Re: Creationism, Myth and Catastrophism
Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2022 2:22 am
212794
VELIKOVSKY'S QUOTES ON DATING CATACLYSM
[from] EARTH IN UPHEAVAL
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arch ... heaval.pdf
__[ARCTIC MUCK & MAMMOTHS]
_P.10. 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.
_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." * Worked flints, characteristically shaped, called Yuma points, were repeatedly found in the Alaskan muck, one hundred and more feet below the surface. One such spear point was found there between a lion's jaw and a mammoth's tusk.6 Similar weapons were used only a few generations ago by the Indians of the Athapascan tribe, who camped in the upper Tanana Valley.7 "It has also been suggested that even modern Eskimo points are remarkably Yuma-like,"8 all of which indicates that the multitudes of torn animals and splintered forests date from a time not many thousand years____ ago.
_In 1797 the body of a mammoth, with flesh, skin, and hair, was found in northeastern Siberia, and since then bodies of other mammoths have been unearthed from the frozen ground in various parts of that region. The flesh had the appearance of freshly frozen beef; it was edible, and wolves and sledge dogs fed on it without harm.1
_The ground must have been frozen ever since the day of their entombment; had it not been frozen, the bodies of the mammoths would have putrefied in a single summer, but they remained unspoiled for some thousands of years____. It is therefore absolutely necessary to believe that the bodies were frozen up immediately after the animals died, and were never once thawed, until the day of their discovery.
__[FOSSILS IN] THE CAVES OF ENGLAND
_p.18. Buckland was concerned "to establish two important facts, first, that there has been a recent and general inundation of the globej and, second, that the animals whose remains are found interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of high north latitudes.*'
_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 tune 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, Dolo-mieu, and Cuvier, each of whom presented his own reasons.
__[WHALES IN MICHIGAN]
_p.32. In bogs covering glacial deposits in Michigan, skeletons of two whales were discovered. Whales are marine animals. How did they come to Michigan in the postglacial epoch? Whales do not travel by land. Glaciers do not carry whales, and the ice sheet would not have brought them to the middle of a continent. Besides, the whale bones were found in post-glacial deposits. Was there a sea in Michigan after the glacial epoch, only a few thousand years____ ago?
__[HIMILAYAN GLACIATION]
_p.47. R. Finsterwalder, exploring the Nanga Parbat massif in the western Himalayas (26,660 feet high), dated the Himalayan glaciation as post-glacial; in other words, the expansion of the glaciers in the Himalayas took place much closer to our time than had been previously assumed. Great uplifts of the Himalayas took place in part after the time designated as the Ice Age, or only a few thousand years____ ago.6
__[MEGALITHIC CITY IN THE ANDES]
_p.50. [Bellamy said:] All this happened millions of years before our moon was caught by the earth, and thus the ruins of the megalithic city Tiahuanacu are millions of years old, that is, the city must have been built long "before the Flood." This theory is bizarre. The geological record indicates a late elevation of the Andes, and the time of its origin is brought ever closer to our time. Archaeological and radiocarbon analyses indicate that the age of the Andean culture and of the city is not much older than four thousand years____. Not only the "built before the Flood" theory collapses; so does the belief that the last elevation of the Andes was in the Tertiary, or more than a million years ago. Sometime in the remote past the Altiplano was at or below sea level, so that originally its lakes were part of a sea gulf. The last upheaval, however, took place in an early historical period, after the city of Tiahuanacu had been built; the lakes were dragged up, and the Altiplano and the entire chain of the Andes rose to their present height.
__[NORTHWEST VOLCANISM]
_p.52. Only a few thousand years____ ago lava flowed there over an area larger than France, Switzerland, and Belgium combined; it flowed not as a creek, not as a river, not even as an overflowing stream, but as a flood, deluging horizon alter horizon, filling all the valleys, devouring ail the forests and habitations, steaming large lakes out of existence as though they were little potholes filled with water, swelling ever higher and overtopping mountains and burying them deep beneath molten stone, boiling and bubbling, thousands of feet thick, billions of tons heavy. In 1889, on the occasion of the boring of an artesian well at Nampa, Idaho, on the Columbia Plateau near the Snake River, a small figurine of baked clay was extracted from a depth of 320 feet, penetrated after piercing a sheet of basalt lava fifteen feet thick. G. F. Wright described the find and wrote: "The well was tubed with heavy iron tubing six inches in diameter, so that there could be no mistake about the occurrence of the image at the depth stated." He also added: "No one has come forward to challenge the evidence except on purely a priori grounds arising from
preconceived opinions of the extreme antiquity of the deposits." 4
__[MAGNETIC REVERSAL]
_p.80. 8 Manley speaks of "the possibility of its [earth's magnetic field] reversal in historical times, 2500 years____ ago, to be cleared up by more research." However, the more exact date is, according to the original works of Folgheraiter and Mercanton, the eighth century before the present era, or shortly thereafter.
__[PATAGONIAN VOLCANISM]
_p.81. In Patagonia volcanic eruptions have occurred down to fairly recent times, and the land between the Atlantic and the Andes is covered in many places with lava flows. All in all only about four or five hundred volcanoes on earth are considered active or dormant, against a multiplicity of extinct cones. Yet only five or six hundred years ago many of the presently inactive volcanoes were still active. This points to very great activity at a time only a few thousand years____ ago. At the rate of extinction witnessed by modern man, the greater part of the still active volcanoes will become inactive in a matter of several centuries.
