Very interesting theories….but do they hold water?

Rich

[SCI] The Shadow of Extinction: Why the End is Near

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Shadow of extinction

Only six degrees separate our world from the cataclysmic end of an ancient era

George Monbiot
The Guardian

It is old news, I admit. Two hundred and fifty-one million years old, to be precise. But the story of what happened then, which has now been told for the first time, demands our urgent attention. Its implications are more profound than anything taking place in Iraq, or Washington, or even (and I am sorry to burst your bubble) Wimbledon. Unless we understand what happened, and act upon that intelligence, prehistory may very soon repeat itself, not as tragedy, but as catastrophe.

The events that brought the Permian period (between 286m and 251m years ago) to an end could not be clearly determined until the mapping of the key geological sequences had been completed. Until recently, palaeontologists had assumed that the changes that took place then were gradual and piecemeal. But three years ago a precise date for the end of the period was established, which enabled geologists to draw direct comparisons between the rocks laid down at that time in different parts of the world.

Having done so, they made a shattering discovery. In China, South Africa, Australia, Greenland, Russia and Svalbard, the rocks record an almost identical sequence of events, taking place not gradually, but relatively instantaneously. They show that a cataclysm caused by natural processes almost brought life on earth to an end. They also suggest that a set of human activities that threatens to replicate those processes could exert the same effect, within the lifetimes of some of those who are on earth today.

As the professor of palaeontology Michael Benton records in his new book, When Life Nearly Died, the marine sediments deposited at the end of the Permian period record two sudden changes. The first is that the red or green or grey rock laid down in the presence of oxygen is suddenly replaced by black muds of the kind deposited when oxygen is absent. At the same time, an instant shift in the ratio of the isotopes (alternative forms) of carbon within the rocks suggests a spectacular change in the concentration of atmospheric gases.

On land, another dramatic transition has been dated to precisely the same time. In Russia and South Africa, gently deposited mudstones and limestones suddenly give way to massive dumps of pebbles and boulders. But the geological changes are minor in comparison with what happened to the animals and plants.

The Permian was one of the most biologically diverse periods in the earth’s history. Herbivorous reptiles the size of rhinos were hunted through forests of tree ferns and flowering trees by sabre-toothed predators. At sea, massive coral reefs accumulated, among which lived great sharks, fish of all kinds and hundreds of species of shell creatures.

Then suddenly there is almost nothing. The fossil record very nearly stops dead. The reefs die instantly, and do not reappear on earth for 10 million years. All the large and medium-sized sharks disappear, most of the shell species, and even the great majority of the toughest and most numerous organisms in the sea, the plankton. Among many classes of marine animals, the only survivors were those adapted to the near-absence of oxygen.

On land, the shift was even more severe. Plant life was almost eliminated from the earth’s surface. The four-footed animals, the category to which humans belong, were nearly exterminated: so far only two fossil reptile species have been found anywhere on earth that survived the end of the Permian. The world’s surface came to be dominated by just one of these, an animal a bit like a pig. It became ubiquitous because nothing else was left to compete with it or to prey upon it.

Altogether, Benton shows, some 90% of the earth’s species appear to have been wiped out: this represents by far the gravest of the mass extinctions. The world’s “productivity” (the total mass of biological matter) collapsed.

Ecosystems recovered very slowly. No coral reefs have been found anywhere on earth in the rocks laid down over the following 10 million years. One hundred and fifty million years elapsed before the world once again became as biodiverse as in the Permian.

So what happened? Some scientists have argued that the mass extinction was caused by a meteorite. But the evidence they put forward has been undermined by further studies. There is a more persuasive case for a different explanation. For many years, geologists have been aware that at some point during or after the Permian there was a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The lava was dated properly for the first time in the early 1990s. We now know that the principal explosions took place 251 million years ago, precisely at the point at which life was almost extinguished.

The volcanoes produced two gases: sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. The sulphur and other effusions caused acid rain, but would have bled from the atmosphere quite quickly. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, would have persisted. By enhancing the greenhouse effect, it appears to have warmed the world sufficiently to have destabilised the superconcentrated frozen gas called methane hydrate, locked in sediments around the polar seas. The release of methane into the atmosphere explains the sudden shift in carbon isotopes.

Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The result of its release was runaway global warming: a rise in temperature led to changes that raised the temperature further, and so on. The warming appears, alongside the acid rain, to have killed the plants. Starvation then killed the animals.

