CHAPTER 16

Cosmology I

Abandonment of the Big Bang and Cosmic Microwave Background theories will lead to a revolution in science.

The Big Bang

“Our present understanding of the universe is based on the Big Bang…”
Nathan Cohen in “Gravity’s Lens” (page 223).

“The singularity at the beginning of the universe …” is how Stephen Hawking described the Big Bang in his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ (page 46). He defined ‘singularity’ as “A point in space-time at which the space-time curvature becomes infinite”. Everything is viewed as having started from a single point at the beginning of time and spreading out from that.

It is claimed that distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us as well as from each other and it is argued that proof is provided by the Doppler Effect, which can be readily understood. An observer alongside a highway hears the high-pitched sound of a rapidly approaching automobile. Between consecutive sound wave peaks, the vehicle moves forward slightly so that the distance between consecutive sound wave peaks as the vehicle approaches is less than it would be if the vehicle were stationary. The shorter wavelength means that the frequency and pitch are higher. When the vehicle has passed, consecutive sound wave peaks received by the observer are now slightly further apart so that their frequency, and therefore pitch, are lower.

Christian Doppler’s 1843 scientific paper on this phenomenon was primarily about light, which can also be represented by wave-forms. If the speeding automobile had an omnidirectional, yellow light on its roof, yellow light received by the observer as it approached would have a slightly green tinge because the yellow light would be displaced toward the shorter wavelength (blue) end of the visible spectrum. When the vehicle had passed, yellow light received by the observer would be slightly orange because it would be displaced toward the longer wavelength (red) end of the spectrum.

The human eye cannot recognize the color change resulting from even the fastest car, for while highway traffic may travel at 1/10^th the speed of sound in air at sea level, that is roughly 1/10 millionth the speed of light. The example is real, however, and the color difference could be demonstrated by a sufficiently sensitive instrument.

A receding star demonstrates the same phenomenon, accounting for the well-known red-shift. Absorption lines in its spectrum are displaced slightly toward the red end, from which it has been concluded that the star is moving away. If a star is approaching the observer it will provide a blue-shift. A spectrograph shows not only a spread of colors but spectral lines that are distinctive for each element, called Fraunhofer lines. The wavelengths of the lines have been determined precisely on Earth so that even very small shifts in wavelengths from space can be measured.

A spectrograph was first used in 1859 to demonstrate that shifts in the position of spectral lines of stars in our Galaxy could be used to determine their relative movement toward or away from Earth. As better telescopes were developed, astronomers were then able to measure the spectral shift of galaxies, and it was with this development that the drift of astronomy away from reality began to speed up.

A quasar (quasi-stellar radio source) is a powerful, energy-emitting body at the center of a galaxy, while others may be generated within galaxies. The first quasar was discovered in 1962 with the radio telescope at Parkes, Australia. The Mt. Palomar Observatory in California soon obtained its optical spectrum, and a huge red-shift of the spectrum was attributed, naturally, to the Doppler Effect. This led to the conclusion that the quasar and its galaxy are 2 billion light-years away from Earth.

It was later discovered that at a red-shift of 200%, the number of quasars increased 1,000- fold, which led cosmologists to conclude that quasars used to be much more plentiful than they are today. Many more quasars have now been discovered, and except within the Local Group, every one of them displays a huge red-shift. Calculated speeds away from Earth are now up to 200 million kilometers per hour, at a distance of more than 12 billion light years! I would like to raise a question here: At what point does common sense enter into all this?

Based upon the observed red-shift of quasars and galaxies, cosmologists have concluded that space itself is expanding. The red-shift of distant galaxies has been explained as being due to either the expansion of the Universe according to Newtonian physics or to the curvature of space-time according to the general theory of relativity. Expansion of space is easier to understand than the curvature of space-time, and this is the explanation that is most frequently given, but as concepts, they are regarded as being equally correct.

Stephen Hawking employed the analogy of spots on the surface of an inflating balloon to demonstrate how the view from every point in an expanding Universe remains similar. The opposite of this trend is illustrated by continuing past the condition of full deflation until the spots have coalesced at a single point. This point represents Hawking’s singularity at the beginning of the Universe.

So convinced are cosmologists that the Big Bang took place, they have calculated the conditions of temperature and pressure that must have prevailed immediately thereafter. What was it that exploded, however, in an explosion stronger than could be contained by gravity, and where did it come from? Their interest stems from a desire to be able to explain the origins of elements and galaxies, but when better explanations for both are recognized, the Big Bang may lose its appeal. One argument that has been used to support the Big Bang involves the amount of helium in the Universe.

One of the attractions of the Big Bang for scientists is that conditions which could have been suitable for the formation of heavier elements, by a process they call “progressive neutron capture”, can be assumed. Then, it can be concluded that the Big Bang really did take place. When the Big Bang hypothesis is finally abandoned, it will take with it the very foundation of Particle Physics as it is practiced today.

“But the mind does not so readily get rid of an obsession.”
Sir Arthur Eddington. 

Missing Dark Matter

“…85% of the universe must be hard to hide…”
Nathan Cohen in “Gravity’s Lens”, (page 189).

Stars within a spiral galaxy tend to share a similar angular velocity whether they are situated at the edge of the visible disk or close to its hub. This shows that the entire galaxy is rotating almost as if it were a solid structure. If our Solar System were to behave like this, the outer planets should be lost into space by centrifugal force. Cosmologists recognize that stars at the edge of a spiral galaxy maintain their position because some force must keep them there.

Since gravity is the only force acting on a galactic scale that cosmologists recognize, they have concluded that this must be what holds galaxies together. Since stars are not lost from the edges of rotating galaxies, cosmologists know that gravity is responsible. Since there isn’t enough visible matter to account for this, cosmologists have concluded that galaxies must include huge amounts of exotic matter that has properties unknown on Earth, is not made up of protons and neutrons, and is invisible. Cosmologists have desperately sought evidence of this dark matter so they could close the Universe. To accomplish this they would need to satisfy themselves that the Universe contains sufficient mass for its expansion to be overcome by gravity. Cosmology is largely about gravity. The problem is that it shouldn’t be.

Another argument that has been offered in favor of most matter being invisible concerns the flatness problem. A ‘flat’ Universe is one in which the rate of recession and its mass are exactly matched. This concept requires the expansion of the Universe to slow until gravity can eventually cause it to contract. The mass density in the observed Universe is thought to be within a factor of 10 (or at least 100) of what is required of a closed Universe. Since any deviation from flatness at the Big Bang should have increased linearly with time, cosmologists conclude the Universe must have been flat to an accuracy of within one part in a trillion (1 million-million). As a result, most cosmologists accept that the Universe is ‘flat’. One problem this causes is that more than 85% of everything must be invisible.

Accepting that the Universe is flat due to an amazing coincidence obviously wouldn’t do, and so the search began for an explanation. This led to the concept of the unified force. The unified force might sound like a team of crime fighters but it describes the proposed equivalence of three fundamental physical forces: the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force were supposedly symmetrical at the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled, however, that supposed symmetry was lost, resulting in rapid expansion.

In this instance, the term ‘rapid’ is a bit underwhelming since it has been calculated that the expansion grew by more than 28 orders of magnitude (which is times 1 followed by 28 zeros) in less than 10^-30 seconds, which is close to no time at all. Champions of the unified force claim that it will solve the flatness problem — if only they can find that missing dark matter. If a Grand Unified Theory is required in order to substantiate missing dark matter and dark energy, then this alone can be taken as an absolute guarantee of failure.

Believing that the elements formed immediately after the Big Bang, cosmologists have concluded that a limit to the number of protons and neutrons must have been what prevented the formation of more of the complex elements. They estimated the total visible mass and compared the effect of dark matter upon small galaxies, and then larger galaxies, and then groups of galaxies, and all of their calculations confirmed their own conclusions that most of the total mass of the Universe must be invisible.

There are many things out there that we cannot see from Earth, but to conclude that most matter is invisible and does not contain protons and neutrons because stars at the periphery of a galaxy appear to reject the laws of gravity is absurd. It is the electromagnetic force, and not gravity, that keeps the stars in their places. The introduction of imaginary matter, having unknown properties, and constituting 85% (up to 99% by some claims — pick a number!) of the mass of the Universe in order to account for stars remaining within their galaxies, is a typical example of the unreality that characterizes cosmology.

“…facts can only be inferred from other facts, not from general laws alone.”
Bertrand Russell.

Missing Dark Energy

The hypothetical dark energy has been termed ‘quintessence’. This reminds me of ‘phlogiston’ which once seemed to be a perfectly plausible term, and which was used to cover up the fact that nobody knew what it was. Phlogiston or ‘fire-stuff’ was supposed to be present in all flammable substances until Lavoisier developed the oxygen theory of combustion.

If this dark energy is an energy field then it might change its strength over time and this would affect the Universe differently at different times. Cosmologists accommodatingly provided a freezing version in which their dark energy runs down with time and a thawing version in which the energy level increases with time. Alternatively, we are informed that there may be no such thing as dark energy at all and that maybe gravity works differently than theory predicts.

A University of British Columbia astrophysicist was recently quoted as saying this about dark energy “It’s most of what’s in the universe. We know it’s there because we can see what it does.”  Why did Einstein have to leave us when he’s needed most?

Einstein’s Cosmological Term

In his book ‘Einstein’s Mistakes’, Hans Ohanian provides an interesting account of what Einstein and many of his contemporaries were doing. As Einstein struggled in 1917 to apply the equations of general relativity to the overall distribution of stars throughout the Universe, he followed Isaac Newton’s lead in accepting that the stars remained in fixed positions and were affected largely by gravity. At the time it was not anticipated that an interpretation of spectral red-shifts of galaxies would be accepted as proof of an expanding Universe, let alone that later observations would be accepted as proof that the expansion is accelerating. Arthur Eddington, the British astronomer, calculated that Einstein’s original model of a static Universe was unstable and would either expand or contract at an increasing rate.

The first clues to the supposed expansion of the Universe were discovered in 1912 by Vesto Slipher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. They were further developed in the late 1920s when Edwin Hubble at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California identified the nebulae that Slipher had been studying as separate galaxies beyond our own. It has since been accepted by cosmologists that the Universe contains 71% repulsive dark energy and 29% attractive mass.

When Einstein was younger, and in his most productive period, he applied his prodigious talent to considering physics on his own terms. Now, however, he held no special insight into the workings of the Universe and accepted the observations of his contemporaries. Accepting the prevailing belief in a static Universe, he had attempted, and failed, to accommodate this restriction by adding a cosmological term that would, in a sense, ‘hold back gravity’.

Later, accepting the views of his colleagues that the Universe is expanding, he removed this term from his equations, regarding it as a mistake. In a major irony, while Einstein had at first been criticized for adding this term, he was now criticized for removing it. Cosmologists presently conclude it should be viewed as a symbol of the dark energy that produces their accelerated expansion.

Cosmologists believe that the measured wavelength of light from a distant galaxy enables them to calculate the distance of the galaxy from Earth, as well as the speed at which it is moving away from us. To them, the further out in space they can see is the equivalent of looking backward in time.

Cosmic Microwave Background

After determination of the ubiquitous redshift of galaxies, the next major pillar of the developing science of cosmology was the cosmic microwave background. In 1965 it was discovered that Earth is bathed in uniform microwave radiation from every point in the sky. Its significance was immediately appreciated by theorists, who had predicted a vestige of heat radiation from the Big Bang. The Big Bang required microwaves and microwaves confirmed the Big Bang. Well — almost.

Big Bang theory required visible and infrared radiation to have been red-shifted by its journey across the expanding Universe, but the extent of the red-shift could not be known. Going with what they had, cosmologists concluded that the observed wavelength had been red-shifted to 1,500 times its original wavelength! In addition, the observed radiation had several thousand times less energy than George Gamow and others had predicted.

They also removed a variation in wavelength across the celestial sphere, which they justified by claiming it to be a Doppler effect. This required our Galaxy, together with the Local Group, to be moving at more than 2 million kilometers per hour with respect to the surrounding Universe. This startling speed, in turn, introduced mystifying complexities to the geometrical relationship between the Local Group and its neighbors.

Andromeda and the Local Group were now the only galaxies to have a blue shift instead of a red-shift like all the rest. The explanation given is that the intrinsic motion of a galaxy, which astronomers call its peculiar motion, can exceed its motion due to the expansion of the Universe. Regardless, radiation the cosmologists had would have to do. Now that the observed radiation had been converted into what theory demanded, it could be used to support the Big Bang. Well — almost.

The massaged data now described completely uniform background radiation, while Big Bang theory demanded density fluctuations, termed cosmic strings, which could be amplified by gravity to form galaxies. (Remember, gravity is the only long-range force that cosmologists recognize.) Scientific American (July ’92, p18) reported: “Theorists obligingly adjusted their models to accommodate ever smaller initial density fluctuations.” Finally, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, with its ultra-sensitive differential microwave radiometers, discovered density fluctuations that could be used to support the Big Bang. Well — almost.

Density fluctuations recorded by the satellite were so small they could not be distinguished from instrument noise. This meant that one final step would have to be carried out. Cosmologists applied advanced probability methodology to their data to provide them with what they required. In its final processed form, the data could be readily distinguished from instrument noise, and described a splendid black-body curve, just as Big Bang theory supposedly requires. A black-body curve describes the absorption of radiation without reflection.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, of Bell Telephone Laboratories, shared the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their discovery of cosmic microwave background. The radiation, which was explained by Robert Dicke and his group at Princeton University, had been predicted by George Gamow in his book ‘The Creation of the Universe’ in 1952. More recently, COBE satellite results have been viewed by many as constituting acceptable proof that there really was a Big Bang.

With rather less than the assets of NASA, I will have to speculate on the source of the cosmic microwave background. I believe that nuclear as well as electrical processes on comets in the Oort Cloud are responsible for the radiation and for its uniform composition from the perspective of Earth. I attribute a variation in wavelength across the celestial sphere as due to a drop in voltage across the Galaxy. The distribution of the microwave radiation along a black-body curve must result from Earth’s location within the transmitter.

