Apollo Objects
Asteroids *
Asteroids, Comets and Meteoroids are all relatively small objects that inhabit our Solar System. When any of them have orbits that intersect with that of the Earth they are known as Near Earth Objects or NEOs. Asteroids (a word coined by William Herschel [1738-1822]) used to be known as minor planets, while meteoroids is the name applied to asteroids that are less than 50 metres in diameter, although some use 10 metres as the classification threshold.
The largest known meteorite is the Hoba Meteorite near Groodfontein, Namibia, which weighs over 60 tons and is calculated to have landed less than 80,000 years ago(ax) and is composed of about 84% iron and 16% nickel, with traces of cobalt(ay). Before man learned how to smelt iron the only source of the metal was from meteorites that were used to craft ornaments or weapons, such as the beautifully crafted knife buried with Tutankhamun. It is also reported that meteoric iron was used to fashion an arrowhead from a meteor that landed 3,500 years ago(az).
Meteorites have had a history of being considered divine in origin, leading to different levels of veneration in various cultures(v). In the 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria is said to have concluded that “the worship of such stones to have been the first, and earliest idolatry, in the world.”
What is probably the first recorded death from a meteorite strike took place in India in February 2016(z).
Comets, until recently, were generally thought to be composed of just dust and ice, ‘dirty snowballs’, which have orbits that periodically bring them close to the sun at which stage the interaction of the comet’s dust trail with the solar wind produces a highly visible coma or tail. The nucleus can have a diameter of a couple of kilometres.
The chemical composition of comets is now known to be varied and much more complex than previously believed. In 2015, Comet Lovejoy was ejecting the equivalent of “500 bottles of wine every second” when it was closest to the sun, in the form of ethyl alcohol(w). A close encounter with the Earth would have been interesting!
In 1883 a large comet is estimated to have come within a few hundred miles of Earth. It was photographed and some years later the image was hailed as the first image of a UFO!
In recent years comets have come to be seen as potentially more dangerous than asteroids in the event of a collision. This view was graphically demonstrated when the Levy-Shoemaker comet crashed spectacularly into Jupiter in 1994, after breaking up into as many as 21 large pieces before impacting. This comet was originally about 20 km in diameter. However, the distinction between comets and asteroids has been blurred by asteroids sometimes displaying the features of comets, such as asteroid P2013/P5, which in 2013 produced six cometary-like tails.
In 2022, a report offered evidence that major cometary or asteroidal impacts or airbursts have been more frequent than previously thought. University of Cincinnati’s Professor Kenneth Tankersley and his colleagues have listed many such events that are known to have occurred since one apparently wiped out the dinosaurs. The most disturbing fact is the number of encounters experienced within historical times, for example – “Archaeologists have found meteorites, microspherules, iridium and platinum anomalies, and burned charcoal-rich habitation surfaces at 11 archaeological sites of the Hopewell culture in three states stretching across the Ohio River Valley. While Hopewell people survived the catastrophic event, which occurred between 252 and 383 CE, it likely contributed to their cultural decline.” (as) Jason Colavito is critical of this claim “because the Hopewell did not enter a terminal decline after their proposed impact date of c. 255-300 CE but flourished for another 200 years.”(at)
In 1752, the French astronomer, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, expressed the view that “However dangerous might be the shock of a comet, it might be so slight, that it would only do damage at the part of the Earth where it actually struck” and with coincidental foresight added “ Perhaps we should be very surprised to find that the debris of these masses that we despised were formed of gold and diamonds” considering how Richard Firestone and his associates more recently used the existence of nanodiamonds to confirm the cometary impact of 11,000 BC over North America.
Asteroids and comets have been blamed by a number of researchers for the demise of Atlantis since the end of the 18th century. It was the Italian polymath, Giovanni Rinaldo Carli, who in 1788 declared [087] that part of a passing comet hit the Earth and was responsible for the destruction of Atlantis. A century later in his second book [022] on Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly similarly claimed that a comet’s collision with Earth was the cause of Atlantis’ destruction(af). Comets rather than asteroids were initially blamed because of their high visibility. However, as our technology advanced and we gradually became aware of the number of large asteroids that intersect with the Earth’s orbit they replaced comets as the more likely cause of historical impacts.