Global warming also seems to explain the geological changes. If the temperature of the surface waters near the poles increases, the circulation of marine currents slows down, which means that the ocean floor is deprived of oxygen. As the plants on land died, their roots would cease to hold together the soil and loose rock, with the result that erosion rates would have greatly increased.

So how much warming took place? A sharp change in the ratio of the isotopes of oxygen permits us to reply with some precision: 6C. Benton does not make the obvious point, but another author, the climate change specialist Mark Lynas, does. Six degrees is the upper estimate produced by the UN’s scientific body, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), for global warming by 2100. A conference of some of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists in Berlin last month concluded that the IPCC’s model may have underestimated the problem: the upper limit, they now suggest, should range between 7 and 10 degrees. Neither model takes into account the possibility of a partial melting of the methane hydrate still present in vast quantities around the fringes of the polar seas.

Suddenly, the events of a quarter of a billion years ago begin to look very topical indeed. One of the possible endings of the human story has already been told. Our principal political effort must now be to ensure that it does not become set in stone.

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“So what happened? Some scientists have argued that the mass extinction was caused by a meteorite. But the evidence they put forward has been undermined by further studies. There is a more persuasive case for a different explanation. For many years, geologists have been aware that at some point during or after the Permian there was a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The lava was dated properly for the first time in the early 1990s. We now know that the principal explosions took place 251 million years ago, precisely at the point at which life was almost extinguished.

The volcanoes produced two gases: sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. The sulphur and other effusions caused acid rain, but would have bled from the atmosphere quite quickly. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, would have persisted. By enhancing the greenhouse effect, it appears to have warmed the world sufficiently to have destabilised the superconcentrated frozen gas called methane hydrate, locked in sediments around the polar seas. The release of methane into the atmosphere explains the sudden shift in carbon isotopes.”

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The conclusion is, these volcanoes are about to erupt again, probably within our lifetime.

…back to current times…

Alpinists’ Ice-Dreamy Mountains Melting Away
By Katy Human
The Denver Post

Wednesday 12 January 2005

Where there was once cold, hard ice, there is now dirty slush and crumbling rock.

From the peaks and slopes of many of the world’s most challenging mountains, ice and snow are dripping away, reshaping the century-old sport of alpinism and disquieting longtime mountain climbers.

“Among alpinists who have been climbing for 20, 30 years, there is this sense of urgency that these climbs are going away,” said John Bicknell, a guide, co-director of the Colorado Mountain School in Estes Park and a former geologist. “For me, it’ll be an immense loss. It’s where I’ve spent most of my life. It’s the terrain I most love.”

Around the world, high-altitude regions are warming and melting. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have all but disappeared. Glacier National Park’s are melting so fast that federal computer models predict they’ll be gone by 2030.

Mark Dyurgerov, a University of Colorado glacier expert and former alpinist, calculated that the volume of the world’s glaciers has dropped by about 10 percent in the past four decades. The decline is even faster in some places, he said, including the popular climbing meccas of Alaska, the Andes and the Alps.

Regardless of whether people, natural cycles or both are to blame, the effects are clear to climbers and guides. They’re watching more rocks tumble down cliffs, throwing away useless old books and maps, and picking their way through miles of crumbly rock only to find climbs too dangerous to attempt.

“There are routes you cannot do anymore,” said Jose Garcia, a Venezuelan who lives and works in Boulder and climbs around the world.

Three years ago, Garcia ventured into the ranges surrounding Piramide, a 19,000-foot-plus mountain in Peru. Avalanches constantly rumbled down the peak, loosened by warm temperatures and the changing structure of snow and ice hugging the mountain. “That used to be a very challenging, very interesting mountain,” Garcia said. “You cannot climb it anymore. You can expect to die.”

As glaciers draping the slopes of high mountains retreat, the ice moves, Garcia explained. Crevasses yawn wider and deeper, giant cliffs of ice called séracs break away, and melting ice or permafrost loosens boulders, which tumble down slopes.

“Books are now obsolete,” Garcia said. “Maps also.”

When considering a climb, he checks the Internet for new route descriptions and pictures, or he contacts colleagues who have been there recently.

Although mountain climbers are often labeled as risk-takers, most say the new risks do not make climbing more fun.