Andromeda

Our celestial neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, has an observed rotational velocity that cosmologists are unable to explain. According to them, stars in the periphery should be lost into space due to centrifugal force. When cosmologists have learned that it is the electromagnetic force and not gravity that keeps galaxies together, this will no longer be a mystery to them, and imaginary dark matter/dark energy might cease to be an obsession.

Unfortunately for the cosmologists, they simply took for granted that astronomers got things right when they determined how our Sun and our Solar System function. As cosmologists investigate increasingly distant phenomena, they apply lessons that have been mislearned closer to home.

Black Holes

Common sense tells us that if a group of specialists set out to determine the energy source of the Sun and got it wrong because they had overlooked the most powerful force in the Universe, and other specialists applied the same flawed knowledge and similar thought processes to determine how galaxies began, they would get that wrong as well. In his book ‘A Brief History of Time’, Stephen Hawking wrote (page 50) that British physicist Roger Penrose developed a theorem to show that any collapsing star ‘must’ end in a singularity.

Hawking used the converse of Penrose’s theorem to show that an infinitely expanding universe ‘must’  have begun with a singularity. The two subsequently collaborated on a paper which, quoting Hawking (page 50): “…at last proved that there must have been a Big Bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe.”

I accept Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and also that the Universe contains as much matter as we observe. The part of Hawking’s statement that I totally reject concerns his Big Bang singularity. Data employed by Roger Penrose assumes the pre-eminence of gravity while ignoring the electromagnetic force. The theorem then goes on to predict that black holes are real. This as a clear indication they are not.

Carl Sagan wrote in ‘Cosmos’ (page 241) that thermonuclear reactions in the solar interior support the outer layers of the Sun, postponing its catastrophic gravitational collapse. Every type of star postpones its inevitable collapse in a characteristic manner, and a star that has twenty times the mass of the Sun is destined to collapse into a black hole. That the postponement of the development of black holes should be attributed to thermonuclear reactions taking place in the cores of stars provides further confirmation of the imaginary nature of black holes.

John Michell, a clergyman and brilliant natural philosopher who is almost forgotten today, claimed in 1783 that no light would escape from a star with sufficient mass. A star, from which light cannot escape, however, is a contradiction in terms since the light from any star is a result of the same electrical current that supports it against its gravitational collapse.

Black hole theory has since added the concept of collapse to an infinite density. Phlogiston ruled for barely a century, while the basic concept of black holes, which John Michell also reportedly suggested, has hung around for more than twice as long. Michell’s claim was made before the time of Michael Faraday, who was two years old when Michell died and long before the dawn of nuclear physics, and the idea should have been dropped long ago.

Black holes have developed into a huge industry encompassing supercomputers and university departments and publications and great gatherings of specialists. Astronauts of the future, say these specialists, may visit a black hole and avoid the singularity by escaping through a wormhole. Some actually believe that astronauts will be able to travel into the past in this way. One day it will be realized that the entertainment value of cosmology reached its zenith with the development of the theory of black holes.

Hawking wrote “[T]he fact that [gravity] is both long range and always attractive means that its effects all add up. So for a sufficiently large number of matter particles, gravitational forces can dominate over all other forces. This is why it is gravity that determines the evolution of the universe”. Gravity is a long-range force which is always attractive. Between two bodies within a plasma, however, gravity is commonly overcome. Cosmologists have never learned this elementary principle: it is the electromagnetic force that determines the evolution of the Universe.

Hawking claimed the Steady-State Theory required a modification of General Relativity to allow for the continual creation of matter, but this is false. I developed the Steady-State Theory in 1990 before the Internet came along, and it was sometime before I learned it had already been proposed, in 1948. The problem with the original version, by Thomas Gold, Fred Hoyle, and Hermann Bondi, was that they accepted the red-shift of quasars as a velocity effect, indicating that the Universe is expanding. As a result, the most promising idea ever conceived in cosmology was abandoned.

To arrive at the infinite density of a black hole, a collapsing large star must first exceed the density of a white dwarf star (so far — so good). It must then exceed the density at which other stars explode, continuing to collapse until it disappears (not so good). Stephen Hawking is regarded by many as pre-eminent in the field of theoretical physics, for which he has been an articulate spokesperson. I was impressed by his ability for explaining complex concepts that he displayed in his popular book ‘A Brief History of Time’, published in 1988.

Having said this, I am compelled to point out that one reason it can be so challenging to make certain ideas understandable is if the ideas are wrong. The book has become a publishing phenomenon and received many awards including the prestigious ‘Locus Award’ for best non-fiction, but it was miscategorized. If it had received the award for best fiction I would not object. In one Internet review the question is asked “Is A Brief History of Time outdated?” and the answer provided was that it will never be outdated. I couldn’t agree more. When a book is wrong it will always be wrong. Wikipedia describes it as “popular-science”  but a more fitting categorization would be well-written science-fiction.

Martin Ryle, 1974 Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work in radio astronomy wrote about cosmologists, who “…have always lived in a happy state of being able to postulate theories which had no chance of being disproved.” Ironically, he was so against the Steady-State Theory that Fred Hoyle claimed Ryle was “…less motivated by a quest for the truth than by a desire to destroy Steady-State Theory.”

Hawking again: “The old idea of an essentially unchanging universe that could have existed, and could continue to exist, forever was replaced by the notion of a dynamic, expanding universe that seemed to have begun a finite time ago, and that might end at a finite time in the future.” Hawking has claimed that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity requires there to have been a Big Bang, but this is a misrepresentation of Einstein’s theory. A Steady-State Universe satisfies the requirements of General Relativity perfectly well.

Black holes have had a considerable influence on cosmology because cosmologists’ understanding of black holes has led to their understanding of the Big Bang. But the Penrose singularity theorems amount to a corruption of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and once again, specialization has led scientists away from reality. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity has been appropriated by cosmologists to confirm their Big Bang, Black Holes, Neutron Stars, strings, super-strings, and God knows what else. Einstein would have been offended, and for his legacy to be abused in this way is a travesty.

A current blog about neutron stars on a popular science platform, written by one who likes to promote himself as an expert in the field, recently pronounced “The future of astronomy is upon us.” Perhaps he and his fellow experts could drag themselves away from studying neutron stars long enough to take another look at our Sun. Perhaps they would realize that most of cosmology is based on lessons that have been mislearned closer to home.

CHAPTER 21

The Caribbean (A Look back)

Most people would accept that the North American ice cap formed
around the North Pole. Why do scientists insist it formed on one
side of the Earth in the mid-latitudes?

The Problem

The geological history of the Caribbean basin has been considered in thousands of scientific papers published by Geological Surveys of several countries, by oil companies, universities, and scientific organizations. All of them missed the essential story.

In the mid-1960’s the United States Geological Survey made a monumental discovery that should have changed the geologic history of the world. They found that throughout the Caribbean Sea, beneath a considerable thickness of ‘Tertiary’ age sediments, occurs a very fresh appearing, coarse-grained basalt lava. Despite the fact that this is the exact type of rock that has yielded Potassium-Argon (K-Ar) dates around the world, on which a major part of the Geologic Time Scale is based, the scientists were unable to obtain a K-Ar date from it. The significance of this is explained here for all those who do not have a background in geology.

When the USGS revealed its astonishing results, it claimed that the fresh-appearing basalt had been subjected to “a special type of alteration”. The agency never explained how they arrived at this explanation, and it avoided admitting the age of the rock could be less than the sensitivity of the method employed. Although they would not have expected the rock to have crystalized less than 100,000 years ago, honesty alone required them to acknowledge this possibility.

Nor has the agency ever reported that it has subjected samples to ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar (Argon-Argon) testing, which is a much more sensitive method that was developed later. If it did, the results may have been discarded because they weren’t what USGS scientists anticipated. Regardless, the standard of work carried out by the USGS in this instance has been below what is acceptable from such a prestigious scientific organization.

The Project

In the late 1960’s the drill-ship ‘Glomar Challenger’ began its worldwide voyages under the ‘Deep Sea Drilling Project’, and on Leg 15 it recovered 2 basement samples from the Venezuelan Basin and 3 from the Columbian Basin in the eastern Caribbean Sea. In a co-operative program by several universities in the late 1990’s these deep-sea samples were combined with five widely spaced samples collected on land, and all were assigned an approximate age of 90 million years. This begs the question as to how the ages of the deep-sea rocks were determined.

As it turned out, the samples were analyzed by the more modern ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar method. In fact, this method had become the modern standard, even though its interpretation is more complex, requiring computer treatment of the data. This procedure is so sensitive that it has even been used to confirm the date of volcanics from Pompeii, which was destroyed in 79 AD.

In the scientists’ paper ‘An oceanic flood basalt province within the Caribbean plate’, ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar ages obtained from the basement rocks were not reported because they were “less well constrained” (as their paper states) than the rest, and the ages reported were based upon the alleged age of fossils in overlying sediments. The determined (but not reported) ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar ages may have been correct but were discarded as impossible.

Just as with the USGS, these scientists refused to accept the results of a method they had always previously accepted because these results contradicted their expectations. Since the overlying sediments had been mapped as Tertiary, underlying basement rocks couldn’t possibly have an approximate age of 10,500 years! The shame, of course, is that such an age is well within the useful range of ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar dating.

The Historians

What is the point of historians spending their entire professional lives interpreting what went on in the past, by translating the actual written records of intelligent, educated observers, only to have today’s scientists, with a typically sparse background in the classics, disregard these conclusions and substitute fabrications of their own? For example, they discount thousands of reports of Venus and Mars moving outside their present orbits, to declare that every planet has always followed its present one. Velikovsky concluded Mars took up its present orbit approximately 2705 years ago (in 2018).

The Caribbean presents a superb opportunity for casting off the shackles of scientific orthodoxy that prevent us from recognizing our world as it really is, and explain why basalt from beneath the Caribbean Sea cannot be dated by a process on which so much of the Geological Time Scale is based. To dismiss this mystery as due to “a special type of alteration”, without a shred of evidence, was an attempt to convince the public that the USGS provides competent answers to scientific questions. In this case, its work was disappointingly flawed.

As I explain elsewhere, much of the problem lies in specialization, which is the curse of all science on the right-hand side of The Chocolate Box. For one thing, specialists commonly apply the findings of specialists in other fields without question, while being unfamiliar with problems in those fields. And if they work for a large scientific organization, which hires only ‘team players’, then a major objective of the entire team may ultimately turn into a common defense of their orthodoxy.

The answer provided by the USGS, attributing the problem to “a special type of alteration” was evidently offered because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Samples might not have been retested even after a more sensitive analytical method became available. Or, in a worse-case scenario, perhaps samples were retested but the results were not released. Either way, it is up to the USGS to reveal the truth now.

Opportunities

Carl Sagan wrote: “Astronomers do not object to the idea of major collisions, only to major recent collisions.” Why? The reason, obviously, is that they…he…didn’t know how to recognize evidence of major recent collisions. The Caribbean offers an opportunity for scientists to study the site of a major recent collision so they can learn what it looks like. The area is highly accessible, with a generally pleasant climate and readily available accommodation, so that professors and their students are unlikely to object to working there.

An examination of this region will provide scientists the chance to advance out of the current Scientific Dark Age on the right-hand side of The Chocolate Box to recognize how catastrophism has shaped our world. It might enable investigators to determine a more precise age for the impact, put aside the absurd role they have assigned Chicxulub, and determine characteristics that can be applied to interpret similar sites around the world.

It doesn’t take much scholarship to recognize the cause of the Barringer Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona because there is a big hole in the ground. There is clearly a need, however, for scientists to learn how to recognize sites sufficiently large to have formed a convection cell. When scientists realize that large asteroid impacts provide the energy required by plate tectonics, moving continents around as a result, the history of our physical world will become much more understandable to them.

I even dare to hope that astronomers will begin to consider how large asteroids from the Main Asteroid Belt get to Earth since their frequency of impact cannot be explained by chance alone. Of course, for astronomers to accept that planets and (world-type) moons are not fixed in their orbits but sometimes leave them to interact with others, could take a couple more centuries.

The objective is nothing less than a new way of doing science on the right-hand side of the Chocolate Box. We mustn’t dismiss reports just because they are a couple of thousand years old, or because one source happens to be a religious book. (Velikovsky wrote in ‘Worlds in Collision’: “….least of all do we place faith in books that demand belief, religious books, though we swear on these.”)

Greater integration of the sciences is a critical requirement, and ‘generalist’ must not be considered a derogatory term. And let me be clear on this point: Co-operation between specialists is not going to get us very far on the right-hand side of the Chocolate Box. It never has. This does not mean that every geologist or astronomer has to develop a command of every subject, but scientists must develop broader interests than they have now, including knowledge of human history over the past 4,000 years.

Major new concepts in geology and astronomy are not too difficult for the general public to appreciate. For example, major impact sites are ‘hiding in plain sight’ all over our planet. The joint NASA-ESA Ulysses program demonstrated that it is electricity that powers our Sun, and by extension, the stars. Particle Physics, which seems to exist increasingly to support the Big Bang hypothesis, is an inward-looking science and should not continue for long in its present form.

We can do better, and an investigation of the geology of the Caribbean Sea would be a good place to start. Once the first sacred cows have been put out to pasture things will get easier.

Most Recent Impact

A major impact formed the Venezuela Basin about 10,500 years ago, and points at the geographic poles were moved about 22⁰ closer to the present equator. In the northern and southern hemispheres, the former and present geographic poles are situated about 10⁰ of longitude apart (in the present coordinate system.) This means that it took about 40 minutes for the poles to move about 1650 miles from their former positions. Therefore, the axis change took place at a speed of close to 2,475 miles per hour, which is more than 3 times the speed of sound in air at sea level.  A 700 km (435 mi.) diameter convection cell formed at the impact site and a pair of parallel faults developed from it, trending toward the Middle America Subduction Zone.

