GLACIAL MELTWATER FLOODS?

Fossil Graveyards at the Younger Dryas, I think

I’m comparing Allan & Delair’s findings with Velikovsky’s. Cardona’s books had suggested that the Saturn nova occurred at the Younger Dryas and now it looks like these earlier authors honed in on the same time frame. They didn’t suggest involvement with Saturn. Cardona and Velikovsky both considered Venus & Mars to be major players. Allan & Delair apparently considered Mars to have been a target of devastation, like Earth. Their article is called Major World Catastrophe at https://www.catastrophism.com/intro/search.cgi?zoom_query. I’m including most of it below and abbreviating it MWC. Velikovsky’s book Earth in Upheaval is available at https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/earth-upheaval.pdf, but it has a number of spelling errors due to bad scanning. I’m abbreviating it EIU. Prepare to be shocked by the amount of violently slaughtered creatures entombed in caves, rock fissures and sediments in much of the world. This is something the mainstream ignores. First, though, I’ll sort of set the stage.

https://earthsurface.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_images/prevglace.png

The map above isn’t totally accurate. The Ice Age ice sheets likely didn’t cover the northernmost portions of Greenland, Canada and Siberia, but likely did cover most of the U.S. Rockies, which isn’t shown.

GLACIAL MELTWATER FLOODS

I think most of the following data supports the idea that the Ice Age occurred after the Great Flood and that the Ice Age ended with another major cataclysm involving asteroid impacts etc, which caused rapid melting of the Ice Sheets. A lot of large sheets of ice, some carrying large amounts of rock and debris, flowing rapidly across landscapes, seems to account for most of the findings described below.

MWC: Proceedings of the SIS 1995 Braziers College Conference" D S Allan and J B Delair. … All the material discussed concerns an event which, on the basis of an average of over nine hundred radiocarbon dates, occurred approximately 11,500 years ago. It also indicates that the Ice Age, so beloved of orthodoxy, almost certainly never existed, or did so only as a more recent interlude of relatively brief duration. The cause of this event is merely hinted at. …

MWC: The Drift. Blanketing many parts of the world's land surface is an extensive geological deposit known as the drift. Like its thickness, its composition varies from district to district, consisting of: a. intractable clay in one place, b. of coarse gravel and assorted rocks in another c. and of mixed sand, volcanic dust and angular grits in yet others. Its deposition appears to have been unusual, for it is found plastered up against the northern flanks of many hills and mountains but not on their southern slopes. Elsewhere it occurs on upland summits but not on neighbouring low ground, or it fills up entire valleys adjacent to others wholly devoid of it. In short, its geographical distribution is singularly patchy. The drift is also largely unstratified but, where stratification is discernible, this is highly contorted vertically and extremely irregular laterally. All observers agree that drift accumulated quickly and confusedly, perhaps in pell-mell fashion like snow whirled about during severe snow storms - but a drifting of gravel and boulders? The only natural mechanism which geologists initially envisaged as possessing the power and universality necessary to produce the observable effects involved immense masses of water acting agitatedly on literally a hemispheric (or even greater) scale. This idea almost immediately encouraged many early naturalists to invoke the Biblical Flood idea as the causal agent - an event which, in accordance with scriptural and other traditional accounts, was widely conceived of as having been primarily rain induced. However as investigations gathered momentum, the diluvial explanation was increasingly regarded as inadequate and scarcely able to account for the fissured, smashed and deeply furrowed condition of even the hardest rocks underlying the drift deposits. The heaviest rains, even if allegedly falling for 40 days and nights[1], could hardly account for such widespread petrographical devastation. Furrowing perhaps, but fissuring? As we shall soon see, this fissuring conforms to a definite global pattern. Flood theory was thus eventually replaced by Glacial theory, which advocated ice action as being responsible for the above phenomena and the distribution of the countless erratic boulders so intimately associated with the drift itself[2].

MS Copilot said: Glacial drift refers to the material transported and deposited by glaciers. It includes:

1) Till (Glacial Till): 1a. Unsorted material directly deposited by glaciers. 1b. Comprises clay, silt, sand, gravel, and larger rock fragments. 1c. Reflects the composition of up-glacier source rocks. 1d. Forms moraines and other features.

2) Stratified Drift: 2a. Sorted and stratified debris due to glacial meltwater. 2b. Includes outwash plains, eskers, and kames. 2c. Composition varies based on location.

3) Clay in Drift: 3a. Clay is often present in glacial drift, especially in till. 3b. It contributes to the overall mixture of sediments. 3c. The specific distribution of clay depends on local conditions.

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/626835

OUT OF PLACE BOULDERS

MWC: Erratic Boulders. Strewn haphazardly across the same landscapes which host the drift deposits are vast numbers of boulders which, because they are commonly composed of rocks foreign to the districts in which they repose, are known as erratics. In many cases the nearest similar in situ rocks are hundreds of miles distant. Although erratics' can be as small as a foot or two across, others are positively huge, while there are innumerable ones of intermediate size and weight. Irrespective of size, however, most are sharply angular and fresh looking[3]. Such details suggest that transportation from their natal localities was swift and of short duration. As the very largest examples are many hundreds of feet long[4] and of prodigious weight, it is difficult to visualise how even the waters of the Flood, or the power of the thickest ice accumulations of alleged glacial (Ice Age) times, were sufficient to move boulders of such magnitude any distance at all - but something clearly did.

