Bruce Masse (and others) on Noah's Fludd
Eric Stevens
worth looking at.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood
The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from
its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea
of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce
Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient
petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You
can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.
In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that
streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this
area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he
is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a
gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years
ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more, he
thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight,
embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world.
His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different
mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid
impacts occur. What scientists know about such collisions is based
mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the
moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been identified, and almost all
are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the
planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of the
craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth
has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have
suspected.
Masse’s epiphany came while poring over Hawaiian oral histories
regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they might reveal about
the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements and create
new tracts of land. He reasoned that even though the stories are often
clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations, many may refer to
actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14
ages for the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian
genealogies. The result: Several flows matched up with the specific
reigns associated with them in the oral histories. Other myths, Masse
theorizes, hold similar clues.
Masse’s biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball
of rock and ice swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off
the coast of Madagascar. The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of
600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against the world’s coastlines and
injected plumes of superheated water vapor and aerosol particulates
into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat and moisture
blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that
pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material
ejected into the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told,
up to 80 percent of the world’s population may have perished, making
it the single most lethal event in history.
Why, then, don’t we know about it? Masse contends that we do. Almost
every culture has a legend about a great flood, and—with a little
reading between the lines—many of them mention something like a comet
on a collision course with Earth just before the disaster. The Bible
describes a deluge for 40 days and 40 nights that created a flood so
great that Noah was stuck in his ark for two weeks until the water
subsided. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the hero of Mesopotamia saw a pillar
of black smoke on the horizon before the sky went dark for a week.
Afterward, a cyclone pummeled the Fertile Crescent and caused a
massive flood. Myths recounted in indigenous South American cultures
also tell of a great flood.
“These stories are all exactly what you would expect from the
survivors of a celestial impact,” Masse says, leafing through
2,000-year-old drawings by Chinese astronomers that show comets of all
shapes and sizes. “When a comet rounds the sun, oftentimes its tail is
still being blown forward by the solar winds so that it actually
precedes it. That is why so many descriptions of comets in mythology
mention that they are wearing horns.” In India, he notes, a celestial
fish described as “bright as a moonbeam,” with a horn on its head,
warned of an epic flood that brought on a new age of man.
Among 175 flood myths, Masse found two of particular interest. A Hindu
myth describes an alignment of the five bright planets that has
happened only once in the last 5,000 years, according to computer
simulations, and a Chinese story mentions that the great flood
occurred at the end of the reign of Empress Nu Wa. Cross-checking
historical records with astronomical data, Masse came up with a date
for his event: May 10, 2807 B.C.
On its own, the mythological evidence is weak, as even Masse
recognizes. “Mythology can help us hypothesize about events that might
have occurred,” he says, “but to prove the reality of them, we have to
go beyond myths and search for physical evidence.”
In 2004, at a conference of geologists, astronomers, and
archaeologists, Masse outlined his evidence for a world-ravaging
impact in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Ted Bryant, a
geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales,
Australia, was intrigued and enlisted the help of Dallas Abbott, an
assistant professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at
Columbia University. In 2005, they formed the Holocene Impact Working
Group (referring to the geological period covering the last 11,000
years) to seek out the geological signatures of a megatsunami. If a
600-foot-high wave ravages a coastline, it should leave a lot of
debris behind. In the case of waves generated by asteroid impacts, the
debris they leave in their wake is believed to form gigantic,
wedge-shaped sandy structures—known as chevrons—that are sometimes
packed with deep-oceanic microfossils dredged up by the tsunami.
When Abbott began searching satellite images on Google Earth, she saw
dozens of chevrons along shorelines and inland in Africa and Asia. The
shape and size of these chevrons suggest that they might have been
formed by waves emanating from the impact of a comet slamming into the
deep ocean off Madagascar. “The chevrons in Madagascar associated with
the crater were filled with melted microfossils from the bottom of the
ocean. There is no explanation for their presence other than a cosmic
impact,” she says. “People are going to have to start taking this
theory a lot more seriously.” The next step is to perform carbon-14
dating on the fossils to see if they are indeed 5,000 years old.
Meanwhile, Bryant contends that chevrons found (pdf) 4 miles inland
from the shore of Madagascar were formed by a wave that traveled 25
miles along the coast, moving almost parallel to the shoreline.
“Neither erosion nor any other terrestrial process could have caused
these formations. The biggest marine landslide ever recorded happened
7,200 years ago off the coast of Norway, and there was a tsunami, but
it was a far cry from leaving deposits 200 meters above sea level,”
Bryant says.
Not everyone is convinced, to say the least. “I don’t believe the
evidence of a crater off Madagascar, and the impetus is on Abbott to
prove it,” says Jay Melosh, an impact expert at the University of
Arizona and an outspoken critic of the theory. To make a case for the
impact, Melosh says, Abbott “should be finding layers of glassy
droplets and fused rock in sea-core samples, the sorts of things we
find at all other similar impact sites.”
On the other hand, a lot remains unknown about impacts. As recently as
60 years ago, some geologists believed that the Barringer Meteor
Crater in Arizona—now considered the prototypical impact scar—was
caused by a volcanic explosion, and they regarded impacts as a minor
if not inconsequential influence on Earth’s history. Just 25 years
ago, Luis and Walter Alvarez raised eyebrows with their idea that an
asteroid collision helped kill off the dinosaurs. So Abbott continues
to hunt for evidence that will clinch the idea that Noah’s flood was
yet another example of extraterrestrial meddling. “It is still up to
us to prove it, but if we have unequivocal impact ejecta,” she says,
Melosh “is going to have to eat his words.”
Eric Stevens
Matt Giwer
> The text of the article follows. The illustrations of the original are
> worth looking at.
> http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood
> The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from
> its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea
> of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce
> Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National
> Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient
> petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You
> can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.
...
Such an open mind. And in such a prestigious scientific journal no less.