A surge of magma from the convection cell, confined between the two faults, was deflected upward by the plunging plate, tearing what are now the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico), plus some smaller pieces, out of Central America and moving them up to 1500 km (more than 900 miles) away. The paths they took can be easily recognized on a physical map of the Caribbean Sea, just as with islands of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s not as if they were hiding their tracks. And where the crust was torn open at the Gulf of Honduras, accommodating the northward rotation of the Yucatán, the evidence can be clearly recognized on GoogleEarth.

As Cuba separated from the mainland the Yucatán Peninsula rotated north taking with it the infamous Chicxulub impact site, or at least its upper part, so that its roots might still be detectable where the impact actually occurred. The island arc formed by the Leeward and Windward islands is made up of young, frequently active volcanic islands that developed as a result of the impact. Oceanic crust from the Mid Atlantic Ridge is now being subducted along the east limb of the convection cell, resulting in the growth of these volcanic islands. At its north end, the arc has begun to divide in two, influenced by the westward moving plate to the north.

Trinidad, as well as Barbados (which is mostly limestone), were broken out of South America. The ‘Aves Swell’ , now deep beneath the surface of the sea, may once have been a peninsula of South America (an extension of the Guiana Shield), and is the probable source of the ‘Gorda Baths’ on the British Virgin Islands, where massive rounded boulders of granodiorite up to 12 meters (40 ft.) in diameter are piled up at the edge of the sea. The islands between Trinidad and the British Virgin Islands are made of volcanic rock (which granodiorite is not) having an age of less than about 10,500 years.

As the Greater Antilles moved to their present locations the surface of the mantle was left exposed. Sediments were deposited by the furious tides following the axis change. These are the same sediments the university professors declared were 90 million years old, based upon fossils they allegedly contain. Ten thousand five hundred years after the sediments were laid down they would be mapped by USGS geologists, who had already decided they were Tertiary, meaning an age of between 1.5 and 66 million years. Something doesn’t add up!

Proofs

• Cores of volcanic rock from beneath the sediments should be dated by the ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar method. This time, the results should be released to the public.
• The original location of the Chicxulub impact might be identifiable by geophysical means.
• Standard geological mapping techniques might satisfy skeptics of how the Greater Antilles were part of Central America until about 10,500 years ago.
• While they’re at it, a competent paleontologist might want to take a look at those 90 million-year-old fossils.

Arthur Schopenhauer

In concluding this series, I want to remind you of what this 19^th-century German philosopher wrote about truth:

“All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

 

Thank you,

Mike Wetherley, P.Geol.

CHAPTER 5

Velikovsky

Astronomers were correct to reject Immanuel Velikovsky’s account of the birth of Venus
but the real explanation went unrecognized.

Upheaval

Immanuel Velikovsky posited that the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt in the second millennium B.C. was connected in some way to a series of natural catastrophes. He investigated the evidence for these, and for catastrophes that had influenced the histories of other civilizations, most of which had no contact with the Israelites. Velikovsky’s conclusions were presented in his book ‘Worlds in Collision’, which was first published in 1950. It ignited a firestorm that has continued even to the present, largely between professional scientists and a part of the general public which has a keen interest in science but no commitment to the defense of professional orthodoxy. Many members of the general public wonder why ancient stories, whether in allegorical form or not, are rejected so readily by scientists, and Velikovsky opined that we are too readily disposed to consider we have solved a problem when we remove it to the remote past.

Our forebears developed an extraordinary interest in the movements of the planets because, during the second and first millennia B.C., Earth experienced close encounters with two other worlds. These resulted in violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, floods, conflagrations, meteorite bombardments, hurricanes and observed electrical discharges between worlds. Some mountain ranges were lifted up more than a thousand meters. Saharan and Arabian savannah were changed into desert, alpine glaciers developed where none had existed before, and the length of a year was extended by 5 ¼ days as Earth adjusted its orbit.

The Earthquake

Certain historical events can be proven; some are widely accepted; others remain plausible. One event that can be proven is that sea level suddenly dropped 20 feet around the world about 3½ thousand years ago, and it is to the discredit of the science of Geology that this fact has been kept hidden. This could be because it threatened to bring the perils of catastrophism into the geological discourse.

The drop in sea level is still clearly evident in the tropics today since it is common for shore-line coral reefs to build up to sea level at low tide. Any ‘raised’ benches 20 feet above sea level at low tide, that are former coral reefs, can be taken as evidence of this event. Look for them on your next holiday in the tropics. They aren’t that hard to find.

Dr. Reginald Daly, a professor at Harvard University, was the author of ‘Our Mobile Earth’ published in 1926. In it, he stated, “A recent world-wide sinking of ocean level of twenty feet took place, probably 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.” This was confirmed in 1950 by the Dutch scientist, P.H. Kuenen, author of ‘Marine Geology’, who estimated an age “…of 3,000 to 3,500 years”. The historian Immanuel Velikovsky, in his book ‘Worlds in Collision’ (1950), calculated a date from historical records for the first of two close encounters between Venus and Earth as occurring about 3,542 years ago (corrected to 2020).

The electromagnetic fields of Venus and Earth bumped together with a tremendous jolt. On Earth, forces that had been built up by mantle currents pushing against tectonic plates over thousands of years were released in an instant. The geometry of every ocean basin was changed, and every city on Earth with its defensive walls, in an era of massive stone-building, was reduced to rubble.

This event could help answer the question of when the pyramids at Giza were built, for if they had existed at that time they could not have escaped unscathed. In fact, this overwhelming event may have been influential in the decision to construct the pyramids. The Sphinx is believed to be considerably older than the pyramids and survived without significant damage, but it is a reworked rock outcrop rather than a structure. Substantial water erosion of the Sphinx is flood damage, and not the result of precipitation.

The incomparable earthquake also dates the key historical event described in “Exodus” of the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, to the Sinai. The crossing was not of the Red Sea, which has a deep rift valley running down its entire length, but north of the Gulf of Suez, across the route of the Suez Canal. Without the earthquake, which destroyed the stone houses of the Egyptians, causing widespread casualties, followed by the drop in sea-level, the Israelites’ crossing at the sea of passage would not have been even contemplated. Parts of the Old Testament can evoke the perception of allegory where none was intended and may lead to reliance upon divine intervention where none is required. Velikovsky wrote in ‘Worlds in Collision’: “….least of all do we place faith in books that demand belief, religious books, though we swear on these.”

It is the survivors of events who chronicle their history, and Velikovsky concluded that Psalm 68:22 in which the Lord says “I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.” refers to Israelites who perished at the sea of passage when the water suddenly returned.

The Red Sea

The physical geography and especially the hydrology of the Red Sea played an essential role in this event. No tectonic forces were released along the Red Sea itself but at Bab el Mandeb, where the Red Sea narrows significantly to meet the Gulf of Aden, which was now 20 feet lower, discharge of water was severely slowed. At the crossing, shallow water drained away quickly, while the level of the Red Sea continued to fall over several days, through temporary violent rapids at Bab el Mandeb.

Eventually, the water level of the Red Sea dropped low enough that it could be affected by the agitated condition of the open ocean. This was the result of tsunamis generated at subduction zones, especially across the Indian Ocean in Indonesia. Tsunamis then progressed along the length of the Red Sea, rising steeply as they reached the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Suez. Traveling rapidly and without warning, huge waves engulfed the site where Israelites, pursued by the Pharaoh’s army, were continuing to cross.

Multiple Disasters

Velikovsky challenged ancient chronology and scientific dogma alike as he sought to establish what transpired in those threatening times. Venus encountered Earth twice in the second millennium B.C., displacing Mars from its orbit so that it passed close to Earth five times in the 8^th and 7^th centuries B.C.

Sophisticated people of the eastern Mediterranean recorded their experiences by every means available to them as every city on Earth with its defensive walls, in an era of massive stone-building, was destroyed and prosperous civilizations instantly collapsed. A new calendar was developed, and major religions commemorate events from those terrible times, while our own astronomers deny they even took place. Earth entered the “comet-tail” of Venus, as Velikovsky described it, encountering its red dust which turned to hot gravel mixed with fire. On the opposite side of the world, American tribes recalled experiences equally abnormal.

Traditions involving a day or night of unusual duration are associated with some of these encounters, indicating that Earth’s axis had temporarily tilted. The first encounter with Venus was about 1522 B.C., as the Israelites crossed from Egypt to Sinai. Blood-red, Venus glowed before them as they fled, while lightning flashed across the sky. The Israelites recall how they were sustained in the Sinai by an enigmatic frost they called “manna”, while Hindus in India, Finns in their homeland, and Maoris in the distant Pacific shared their experience. Manna hasn’t been recognized in ice cores from Greenland or Antarctica, but it probably hasn’t been searched for with much enthusiasm. Tuff from the huge eruption of Mt. Toba hasn’t yet been recognized in ice cores either.

The Second Encounter

Fifty-two years later, Earth again encountered Venus, as Joshua led his people against the Canaanites. Once again the Sun tarried in the heavens while across the world a night refused to end. Seven centuries after that, Venus was to dislodge Mars from its orbit, to repeatedly threaten Earth. Encounters between four worlds (Earth, Venus, Mars and our Moon) are described in allegorical form in Homer’s Iliad, and when Venus and Mars came together, what I have termed ‘cloud comets’ were observed to form out of the tail of Venus. These comets, made of ice crystals, were still common during the time of Julius Caesar after another seven centuries had passed. Numerous accounts of them are available and can be read today.

Rome was being founded when Mars drew near, and Romans elevated Mars to their most powerful deity. Violent earthquakes occurred so frequently that Rome’s first buildings collapsed even before they could be completed. Every fifteen years the planet Mars returned until it had brought misfortune to Earth on five occasions, whereupon it retreated to the orbit that it now follows. Venus had already assumed its present orbit, resulting in a change to the calendar of an additional 5¼ days to a year. Velikovsky wrote about these wondrous events in ‘Worlds in Collision’ and reaped the scorn and fury of scientific orthodoxy. The least temperate response of all came from astronomers.

Beliefs representing a lifetime of dedication and benefit are not readily discarded. The future can appear threatening when convictions stand discredited for it is conviction that keeps anxiety at bay. Anxiety results when that conviction is undermined, for there is no guarantee those who succeeded once would ever see their good fortune repeated. Part of the blame, however, rests with Velikovsky. He recognized the scientists’ mistakes readily enough but assumed because of it that he was always able to instruct them correctly.

He frequently ran into trouble there, for while he was an incomparable historian he lacked a background in science. Scientific training stresses methods and scientists and historians do not speak the same language. Sometimes, Velikovsky proffered more than one suggested explanation, as for the Sun standing still, and his detractors seized upon the less likely with glee, using it as an opportunity for ridicule. Sometimes, Velikovsky was wrong.

Ancient legends relating that Venus had come out of Jupiter were accepted by Velikovsky and denounced by astronomers who could provide any number of reasons to show that it could not have taken place. This time it was the astronomers who were right, but the dispute was unenlightened for it apparently did not occur to either side that Venus could have been a moon of Jupiter. Carl Sagan reported the odds against the planetary encounters described in ‘Worlds in Collision’ having taken place, describing them colorfully as “a trillion quadrillion to one” (‘Scientists Confront Velikovsky’, page 63). That did not enlighten much either, for Sagan had assumed the encounters were random and affected only by gravity, and neither was the case.

What passes for acceptable proof within one paradigm can amount to nonsense within another. Sagan was at least fair to Velikovsky, taking the position that it is wrong to suppress a book. For this, he deserves more credit than he generally received from Velikovsky’s supporters.

‘Paris Match’, quoted in ‘Stargazers & Gravediggers’ (p.160), stated the following:

“…it is wrong to try to suppress a book.
 …it is wrong to do so in a clandestine manner.
 …it is wrong to do so without even reading the book.
 …it is wrong to try to influence its reviewers.
 …having done all this, it is wrong not to admit it.”

Public interest in Velikovsky’s ideas has never gone away, while the judgment of professional scientists has continued to be overwhelmingly negative. The journal ‘Pensée’ supported Velikovsky’s ideas from 1972 to 1974, and its authors were responsible for the book ‘Velikovsky Reconsidered’ (1976). In 1974, a meeting of the ‘American Association for the Advancement of Science’ was held to examine the issues again. Velikovsky’s defense of ‘Worlds in Collision’ was published in ‘Pensée’ and the contributions of the scientists were published in the book ‘Scientists Confront Velikovsky’ (1977).

‘Velikovsky Reconsidered’ may have been most valuable for the inclusion of a paper by Ralph E. Juergens entitled ‘Plasma in Interplanetary Space: Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskyan Catastrophism’. Recent progress in acquiring data from space makes Juergens’ paper more relevant now than ever (See: #14. The Electric Sun).

The Detractors

When Immanuel Velikovsky wrote in ‘Worlds in Collision’ that the order of our Solar System has changed within the memory of humankind, the science of astronomy was presented with the most serious challenge it has ever faced. With one nervous eye upon the Creationists, a libelous movement developed within the realm of scientific orthodoxy with the sole objective of discrediting Velikovsky and his theories.

Its guiding light was Harlow Shapley, who labeled Velikovsky a charlatan and a fraud. Shapley was one of America’s best-known astronomers and a director, at one time, of Harvard College Observatory. Another was Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a former student of Shapley and a member of his staff, who attacked Velikovsky’s book before she had read it. Criticized for her lack of professionalism, she later claimed to have read the book but that it hadn’t changed her mind.

“The claim of …universal knowledge is the unmistakable mark of the quack.” Wrote Dean B. McLaughlin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan, who later admitted he had not read the book either. “Velikovsky claims to be able to dispute the basic principles of several sciences! These are indeed delusions of grandeur!”