_Fig. 1. Erratic boulder in Nairn, N.B., photographed by E.K. Hall

EIU: The Erratic Boulders. THE WATERS of the ocean in which our mountains had been formed still covered a part of these Alps when a violent paroxysm of the globe suddenly opened great cavities ... and ruptured many rocks.... "The waters were carried toward these abysses with extreme violence, falling from the height they were before; they crossed deep valleys and dragged immense quantities of earth, sand, and debris of all kinds of rocks. This mass, shoved along by the onrush of great waters, was left spread up the slopes where we still see many scattered fragments."1 Thus did Horace Benedict de Saussure, foremost Swiss naturalist of the end of the eighteenth century, explain the presence of stones broken off from the Alps and carried to the Jura Mountains to the west; so also did he explain the marine remains found in alpine ridges, and the sand, gravel, and clay that fill the valleys of the Alps and the plains beyond them. The loose rocks lying on the Jura Mountains were torn from the Alps; in their mineral composition they differ from the rock formations of the Jura, showing their alpine origin. Rocks that differ from the formations on which they lie are called "erratic boulders." These stone blocks lie on the Jura Mountains at an elevation of 2000 feet above Lake Geneva. Some of them are thousands of cubic feet in size, and Pierre a Martin is over 10,000 cubic feet. They must have been carried across the space now occupied by the lake and lifted to the height where they are found. There are erratic boulders in many places of the world. In the British Isles, on the shore and in the highlands, are enormous quantities of them, transported there across the North Sea from the mountains of Norway. Some force wrested them from those massifs, bore them over the entire expanse that separates Scandinavia from the British Isles, and set them down on the coast and on the hills. From Scandinavia boulders were also carried to Germany and spread over that country, in some places so thickly that it seems as though they had been brought there by masons to build cities. Also, high in the Harz Mountains, in central Germany, lie stones that originated in Norway. From Finland blocks of stone were swept to the Baltic regions and over Poland and lifted onto the Carpathians. Another train of boulders was fanned out from Finland, over the Valdai Hills, over the site of Moscow, and as far as the Don. In North America erratic blocks, broken from the granite of Canada and Labrador, were spread over Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio; they perch on top of ridges and lie on slopes and deep in the valleys. They lie on the coastal plain and on the White Mountains and the Berkshires, sometimes in an unbroken chain; in the Pocono Mountains they balance precariously on the edge of crests. The attentive traveler through the woods wonders at the size of these rocks, brought there and abandoned sometime in the past, frighteningly piled up. Some erratics are enormous. The block near Conway, New Hampshire, is 90 by 40 by 38 feet and weighs about 10,000 tons, the load of a large cargo ship. Equally large is Mohegan Rock, which towers over the town of Montville, in Connecticut. The great flat erratic in Warren County, Ohio, weighs approximately 13,500 tons and covers three quarters of an acre; the Ototoks erratic, thirty miles south of Calgary, Alberta, consists of two pieces of quartzite "derived from at least 50 miles to the west,'* of a calculated weight of over 18,000 tons." Blocks of 250 to 300 feet in circumference, however, are small when compared with a mass of chalk stone near Malmo in southern Sweden, which is "three miles long, one thousand feet wide and from one hundred to two hundred feet in thickness, and which has been transported an indefinite distance...." It is quarried for commercial purposes. A similar transported slab of chalk is found on the eastern coast of England, "upon which a village had unwittingly been built."3 In innumerable places on the surface of the earth, as well as on isolated islands in the Atlantic and Pacific and in Antarctica,4 lie rocks of foreign origin, brought from afar by some great force. Broken off from their parent mountain ridges and coastal cliffs, they were carried down dale and up hill and over land and sea.

thatoregonlife.com

TECTONIC EVENTS

COMMENT: This next section seems to describe events that more likely occurred 700 years earlier during the Great Flood. However, it’s hard to imagine that fissures (like in the image above) remained open for that long a time after the Flood.

MWC: Crustal Dislocation. On first acquaintance, the individual axes of the rock fissures mentioned previously appear to run to all points of the compass but when considered as a whole they prove to be part of a coherent worldwide fracture complex, the principal overriding alignment of which is NW-SE[5]. General agreement exists that this fracturing, of which India's Gangetic Trough[6] and California's San Andreas Fault[7] are famous examples, occurred on a planetary scale and everywhere at about the same time[8]. Their origin is connected with: a. the formation of the Great Rift Valley of Africa and Asia Minor[9], b. the deep-sea trenches on the ocean floors, c. various major fault lines and d. Earth's most recent phase of mountain-building (orogeny)[10]. In their present guise most of these features are remarkably youthful. Abundant interdependent evidence reveals that they date from late Pleistocene times, i.e. between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, when rampant volcanic activity is also known to have occurred. The largest of these fractures, now largely infilled by drift-like deposits, is that which extends unbroken from Sumatra in Indonesia to the Mediterranean[11] via the Gangetic Trough and the Persian Gulf. Informed opinion[12] has concluded that this fracturing occurred more or less simultaneously everywhere, indicating that Earth, as a planet, either abruptly malfunctioned or was suddenly subjected to some damaging external influence. Either way, massive crustal dislocation resulted globally. Mountain ranges[13] were heaved up, former oceans displaced, earlier river systems disrupted and land areas extensively fractured as, concomitantly, earthquakes and volcanism proliferated. The likelihood of Earth malfunctioning on such a scale of its own volition is offset by the additional conclusions that (a ) this fracturing can only have been caused by a deceleration of Earth's rotation[14] and (b ) Earth's axis must have been inclined at the time in a more vertical plane than at present[15]. Reference to the huge thermal increase engendered by physical changes as drastic as these is surely superfluous. Not only was the increase enormous, it was inevitable.