“Climbers seldom look for dangerous routes,” said Gary Neptune, owner of Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder and a lifetime alpinist. “Challenging, yes, but minimizing danger, that’s part of the game.”

Climbing in Africa several years ago, he and his colleagues searched for a glacier - the known access route to a peak in the Rwenzori Mountains. It had disappeared sometime in the past 30 years - the age of the photographs in his guidebook, Neptune said.

He and his colleagues abandoned the climb. “It’s all getting less predictable or more extreme,” Neptune said.

In the Alps, paths to some peaks have morphed from smooth glacial hikes into dangerous scrambles up rock- strewn slopes. Grosses Wiesbachhorn - the pitch in Austria where alpinists first used ice pitons in the 1920s - hasn’t been icy in years, Neptune said.

A few decades ago, Boulder climber and guide Bob Culp loved to practice ice climbing at the foot of a glacier coming off France’s Mont Blanc. He took his son there a few years ago, he said, but the trail to the glacier was closed. The two took another route to the glacier’s edge.

“While we were standing there looking, a baseball-sized rock came tumbling down and hit me in the hip,” Culp said. “I wasn’t hurt, but I thought, ‘This is not a place we want to be right now.”‘

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First the glaciers melt……..then the seas rise………….then small islands worldwide disappear…………….and the earth as we know it is slowly, but surely……………disappearing.

…and finally, this story…

When the Earth Nearly Died
Compelling Evidence of A Catastrophic World Change 9,500 BC
c) by By D S Allan and J B Delair. 386pp.

The tradition of a Golden Age existing in the distant past, and of a fall from grace into barbarism due to catastrophes of apocalyptic proportions, is enshrined in the memories and ancient writings of many peoples. These notions are, however, conventionally regarded as pure invention. The existence of a surprising amount of factual evidence which suggests that these accounts are actually based on a series of events really experienced by humankind, is generally either ignored or treated with great caution by established scholarship, largely because attempts to explain how this Golden Age came to an end have hitherto been unconvincing or uncomfortably threatening to orthodox interpretations of history.

The real history of humanity is, however, far more dramatic and interesting than the conventional version implies. When the Earth Nearly Died offers an exciting and challenging new interpretation of the information currently available to us.

When the Earth Nearly Died carefully documents the fascinating story - which has never been told before in such detail - of how this Golden Age of peaceful conditions and equable climates ended traumatically in a tremendous catastrophe about 11,500 years ago. This was part of a cataclysm which disturbed the whole solar system, destroyed at least one sizable planet and its satellite, and also severely devastated Mars and Earth.

Among the fundamental geophysical effects experienced by Earth were a massive fracturing of the crust, a realignment of Earth’s axis, elevation of new mountains, and widespread rearrangement of land and sea. These changes were accompanied by an appalling global conflagration, a gigantic flood, and what has been described as ‘collapsed sky’ conditions. A bombardment by debris from the disintegrated satellite of the destroyed planet added to the worldwide chaos.

Much of Earth’s animal and plant life was annihilated by these frightful events. Remains were often buried hundreds of feet below and within vast new deposits which smothered huge areas, both on land and under the sea. Elsewhere they lay piled in caves, choked rock fissures, or were massed into veritable hills. Some havens and refuges did exist, offering shelter to various faunal and floral species from flood or fire - then to have to endure the appalling conditions which followed. These included intense cold, occasioned by chronic atmospheric pollution which severely restricted the solar radiation reaching the Earth, loss of vital resources such as shelter, tools and sources of warmth and nourishment. The extent of the damage was so great that the immediate survivors found themselves literally catapulted into what was, in effect, a new world.

The possible origins of this terrible calamity are considered in some detail, the authors concluding that, after dismissing comets, asteroids and giant meteors, the most likely candidate is a supernova explosion which, on the astronomical scale of things, occurred uncomfortably close to our solar system relatively recently. This story is told from different perspectives: from the study of terrestrial organic remains; evidence from present land-forms; the testimony of geophysics and astronomy; and the traditional accounts and memories of numerous peoples round the world. It becomes clear, in the process, that modern science’s invention - ‘the Ice Age’ - evades abundant important evidence which points coherently to a rather different interpretation of events.

There are dozens of fascinating photographs, some of which are published for the first time, and many maps, diagrams and charts, designed to make this original and important work easily accessible and entirely convincing in its earth-shaking implications.