For some decades, Bob Kobres has been studying the evidence for cometary encounters contained in ancient mythologies and their possible association with known events(ah) such as the creation of the Carolina Bays or the Bronze Age Collapse(ag).
The early part of the 20th century saw the eccentric William Comyns Beaumont[088][089][090]and the mysterious Hans Schindler Bellamy[091] both supporting the idea of Atlantis being destroyed by an encounter with an extraterrestrial object. The theory has been adopted by a growing number of popular modern writers such as Otto Muck[098], Egerton Sykes, Andrew Collins[072], Paul Dunbavin[099], Karl Jürgen Hepke(a), Frank Joseph explains [102.108] how a number of scholars encouraged by Muck, came forward to publicly state their belief that Atlantis had been destroyed by an extraterrestrial impact or impacts: “They included the world’s foremost authority on Halley’s Comet, Dr M.M. Kamienski, a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; Professor N. Bonev, one of the 20th century’s leading astronomers at the University of Sofia, in Bulgaria; and Jack Hills, of the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory”.
In 1971, Sykes’ Atlantis magazine devoted an entire issue to the matter of impact craters around the globe(ak), a subject that he also wrote about a few years earlier(av). More up-to-date is a paper by Andrew Glikson published in August 2023. In it he notes that “Geophysical evidence suggests there is a massive, magnetized structure deep beneath Australia. Experts think it could be the remnants of the largest meteor crater on Earth.” This feature in New South Wales known as the Deniliquin structure may date to half a billion years and is “yet to be further tested by drilling, spans up to 520 kilometres in diameter. This exceeds the size of the near-300km-wide Vredefort impact structure in South Africa, which to date has been considered the world’s largest(ba).”
Emilio Spedicato of the University of Bergamo has written(b) and lectured widely on his hypothesis that the last Ice Age was started by an extraterrestrial impact over a continent and ended with a similar event over an ocean. This second impact was the cause of Atlantis’ destruction and Spedicato specifies Hispaniola as containing the location of its capital.
Spedicato is not alone in believing that impacts by large objects have been responsible for the triggering of past Ice Ages. As we have seen a large number of writers have suggested an impact with the Earth as the primary or at least the secondary cause of the destruction of Atlantis(d). These cosmic collisions have occurred throughout the history of our planet, continuing to this day. Most of the impact material is small and burns up in the atmosphere. Some low-density objects have penetrated the atmosphere but disintegrated before actually impacting, generating powerful shock waves commensurate with their size. Such an event was the well-known Tunguska(i) explosion over that area of Siberia in 1908.
Commenting on the Tunguska event Stephen E. Franklin added that “Less than five hours after the Tunguska object exploded at 7:14 AM local time in Siberia, another fireball was seen over Kagarlyk near Kyiv in what is now Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) at around 7:00 AM local time followed by the impact of a 1.912 kg stony meteorite.”(ad)
In 2001, Dr Luigi Forschini one of the leaders of an Italian expedition to the Tunguska region studied some of the 60,000 fallen trees and for the first time, they also had access to previously untranslated eye-witness accounts. They concluded that the object had arrived from the southeast at about 11 km per second and that an investigation of its likely orbit concluded that it was more likely that the intruder had been an asteroid rather than a comet. They speculated that it was probably not much more than ‘a pile of rubble’ that broke up completely, leaving no crater(aq).
In 2013, Gernot Spielvogel co-authored Sonnenbomben [1582] in which it is suggested that the Tunguska event was caused by a solar plasma ‘bomb’. Elsewhere, a YouTube video reviews the Tunguska event and concludes that many of the remaining mysteries associated with can be explained if it is treated as a major electrical discharge event(bb) between the Earth and an approaching asteroid or comet.
The most recent (April 2020) Tunguska theory is that it could have been caused by an iron asteroid partially entering and then leaving the atmosphere!(aj) The most bizarre Tunguska suggestion is that it was the result of experiments carried out by Nikola Tesla(al). Another claim is that a massive explosion of escaping underground gas was the culprit(am). July 1st, 2021 another update on Tunguska theories revealed very little that was new(ao).
