current theory of scientists concerning the asteroid belt orbiting the Sun between Mars
and Jupiter is that here is the debris of a great body exploded by collision with
another body some millions of years ago. One may reason that if this could happen in
asteroidal space, it could also happen to Earth's space. There has obviously been a
limit to the size and mass of all that has struck Earth.

Satellite photography has in the past few years introduced a new instrument for crater
detection, whether volcanic or meteoric, as in the Bichat structure of Mauritania. Some
photographic reconstructions delineate what appear to be many crater outlines. Soon, it
appears, the number of defined crater outlines will soar into the hundreds, and perhaps
thousands.

Given the new interest in meteoritics, the identification of meteoritic fields may also
proceed apace. As long ago as 1889, a list of 14 small fields was published, all of the
nineteenth century and ranging from 3 to 16 miles long. The Arabian barrad fields,
Donnelly's drift stones, and the tektite fields, already discussed, are much larger and
older phenomena. The Atacama Desert also evidences a large meteoritic field, still
unmapped, with many siderites and rich silver mines at its center. Meteoritic material
on Earth is evidenced therefore by dust, stones, and craters, with all ranges of size
from visually undetectable clay elements to basins so large as to be hitherto visually
unimagined.

The answers to our persistent questions about the extent and recency of
quantavolutionary phenomena at the Earth's surface are now beginning to take shape. The
Earth must have suffered as much meteoritic bombardment as its planetary neighbors and
satellite. On several occasions--at Hudson's Bay, the circular bulge of the West Africa
Coast, Ishim, Bermuda, St. Lawrence Bay, Argentina, Australia, Antarctica, and others,
all inadequately discerned until now--global catastrophes could have occurred with
large-body impact encounters. On other occasions, as we. discussed earlier, meteoritic
showers and bombardments also may have been globally catastrophic. Harold Urey writing
in 1973, conjectures a comet of 10 18 grams and an impact velocity of 45 km/ sec to end
the Cretaceous and begin the radically different geological period of the Tertiary  [15]
; his scenario of effects upon Earth is substantially that provided here and in the much
more detailed analysis of Kelly and Dachille for so large a body. (The reader is asked
to recall that scientists have only lately granted comets this possibility of large
masses and Earth collisions. The recent work by S. V. M. Clube and W. M. Napier,
entitled The Cosmic Serpent (1982), essaying a connection between solar-system galactic
spiral encounters and recurrent paleontological catastrophes, via cometary and
meteoritic crashes, is perhaps the first treatise to be published by professional
astronomers. The independently pursued work of the astronomer Earl R. Milton, much of it
in press as Solaria Binaria, with the present author, is comparable. Clube and Napier
wrote unaware of the astronomical theory of Chaos and Creation and similarly, I did not
obtain a copy of their book until the present work was at the printers.)

But would any or many of the larger impacts be recent, within the past score of
millennia? This is probable. The methods by which heavy meteoritic and cometary impacts
on Earth are timed begin with averaging on uniformitarian assumptions. Thus Dachille
arrived at his 1967 numbers by averaging the expected number of major impacts over a
five billion year age for the Earth and Moon; then, again using uniformitarian premises,
he reached for some broad guidelines. 'Weathering rates estimated for continental masses
and great mountains are about 80 meters per million years, and for land masses in
tropical regions 225 meters per million years. Circular ridges of less than 750 meters
relief could be broken down in 5 million years, to be unrecognizable..." [16]  Thus he
arrives finally at his low figure for discoverable craters.

But when, with Kelly, he came earlier to describe the Bermuda event, he could
contemplate this global catastrophe of maximum intensity as having occurred at the time
of the Chaldeans and Hebrews, about 3500 years ago. In the Bermuda case the two
scientists follow quantavolutionary logic and can explain the new face of the globe in
terms of seconds, minutes, weeks, years. They do not need or use much time. Not only
that, but they indeed destroy time by the few-second incoming passage of the body
through the atmosphere and the gigantic explosion that transforms a considerable portion
of the atmosphere and rocks of the world. How many radioactive clocks, depending upon
stable rocks and atmosphere, were disrupted?

Here the uniformitarian suffers the same embarrassment as the catastrophist. Just as he
jests at the catastrophist, "You say that evidences of catastrophe are unavailable
because they are destroyed," now the catastroptfist jeers at him, "you say that you
cannot find meteoroid craters because they were eroded." Perhaps there never were a
million craters or more. If undeniably showers of ice, water, dust, stones and heavy
bodies have struck the Earth, cannot a deluge of dust, stones and heavy bodies have done
the same? It is prima facie reasonable that the changes wrought, upon Earth have been
the work of a few thousand years. And it is an open question whether the changes are
recent or ancient. Perhaps the bombardment of Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Earth is
all recent history.

C. Simon (1982) reports on the topography of giant circular ripples moving out from a
point west of Hudson Bay as indicated by gravity anomaly data  [17] . Scientists
involved conjecture that a 60-90 km meteoroid impacted, digging a great crater and
wrinkling the surface for thousands of kilometers around. All is covered over but the
density variations remain, below the surface, to provide the circular patterning.

That such an event would be electromagnetic as well is certain. Lacking surveys, we are
left to surmise. Electromagnetic effects must' be especially important in meteoroid
impacts. Dachille has described electromagnetic fields produced by impacts of high-
velocity explosives in military tests, and has projected the Em fields to meteoroid
masses of 10 12 , l0 16 , 10 20 grams at 40 km/ sec. "Magnetic fields more intense than
those of the most powerful electromagnets extant would be imposed upon matter many
hundreds of kilometers from the point of impact." [18]

Once again, we must pose the dilemma that is to be a theme of our book: either the Earth
must be so thoroughly tortured electromagnetically that the search for magnetic maps to
represent the Earth's magnetic fields is futile; or the Earth's surface was so lately
magnetized, whether for the first or last time, that collisions and encounters and all
other remagnetizing influences have not had time to deface it.

A generation ago, in the Physical Review for Aug. 15, 1948, Carl Bauer theorized that
the asteroid belt contains remnants of the explosion of a planet less than 60 million
years ago. He calculated the age from the quantity of helium in examined meteorites,
assuming its origin from radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Ovenden also later on
retrojected an exploding planet as the ancestor of asteroids. Von Flandern added comets
to meteoroids: "Comets originated in a breakup event in the inner solar system about 5 x
10 6 years ago. In all probability it was the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt
and which produced most of the meteors visible today." [19]

In the course of his study, he alludes to "the lack of any definite finds of 'fossil'
meteorites or meteorite craters," citing Cassidy; moreover, he reports that "Stair
mentions that neither tektites nor other meteorites have been found in any of the
ancient geologic formations, which also suggests that most surviving meteorites are
relatively quite young, in contradiction to their estimates by the usual dating
methods... The need for a revision of the standard dating methods is certainly suggested
by these new results."

An astrobleme, large or small, disappears quickly under conditions of rain, tides,
current, wind, fall-out, seismism, volcanism, biosphere invasion, and recurrent
disasters governing its location. Still, what, if not astroblemes, are the multitudinous
faint circles that John Saul has located on published maps, publicly available?

     The Earth's surface exhibits faint circular patterns which have not been described
     before. These circles are characterized by near perfection of outline. by the presence
     of topographic highs (rims) along parts of their circumferences, by their generally
     large scale (diameters of from under 7 km up to approximately 700 km in the areas
     examined), and by their definition in various geological environments, in many rock
     types, and in rocks of all ages. Many of the circles are intermittent in places along
     their rims but about 55% of the approximately 1,170 definite circles observed to date
     can be visually traced around an entire 360   of arc. The circles are further
     characterized by the presence of fracturing and brecciation along parts of their rims
     and by the extraordinary control they place on regional geology in general and on ore
     mineralization in particular  [20] .

Saul has only begun such surveying, and has found circles in the Western United States,
northernmost Mexico, the Appalachians, Alaska, the Yukon, Madagascar, and Corsica. The
circles occur more frequently in mountains rather than plains, indicating that mountains
may often have been formed by such upheavals and that the scars are too deeply buried by
overdrift to be observable straightaway on the plains.

Perhaps, he says, these circles are more shadows of astroblemes than the original
craters themselves; they would be like old scars on human skin, which often are
distorted and shift away from the original wound. Kellaway and Durrance, it turns out,
had some time earlier discovered such circles too, and called them cycloliths  [21] .
They called attention to cycloliths in Great Britain and Mauritania (the Richat
structure), and stress that they can be responsible for river development and drainage
patterns. Rivers would channel along the rims, giving them a negative enhancement, and
would make gulleys in the fractures associated with the cratering.

The cycloliths are granted great ages mainly because of their faintness. Yet their
existence contradicts the interpretation of the rocks below them; if two intersecting or
adjoining circles of similar states of preservation overlay rock exposures, say, a
hundred million years apart, then, either the rocks or the circles are of the same age,
and the rocks give no indication of the age of the cycloliths; worse yet would be the
finding that the circles straddle rocks "older" than themselves. This is all matter for
investigation.

Yet if time were short, could the Earth have suffered so many blows? In any event, large
cycloliths must number in the scores of thousands, unless the Earth, like the Moon, has
a preferred side for suffering bombardment. Small cycloliths must then approach the
millions. Nor are we speaking of fossil craters, contained in stratified sediments, none
of which appear to have yet been discerned. It is one thing to say, as do the writers
above, that the bombardment occurred upon a newly formed Earth crust, as on the Moon,
four billion years ago, for then all the time given is free to give. But could they have
been made by impacts in a recent period of, say, six thousand years? Then if two million
landings ensued, they would average several hundred a year, like one clean hydrogen bomb
per million square kilometers. Deluges of water might settle much of the dust. Still the
prospect is awesome. Soft landings, ice falls, cosmic lightning blast--these might cause
the Earth less agony. It is too soon to say.

Velikovsky, in Worlds in Collision, did not treat of collisions, strictly speaking,
between Earth and its principal antagonists in space, Venus and Mars. The bodies
approached one another at times between about 1450 and 687 B. C.; they exchanged
electrical charges; dusts, stones, and gases fell upon Earth. Earth passed through the
tail of Venus, which was behaving as a comet. The earth paused in its rotation on
encounter. Here Carl Sagan in criticizing Velikovsky had to agree; the biosphere would
not go swirling off the globe into space by centrifugal force, as others had argued.
Actually the danger of explosions into space would rather come from electro-
gravitational interactions  [22] .

A portion of such a cometary Venus or of its tail probably did, however, crash into the
terrestrial globe. This was called Typhon by many writers and in legends. Typhon was
both the name of a conquering king of Egypt, following the disasters that brought the
Middle Kingdom to an end, and the name of a monster who threatened the world at the same
time. We can let Donnelly tell the story  [23] ; he does it well:
     
     Born of Night a monster appears, a serpent, huge, terrible, speckled, flesh-devouring.
     With her is another comet, Typhon; they beget the Chimaera, that breathes resistless
     fire, fierce, huge, swift. And Typhon, associated with both these, is the most dreadful
     monster of all, born of Hell and sensual sin, a serpent, a fierce dragon, many-headed,
     with dusky tongues and fire gleaming; sending forth dreadful and appalling noises, while
     mountains and fields rock with earthquakes; chaos has come; the earth, the sea boils;
     there is unceasing tumult and contention, and in the midst the monster, wounded and
     broken up, falls upon the earth; the earth groans under his weight, and there he blazes
     and burns for a time in the mountain fastnesses and desert places, melting the earth
     with boundless vapor and glaring fire.

     We will find legend after legend about this Typhon; he runs through the mythologies of
     different nations. And as to his size and his terrible power, they all agree. He was no
     earth-creature. He moved in the air; he reached the skies...

     According to Pindar the head of Typhon reached to the stars, his eyes darted fire, his
     hands extended from the East to the West, terrible serpents were twined about the middle
     of his body, and one hundred snakes took the place of fingers on his hands. Between him
     and the gods there was a dreadful war. Jupiter finally killed him with a flash of
     lightning, and buried him under Mount Etna.

     And there, smoking and burning, his great throes and writhings, we are told, still shake
     the earth, and threaten mankind:

     "And with pale lips men say, To-morrow, perchance to-day Encelidas may arise!"

Typhon, also spelled Typhaeon, is evidently another version of Phaeton (and probably of
Python who was a monster killed by Apollo). The Phaeton myth, most famous 'of all, is
treated by Plato self-consciously as a myth in form but standing for true natural
history. Phaeton is reluctantly lent the chariot of his father the Sun for a day. He
cannot control its powerful steeds and burns sky and Earth in his wild plungings.
Finally he is felled by a Jovian thunderbolt, cast dead into the river Eridanus, and the
nearly destroyed Earth recovers. The sad and angry Sun emerges once more.

Parallel legends are found in other cultures; the best resume occurs again in Donnelly's
Ragnarok. The paramount student of ancient astronomy of his day, F. X. Kugler, dissected
the myth of Phaeton to assess its validity and concluded that a comet struck the Earth
in the north Aegean region in the second millennium B. C. The event is probable. If it
is tied into all the other evidence, in legend, history, and geology, of the same time,
the event becomes more probable--and of more dire consequences. It is best if we avoid
repetitious listing of disastrous effects; suffice to say that every criterion of a
major exoterrestrial impact is satisfied, except the location of the point of impact.

Still the story is not to be ended neatly. At one and the same time, so it appears, a
great body passed close by the earth (call it proto-Venus) and a large body collided
with Earth. The disasters afflicting the world in those days were effects of both
events. Until the crater or aerial explosion point of flaming yellow-haired Phaeton can
be found and its size and traits used to evaluate the occurrence, the effects of the
principal body's pass-by cannot be calculated. Inasmuch as the effects have been
extensive and continuing, not only geophysically but socially, the research seems
worthwhile.

Because it is our favored theory that the Moon erupted from the Earth, we give less
attention to the idea that we discarded some years ago, namely that the Pacific Basin
originated in a meteoroidal impact. We do ascribe many impacts prior to the episode,
based upon legendary indications (see Chaos and Creation) and contributing to the
loosening of the crust. It is noteworthy that E. R. Harrison "proposed that the Pacific
Basin was the seat of an immense explosion in the primitive Earth" and suggested a
planetesimal of about 100 km radius  [24] . The rim of the Pacific has a number of
characteristics of an astrobleme rim, on a gigantic scale.

Our preference for the lunar fission is based upon evidence elsewhere in this work, and
in the Quantavolution Series; it has to do mainly with the nature and behavior of the
Moon, with legendary evidence, with the recency of the event as attested to by today's
oceanography, and by the electrical effects of a two-body pass-by that would execute
more efficiently, even while dampening, the effects evidenced in the Pacific Basin and
throughout the global cleavage and rifting system.