EIU: Sea and Land Changed Places. The most renowned naturalist to come from the generation of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars was Georges Cuvier. He was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the science of fossil bones, and thus of the science of extinct animals. Studying the finds made in the gypsum formation of Montmartre in Paris and those elsewhere in France and the European continent in general, he came to the conclusion that in the midst of even the oldest strata of marine formations there are other strata replete with animal or plant remains of terrestrial or fresh-water forms; and that among the more recent strata, or those that are nearer the surface, there are also land animals buried under heaps of marine sediment. "It has frequently happened that lands which have been laid dry, have been again covered by the waters, in consequence either of their being engulfed in the abyss, or of the sea having merely risen over them.... These repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither all been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proven, with regard to the last of these catastrophes, that which, by a twofold motion, has inundated, and afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or at least a part of the land which forms them at the present day. * The breaking to pieces, the raising up and overturning of the older strata (of the earth), leave no doubt upon the mind that they have been reduced to the state in which we now see them, by the action of sudden and violent causes; and even the force of the motions excited in the mass of waters, is still attested by the heaps of debris and rounded pebbles which are in many places interposed between the solid strata. Life, therefore, has often been disturbed on this earth by terrific events. Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some, which inhabited the dry land, have been swallowed up by inundations; others, which peopled the waters, have been laid dry, the bottom of the sea having been suddenly raised; their very races have been extinguished for ever, and have left no other memorial of their existence than some fragments which the naturalist can scarcely recognize. ^ Cuvier was surprised to find that "life has not always existed upon the globe," for there are deep strata which contain no vestiges of living beings. The sea without inhabitants "would seem to have prepared materials for the mollusca and zoophytes," and when they appeared and populated the sea, they deposited their shells and built coral, at first in small numbers, and eventually in vast formations. Cuvier believed that changes have operated in nature not just since the appearance of life, for the land masses formed previous to that event also seemed to have experienced violent displacements.3 He found in the gypsum deposits in the suburbs of Paris marine limestone containing over eight hundred species of shells, all of them marine. Under this limestone there is another—fresh-water— deposit formed of clay. Among the shells, all of fresh-water (or land) origin, there are also bones—but "what is remarkable," the bones are those of reptiles and not of mammals, "of crocodiles and tortoises". Much of France was once sea; then it was land, populated by land reptiles; then it became sea again and was populated by marine animals; then it was land again, inhabited by mammals; then it was once more sea, and again land. Each stratum contains the evidence of its age in the bones and shells of the animals that lived and propagated there at the time and were entombed in recurrent upheavals. And as it was on the site of Paris, so it was in other parts of France, and in other countries of Europe. The strata of the earth disclose that "The thread of operations is here broken; the march of Nature is changed; and none of the agents which she now employs, would have been sufficient for the production of her ancient works." * "We have no evidence that the sea can now encrust those shells with a paste as compact as that of the marbles, the sandstones, or even the coarse limestone.... "In short, all[now active] causes united, would not change, in an appreciable degree, the level of the sea; nor raise a single stratum above its surface.... It has been asserted that the sea has undergone a general diminishing of level.... Admitting that there has been a gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea has transported solid matter in all directions; that the temperature of the globe is either diminishing or increasing; none of these cases could have overturned our strata, enveloped in ice large animals, with their flesh and skin; laid dry marine[animals] ... and, lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even entire genera."5 Thus, we repeat, it is in vain that we search, among the powers which now act at the surface of the earth, for causes sufficient to produce the revolutions and catastrophes, the traces of which are exhibited by its crust." ^ But what could have caused these catastrophes? Cuvier reviewed the theories of the origin of the world current in his time but found no answer to the question that preoccupied him. He did not know the cause of these vast cataclysms; he only knew that they had occurred. Many fruitless efforts" had been made, and he felt that his search for the causes of the cataclysms was fruitless too. These ideas have haunted, I may almost say have tormented me during my researches among fossil bones."

SLAUGHTERHOUSE EARTH

MWC: A Premature Extinction. Distributed irregularly within the drift are immense quantities of sub-fossilised plant and animal remains. Sometimes preserved in isolation, these more commonly occur as extensive graveyards in which the remains were frequently buried in a highly dismembered condition. Everywhere the picture is of high-speed violent action, exactly, of course, what one would expect of a suddenly dislocated planetary crust. Sometimes the remains, especially those of trees, were carbonised, or converted into lignite. Elsewhere, as in arctic Canada, Alaska and northern Siberia, both animal and plant remains were, at the moment of burial, frozen more or less intact and have remained so ever since. Their frozen remains still retain berries, cones, nuts, bark and leaves as in life, some with their original colours. Similarly, long dead molluscs are encountered with their internal soft-parts and shell colourations unaltered, while the nearly entire cadavers of musk-oxen, hairy mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and other bygone animals from those latitudes are justly famous. Not so well known are the occurrences of the refrigerated complete carcasses of soft whales, seals, various fishes, zebras and birds - environmentally incompatible biota. No natural habitat and no animal or plant species escaped. At best many species were simply decimated. At worst entire genera and specialised biological communities were obliterated. The age, sex, or adaptation of individual organisms was no guarantee of immunity. The faunas and floras affected were extremely varied, healthy and numerically prolific. Expressed briefly, the scenario represented by the foregoing was nothing less than a premature extinction.