James Conant, president of Harvard University, published a book entitled ‘Science and Common Sense’, in which he bemoaned the success of ‘Worlds in Collision’ as “…a distressing phenomenon.” Conant explained how even highly educated and intelligent citizens will usually fail to understand scientists. But, according to Conant, disseminating more scientific information is not the answer. Velikovsky summed up Conant’s main point in this way: “The public’s part in the enterprise is to provide funds…”

Harold C. Urey, a professor of chemistry at the University of California (San Diego) wrote in a letter (March 7, 1969) to student Katherine Lindeman: “Velikovsky is a tragedy. He has misguided people like you in great numbers, and my advice is to shut the book and never look at it again in your lifetime.”

David Stove wrote of the ‘Scientific Mafia’ in a paper appearing in ‘Honi Soit’, a campus publication of the University of Sydney, Australia. This wasn’t the only time the term came up. The Italian scientist De Finetti compared the orthodox scientific complex to “…a despotic and irresponsible Mafia”.

Henry H. Bauer, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute was another who wrote a book to discredit Velikovsky. In ‘Beyond Velikovsky’, Bauer wrote (page 133) “To my own satisfaction, then, I have concluded that Velikovsky’s ideas about matters of natural science are not worth taking seriously.” In his book, Bauer quoted the publisher of the popular science journal ‘Scientific American’ regarding the total boycott on Velikovsky’s views in that publication as saying: “We have not encountered a single scientist working in any of the many fields, from archaeology to astrophysics, on which Velikovsky touches who finds any interest whatever in anything he has to say. That is why you have not seen any account of Velikovsky in our pages…”

Bauer wrote: “Of course Velikovsky probably is wrong. It is impossible to imagine that one man could single-handedly refute most twentieth-century science…” Here, I would like to raise a question: Given sufficient insight, would it be wrong for one to try?

Velikovsky wasn’t some ancient whose pursuit of truth could be regarded with condescension. He was a contemporary of his critics and, they determined, he must be stopped. I have repeated Velikovsky’s transgression of more than half a century ago as my writing provides new knowledge to scientists and to the general public simultaneously, instead of (here I quote Velikovsky) “…couching it in incomprehensible scientific jargon and submitting it to a closed circle in an inner chamber.”

Carl Sagan made an interesting comment in ‘Cosmos’ (p.177): “Whether Thales’ conclusion was correct is not as important as his approach…” If Sagan had applied this attitude to Velikovsky’s works a more rational conclusion might have been the result. I don’t want to hear whether Velikovsky was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. He left us a gift which amounted to a revolution in methodology, and scientists should have had the grace to accept it with gratitude. Instead, they endeavored to destroy him.

Outraged scientists, whose doubts about some of Velikovsky’s claims were probably real enough, demonstrated that they were prepared to go to any lengths to defend their positions. The Macmillan Company was forced to give away publication of ‘Worlds in Collision’, which was listed as a top-ten bestseller on the ‘New York Times’  list for 27 consecutive weeks. This was because across America, Macmillan’s salespeople were being denied access to university campuses as the result of a criminal secondary boycott, and textbook sales represented the main part of the company’s business. Velikovsky was denied access to scientific journals for his replies while continuing to be a target for abuse and derision by members of the orthodox scientific community.

Occam’s Razor

One of the criteria by which a scientific claim is judged is the economy of the theory compared with that of competing theories. A scientific and philosophical rule known as ‘Occam’s razor’ is held to require that the simpler of competing theories should be preferred to the more complex. In ‘The ABC of Relativity’, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Of the possible laws, we choose the simplest one which predicts the actual motion of bodies correctly: logic and experience combine in equal proportions in obtaining this expression.”

The simplest, therefore, or as scientists prefer to describe it, the “most elegant” theory that explains the process should be preferred as the true one. Unfortunately, in common practice, this has come to mean that the simplest process is the true one, and it is on this precise point that the scientists made a major blunder.

The exquisite order of the planets and moons, the almost perfectly circular orbit of Venus, and the completeness with which gravitational theory was able to explain every question of celestial mechanics that had been put to it convinced the scientists that they were right and Velikovsky was wrong. They saw the order of our Solar System as being governed by gravity alone, and if this were so, the disruptions described in ‘Worlds in Collision’ could not have taken place. Gravity alone, however, does not govern our Solar System, and when Velikovsky told us that the Sun and the planets are electrically charged, he was drawing our attention to one of the most important properties of the Cosmos.

A lead scientist at NASA’s JPL told me in 1994 that he doesn’t believe Earth has an electric charge. That it does can be readily demonstrated by one of the simplest geophysical instruments of all, the gold-leaf electroscope. This instrument is so sensitive that after being grounded at ground level, by the time it is raised head-high it is showing an electric charge. Early scientists took an electroscope up in a manned balloon to see if they could get above the charged zone but, of course, they could not. Since NASA has since reported its surprise at recognizing an electric charge on an asteroid, the scientist may have changed his opinion by now.

Unrecognized by scientific orthodoxy, and without obvious effect upon the orbits of the planets, it is the electromagnetic force that enables our Solar System, and our Galaxy, to function. Velikovsky’s claims on the effects of solar and planetary electric fields were ridiculed by the scientists because their gravitational calculations all worked out even though electromagnetic influences had been disregarded. Electromagnetic forces play a dominant role in our Solar System and our Galaxy, however, becoming evident from time to time.

In a paper copyrighted in 1972, Ralph E. Juergens reminded us of a little-known phenomenon that had been given the distinctive name ‘The space-charge sheath’. Investigated in the 1920s and seemingly forgotten after that, it provided the key to a plausible model for the functioning of our Solar System, an outline of which I am pleased to present in ‘martiangrandpa.com’. The space-charge sheath is not personal wear for astronauts but describes how charged particles in a plasma collect within a zone of limited extent about a charged body until the outer edge of the zone carries a charge that is the same as the charge on the surrounding plasma. A sheath of positively charged plasma particles, attracted to a negatively charged body, effectively constitutes a sort of electromagnetic insulation.

The flight of Mariner 2 in 1962 revealed interplanetary space contains positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons, which is to say, a plasma. This discovery changed the rules of the game because while the effective range of influence of an electrically charged body in a vacuum approaches infinity, with its strength reducing as the square of the distance, the effect in a plasma is limited to a finite distance by the space-charge sheath. A practical example is that in a vacuum, Mars and Earth would perturb each other’s orbits by their electrical charge as well as by their mass, while in a plasma only their mass has any effect. The argument put forward by the astronomers that the extent to which their gravitational theories explaining celestial mechanics proved Velikovsky wrong, lost its credibility in 1962.

Planets in their present orbits interact only through the relatively weak force of gravity, but when planets draw close on intersecting paths, much stronger electromagnetic forces come into play. As worlds draw close, their rotational axes may tilt and lightning bolts discharge between them. An isolated body would eventually acquire the same charge as the surrounding plasma, and its space-charge sheath would disappear unless its charge was continually being renewed.

Ray Craters

Velikovsky recognized that ray-craters on the Moon are the result of electrical discharges between worlds, and ‘The Iliad’ describes Mars charging at our Moon (both are represented as gods) and hurling spears at her. These ‘spears’, seen from Earth, were lightning bolts which resulted in ray craters. Lunar craters resulting from electrical discharges would be expected to have steep walls, roundish outlines, and glazed surfaces. Later Apollo missions encountered glass covering rounded and steeply walled ray craters, all of which were attributed to asteroid impacts.

It is rare to find any natural glass on Earth that is older than 50 million years old since older glass has crystallized and fragmented by then. Scientists claim that some glass on the Moon is billions of years old and that the devitrification of glass on Earth is due to the presence of water. This explanation is based on their belief, without any proof, that the moon craters being investigated are billions of years old. Water is relevant to their argument only to the extent that rock surfaces on Earth are subject to normal erosional processes.

Pliny, in his ancient book ‘Natural History’, drew attention to a lake in Italy, surrounded by cinders, that was said to have been formed by a “thunderbolt from the heavens”. If this is true there could be other lakes on Earth which formed as a result of interplanetary electrical discharges. I expect they would be roundish and deep and could be surrounded by cinders. Most likely they have been mistaken for volcanic craters or maars.

Maars are typically round craters, surrounded by cinders that have been ejected by repeated gas explosions. One was actually observed forming in Mexico last century, while two geologically Recent maars (the Soda Lakes) occur on the outskirts of Fallon, Nevada. You can easily locate them on GoogleEarth.

Our Heritage

Between about 1522 B.C. and 687 B.C. (3540 and 2705 years before 2018), our ancestors experienced seven close encounters with other worlds: two with Venus and later, five with Mars. There were, living at the time, sophisticated people of considerable learning who recorded their observations by every means available to them. Their eye-witness accounts of terrifying personal experiences have come down to us in writings, as well as in oral histories that were written down later. Many of the stories in the ‘Old Testament’ are set against a backdrop of catastrophe, as is ‘The Iliad’ and many others including Chinese books of that same period.

As Velikovsky commented, the later encounters with Mars, which took place from 747 BC to 687 BC “…did not take place in a mist-shrouded past; the period is part of the well-authenticated history of the lands of the eastern Mediterranean.” Numerous records written down at the time can be read today. We cannot simply pretend that none of this took place.

A new age dawned with a new calendar, and with a new planet, Venus, visible in the night sky. Early Roman history records that comets were numerous then, some so bright they could be seen during the day, while earthquakes shook Rome every few days. And a story that was ancient even long before the time of ‘Exodus’ told of a flood that covered the Earth. Stories of such antiquity have been automatically denied by our scientists, who have demonstrated remarkably little interest in considering why similar stories were shared by civilizations around the world that had no contact with one another.

Our history is too important to be denied us by members of a pretentious modern cult which has invented its own version of the past. So much has happened in the last 4,000 years, while the age of the Earth is more than a million times as great, that it is unreasonable to interpret that great expanse of time according to only what we see around us today.

Astronomers have never been noted, as a group, for being knowledgeable about ancient history. Under the cult of ‘uniformism’, however, they feel justified in developing fairy tales about their science, while dismissing a wealth of historical records that are in total disagreement. There is not a shred of evidence, for example, that planets or moons originated in their present orbits, or that they have never moved from them. This is just something that struck someone as a good idea at the time. Our ancestors, who lived only 2,700 years ago, experienced terrors of which modern astronomers have no appreciation.

Immanuel Velikovsky challenged modern astronomy, and for his efforts, he was attacked by what has been described as a “scientific mafia”, which engineered a criminal secondary boycott against his publisher. Velikovsky made mistakes, but one has to wonder about a profession that is so unsure of itself to go to such lengths as preventing publication of a book with which they disagreed. It tends to be the sciences based least upon feedback from reality and most upon conjecture, that offer the less reasoned responses to criticism. As Velikovsky put it “If, in matters of science, the opinion of the majority decides where truth lies, then the Earth was the center of the Universe until about 300 years ago.”

Why is it that ancient myths of civilizations around the world concern themselves with the birth of Venus, but not with the birth of any other planet? A new generation needs to examine Velikovsky’s claims one more time, leaving aside his conclusions about the origin of Venus, which he got wrong, and to consider the valuable heritage that our ancestors left us. This is our history; it belongs to us and we are entitled to it. It involves observations of the terrors and beliefs of generations before ours, which experienced them. Many competent historians have spent their entire careers investigating the history of those times. Astronomers have an obligation to the society that supports them to be less pretentious, and more open to the consideration of ideas that are at variance with their present claims.

At its annual meeting in Cleveland, in December 1950, ‘The American Association for the Advancement of Science’ grappled with the question of how scientists might better exercise control over theories perceived to be to their disadvantage. It was proposed that a “jury of peers” (censorship board?) should be required to consider new theories before they could be published, in order (what else?) “…to protect the public”. Would such a jury have passed the heresies of Aristarchus? Copernicus? Galileo? Newton? Darwin? Pasteur? Fleming? Einstein? The probabilities can hardly be viewed as encouraging.

William A. Irwin, reviewer, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas wrote in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, in April 1952 “Rampant superstition is intolerant; when it gains the power, it decides by its own distorted principles what may and may not be said or published.”

I have respected Velikovsky’s accomplishments while still drawing attention to certain errors appearing in his book ‘Worlds in Collision’. My advantage is that I have the benefit of more than half a century of additional scientific investigation including space exploration, to draw upon. Overall, Velikovsky’s book was a phenomenon.

It reminds me of a quote taken from the movie, ‘Phar Lap’ which is about a fabulous Australian racehorse brought to race at Calienté, near Tijuana. After breaking the course record it was found poisoned. In the movie, the American promoter opined: “When something’s good, that’s fine, but when something’s too good it upsets the whole system.”

To a degree, I have attempted to emulate Velikovsky. I have expressed my own ideas on science, and I have focused attention on where Velikovsky’s writing attracted particular criticism. Time alone will tell the extent to which I have succeeded.

CHAPTER 4

Atlantis

The Caribbean Sea is linked to the destruction of Atlantis
as reported by Plato.

Atlantis

Ignatius L. Donnelly, a U.S. Congressman who served in the 1860’s, was ahead of his time on a number of significant issues, including women’s suffrage and education for freed slaves. This may have been why his best-known book, ‘Atlantis: The Antediluvian World’ was so savagely attacked by critics, just as Immanuel Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision’ would be similarly attacked upon its publication 68 years later. Donnelly accepted Plato’s dialogues ‘Timaeus’ and ‘Critias’ in a historical tradition rather than following the allegorical interpretations of Renaissance writers.

Donnelly accepted that Atlantis had been destroyed in the same event that led to the ‘Flood Story’ in the ‘Book of Genesis’, and that its sudden annihilation by earthquake, flood, and volcanism actually took place. Plato said that it had happened 9,000 years before he recounted his story, “acquired directly from Egyptian priests” (approximately 2,400 years from today). In a somewhat condescending criticism in ‘Worlds in Collision’ (page 147), Velikovsky claimed: “There is one zero too many here.” as he sought to include the destruction of Atlantis into his own timetable of more recent catastrophism.