By now the reader may be wondering how the Moon and more could have been erupted in one
set of events, how so much of what we see on the surface could have dropped from above,
and how thousands of craters, many quite large, could be dug into the Earth, all within
a period of time which, it is increasingly apparent. I believe to have occupied only ten
to twelve thousand years, in the Holocene period, no less. Are there not too many
disasters to let the biosphere survive? Further, how do these relate in time? Finally,
does the author accept all of the suspected astroblemes of the world without question?

To the last question, the author has to apologize for a general ignorance. The Bermuda
astrobleme may be an illusion, for example. The thousands of faint circles or cycloliths
may be how the Earth swells and expands. As to how the growing inventory of astroblemes
may be placed in time, the author refers to a hypothetical calendar, carried here below
and in Chaos and Creation. The ladder of associations between time and events will be
better and better constructed as the calendar is investigated. To the first question, on
the inconceivably large scope of the disastrous falls and their bisopheric effects, the
author again pleads the general ignorance. On one issue, he feels confident, namely,
that a small meteoroid such as the Alvarez team has sought and believed sufficient to
destroy the dinosaurs and much else around the world--a meteoroid of a few kilometers
diameter--would barely interrupt the reproduction cycle of the species; but it did not
occur alone.

Certainly I did not begin my studies with so prodigious an armory of missiles in mind.
It happened that more and more effects called for causes. It happened, too, that more
and more literature has been becoming available that indicates exoterrestrial
intervention in earthly processes. Meanwhile, I increasingly strapped myself into a
short-time harness, which is explained astrophysically in Solaria Binaria,
anthropologically in Chaos and Creation and Homo Schizo I, and to some extent in the
chapters gone by here and in those to come. My model demands a short-time for many
exoterrestrial transactions to occur. If either the amount of time or the number of
encounters is to be substantially changed, my model will crack up, and the value of my
work must then rest on its assembly and description of exoterrestrial effects in the
different areas of geology, astrophysics and anthropology. An exception would occur if
it will be shown, as we have said in Solaria Binaria, that the formative period of the
Earth, under a million years ago, brought down showers of material whose marks are
faintly observable everywhere still. However, I am in no sense foreseeing a crack-up and
ask the indulgent reader to continue to ride along with the model.





{S : Notes (Chapter Eleven: Encounters and Collisions)}
Notes (Chapter Eleven: Encounters and Collisions) 

1. (1749-1827) Oeuvres ComplÚtes (Paris: 1884) VII 121; and see VI 234-5, 478; VII cxx
ff.

2. Frank Dachille, "Interactions of Earth with Very Large Meteorities," 24 Bull. S. Ca.
Acad. Sci (1962), 1-19; see also "Axis Changes in the Earth from Large Meteorite
Collisions," 198 Nature (13 Apr. 1963), 176.

3. "Meteorites-Little and Big..." 46 Earth and Mineral Sci. 7( 1977), 49-52.

4. C. S. Beals, Ian Halliday, and J. Tuzo Wilson, Theories of the Origin of Hudson Bay
(Ottawa: Dept. of Energy, Mines, ResoHad trouble resolving dest near word  action type
is Launch urces, 1968).

5. Dachille (1977) 51; 5 Astronomy (Feb. 1977), 60.

6. D. W. Hughes, 256 Nature (28 Aug. 1975), 679, referring to studies of Ashworth and
Hutchinson on hydrous meteoritic minerals.

7. O'Leary, Campbell and Sagan, "Lunar and Planetary Mass Concentrations," 165 Science
(15 Aug. 1969), 651-7.

8. J. Smit and J. Hertogen, "An Extraterrestrial Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary
Boundary," 285 Nature (1980) 198-200.

9. Op. cit., 203-4.

10. John Normain et al. "Astrons--The Earth's Oldest Scars?" New Sci. (24 Mar. 1977),
689-92.

11. New Sci. (19 Mar. 1981), 740.

12. 63: 249 (1982).

13. 81 J. Geophy. Res. (1976), 5651-63.

14. ( 1977) 692, fig. 5.

15. " Cometary Collisions and Geological Periods," 242 Nature (2 Mar. 1973), 32-3; cf.
R. A. Lyttleton, 245 Nature (21 Sep. 1973), 144-5 for comment.

16. Op. cit., 2.

17. " Deep Crust Hints at Meteoritic Impact," 121 Sci. New (1982), 96.

18. " Electromagnetic Effects of Collisions at Meteoritical Velocities," 13 Meteoritics
(Dec. 1978), 430-3.

19. " A Former Asteroidal Planet as The Origin of Comets," 36 Icarus (1978), 51-74, 71.

20. John M. Saul, "Circular Structures of Large Scale and Great Age on the Earth's
Surface," 271 Nature 26 Jan. 1978), 345 ff.

21. Supra, 75, ltr Geoffrey A. Kellaway and Eric M. Durrance with Saul reply 273 Nature
(4 May 1978), 75.

22. Asimov et al., loc cit. and S. Kogan, op. cit.

23. Op. cit., 140.

24. 188 Nature (24 Dec. 1960), 1064-7. 





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART III: }
{Q HYDROLOGY: }
{C Chapter 12}
{T Water}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER TWELVE

WATER

With both waters and elaborate forms of life, Earth is unlike other planets. The belief
that this situation has persisted for billions of years may be considered someday as
bizarre as the belief that the earth is flat.

The world's oceans contain 1.4 X 10 18 tons of salted water. Its surface fresh waters -
streams, rivers, lakes -come to 5.1 X 10 14 tons, 50,000 times less, a drop in the
bucket. The ice of the continents amounts to a menacing 2.3 X 10 16 tons. And water
vapors constitute 0 to 7% of the atmosphere up to 50 miles high, enough to lay a cloud
cover over half the globe at any given time. And there are groundwaters, more voluminous
than those of the surface. The fresh waters amount in all to three percent of all
waters, and three-fourths of the fresh waters are bound up in ice.

The omnipresence of water in large amounts in all life forms grant it a large role in
biological and atmospheric activities. Its employment and bulk make its lithospheric
transactions important shapers of the Earth's surface. Where do the ocean waters come
from? Since she sees the streams and puddles after a rain, a child reasons that all
water comes from the sky, that is, unless a geologist gets to her quickly to tell her
that the oceans have always been here from the time the Earth was formed, or almost as
long. An eccentric geologist might say that, over the ages, hydrogen atoms descend from
the Sun and space upon Earth, unite with oxygen in the atmosphere and then over billions
of years drop to form the waters of the oceans.

The conventional myth -by which I intend no slight -is set forth by E. Bullard [1]  who
assumes "the obvious things.... one of them is the constancy of the total volume of
water through the ages." Water is "obviously" in "equilibrium," but "the mechanisms of
the equilibrium are unknown."

Thus "it looks as if the water must have been tied up in compounds, perhaps hydrated
silicates, until the earth had formed and the neon had escaped." (This last is needed to
explain why neon, so abundant in the Sun and stars, is so rare on Earth.) "Water must
then have been released as a liquid sometime during the first billion years of the
earth's history, for which we have no geological record." Bullard follows this with
further apologies for the myth but says that the past decades have revolutionized
oceanography and have "unlocked the history of the oceans."

The door may be unlocked, but few have entered. The billions of years of equilibrium can
no longer be accepted: new theory has the ocean floors being scraped and relaid by the
continental plates at least over the past two hundred million years or less; no longer
can the myth hold that the most ancient sediments must rest on the ocean floors, hence
no evidence is thereby offered of what the waters may have been like.

Surely there has been water so long as life has existed, but not necessarily salted
water nor much water. One may assume little water to begin with and little for long
after. Swamps and shallow seas are best for evolution and quantavolution of species;
thick atmospheric soup might be even better, at least in the beginning. Even now, life
seems to reject the oceanic abyss. This is a sign of youth, for the abyss is not without
nutrients, and forms of life exist that require little or no sunlight.

The oceans do not carry all the uranium that they should possess after long eons of
riverine deposits. Their salt is excessive and its sources are not organic. One
calculation emerges with only 2.6% of the present chlorine of the oceans as conceivably
of continental origins.

The sea bottoms seem never to have been compressed and folded, so this indirect evidence
of the age of the water is lacking. Sediments are thin, and mostly accorded under 80
million years of existence. That is only one-fiftieth of the conventional age of the
world oceans. Have there been fifty world-girdling oceans?

If the ocean basins were filled late in time, deluges from the skies have to be assumed.
There is no other source, nor any more apt source, than the waterlogged comets and great
planets. One is compelled to seek water there, and bring it here. Hence the need to
invoke explosions of water from Saturn et al., and passing cometary encounters.

Once the theory of a deluge( s) is given, the search for the source of the water is by
no means ended. The Earth's water may have been injected, boiled off the imagined
primodial melt, stayed up in the skies, and then fallen when a crust had formed and
cooled below 212 . This may have happened, but then again it may not have. It would seem
that if vapors rose high, they would stay there and rotate with the Earth, descending
only when terrestrial electrical conditions permitted or were "seeded" by exoterrestrial
fall out (which is also an electrical phenomenon).

Professional courtesy grants geologists not only their huge oceans but also the basins
to hold the waters. "God" must have made the basins to hold the water, and even if gods
are dispensed with, the basins must stay. So just as some communists stuff their
religion into the mummies of Lenin and Mao, some geologists stuff their religion into
the "nature" that wisely provided ocean basins to hold the great waters.

The waters are too great for the basins to contain; they cover much of the "true"
continents. The fact that the basins occur and the waters occur does not mean that they
were made for each other. Nor have they corresponded. Yet the presence of the basins is
essential to the preservation of the greater part of the continents. If all the earth's
present crust were a uniform level, the waters would cover the globe to a depth of a
kilometer and more.

There is not enough water in the earth's granite or basalts to fill the oceans. Granite,
the rock that underlies the continental sediments, is notably lacking in porosity.
Porosity is the ratio of void space to the bulk volume of a rock, and therefore a
measure of the water or gas contained in the rock at the time of its emergence from a
molten state. Its porosity ranges from 0.3 to 1.5%. That granite could not be generated
from the deeper basalts of the mantle is argued by Y. N. Lyustikh, a soviet
geophysicist; four times the present water mass of the earth would be needed for the
job. [2]  Nor can the process by imagined.

The crystalline, glassy, volcanic basalt, which lines the ocean floors, can have a
porosity of anywhere from 1% to 30%. Generally the porosity declines with the depth of
the sea, a phenomenon attributable to pressures more lately applied than to original
pressures, since this rock was often melted and extruded in unfilled basins that is, at
less depth that it is presently discovered. Rocks of the same chemical constitution that
differ in porosity will have had different histories in at least one significant regard:
the rock of lower porosity had larger infusions of water and/ or vapors during its last
melting and reforming. An expansion of the earth could be facilitated by the
incorporation of water and vapors in heated rock. Water could recycle itself time and
time again: it would flood a hot chasm, be incorporated in the rock, be extruded,
expelled, and again enter a hot chasm.

Water exists exoterrestrially. Only in 1970 were the first observations of comets in the
ultraviolet spectral region made. Cometary atmospheres (comas), in which dust and minor
molecular components had been hitherto alone observable, now revealed indicators of a
large component of water, "confirming the Whipple hypothesis of comets being 'dirty' ice
conglomerates." [3]  By 1980, other comets had disclosed similar compositions.

The outer planets contain great amounts of water. The rings of Saturn contain about 377
billion km 3 of non-conglomerated swarms of ice particles, by one reckoning. It has been
dropping rings in the past. Saturn is 95 times the size of Earth; if Earth carried the
same amount of ring ice relative to its size, it would have had 4 billion km 3 of ice
particles to fill the ocean basins. The ocean basins contain 1.37 billion km 3 of water.
True the density of Saturn's rings is much less than Earth's waters; still, the
necessary relation of sky waters to ocean waters can be premised, especially if Saturn
were to have shed most of its waters in times past. Moreover, Saturn is only one of many
waterbearers in space. Jupiter and the other planets carry water, like Saturn and
numberless comets.

Ancient wise men of Palestine, Mexico and India are known to have attributed the
deluging of the earth to planet Saturn. Thus, the Hebrew Talmud reads in one place.
"When the Holy One decided to bring the Deluge on the Earth, He took two stars from
Khima and (hurling them against the Earth) brought the Deluge on the Earth." [4]
Velikovsky identified Khima as Saturn. In Mexican documents, where ages of the world are
called "suns," "the first world age, at the end of which the earth was destroyed by a
universal deluge, and presided over by Ce-acatl, or Saturn" [5]  The ancient Persians
reported the star Tistar appearing in three manifestations to the accompaniment each of
a different deluge of rain of ten days' durations. [6]

Long before modern astronomy, Saturn was perceived to have rings and to be watery, never
Venus, Mercury, or Mars. How the ancient would associate Saturn with water is a mystery
unless the planet had been observed at a distance much closer than it appears to the eye
today and seen to blow off some of its rings or gases that ultimately arrived to deluge
the Earth. Since Saturn under various names was the ruling god in human cultures at the
time of Noah's Flood, the associations begin to appear reasonable. However, the
Saturnian deluge followed the Golden age of Saturn, and oceans existed at least to some
depth in Saturnian times. They were navigable by Saturnian age peoples.

It can be hypothesized that Saturn contributed some of the vast bulk of ocean waters.
Where did the earlier waters come from? If Saturn did not supply the primordial and
secondary earth waters, the deluge theory has to seek evidence of earlier acquisition of
water. We can begin with a postulation providing for some water that the Earth inherited
from the plenum of gases in which it thrived over most of its history. Then three major
sources are indicated, this inheritance from the gaseous plenum enveloping Solaria
Binaria -the Sun and its partner -in a long period of binary transaction; second,
deluges when the legendary Uranus (Ouranos) complex broke up; and third, upon the
disruption of Saturn. Let us say, for hypothetical purposes, the three investments of
the Earth with water came in one-sixth, three-sixths, and two-sixths of the total.

The ocean waters are geologically young. Granted waters are difficult to date, Melvin
Cook has shown that the oceans contain under 100,000 years' accumulation of uranium,
even granted a uniformitarian riverine run-off curve (which, of course, would mean much
less time on the quantavolutionary exponential curve). [7]

That the basins which hold the water are young, which is yet to be shown, holds
significance for the youth of the waters as well. Few evolutionists and
quantavolutionists regress in time to a completely water-covered Earth, although the
first passage of Biblical Genesis might be construed so: for Elohim separated the chaos
by a firmament dividing the waters below from the waters above, and assembled the land
out of the waters below. And the primeval legend of the Earth being fished out of the
waters is found in the farthest removed cultures of the globe. Also among the first
impression and memories of mankind was the image of the vast cloudy universe recurrently
pouring water and debris down upon the hapless Earth.

