Your tax dollars at work: mammoths ballIstics report
- From: "rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx" <rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 28 Sep 2005 06:00:23 -0700
Is this a t.o category loony, or something else?
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1726&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
"A distant supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago may have led to the
extinction of the mammoth, according to research that will be presented
by nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of the U.S. Department of
Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Firestone, who conducted this research with Arizona geologist Allen
West, will unveil this theory at the 2nd International Conference "The
World of Elephants" in Hot Springs, SD."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/24/BAGG9ET78M1.DTL
The Firestone-West proposal drew quick criticism from a leading expert
on cosmic impact events, David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center
in Mountain View.
"Apparently, none of this work has been published in a peer-reviewed
journal," Morrison said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "The idea that
debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density,
comet-like objects is unsupported in terms of any science that I know
of." Also, the claim of tiny impact craters in the tusks "is pretty
obviously false," Morrison said. "No such grains could get through the
atmosphere."
In a phone interview, Firestone, referred to Morrison's criticism about
particle passage through the atmosphere as "the conventional thinking.
(But) we have 'em (the particles) in the tusks!" he added with a laugh.
It does sound like this guy Firestone is putting the "berk" into
Berkeley. It reminds me of t.o partly because of claims elsewhere
fossils, and maybe mammoths, allegedly preserved in the act of bending
their necks upwards to try to avoid drowning in Noah's flood. In this
case the bullet particles in the tusks - which the small print
indicates only stand for extinction 20,000 years later when a comet
that was somehow caused by the same supernova fell on the mammoths,
which evidently were shocked by the initial impact into standing very
still for a /very/ long time - remind me of that "evidence" in the
postures of fossils, which of course are not necessarily the postures
that the creatures held in their last moments of life. They get
squashed and bent.
The other detail that I liked for the wrong reasons in the San
Francisco Chronicle version is that mammoths "resembled hippie
elephants", which I guess is why Lawrence Berkeley Lab is interested,
even after all these years. But, okay, mammoths had longer hair, but
otherwise I'd guess that Indian elephants that actually live in the
part of the human world that has the most meditation, reincarnation,
incense, long hair, etc., are closer to being hippies?
(On the other hand, those elephants also tend to have steady jobs.)
.
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