It wasn’t Plato who was mistaken, however, and his date for the catastrophe should be compared to the one I have offered, 10,500 years, or perhaps slightly more, based on laboratory analyses. I believe Atlantis existed “…beyond the pillars of Hercules” (Gibraltar) as the Egyptian priests had recounted to Plato. This would place it in the vicinity of the Azores, on the mid-Atlantic Ridge, just as Iceland is also situated on the Ridge.

Whatever the truth about the details of Atlantis, which has been distorted with mythology over fifteen centuries, and nonsense in modern times, I believe that the essential story of Atlantis is true. “In a terrible day and a night (Plato), assailed by earthquake, flood and volcanic activity, Atlantis sank beneath the sea, which had changed to stone.” The stone was pumice, which floats, expelled from volcanos and vents along the mid-Atlantic ridge as Atlantis sank beneath the waves, following the impact of the asteroid 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) to the southwest.

It has been supposed that Atlantis is merely a myth and that sudden, spectacular advances were made in agriculture, technology, and many other fields, in Egypt some 10,000 years or so ago. It is more likely that survivors from Atlantis and from outposts on the mainland – ancestors of the Pharaohs and their people, ended up in Egypt’s fertile Nile Delta, where they continued to practice and develop technology that was already known to them, and where their priests kept the history of Atlantis alive.

The Flood Story

“…all the fountains of the great deep (were) broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”
Genesis 7:11

Every society on Earth has its Flood story, for this was the greatest catastrophe to have taken place within the memory of humankind, so it is not surprising that its story was passed down for half a thousand human generations. What is remarkable is that so few modern scientists accept it. The biblical story of Noah and the ark is a fable, but the story of the flood is a legend based on real human experience. The religion of the descendants of any human survivors of the next major axis change will incorporate stories of that catastrophe.

Some of the first geologists were religious fundamentalists who traveled around England examining the rocks and seeking confirmation of the Noachian flood described in the ‘Book of Genesis’. Because numerous worldwide floods have occurred, they recognized the evidence everywhere they looked and concluded from this that the Bible is right.

At the time, a growing secular movement was drawing its members away from the traditional teachings of the Church and promoting the idea of free thought. That the religious scientists (today, they would be called Creationists) were claiming the Bible was right was anathema to secular scientists, who took the position that there had never been a flood. Astonishingly, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that remains their position today.

Inertia is the tendency of matter to either remain at rest or to continue in uniform motion in a straight line. When contemplating a large axis change, consider the inertia of an ocean. It has a rotational velocity at the equator, of over 1,000 mi. (1,600 km) per hour, while at the geographic poles the rotational velocity is zero. Clearly, the potential of an oceanic flood to scour the land, or to bury it with sediments, can be immense.

Furthermore, if a duration of 40 minutes (which is what a longitude change of 10⁰ suggests) was required for the poles to move 1,650 miles (2,650 km), the rate at which the change took place along the meridian of maximum change was 2,475 mi. (close to 4,000 km) per hour! Although water would lag behind, this describes an incredibly destructive force. It should be kept in mind that the change over most of the world was less extreme, with two points on the Earth’s surface not changing their latitude and longitude at all. Of course, if one or both points are in an ocean, there might not be much reduction in the violence experienced there.

At an axis change, continents plunge beneath the oceans, and floods that are kilometers-deep roll over the continents. Vegetation and animals are swept away, and overburden scoured down to bedrock. Water can also be dragged north or south to where its rotational velocity is inappropriate for its latitude, further increasing its erosive power.

It is common to think of Earth as being spherical, but the flattening at each pole is more than 21 km (13 mi.), which is almost 2½ times the height of Mt. Everest above sea level. When these Polar Regions are rotated to lower latitudes, low lands immediately fill with water. Thousands of years are required for Earth to regain its preferred shape. As this takes place, the displaced geomagnetic poles move slowly closer to the geographic poles, and the total magnetic field strength, having increased at the catastrophe, gradually weakens again. Unexplained bulges on Earth’s surface may be the result of axis changes or close encounters, that haven’t yet healed.

Fossils

The last flood submerged animal species that would never live on Earth again, burying large mammals along the Arctic coast with mud scoured from the depths of the Arctic Ocean. This mud was below the freezing point of freshwater and was free of aerobic bacteria so that frozen remains of the animals are well preserved to this day.

The presence of these remains does not prove the animals ever lived in that area, and where their remains are numerous it doesn’t prove they lived in large groups. At the other end of North America, remains of sabertooth tigers are found at La Brea, in California. They could not have simply got stuck in the tar or they would be well preserved!

Well, yes, we know that their bones are well preserved, but their bodies were typically torn apart as they mixed with water-degraded petroleum from a major oil release along the California coast. Perfect skeletons have been prepared for display because so many bones are available, but it is unusual for one to be completely made up of bones of the same individual. Notably few herbivores are included in the formation because the flotation characteristics of dead herbivores differ markedly from those of dead carnivores.

Dead herbivores floated away as methane from rotting vegetation collected in their bellies, while dead carnivores sank into the thick, degraded oil. La Brea is much more than just a collection of tar ‘pits’. It is a sub-outcropping geological formation consisting primarily of degraded oil and animal bones, extending for several miles along the coast. Although rare, it is not unique.

Previous Floods

“…neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Genesis 9:11

There have been many floods over at least the past 541 million years. Based on this record, and in conflict with the biblical claim above, there will be many more! The most recent flood due to impact occurred about 10,500 years ago, while the previous one occurred about 63,000 years earlier, and there is some evidence that the one before occurred only 76,000 years earlier.

If there is any inference that could be taken from this, taking into account historical records, it is that the frequency of major impacts has been increasing. If an interval between major impacts of only 70,000 years or so were representative of the distant past, it is doubtful whether any large land animals would be left on Earth, including us.

With every impact of this magnitude, most land-dwelling animals on Earth die. Most fossils are formed at these times, explaining why the fossil record is so discontinuous. It is not uncommon for species that are plentiful at the end of one period to never again appear in the geologic record. As the reader will have realized by now, most divisions of geologic time into eras and periods, throughout the entire Phanerozoic eon (the past 541 million years) have been due to oceanic floods that resulted from the impact of large asteroids.

Oceanic floods as a result of major asteroid impacts constitute a dominant form of catastrophism affecting our planet, and the stratigraphic record attests to their recurrence, at least since the end of Precambrian time. They have repeatedly turned over a new leaf in the book of evolution, destroying the trilobites and the dinosaurs and the mammoths, and millions of species in between. The most recent flood may have destroyed more large mammalian species than any previous one. Large animals that lie preserved along the Arctic coast of North America arrived almost literally, in two waves. Each oceanic flood was the result of an axis change following a major impact. Dating of these animals’ remains has indicated they arrived about 10,500 and 75,000 years ago.

Calcrete

There have been many floods, and some landforms required more than one flood to develop. A good example is the ‘mesa and butte’ topography that has come to typify the American southwest. It’s the one with all the box canyons where the bad guys hang out in the old ‘Westerns’. A mesa has an extensive plateau on top or is connected to a ‘mainland’, while a butte stands alone.

As seawater evaporates after a flood and is drawn to the surface by the Sun, a layer of impure limestone develops close to the surface. It is frequently a meter or more, thick, depending on the porosity and permeability of the surface. (Geology students think of a light bulb to remember the difference: a light bulb has infinite porosity and zero permeability.)

Calcrete (also called duricrust or caliche) is the bane of mineral exploration geologists seeking sub-surface samples in arid areas, as an expensive, massive bulldozer with a ripper must often substitute for a tractor-mounted backhoe. In arid regions, however, this limestone has found use where timber is scarce, as building-material for dwellings and walls to contain livestock, for road building material, and even for walls to support agricultural terraces along canyons, as I have seen practiced in what is now Israel. Sediment was then laboriously carried up from the river below to provide soil to grow crops.

An oceanic flood can result in the formation of calcrete as a shallow limestone bed, or sometimes an irregular bed having prominent vertical extensions. It tends to persist in a largely unaltered state, preventing the development of agriculture or most plant growth. The calcrete surface may be resistant to destruction by an oceanic flood at first, but then it is attacked by density currents containing particle sizes up to boulders at the base of the flood.

As the shallow calcrete layer is breached, valleys form, with tributaries flowing into them. Density currents at the base of the high energy flood undercut cliffs, which are rapidly eroded, leaving mesa and butte topography. When a waterfall in a stream, which has eroded its way back over a calcrete bed, stops flowing, a box canyon is left behind as a common feature.

Extinctions

The extinction of Pleistocene megafauna around 10,500 years ago has been attributed to hunting pressure by native people, climatic change, disease and (finally) asteroid impact. Of course, the aspect of “asteroid impact” that has always been missed is the oceanic flood that accompanies an axis change. Just considering North America, the place was a zoo, with several elephant species, more familiar horses and camels; saber-toothed tigers, and giant versions of present tortoises, beavers, sloths, bears, and bison. A complete list would be much longer, including extinct reptiles, birds, fish, and insects.

Australia underwent a similar extinction of its giants, and their remains occur in cave systems beneath the western desert. Another significant change to Australia was the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef. Until the most recent major axis change, the eroded shelf that was to host the Great Barrier Reef was situated outside of the tropics and may even have been above sea level.

Any humans living along the Queensland coast would have been removed by the oceanic flood, but others migrated there soon after. It is remarkable that their descendants, 10,500 years later, can recount stories of the sea level rising and flooding this broad shelf which did not yet support corals. The rising sea level was due to melting ice from the shattered ice caps.

Flooding of the shelf in its new tropical environment occurred, fortuitously, to an average depth of some 35 meters, which is about as deep as light can penetrate water with any strength, thus providing an ideal environment for a wide range of tropical corals. I would like to know if stories have persisted in Australia about the oceanic flood itself. The continent is known to have been populated before then, so there were either flood survivors from higher ground, or else newcomers who arrived on the continent soon after.

Much of Australia has low relief, so floodwaters might not have reached as high as elsewhere, even though the continent is only some 30⁰ from the meridian of maximum latitude change. One might expect, therefore, that there are Australian Aboriginals who are descended directly from some living on the continent about the time of the axis change. If so, flood memories may have been passed down, just as they have been elsewhere around the world.

People and animals on low islands are especially vulnerable to oceanic flood resulting from axis change. Kelly and Dachille pointed out clear evidence of past depopulation, comparing contrasting ecological systems between neighboring Pacific islands. It is most likely that the depopulation of these islands is so evident because a huge wave crossed the Pacific around 3,540 years ago (2018). Furthermore, there was a sudden drop in sea level of 20 feet (6 meters) at that time, prior to which, some presently populated islands would have been below sea level. (See #10: Venus.)

The result of this sudden drop in sea level can still be recognized today. Many of the ‘raised’ benches in the tropics are former coral reefs that were right at sea level at low tide. They are easy to recognize, so look for them on your next vacation to the tropics. Hawaii’s famous Pali cliffs were sculpted by the water of oceanic floods that have passed completely over the lower islands, no doubt removing most animal life there each time.

There are some problematic sites that will be destroyed by the next axis change. Nuclear power stations and nuclear waste and weapons dumps will be obliterated, and radioactive detritus will be widely scattered, some with half-lives of a billion years. Some of it will be deeply buried, but may still be in contact with ground-water. Another installation at risk, due to its location on Spitsbergen, 1,100 kilometers from the Geographic North Pole and 130 m (430 ft.) above sea level, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. A small axis change moving it southward might render it permanently inaccessible beneath the sea. Movement of the North Geographic Pole during the last axis change was twice the distance between Spitzbergen and the present geographic North Pole.

The seed vault is a “fail-safe…facility built to stand…the challenge of natural…disasters.” (taken from their website.) Its stated purpose is to guarantee future crop diversity and is being partly financed by some of the world’s largest agribusiness giants involved with the development of genetically modified plants. This leads one to question the kinds of catastrophes that have been envisaged to threaten the future availability of current seeds. Axis change might not have been one of them.