_Figure 2 Muck deposit in Alaska, showing mixture of wood, bones and carcasses. (By courtesy of Prof. Frank C. Hibben, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico)

MWC: Unnatural Congregations. Any doubts about that interpretation are quickly dispelled by the following details. The remains of all the above animal forms, together with those of an immense range of others, often choke caves and rock fissures on all the continents except those at the poles. They lie in stiff cave earths or a harder deposit known as breccia. These repositories, which are frequently multi-leveled, winding and narrow-passaged, sometimes descend in stages to great depths below present land surfaces. Some Australian caves drop as far as 200 feet (61m.) below ground level[16], while several European rock fissures descend to over double that distance. Even so, broken animal remains crowd even those depths and the furthest recesses of the most extensive caves and fissures. The long lists compiled down the years of the different biota retrieved during excavations of these sites are revelatory. Practically every living, and most extinct, genera and species has been identified among these assemblages, indicating that virtually the whole of organic creation was equally affected by whatever so destroyed and entombed them. However their burial was frequently abnormally varied. While most caves and fissures have yielded wide ranges of once contemporary animals (many, such as whales with land animals[17], dolphins with bears and Red Deer[18] and horses with sea urchins[19], being faunistically incompatible and congregated purely by chance), several caves contain the relics of just a single genus. Thus, in the Sicilian Cave of San Ciro only hippopotamus bones occurred[20]; the Austrian cave at Peggau yielded only bear remains[21]; opossums and rodents were the sole occupants - but numbering hundreds of thousands - of one of the bone-caves at Santa Lucia in Brazil[22] and only moa remains were found in some New Zealand caves[23]. Bone caves also contain other faunistic anomalies. One repeating pattern concerns the remains of animals which could never have prospered in the regions where the caves now exist. Thus, in caves at Choukoutien, near Peking (40 N), chaotically interred bones of the woolly rhinoceros, porcupines, the ancient elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), camels, baboons, the ostrich and a species of tropical tortoise occurred as vast heterogeneous masses[24]. Today, ostriches are confined to Africa and Arabia[25], while the tortoise, baboons and porcupines are denizens of more southern latitudes. Porcupine distribution, moreover, is now discontinuous. They are at present restricted to parts of Africa, Russian Europe and South America[26]. Cumberland Cave in Maryland is another which has yielded anomalous faunal remains. Some of the identified species were distinctly southern' (Lower Austral) forms but others were typically northern' (Boreal)[27]. Yet all were buried together promiscuously in great disorder. Similar faunistically mixed remains have been retrieved from the tar-seeps at McKittrick and San Pedro, both in California. These involved an amazing variety of birds adapted to a very wide range of natural habitats. Among the many forms recorded were woodland birds, meadowland birds, jungle birds, sea birds, river birds and waders, nightbirds, birds from cool-temperate climes and others from tropical, grassland and semi-desert settings[28 & 29]. The above compares favourably with the extraordinary evidence from Geiseltal in Germany and Moel Tryfaen in Wales. Neither of these instances, however, involve caves. Amongst other remains, the Pleistocene lignite beds at Geiseltal envelop a modern insect fauna in which wing-cases, membranes and other soft parts, often retaining their original colours, are marvelously preserved. The problem is, however, that the species found come from Africa, East Asia and various American regions. They could never have originally lived together, any more than could many of the plants in these lignites. The plants, some of which still retain green leaves, are today found only in Brazil, Java and the Cameroons. Likewise, buried haphazardly alongside the insects and plants is a faunistically perplexing animal congregation. This includes South American condors, Indo-Australian birds and marsupials, east African crocodiles and salamanders, apes, a giant constrictor snake and, paradoxically, various mammals typical of a northern steppe environment[30]. Just as baffling are the molluscs entombed in drift deposits on Moel Tryfaen, a mountain in North Wales rising to 1,300 feet (400 m.) above present sea level. The species recognised belong to northern, temperate and southern environmental regimes. In order to thrive, some required deep and others shallow water, some clear and others muddy water and some were peculiar to shingly and yet others to bare rock conditions[31]. Again, another case of mixed faunas congregated unnaturally in one spot.

MWC: Fast Blitzschnell. If the foregoing burials seem abnormal, then those which follow must seem still more so. Although mammoths certainly existed in the New World only a few thousand years ago, they were apparently never as numerous as their bulky cousins, the mastodons. Fully grown mastodons were 9 feet tall or more at the shoulder. Enormous herds of them populated the Americas during later Pleistocene times and untold numbers perished violently and suddenly in the final days of that epoch. The suddenness of the demise of many mastodons has been demonstrated by the discoveries at many localities in the eastern USA of almost entire carcasses, complete with leathery skin and hair, standing vertically (but also occasionally upside-down) 4 to 6 feet below the surface of unstructured, but now consolidated, alkaline muds occupying shallow basins or sinks in the underlying harder rocks[32]. In all known examples, these muds seemingly accumulated as single depositional events. Standard explanations that these were mired individuals which had fatally endeavoured to cross swampy ground lose conviction when we consider (a ) the specimens buried on their backs and (b ) those which formed groups featuring juveniles. The sheer size and weight of adult mastodons was such as to virtually ensure that, once stuck fast in thick mud, even a struggling adult would be unable to turn itself upside-down. The adhesive nature of the ensnaring mud would frustrate all such attempts. That the less bulky juveniles were also buried erect near their adult kin - the inert postures of several being likened upon discovery to those assumed during the act of walking (a near-impossible disposition of limbs in a struggling mired animal) - and the fact that the majority of the upright individuals had some or all of their feet planted firmly upon the subjacent hard strata also militates against the miring hypothesis. Of further interest is the curiously repetitive SW to NE alignment of many of these carcasses, not only at particular sites but at many hundreds of miles apart. Had the mastodons, in sheltering rock basins, turned to face or avoid an impending threat of such awesome and sudden operation that there was not even time for them to be knocked over by it? Certainly all the signs suggest that these animals were overwhelmed almost instantaneously, to be buried literally where they stood. The result was immediate annihilation and preservation, an act succinctly expressed by the German word blitzschnell. Not improbably the same scenario underpins the burial of the mammoths found standing erect in muds within drift deposits near St. Petersburg[33] and Moscow[34]. Blitzschnell was used expressly to account for the extraordinary preservation of the plant and insect remains previously mentioned from Geiseltal. It seems to be applicable to a great deal of other evidence usually assigned to the latest Pleistocene times.