Two similar explosions occurred over South America in the 1930s(ar). However, some are large enough to survive the journey to the surface. Depending on the size, density, speed and angle of approach, the consequences of a large impact are difficult for the average person to appreciate. As Austen Atkinson wrote[109] “A single impact by a rock the size of (London’s) Millennium Dome could devastate the surface of the globe with an explosive release of energy five times more powerful than the entire world’s nuclear arsenal. On 19 May 1996, just such an object came within 280,000 miles of Earth: six hours from a collision. Humankind could have been eradicated.”
The most famous impact is probably that which is known as the Chicxulub Event in the Yucatan took place 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. A 2017 update on Chicxulub studies was presented(ap) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans.
A more recent (2019) paper(ae) reports that “excavations in North Dakota reveal fossils of fish and trees that were blasted with rocky, glassy fragments that fell from the sky. The deposits show evidence also of having been swamped with water – the consequence of the colossal sea surge that was generated by the impact.”
The Chicxulub event may have been more complicated than generally thought, as a 2022 report revealed that “researchers have now uncovered another crater off the coast of Guinea that might well be Chicxulub’s cousin. The newly discovered feature, albeit much smaller, is also about 66 million years old. That’s a curious coincidence, and scientists are now wondering whether the two impact structures might be linked. Perhaps Chicxulub and the newly discovered feature—dubbed Nadir crater—formed from the breakup of a parent asteroid or as part of an impact cluster, the team suggested.”(aw)
The Yucatan impact has a rival claimant in the Indian Ocean as the dinosaur killer, known as the Shiva crater. This is claimed as the largest multi-ringed impact crater in the world(an).
11 million years later another impact in the Atlantic is credited with the expansion of the mammals according to a new study by co-author, Dennis Kent from Rutgers University.
An online calculator of impact effects was developed by scientists at Purdue University and Imperial College, London was first published in 2004 and recently updated(g).
By 2009 175 large impact craters have been discovered all over our planet and many more are undiscovered having been destroyed over time by wind and water erosion or hidden by vegetation. In 2006, a crater with a diameter of 30 km was discovered in the Southern Egyptian desert. This discovery may solve a mystery in the same region that has baffled science for over seventy years, namely, the Libyan desert glass that covers an area of 60 x 100 km. However, the largest known impact crater is the Vredefort crater in South Africa with a diameter of 300 km (186 miles). But this may have to take second place to the 300-mile-wide crater identified in Hudson Bay in North America.
The spectacular collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in July 1994 and how it disintegrated into a number of huge pieces before impacting over seven days, may offer one possible explanation for the mechanism that could produce the apparent clustering of 3rd millennium BC impacts on Earth.
The current estimate is that there are more than 2,000 asteroids exceeding a kilometre in size together with 10,000 over half a kilometre plus millions of smaller items in Earth-crossing orbits; collectively known as ‘Apollo objects‘. The meteor that exploded over central Russia in February 2013 belonged to this Apollo group. Add to this the risk from comets, normally larger than asteroids, and it is obvious that large-scale impacts are inevitable, however infrequent. The good news is that in 2011 it was reported that a NASA space telescope recorded a 40% reduction in their earlier calculation(j) which should be compared with the assessment referred to(f) at the end of the last paragraph of this entry. May 2012 saw further estimates being published(l).
Terminology, definitions and number estimates are constantly changing. Asteroids that are more than 100m across with orbits that come within 7.5 million km of Earth are now referred to as PHAs (Potentially Hazardous Asteroids). As of June 2014, the IAU has listed 1,466 PHAs, while NASA estimates put the actual total in excess of 4,700(q).
As recently as 1953 an asteroid impact with the Moon was photographed as a flash and only in 2002 was the resulting 2Km- wide crater identified. The estimated energy released by this 300-metre-wide object on impact would have been half a Megaton of TNT (35 times the Hiroshima bomb). A hit of this magnitude on Earth could have wiped out a large city.
It must be kept in mind that the immediate damage caused by the impact itself is only the beginning of the story; tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes together with worldwide long-term dust veils could trigger climate change leading to ongoing adverse effects on vegetation and animal life. For humans, this meant death, destruction, floods, repeated crop failures and probably a breakdown in any existing civil order.