Details
Part 1: A Lost Beginning

The character of our forebears and the conditions under which they lived is a subject which has for long fascinated people. Science today holds that the primates have been living on the Earth for at least three million years, and that modern, erect man has been around, slowly adapting to a perceptibly changing Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Conventional modern dogma insists that there has been a gradual and steady evolution of modern people from primitive cultures, as they emerged from a hostile Ice-Age environment which had gripped the world for a million years.

This ‘uniformitarian’ picture - which claims that environmental conditions usually evolve infinitesimally slowly - has, however, been current for only 150 years. Scientists had observed that many of the clays, gravels and sands in various parts of the world appeared to have been laid under chaotic conditions on rock surfaces which had been pulverised, smashed or polished. Early authorities attributed these to powerful floods of water or to some other cataclysmic agency. These advocates became known as ‘catastrophists’. Subsequently, their explanations lost favour, and the pioneers of the then new subject of glaciology a century and a half ago ‘invented’ the ‘Ice Age’, lasting a million years, to account for many of the Earth’s surface features. The Pleistocene epoch was specially coined to accommodate the field of evidence supposedly supporting the ‘Ice Age’ invention.

This first part of When the Earth Nearly Died challenges contemporary theories by showing in a detailed survey that well-established geological, palaeontological and biological evidence point to this planet undergoing sudden and very major physical changes about 11,500 years ago. (In fact, the ‘Ice Age’, as proposed by orthodoxy, is abandoned by the authors in favour of a much shorter later period of intense cold). Nearly all the phenomena ascribed to conventional Ice Age theory can be interpreted as the result of natural convulsions of worldwide proportions. The authors - citing much reputable supporting evidence - argue that the great mountain ranges of today and the great crustal displacements which, along with enormous seismic and volcanic eruptions, changed the face of the Earth, in fact happened violently, rapidly and comparatively very recently.

A foretaste is given here of important evidence that just will not fit the uniformitarian theories. For example, evidence from Siberia, the coldest area in the world, but one which has never been glaciated; or of rocks showing all the classical features of ‘glacial action’, yet apparently eroded from a direction which conventional glacial action could not have achieved.

Part 2: Premature Extinction

Modern biology has attempted to dovetail its theories with the conventional Ice-Age doctrine. Innumerable unassailable facts, however, refuse to comply with this. Some notable botanists have openly refuted it. They have pointed out that Alpine flora must have originated in pre-glacial times, as insufficient time has elapsed since the end of the Ice Age for the development of such a rich diversity of plants. The existence of identical species of plant on different sides of a large ocean barrier (eg between Europe and Greenland) indicates that in recent times there must have been a land route between the two. The remains of typical pre-glacial Pliocene or Miocene species (according to conventional theory, at least ten million years of age) are frequently found to be scarcely fossilised. Also, a number of examples are given to show that the climates in Northern Europe and in Siberia were much milder in recent times than they are at present.

Examples of dislocated continental floras are given. In the North Atlantic, for example, the Azores and Canaries were recently connected to what is now North Africa. From this kind of evidence, a picture is built up of a world, during the time of modern man, that was very different from what we have now; of a large landmass continuous from northern Siberia to Alaska; of another linking N W Europe with Greenland; of an enormous continent connecting South America, Africa and the southern Indian Ocean; and of another, now mostly submerged, in the South Pacific.

Mammoths and mastodons are usually considered as animals which evolved to thrive in icy environments. Yet mammoths preserved in icy soils in Siberia have been found with temperate grasses in their stomachs. Evidence has now come to light of vast herds of mastodons being massacred by early man in North America. In the conventional chronology this would have indicated the antiquity of these proto-Indians. Now it appears that the mastodons lived in a warm equable climate and survived into comparatively recent times.

One of the most fascinating bodies of evidence is provided by animal remains found in caves, especially in Europe, Asia, South American and Australasia. These usually consist of chaotic agglutinated piles of disjointed bones of a variety of species that could never have co-existed in the same environment - tropical species in northern graveyards and northern species at many equatorial sites. Bird remains in Californian tar-pits illustrate this anomaly even more tellingly. We can only conclude that a vast cataclysm brought about such global carnage.

We see here in Part Two evidence that the enormous geophysical disturbances described earlier indeed made dreadful and often fatal inroads into animal life almost everywhere, rendering many species extinct and engendering a very different geographical distribution for the species which survived.