A more correct interpretation is that early man was caught in an increasingly turbulent
cloudy world. The next chapter, on Deluges, carries this matter forward. But meanwhile
let us interject a commentary on the origins of the fresh waters of the Earth.

Most if not all of the lakes of the world can be thought of as slowly diminishing
stagnant floods -the salt lakes like the Great Salt Lake (Utah) and the Dead sea, and
the freshwater lakes such as the Great Lakes (USA), and the thousands of Canadian and
American "glacial lakes." That these latter are in most cases being fed by rains and
streams as fast as they evaporate or drain does not obviate the fact of their origins.
They were created under flood conditions. If this is so, it is likely that ground waters
and swampland are also behaving as flood waters, that is, everywhere draining at the
levels of the ocean basins. The Caspian Sea has been shrinking rapidly over the past 150
years, not alone because of human diversions, and becoming more saline. According to the
idea that this sea may be a remnant of a recent and westwards dumping of the contents of
the vast Gobi Sea, now Desert, carried on over thousands of kilometers, ending in the
Mediterranean, the desiccation is to be expected. But, too, the local freshwater
replenishment of the Caspian may be inadequate, and may always have been since its
quantavolutionary creation.

So, too, can the ocean basins be regarded as flood drains, again to make a logical
point, which is otherwise an absurd stretching of language. It can be looked at in this
way: the basins of the oceans existed before they contained water; some water flowed or
dropped into them, "flooding" them. More craters were added, more 'flooding' took place.
Finally they were even 'over-flooded, ' that is, land not properly abyssal but belonging
to continental sial was flooded up to present shorelines.

Whether or not the flooding is continuing is debated in hydrological circles, along with
the questionable trend of land elevation, and is, of course, related to trends of
climate as well. If the hypothesis here is correct and the freshwater (and saline)
bodies are late aspects of world tidal and flood movements, and if swamp and groundwater
levels are also aspects of the same, then the biosphere worldwide is faced with a
growing shortage of water. In the foreseeable future, life on earth will come to depend
upon the systematic utilization of freshwater trapped in ice, upon irrigation from
reservoirs, upon converting freshwater bodies into reservoirs, upon worldwide controls
over the augmentation and distribution of atmospheric waters, and upon conversion of
salt waters to fresh water. Mankind may confront, not only the effects of its ravaging
of water supplies everywhere by overuse, by populations pressure, and by promoting off-
flow of continental water supplies -but also a more grave problem, the hitherto
unsuspected natural trend of the continental crust to lose its water holdings, because
"they never belonged there in the first place."

A great many dry lake basins exist around the world. Some are large, as Lake Bonneville,
whose remnant is Great Salt Lake, and the Caspian Sea basin, containing today's shrunken
lake, still the largest in the world. Some freshwater lakes, such as Titicaca (Andes)
and Tanganyika, contain adapted or primordial oceanic animals like the seahorse and
jelly fish. Perhaps a million watered and dry lakes exist.

By origin, basins may have been created by natural dams accreted gradually or thrown up
abruptly by avalanche, by calderas of extinct volcanos, by meteoroid craters, by faults
and rifts (as lake Baikal and the Dead Sea), and by the bulldozing done by ice and rock
thrusts. The original water may have been groundwater seepage, rainwater, deluges, ice
melt, or tides.

With six forms of basin and six archtypes of water, the combinations and permutations
are numerous. And we have no global survey of lakes with which to compose a frequency
distribution. The only exclusively non-quantavolutionary basin form is the damming by
gradual accretion. Four types of water contents (excluding rainwater) might be
quantavolutionary; three types (excluding deluges and tides) might be non-
quantavolutionary.

No lake is geologically old: this is an impressive datum. It says something about the
lately tortured Earth. An undisturbed or slowly changing surface should include a
proportionately great number of lakes aged in the millions and tens of millions of
years. To object that lakes become filled with sediments must imply that such fossil
lakes should exist by tens of thousands in the stratified rocks of the world. They do
not. Some seemingly ancient lake beds are evident. These should be placed in the
frequency distribution.

The results, even by raw conjecture, would be disappointing. The fossil lakes would be
all too few. For, if we multiply the present million lakes, say, of an average age of
10,000 years as a guess, and take the last billion years of the earth "history" as
providing similar lakes, we get 100,000 periods, and one hundred billion lakes. With
climates changing (and Flint, for one, along with many other geologists had to invent a
turbulent rain belt to fill his pluvial lakes), and with continents drifting about, and
lands rising and sinking, why should not lakes have visited every place at some point in
geological time, and be found in all (or say 10% to 100%) of the geological columns
dutifully examined. I fear that reductio ad absurdum will once more assail conventional
geological theory.

Freshwater springs exist in many places, emerging above their "natural " level, often
quietly but sometimes with explosive vigor. The subterranean liquids and gases -water,
oils, natural gas, and even compressed air -appear frequently to be pocketed under
pressure. Calculations by M. Cook and others allow only a few thousand years for their
escape, at most. Their burial must have occurred in some form of thrusting and folding,
that is, is no longer occurring; we have accounts of many springs that have died, few
that are new. This last fact would arbitrate against conventional theory that
underground volatile pockets are fed from descending rock strata and then forced up
above their local level at some interstices among the rocks, unless, of course, it is
granted that the fresh waters generally are draining away, for the reasons given above.

Once more we turn to oceanography for help. The U. S. Atlantic Ocean shelf was drilled
in 1976 at water depths of less than 300 meters and penetrated to depths of from 20 to
300 meters, at 19 widely separated sites. "One of the most significant discoveries... is
that fresh ground water occurs beneath much of the Atlantic continental self." [8]
These fresh and sometimes brackish waters occupy large lenses in rock strata that are
Cretaceous or younger.

The investigators considered whether these expanses of fresh water below the ocean salt
waters were remnants that had been trapped in shelf sediments when the Pleistocene ice
ages lowered the ocean waters, or were submarine discharges from mainland aquifers.
Generally the first solution was preferred, although indications of submarine intrusions
were discovered at southerly sites. The investigators did not suggest a third
hypothesis, which we offer here, that indeed the freshwater lenses are fossils, but not
from a period of withdrawal of waters to make ice. Rather they are both remnants and
submarine channels of the age before deluges filled to over flowing the basaltic ocean
basins. Fresh waters were trapped in the continental rocks as they made way toward the
abyss and are probably trapped in the debris of the continental slope as well. They are
extensions of normal aquifers, a circulation and storage system that is being broken
into and polluted. We speculate( as do the investigators) that these waters have been
suboceanic for only a few thousand years, and will not be with us for long.





{S : Notes (Chapter Twelve: Water)}
Notes (Chapter Twelve: Water) 

1. "The Origins of the Oceans," in The Oceans (San Francisco: Freeman,), 16-25.

2. B. Y. Levin, op. cit., 168.

3. M. K. Wallis, "Cometary Science," 286 Nature (17 July 1980), 207.

4. III Kronos 4 (1978), 19.

5. Velikovsky, V Kronos 1 (1979), 5.

6. Bellamy, Moon, Myths and Man, loc. cit., 124.

7. Prehistory and Earth Models, loc. cit. 8. J. C. Hathaway et al., 206 Science 4418 (2
Nov. 1979), 515-27, 523.







{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART III: }
{Q HYDROLOGY: }
{C Chapter 13}
{T Deluges}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DELUGES

We resort again to the skies for cataclysms. A dense canopy of primordial clouds, lately
dropping, has long been a tempting theory. Jordan, who wrote a book generally upon earth
expansion, assembled data and authorities in support of the idea that in the Devonian
and Carboniferous age there was "a world-wide uniformity of climatic conditions from the
furthest south to the furthest north." [1]  A cloud cover of a thickness of perhaps ten
kilometers was deemed possible, leading to the warmth and precipitation that grew
rapidly the huge forests of the carboniferous period where, he pointed out, the trees
carried no seasonal rings. R Potonie is cited on the evidence for low light intensity in
those times.

Jordan favored Dirac's hypothesis of a declining gravitational constant. This would
permit a larger solar constant in earlier times, which would have brought on the vapor
cloud canopy. At some point the gravitational grip relaxed and the rings and clouds
descended. Jordan was not concerned with the speed of drop or the basins required to
collect the waters or with the recency of the translation from sky to Earth. However,
the sky-drops may not have been so long ago. Rich and specific traditions of great
celestial waters and deluging of the whole earth convey a strong presumption of truth.
Prehistoric floods are believed in by many peoples who have suffered in historical times
floods of only trivial consequences. Not even psychoanalytic theory, which is the most
penetrating critic of delusions, can locate a psychic source of the flood complex; the
waters of the sac in which we all swam in embryo are believed to have been a soothing,
not devastating, medium.

Scholars have repeatedly analyzed much of the surface of deposits of the Earth and
reported them to be the result of universal deluges; just as often they have been
rebutted by scientists who see in their studies the hand of religious authority. The
greater the controversy, the less immediate the conviction that my few paragraphs here
can convey. Nevertheless, I will state that an unbiased scientist must today admit that
the action of heavy, large-scale floods produced by vertical and lateral rushes of water
can, in a holistic context, account for numerous deposits and land forms around the
world. A presumptive and perhaps invalid stretching of time can only stagger the events
so as to deny them simultaneity and hence grand scope. Or, in keeping with legends, the
events can be concentrated, but the intervals of quiescence then may be stretched out
greatly. Or, finally, both the events and the interims may be condensed in time, a view
preferred here.

The sources of huge flood waters are limited. They may occur from the sudden collapse of
an ice cap such as that of the Pleistocene, which covered, it is said, 30% of the
Earth's surface. They can be exoterrestrial -from a comet or exploding body of the
planetary system. They can descend from a onetime far-flung vaporous canopy. They can be
mobilized as tides from an interruption of the Earth's motion, a tilt of the Earth's
axis, or a drag induced by a giant passing body. They can, also as tides, be generated
from a heavy meteoroid impact on the ocean, directly and also indirectly as in all cases
above, from the winds, rock shifts and seismism accompanying them.

Deluges and tides both cause flooding. Some distinctions are necessary, though, for the
next chapter continues this one with the story of great tides that swept the Earth.
"Deluges fell." We should preserve the strict meaning of deluge, as a cataclysm, a "down
fall." That is, a deluge is defined as an immense rain or fall of matter from the sky. A
flood tide is a body of water in motion. A flood is a raising of water levels from rain
or tide or both. In this chapter, only the vertical flood, the true cataclysmic deluge,
is considered; in the following chapters, lateral floods and tides are treated.

Diderot's Encyclopedia (1751-1765) carried an article on "The Deluge" written by a young
French engineer and soldier, Nicholas-Antoine Boulanger. Going beyond Newton's disciple,
Whiston, who had explained the Deluge by a comet, he then wrote the first scientific
work uniting the four factors; comet, flood, terror, and the origin of religion. G. R.
Carli followed in a few years with additional world-wide legends and geological evidence
of catastrophe. The ancient reports of universal catastrophe, both men reasoned, bore
the stamp of truth.

In the century that followed, the natural and psychological sciences separated
themselves from history and legend. The Biblical Deluge, for example, was steadily
diminished and even dismissed as a fairy tale. It became a local flood along the
Euphrates River, an account which the Hebrews picked up and patched into their holy
scriptures. The influential geologist Seuss opined that "the traditions of other peoples
do not in the least justify the assertion that the flood extended beyond the lower
course of the Euphrates. More recently, the great floods that moved over the Indus River
centers of India in the second millennium B. C. have been explained by Raikes as the
effects of the bursting of natural mud dams. Such floods, goes the conventional belief,
typified in the work of D. Vitaliano, occurred elsewhere from time to time and were
exaggerated out of local pride.

Anyone who has experienced heavy rain and flood is keenly aware of the damage and the
fright that come with the prolonged precipitation combined with the rising and swirling
waters. Individuals and towns do not forget them easily. But no culture makes of any
such weather event a centerpiece of their history as human beings. No matter how
disastrous (as for example, was the Yangtse flood that killed an estimated million
people in 1887), unless a flood practically obliterates a culture, or is accompanied by
compelling foreign "divine" phenomena, it does not mark indelibly the social memory.

Donald Patten lists sixty-eight deluge traditions on six continents. He might have named
many more. For instance, twenty-five of them come from the Americas; but Marie and
Richard Andress, folklorist and geographer respectively, found forty-six in the New
World, almost twice as many accounts. But Bellamy estimated 500 deluge myths coming from
250 peoples or tribes. The probability is high that every culture can recite the story
of a universal flood which practically nobody survived. [2] The deluge is frequently
pictured, too, in ancient and modern art. A. Durer and Leonardo da Vinci painted their
images of it, both making it a kind of typhoon. And indeed, in the ancient Chaldean
story of the flood of Xisuthros the node of the Deluge is spoken of as a waterspout that
"swelled up to heaven "and struck fear into the gods; the god Ea pleaded that any and
all disaster be visited upon men, but nothing so terrible as "the waterspout of the
Deluge." [3]

In every ancient legend of great waters descending from the sky, a few survivors live to
tell the tale. At any rate, so it seemed to the survivors. But given any tiny sum of
survivors in various parts of the world, one has the basis for survival of the human
race. Even a single couple procreating successfully can set off a population explosion
within a few generations. The mathematics of reproduction are such that some eight
billions might theoretically come forth in a thousand years. That is over twice the
present population of our crowded world of today.

While catastrophic forces work on exponential curves, so do populations of all living
forms. Indeed, unwilling as they may be to accept such a defense, one of the best
arguments for Darwinian adaptation is the capacity of all living things to increase from
a pair to billions in a numbers of years. There would be no need for exponential
population growth under uniformitarian conditions. But population explosions themselves
are an indirect proof of catastrophes.

Since the time of Boulanger, quantavolutionary thought has arrived at a number of
additional conclusions about the "Deluge." These are at odds with conventional science,
yet have been using more and more the findings of conventional science.

Boulanger and others have talked of "the" Deluge as if there were only one, whether
unique in occurrence or unique in size. Most of the ancients spoke of periodic flood
catastrophes. The Greeks spoke of three great floods, Deucalion, Ogyges, and Dardanus.
The first two have been tied to great floods of Exodus times, the mid-second millennium
B. C. [4]  According to Philochorus (3rd c. B. C.), "deluge-swept Attica remained
without a king for 189 [or 190] years " in the wake of the Ogygian Flood. [5]  Sextus
Julius Africanus said that "all the former population of Attica was killed in the
Ogygian deluge and the country remained uninhabited for 270 years." [6]

The Flood of Dardanus was probably of the 8th century B. C. The story of Atlantis may be
contemporary with the Saturnian flood. We note that the Atlantic Ocean was called the
Sea of Kronos. Atlantis would then have sunk in the flooding of the continental shelves
by the Noachian Deluge. In a prescient line, Bellamy thinks: "Genesis I is a dragon myth
without a dragon, a deluge myth without a deluge." [7]  This would be the initial
deluges of the first, Uranian period of Chaos. The Greek myths of Ouranos and Okeanos
were concerned with universal deluges of the earliest catastrophes, involving the
breakup of the Super-Uranus partner of the Sun.