It was as recent as the 1930s that geologists were being told that Meteor Crater in the Arizona desert was the only known evidence that an impact, with worldwide consequences, had ever taken place. The site is also known as Barringer Crater after the family who owns it. Until recently, it held the record for the largest impact crater less than 100,000 years old; it’s about 49,000 to 50,000 years old and measures 0.75 miles (1.2 km) in diameter. That is, until 2019, when the Yilan crater was discovered in China, which measures about 1.15 miles (1.85 km) across and likely formed about 46,000 to 53,000 years ago, based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal and organic lake sediments from the site, the NASA statement says(au).
It was also in the 1930s that the first of the Apollo objects were identified. Since then, the number of large identifiable impact craters grew to hundreds and the number of Apollo objects, whose impact would have global implications, became thousands. It then became obvious that the Earth as we know it is at serious risk. World authorities are slowly realising that the probability of similar impacts in the future is simply inevitable.
Until recently, statistical analysis indicates a major impact every 10,000 years; with the last such event occurring 12,000 years ago possibly destroying Atlantis, directly or indirectly. However, in 2006, this estimate was revised downward to a major collision every 1,000 years with the last impact having taken place around 2800 BC, in the Indian Ocean, where an 18-mile diameter crater has been discovered at a depth of 12,500 feet.
However, a paper(x) published in October 2015 has suggested that a study of mass extinctions over the past 260 million years appears to have taken place every 26 million years coinciding with major asteroid/comet impacts.
So far 175 large impact craters(e) have been discovered all over our planet and many more are undiscovered having been destroyed over time by wind and water erosion or hidden by vegetation. In 2006, a crater with a diameter of 30km was discovered in the southern Egyptian desert. This discovery may solve a mystery in the same region that has baffled science for over seventy years, namely, the Libyan desert glass that covers an area of 60 x 100 km. However, the largest known impact crater is the Vredefort crater n South Africa with a diameter of 300km (186 miles). But this may have to take second place to the 300-mile-wide crater identified in Hudson Bay in North America. A 2015 report tells of two impact zones that total more than 400 kilometres across, which were identified in the Warburton Basin in Central Australia(t).
Although it appears that similar suggestions have been made since the 1950s, the debate has now reached a new level. The Hudson Bay feature has generated even greater interest since Richard Firestone, a nuclear physicist together with Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith published[110] their claim that it was created around 11,000 BC and had human witnesses who preserved their memory of it in their local folklore and that may have been responsible for the extermination of the Clovis people(ai). Firestone’s tentative 11,000 BC date for this event is earlier than Plato’s even more questionable 9600 BC date for the destruction of Atlantis might be connected since the event described by Firestone & Co. would have had global consequences and could have affected any suggested Atlantis location. In 2007, at a news conference during the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union, in Acapulco, Mexico, two archaeologists from the University of Oregon, Douglas J. Kennett and Jon M. Erlandson added geological evidence to support Firestone’s thesis. In 2008 evidence of an exploding comet/asteroid over Canada during the same period was presented(c) by other academics from the University of Cincinnati. However, it must be noted that the Firestone hypothesis has encountered some criticism since the start of 2009 and must therefore be treated with due caution. This criticism appears to be gaining support according to a May 2011 report(h). In June 2012, James Kennett, son of Douglas Kennet mentioned above, was part of a team that announced further evidence of a major impact event 13,000 years ago extending from Pennsylvania and South Carolina as far as Syria(m).
Dr Reinoud de Jonge has written several articles(d) that drew on petroglyphs in Brittany to support his contention that the Earth had an encounter with a cometary body in 2345 BC. This would appear to complement the work of Mike Baillie and George Dodwell, who echoed William Whiston’s proposed date of 2346 BC, for an encounter with a comet that caused the biblical Deluge.
Since only 30% of our globe’s surface is exposed land, it is reasonable to conclude that 70% of impacts will have landed in water, leaving little lasting evidence. However, at least ten of these identified impact craters occurred after the last Ice Age and at least seven of them date from around the third millennium BC, a period when there were widespread cultural collapses.