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”
Will Durant

Evidence for Axis Change & Oceanic Floods

• Most people other than scientists, associate the formation of major ice sheets with Polar Regions. Ice sheets are moved from Polar Regions to lower latitudes by axis change. There has been much speculation by Canadian geologists about why Pleistocene ice in the Canadian Arctic moved north. At the time, however, the ice was moving south.
• Pleistocene glaciation in Australia is claimed to have occurred in Permian time (which ended about 252 million years ago). Glaciated outcrops on islands along the south coast of Australia, however, are just as smooth and polished and exposed as those of the Canadian Shield. Parts of South America and Africa that were glaciated in Permian time are covered with thick residual soil, and no outcrops of polished rock occur.
• Australia was closer to the Antarctic Circle before the last axis change, and glaciation along its southern coast, northward into the interior, occurred then. The ‘snowball Earth’ concept, described in some older geology texts, was based upon evidence of glaciation occurring at presently tropical latitudes, as a result of axis change.
• It is claimed that thick beds of sandstone and shale exposed along the walls of the Grand Canyon were deposited gradually over millions of years. Local rivers would not have carried only mud for millions of years, however, and then changed suddenly to carrying only sand. These are rapidly deposited oceanic flood deposits, as are most sedimentary rocks on Earth.
• Great Salt Lake persists as a fading memory of former Lake Bonneville. That huge lake, in a notably arid climate, was not only almost 1,000 ft. (300 m) higher than the present lake level, but its outflow cut two deep canyons. Established lakes don’t have more than one outlet, and Great Salt Lake has none. In the Great Basin of the western United States, calcareous tufa (a precipitate formed by marine algae) was deposited on rocky shorelines of more than a hundred lakes, including Great Salt Lake, showing that they contained seawater. Some reflect two successive fillings, and Dry Falls, in Grand Coulee, Washington State, shows that it was cut by two successive floods.
• Marine life is stranded in inland lakes by every oceanic flood when every lowland basin on Earth is filled with saltwater and sometimes adapts to the new conditions. From jellyfish in Lake Tanganyika to crustaceans in Lake Titicaca, marooned species occur around the world. In the Caspian Sea, seals feed on salmon and herring, while in Lake Baikal, seals and sponges live together with fish from the ocean. Seals also live in inland lakes in Quebec. Whales proved to be less adaptable, but their skeletons have been found on the shores of Lake Champlain, in several dry lake beds in North Africa, within the Los Angeles Basin, and at numerous former lakes now far from the sea.
• Caspian Sea seals are so similar to Arctic seals that some scientists postulated a canal between the two regions at some time “in the past.” It was easier for them to accept a canal 3,000 km (1,850 mi.) in length, for which there is not a shred of evidence than to accept the reality of oceanic flood.
• River terraces result from floods pouring off a continent. Terraces along the Mississippi River have been claimed, without evidence, to have formed hundreds of thousands of years apart. It is remarkable then, that in an area of high precipitation, the highest terrace (claimed to be the oldest) is just as well preserved as the lowest. Marine terraces occur along major river valleys around the world and all are the product of oceanic flood. Some notable North American examples are the Yukon River in Alaska, the San Juan in New Mexico, and the Stikine in British Columbia.
• The greatest canyons on Earth lie beneath the sea, some being deeper than Grand Canyon in Arizona. Many are extensions of river valleys, formed as sediment-laden flood water returned to the sea. Others lack a land association and formed as furious flood tides were channeled between islands. Impressive submarine canyons exist between the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, and among the Santa Barbara Islands off California. The English Channel also displays evidence of deep scouring. Antarctica and Greenland lack well-developed submarine canyons because floodwater flowing off an ice cap carries little sediment, and it is sediment that causes most of the erosion.
• River valleys have served repeatedly as conduits for the return of floodwater to the ocean, which is why river valleys are so large compared to the rivers that now occupy them. Some flood runoff channels carried off a significant part of the water from an entire continent. The satellite photo depicts the mouth of the Mackenzie River in Arctic Canada. The blue meandering stream is the “mighty Mackenzie River”, as it is so often described, while the dark, cliff-bordered swath occupying the lower half of the photo is the oceanic flood runoff channel. The width of the present meandering river is less than 3% of the width of the flood channel.
• Animal bones of many species, mostly broken and splintered, are packed into several rock fissures in Europe. So prolific were some deposits that the bones of hippopotami have been quarried, as near Palermo in Sicily, to provide high-quality bone ash for industrial use. Some bone-packed fissures are high on steep hillsides, lacking access for large animals. Immanuel Velikovsky drew attention to this though few cared to listen.
• The most recent flood occurred in summer in the northern hemisphere, for some animals entombed in permafrost have flowering plants in their mouths. Some members of big game species that survived must have been on their high summer range, while others on the lowlands were swept away. The largest and strongest animals appropriate the lowlands for themselves, where food is most plentiful and the climate most temperate. Then, after they have been removed by a flood, species that had been pushed back to the hinterlands venture forth to investigate what new opportunities are available to them. Repeatedly, have the meek inherited the Earth.
• Humans, also, were saved by the season. After floodwaters receded in America humans came down from the highlands and skilled craftsmen again manufactured their traditional Clovis and Folsom-type spear points to hunt the elephant species on which they had depended. Those large animals were gone, however, and from then on they manufactured smaller stone points to fit their arrows.
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  Furthermore, the claim of some anthropologists that people who made the spear points were replaced by a different race that made arrowheads would be a bit like anthropologists of the future concluding that the race that made radios died out and was replaced by a superior civilization that made television sets. People adapt to changing circumstances.

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  Kelly and Dachille quote Indian legends indicating that many people survived the impact in the valley of Mexico City. Also, people responsible for the Folsom and Clovis points survived 1,000 miles further north, as did people who made similar points found at Wenatchee, in Washington state. There could have been other groups of survivors scattered throughout the western Cordillera.

• Where the waters slowed, they deposited a layer of sandy silt, as if to compensate for all that had been taken away. Enriched by plant remains over thousands of years, it constitutes our topsoil. Most agriculture on Earth is dependent upon this precious layer.
• Boulders of a different type than the bedrock on which they are found, and lacking any nearby source, are termed ‘erratics’. Unfortunately, the definition provided in geological dictionaries defines them as having been left by glaciers or icebergs. In fact, erratics situated high up on islands far from any mainland are most likely to have been moved there by oceanic floods. In Antarctica, the Shackleton expedition found granite boulders high on the slopes of volcanic Mt. Erebus.
• Drumlins are oriented gravel ridges, often with associated bedrock erosion, formed as deep floodwater lying on a continent forced its way under an ice cap by hydrostatic pressure, quickly breaking up the icecap. Another common glacial feature in northern Canada is the ‘esker’. Once said to represent the courses of streams that flowed beneath glaciers, this was discredited by the fact that many course up and down hills. As the ice cap broke up, sediment was heaped by floodwaters against ice blocks, and after the ice melted or was removed, eskers remained. They present an asymmetric cross-section, with the steeper side against the ice and the shallower side away from the ice.
• C. Chamberlin (1843-1928) was an influential geologist who headed the glacial division of the U.S. Geological Survey. He was a professor at several American universities and founded the ‘Journal of Geology’. He claimed to have recognized five separate advances of the ice sheet over the north-eastern United States and even gave them names that are still in use by geologists today. The earliest is known as the ‘Nebraskan’, followed by the ‘Kansan’, ‘Illinoian’, ‘Iowan’, and ‘Wisconsin’. Each accumulation of till was caused by runoff from an individual transgression of the sea. Instead of them being separated by “many thousands of years”, as Chamberlin claimed, their formations were separated by hours, and there were no interglacial stages.
• It used to be taught that at the end of each geological period the land “sank beneath the sea”, re-emerging as if responding to a need to breathe the air again, as the next geological period began. Water flowed onto the land during an axis change, depositing sediments or eroding them, before flowing back to the sea. The evidence left by shallow seas is very different from sediments left by oceanic floods, and I have known petroleum geologists to describe flood deposits of eroded reef material, spread evenly over hundreds of square miles, as ‘reefs’ because they contain fossils of reef-forming animals.
• Similarly, ‘transgressive seas’ are always the result of an oceanic flood. A normal sea advancing against the land never leaves behind smooth, parallel, sedimentary beds over large areas.
• Zircon crystals found distributed across the North American continent have been interpreted as being deposited by a system of giant rivers that must have existed to carry them from their Appalachian source rocks. No evidence of these rivers exists and distribution of the zircons must be a result of oceanic floods.
• Mammoth dung discovered in caves on the Colorado Plateau contains a floral assemblage which now occurs only at higher elevations, or at more northerly latitudes (OMNI magazine, May 1991). The south boundary of the state of Colorado is some 1,850 km (1,150 mi.) further from the North Geographic Pole than it was 10,500 years ago. As a result, that floral assemblage from the Colorado Plateau now grows, at the same elevation, in the vicinity of Prince George, British Columbia.
• Marine terraces at Palos Verdes, California which mount to an elevation of 400 m (1,300 ft.) continue as submarine terraces to a depth of 150 m (500 ft.). One explanation provided for their origin is that terraces above sea level were cut by the sea from top to bottom, and the subterranean terraces were then cut from bottom to top. The only problem was that nobody had come up with a process to accomplish this.
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  A term used in one textbook to describe what transpired is “eustatically consociated diastrophism”. When terms like this are employed it is fair to conclude that the writer has a somewhat less than total grasp on what took place. Velikovsky stated that clear writing is a sign of clear thinking.

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  The terraces were cut by powerful longshore currents. The very highest terrace, or else the very lowest, was cut first. Then, as the ocean continued to slosh back and forth after the axis change, becoming progressively calmer, it proceeded to cut the second-highest or second-lowest, and so on.

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  Longshore currents produced terraces elsewhere along the California coast. At Cape Mendocino, a “staircase” of five terraces, each 30 to 45 m (100 to 150 ft.) in height above sea level was described in a 1976 issue of ‘California Geology’. Readers were informed that “…this showed the coast has been rising steadily for some 500 thousand years at a rate of 2 or 3 centimeters per century.”

• Gold sluicing operations in Alaska have given up the remains of many large animals. Dismembered and disarticulated, sometimes with flesh still attached to the bones, the remains of mammoths, mastodons, rhinoceroses, horses and many others lie entombed in the permafrost. They lie interspersed with shattered trees and covered with mud and silt from the bottom of the sea. Some deposits were laid down approximately 10,500 years ago, others 74,000 years ago. Human remains must lie there also for when Earth’s axis changed, only those above flood level would have been likely to survive.
• The final evidence I shall provide for axis change is the large number of thoughtful, knowledgeable people who over the centuries, have recognized that Earth’s axis has changed. They collected mountains of evidence for it and tried their hardest to convince others. A small sampling of this list includes G.V. Schiaparelli, William Whiston, Georges Cuvier, I.L. Donnelly, Immanuel Velikovsky, Harold Jeffreys, W.B. Wright, Charles Hapgood, Hugh A. Brown, John White, Frank Dachille, and Allan O. Kelly. A complete list would be much longer, extending back to the time of Virgil, and could include some who were ancient even then. Most claimed that the crust of the Earth slipped over its core, compared to the more plausible explanation I have offered that the entire Earth rotated about a temporary, secondary axis in response to the impact of a large asteroid.

Major Past Impacts

Every impact of a sufficiently large asteroid on Earth resulted in an oceanic flood. Some of the largest were also associated with something else. Great eruptions of lava commonly referred to as ‘trap rock’ or ‘traps’, occurring over extended areas, are called ‘flood basalts’. Some of these eruptions have exuded more than a million cubic kilometers of lava and tuff, accompanied by sulfurous gasses, having disastrous implications for most life. The oceans and the atmosphere are turned acidic and poisonous, leading to a collapse of the food chain.

Biologists have recognized what they term a ‘bottleneck’, where a limited number of survivors share a restricted gene pool so that a species may be vulnerable to extinction even thousands of years after the event. The most likely catastrophe in almost every case is axis change due to a meteorite impact, resulting in an oceanic flood. One example is the African cheetah which is known to have passed through a genetic bottleneck about 10,500 years ago. A recognized human bottleneck occurred 74,000 years ago, attributed here to the Mt. Toba volcanic eruption and an oceanic flood that followed the Hudson Bay asteroid impact.

North America had cheetahs as well, but they went extinct at the time of the flood, although they may have left behind a hint of their former presence. It is well established that healthy predators and prey tend to have similar top speeds. The pronghorn antelope, however, easily outrun any present predator, and it is supposed that they were hunted by cheetahs before the flood. The cheetahs went extinct in North America, while the pronghorns survived.

The greatest known mass extinction after the end of Precambrian time occurred at the end of the Permian Period, some 252 million years ago, which was probably associated with the formation of the ‘Siberian Traps’ of eastern Siberia, situated on the opposite side of the world from Africa. A later event formed the ‘Deccan Traps’ of India, which are associated with a major impact (the K-T Boundary) responsible for the collision of India with Asia. Every flood basalt event, as well as some of the largest volcanic eruptions, has probably been in response to a major asteroid impact.

The popular connection between dinosaurs and deserts is largely due to their bones being most easily discovered there as the sand is loose and blows around readily. Dinosaur remains are known to occur almost anywhere on Earth. Large groups occurring together cannot be taken as proof of the animals having lived in groups, or even having lived near to that location. Nesting colonies, of course, are proof of both.

Paleomagnetism

This is the study of the magnetic properties of volcanic rocks, especially their ‘remanent magnetism’ (natural permanent magnetization). It provides information on the position of the closest geomagnetic pole when volcanic rocks crystallized, as well as the intensity of the geomagnetic field. It has lately become popular to add ‘magnetic reversals’ to the terrors that threaten us. Under this scenario, Earth’s magnetic field would disappear, leaving us unprotected from the lethal effects of radiation from space.

This concept was developed after a study of reversed magnetism of rock stripes that parallel the mid-Atlantic ridge. Happily, the situation has been misread, as past axis changes have resulted in volcanic rocks with their crystals aligned to whatever geomagnetic pole happened to be closest at the time of their formation. Sometimes it was the north geomagnetic pole, and sometimes the south. There is no evidence that Earth’s magnetic field has ever reversed, or that it is ever going to. The strength of Earth’s magnetic field increases after each axis change then decreases slowly over following millennia as the magnetic poles draw closer to the geographic poles.

Proofs

1. An obvious proof of some of the above claims is to apply ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar dating to cored basement rock from the Venezuelan Basin and the Columbian Basin. Samples from these locations were collected by the ‘Glomar Challenger’ and are available to recognized researchers. Their age of deposition is approximately 10,500 years, instead of the 90,000,000 years that has been reported by some. (That’s slightly more than .01% of what was claimed.)
2. Modern radiometric dating has been applied to animal remains and wood buried in the permafrost of Alaska and the Yukon. Animals were left by an oceanic flood from an axis change about 10,500 years ago, while an earlier group was entombed about 74,000 years ago. (Mammoth remains on the New Siberian Islands are much younger.)

It is interesting to consider this quote taken from a Wikipedia article entitled ‘True Polar Wander’: “Data indicate that the geographical poles have not deviated by more than about 5⁰ over the last 130 million years…” So much for ‘data’. It is not unusual for scientists to make extravagant claims for some pet theory, in the absence of any credible support. A favorite claimed confidence level is 99%.