Diluvians are of several minds. My view is that the deluges were numerous, with two
great peaks. This view has at least the advantage of including all known and suspected
deluges in human memory. As pointed out earlier, various high energy expressions such as
typhoons and volcanic explosions invariably pick up and drop huge amounts of water and
are at least localized deluges.

The first peak, the Uranian, consisted of a series of drops of sky-held waters,
occurring from the beginning of the holocene period when set at 14,000 B. C. and
continued for several thousand years through the lunar fission. Deluges of stone and
dust (or mud) occurred simultaneously. The second peak may be placed at the end of the
age of Saturn and can be identified as the flood of Noah (sometimes calculated at 4000
B. C.). Dense material fall-outs of catastrophic extent occurred at the time of the
heavy-body encounters with Venus and Mars, in the second and first millennia B. C. These
were exoterrestrial. In these cases, described in Chaos and Creation, as well as on a
number of other occasions, universal and local conflagrations and explosions caused
damaging fall-outs of material that was raised from the Earth. The gravest such
occurrences would have been the fall-back of some of the material that was erupting to
form the Moon, around 11,500 B. C. Huge falls of insects, fish, frogs, etc. would have
certainly constituted terrifying spectacles over less extensive areas, and were
sometimes the cause of plagues.

Issac Vail, an American naturalist, in 1874 proposed that the Deluge of Noah occurred
"as a philosophical necessity, arising from a world-condition that no longer obtains
.... A vast cloud-canopy of primitive earth-vapors, such as now envelop the planets
Jupiter and Saturn, lingered as a revolving deluge-source, in the skies of antediluvian
man --a source of primeval rains, snow and hail, competent to produce all the floods,
and all the Glacial Epochs the earth ever saw, and that this last fall of those
primordial waters deepened the oceans many fathoms." [8]  Vail was a polymath whose
analyses of myth were superb. Unfortunately, a fire consumed his principal manuscripts
and he was compelled to rewrite them from memory, and then only in part, omitting many
citations of sources.

Vail calculated the fatal flaw of the conventional theory of the ice ages; the
incapacity of the Earth internally to generate enough heat to lift the waters and convey
them to where they would form ice. And, had a mechanism to lift such masses been
employed by exoterrestrial sources (although noone considered this possibility), then
the poles as well as the Equator would be consumed by heat. The only alternative, Vail
thought, was a pre-existing high set of Saturnian rings which descended into Jovian
cloud bands and then fell upon the Earth as snow and ice in the polar regions, to which
they were deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere.

Vail thought that the vast changes recorded in ocean and terrestrial life proved that a
canopy had existed and had from time to time dropped part of its contents upon the
earth. He pointed to pre-existing tropical conditions uncovered throughout the globe as
proof of a "greenhouse" climate in which the clouds diffused the sun's heat and
maintained even temperatures everywhere.

Vail did not introduce heavy-body encounters into his model of heaven and earth. Yet
there is yet another possible source of a deluge, terrible beyond all others. If a
passing body were attractive enough to disrupt, dislodge, and explosively pull into the
sky portions of the earth's surface, it would also extract water and ice directly from
the earth. The portion of the water that did not follow the intruding body into far
space beyond the earth's grasp would fall back upon the world as a deluge or circle the
earth with the moon and ultimately, if disturbed, fall.

Vail was not specific as to why the canopies would ever fall. He appealed to a "natural"
and "divine" order or process happening over long ages, without external intervention.
If the rings had moved with the Earth like the Moon does, they would hold their orbits
similarly. Their fall would be at best exceedingly slow and the climatic ages that they
would produce on earth exceedingly long, too long for any catastrophic theory. However,
a collapse would be rapid under certain conditions. The globe or canopy might change its
motions and/ or electrical charges. Both would occur with large-body encounters and
dense-material fall-outs and radionic storms. A great meteoritic explosion, a phaetonic
atmospheric pass-through, and a bombardment of particles would singly or in combination,
and in proportion to their volume, precipitate deluges upon Earth.

Now we see a complex of possible events: that "heavenly waters" (canopies) might have
existed, that they might have fallen, and that explosions might have produced them and/
or brought them down along with exploded waters. The mechanisms are described more
precisely in Solaria Binaria.

We continue Vail's account: the most ancient of East Indian gods was Varuna, whose name
means the "surrounder" or "concealer." He is the regent for the Sun. The root syllable
"var" means water, hence "he who covers the heavens with his water canopy." Ouranos is
the Greek equivalent: this Heaven-god, ancient Hesiod's Theogony tells us, came from far
away to embrace "Mother Earth," Gaea, and "lay close about her on all sides around." The
most archaic deity of the Latins was Coelus, ruler of heaven (Coelum), who like all the
other heaven-gods, was ultimately banished. The Kojiki, holy scriptures of Japan,
maintains that the gods, in the earliest days, brought the heavens and earth very close
together. Two light-gods then ruled the world from their "f1oating bridge of heaven."
Later, heaven "began to retire and eventually passed utterly away."

In the Hebrew Genesis, the Elohim (the Most High) created the Heavens and the Earth. The
Heavens were a "firmament" placed "in the midst of the waters." The "there-waters"
(Shimayim or Heaven) existed with lights but not with the sun and moon, for they are not
mentioned in the opening passage of Genesis. The Assyrians said also that the sun, moon
and stars came into view only when the monster foes of order were dislodged. When the
Scandinavian heaven, Asgard, died with the gods, during Ragnarok, "the Sun and his
legions came riding through the gap in shining array."

The name "Yahweh" came later when the skies were opened, just as names of the leading
gods changed in all cultures, with the coming of a new age. In Greek terms, Kronos
(Saturn) became Zeus (Jupiter). When Kronos was removed by Zeus, Zeus removed also his
own younger brother Poseidon from Heaven and sent him to rule the terrestrial waters.
But note that Okeanos (the Ocean) had, as a rebellious Titan, already been expelled from
Heaven before Poseidon left it.

So the Great Deep of the earliest religions was a watery sky. The final waters of the
Great Deep were broken up at the time of the Noachian (or Poseidon) Flood. But there was
"a long, long time when floods were the order of the day."

If I may refashion the theory of Vail, in the light of what I have written elsewhere, I
should suggest that (a) self-conscious myth-making mankind was born beneath a high
canopy of rings and clouds, without a visible Sun; (b) deluges began and a visible
Uranian Sun and the present Sun appeared; (c) the Uranian Sun went nova, the Earth bore
forth the Moon and cleaved, while undergoing further deluges that partially filled the
newly formed ocean basins; (d) the heavenly clouds remained to some extent thereafter
(during the Golden Age of Saturn when the world lived tropically); and then (e) the
second great Deluge came, which was the Noachian deluge.

Jewish legends of the earliest period of man go beyond the Bible in defining a cosmic
catastrophe prior to Noah's Deluge. It may be called the Enosh Catastrophe, for it
happened during the time of Adam's grandson, Enosh. Since I have designated the full
self-awareness of modern man (in Homo Schizo I and I1) as part of the early catastrophic
scenario of a binary nova of Super-Uranus, and suggested that this was accompanied by
great flooding, and that the Moon eruption and Earth cleavage (Chaos and Creation) also
brought down to Earth great deluges to fill the ocean basins, perhaps Enosh belonged to
one of these eras. The second is preferred if only because in legend and scripture Adam
(mankind) was self-aware and active, and had been evicted into a hard world from the
Garden of Eden, which represents a catastrophe of a universal globe-tilting kind.

The legends say that mankind's attention was riveted upon celestial events; idolatry
(implying deviant sky-body worship) and gods (the same, but lawful) were active and
importuned. The terrestrial effects were said to be threefold: the sea transgressed its
bounds and a third of the Earth was flooded; "There arose mountains, valleys, and rocky
ground, whereas prior to that everything had been smooth and even...; man's stature was
shortened." [9]  Ignoring the last, which is for another book, we are left to conjecture
original or successive (Uranian) deluges possibly in conjunction with the eruption of
the Moon and the cleavages of the globe, at which time great orogeny occurred and much
of the land was thrusted and folded. O'Gheoghan points out that two deluges were
attributed by Phoenician sources to the planet El (Saturn, possibly our lunar Super-
Uranian and Super-Saturn novas)  [10] .

The Greeks had a god who was a son of Ouranos. His name was Okeanos and his behavior was
consonant with our theory. Okeanos, writes Giorgio Santellana and Hertha von Dechand,
dwelt originally in heaven  [11] . He was the rivers of heaven who flowed down from the
sky to earth. He was the "beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pale" and his name,
too, is derived etymologically from "heaven." Jane Harrison also found that "Okeanos is
much more than Ocean and of other birth." [12]  He was the "daimon of the upper air," of
the stratosphere, of the binary system's atmospheric plenum in our interpretation.
According to Homer, the universe took the form of an egg that was girded about by
Okeanos, the Generator. And Socrates in Theathetus says, "When Homer sings of the wonder
of 'Ocean whence sprang the Gods and Mother Tethys' does not mean that all things are
the offspring of flux and motion." [13]  "Mother Tethys" is the ancient sea that in my
opinion preceded the earthly oceans, and was the central body of water of Pangea, as the
wholly land-covered Earth may be called. A whole subsequent paragraph of Santillana and
von Dechend bears quotation:

     The authority of Berger can reconstruct the image. The attributes of Okeanos in the
     literature are "deep-flowing," "flowing-back-on-itself," "untiring," "placidly flowing,"
     "without billows." These images, remarks Berger, suggest silence, regularity, depth,
     stillness, rotation--what belongs really to the starry heaven. Later the name was
     transferred to another more earthbound concept: the actual sea which was supposed to
     surround the land on all sides. But the explicit distinction, often repeated, from the
     "main" shows that this was never the original idea. If Okeanos is a "silver-swirling"
     river with many branches which obviously never were on sea or land, then the main is not
     the sea either, pontos or thalassa, it has to be the Waters Above. The Okeanos of myth
     preserves these imposing characters of remoteness and silence. He was the one who could
     remain by himself when Zeus commanded attendance in Olympus by all the gods. It was he
     who sent his daughters to lament over the chained outcast Prometheus, and offered his
     powerful mediation on his behalf. He is the Father of Rivers; he dimly appears in
     tradition, indeed, as the original god of heaven in the past. He stands in an Orphic
     hymn as "beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pole," and in that famous ancient
     lexicon, the Etymologicum magnum, his name is seen to derive from "heaven."

Boreal means "northern." It also means "bore," a "hole". Both of these prehistoric
meanings refer to the first human sense of direction. As the clouds that surrounded man
's early cultures began to break up and descend as deluges, the first openings of the
sky were in the north (to those living above the Equator). Uranus, in the late Roman
Empire, was still pictured as a god cloaked in clouds.

The Hyperboreans were people who lived farthest north. Their legends said that the great
light (commonly, but mistakenly translated as Helios) arose and also set but once a
year. So time-cycles were possible in the brilliant peak of illumination.

Most legendary clues seem compatible with the model being tested here--of an early
cloud-covered greenhouse world, now broken through and deluged by water, fire, and
rocks; of clouds lowering upon a smothering Mother Earth; of the beginnings of reliable
changing lights and planetary figures in the Boreal hole; of a rapid development of
thought and culture; of the retreat of Ouranos (Uranus) and the appearance of Kronos
(Saturn).

But then also the land of Pangea was being flooded and the ice was piling up in the
polar regions. Life forms retreated steadily southwards. Then came a Lunarjan
catastrophe, the worst, followed by the full mild, misty "golden age" of Saturn
(Kronos). Again, disaster, with the Noachian Deluge and the coming of electrical Yahweh
(Zeus-Jupiter) to the force  [14] .

Afterwards, sunshine, dryness, lightning, thunder and the present rain-making cycle
governed the atmosphere. Vail put it one way: "All through the Ouranian and Kronian
ages, the thunderer [Jove] was silent." I would say that these former ages were fully
catastrophic in their beginnings and end, and cosmic lightning and pandemonium were
present, but that a fairly clear and dry world was the scene for the working out of
Jupiter's divine character.

The first fall-out of sky-waters must have been limited--one sixth of today's total, we
guess--because, as we argue later on, they descended upon a world largely without basins
to receive them. The world would have drowned without the basins. Nor did the second
fall come at one time but over a period of centuries prior to and after the forming of
the basins. Even then, if the waters had not fallen partly as ice upon the caps, where
it did not melt, then too the world would have been swamped.

The deluges would not amount to much rain if they were spread out over thousands of
years. This, of course, was not the case, but is worth calculating. We assume that the
original Tethyan Sea, shallow but globe-gidling, held one-sixth of the 1,347 million
cubic kilometers of water contained in the present oceans. Further, we assumed that two-
sixths of the present oceans came down in subsequent deluges of Noah and thereafter. Ice
caps (now I/ 200 of the total waters) are ignored, so, too, possible expansion of the
Earth during the period, and also the rain cycle that would be occurring all the while.
We allow ourselves 6000 years to bring down new waters equal to half the oceans today,
that is, 673.5 million km 3 . The annual average quota becomes 112,250 km 3 /y, which
turns out to be only 22 cm 3 /cm 2 /y, when it is averaged over the Earth's surface.
This is much less than the average rainfall around the world today, which can rise well
above 200 cm3 in a number of localities such as the State of Washington or Hongkong.
Evaporation and precipitation would add to the figure. Further, most important, most of
the deluging might occur in years, not millennia, and then we should have to resort to a
dynamism unlike ordinary rain, and resembling more ropes, hoses, and cyclones of water
at many locations.

The ancient Scandinavians called snow the "pus of the gods." Something is to be said
about snow and ice deluges soon. In many places, however, the waters of the deluges and
floods or tides were heated. Rains came down in gobs the size of a man's head and were
at times boiling hot, according to the Zend-Avesta of Persia. Josippon bin-Gorion
repeats a Jewish myth: "The fountains of the deep broke up first. Then came the flood
from above. Then fire fell also, and rain, boiling hot." [15] Bellamy writes that "quite
a number of peoples report not only a Great Flood, but specifically a flood of hot
water." American Indians of the West claimed that the waters of the Great Flood were
warm. The Voguls of Finland said a great fire raged over the world first and was
followed by a deluge of hot water. Then the hot waters raged across the land. Fire mixed
with the water--even their rafts caught fire, they said. Amerindians of Brazil said that
the Sun was a cauldron of boiling waters that tipped over.