In a recent book[111] the renowned dendrochronologist, Mike Baillie, has outlined compelling evidence from his discipline combined with ancient mythologies to support the idea of extraterrestrial impacts in early historical times. May I suggest that the mythologies that possibly relate to multiple impacts are in fact recollections of a comet that had been visible for some time before breaking up under the gravitational influence of our planet before impact? This idea was developed by Baillie in a subsequent book[112] written with Patrick McCafferty that focused on Celtic mythological figures. Comets rather than asteroids are more likely to have contributed to the development of myths since an asteroid would not have been visible long enough for it to develop an identity that would be remembered in legend. Graham Phillips has gone further and proposed[036] that a close encounter with a comet in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC triggered the development of monotheism at that time. Furthermore, he contends that as the Earth passed through this comet’s tail, it introduced large quantities of the amino acid, vasopressin that heightened aggression in humans leading to large-scale conflicts worldwide. This comet, 12P/Pons-Brooks is due for another close encounter with Earth in 2024.
A 2012 paper(o) by Fernando Coimbra investigates the influence of unusual astronomical events, in particular comets, on the subject matter of rock art. An earlier paper(p) by Coimbra looks at the swastika as a specific example of a reflection of such an event.
Mythologies, worldwide, offer evidence of these impacts and have been subsequently reinforced by classical writers who describe in non-scientific terms the effects of these extraterrestrial assaults. Pliny wrote in his Natural History (Book II, sec 91) of ‘A terrible comet was seen by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon, the king of that period, gave his name; it had a fiery appearance and was twisted like a coil, and it was very grim to behold: it was not really a star so much as what might be called a ball of fire.’
Similarly, the Greek myth of Phaëton has been interpreted as a record of an encounter with a comet. Edith and Alexander Tollmann also identified an 11,000 BC impact with the Köfels region of the Austrian Tyrol as one of the impact zones. The interpretation of ancient legends and myths is a matter of subjective response, but the volume of such evidence is so great that the probability of a number of major impacts being within the memory of man, who relayed the experience down to us through the medium of tradition, is quite high.
The fact that our Earth is continually at risk of a cosmic collision, the physical evidence of recent and past collisions, the recording of impacts on the Moon and Jupiter compounded with stories in ancient mythologies offer strong grounds for accepting the possibility of Atlantis being destroyed as a result of a collision with an extraterrestrial object as a credible working hypothesis.
While an asteroid impact destroying Atlantis is relatively easy to accept, some authors have proposed even more dramatic scenarios where the impact was so great that it caused the Poles to change position and/or the Earth’s outer mantle to move relative to the inner core. There is little doubt that cosmic collisions of all the possible natural catastrophes pose the greatest possible threat to life on Earth. There is an interesting website(c) that discusses both catastrophes and Atlantis. Another site(e) has a small collection of images of impact craters as seen from space. 2010 produced a frightening upward reassessment of the asteroid threat(f).
In 2001, NASA(k) identified 1,000 asteroids and comets orbiting close to Earth that are capable of causing catastrophic damage to our planet in the event of a collision. An interesting map was published(n) in February 2013 showing the locations of 34,513 impacts dating back to 2300 BC.
Recent deliberate encounters with comets and asteroids have produced images and data that have raised questions about the traditional description of comets being composed of ice and rock. The lines between asteroids and comets are becoming increasingly blurred and new definitions are required(r). The trend now is to see asteroids and comets as part of a continuum. Evidence is emerging that the H20 previously associated with comets may have been OH radicals(s).
The 2014 landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko would appear to have destroyed the ‘dirty snowball’ description of comets, coined in 1950 by the noted astronomer, Fred Whipple, and should now be abandoned.
Although large asteroids or comets have caused and will again cause global catastrophes on a scale that we can only imagine, they are not the greatest potential threat to our existence. It is estimated that our galaxy, like others, is also home to free-floating giant gas planets untethered to any star, which, if they wandered our way, could not only obliterate our planet but de-stabilise our solar system.(u)
Terry Westerman offers a fascinating overview of possible global impact sites on his fully illustrated website(y).
Fortunately, the death and destruction caused by comets are balanced by the probability that they are also the source of life on our planet. This idea is gaining greater acceptance with a further paper(aa) offering additional supportive evidence published in April 2016.
Nevertheless, improved vigilance is required if we are to believe Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario, whose research in 2014 concluded(ab) that hazardous asteroids are 10 times more likely to hit Earth than previously thought!