EIU: In Alaska. IN ALASKA, to the north of Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, the Tanana River joins the Yukon. From the Tanana Valley and the valleys of its tributaries gold is mined out of gravel and "muck." This muck is a frozen mass of animals and trees. F. Rainey of the University of Alaska described the scene: * "Wide cuts, often several miles in length and sometimes as much as 140 feet in depth, are now being sluiced out along stream valleys tributary to the Tanana in the Fairbanks District. In order to reach gold-bearing gravel beds an overburden of frozen silt or ==='muck' is removed with hydraulic giants. This 'muck' contains enormous numbers of frozen bones of extinct animals such as the mammoth, mastodon, super-bison and horse." … "Although the formation of the deposits of muck is not clear, there is ample evidence that at least portions of this material were deposited under catastrophic conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dismembered and disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain, in their frozen state, portions of ligaments, skin, hair, and flesh. Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses. . . . At least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in these deposits, although they are extremely warped and distorted. … The presence of volcanic ash indicates that a volcanic eruption did take place, and repeatedly, in four consecutive stages of the same epoch; but it is also apparent that the trees could have been uprooted and splintered only by hurricane or flood or a combination of both agencies. The animals could have been dismembered only by a stupendous wave that lifted and carried and smashed and tore and buried millions of bodies and millions of trees. Also, the area of the catastrophe was much greater than the action of a few volcanoes could have covered. Muck deposits like those of the Tanana River Valley are found in the lower reaches of the Yukon in the western part of the peninsula, on the Koyukuk River that flows into the Yukon from the north, on the Kuskokwim River that empties its waters into Bering Sea, and at several places along the Arctic coast, and so "may be considered to extend in greater or lesser thickness over all unglaciated areas of the northern peninsula."4 What could have caused the Arctic Sea and the Pacific Ocean to irrupt and wash away forests with all their animal population and throw the entire mingled mass in great heaps scattered all over Alaska, the coast of which is longer than the Atlantic seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida? Was it not a tectonic revolution in the earth's crust, that also caused the volcanoes to erupt and to cover the peninsula with ashes? In various levels of the muck, stone artifacts were found "frozen in situ at great depths and in apparent association" with the Ice Age fauna, which implies that "men were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska."

EIU: The Caves of England. In 1823, William Buckland, professor of geology at the University of Oxford, published his Reliquiae diluvianae (Relics of the Flood), with the subtitle, Observations on the organic remains contained in caves, fissures, and diluvial gravel, and on other geological phenomena, attesting the action of an universal deluge. Buckland was one of the great authorities on geology of the first half of the nineteenth century. In a cave in Kirkdale in Yorkshire, eighty feet above the valley, under a floor covering of stalagmites, he found teeth and bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, deer, tigers (the teeth of which were "larger than those of the largest lion or Bengal tiger), bears, wolves, hyenas, foxes, hares, rabbits, as well as bones of ravens, pigeons, larks, snipe, and ducks. Many of the animals had died "before the first set, or milk teeth, had been shed." Certain scholars prior to Buckland had their own explanation for the provenience of elephant bones in the soil of England, and to them Buckland referred: "[The idea] which long prevailed, and was considered satisfactory by the antiquaries[archaeologists] of the last century, was, that they were the remains of elephants imported by the Roman armies. This idea is also refuted: First, by the anatomical facts of their belonging to an extinct species of this genus; second, by their being usually accompanied by the bones of rhinoceros and hippopotamus, animals which could never have been attached to Roman armies; thirdly, by their being found dispersed over Siberia and North America, in equal or even greater abundance than in those parts of Europe which were subjected to the Roman power."1 It appeared that hippopotamus and reindeer and bison lived side by side at Kirkdale; hippopotamus, reindeer, and mammoth pastured together at Brentford near London.2 Reindeer and grizzly bear lived with the hippopotamus at Cefn in Wales. Lemming and reindeer bones were found together with bones of the cave lion and hyena at Bleadon in Somerset.8 Hippopotamus, bison, and musk sheep were found together with worked flint in the gravels of the Thames Valley.4 The remains of reindeer lay with the bones of mammoth and rhinoceros in the cave of Breugue in France, in the same red clay, encased by the same stalagmites.5 At Arcy, France, also in a cave, bones of the hippopotamus were found with bones of the reindeer, and with them a worked flint.6 According to the prophecy of Isaiah (11:6), in messianic times to come the lion and the calf would pasture together. But even prophetic vision has not conceived of a reindeer from snow covered Lapland and a hippopotamus from the tropical Congo River living together on the British Isles or in France. Yet they did leave their bones in the same mud of the same caves, together with bones of other animals, in the strangest assortments. These animal bones were found in gravel and clay to which Buckland gave the name of diluvium. Buckland was concerned "to establish two important facts, first, that there has been a recent and general inundation of the globe and, second, that the animals whose remains are found interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of high north latitudes." The presence of tropical animals in northern Europe "cannot be solved by supposing them to migrate periodically ... for in the case of crocodiles and tortoises extensive emigration is almost impossible, and not less so to such an unwieldy animal as the hippopotamus when out of the water." But how could they live in the cold of northern Europe? Buckland says: "It is equally difficult to imagine that they could have passed their winters in lakes or rivers frozen up with ice." If cold-blooded land animals are unable to hide themselves in the ground over the winter, in icy climates their blood would freeze solid: they lack the ability to regulate the temperature of their bodies. Like Cuvier, Buckland was "nearly certain that if any change of climate has taken place, it took place suddenly." Of the time the catastrophe occurred, which covered with mud and pebbles the bones in the Kirkdale cave, Buckland wrote: "From the limited quantity of postdiluvian stalactite, as well as from the undecayed condition of the bones," one must deduce that "the time elapsed since the introduction of the diluvial mud has not been of excessive length." The bones were not yet fossilized; their organic matter was not yet replaced by minerals. Buckland thought that the time elapsed since a diluvial catastrophe could not have exceeded five or six thousand years, the figure adopted also by De Luc, Dolomieu, and Cuvier, each of whom presented his own reasons. Then the illustrious geologist added these words: "What [the] cause was, whether a change in the inclination in the earth's axis, or the near approach of a comet, or any other cause or combination of causes purely astronomical, is a question the discussion of which is foreign to the object of the present memoir."