Saturn was the chief sun in ancient legend, it should be borne in mind; several recent
studies have established this identification (see Chaos and Creation). Saturn, successor
to Uranus, was both an early sun, a bright binary partner of the Sun, and flared
magnificently when it went nova just before its deluge waters struck the Earth.
Moreover, while lightning would unquestionably have played about the deluge scene, the
fires and heat connected with the deluge and flood waters would be associated with the
debris of the nova and the heavy volcanism which, as one Jewish commentator wrote,
sprang up on all sides [16] .

The Feast of Lights (Hannukah) and the Christmas Light festivals, as well as the Hindu,
Roman and other Saturnalia derive from the brilliant seven-day display of Saturn in
nova, before the deluge struck. Frazer give us a Jewish folktale to conclude our
instances of sky-associations for the Flood of Noah:

     Now the Deluge was caused by the male waters from the sky meeting the female waters
     which issued forth from the ground. The holes in the sky by which the upper waters
     escaped were made by God when he removed stars out of the constellation of the Pleiades;
     and in order to stop this torrent of rain, God had afterwards to bung up the two holes
     with a couple of stars borrowed from the constellation of the Bear. That is why the Bear
     runs after the Pleiades to this day; she wants her children back, but she will never get
     them till after the Last Day  [17] .

In Solaria Binaria, which is the heavily astronomical work of the Quantavolution series.
Milton and I formulate the dynamics of the deluges. 1 mentioned earlier that the form
which the deluges of Uranian and Saturnian times took was probably cyclonic, with the
waters jetting down, as fountains or as liquid meteoritic fails. This would be a
necessary assumption for biosphere survival and for disposing of the huge quantities of
water involved. At the same time, we must speculate upon the lithospheric effects of the
thousands of jets or spouts. Where are the visible effects today?

Perhaps the myriad rings faintly visible on satellite photographs of the Earth's surface
(as reported in earlier pages) represent cyclonic craters formed by the jets and soon
filled by aquatic tides and earth flows. When I first began to study the incidence of
meteoroid impacts, I was pleased at each new discovery. But as the number of indicated
craters grew larger and larger, 1 began to wonder how the Earth could have been so
completely bombarded yet its biosphere could have survived. Cosmic lightning bolts and
plasmoid lightning balls supply part of the answer. A liquid bombardment might also be
an answer. We shall have to await a more extensive survey of the surface halos of the
Earth.





{S : Notes (Chapter Thirteen: Deluges)}
Notes (Chapter Thirteen: Deluges) 

1. Pascual Jordan, The Expanding Earth (1971) (orig. German ed. 1966).

2. The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, op. cit., 164-6, 52. Bellamy: Moon, Myths and
Man, op. cit., 120.

3. Kelly and Dachille, op. cit., 241.

4. By Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, 148-52.

5. H. S. Bellamy, The Atlantis Myth (London: Fabar and Fabar, 1948), 145.

6. Ibid.

7. Moon, Myths and Man, op. cit., 178.

8. "The Misread Record," p. 1. Most of the specific allusions in these next paragraphs
are form Vail's Selected Works, loc. cit.

9. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: 1909), V. 152, note 55. Quoted by B.
O'Gheoghan, "Notes on a Possible Pre-Deluge Catastrophe," III S. I. S. Rev. 2( Aut.
1978), 36.

10. Op. cit., and see H. Tresman and B. O'Gheoghan, "The primordial Light?" II S. I. S.
Rev. (1977), 35ff.

11. Op. cit., 190-1.

12. Ibid., 189.

13. Ibid.

14. The author's Moses examines the electrical associations of Yahweh.

15. Bellamy, M. M. M., op cit., 124-5.

16. Velikovsky in V Kronos 1 (1979), 9.

17. Folklore in the Old Testament (1981), I, 143-4.




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART III: }
{Q HYDROLOGY: }
{C Chapter 14}
{T Floods and Tides}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FLOODS AND TIDES

Paleontology is based largely upon the classification and ordering in sequence of
marine fossils. Cuvier, one of its founders, claimed as the best evidence of universal
floods, that land animals were always found in association with marine fossils.
Terrestrial strata were laid upon marine strata which were superimposed upon
terrestrial strata. In 1796, he named three ages and three catastrophes, evidenced by
three quite different 'aggregates of species. Man appeared following the last of these,
he believed. Today, many fossil deposits consisting solely of land animals can be
pointed out, but the presence of marine fossils in all regions of the world and at all
altitudes provides an unending source of doubt. The Earth has had to be made mobile,
with sliding land masses and sinkings and rising, to explain this fact, and with great
stretches of time to accomplish what several very general tides, directed by
exoterrestrial bodies, might in theory accomplish in short order.

Strictly speaking, floods are waters 'seeking their own level. ' 'Gravity flow' is
implied, whether a high cresting river is over-flowing a town's streets or waters from
all Sides are rushing down into a huge basin from which the Moon has been wrenched to
form an ocean. Phenomena often called 'floods' might be more carefully denominated
deluges, tides, and tsunamis. Remaining as floods would be barrier-bursting avalanching
floods, the aforesaid floods from the rising and sinking of land (elsewhere treated),
the varieties of rain-fed waterdownslides, the rising of waters below the ground from
higher waters of distant sources and. more obviously, the melting of ice.

Tides. on the other hand, are moving waters led by other moving forces. We are not
concerned here with ordinary lunar tides, of whose perplexities I. Michelson writes,
"We are to this day unable to decide whether high tides occur when the Moon is in the
meridian or whether the exact opposite, low tide, is more nearly correct." [1]  The
implications in this state of affairs, that electrical fields are operative, etc., are
not germane here.

The palaetiology of flooding is no less complex than the lunar tides. Possessed of
records of the Nile, Thames, Mississippi and other river flows, one can make
predictions of some value concerning their behavior in the near future. Given a case
where long-term records are not available, it is easy to make errors both about past
and future behavior. For instance, the Pecos River in Texas flooded severely in 1954.
older techniques of paleohydrology had assigned a frequency of recurrence probability
in the millions of years; newer techniques reduced the recurrence interval to about
2000 years  [2] . Such cases should be borne in mind when considering the probable
dates of prehistoric floods: are we viewing a 10 million-year effect or a 2000 year
one? Are we dealing with a rapid series or very gradual pulses?

More important to geomorphology are the tides of the great tsunamis and the tides of an
Earth that is losing its balance by some external intervention. On several occasions,
the Earth has had not only its waters diverted up and around, but also its very crust,
this too constituting a tidal movement of land.

A comet with a nucleus as large as the Earth would from 50,000 miles' distance pull up
ocean waters to a height of several miles at its focus. An exact calculation requires
many assumptions; approximations of such encounters have been figured by persons as
eminent as the mathematician Laplace. Hoerbiger and Bellamy more recently have
calculated the tides engendered by a capture of moon-sized satellites. If one is
pondering the escape of a Moon-sized mass from the Pacific Basin, a larger body, closer
approach, greater mass, and favorable electrical conditions (greater attraction) must
be conjectured. Atmosphere, water, the crustal rocks, and the upper mantle must
participate in the tidal action--indeed the tidal force would extend through the whole
globe, and the concept of tide becomes as strained as the globe itself under the
postulated circumstances.

Should such an event have occurred, and it does seem the most plausible method of
providing the Earth with its satellite, the tidal pull would have dragged the surface
waters everywhere towards the node of escape. Thereupon, as the intruding body moved
on, the tidal force would relax and the tidal waters would rush back in great rings
around the globe, reverberating for large but diminishing distances until they should
accommodate to the new complex of Earth motions and the tortured terrain.

However, our model here and in Chaos and Creation calls for a small portion of the
Earth's present waters having been available for the tides caused by lunar evacuation.
Less waters would yet have been available for the tides that would otherwise reach
miles into the sky. Nor, for that matter, were the mountains elevated to their present
heights, but rather were only then forming under catastrophic diastrophism.

The Saturnian or Noachian Flood some thousands of years later than the postulated lunar
tide also would have had major traits of a tidal disaster. Patten estimates aquatic
tides of 5,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level and extensive tides of magma beneath the
crust. This "breaking up of the fountains of the deep," he says, might account for
99.9% of the flood waters of the Great Flood of Noah, leaving only 0.1% as deluge
waters from the skies. His schedule of events follows Davidson, Stibbs and Kevan and is
useful  [3] . During forty days the rains fell. For another 110 days flood (tidal)
waters continued to rise. Next, 74 days were occupied in the "going and decreasing."
Not until another 40 days passed did Noah send out a raven. Then 21 days were taken to
send out three successive doves. A further 86 days occurred before the total experience
ended. Thus 371 days passed.

If the Bible is historically accurate, even only generally so, a tidal catastrophe is
depicted in which rains played a minor role. Even granting that all the overrunning of
the land and climbing of mountains was accomplished by tides, there remains in mind a
question respecting the origin of the oceanic waters. The continental slopes and
shelves were permanently inundated at some point in time, and this seems the most
reasonable time for the job. The quantity of water required and mode of deluging are
difficult to conceive. E. R. Milton and I finally settled upon introducing waters
sufficient to cover the slopes and shelves at this time, despite the enormous bulk
required to raise ocean levels by thousands of feet. We reasoned that, if all of this
water were not introduced here, we could not find legendary substantiation for it
elsewhere.

Having the waters descend was more difficult. As Kofahl has clearly shown, so heavy a
deluge in the short period of forty days might practically wipe out the surface of the
Earth  [4] . So, as already indicated, we relied upon a few bits of evidence to
consider and adopt the typhoon mechanism, having the waters streaming down in thick
columns dispersed around much of the globe. This would have the advantage of letting
much of the Earth go relatively unscathed. An average of one typhoon for every 100
square miles on the globe's surface would provide all the new water needed to cover the
continental slopes and shelves. Preceding and successive deluges would make less severe
the requirement. So would, of course, an increase in the 40 days and nights of rain
that the Bible allows for the Deluge. A reason for acknowledging the many days of
rising and falling tides is that, subsequent to exploding its waters upon the Earth, a
major portion of the fissioned Super-Saturn may have pursued a path paralleling the
Earth's for some time before overtaking and passing the Earth. This or another major
portion finally receded into a position beyond Jupiter, and probably even retained its
identity as the retired god, god of the underworld, the god placed in bonds by the new
king of the gods, Zeus-Jupiter-Marduk-Yahweb.

Early students of Siberian geography, working without an ice-age theory, observed from
geomorphology and fossil conglomerates that in the far north a gigantic tidal wave had
recently been propagated. North-south tides of this size strongly suggest an axial
imbalance of the Earth. Water in the bottom of a rowboat splashes towards someone
climbing up from the side, and splashes then back and forth, as he gets on or drops
off. The enormous fossil aggregations that, with a sand admixture, compose whole
offshore islands, testify also to tidal action proceeding northwards and then
withdrawing  [5] .

A change in the speed of rotation of the globe, for which an exoterrestrial large-body
encounter must be presumed, necessarily entails large tides. Some writers, including
ourselves, have surmised a shift from 360 to 365 days a year around the eighth century
B. C. Putting aside the more plausible cause of orbital recession, and laying the
burden of such a shift upon a speed-up of rotation, with shorter and more days, the sea
level would be theoretically raised by 118 m at the Equator and dropped by 227 m at the
poles. So calculates V. J. Slabinski, assuming a water-covered Earth and implying
instant time [5A]. The "historical belt" around the world in the Mediterranean, Near
East, India, China, and Mesoamerica would have noted "moderate" drops or rises of 35 m
or less.

If an axial tilt occurred at the same time, counterrailing and aggravating motions
would have occurred. Presumably, too, the "solid crust" would soon warp and flow to
erase much of the change. Some orbital change, as stated above, probably would alter
the calculations, too. The several factors at work highlight the problems of
conceptualizing and calculating the effects of encounters, but heavy tidal movements
must be assumed.

The legends of tides number in the hundreds, but they are usually hard to allocate to
periods of time, particularly in this incipient phase of the science of
quantavolutions. When the Biblical Book of Exodus says, "The waters were a wall unto
them on their right hand, and on their left," tidal behavior is suggested at the
critical point of the Venusian comet, about 1450 B. C. by Biblical-derived dating. And
the Psalms are chanting of the same event when "He made the waters to stand as a
heap..." And the Midrashim comment likewise, "The waters were piled up to a height of
sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations of the earth." (Though
here we are bothered by the height and wonder whether, with the tides, there was a
cyclonic tube reaching into the far heavens, the famous column of smoke by day and fire
by night, that guided the Hebrews in Exodus). Also, in China, if the time of Emperor
Yahou belongs anywhere, it belongs around the time of Exodus; and there the waters
"over-topped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." [6]

But when the Lapps recite how the angry god Jubmel raged against the wicked, and,
"foaming, dashing, rising sky-high came the sea-wall, crushing all things," we are not
sure that this is the time of Exodus or earlier or a combination of later and earlier
events. So it goes around the world. The tides are there: immense, overpowering
everything, wrecking the surface, launched by the gods, accompanied by fire and wind;
still each legend has to be examined carefully before assigning it to a given
catastrophe.

The Jubmel legend ends up as sophisticated language, as good a poetry as ever written
perhaps, but it is not the language of the time of the event. Even the Biblical
language is not the Exodus language. All the accounts are much later than the events.
So the quality of the language does not date the legend. I think one may accept,
however, that the tides were overwhelming at Exodus-time.

They were also present at other catastrophic intervals, and particularly in the
Lunarian Age. The Noachian-Saturnian Flood was a deluge and tidal flood. The Popul Vuh
of the Meso-Americans speaks of the god Hurracan as the driver of disastrous winds and
tides, but sounds as if it were reminiscing about events of the early primordial
period, our Lunarian episode.

The peculiar image of the walls of water parting gives pause, too. It is not only
Biblical but, for example, Inca; near Yucatan, twelve roads of escape were opened
through the sea to let pass certain peoples from the East. Can tides behave to create
passages? The answer must be "yes." Not only is there a typical shore withdrawal before
a tsunami; the tsunami can occur in a series. Further, the immense expressions of
energy in tides, as in winds and earthquake, sometimes act to spare the most
incongruous as well as precious things. Cows have been picked up by cyclones and set
down miles away without injury.