Further Reading: Hoyle[602] , Maguire[604], Verschuur[579], Clube & Napier[290], Allan & Delair[014].
(a) https://web.archive.org/web/20200225130714/http://www.tolos.de/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190805194450/http://atlis.de/
(b) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(c) Oregon researchers involved in new Clovis-age impact theory | EurekAlert! Science News (archive.org) *
(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20200128100421/http://barry.warmkessel.com/dejonge.html
(f) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1306555/Our-terrifyingly-crowded-solar-How-asteroids-closing-in.html
(g) https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth
(h) https://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/comet-claim-comes-crashing-to-earth-31180
(i) https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30jun_tunguska/ (link broken)
(j) https://www.space.com/13130-dangerous-asteroids-earth-nasa-telescope-results.html
(k) The Probability of Collisions with Earth (archive.org)
(m) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120611193657.htm
(n) Every meteorite fall on earth mapped | News | theguardian.com
(o) https://www.academia.edu/5354586/Rock_art_and_the_memory_of_unusual_astronomical_events
(p) https://www.academia.edu/2951519/The_astronomical_origins_of_the_swastika_motif
(q) BBC Focus Magazine, July 2014, page 67.
(r) Are comets asteroids or asteroids comets? – Thunderbolts Forum (v2.0) (archive.org)
(u) https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-make-our-home-on-a-rogue-planet-without-a-sun
(w) https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/26/9615392/comet-lovejoy-ethyl-alcohol-organic-molecules-life
(x) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-scientists-link-comet-asteroid-showers.html
(y) Seismic Circles (archive.org)
(aa) Archive 2998 | (atlantipedia.ie)
(ab) https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a10236/the-asteroid-threat-visualized-16490560/
(ac) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37647049
(ad) https://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterNine.htm
(ae) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47755275
(af) Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel | MalagaBay (archive.org)
(ag) https://web.archive.org/web/20200916132547/http://defendgaia.org/bobk/bronze.html
(ah) https://web.archive.org/web/20200203201811/http://defendgaia.org/bobk/bobk.html
(ai) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/656015?journalCode=ca
(aj) https://www.q-mag.org/the-new-final-tunguska-theory.html
(ak) Atlantis, Volume 24, Nos 3/4, April-July, 1971.
(al) https://theunredacted.com/the-tunguska-blast-teslas-death-ray/
(an) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015102246.htm
(ao) Remembering Tunguska: A Mystery Explosion that Baffles The CIA Over a Century Later – The Debrief
(ap) <chicxulub killer meteorite> (q-mag.org)
(aq) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1628806.stm
(ar) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_tunguska23.htm
(as) Near-Earth Comet Exploded over North America about 1,500 Years Ago | Sci-News.com
(at) Researchers Behind Ice Age Comet Claim Say a Comet Destroyed the Hopewell, Too – JASON COLAVITO
(au) Scientists uncover the largest crater on Earth under 100,000 years old | Live Science
(av) Atlantis – Die Theorie vom Meteoriten-Impakt – Atlantisforschung.de
(aw) https://eos.org/articles/impact-crater-off-the-african-coast-may-be-linked-to-chicxulub
(ax) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite
(ay) National Geographic, June 2023 p.102
(bb) (1) Matt Finn: Tunguska Mystery of 1908 | Thunderbolts – YouTube
Ice Ages
Ice Ages have been a fact of life on Earth for aeons, according to conventional ice age theory. There is now evidence that during the very early existence of our planet, the entire Earth was completely glaciated, possibly twice!(w)
However, the exact cause of the onset of any ice age is still a matter of active debate(ab). Ralph Ellis has now proposed a new theory based on a cyclical alteration of polar albedo by atmospheric dust(n).
In any study of Ice Age Theory, due consideration must be given to the radical views expressed by Allan & Delair in their well-received book, Cataclysm [014].
