The Cosmic Tusk

Vance Holliday

Vance Holliday was thoughtful to give the Tusk a heads up on his essay first published here at the Argonaut.  I have not read it throughly enough to respond myself right now, but I am certain of this: One or more of the dozen key researchers from the other side of the debate should write something similar.  His tender tale of woe and misunderstanding is exceeded only by their own.

Take it away, Dr. H:

A COSMIC CATASTROPHE: THE GREAT CLOVIS COMET DEBATE

A personal perspective on an Outrageous Hypothesis

I first became aware of the idea of some sort of late Pleistocene “cosmic event” in the late Spring of 2007 when, like may other scientists, I heard about a symposium on the topic at the American Geophysical Union meetings in Acapulco where the hypothesis was essentially unveiled to the scientific community. I heard that this “event” was responsible for late Pleistocene extinctions, the demise of the Clovis “culture” and dramatic climate change in the final millennia of the Pleistocene. I was interested in the hypothesis because I’ve spent many years investigating topics that the hypothesis addressed, including Paleoindian archaeology, and late Pleistocene paleoenvironments and paleogeography. I was skeptical because, well, we are supposed to be skeptical of new hypotheses in science. More specifically, however, several things bothered me:

Continue reading Skeptic Speaks: A Personal Essay from Vance Holliday on the Clovis Comet

Abstracts for Session 60 “The enigmatic Younger Dryas climatic episode”

Oral Presentations

Posters

From PBS’ NOVA site on the Clovis Comet:

“THE ICE AGE EXTINCTION DEBATE (UPDATE)

by Evan Hadingham, NOVA Senior Science Editor

In Megabeasts’ Sudden Death, NOVA reported on a radical new theory that an extraterrestrial impact devastated North America and other regions at the end of the Ice Age. First aired at a conference in May 2007 by a team led by geological consultant Allen West, the theory proposes that a comet or asteroid struck the ice sheets that covered most of Canada around 12,900 years ago. In an alternative scenario, the theory claims that a series of comet or meteor fragments burst in the atmosphere, similar to the Tunguska explosion that devastated a wide area of Siberia in 1908. In either case, according to the theory, the event ignited continent-wide firestorms and led to the extinction of about 35 types of giant animals, or “megafauna,” including mammoths, mastodons, lions, saber-tooth cats, and giant beavers. The event is also claimed to have reduced the populations of early Native American hunter-gatherers known as the Clovis people, and to have helped flip the Earth’s climate into a severe, final cold phase known as the Younger Dryas.

From its first announcement, the Younger Dryas impact theory sparked widespread controversy among archeologists, astronomers, and the science press. NOVA helped support an attempt to test the theory by a leading climate scientist, Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine, who searched for evidence of distinctive materials associated with impacts in the Greenland ice sheet. As shown in the program, West’s team analyzed Mayewski’s samples from Greenland and their results appeared to confirm the theory.

About a year after the first broadcast of NOVA’s show, several prominent astronomers and physicists who specialize in impact studies and are skeptical of the theory contacted NOVA. They argued that viewers needed to understand one of their key arguments—that an impact of the scale and type envisaged by West’s team was extremely improbable. In NOVA’s program, Sandia Lab physicist Mark Boslough briefly mentions this argument, but the reasoning behind it was not explained. NOVA therefore invited Boslough and astronomer Alan Harris of the Space Science Institute to write brief, non-technical essays about the improbability argument and other objections to the theory. To respond to these points, NOVA askedAllen West and one of his team, retired NASA impact specialist Ted Bunch, to respond to Boslough and Harris’s criticisms. The result is a snapshot of a highly intriguing debate that remains unresolved.”

**********************
Go to Evan Hadingham’s original essay of March 2009

Go to Evan Hadingham’s update of May 2011

Detractors:

Go to Alan Harris essay

Go to Mark Boslough essay

Proponents:

Go to Allen West essay

Go to Ted Bunch essay

UPDATE: I failed to add Allen West’s expunged conviction to the links below.  Here it is:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/57840143/2010-09-15-Allen-West-Expunged-Conviction-2 To put this kind of stuff in perspective, I was once fined a similar amount (around $4000) by the North Carolina Attorney General’s office for sediment pollution.  Horrors!  I am in the pollution control business!   Truth is, I was restoring a fabulous wetland (I’ll try to post the winning Wetland Scientist calendar photo of the project later) where a technically flawed silt fence installation met a surly regulator with an ax to grind.  I suppose someone with enough guile could spin that to make me look unlike the ecological hero I am truly am, which would not be unlike the attempt made on West’s reputation by Dalton.