When Krakatoa exploded, the people of Batavia a few miles away braced for a gigantic
tidal wave that never came. Yet the wave wiped out other villages not far away and
raced across the oceans to frighten Indians and Africans. There are parts of the Aegean
islands that were scarcely mounted by the towering wall of water that set out with
hurricane speed from Thera-Santorini around 1000 B. C. Tides rip, cross, translate, and
in other ways convey their force. During the flood of Manu (Saturnian flood, probably
about 4000 B. C.) hurricanes and turbulence surrounded the boat of the Indian Noah.

The skies are full of motion and the mover's body is itself moving. The atmospheric is
raging with currents of wind and electricity. The Earth itself is moving. The celestial
actors in the scene are imposing or withdrawing forces. Hence, exoterrestrially induced
tides will not behave so simply as tides operate with the regular passage of the Moon
or of a single earthquake. They will draw startling geometric figures. No one would
have been more amazed than the Jews themselves, to have survived the double-walled
water passage into Sinai. They lost, according to legend, the vast majority of their
people to the waves that swallowed the Pharaoh's warriors. It is logical that few might
reach the "Promised Land."

The "great spark" that Velikovsky says struck the walls of water and caused them to
collapse upon the hapless pursued and pursuers is attributed by him to a discharge of
cosmic lightning between Earth and Cometary Venus, releasing the attraction between the
two bodies. It is well to note in this connection that an American Pima Indian myth
paints a similar scene  [7] .

     There were 3 warnings from an eagle of great flood.

     Suddenly a terrible roar paralysed men with fear. A green water-mountain rose over the
     plain. For a very short time it seemed to stand upright like a wall -then it was split
     by a vivid flash of lightning, and plunged forward like a ravenous beast. Only one man
     escaped, keeping afloat by clinging to a large lump of rubber or pitch.

The flood of Noah is an example of both deluge and tide. If it were purely a deluge,
how would the Ark end up on a tall mountain of Anatolia? (How would the boat of Manu,
the Hindu Noah, end up in the high Himalayas, for that matter?) Even the heaviest
deluge could not over-fill the ocean basins and cause the waters to ascend the highest
mountains. The waters would run off, carrying any barges downstream, or else the world
would be permanently drowned.

Alternatively, the mountains would have appeared in the course of the deluge (because
the continents were on the move) and afford anchorage and survival. Or else the deluge
was accompanied by tidal rises of the waters of the Earth owing to the electro-
gravitational attraction of close-in celestial bodies. Or else all three events
happened more or less simultaneously: the deluge fell; the lands moved and rose; and a
tidal force (the same that was causing the deluge to fall and the lands to move and
rise) drew the waters up to the heights of whatever mountains pre-existed or were
appearing.

The Bible contains many specifics, almost as if it were, as Patten says, an eye-witness
account. His is probably the best all-around analysis relating to the Flood. He
establishes it securely as a tidal flood, "a universal, global Flood, and that it was
caused by the interacting gravities of two astronomical bodies of planetary dimensions
-the Earth and the astral visitor. Since the Earth possesses two fields, one
gravitational and the other magnetic, there were two kinds of celestial conflicts with
the intruder." [8]

The question of "how few" were the survivors need not detain whether scores or
thousands -but they certainly were widely scattered about the world. The following
quotation from the ancient Nicolaus of Damascus seems reasonable  [9] :

     There is a great mountain in Armenia, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many
     who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark
     came on shore upon the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were for a great
     while observed: this might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews
     wrote...

The steady increasing and decreasing of waters is a tidal as well as a deluge
phenomenon. The ten-month duration assigned the flood seems more to indicate a long-
range tidal attraction of a celestial body; a flood, even if universal, would not take
so long to recede as the 74 explicit and 90 additional implicit days before the full
grounding of the Ark.

The archaeological history of the deluge has been controversial. It has been reviewed
by M. E. L. Mallowan and H. J. Lenzen, among others, and Robert Raikes has supplied a
critique of the theories  [10] . What is generally discoverable in the Middle East is a
seeming succession of water-destroyed levels in many excavations dated in the period
2600 to 3500 B. C. Raikes accepts these datings. I cannot, for I am compelled by many
other considerations in this book and others to assign the Biblical Flood to a time 500
to 1400 years earlier. That humans were civilized before the Flood is undoubted.
Whether there exist excavations from this period among the Middle East excavations has
to be determined by examining one site after another.

Judging by the way the tide advanced and retreated, there would not have been a total
dredging and destruction of already buried antediluvian sites but probably a complete
extirpation of diluvian settlements. There should therefore be a rupture and hiatus
between ante-diluvian and post-diluvian cultures. Probably the distinction ordinarily
made between Paleolithic and Neolithic ages directs itself unwittingly at this
catastrophic break.

Hence the Great Archaeological Debate over the Deluge of Noah has probably not been
treating of the Deluge at all, but has been trying to force lesser floods of later eras
upon the legendary accounts of the great Saturnian floodtime. Nor was Velikovsky of a
precise opinion in these matters. It is in the hiatuses between Paleolithic and
Neolithic that one must search for evidence of the Noachian-Saturnian-Gilgamish-Manu
world flood.

Tides may be aquatic, but readily transport denser bodies. The velocity of water is as
significant as its volume for carriage. Moving currents carry to the sixth power of
their velocity. If a stream of volume "X" were to move at 2 km/ h it would carry 64
times the load it could carry if it moved at 1 km/ h. Tidal transport is scarcely less
powerful.

Tides can stretch for great lengths and in all directions. Those who like to imagine
that the Exodus tide was limited ignore the evidence that the Red Sea was in motion.
Moreover, they overlook the fact that unidimensional tides are practically restricted
to hurricanes. A splash, a large-body pass-by, an explosion or a deluge summons a 360
degree tidal effect.

The speed of tides is swift unless remote bodies are their cause, as with the daily
tides of the Moon. The appearance of the tidal effect during the Exodus, long after the
first plague signaled the approaching comet, indicates a remote and approaching body.
The Navajo say that on the occasion of the world flood (which cannot be precisely
named) the animals had been running from east to west for days before they saw a semi-
circle of water moving, like a mountain range, towards them from the east. By the next
day the waters were upon them and only those who had reached the nearby mountain-tops
survived. The tidal flood was preceded by a bright light in the east, an indication
that an incandescent body was in the sky  [11] . Again the speed was relatively slow
compared with the tidal waves from hurricanes, explosions, earthquakes, and falling
bodies.

The amplitude of tidal waves will vary greatly. Historical explosions have raised waves
of 85 meters, as in the Krakatoan case. Earthquakes, as in Alaska, have done as much
too. The Thera volcanic tsunami of circa 1000 B. C., is thought to have raised higher
tidal waves than Krakatoa. As we have said, an exoterrestrial body may raise tides
kilometers high. Adding to the rain-flood from a deluge would be the flash-flood, the
destruction wrought by fast-draining rain waters. Ancient times witnessed flash floods
of great scope and intensity under deluge conditions. Heavy deluge waters filled the
rivers and ocean canyons of the world; they poured off the mountains in the Deluge of
Noah, and legendary heroes from Columbia, China and elsewhere earned their glory from
engineering the escape of the floods.

A non-tidal moving flood is caused by the bursting of barriers: a natural dam blocks
and collects water and then collapses. Some of the behavior and landscaping to be
expected of great tides and floods are exemplified in the Channeled Scablands (Wash.,
U. S. A). They are 15,000 square miles of effects of a barrier burst flood; they were
not made by a tide, not directly at least. Some 100,000 miles of this section of North
America are thickly covered with lava, in places more than 10,000 feet thick, which can
be ascribed to the immense volcanism incurred when the American continent traveled
westwards over the global fracture of the East Pacific area. This might have been
around 11,500 years ago, not the 10 to 30 million years conventionally given to the set
of events. The whole area was then covered with silt and loess.

The Scablands are a water sculpture of this lava surface. Expert opinion asserts that a
barrier of ice corked a mountain pass and caused a Glacial Lake Missoula to form. The
Lake was half the volume of present-day Lake Michigan, but pitched high above sea
level. The lake, it is thought, was of short duration and finally overflowed. The water
cut through the ice cork. (The immediate cause may have been Earth movements.) "Within
a very short time -perhaps no more than a day or two -the ice dam was destroyed and the
contents of the lake were released." [12]  So reads a tourist bulletin on the area. A
maximum speed of 45 miles per hour has been assigned to the resulting flood, and a
maximum rate of flow ten times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world today.
A luxuriant biosphere was wiped out, including large mammals, camels, bison, antelope,
and, to my thinking, humans. I add "humans" partly because a doll was found in clay
below 150 feet of lava, not far east of the same lava field, at Nampa, Idaho.

The flood plucked and transported huge blocks of basalt. It flayed the basalt of its
skin of loess. It dug channels in the basalt more than 200 feet in depth, and one of 8
miles in width. It made instant falls and plunge pools and eroded them backwards
quickly. When the waters slowed they began to dump debris, some 500 square miles of it,
to a depth of over 125 feet. The flood crest lasted a day or so, the main flood 2 to 3
weeks. Today, a satellite photo taken from 569 miles up shows the ramified and
interlacing channelways of the flood cutting through the loess into the basalt, and
then generally the unvegetated region around them.

The barrier-burst flood theory originated with Professor J. H. Bretz of the University
of Chicago and was not accepted for many years because it was catastrophic. [13]  In
fact, the theory can be pressed further in the direction of radical catastrophism.

First there are the reaffirmations of certain catastrophic doctrines. Energy kills
time. Buttes, ravines, and river channels can be carved from dense rock in days. A
biosphere can be destroyed down to bedrock in a single rush. Broad river channels are
sculpted immediately through deep soil and loose rock. Giant gravel ripples are laid
down; hills are fashioned; long steep slopes are fashioned Ó la minute. Heavy stones
are sown far and wide, the famous "eccentrics." Basalt is stripped to form monumental
columns.

A catastrophist still may not rest content with the analysis. Why, he can ask, is the
volcanic base of the region timed so long ago and why is the volcanism supposed to have
required intervals of thousands or millions of years to be laid down deeply? What water
did in a month could be equaled and surpassed by lava in a few years.

It is thought that glacial Lake Missoula formed 18 to 20 thousand years ago. Also it is
said that several smaller lakes had formed in the same way and been discharged in the
same manner. That is, the glacial ice lobe plugged the escape gap and pulled the plug
several times. The previous logic holds here too: ice can form slowly or fast; climates
change slowly or fast; plugs must be pulled in tempo with these fluctuations.

Moreover, plugs can be placed or pulled tectonically, perhaps without the use of ice;
the Earth shakes and gaps are blocked; another shake and the blockage bursts. More
generally, suppose that the lava-paving occurred in the first phase of "Lunaria"
(11,500 to 10,500 B. P.), after the Moon explosion, global fracture and the mountain-
building thrusts and folds from the north. The high canopies are still descending and
drenching the northern areas. The waters drain down the old raised glacial valleys and
new ravines. The tectonic scenario of Lake Missoula goes into effect.

The area through which the flood raged is tipped to the southwest and the waters of the
flood drained that way. The land is supposed to have tilted after the lava beds were
laid. The tilting actually might have been responsible for the uncorking of Lake
Missoula. Such extraordinary seismism would have been heavily felt in the Lake area.

Nor may the heavy loess coverings of the basalt give more than brief pause. Credited to
wind-blown erosion material, it is not clear where such heavy dust would have
originated or what climate brought such strong winds to transport it. Wherever it came
from should contain the "mother lode"; where is it? This deep frosting was laid down by
exoterrestrial sources, a cometary train, some would say. Others may claim that the
loess or silt is a deposit from the inutterably greater thrust and fold phase of the
ice cap avalanche and crustal movement, with contributions of ashes from biospheric and
volcanic fire. By the time the scablands were etched upon the surface, the fires had
been banked and the Earth was settling down.

The Scablands, we recall, are supposed to have registered several floods in succession
from the same general source, glacial waters. I collapsed these somewhat and placed the
Uranian-Lunarian deluge-avalanche-uplift period earlier. The Saturnian deluge and tidal
flood would have come later, and contributed to a huge rise of waters drawn by a
passing comet, which moved from place to place, drawn upwards and penetrating barriers
and then withdrew as the attractive force was withdrawn. I have not attempted to say
whether the Venusian episodes drowned and scoured the Scablands; when one thinks of the
shrinking times allotted to ice ages, Lake Lakontan, Niagara Falls, and a great many
"post-glacial" lakes, one should not be surprised if the Scablands Flood was a much
later event and that my guess is too old.

Across the world from the Scablands are Mesopotamia and India, whose peoples claim
great floods as part of their historical experiences. These floods -were they
originally from deluges or tides? Comparisons with the Scablands may be useful. In all
cases, the tradition claims several great floods. Just as the Greeks had at least three
floods, the Indians seem to have had their flood of Manu and the flood of the Gariga
region, both described in the Puranas.

Both were disastrous, and we need not doubt that, as with the Scablands, other floods
occurred from time to time. A similar series seems to have happened in Mesopotamia,
where for centuries controversy over the number and extent of floods has raged.

However a hydraulic engineer and scholar, Robert Raikes, has given close attention to
the literature of archaeology and to the topography of the reported events; Raikes
favors a non-catastrophic approach which, to his annoyance, has been deemed by many
others to be a catastrophic approach. So he is in somewhat the same seesawing position
as Bretz of Scablands fame.

Let us take up the Indian case first. Here, on the one side, are the true
catastrophists, religious or scientific, who say that the Indus civilization was
wrecked by the mid-second millennium Venusian events -mostly earth movements and tidal
floods. In full opposition, the uniformitarian extremist would be one scholar
(Fairservis) who deems the Indus culture to have declined because of economic
extravagance and poor ecological practices, until finally the Aryans of the northern
plateau could swoop down upon the remains  [14] .

The area under discussion is of great size. The influence and interconnections of the
Indus and probably pre-Indus culture were most extensive -at least from today's Iran on
the north to China on the east, to Arabia and Africa in the west and south to the
islands of the South Seas.

Raikes finds in the Indus River Valley evidence of repeated flooding and of attempts to
build against the flooding, until finally about 1500 the Valley was abandoned. He finds
reprehensible "a general tendency to ascribe the abandonment of prehistoric sites to
climate changes" without quantification of the degree of change beyond normal
variations; also quite wrong is "the over-simplification which is to ascribe
abandonments of sites to regional, or even world-wide periods of tectonic
catastrophes."  [15]

"Many archaeologists believe that at Mohenjodaro an extreme flood event or a series of
them account for the great depth of silt/ clay which has buried 11 or 12 meters depth
of occupation levels under the present flood plain." Raikes traces the cause of
flooding to "a combination of tectonically caused damming of a part of the Indus south
of Mohenjodaro coupled with the division of Indus flows between the Nara channel and
that of the Indus proper." Behind the tectonism may have been a rising seacoast,
together with "extensive mud extrusions (including mud volcanoes) still active..."