EIU: Agate Spring Quarry. In Sioux County, Nebraska, on the south side of the Niobrara River, in Agate Spring Quarry, is a fossil-bearing deposit up to twenty inches thick. The state of the bones indicates a long and violent transportation before they reached their final resting place. "The fossils are in such remarkable profusion in places as to form a veritable pavement of interlacing bones, very few of which are in their natural articulation with one another," says R. S. Lull, director of the Peabody Museum at Yale, in his book on fossils.1 The profusion of bones in Agate Spring Quarry may be judged by a single block now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This block contains about 100 bones to the square foot. There is no way of explaining such an aggregation of fossils as a natural death retreat of animals of various genera. The animals found there were mammals. The most numerous was the small twin-horned rhinoceros (Diceratherium). There was another extinct animal (Moropus) with a head not unlike that of a horse but with heavy legs and claws like those of a carnivorous animal; and bones of a giant swine that stood six feet high (Dinohyus hollcindi) were also unearthed. The Carnegie Museum, which likewise excavated in Agate Spring Quarry, in a space of 1350 square feet found 164,000 bones or about 820 skeletons. A mammal skeleton averages 200 bones. This area represents only one twentieth of the fossil bed in the quarry, suggesting to Lull that the entire area would yield about 16,400 skeletons of the twin-horned rhinoceros, 500 skeletons of the clawed horse, and 100 skeletons of the giant swine. A few miles to the east, in another quarry, were found skeletons of an animal which, because of its similarity to two extant species, is called a gazelle camel (Stenomylus). A herd of these animals was destroyed in a disaster. As in Agate Spring Quarry, the fossil bones were deposited in sand transported by water. The transportation was in a violent cataract of water, sand, and gravel, that left marks on the bones. Tens of thousands of animals were carried over an unknown distance, then smashed into a common grave. The catastrophe was most probably ubiquitous, for these animals—the small twin-horned rhinoceros, clawed horse, giant swine, and gazelle camel—did not survive, but became extinct. There is nothing in their skeletons to warrant regarding them as degenerate and doomed to extinction. And the very circumstances in which they are found bespeak a violent death at the hands of the elements, not slow extinction in a process of evolution. In many other places of the world similar finds have been made, and in one of the sections to follow we shall discuss the famous bone quarry of Siwalik. In the United States, Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, twenty miles south of Cincinnati, contained the bones of one hundred mastodons, besides many other extinct animals. President Jefferson gathered there his famous collection of fossils. In San Pedro Valley, California, skeletons of the mastodon are found standing upright, in the posture in which they died, mired in gravel, ash, and sand. Fossils found in John Day Basin, Oregon, and the glacial Lake Florissant, Colorado, are embedded in volcanic ash. In the Southern states fossil bones are quarried for the commercial exploitation of phosphates. In Switzerland a conglomerate of bones of animals that belong to different climates and habitats was found in Kesslerloch near Thayngen: Alpine types are there in one "Tiergemisch" with animals of the steppe and of the forest fauna.2 In Germany a gravel pit at Neukoin (formerly Rixdorf), a suburb of Berlin, disclosed two faunas: mammoth, musk ox, reindeer, and arctic fox "suggest a boreal climate"; lion, hyena, bison, ox, and two species of elephant suggest varying degrees of warmer climate." The faunas were interpreted as belonging to two periods—glacial and interglacial—but the bones were found all together. "It seems probable that the relations are more complicated than has been realized."8 There has not yet been found "a satisfactory climatic interpretation. Great multitudes of animals that filled prairies and forests, water and air, forms, fragile or sturdy, with an urge to live and multiply, were more than once suddenly called upon to write their names in the register of extinction.

WHAT CAUSED METAL PLATING?