Over the last three million years, a period referred to by geologists as the Pleistocene Epoch, at least thirty Ice Ages have been ‘identified’. The exact extent of the polar ice caps during the last Ice Age is the subject of some debate with new evidence from northern Sweden and Norway, suggesting a less extensive cap than previously believed. However, there is evidence that Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which is now 13,803 feet above sea level,” had a large glacial ice cap of about 70 square kilometres until 14,500 years ago.”(ag)
Various theories have been proposed to explain the onset and the ending of these Ice Ages ranging from changes in the Earth’s orbit(g) around the sun to the effects of the Earth’s passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
Over recent decades we have been consistently told that global warming is underway with a constant threat of rising sea levels. Consequently, it was no surprise when, in April 2018, The Guardian had a headline declaring that Glacier loss is accelerating because of global warming(r). However, an equally up-to-date website(s) claims that most of the world’s glaciers are actually growing and makes the comparable assertion that sea levels have stopped rising(t). Over a decade ago the well-known botanist David Bellamy made similar claims, that were refuted in a revealing article by George Monbiot, also in The Guardian(u).
Emilio Spedicato has proposed(a) that glaciations are started by asteroidal or cometary impacts on land and terminated by impacts with an ocean. The late Sir Fred Hoyle and his equally radical colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe concurred with this view. They believe that an impact of sufficient size would have vaporised and ejected billions of gallons of water into the upper atmosphere creating an immediate ‘greenhouse effect’ that then led to the melting of the glaciers. In a 1999 paper, Hoyle & Wickramasinghe wrote of the positive effect of greenhouse gases in staving off the next ice age(aa).
Another impact theory has been proposed by Jon Nelo Juganaru, writing as Raven Alb J, in his rather bloated offering Why and How the Ice Age Ended [1051]. In it he suggested that an asteroidal collision with the Earth effected a pole shift and that caused the Great Flood and the last ice age!
Another recent theory suggests that a severe reduction in sunspot activity may herald the imminent return of another ‘little ice age’ such as was experienced in the 17th century and known as the Maunder Minimum. During that period only 50 sunspots were recorded instead of the usual 40-50 thousand(ah). NASA has denied that there is any such impending cooling and that the possible effect of any reduced solar activity would be more than offset by the warming caused by human activity(ai).
Spedicato contends(z) that circa 9,600 BC, an impact in the Atlantic by an Apollo Object led to the demise of Atlantis, an idea similar to the earlier contention of Otto Muck.
In 2003, scientists at Kansas University drew a lot of attention with their claim that gamma-ray bursts can cause an ice age and mass extinctions. However, the suggested frequency of a gamma-ray explosion that might affect the Earth, every few hundred million years runs counter to conventional ice age theory which proposes that the frequency of ice ages runs to hundreds of thousands of years(ad).
The last Ice Age reached what is known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 25,000 -15,000 BP, according to Ray & Adams(q). LGM describes the time when the glaciers reached their maximum extension.
Remarkably, the very existence of an Ice Age was only first conceived just over 150 years ago when Louis Agassiz first published his theory[002][003]. It took another century before it was fully realised that some of the consequences of the melting of the glaciers at the end of each Ice Age, would have been the flooding of continental shelves and the breaching of low-lying land bridges.
An example of such events would have been the submergence of the majority of the Celtic Shelf separating Britain and Ireland from mainland Europe. In the South China Sea, large chunks of what is known as Sundaland were also flooded. At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Bosporus was breached flooding the Black Sea, and more controversially some claim that there had been a breach of a landbridge at the Strait of Gibraltar.
Prompted by the fact that the date given by Solon/Plato for the destruction, 9600 BC coincides with the retreating of the glaciers of the last Ice Age, all the above submergences and breaches have been included in the Atlantis debate.
New studies have shown interesting confirmation of the ‘Out of Africa‘ theory, which had recently come under attack. The effects of the last Ice Age on the population of Europe were quite dramatic(l). In 2013, journalist, Paul Salopek set out on a 21,000-mile walking journey from East Africa, across Asia, and down the west coast of the Americas in an attempt to emulate mankind’s long odyssey as he (mankind not Saklopek) populated the planet(v).
The most recent genetic studies suggest that “a vast inland oasis in present-day northern Botswana was once home to the founder population of all modern humans.” (x)
A first-rate work [390] by Steven Mithen on the aftermath of the last Ice Age was recently published.
Fundamentalist Christians who believe in a literal seven days of creation have great difficulty with modern Ice Age theory(b) and some propose that an ice age occurred after the biblical Deluge(f). For some fundamentalists the (only) Ice Age lasted from around 2500 BC until 1500 BC(o), otherwise, it will not fit into Archbishop Ussher’s 4004 BC date for the creation of the world!