The writer formerly employed by Nature, Rex Dalton, recently implied in a Miller-McCune blog that Allen West is a criminal charlatan. That is untrue. I have spoke over the last month to Allen, as well as a number of his collaborators, and determined the true story to the satisfaction of the Tusk.  I have also assembled and shared a number of primary documents linked below, not identified or referenced by Dalton, et. al.

Rex Dalton

The true story is consistent with my experience that Allen West is an honest-to-goodness, if imperfectly credentialed, key contributor to the Younger Dryas Boundary hypothesis and the supporting publications.

I am very biased in this matter.  For instance, Allen is my most frequent (if only) house guest.  My wife Pam and I have allowed Allen to stay with our young family on several occasions. The little guy has been a close friend for over five years.  I know Allen West as well as anyone on the Younger Dryas team or its collaborators.

I suppose Allen West could appear to readers of Dalton’s article to be a liar salting his samples at his own expense to get on TV. But I have reason to believe this is untrue.

For one, I have spoken regularly over the last decade with the laboratory techs, supervising scientists and co-authors dealing with the hundreds of samples from dozens of locations around the world and it would simply be impossible for Allen to direct from his “laboratory” in Arizona a fraud of this complexity, scale and nature.

The entire dynamic of the YDB-as-cosmic- impact-layer claim has been a (somewhat ad-hoc) series of multidiciplinary “ah-ha’s!” that occurred with — and mostly without — Allen’s involvement.

The nature, location and personalities involved in this work is not directly evident in the many supporting papers — and Dalton takes advantage of that. Journal articles are justifiably silent on timelines, locations and the experience of dead “lab hands” impossible for Allen West to manipulate.   But there were plenty of them.  Too many for a fraud, and apparently too many for Dalton to follow-up to disprove his hypothesis.

The nanodiamonds and other materials identifed at UC Santa Barbara and Oregon were no Piltdown Man, James Kennett is no Johann Beringer and Allen West……would have no analogy to his magical deviousness if the evidence presented were a fraud.

I have spent a month looking into the true story. Here it is:

Allen West was employed 13 years ago as a consultant for a company in California that contracted with several cities for water studies. Geophysicists can work without a license in California under some conditions. He thought they were following the law, but in this case, he needed a license.

That inadvertent mistake led to a misdemeanor and a $4500 fine. The District Attorney acknowledged that there was no intent to defraud and allowed the misdemeanor to be reduced to a simple infraction that was subsequently removed from his record. Allen West’s record in the State of California is completely clean, and he has no “criminal record,” contrary to the claim by Rex Dalton in his article (see 1).

Dalton disparaged the quality of the work in question despite the fact that he is aware that West’s California geophysical work continues to be referred to positively in 10 reports by four Federal and State governmental agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the California Department of Water Resources, and the California Energy Commission (see 2).

In 2005, seven years after Allen completed that work, he retired and contracted to write the Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes. Preferring privacy, he chose the pseudonym “West” instead of his given name “Whitt,” and filed the name with the State of Arizona as a legal tradename under the designation “author” (see 3). He continued to use the new name in his scientific career and changed his name legally, meaning it is not an “alias” as erroneously reported by Dalton. People often change their names for various reasons, as for example, Isaac Asimov, who changed his name from Ozimov — nobody accused Asimov of deception.

Allen’s mistake 13 years ago was failing to navigate California’s “guild” bureaucracy. It has no bearing on the excellent science that he has done, as monitored by scores of collaborators. Aspersions by Rex Dalton that Allen West somehow falsified evidence of magnetic spherules, nanodiamonds, and other impact markers are preposterous considering the impossibility of generating these materials in one’s basement.

All of the YD impact data that Allen has produced have been independently verified by other researchers.  Indeed, considerable new evidence will soon be published. Critics who failed to verify some aspects of the work should be advised that the “absence of evidence is not the evidence of its absence.”

REFERENCES:

(1) Link to dismissal of case.