"Both the flood deposits and the evidence of rebuilding occur at a great many different
levels." Thought Raikes, perhaps the people built, were flooded, rebuilt, and so on,
always keeping just above the new water levels. But why did the act not go on
indefinitely, so that when the river finally settled itself the people might be still
around and flourishing? They either abandoned the culture or they were destroyed. One
can imagine that silt (loess, clay) can be laid down by comet trains. Also from far off
multiple volcanism and cyclones. Or the tectonism, that Raikes tries to contain, was
far more extensive. The seacoast and mountains were rising rapidly. Dams were
tectonically built and burst as at the Scablands. The elapsed time from damming to
filling to flood "would have been very short," in Raikes own words.

Raikes suggests similar events at Chanhu-daro. He refers to "other uplift episodes," in
the same article. And in another to "a general, if less marked," raising of the Indus
flood-plain to the south, at Sehwan. He believes that "there has been no climatic trend
toward either wetter or dryer conditions since Harappan times," so again turns to a
stress upon tectonism  [16] .

Many sites, particularly in the Baluchistan region, north of Mohenjodaro, show signs of
a destruction by burning. Harappen centers were not flooded. Abandonment was sudden in
these and other places after which they stood empty for centuries. Yet "one fails to
see any evidence of the hill raiders who supposedly brought Harappa to its knees."

B. B. Lal turned his attention to the phenomenon of a wide scattering of copper pieces
and Ocher Color Ware in the present Delhi area of India. They are found over a huge
area of 60,000 km 2  [17] . At Bahabrabad, for example, the pottery and copper objects
had been strewn in a level six meters below ground, and had been covered by sand,
pebbles and earth. The hypothesis was a veritable "deluge." Tectonism is blamed, with
or without a deluge, possibly through the mud dam mechanism or river diversion.

The Indian flood area, whether once devastated or several times over, includes the
famous fossil beds of the Siwalik hills. These are foothills of the Himalayas, north of
Delhi. They are crammed with hordes of specimens of a great many species. Many of them
appear for the first time in these beds and are extinguished in them, so far as
paleontologists know.

In the Geology of India, D. N. Wadia writes  [18] , "This sudden bursting on the stage
of such a varied population of herbivores, carnivores, rodents and of primates, the
highest order of mammals, must be regarded as a most remarkable instance of rapid
evolution of species." Tortoises of over six meters, two dozen species of elephant,
pigs, oxen, and apes are scattered about. There are signs of earthquake, folding of the
land, perhaps folding and deep burial of animals.

Similar deposits are found 1300 miles away in Burma, cut away to view in the valley of
the Irawaddy River. Two great zones of fossils are separated by 4000 feet of sand.
Petrified trees pervade the fossils in the thousands. Writes Velikovsky: "Animals met
death and extinction by the elementary forces of nature, which also uprooted forests
and from Kashmir to Indo-China threw sand over species and genera in mountains
thousands of feet high." [19]

Other instances may be added to extend the area involved in disaster much further,
probably to the limits of proto-Indian civilization, and indeed throughout the world.
The dates are hinging upon 1500 B. C. in many instances. Therefore, it would seem
reasonable to place Raikes' work on the revolutionary shelf; try as he may to limit it,
his evidence and own conjectures press in the direction of general catastrophe.

What emerges from Raikes' complex analysis is that in the Old and Middle Bronze Age -
and particularly at the age-break between Middle and Late Bronze -there is proof of
various terrific floods to which all known settlements succumbed. Raikes inclines,
after considering six possibilities, towards a land subsidance on a large scale
complementing a land rise to the east.

He does not mention the backup of river waters that would occur from Thira-type
tsunamis driving north through the Persian Gulf, although the evidence allows it. Such
tides could come from a Typhonic impact explosion, a poseidonian earthquake, or a
large-body encounter producing an axial tilt or interrupted rotation of the globe. (One
notes the level of ashes and char beneath the flood level of Shurrupak. It does not
appear to have been an incendiary blaze.) He does not consider canopy water-drops, but
insists upon retrojecting uniformly precipitation rates from modern times. Although the
evidence of the period which he is examining is disordered and prejudiced already, yet
the evidence that he must confront shows a flooding that is utterly devastating, and
unexampled in recent times. But still, he draws back from catastrophic conclusions,
loath to abandon the dogma that catastrophe could not have happened, and certainly not
an exoterrestrial one.

Since large upthrusts of the Himalayan mountains are now being dated to post-glacial
times  [20] , since even mountains much higher than the Siwalik foothills contain "old"
marine fossil beds, since the Siwalik-type beds are so young even when conventionally
dated, since evidences occur of huge waves of translation moving from south to north in
India and leaving great moraines (including the Siwalik-type hills), since neolithic
stones are found in the loess of the Himalayas and since great human cultures were
flooded over and probably deluged as well, one is entitled to the quantavolutionary
hypothesis: a series of abrupt, intensive, wide-scale changes overwhelmed the Indian
subcontinent.

Frantic proliferation and extinction of species occurred, while India broke from Africa
and crashed into Asia, while tides moved over the land, ramming, ripping, rising, and
drowning, while the land raised up in a great arc into Asia, while hominids, then
humans, entered and built cultures that were then destroyed and recreated. It may be
that from this part of the world will come the easiest and fullest proofs of
revolutionary primevalogy, of a succession of geological and cultural ages coinciding
with the successive disruptions of what had been Solaria Binaria.

Dwarfing the Scablands and Indus barrier floods was the Gobi Sea flood, which may have
been connected with the complex Noachian Flood. Thomas Huxley wrote the first scenario
of the event. Bellamy refurbished the story in this century  [21] . The Gobi desert,
which the Chinese call "the Sea of Sand," was once a great body of water. Numerous
settlements lined its shores. Then suddenly it was emptied in a huge barrier-type
flood. Its cultures disappeared along with a great many other settlements along the
line of the flood. The western barrier of the Gobi Sea broke between Tian Shan and
Altai mountains, and rushed through where today remain the waters of Telli-nor, Ebi-
nor, Ala-kul, Sasyk-kul and Lake Balkhash, much of it now saline and disappearing. The
great flood spread out into a "Sea of Turkestan" and then drained down into the
depression of the Aral and Caspian Seas.

It then poured out between the Ural mountains and the mountains of northern Iran,
descended west through the Manych Depression into the Valley of the Don, the Sea of
Azov, and the Black Sea. The areas of today's Romania and Bulgaria were temporarily
part of a greater Black Sea. Soon it overflowed at the straits of the Bosphorus and
pushed through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean region. The Aegean and Eastern
Mediterranean lands were flooded.

Next the Adriatic River, possibly the legendary River of Eridanus, and nowadays the
truncated Po River, was turned into an Adriatic Sea. The Ionian Sea overflowed and the
land bridges between Italy and Africa were covered with water. The shelves of the
region of Tyrrhenia were submerged, the survivors driven to the high places of the
Italian peninsula and islands, and contact was ultimately made with Gibraltar.

The Sahara basin may have been filled with water upon this occasion, to have become the
ancient sea of Triton. It was this Tritonian Sea that figured in the mythical birth of
Goddess Pallas Athena (the planet Venus) and I think that it was around 3500 B. P.,
therefore, when the Tritonian Sea broke out and threw itself into the Atlantic Basin.
Ancient Saharan ruins and the art of the Ahaggar mountain caves amply testify to the
ancient cultures there between 4000-1500 B. C.

The elapsed time for the 4000-mile journey from China may have been months or years.
The drainage of the several temporary basins established en route from East Asia to the
Atlantic Ocean occupied centuries. Barrier-burst floods and tides must have been
numerous, we conclude, because of the mountain-building, severe faulting, deluging, and
other movements and outbursts that were occurring. Both actions would have been quite
unexpected and erratic. They would have devastated the biosphere. Evidence of both
effects comes sometimes from jumbled deposits of animal bones and wood. These locations
consist of different species, that were killed suddenly (not by men), by the hundreds
or thousands, and were transported to the location, by tides of water but in some cases
also by hurricane and cyclonic action. In the Yukon Valley of Alaska, bulldozers
scraping for gold have removed bones by the ton and drills have picked up bones
hundreds of meters below ground. Such evidence exists around the world, and much more
will be said on the subject in Chapter 26.

The number of fossil deposits will probably be extended to many hundreds of cases in
the future. Still, most deposits would have been destroyed at the moment of
catastrophe. Fires would have burned others. Impenetrable ice covers many bone piles. A
succession of revolutionary actions would have blown to bits, dissipated, ground up,
converted to fuels, washed into the sea, and deeply buried many others. The scenes at
bone deposits are impressive: they are worldwide; they are found at low and high
altitudes. Strange bedmates are discovered: ostriches and foxes; mammoths and lions;
peacocks and horses; elephants and sharks.

Anthropologist Frank Hibben surveyed the bone mucks of Alaska and heard of similar
deposits in nearby Siberia. The Arctic Ocean is in fact rimmed by the bones of many
millions of animals. Hibben weighed the possibilities: hunters' overkill, ice flows,
natural death, volcanic ash burials (ashes are abundant in the muck), volcanic gases?
The mystery seemed to him unsolvable. He wrote of it in 1947; he revised his work in
1967 [22] . There is no indication that he had heard meanwhile about Velikovsky,
Hapgood, Patten, or Cook who were offering solutions to the mystery in terms of
Cuvier's century-old expression -"revolutions of the globe." Derek Ager, with a mind
and eye for the catastrophic occurrence, remarks that "tsunami, ' or 'tidal waves' as
they were for long misnamed, have an immense effect on shorelines, both in erosion and
in the shifting of great quantities of sediment." [23]  But what parcel of land in the
world has never experienced a tsunami?

"It is generally accepted that tsunamis are usually triggered by earthquakes or violent
volcanic explosions. It is also possible that they can be produced by the slumping of
large masses of sediment in water..." Or by meteoroid splashes, we might add, or
hurricanes and cyclones. "Though infrequent, there are certainly enough of them for
geological purposes. From historical records it can be deduced that there have been
more than two hundred notable tsunamis in the last two thousand years; this would allow
us more than 100,000 in a million years."

Then move the continents a little here and there, raise and lower shorelines, change
climates a few times, and add ten, fifty, a hundred million years. We have millions of
great tsunamis to work with. Obviously the whole surface of the Earth will have been
worked over a number of times by ordinary, uniformitarian waves. Thereupon add all the
other high-energy forms: deluges, exoterrestrial impacts, volcanism, and so on: it is a
wonder that the crust of the Earth is not a homogenous finely ground mixture of all
past life and surfacing rocks. Now add great catastrophes elaborated in this book and
the homogenous mixture should be guaranteed.

That is, stratigraphy is hardly understandable by following uniformitarian principles,
if we acknowledge what scientists have all along been discovering, but more recently
have become acutely aware of. Even if, as Ager writes, "the changes do not take place
gradually but as sporadic bursts, as a series of minor catastrophes," the strata of the
Earth do not make sense.

Those who believe in major catastrophes interrupting huge serene tracts of time may be
wrong, because they must add to the effects of the great disasters the effects of a
multitude of minor ones called for during great stretches of "peaceful" time. The
result would be a homogenized crust. The effects of the forces that have operated are
such as to suggest for the Earth a short and recently catastrophic history. The Earth's
surface still retains its forms and fossils because its tortures have been clustered
and have occurred following a short total Earth history.






{S : Notes (Chapter Fourteen: Floods and Tides)}
Notes (Chapter Fourteen: Floods and Tides) 

1. PensÚe (1974), 71.

2. 215 Science (Jan. 22), 4531.

3. Op. cit., 65, 61.

4. R. E. Kofahl, "Could the Flood Waters Have Come from a Canopy or Extraterrestrial
Source?" 13 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (March, 1977), 202-6.

5. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 7-9, 38-9.

5A. C. L. Ellenberger, ltr., VIII Kronos (1982), 94-5.

6. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 70-6.

7. Bellamy, M. M. M., op. cit., 257.

8. Op. cit.

9. Book 96 (lost) quoted by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, by Whiston, and by
Patten, op. cit., 61.

10. R. L. Raikes, Unpubl. paper, "Ecological Role of Extreme but Predictable Climate
Events on Prehistory with some examples, for comparison, of Unpredictable Events and
Their Consequences;" "The Physical Evidence of Noah's Flood," 28 I Rag part I, 52-63.

12. The Channelled Scablands of Eastern Washington (U. S. Govt. Printing Office, Wash.
D. C., 1974).

13. J. H. Bretz, "The Lake Missoula Floods and the Channelled Scabland," 77 J. Geol..
(1969), 503-43. The original work was published in 1923.

14. See Gil. Possehl, "The Mohenjo-daro Flood," 69 Am. Anthrop. I (1967), 32-40,
opposing views such as Raikes, 66 Amer. Anthrop. (1964), 284-9 and see below, fn 16.

15. Op. cit., fn 10 (unpubl. paper).

16. " The Mohenjo-Daro Floods," 39 Antiquity (1965), 196-203, 203.

17. " A Deluge? Which Deluge?" 70 Amer. Anthrop. 5( 1968), 857-63.

18. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, 79.

19. Ibid., 21.

20. Ibid., 74-8.

21. Bellamy, M. M. M., op. cit., 308-16.

22. The Lost Americans (NY: Crowell, 1968).

23. Op. cit., 45.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH: }
{P PART III: }
{Q HYDROLOGY: }
{C Chapter 15}
{T Ice Fields of the Earth}
{S - }


THE LATELY TORTURED EARTH:
Part III: Hydrology

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ICE FIELDS OF THE EARTH

The earliest humans had to contend with growing ice caps and glacial fields, or at least
some force that created their effects. Did the Great Ice Ages really happen? For a
century the confident answer of science has been "yes." The idea is fetching; so much
ice surrounds the north and south poles now that it seems reasonable that once there was
even more, and probably once there was less, or none at all. At peak time, an estimated
30% of the Earth's land surface was covered by ice, three times the area occupied by ice
today; this was as late as 11,000 years ago, or so it is believed.

When Emiliani discovered evidence that the Gulf of Mexico was for a time freshwater, he
posited a rapid end to the Ice Ages and a flooding which may have drowned the mythical
Atlantis culture, since the time (ca. 11,600 B. P.) conforms to Plato's date of the
disaster. The surmise engendered sharp criticisms, allowing even historians to get into
the act  [1] .