Part 3: The Enduring Memory

Traditions and legends which seem to describe some of the tremendous catastrophic events that terminated Pleistocene times, have never before been collectively studied in detail. Although the authors have amassed a tremendous amount of persuasive and fascinating material - sufficient to fill a book on its own - it was decided to include only a representative selection of this material here.

The study of such ancient material is fraught with difficulties, as interpretations cannot be subjected to any sort of scientific verification. There are many approaches, from treating them as ingenious fabrications for entertainment, to seeing them as symbolic tales describing how primitive people saw their world, or as religious teaching. The authors investigate here the possibility that some of these accounts and traditions are based in fragmented memories of once real people and events, and are therefore genuine echoes of primeval history. It is interesting that, while the traditions of more primitive groups seem often to be associated with actual events, those of more civilised peoples inevitably take on the colour of a more elaborate fantasy.

A theme common to the traditions of most peoples of the world is that of a great flood or deluge. References are often also made to a conflagration or firestorm and to land being lost or raised. Not infrequently also, we hear of strange substances falling from the sky - like gravel, stones, blocks of iron or resinous substances. Some speak of a collapsed sky, of changes in the rotation of the Earth, of terrible winds, continuous lightning, volcanic eruptions and the boiling of lakes and streams. Prolonged darkness is frequently alluded to, and there is even mention of the rapid, widespread formation of ice.

The authors here bring together some of the traditions which most obviously relate to these various events. Very significantly, many accounts specifically ascribe these changes to a cosmic agent, anciently remembered by a variety of names, of which Phaeton is one of the best known.

Part 4: Cosmic Conflict

The authors suggest that today we are rather in the position of the owners of a vandalised building who, not knowing who the vandals were, could nevertheless infer the reality of their visit from the testimony of eyewitnesses and the chaotic state of the building. The damage to Earth is only too apparent, and eyewitness accounts mentioned in Part Three have described both the visitation and the damage.

Part Four is like the unravelling of a murder mystery: how could this catastrophic event of 11,500 years ago have come about? Some basic facts have to be explored: about Earth’s structure and magnetism; how polar shift or crustal displacement could occur; the nature of the solar system and the evidence for a planet having disappeared. Evidence for a cosmic upheaval having taken place at that time is considered, leading the authors to come to conclusions very different from Velikovsky’s - who studied similar evidence in his Worlds in Collision.

Perhaps the most remarkable support for this apocalyptic heavenly visitation is that given on Akkadian cylinder-seals found in Mesopotamia. This ancient epic describes how the peace of the solar system was disrupted long ago by the arrival of a ‘new’ god, Marduk, and traces the resultant havoc among the planets step by step. Marduk (Phaeton under another name) was a huge and awesome radiant visitor from interstellar space, spewing great jets of fire from time to time. There is a remarkable description of Marduk’s break-up of a major planetary neighbour of Mars, Tiamat, and its subsequent departure sun-wards with a great mass of the stricken planet’s debris.

The authors analyse the Babylonian epic in terms of how its story fits in with what we now know of our Solar System. They also look at other traditions, particularly from Greece and Mexico, which seem to record other aspects of the same story. They take Velikovsky to task for some of his specious arguments, and use some of the evidence from the Mariner space flights to refute some earlier theories about this subject.

One of the drawings in the book shows a hypothetical scheme of Phaeton’s (Marduk’s) path through the solar system. This is inferred from the fact that some planets appear to show evidence of disruption whilst others do not appear to have been affected and are therefore presumed to have been distant from its path. The authors argue that Phaeton’s enormous influence on some of the planets suggests that it possessed an abnormally intense electro-magnetic field which was naturally attracted to the equivalent fields of the planets it encountered and disturbed.

Any external agent capable of disturbing planetary motion would have had to be exceedingly powerful. Comets and asteroids are shown to be inadequate candidates. Considering the available evidence, Phaeton was a high velocity planet-sized fragment from a supernova explosion. The authors surmise that Phaeton, being of stellar origin, would have possessed the visitor’s traditionally reported characteristics, and they cite evidence which strongly points to just such a supernova known to astronomers as the Vela event occurring at unusually close quarters astronomically about 13,000 years ago - approximately 1,500 Earth years elapsing for Phaeton to supersonically traverse interplanetary space.