MWC: The Metal Factor. Especially noteworthy are the numerous instances of drift age animals and plants found agglutinated by, embedded within, or unexpectedly associated with, certain ores. Examples include a nearly complete rhinoceros skeleton entombed in a vein of lead in Derbyshire[35], thousands of agglutinated bones in a cave at Gailenreuth, Germany[36], many more cemented together in red iron-oxide stained breccia at Kesslerloch, Switzerland[37], those within nearly pure iron-ore infilling rock-fissures descending to 720 ft[220m] below ground level in Carniola, Austria[38] and ore-agglutinated masses of bones occupying cave after cave in Australia's Wellington Valley[39]. Many cave breccias are strongly ferruginised. That of Tea Tree Cave in Queensland is an outstanding example[40]. Animals remains from drift age sands and gravel also often exhibit external metalliferous staining. Typical examples were the mammoth and other mammal bones found at Turnham Green and Acton, Middlesex, last century loaded with manganous oxide[41]. Molluscs possessing a pronounced ferruginous patina occurred in blue-grey iron-sand overlying the celebrated frozen rhinoceros carcass of Vilyui in Siberia[42]. Even a small soapstone idol exhumed from glacial deposits over 280 feet (86m.) below ground level at Nampa, Idaho, late last century was found invested with reddish iron oxide[43]. At many localities the stones and sand grains constituting much of the drift itself have been similarly ferruginised. The particles of compact sands directly overlying so-called glacial deposits at Thorne in South Yorkshire were cemented into extensive pans by oxide of iron[44]. Analogous evidence has been recorded from Alderbury in Wiltshire[45], while similarly iron-impregnated sands at Everthorpe in Humberside are locally as much as 15 feet thick[46]. Black manganous staining also occurs at several levels in the drift gravels at Radley and other places around Abingdon. Their formation was allegedly of brief duration[47]. Comparable ferruginisation, often accompanied locally by the presence of gold, platinum and diamonds, repeatedly characterises the drift deposits of France, Germany, Poland, western Russia[48] and various other European and near-eastern countries. In Israel and Jordan, for instance, the evidence extends to include manganese, copper, asphalt and oil[49,50,51,52]. Very importantly, some of these ores, which are high-temperature products, occur in non-metamorphosed sediments[53]. Under normal circumstances such ores would be produced in conjunction with metamorphic (fire-formed) or metamorphosed rocks, not with non-metamorphosed sediments. The examples just highlighted appear to have been injected into the sediments by some external mechanism. The Americas host similar evidence. Small scattered flakes of gold abound, sometimes at great depths, in the drift of Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota[54], Virginia and the Carolinas[55], along with platinum, lead, zinc and iron ore in drift filled pockets occupying the uneven surfaces of the underlying bed rock. At Sudbury in Ontario, a place where this scenario is well seen, nickel also occurs in the drift'[56, as well as innumerable pieces of copper described as nearly pure metal'. One piece, almost 3,000 lbs. in weight, lay in ferruginous clay, while countless smaller examples, down to the size of a garden pea, occur, along with good quality diamonds[57], in the same deposits as far south as Ohio (58). Diamonds, which occur in silicate rocks[59] and are associated with volcanism[60], have also been discovered in considerable quantities within drift deposits along the southern margins of Hudson Bay[61] where no recent volcanic activity has occurred. It was initially suggested that glacial action during the so-called Ice Age transported the diamonds thither from Labrador, a region which later studies showed was actually never seriously glaciated[62]. These diamonds and the other above-mentioned ores must therefore have been dispersed by other means.

_Figure 3 (Van der Grinten's projection, scale 1:250,000,000 at the Equator) Ocean floor areas from which ferromanganese nodules have been reported. Each dot represents a separate locality, not an individual nodule. It should be noted that many areas have yet to be searched for nodules, the expectation being that the final number of nodule-yielding localities will be appreciably higher than shown here. (Compiled from Berger, Horn and other sources.)

MWC: Manganese Nodules. Covering great swathes of the world's land areas is a surface formation known as the loess. It is especially prominent in parts of China and North America, locally attaining impressive thicknesses. Explanations of its origin have ranged from the aeolian (wind-blown) to the aqueous (water-borne). For present purposes we focus on the formation's basal layers. In Northern China the lowest loess beds are crowded with red-hued manganese nodules called Pisolites[63]. The loess of other Chinese regions also exhibits similar metalliferous associations, a characteristic also true of the American loess. That in Nebraska, for instance, contains as much as 20.26% aluminium and 7.80% iron[64]. Indeed, the mineral content of loess is generally dominated by silica and heavy minerals[65], thereby paralleling the previously noted occurrences of heavy (high temperature) metals here and there in the drift deposits. A striking example of the latter occurred in the drift gravel redeposited as a deltaic formation at the mouth of the Fraser River in British Columbia. There, unexpected concentrations of manganese, cobalt, iron, lead, zinc and copper have been found[66]. Such high temperature ores are not produced by agencies which accumulate loess or drift-like deposits. They are produced deep within the Earth or arrive meteorically, having formed elsewhere under extremely hot conditions. The occurrence of silica in the loess correlates with the aforementioned silicate origins of diamonds, locally present in the drift of many areas and both with the marked volcanism of late Pleistocene times. Is it coincidence that immense banks and lenses of now frozen volcanic dust and ejecta occur confusedly among the mountains of mangled late Pleistocene animals and plants comprising the Siberian and Alaskan graveyards? At least one high authority, particularly familiar with the relevant field evidence, concluded that great falls of volcanic ash had contributed to the wholesale slaughter of the animals and plants preserved in these refrigerated deposits[67]. That the loess is apparently of comparably recent age is indicated by studies of the myriads of mineral grains composing the bulk of the deposit as a whole, for it is widely conceded that these are singularly fresh and angular looking[68]. The deposition of volcanically produced dust, ash, diamond forming silicate rocks and high-temperature ores coevally with the slaughter on all continents of organisms of practically every kind, as well as the chaotic burial of all this diverse material, would seem to be valid reflections of a once terrible reality traceable on many of Earth's land areas. The same scenario is also apparently discernible under the sea, albeit in less detail. Sea bed clays and muds from the Arctic possess brown colours due to the huge quantities within them of oxidised ferric iron particles, while others from the White Sea, the Barents Sea and off the Siberian coast contain a notably high amount of manganese oxide[69]. Floor sediments from the Pacific Ocean proved to contain layers of volcanic ash and large amounts of nickel and radium - two elements almost completely absent from sea water. Nickel, moreover, is very rare in most terrestrial rocks and continental sediments[70]. The brown and red clays which extend across large areas of the ocean floors also contain huge numbers of ferromanganese concretions or nodules. They are irregularly shaped and vary in size from that of garden peas to lumps as much as 3 feet (0.9 m.) in long diameter[71]. Like the red clays, they are naturally radioactive[72]. These nodules occur in unbelievable numbers in certain areas although, overall, their distribution is patchy, the reason for which remains unclear[73]. In the areas of their greatest abundance, however, they cover almost 100% of the sea bed[74]. Collectively they are thought to represent between 100 and 200 billion tonnes of material[75]. The nodules are rich in cobalt, nickel, copper and other heavy ores, suggesting that, as these metals are rare in sea water and because the nodules are thought to grow through natural chemical accretion of these, the time needed for the largest to have attained their present sizes was, due to the slowness of the process, very lengthy. Accordingly, the nodules are generally considered to be ancient objects[76]. The fact that a very high percentage of these nodules occur on the surface of the uppermost layers of the red clay has encouraged the conclusion that they formed principally in areas of low sedimentation rates, otherwise they would soon be covered up in regions of high sediment supply[77]. Moreover, these red clays are themselves geologically youthful. That being so, the nodules which lie upon them must be at least as youthful if not more so – i.e., they cannot be very old (terrestrially) at all. Consideration of all the foregoing facts indicates that these nodules have been acquired by Earth en masse in geologically very recent times, more or less simultaneously everywhere. This implies a cosmic origin which, if correct, signifies a sudden arrival in vast numbers of a veritable blizzard of metallic missiles. Interestingly, the oceanographer Petterson concluded that the nickel and iron in the brown Pacific clays were of meteoric origin[78], an idea broadly in agreement with others about the origins of other sea floor deposits[79, 80]. The genesis of such cosmic material, although an intriguing field for research, is a topic beyond the remit of this paper. We can, however, reach several conclusions from the data presented in this essay which do not wholly militate against the cosmic origin of the catastrophic events indicated by that data.