It seems that everyone believes that the ice cameth and each has an individual scenario,
which is not complete unless it contains quotas of confusion and contradictions. If one
wishes to spend a lifetime solving a puzzle while wrapped in an enigma, a career in
paleoglaciology is recommended. One can scarcely blame an amateur from enjoying and even
tolerating Donnelly's old idea that the ice ages never existed. Next best, one can call
down the ice (or most of it) from outer space, as we do here. And so does Patten. Third
best would be the Milankovich theory which depends upon cosmic perturbations in Earth-
Sun transactions, but lets Earth manufacture the ice. John and K. P. Imbrie have updated
and defended the theory, which, highly complicated in itself, is also confounded by the
uncertainties of paleoclimatic studies  [2] .

Hard evidence that a set of ice ages occurred falls into several categories, as follows:

Certain northern lands near the present ice are rising, as if a large load had been
lifted from them. They seem to form arcs with Baffin Bay as an old geographical pole and
center of an ice cap. (The western rising arc is separated from the eastern arc, as if
they had been pulled apart.) An issue occurs if one asserts that the rising would ensue
from a shifting of the Earth's axis and North Pole, regardless of the presence of ice.

Far to the South of the present Arctic ice, and far to the north of the present
Antarctic ice, the rocks and soils show peculiar qualities. Huge areas of rock are
scoured and scratched as if some gigantic force has scraped over them, now advancing and
then again retreating. Immense fields of stones (or drift) have been pushed and shoved
into place, as if by moving ice. An issue occurs if one asserts that tides and
exoterrestrial stone fall-outs had produced the fields.

Glaciers, formed on mountaintops around the world, take their origin usually in a U-
shaped nook of a mountain. Their ice forms and slowly slides downwards through valleys,
carrying drift and ending in melting waters. They abrade and pluck the drift as they go
along. They are broad, and they terminate in broad curls, from which streams form and
run off. Many "extinct" glacier forms exist, indicating that once there may have been
much more cold and ice. That is, unless these "fossil" glaciers were pointed towards the
sun in a global Earth tilt, and melted, or once were a part of a large crustal lateral
avalanche that thrust whole areas away from the polar regions. Or unless exoterrestrial
ice were dumped upon higher places and melted away from lower places.

Heat is required in large amounts to raise water for the snow falls over glaciers as
well as polar regions. Some say the heat required would be too great for the biosphere
to tolerate unless the snow gathered by very slow increments; there is evidence that
"glacial ages" came and went rapidly. Further flora and fauna of the glacial age seas
are arctic types; then where were the sufficient warm seas whose waters would evaporate
and stream polewards as clouds? If cold water and snow fell from high cloud canopies, it
could persist at higher altitudes and latitudes and accumulate and flow.

In many settings, such as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, large plains end on the downslope
with a number of ponds and layer upon layer of sands, gravel, and clay. In it are
scratched stones and finely ground glacial flour. It seems that an ice sheet had once
moved downwards on all sides from a northerly direction, acting like a glacier on a
grand scale.

Humps, low ridges, occasional erratics (rocks foreign to where they are found), and
kettle pools (some dry) are scattered along the hypothetical front of the glacial sheet
and might well have been produced by the forward march and retreat of the flood of ice.

Futhermore, an ice sheet that moved down into North America all across the continent
blocked all northward flowing rivers; it created many lakes, some extinct like Lake
Agassiz, others extant like the Great Lakes. The ice sheet forced a southward fanning
out of many rivers, away from the ice front, to carry the melt waters. Once again, much,
if not all, of the work assigned to ice could have been performed by winds, tides,
exoterrestrial fall-outs of pebbles, dust and ice, extreme precipitation, and axial
tilts of the globe.

I have not mentioned climatic changes: a very cold climate, as evidenced by the kinds of
fossil flora and fauna discovered in old beds, indicates that a great deal of ice might
have been nearby. Nor have I ventured to say when the ice ages happened and how many of
them there might have been.

Full justice cannot be done here to the case for the ice ages. The conventional
literature does so. But because some of the ice age reasoning falls victim readily to
catastrophic claims, it may be time to advance the cause of quantavolution. Here three
different positions are held: one is that the Ice Ages did not occur. The second says
that they did exist but were sudden events, beginning and ending in disaster. A third
admits their slow development but claims that they ended in catastrophe.

Ignatius Donnelly is the best older critic of the very idea of ice ages. (Douglas Cox
has recently presented strong persistent objections to the reality of the ice ages.) [3]
In Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, Donnelly asserts first of all that there is no
evidence of the ice ages in the cold Siberian wastelands and parts of Alaska that
stretch up to the present Arctic ice. This is true enough. But, most catastrophists
believe that a sudden tilt of the Earth occurred in the last ice age and hence these
areas had not been so cold before then.

However, Donnelly proceeds. He argues that the debris of the called ice age -the pebble
fields, erratic stones, and vast clay and till deposits -are not caused by the movements
of ice at all. Rather they are the stuff of which the long tail of a comet is in part
composed and it was a comet that devastated the earth in the early memory of mankind.

Little was known of comets and comet tails in his days. Until the past few years,
scientists generally doubted that such substantial material was being transported around
the heavens. Indeed, Velikovsky came in for much ridicule when he wrote in the nineteen
fifties, in much greater detail and with stronger evidence, of the substantiality of
comets. (He did not adopt Donnelly's anti-theory of the ice ages, however.)

Today the immense material potentiality of comets is scarcely doubted. Ice and gases,
and otherwise terrestrial minerals found in meteoroids, are now accorded comets. Yet
Donnelly's theory has not been seriously criticized; we forget that geology once got
along without the ice ages, and that the inventor of the ice age theory, Louis Agassiz,
was a catastrophist. The immense drift and till deposits could have come from
exoterrestrial sources.

Although the analogies between glacial behavior and ice sheet behavior are numerous and
strong, it is possible that the ice did not exist and that the dead glacial moraines are
merely evidences of a cold climatic episode or episodes, not direct proof that they were
related to a larger ice age sheet that blanketed millions of square miles to a depth of
a kilometer and more.

Moreover, since the poles are flattened a bit from the spin of the Earth, would not the
old polar areas of a perhaps faster spinning Earth be still relaxing into a spherical
form? This would give a false impression of heavy ice caps having been removed. Further
the weight of the Wisconsin ice cap would have been 3.10 23 grams and 10 33 ergs of heat
would have been required to melt it. The melting would have taken at least 30,000 years,
yet there is near to a consensus even among uniformitarian geologists that the ice cap
disappeared rapidly, catastrophically. And the arctic land rising, mentioned earlier,
appears to have begun only 10,000 years ago.

Why I do not accept Donnelly's theory despite its brilliance has to do with the
correlative evidence going far off the straightforward discussion of ice ages. Some of
the reasoning emerges when the theory of Melvin Cook is explained. Cook writing in the
nineteen sixties, accepts the evidence for huge ice caps at both poles. Further he seeks
no exoterrestrial power. His theory is nonetheless the most perfect of catastrophic
models yet advanced. Ignoring the beginnings of the ice ages, but pursuing their end,
his story commences with the great ice caps.

These, he says, by their enormous and accumulating weight, bore down upon the crust so
heavily as finally to cause a rupture of the rim of the crater. The ice caps avalanched.
They scraped the earth as they moved. They acted as gigantic bulldozers that caused
mountain ranges to be thrust forward and buckled and folded upwards. Giant floods from
the rapid melts swept the earth.

The globe fractured and caused the continents to spread apart rapidly. The Atlantic
Ocean and the Arctic Ocean were opened up. In the end the surface of the earth was
greatly changed. A great many land and life forms, together with cultural centers, were
destroyed in the process. As the huge ice blocks descended, they turned over the
biosphere and folded it to create coal and oil deposits in a geological "instant."
Waters that were buried deeply are still rising under pressure. Yet the end came
quickly, occupying a few years, not millions of years.

The legends are definite but seemingly too rich. The northern peoples talk of terrible
ice falls and winters, far beyond historical experience, and perhaps long before history
as we gauge it. In Old Norse, the language of the Edda epics, snow is called eitr-ornir,
"white pus of the dragon." Martin Sieff writes: "Saturn is the solar system's 'treasury
of snow'... The Greeks associated the planet Saturn (Kronos) with snow and hail, which
were thought to be the planet-god's weapons; Nonnos told of the "shining victory of Zeus
at war and the hailstorm-snowstorm conflict of Kronos..." [4]

Could the ice have fallen from the skies? Examination of glaciers shows that there is a
gradation of consistency, from fresh fallen snow to dense ice, the dense ice being
older. No question but that, if snows fell heavily they would promptly turn into ice.
Further, the greater the falls, the swifter the glaciers would move and the longer and
greater their moraines.

Moreover, why should the ice ages occur in extremely distant as well as recent ages; how
do they come and go in stages, and concentrate most recently in a million years of the
recent Pleistocene epoch (which is the typical allotted time)? The Sun is invoked.
Whereas, on the one hand, the Sun is credited with great stability, on the other hand it
is presumed to have stoked its furnaces from time to time, causing the ice to form. But
back again. If the Sun cools, the equator cools; if the equator cools, waters evaporate
more slowly; there is less to be carried north and to drop in the form of snow.

Continental drift has been argued as the cause of ice ages: "The ultimate cause of
glaciation is thus seen to be movement of continents into appropriate latitudes... And
much of the fossil evidence upon which the time-honored concept of Tertiary 'cooling'
has been founded could be nothing more than a reflection of drifting of what are now the
northern-hemisphere land masses and ocean floors toward the pole and hence into cooler
climes." [5] Another theory holds that a huge number of tropical volcanos erupted at
once, which threw vast amounts of water into the air, which, because the upper
atmosphere was darkened, caused less sunlight to bombard and warm the Earth, which
finally caused the vapors to fall at the poles in the form of snow and ice  [6] . Also,
Hibbin attests to many burials of pleistocene animals in ashes that fell after the ice
ages  [7] . It should be borne in mind, however, that extensive simultaneous volcanism,
as well as the ice ages, points to exoterrestrial forces impinging on Earth.

The solution must be catastrophic, it appears, but must take a special form, which
elsewhere we have called Solaria Binaria. If it is consolation to the reader,
explanations of "the ice ages" have generally been bizarre and fantastic. Nothing less
may be expected of our theory here, unless, of course, the reader is conversant ahead of
time with our work. It is not unreasonable, we argue, to postulate a primordial age, as
recent as 14,000 years ago, when no ice caps existed. The Earth would have been
generally comfortable. It would be also enveloped in the gaseous atmosphere of the
binary magnetic tube. This Uranian heaven blocked direct sunlight, but afforded an
equable climate to the Earth.

The binary tube atmosphere would itself have been maintained by the same electrical and
inertial forces that kept the Earth in rotation and orbit. Then the solar system as a
whole was disturbed by the failure of one of its parts. The part that failed was the
counter-solar or Super-Uranian node of the binary solar system. When the electrical
current between the Sun and Super-Uranus diminished, the magnetic field around the
current diminished. All the bodies that circled around the current ceased orbiting
around the axis between Super-Uranus and the Sun and descended radially to the plane of
the ecliptic. They began to find new individual orbital paths around the Sun. They moved
out towards larger orbits.

The atmosphere, a remnant, specially attached to the Earth, of the old plenum
atmosphere, drew more closely about the Earth. "Heaven came down to embrace Earth," to
paraphrase the Greek myth. The clouds were pierced by material erupted from the
disintegrating Super-Uranus and blown down the magnetic tube between the binary
partners. Some of it precipitated upon the surface of the Earth. The Earth could not
melt much of the ice, most of which fell at the electrically least-guarded poles. The
now direct sunlight helped the friction of the fall to vaporize and precipitate some of
the ice as rain. Flooding began at the edges of the forming ice caps. The time
postulated for these events began about 14,000 years ago.

Within a few centuries the threat to life on Earth became extreme. Great ice blocks
covered the extremities and local regions of the globe and threatened ultimately to make
contact, erasing practically all life.. At the same time flooding spread throughout the
world.

If one-third of the globe was covered by ice at the time of maximum advance, according
to conventional theory, ice was piled three miles deep at the poles; there was twelve
million cubic miles of ice. For a hundred years catastrophists and disbelievers in the
ice ages have pointed out that an incredible power (heat and winds) was required to
evaporate equatorial water, lift it, and transport it to the polar areas. The world
would have burned up at the equator while freezing deeply at the poles. The idea
supplies its own contradiction; yet it is the accepted theory, that molecule by molecule
the water evaporated, drop by drop it condensed in vapor clouds, ton by ton it fell -
all off and on for a million years and more. Then the mechanism was turned off, rather
suddenly; much of the ice melted and the oceans rose by several hundred feet several
thousand years ago.

Direct exoterrestrial deposition of snow to form the caps follows from the heat
requirements to evaporate, lift, transport and condense as snow the contents of the ice
caps. The surface heat requirements might have stressed the biosphere life tolerances.
Further, in order to raise the required mass of water, the clouds transporting water
from tropical to arctic regions would become so dense that heat from the Sun of today
would cease to penetrate to the surface with sufficient energy to continue the lifting
task. The latent heat of aqueous vapor at the tropics is 1000  F. A pound of water
vaporized at the Equator has absorbed 1000 times the quantity of heat that would raise a
pound of water in temperature by one degree Fahrenheit.

An exoterrestrial catastrophic solution is called for, from beginning to end. The time
to erupt the Moon arrived with a passing great fragment of Super-Uranus. The Earth's
crust burst. Lava had to flow in endless streams. Great volumes of sky-borne ice must
have fallen and participated in the bursting mechanics. Cook has figured the needed
forces, but we should add an initial impetus from the eruption and blow-off of the
Pacific crust. A fracture shot to the old north pole and down the Atlantic, thence
around the world. The ice avalanched. It fed the boiling sea bottoms to help them settle
and expand. Much was then evaporated and precipitated again by the conventional method,
but under catastrophic conditions. Finally the new world surface shaped up and
stabilized. The precipitous curve of disaster dropped exponentially to the slight level
of activity where it could be mistaken for a linear uniformitarianism.

It was thus that the worst and best accident happened. The earth cleaved, lost most of
its continental crust, and the ocean basins began to form. This greatest of all
catastrophes removed the ice and permitted life to survive; it became the greatest of
all blessings. A date of 11,500 B. P. may be ascribed to the event.

The ice caps, as Cook has so well calculated the scene, collapsed and avalanched upon
all sides, moving into the great chasms of boiling lava directly or through floods that
rushed over the land and plunged down into the new oceanic chasms, carrying debris to
form slopes. Hundreds of deep canyons were grooved into the land and slopes around the
world, where they remain today, "fossils" from the time of ice age collapse and of the
filling of the ocean basins. The ice caves were formed -solid ice from the ice ages
sandwiche