Just go to Wiki -There is nothing mysterious about the Grand Canyon . There is a tremendous amount of data on its rocks and geological history.There is no evidence at all of electrical scarring. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon#Geology
norpag
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
Starbiter you make a completely unsupported assertion about what is taught in geology classes today.Give at least one specific example . What precisely is wrong with what is taught re Dolomite ,Ultra high pressure metamorphism and "missing" volcanoes whatever that is supposed to mean. I doubt that you have ever taken a class on these topics which are in any event irrelevant to Glaciation, Canyons and electrical scarring.
Sparky
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
norpag,
There is no evidence at all of electrical scarring.
Are 'you suggesting that you have "credentials" which would support such a statement? What exactly were you taught about electrical scarring evidence? Is there a specific course on electrical scarring or is that included within another course.? What lab experiments, examining electrical effects , were you a party to?
Otherwise, that is a completely unsupported statement.
norpag
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
In science, unlike in religion, credentials and authority don't mean much- only empirical data and observation count See the links to fulgarites earlier on this thread. If the Grand Canyon was formed by electrical scarring there would be fulgarite type rocks on a Grand scale. No such rocks have been observed.
starbiter
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
norpag wrote: Starbiter you make a completely unsupported assertion about what is taught in geology classes today.Give at least one specific example . What precisely is wrong with what is taught re Dolomite ,Ultra high pressure metamorphism and "missing" volcanoes whatever that is supposed to mean. I doubt that you have ever taken a class on these topics which are in any event irrelevant to Glaciation, Canyons and electrical scarring.
Thanks for responding norpag. The topics i mentioned might be better discussed on the dune thread. I don't want to disrupt this discussion.
I'll begin the discussion over there. Let's start with dolomite. From your statement above You see no problems with what is taught about dolomite by mainstream geology. I do. I have no formal training in geology. I never paid for a class. I did hang out with a field class. I had better access to the professors than the real students. You should be able to roll right over me with your degrees.
michael
Sparky
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
norpag wrote: In science, unlike in religion, credentials and authority don't mean much- only empirical data and observation count
Well, that is the way it is suppose to work.....but...
See the links to fulgarites earlier on this thread. If the Grand Canyon was formed by electrical scarring there would be fulgarite type rocks on a Grand scale. No such rocks have been observed.
So, Fulgurites, from your empirical data and observational experience, would be the only electrical scarring that would be observed, and in the absence of such, there would be no reason to consider electrical activity in the formation of Earth's features?
webolife
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
Hey I sympathesize with norpag's inability to shift Earth Science paradigms — there simply is no tolerance in academia for EDM or other interplanetary plasma discharging such as would be the culprit behind starbiter's super-aurorae. My own degree in Earth Science was devoid of any such consideration; nevertheless, although my "speciality" area of rapid crustal deformation and megaflooding is a huge departure from the cautious "occasional catastrophe" thinking of the standard geologists, I still acknowledge many of the basic processes taught in standard geology, albeit on a grander and faster scale. To norpag, I owe my justification of the catastrophic view to the realization that absolute dating methodologies are irretrievably steeped in assumption rather than actual observation, and that relative dating assumptions [eg. superposition] have been overthrown by actual observations in stratigraphy, such as those provided by Guy Berthault's flume experiments, along with my own direct observations of varves in progress at Lake Kachess and other locations in Washington. I am very cautious in my reception and analysis of EU arguments of EDM Earth history, and moreso of the plasma connections attributed to mythology, Saturn theory, etc. a la Velikovsky, Cardona, Scott, et al. But I am here to learn, to pose questions, to challenge others [but mainly myself], and to above all maintain a "growth" mentality.
Sparky
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
webo-, i do believe we have been treated to a "drive by" ejecation..
A Phd's conclusion, without looking at all arguments and data available, is a logical fallacy, "A hasty conclusion". Pretty much sums up standard cosmology too.
norpag wrote: Starbiter you make a completely unsupported assertion about what is taught in geology classes today.Give at least one specific example . What precisely is wrong with what is taught re Dolomite ,Ultra high pressure metamorphism and "missing" volcanoes whatever that is supposed to mean. I doubt that you have ever taken a class on these topics which are in any event irrelevant to Glaciation, Canyons and electrical scarring.
Hello Dr norpag: I gave You the one specific example You requested, on the dune thread.