(2) Links to reports citing West’s work in California. Search for “Whitt.”

a) U.S. Geologic Survey

http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2004/5267/sir2004-5267.pdf

b) U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Hi-Desert Water District: http://margosturges.com/californiadroughtupdate.html

c) Calif. Dept. of Water Resources:

http://www.water.ca.gov/pubs/groundwater/bulletin_118/basindescriptions/7-10.pdf

http://www.water.ca.gov/pubs/groundwater/bulletin_118/basindescriptions/7-12.pdf

http://www.water.ca.gov/pubs/groundwater/bulletin_118/basindescriptions/7-62.pdf

d) California Energy Commission for solar power plant installations:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/genesis_solar/documents/2009-11-13_Data_Requests_Set_1A_1-227_TN-54067.pdf

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/solar_millennium_palen/documents/2009-12-7_Data_Requests_Set_1_TN-54349.pdf

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/genesis_solar/documents/2010-06-25_Staffs_Prehearing_Conference_Statement_TN-57332.PDF

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/genesis_solar/documents/2010-06-29_Staffs_Rebuttal_Testimony_TN-57363.PDF

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/genesis_solar/documents/staff_assessment/04_CEC-700-2010-006_SectC5-C9.pdf

(3) State of Arizona tradename filing for name change as “author.”

I have nothing but an iPhone until later tomorrow. So this post is necessarily brief.

Allen West has taken a hit to his credibility (and to some extent the Tusk’s) from charges by Younger Dryas Hypothesis critics ranging from professional misconduct to falsifying lab results.

As an advocate of Allen’s and someone who has spent years watching him personally sacrifice with no financial gain from this subject, I am probably as surprised as anyone these charges have emerged.

There is surely some truth here — but more than a little spin.

For one Allen never claimed he was any more credentialed than he was — the first time I spoke with him he claimed only a philosophy doctorate from an obscure school in Nebraska. That said, it is hard to find out someone you know once went by different name.

I am in touch with Allen and hope to have more to say soon.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/comet-claim-comes-crashing-to-earth-31180/

Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth
An elegant archaeological hypothesis, under fire for results that can’t be replicated, may ultimately come undone.
By Rex Dalton

Even though they can’t replicate their work, the authors of a controversial scientific theory about a comet impact that caused the Clovis catastrophe refuse to give in to their many critics. (Wikimedia Commons)

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced.

But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the comet theory is “bogus.” Researchers from multiple scientific fields are calling the theory one of the most misguided ideas in the history of modern archaeology, which begs for an independent review so an accurate record is reflected in the literature.
“It is an impossible scenario,” says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where he taps the world’s fastest computers for nuclear bomb experiments to study such impacts. His computations show the debris from such a comet couldn’t cover the proposed impact field. In March, a “requiem” for the theory even was published by a group that included leading specialists from archaeology to botany.

Continue reading Blast from past: YD team member diciplined by Golden State geo board in 2002

Continental human population decline during Younger Dryas in North America

I don’t have the full paper yet but here is the abstract. Somewhere on the Tusk or Scribd I have the conference poster which was a precursor to this paper. [Found it!] Note that David Anderson is the keeper of the Paleo-Indian Database

When does this stuff move from kooky — to compelling??

Multiple Lines of Evidence for a Possible Human Population Decline during the Early Younger Dryas

David G. Anderson1, , , Albert C. Goodyear2, James Kennett3 and Allen West4
1 Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
2 South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
3 Department of Earth Science and Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
4 GeoScience Consulting, Dewey, AZ, USA
Received 5 November 2010; revised 10 April 2011; accepted 11 April 2011. Available online 22 April 2011.

Abstract
Three approaches are used to test whether or not human populations across North America were affected by abrupt climate change and/or other environmental factors associated with the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling episode at ca. 12,900 cal BP. They are: (1) frequency analyses of Paleoindian projectile points from across North America; (2) time series of lithic assemblages from eleven Paleoindian quarry sites in the southeastern United States; and (3) summed probability analyses (SPA) of radiocarbon dates from cultural (human-related) sites across North America and parts of the Old World. The results of each analysis suggest a significant decline and/or reorganization in human population during the early centuries of the YD, varying in extent by region. Archaeological settings formerly heavily utilized, such as stone quarries in the southeastern U.S., appear to have been largely abandoned, while over large areas, a substantial decline occurred in the numbers of diagnostic projectile points and cultural radiocarbon dates. Later in the YD, beginning after about 12,600 cal BP, there was an apparent resurgence in population and/or settlements in many areas, as indicated by increases in projectile points, quarry usage, and human-related radiocarbon ages.

Pre-cursor conference poster