Part 5: Anatomy of a Disaster

Analysis of evidence for the kind of world that existed before the ‘Deluge’ indicates a far more genial climate than exists today, with luxuriant plant growth even in areas which are now decidedly polar. Such conditions could only have existed if Earth had previously rotated more slowly and around a more perpendicular axis than today, with days being longer and the seasons largely undifferentiated. There is evidence from a number of disciplines to indicate that this was in fact once the case. Furthermore, from botanical evidence we know that the distribution of land and sea differed considerably from that of today and there is much evidence to suggest that mountains and deserts were at this time generally modest in size, and seas relatively shallow.

A medieval map of the north Atlantic region is discussed. It shows some modern features accurately, yet shows a topographically detailed Greenland without its ice cap and a number of large islands that no longer exist. Some authorities have indicated that the map includes information from much older sources. If it is indeed as accurate as it seems to be, its testimony against Ice-Age interpretation of geophysical changes is strong. Also, contrary to the established theory that ice sheets smash the bedrock over which they lie, reference is made to thick ice in Antarctica which protects the strata it presently mantles. Such considerations point clearly to a need for an alternative interpretation of Earth history.

Part Five - in many ways the climax of When the Earth Nearly Died - is concerned with reconstructing the dramatic and literally earth-shaking events brought about by Phaeton’s invasion of the solar system. As Phaeton approached Earth the effects were catastrophic. These included extraordinary electromagnetic and geophysical effects on Earth; a change in the orbit of the Moon and of the planet’s axis; tremendous volcanic eruptions, and unbelievable havoc on the whole surface of Earth and its biosphere. The experience of these events by humankind included such phenomena as ‘collapsed sky’ (perhaps like that predicted by modern authorities as likely to accompany a thermonuclear holocaust), boiling waters, a loss of sunlight caused by constantly erupting volcanoes, earth fractures, firestorms, hurricanes, bombardment by cosmic missiles and strange objects (for which there seems much evidence in deposits of non-terrestrial materials), rains of fire or ‘blood’, piling up of the oceans and a ‘torrent from heaven’ (the Deluge itself) which scoured the very surface of Earth and left impressive hills of trees and animal remains, particularly in the Arctic; finally refrigeration - the real ‘Ice Age’ which lasted scarcely 4,000 years (compared with the conventionally-advocated million years or so).

The authors correlate much relevant information from various disciplines on a theme-by-theme basis, enabling us to picture the course of events as they unfolded. Many traditions, for example, speak of intense cold, conflagration, terrific winds, flaming fragments dropping from the skies, floods and torrents of rain which were directly associated with significant events and with a period of great and prolonged darkness, which quickly followed a world-wide Deluge. These traditions are not only consistent with one another, but also reflect the sequence of physical processes and effects as defined and supported by geophysical knowledge. Furthermore, they largely coincide with the effects that astrophysicists would expecpect in the event of a close hostile cosmic fly-by.

Part 6: Phaeton’s Legacy

Such dramatic reshaping of Earth’s recent history and its implications concerning early human history requires careful consideration. This is attempted in the last part of the book, which pulls together some of the loose ends to round out the story.

What did the world look like after the immediate and devastating physical effects of the encounter had subsided? Astounding quantities of gravel, sand, clay and mud had accumulated on hillsides - even on hilltops - and had spread over valley floors and across plains. The new topography brought about new drainage systems and lakes. Organic debris was deposited in fissures, cracks, and the innermost recesses of caves. Gigantic rafts of mangled vegetation lay in thick banks as far as the eye could see and the stench of death and decay pervaded many regions, especially in lower latitudes where most fresh water sources had become polluted or poisoned.

The question of how any living being could survive such a catastrophe is very interesting. There are many traditions of Deluge heroesand arks. There were parts of the globe which were apparently not devastated to the same degree. Many must have sought refuge in caves, and indeed a number of traditions speak of this. By its very nature, the Phaeton disaster affected all people indiscriminately. Small cross-sections of pre-catastrophic society found themselves sharing common refuges, and where such groups contrived to survive, entered the post-catastrophic world together equally destitute and bereft of basic necessities, literally thrown back into a stone age. One of the intriguing suggestions made by the authors is that necessity for survival turned man from a vegetarian into a carnivore. Ancient sources are cited which apparently corroborate this.