I am glad that you have posted these topics. The catastrophic history of the earth, and of life upon it, is a very important topics for all scientists, students, and teachers & professors. Thunderbolts is the primary forum online for introducing our electromagnetic Universe, but, IMHO is too primarily focused on the sky, no pun intended. That is, the movements and activities of the planets and other bodies of our solar system, were primary causes of many, if not most, of the earth's various catastrophes and major changes throughout its history; and none of those movements and activities be explained by a gravity-only cosmogonic model. The electromagnetic model(s) of the the solar system's history, though, explain how and why these planetary movements took place; and I'm including here comets, asteroids, meteors, and so on. -Yes?
jone dae
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
I've enjoyed reading the posts on this page. However, I have to ask, including of the person who started this thread, are you familiar with the works of Earl Milton and Alfred De Grazia? They have done very important work in this area! I include their names with Juergens, Velikovsky, Birkeland, Alfven, Arp, and Peratt, along with the Thunderbolts authors. Some samples for you (plural) to read and consider: In geology and biology the currently adopted time scale depends upon the decay of long-lived radioactive atoms. The possibility that radioactive decays are environmentally induced has recently been proposed [9]. Without radiometric dating the rampant inflation in the magnitude of the cosmic timescale over the last century [10] will undoubtedly enter a sharp period of regression. This question will be debated in detail in time; for the present it is sufficient to say that if radioactive decay processes are not invariant, then many problems facing Velikovsky will vanish. The end result might well be a widespread reconsideration of Velikovsky's revised chronology. Similarly, if the cosmic time scale is drastically shortened, then the physical history of the Earth and Solar System will have to change. –Earl Milton, in Recollections of a Fallen Sky.
jone dae
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
A few more samples... some of the "con" (as in pro vs. con) authors will want to read the quoted texts, where also the notes and bibliographies may be found: 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; "miniclimate" 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 solarplanetary 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. –Alfred De Grazia in The Lately Tortured Earth, Ch.2.
jone dae
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
Third of four samples.... Presently, radiometric dating, particularly the Potassium-Argon test, is determining the ages of hominids, and this test is applied ordinarily to volcanic issue. The stretching of the time of hominids has gone on regardless of definitions of boundaries, and little attention is given to traditional geochronology. If the volcanic ashes imbedding a bone are adjudged to be two million years old, that is usually the end of age reckoning. So the hominids have gone back beyond the Pleistocene well into the Pliocene. How baffling the time element can be is suggested in an incident. A skull of homo erectus was discovered in Kenya by Bernard Ngeneo, working under Richard Leakey. It was dated at 1.5 million years. Peking man, a prototype of homo erectus had been dated by non-radiometric methods at 0.5 million years or less. Leakey said, "this raises questions about the true age of Peking Man. The Chinese must develop a new, different way to date their sites for more accuracy. Upon re-examination, they'll probably find these fossils to be a million years older than now dated."[6] In effect, the 40K-40A dating method is giving very old and by implication "good" results, and should be the sole method of plotting man's ascent! If so, some dates of hominid and homo fossils that were estimated before radiometric methods were employed may be useless. Or else these types lived for millions of years on Earth. As I stated earlier, modern types are now being found aged in the millions of years, not only skulls of modern volume but also modern bones, and now modern footprints. –Alfred De Grazia, in Ch.2 of Homo Schizo I.
jone dae
Re: Earth's Surface Formed Recently
Fourth of four samples... The defensive positions of a century ago are irreparably in disrepair, however. At that time the age of the Earth itself was being argued in the highest scientific circles in the neighborhood of thirty to ninety million years, which would on today's hominid reckoning give perhaps one-tenth of all earth-time for the development of man [16]. But then man was still hovering in the five figure bracket of 20,000 to 90,000 years. Certainly, were it not for radioactive dating methods, evolutionary theory would be at an impasse for lack of time for mutation and for natural selection to transform the biosphere. Like question-begging is the plague of natural selection, circular reasoning is the plague of traditional geochronology. "The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately... circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."[17] There are neither transition fossils in any number to mark the important fossil stages, nor complete fossil columns showing the evolutionary sequence; nor is evolution a hard set of facts. Yet index fossils with a doctrinaire chronology are imposed on the rocks and the rocks assigned dates. Then rocks of comparable type, though lacking fossils, are dated accordingly, and many of the strata and formations surrounding them, too. Velikovsky has ingeniously displayed, using Blanckenhorn's study of the Syrian-Palestinian rift valley, through which pass the Jordan River and Dead Sea, that the old geochronology, before radiochronometry, could properly formulate for it a history of a few thousand years, rather than many millions of years [18]. He further used proto-historical evidence, that of Biblical sources, to strengthen the theory of short duration for the rifting of the area. The older methods of geochronology are often too flexible to engender confidence. We must bring time into a new order. So long as it is the tool of the old vision of a point-by-point development of humanity, time will stretch out of bounds. The Holocene-Pleistocene boundary is not fixed upon an event, unless it be an end of the ice ages. But the ice ages are still going on, and it is doubtful that they played much of a role in the humanization and diffusion of man, except for imposing sometimes rather obvious limits upon settlement. The Pleistocene-Pliocene boundary was set by the International Geological Congress of 1950 on the basis of late Cenozoic stratigraphy in Italy, more precisely on the entrance of northern marine invertebrates into the Mediterranean. This boundary, too, is scarcely useful, and should be ignored in reckoning the origins of man in time. The Pleistocene record is always discontinuous and fragmentary, especially in glaciated areas. The task of scholars "would have been incomparably easier if some stratigraphic section covering the entire Pleistocene were available, showing, for instance a complete sequence of alternating tills and soils. Unfortunately, such a section seems to be available nowhere in the glaciated areas."