Axis Change

In his 1991 book ‘Extinction’, author David Raup has the following to say about the effects of large impacts. “The predicted effects of large impacts include shock waves, tsunamis (tidal waves), acid rain, forest fires, darkness caused by atmospheric dust and soot, and global heating or global cooling.” He evidently wrote down everything that occurred to him at the time, but do you see what is missing? Only axis change, which can produce worldwide volcanism, oceanic floods that can destroy most individuals of higher forms of life over entire continents, and changes in latitude that can make the resultant climate unsuited to the reestablishment of former ecosystems.

Ignorance in geology has distorted every science with which it has come into contact. When geology changes, fundamental beliefs in sciences often thought to have little in common with one another, from astronomy to zoology, will all change.

The 19^th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

 “All truth passes through three stages:

First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

CHAPTER 12

Mars

The weathering of basalt cannot produce quartz sand,
so if sand on Mars is made of quartz,
where did it come from?

Our Neighbor

In the entire Solar System, only Mars and Earth rotate at similar rates and have rotational axes inclined to the ecliptic at similar angles. These similarities may have been established by a close electromagnetic coupling which brought both planets to a common inclination of their rotational axes, and to a common rotational speed. Mars has only 10.8% of the mass of Earth so Mars would have more closely accommodated its rotational parameters to those of Earth.

The distance between Earth and Mars is at a minimum about every 780 days, and their separation at each seventh pass, occurring about every fifteen years, is said to be less than the rest. The frequency of these approaches may reflect a continued adherence to the frequency of catastrophic encounters that took place during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. and which are described by Emmanuel Velikovsky in his book ‘Worlds in Collision’. Earth had five close encounters with Mars from 747 B.C. to 687 B.C. with the latest ones predicted by prophets around the world.

Today, the closest approach of the two planets continues on this same frequency. Mars bears physical evidence of at least two especially close encounters with Earth, and as Velikovsky recounted in detail, a wealth of recorded historical evidence shows that more recent encounters have taken place. Close encounters between Earth and another planet must occur more frequently than the largest asteroid impacts but the record left is less obvious. Mars, like Venus, is known to have a ‘phase lock’ on Earth which means that it presents its same face toward Earth on each closest encounter.

In his book ‘Worlds in Collision’, Immanuel Velikovsky got into trouble when he stepped out of the role of historian and into that of a scientist. Carl Sagan wrote, “…where Velikovsky is original he is very likely wrong; where he is right the idea has been pre-empted by earlier workers.” It is not a sin for a historian to be pre-empted as original historians are called ‘novelists’. As for the claim that planets change their orbits from time to time and interact, it is Velikovsky who was right.

There is a duality to science: one part is technological and the other is interpretive.  The technological part thrills and amazes us and a favorite early example and a tremendous achievement was NASA’s ‘Voyager’ program which acquainted us with the outer planets and their moons. The interpretive side of science can be a different story and the accepted account of the history of Mars for example, and its geomorphology, in particular, is wrong.

This is because some of the most fundamental lessons about our Solar System in general, and Earth in particular, have been mislearned and wrong conclusions from Earth are now being applied to Mars. Much energy has been expended by astronomers to determine the relative ages of Martian surface features by counting craters. Areas with many craters have been concluded to be older by millions of years, than areas having few. It is explained here how most of these craters were formed by a catastrophic process within a few hours.

The Moons of Mars

Mars has two moons, both of which follow orbits that are slightly unstable. Phobos, average diameter 22.3 km (14 mi.) orbits within 6,000 km (3,730 mi.) of the Martian surface. This is close to the ‘Roche limit’, which is the distance at which tidal disruption threatens the moon’s physical integrity. The Roche limit is 2.4 times the radius of a planet for a moon having a similar density. The velocity of Phobos is slowly increasing, which means that its orbit is diminishing in size so that it could eventually strike the Martian surface.

The smaller moon, Deimos, average diameter 12.7 km (8 mi.), orbits at about 20,000 km (12,500 mi.) above the surface of Mars. This is close to the geosynchronous-orbit position and is also close to the outer limit at which the planet is able to retain it. Its velocity is decreasing, which means that it could eventually part company with Mars. Both moons constantly present the same face toward their planet. For comparison, Earth’s moon is an average distance of 384,400 km (238,850 mi.) away.

Neither moon follows orthodox views of how moons are supposed to look or behave. Their general appearance is similar to that of asteroids populating the Main Asteroid Belt, suggesting large asteroids that impacted Earth were not encountered randomly. They may have been brought to Earth as moons of Mars.

Space is vast, and the probability of random collisions between Earth and large asteroids is small. Nonetheless, Earth has a high internal energy level because it has received many major impacts, in even the recent past. It is my guess that the Martian moon Phobos is comparable in size to the asteroid responsible for the impact that formed the Venezuelan Basin.

The moons of Mars orbit so close to their planet that neither would be visible to observers at the Martian poles. They were not discovered until 1877; at least, that is what the history books tell us. Jonathan Swift, however, wrote about two Martian moons, and so had Voltaire, and in allegorical terms, so had Virgil and Homer (‘Worlds in Collision’).

In the book ‘Mars Beckons’, by John Wilford, an old story is repeated that attributes knowledge of the moons to a prediction by Kepler, in 1610. The way the story goes is that two moons appealed to Kepler’s passion for progression, since Venus has no moon, and Earth has one and Jupiter has four (major) moons. Jonathan Swift, however, got more than just their number correct, while Homer and Virgil preceded Kepler.

Swift described their roughly ellipsoidal shapes, as well as their remarkably short periods of revolution, neither of which had any known precedent. As Velikovsky surmised, Swift must have had access to an ancient account that has been lost. During close planetary encounters with Mars in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., the moons would not have escaped detection.

All moons in close orbit having sufficient mass are tidally locked, which means they constantly present the same face to their planet. This is attributed to tidal forces synchronizing the rotation of both bodies. Moons tend to develop hemispheric asymmetry as shown by Earth’s Moon, which has a bulge 1,000 m (3,300 ft.) high. The theory is that the bulge has resulted from the gravitational attraction of Earth acting upon the perpetually presented face. Mars may once have been a moon itself, perhaps of Earth, for its form displays a striking hemispherical asymmetry, with the plane of demarcation inclined at an angle of approximately 30⁰ to the present equator.

Every moon in the Solar System is the result of capture, and no moon developed by accretion in its present orbit. Even those scientists who have recognized that Phobos and Deimos are former asteroids puzzle over how they could have come to Mars, for their dogma precludes any consideration that Mars traveled to them.

Proponents of the new science Chaos Theory have introduced unexpected gravitational instabilities in order to explain the catapulting of asteroids from far beyond the orbit of Mars to the vicinity of Earth orbit. They haven’t recognized that Mars may have a specific function within the Solar System, which involves cycling between the Main Asteroid Belt and the vicinity of Earth orbit. Mars brings large, usually stony asteroids close to Earth which impact Earth whenever Mars loses its hold on them. Each time, another leaf is turned in the book of evolution on Earth, as new points come to occupy the geographic poles and oceanic floods ravage the planet. These events have occurred more recently than most can imagine.

The Lost Planet

Parallel markings on Phobos have been described as grooves, although their similarity in appearance to basaltic flows is striking. If they are flows, they had to form on a world under the influence of gravity. That would be the Lost Planet, debris from which constitutes a major part of the Main Asteroid Belt, right where the Titius-Bode rule predicts that a planet should be. Phobos may be a part of that Lost Planet.

Critics claim that there is not enough mass in the asteroid belt to form a planet, but this claim is irrelevant. Ceres is a small world which bears no relationship to its asteroid neighbors, but if one combines the mass of all present stony to iron asteroids with the large asteroids that have impacted Earth, and consider that others might have impacted other worlds or even left the inner solar system without ever having resided in the Main Asteroid Belt, there could easily be enough.

It has been estimated that there are up to almost half a million asteroids having a diameter exceeding 1 km (0.6 mi.) accompanied by millions of smaller ones. Of the largest, there is estimated to be more than 200 having a diameter exceeding 100 km (60 miles) with another 200 exceeding 6 miles.

Asteroids can be classified in various ways, with one group comprising stony, iron, and stony-iron types. These are all fragments of the Lost Planet and have probably resided within the Main Asteroid Belt since the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary. A different group consists of carbonaceous chondrites, which contain water, organic compounds, and even micro-diamonds, and which may represent the burned-out remains of nucleate comets.

Stony-iron meteorites have been claimed to be 4.6 billion years of age. There is evidence, however, that the meteorites were exposed to cosmic radiation in space for a much shorter period. The frequency of particle tracks in the meteorites resulting from cosmic radiation is much lower than would be expected if the meteorites had been exposed in space for billions of years.

The logical conclusion is that the meteorites were shielded from cosmic radiation within a large protective body. Every stony-iron meteorite tested has provided the same result and it is surmised that their period of exposure has been as short as around one-half billion years.

The dating of particle tracks due to cosmic radiation is not a precise technique, and the destruction of the Lost Planet probably occurred at the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary which is now thought to have been about 544 million years ago. The major catastrophe at this important contact might not have been restricted to Earth, but one that affected the entire Solar System.

An influx of comets from the Oort Cloud would have been part of this indeterminate event. The comets provided Earth with additional seawater, and additional life (in the form of bacteria and viruses), plus hydrocarbons (which provided sustenance for the bacteria), and which brought about the so-called ‘biological big bang’ of the early Cambrian period. By contrast, a sister planet disintegrated, forming the Main Asteroid Belt. That might have been Earth! The proximity of Jupiter could have played a significant role in this event.

We are told that the reason seawater is salty is that salt (NaCl) is being leached out of the rocks. Sodium, and especially chlorine, however, are uncommon in rocks. The salt must have been already a constituent of the water when Earth received its oceans.

The Northern Hemisphere of Mars

The hemisphere north of the demarcation line presents a surface of smooth plains with relatively few craters, dotted with volcanos. Lava, it has been claimed, must have masked all evidence of the previous, heavily cratered terrain which existed there. At least some of the ‘lava’, however, even in one description provided by NASA, is not lava at all, but water-lain sediment as proven by a photo that includes a splosh crater occupying the floor of a larger crater.

Two volcanic centers just north of the geographic equator are situated 90^o of longitude apart, (Mars has been assigned 0^o to 360^o of longitude, unlike Earth which has 180^o East and West.) One of the centers contains three small shield volcanos while the other contains four large shield volcanos and half a dozen small ones. Of the four large volcanos, the most impressive is Olympus Mons. Having a diameter up to 600 km (370 mi.) and standing some 27 km (17 mi.) above the surrounding plain, it is thought to be the largest in the entire Solar System.

Olympus Mons has a sharply defined, complex vent which formed as lava subsided after eruptive episodes. Its shield is encircled by a continuous, slightly eroded escarpment providing a vertical drop of as much as 4 km (2.5 mi.) down to the surrounding plain. The escarpment probably formed as this massive volcano was attracted away from Mars gravitationally during a close encounter with another world. The surrounding area was attracted less strongly and fell away.

The significant gravitational effect suggests the escarpment resulted from close contact with a more massive world. Mars is known to have had close encounters with Earth, which has almost 10 times the mass of Mars, and I suspect that Earth was that world. Again, I am using the term ‘world’ to describe a spherical planet or moon having an iron core surrounded by a stony mantle. I will speculate later about a common origin for every world, and you are already familiar with my claim that some planets and moons have changed roles.

A significant feature associated with Olympus Mons is an extensive adjoining zone of collapsed terrain made up of curved ridges and troughs having their concave side facing the volcano. This area appears to have played an important role in the growth of Olympus Mons. Three neighboring volcanos, considerably smaller than Olympus Mons but still larger than any mountain on Earth, are also partially encircled by faulted escarpments. Their peaks share a remarkably common elevation even though there is as much as 8 km (5 mi.) difference in the height of their bases, indicating gravitational rather than hydrostatic control.

The North Polar Region is crowned by an ice cap displaying a prominent concentric, spiral pattern. Much of this ice cap is permanent, consisting of water-ice. It grows larger each winter and smaller again each summer from the sublimation of carbon dioxide. (Sublimation describes a change of state either from solid to gas or gas to solid.) The dark pattern is due to a spiral arrangement of eroded, terraced canyons along which the underlying surface has been exposed. The spiral direction (observed from above) is counter-clockwise. The canyons are thought to be up to several kilometers wide and more than a kilometer deep. The ice cap is encircled by extensive fields of sand dunes.

The Southern Hemisphere of Mars

The hemisphere south of the demarcation line is densely cratered and rugged. Craters vary in size up to the crater Hellas Planitia, with a diameter of some 1,600 km (1,000 mi.), which is claimed by astronomers to be ‘the largest crater yet discovered in the Solar System’. They will have to drop that claim soon. There is a paucity of smaller craters, compared to the surface of Earth’s moon. There are no young volcanos south of the geographic equator but a crustal bulge on part of the equator is traversed by a most remarkable feature.

Extending for some 4,000 km (2,500 mi), or more than one-fifth of the planet’s circumference, is a complex of canyons so extensive and deep that Earth’s Grand Canyon seems practically insignificant by comparison, and would be scarcely noticed, except for its contrasting appearance, were it to be added as a hanging valley. The canyon ‘Coprates’ alone has a width of more than 150 km (93 mi) and a flat floor as much as 6 km (3.7 mi) lower than the surrounding surface. Its walls have failed extensively by slumping, and are incised by drainage lines along its entire length.

If you examine the image you may notice differences between NASA’s image of Valles Marineris and any similar canyon complex on Earth. The smooth upper elevation surface arrives at the canyon abruptly, with no transition to the canyon walls by water erosion. The main channel floor is remarkably flat from side to side. I believe these differences reflect the contrasting erosional processes that were involved, for Valles Marineris was literally routed out of the Martian surface rather than more slowly eroded by processes familiar to us on Earth.

The South Polar Region has an ice cap as well, much smaller than its northern counterpart, but which displays a complex of similarly terraced canyons. These canyons have a less well defined spiral pattern, but one which trends in the opposite direction to those on the northern ice cap. Just as in the north, sublimated carbon dioxide causes the area of the ice cap to fluctuate with the seasons and it is also encircled by extensive sand dunes.