MWC: Summary, Comparisons and Conclusions. All data discussed centres on an averaged radiocarbon date falling on or about 11,500 years ago. This is the conventional geological date marking the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age) epoch. Extensive unconsolidated surface deposits, collectively styled drift, mantle many land areas globally, often oblivious to underlying topography. Its irregular internal character indicates a rapid and tumultuous mode of deposition. Bedrock surfaces subjacent to the drift are strangely smashed, furrowed and fissured. Immense numbers of large and small boulders, demonstrably transported great distances as objects foreign to the localities now hosting them, often decorate drift covered regions. These are accordingly called erratics. Early theories usually attributed the accumulation of the drift and the erratics to the rain-induced waters of Noah's Deluge. The causal agent was subsequently changed to ice - drift and erratics thereby becoming supposed Ice Age phenomena. Largest erratics not apparently movable by even excessive rain water or ultra thick ice. Modern flash-flooding is often sufficient to produce boulder fields resembling those elsewhere ascribed to glacial (Ice Age) activity. Rock fissures are part of a world fracture complex associated with concomitant crustal dislocation, rifting, mountain-building, widespread volcanism and oceanic displacement. Global fracturing considered possible only if Earth's rotation was slowed and its spin axis inclined more vertically than now. Huge thermal increase an inevitable outcome of such physical developments. Drift encloses immense numbers of diverse sub-fossilised plant and animal remains, mostly dismembered, sometimes carbonised and always interred tumultuously. In certain Arctic regions great masses of these remains, occasionally including entire cadavers, have survived in frozen condition down to present times. The affected floras and fauna were flourishing ones. Their demise, demonstrably sudden and violent, represented a premature extinction. Resultant biological debris often unceremoniously congregated in meandering caves and deep rock fissures, even occupying the furthest or deepest recesses of those tombs. Only exceptional and sustained water power (furnished by oceanic displacement?) could achieve such effects. Cave and fissure remains generally encompass both living and recently extinct biota, confirming thereby the global scale and operation of the extinction. Environmentally and faunistically incompatible biota often present in the cave and fissure deposits. Lignites and tar-seeps contain a similar record. Many organisms buried aberrantly. Their demise believed to be instantaneous (Blitzschnell). Cave and fissure biota remains often ore-stained or buried in ores. Cave earths and breccias also heavily ferruginised. Iron oxide and manganese the most common. Local ore-staining or cementing of drift sands and gravels. High-temperature ores (especially iron, manganese, copper, gold and lead) locally abundant in drift deposits globally. Instances known of high-temperature ores embedded in non-metamorphosed sediments. Anomalous depositional processes involved. Diamonds, having a silicate rock (volcanic) origin, locally common in drift deposits, themselves associated regionally with extensive volcanic ash, lava and dust beds. High mineral content in loess, dominated by high-temperature heavy ores, notably silica, iron and cobalt. Angularity and freshness of mineral grains in the loess signify geological recency. Abundant manganese nodules generally present at base of loess. Sea-bed red clays highly ferruginous and rich in nickel and radium, the first very rare in terrestrial rocks and both virtually absent from sea water. Naturally radioactive manganese nodules exceedingly abundant on many parts of the ocean floors. They occur on the upper surface of the submarine red clays. Their deposition cannot be geologically remote. Collective tonnage of nodules {is} believed to be 100-200 billion tonnes. Manganese nodules {are} rich in heavy ores, e.g. cobalt and nickel. Believed to be of meteoric or cosmic origin. Assessed dispassionately, the above data apparently represents a diverse yet integrated record of a major convulsion approximately 11,500 years ago, occasioned by extra-planetary forces acting calamitously (but briefly) upon the whole Earth. It should form the factual core of any wider study of this particular event.

{COMMENT: There are always a few factoids that are misfits. Darnit.}