[19] We note, too, how geological time-reckoning expands as we go back in history. The Upper Paleolithic artistic period was dated back 30,000 years by French scholars and geologists, working on remains in caves and rock shelters. Estimates of sedimentation rates of deposits into which artifacts were sandwiched, gave such duration. But the dating of the Upper Paleolithic artists is more a working consensus that an absolutely tested fix. Pergrony and Caslis give us an age of 4500 years ago for metals, a Neolithic lasting 5000 years before then, a Mesolithic of 2500 years, an Upper Paleolithic of 30,000 years, a Middle Paleolithic of 80,000 years and Lower Paleolithic of from 800,000 to 1,500,000 years [20]. As we have pointed out, this last figure is now verging upon five million years. The Upper Paleolithic period falls between the claimed periods of competence of radiocarbon dating and potassium-argon dating. The most careful work on this period is therefore dependent on sedimentary dating in large part, and this cannot get around the possibilities of periods of flood and torrents, laying down blanket after blanket of clay and gravel to create illusions, in today's peaceful landscape, of the passage of much time. This is no new problem. For instance, when Alfred Wallace was writing his studies of the distribution of animal life in the nineteenth century, he had to confess to the great difficulty of judging sedimentary deposits [21]. In repeated discussions at the Dordogne cave and shelter sites with French scientists who have excavated and are responsible for them, I have been unable to accept their meticulous reconstructions as valid. In the end, they rely nowadays upon carbondating, which although it often upsets their expectations, at least keeps them in the Paleolithic period rather than moving them into more recent times. That radiocarbondating which is based upon measuring a ratio involving the diminishing amount of carbon- 14 isotopes discoverable in organic remains, can be erratic, owing to atmospheric, species, and soil transformations, has already been the subject of investigation. Recently, changes in the Earth's geomagnetic field have been added to the several conditions that alter radiocarbon dating. Unfortunately, the usefulness of radiocarbon dating decreases exponentially as we move into the periods of the neolithic and beyond, when the need for a dating instrument becomes increasingly acute [22]. Geologists bought evolutionary time to preserve themselves from alternative catastrophic hypotheses. Whereupon the biologists and anthropologists, together with the geologists, were persuaded of radiochronometry by geo-physicists. The Potassium-Argon test claims validity over a time span of a billion years and more, beginning at 100,000 years or less before the present. Its favorite rock for testing is erupted volcanic material, ashes and lava. It establishes a constant rate of decay of the isotope potassium-40 into the isotope argon-40 (40K to 40A). Then it measures the amount of 40K and 40A in a rock sample and, by the proportion of the two, determines the 'age' of the rock, hence of fossils embedded in the rock. A high proportion of Argon-40 signifies an old age. Unfortunately for its validity, and despite the brilliant technical theory and achievements represented in its applications, the 40K ug 40A test suffers from a defect common to radioactive elements in nature. The elements migrate. In consequence, the proportions change, giving illusory ages. Rocks can both acquire and lose both elements or either alone. Moreover, one cannot rely upon a temporal sequence that appears nicely to show older strata succeeded by younger strata as a proof that the sequence occurred smoothly and without disturbance. For the whole sequence may have been laid down in short order during a turbulent period that is accompanied by high argon deposition, or the eruptive sequence of a volcanic source can lay down deposits, first heavier, then lighter, in Argon-40, owing to a tendency of such trace materials to migrate from heavier to lighter rock. It may not be necessary to disbelieve absolutely in the validity of 40K ug 40A dating to maintain a quantavolutionary opinion of the process of humanization. However, it is more difficult to explain certain critical fossil data and the mechanics of humanization while adhering to a long time perspective. Vast stretches of noneventful time have to be accepted between the occasions of significant changes, such as bipedalism, large brain, tools, and language; or else the finest, minutes, multitudinous ladder rungs or steps are forced upon one, leaving one again in baffling contradictions and a need to search for a meaning behind evolution such that every bit of change requires every subsequent bit of change, connecting intelligence with depilation, and so, on, thus accounting for the confusion of ladder-rung-labelling, with now one trait, then another being given priority. –Alfred De Grazia, Ch.2, Homo Schizo I.
Well, that is the way it is suppose to work.....but...
See the links to fulgarites earlier on this thread. If the Grand Canyon was formed by electrical scarring there would be fulgarite type rocks on a Grand scale. No such rocks have been observed.So, Fulgurites, from your empirical data and observational experience, would be the only electrical scarring that would be observed, and in the absence of such, there would be no reason to consider electrical activity in the formation of Earth's features?