Geomorphology

Basalt

Basalt on Earth forms by differentiation as mantle peridotite undergoes decompression while approaching the surface. It underlies every ocean on Earth as well as every continent. Earth’s continents are made up partly of granite for which peridotite, and hence basalt, provided original material. A flood of basalt poured onto the surface of India, just as a similar flood had covered much of Siberia, and later, the Columbia River Plateau. Lava floods constitute an anomaly within a plate tectonic system and it is probable that every extensive lava flood on Earth is a consequence of a major impact.

Many stony meteorites consist of basalt, as do the surfaces of our Moon, Venus, and Mars, and it is likely that basalt is the most common crustal material of every rocky world in the Solar System. Basalt is made up of mineral groups known as plagioclase feldspars and ferromagnesian silicates, with occasional traces of quartz, but there is one thing that it does not have. Basalt contains no sand-sized grains of quartz.

Quartz is a common sand-forming mineral that most commonly results from the weathering of granite, and quartz grains accumulate in great quantities on the continental shelves on Earth. When samples of sediment are collected from the Martian surface, the sand dunes should not be overlooked. Determining the composition of the sand dunes will reveal if that sand came from Earth.

I presented a paper on this topic to the Planetary Geology Group at JPL, and it was not well received by one member of the audience who considered himself an expert on all things to do with Mars. After leaving JPL, I remarked that perhaps I should have kept going past Pasadena to Hollywood, because people who deal in fantasy may be more capable of recognizing reality. As a picture hanging on my wall of a polar bear in a snowstorm demonstrates, we recognize anything only by comparing it to something else.

Sand Dunes

Writing in ‘Broca’s Brain’ (page 184), Carl Sagan compared two similar fields of sand dunes. One lies within Great Sand Dunes National Monument, near Alamosa, Colorado, where it has been deposited within a curve made by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The other is on Mars, in an area called Hellespontus, where it occupies an eroded remnant of a large impact crater.

With only moderate exaggeration, Sagan wrote that the two dune fields have the same total extent, the same dune to dune spacing, and the same dune heights. He noted these points and then compared the dissimilar atmospheric pressures of Earth and Mars. After speculating upon different particle size distributions, he posed this question: “How, then, can the dune fields produced by windblown sand be so similar?” (My emphasis)

Since scientists attribute terrestrial sand deposits on Earth to wind, it should come as no surprise that they attribute similar deposits on Mars to wind as well. At this point, a problem should be recognized—which is that Mars has hardly any air. Its atmospheric pressure is less than 1% of that on Earth. The Martian winds can sculpt dunes where they are situated within a crater, such as Hellespontus, but they could not have deposited them there.

Here is a demonstration of how specialization in science can lead us away from reality, and I quote Velikovsky from the final page of his epilogue in ‘Worlds in Collision’: Barriers between sciences serve to create the belief in a scientist in any particular field that other scientific fields are free from problems, and he trusts himself to borrow from them without questioning. It can be seen here that problems in one area carry over into other scientific areas, thought to have no contact with each other.” The dune field on Mars formed more than a million years ago, while the one in Colorado formed 10.5 thousand years ago, but they share a unique bond: They were both formed by the same sea.

Yardangs

A current geology textbook (‘Physical Geology’ by Skinner and Porter) informs that a yardang is “an elongate and streamlined wind-eroded ridge.” So prevalent is the belief that wind is a major agent of erosion on Earth that it has been claimed to be responsible, not only for yardangs but, at least in part, for practically every type of landform in existence.

An earlier textbook (‘Principles of Geomorphology’ by W.D. Thornbury) informs: “Possibly the only topographic form that can be attributed unequivocally to wind abrasion is the yardang.” The term, curiously, was first applied to depressions but is now applied only to ridges. It was always an obscure term in any case—until yardangs were discovered on Mars.

Most scientists do not know that most of Earth’s land surface, including present high altitude areas, has been sculpted by water, due to axis change. Since they attribute yardangs to erosion by the wind on Earth, they naturally attribute them to the same process on Mars. When yardangs were discovered on Mars they were accepted by scientists as proof that wind is a dominant erosional and depositional agent there even though Mars has hardly any air.

Calcrete

In 1976, Viking Lander 1 touched down on a gently rolling volcanic plain, 22^o north of the Martian equator. Images that the spacecraft transmitted to Earth revealed a surface littered with broken rock and low dunes made up of fine-grained sediments. One of the images showed something else.

As the spacecraft braked to slow its descent, exhaust gases from its retro-rockets blasted away unconsolidated surface material to expose a firmer layer of what may prove to be calcrete. A similar bed of limestone forms a layer just below the surface of much of the Earth’s arid areas. Calcrete (also called duricrust, or caliche) forms as sea-water is drawn toward the surface by capillary action. As sea-water evaporates it leaves behind a precipitate of its mineral content, forming a layer of impure limestone. This layer could be widely distributed on Mars, for in one of the Viking Lander experiments, surface material effervesced strongly when brought into contact with hydrochloric acid.

Water

As soon as it became accepted that water had once flowed upon the surface of Mars, speculation began to develop about extensive reservoirs of ice that must have existed within the Martian crust. The heat from volcanic activity must have caused some of this ice to melt, releasing water which created the canyons and channels. Since stream patterns clearly indicate the water flowed from east to west, the source must have been an extensive area of chaotic terrain to the east of the canyons where many of the ‘outflow’ channels begin. Furthermore, splosh craters must have been formed by meteorites impacting icy ground ‘over billions of years’.

As the scientists continued to interpret their own data it confirmed their knowledge about events which, it became increasingly clear to them, had all taken place ‘billions of years ago’. They confirmed the age of the surface by the number of craters that had formed on it over all of that time, and they noted that the floors of the largest craters are level and smooth, further confirming their great age.

It was fascinating to read that the source of the Martian flood has been identified as “springs and precipitation”, for in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 7, Verse 11, it is written: “…the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” It appears that the priests of science are prepared to employ the explanations of the priests of religion when called upon to explain a situation they haven’t yet quite grasped. They cannot yet bring themselves to accept that the water came from Earth, but when fossils from Earth are found there, everyone will know.

Bulges

Bulges upon Earth’s surface, which are as much as 10 km (6.2 mi.) high and several thousand kilometers across could be the result of past planetary encounters. On Mars, a positive gravitational anomaly coincides with the highest part of the Tharsis bulge, indicating that the bulge is supported by denser material from beneath the crust. This is the only indication of deep magma that has been recognized, for all Martian volcanos appear to have a shallow source. Although an (undefined) relationship has often been claimed between the Tharsis bulge and Valles Marineris this is unlikely, since the ‘Space Router’ cut across all topography that it encountered (See: #13: The Martian Flood).

None of the small bulges on Mars display strong gravitational anomalies, suggesting that they are isolated from sources of deep magma. The thick, immobile crust of Mars is evidence of a low internal energy level in the planet’s interior, while by comparison, numerous large asteroid impacts on Earth have resulted in a high level of internal energy.

Volcanism

Olympus Mons and the other shield volcanos of the Tharsis and Elysium regions on Mars present a geologically young appearance and may have developed rapidly at times of close encounters with other worlds. During every close encounter, the rocky surface bulged and the constraining pressure upon underlying rocks was reduced. The following explains processes that could have controlled the development of the great shield volcano, Olympus Mons.

Ice under pressure at the base of a glacier can melt because liquid water occupies less volume than an equal mass of ice, assisting glaciers to move. In contrast, liquid rock occupies a greater volume than an equal mass of solid rock. Rock that is sufficiently deep can remain solid even when its temperature reaches that of lava at the surface because it is being constrained by the weight of overlying rock and so is unable to expand. Reducing the weight of overlying rock can cause a buried rock to liquefy, which can happen when another world draws close.

A bulge, in the form of a low, standing wave of solid rock moved across the Martian surface as Mars rotated beneath it, and lava was squeezed upward from the liquefied layer. Lava which normally weighs 38% of what it would weigh on Earth now weighed much less, so the usual limitations on the elevation to which it could be pumped no longer applied. Prolific outpourings of lava led to the development of Olympus Mons and others that dwarf the highest mountains on Earth.

Scientists base their calculations of the ages of Martian volcanos upon observed rates of hotspot volcanism on Earth, but they are incomparable. Characteristics of the Martian crust cannot be inferred from the hydrostatic head required for magma to be pumped to the top of Olympus Mons without allowing for the decreased force of gravity when another world is near.

The source of the lava forming Olympus Mons appears to be a region of collapsed terrain that covers an area several times that of the volcano. The strongly textured area was faulted repeatedly into curved ridges and troughs as slumping proceeded. Lava was contributed from within a zone below the surface in which the temperature of the rock was high enough for it to melt when the weight of overlying rock was reduced.

As the mass of the volcano developed, the gravitational attraction of a nearby world caused the crust to fracture. A continuous fault scarp formed around the shield and the surrounding plain dropped away. The resulting cliff has a height of up to 4 km (2.5 mi.), which is nearly one half the height of Mt. Everest from sea level. Some observers have concluded, from the enormous size of Olympus Mons, that the source of the lava was situated deep beneath the surface. Instead, the region of collapsed ground adjacent to the volcano indicates the source was quite shallow.

When another world draws close to us, volcanism on Earth increases as well. There are other effects on Earth. The sudden release of long-term stress accumulated within a plate-tectonic system can result from a close encounter. Mountain ranges grow rapidly higher at such times, and other large-scale geological structures undergo change.

When Venus made its first close approach to Earth in about 1522 B.C. sea levels dropped suddenly about 6 m (20 ft.).  This resulted in ‘raised’ coastal platforms around the world. Tectonic forces that had built up over thousands of years were released, and the geometry of the ocean basins was changed. If you should holiday in the tropics, look for these platforms. Many were formed from reefs since some corals tend to be at sea level at low tide, and you might find a surface displaying dead coral, perhaps with shells. Some presently inhabited islands in the Pacific would have been underwater before this drop in sea level occurred.

Tektites

Tektites are glassy meteorites having a length of up to several centimeters, found across Earth’s surface in what geologists term ‘strewn fields’. Tektites come from Mars at times of close encounters with Earth, and there is a dated record of the most recent event. The arrival of tektites dates only to Tertiary age because older glass has crystallized and disintegrated.

Tektites are typically more than two-thirds silica, having a composition that is similar to that of granite. If their source rock was basalt, the high silica content required some process of differentiation by which minerals with lower silica content were concentrated out of basaltic magma. Such a process typically takes place either by crystals settling out of solution or by growing on the cooler surfaces of a magma chamber. Siliceous rocks crystallize at lower temperatures than more basic rocks.

Under the gravitational influence of Earth, Martian rocks bulged toward the surface, and the reduced confining pressure caused a layer within the crust to liquefy. Molten rock surged toward the volcanic vent and a rush of magma blasted away a vent plug developed during a preceding episode of volcanism, and which was ejected toward Earth to form tektites.

Siliceous magma is more viscous than basaltic magma. Contained gases are less able to escape and so siliceous lava tends to be explosive. The volcanic fragments were reheated by their travel through Earth’s atmosphere until they exploded from the pressure of expanding gases. The altitude at which this occurs varies considerably. More streamlined ones may derive from fragments that explode at higher altitudes, with irregularly shaped ones coming from fragments that explode closer to the ground.

During my mineral exploration days, I met a station (ranch) manager in Western Australia who told me about a neighbor with a tektite trap. I first took this to be the sort of story that is told to a supposedly naïve young Canadian geologist, but it turned out that the neighbor really did have a tektite trap and one which had been quite productive. On his property, there was a shallow surface layer of red laterite overlying a gently sloping hardpan base, and the enterprising manager had installed several strands of clothesline across the slope so that tektites washed out of the surface layer would get caught up on them. After an (infrequent) heavy rain he would go out with a pail and pick up tektites to sell to tourists.

Tektites that are known as ‘australites’ are readily found in Western Australia and South East Asia, having arrived in the 7^th century B.C. This would explain their remarkably fresh appearance and close proximity to the surface, as well as the pristine appearance of the caldera vent on Olympus Mons which is proposed as their source. It should be noted, however, that the vents of some other Martian volcanos have a similar fresh appearance. Documented sources (‘Worlds in Collision’) recount that on the night of March 23, 687 BC: “In the night, stars fell like rain.” That was the night of the annihilation of King Sennacherib’s army (Isaiah 37:36) as Mars passed overhead.

SNC Meteorites

Thousands of meteorites collected on Earth have been analyzed and it has been concluded that almost all of them have come from asteroids. Some, however, were thought to have come from Mars, if only some way could be found to account for this. The letters in the unusual term ‘SNC’ stand for Shergotty in India, Nakhla in Egypt, and Chassigny in France, three places where the first meteorites of this type were found. They are thought to be younger than most other meteorites, while their composition and texture show they formed on a body with a strong gravitational field. Analyses of the gasses from glassy inclusions within these meteorites show the relative abundance of some gaseous elements is similar to their occurrence in the Martian atmosphere.

Scientists have been challenged to invent a scenario that could account for this compelling evidence without requiring them to recant their dogma. The major stumbling block has been that SNC meteorites do not exhibit the shock deformation effects they expect from the application of a force able to overcome the normal 34.1 km (21.2 mi.) per second escape velocity on Mars. Escape velocities are much lower, however, during close encounters between worlds. Explosive volcanism at such times even results in the direct transfer of volcanic ejecta from Mars to Earth.

It has been just over 2,700 years since Mars retreated to its present orbit. Astronomers wonder how former asteroids ended up as moons of Mars for it is unimaginable to them that Mars travels to the Main Asteroid Belt, acquires fragments of the Lost Planet as moons, and brings them close to Earth. It is a wonder of wonders that this catastrophic system is the driver of evolution on Earth resulting, for one thing, in a species that is able to contemplate its own origins.