Furthermore, it would be dishonest if I did not record that there have been more credible attempts to debunk the ‘conventional’ Ice Age Theory. The late Peter K. Bros (1939-2007) expressed such views in J. Douglas Kenyon’s Forbidden History[802.44] and in Atlantis Rising magazine(ae).
Dr. Horst Friedrich (1931-2015) was strongly opposed to Ice Age Theory and in one of the many papers that he published on the subject, he invoked the earlier work of C.G.S. Sandberg in support of his views(aj).
Furthermore, Allan & Delair offer similar views in Chapter 12 of Part One of their acclaimed book Cataclysm[014] as does Richard E.Mooney [0842.87]. An essay by Kurt Johmann entitled “Debunking Ice Age” is also worth a read. The Thunderbolts website has a forum(h) dealing with whether Ice Ages occurred at all! Those interested in this particular controversy will find some worthwhile comments there. The same site has linked to an article that offers further challenges to conventional Ice Age and global warming theories. This report(j) concerns the discovery of the remains of a 4,000-year-old forest in the Alps at the edge of a retreating glacier, which added further evidence that warmer climates than at present were experienced since the last Ice Age. A regular Thunderbolts contributor, Rens Van Der Sluijs, also deals with global warming during the last Ice Age as revealed through mythology(k). However, Thunderbolts ‘Electric Universe’ concept has also received some highly critical reviews(m).
An interesting side issue is the work of Genevieve von Petzinger(y) who has collated recurring geometric symbols found in the Ice Age caves and rock carvings, not only across Europe but in Asia and less frequently in Africa and the Americas.
The University of Sheffield has now produced a set of maps showing the shrinkage of the last glacial ice sheet that covered most of the British Isles at the end of the last Ice Age(d). That particular ice sheet contained enough water to raise the world’s oceans by 2.5 metres when melted. Further maps have been published on Don Hitchcock’s website(i).
The retreating ice sheets also produced drumlins, with as many as 20,000 to be found in Ireland, with many of these and other Ice Age creations featuring in the placenames of my country(p).
We should not forget that Mother Nature can still spring weather surprises on us, such as the Great European Freeze of 1709 that led to widespread death of humans and livestock, crop failures and food riots(af).
(a) Wayback Machine (archive.org)
(b) https://creation.com/do-greenland-ice-cores-show-over-one-hundred-thousand-years-of-annual-layers
(f) https://www.accuracyingenesis.com/iceage.html
(g) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100406133707.htm
(h) Questioning the Ice Ages – Thunderbolts Forum (v2.0) (archive.org)
(i) https://donsmaps.com/icemaps.html
(k) Global Warming in the Ice Age – The Thunderbolts Project™ (archive.org) (new link) *
(m) See: Archive 922
(o) http://therightsway.com/great-pyramid-for-navigation/
(q) https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue11/rayadams_toc.html
(s) Ice Age Now – The next ice age could begin any day (archive.org)
(t) Sea levels falling Archives – Ice Age Now
(u) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/may/10/environment.columnists
(v) https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2018-08-cities-silence/
(w) Scientists Are Warming Up to the Idea of Snowball Earth (archive.org)
(x) https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/likely-human-homeland-identified
(y) https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/geometric_signs/geometric_signs.php
(z) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/407b/61808c670384e94df67cd6bd956ce75131ad.pdf
(aa) http://defendgaia.org/bobk/ccc/ce120799.html
(ab) https://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/IceAgeTheories.html
(ac) https://www.big-lies.org/modern-physics-a-fraud/kj_debunk_ice_age.html
(ad) Scientists have new theory on ice age (freerepublic.com)
(ae) Atlantis Rising No. 41
(af) New Scientist, 07 February 2009
(ag) Ancient Hawaiian glaciers reveal clues to global climate impacts — ScienceDaily
(ah) https://q-mag.org/a-new-little-ice-age-by-2030.html
(ai) https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there-is-no-impending-mini-ice-age/
(aj) Ein kompetenter Geologe verreißt die Eiszeitlehre! – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) (English)