__[METEORITES]
_p.83. According to a hypothesis offered by Swinne and referred to by H. Pettersson, "meteorites should be a relatively recent occurrence, limited to the last 25,000 years, and have been absent during preceding millions of years. 8
__[SWEDISH GLACIERS]
_p.84. Of the methods used to find how much time has passed since the ice cover started to melt, the "varve" method, until recently, was thought to be fairly precise. This method was introduced by G. de Geer, who counted the annual bands of silt and clay ("varves") deposited, coarse in summer and fine in winter, under the ice in the coastal lakes and rivers of Sweden, once covered by the glacial sheet of the Ice Age. De Geer calculated that it had taken about 5000 years____ to melt the ice cover from Schonen, at the southern tip of Sweden, to the place in the north where there are still glaciers in the mountains. In no place are there five thousand overlying varves; but De Geer looked for similar series or patterns of thick and thin varves from one lake to another, about fifteen hundred outcrops altogether, always with the thought that a varve series found high in the deposit of some southern lake would repeat itself closer to the bottom of a lake to the north. Additional figures used in De Geer's evaluation of the time that passed since the end of the Ice Age are of a more hypothetical nature. For the preceding period, the time allegedly needed for the ice to retreat all the way, from Leipzig to southern Sweden, where no varves are found, De Geer offered, as a surmise, a span of 4000 years____. Then he surmised further that the end of the melting of the ice cover coincided with the beginning of Neolithic time, which he placed 5000 years____ ago, thus arriving at the final figure of 14,000 years, or 12,000 years before the present era. The area of Stockholm was freed from ice about 10,000 years ago.
__[WISCONSIN GLACIATION]
_p.85. H. E. Suess of the United States Geological Survey reported recently that wood found at the base of inter-bedded blue till, peat, and outwash of drift, and ascribed by its finder to the Late Wisconsin (last) glaciation, is, according to radiocarbon analysis, but 3300 years____ old (with a margin of error up to two hundred years both ways), or of the middle of the second millennium before the present era. Still more recently Suess and Rubin reported that "a glacial advance in the mountains of westem United States was determined to have occurred about 3000 years____ ago.
__[CANADIAN STRIATIONS]
_p.86. "Another indication that the final melting of the ice sheet upon British America was separated by only a very short interval, geologically speaking, from the present time is seen in the wonderfully perfect preservation of the glacial striation and polishing on the surface of the more enduring rocks. ... It seems impossible that these rock exposures can have so well withstood weathering in the severe climate of those northern regions longer than a few thousand years____ at the most."2
__[NIAGARA FALLS]
__p.87. The date of the end of the Ice Age was not changed whenv subsequent examination of records indicated that since 1764 the falls had retreated from Lake Ontario toward Lake Erie at the rate of five feet per year, and that, if the process of wearing down the rock had gone on at the same rate from the time of the retreat of the ice cover, seven thousand years____ would have been sufficient to do the work. However, since in the beginning, when the ice melted and a swollen stream earned the detritus abrading the rock of the gorge, the erosion rate must have been much more rapid, the age of the gorge must be further reduced. According to G. F. Wright, author of The Ice Age in North America, five thousand years____ may be regarded as an adequate figure.1 The erosion and sedimentation of the shores of Lake Michigan also suggest a lapse of time reckoned in thousands, but not tens of thousands, of years____ since the beginning of the process.2
_We are obliged to fall back on the Upper Great Gorge, the uppermost segment of the whole gorge, which appears to be genuinely postglacial. Redeterminations by W. H. Boyd showed the present rate of recession of the Horseshoe Falls to be, not five feet, but rather 3.8 feet, per year. Hence the age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years____-— and to obtain even this [low! figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times."4
_p.88. If we follow the principle of quantitative analysis and accept De Lapparent's figure as approximately correct, the maximal extension of the Rhone Glacier dates from a point well within the bounds of human history. The recent field work in the Alps actually revealed that numerous glaciers there are no older than 4000 years____. This startling discovery made the following statement necessary: "A large number of the present glaciers in the Alps are not survivors of the last glacial maximum, as was formerly universally believed, but are glaciers newly created within roughly the last 4000 years____.
__[MISSISSIPPI RIVER]
_As early as 1861, Humphreys and Abbot calculated the age of the Mississippi by evaluating the detritus borne by it and the sediment deposited in the delta. They arrived at the low figure of 5000 years____ as the age of the delta, its birth thus being related to about the year 2800 before the present era.1 However, when at the close of the Ice Age the ice cover melted in the north, multitudinous streams must have earned an enormous amount of detritus into the Mississippi and its tributary, the Missouri, and for* this reason the above figure, if otherwise properly calculated, must be appreciably reduced.
_p.89. The Falls of St. Anthony on this stream at Minneapolis have excavated a long gorge by removing the bedrock. In the 1870s and 1880s N. H. Winchell made this falls the subject of a study. Comparing topographical maps covering two hundred years, he concluded that the falls had retreated 2.44 feet yearly. If this was the constant rate of retreat, the falls must have started 8000 years____ ago.2 But here, too, a larger stream carrying abundant detritus, which abraded the bedrock, must have flowed when the ice cover melted. J. D. Dana, studying the area of Lake Champlain and of the Northeastern states in general, came to the conclusion that prodigious floods of almost unimaginable magnitude accompanied the melting of the ice cover: in the lower part of the Connecticut River the floods rose two hundred feet above the present high-water mark.8 And if this is true for those regions, it must be true also for the valley of the Mississippi. Consequently the gorge of the Falls of St. Anthony must be of more recent date than ^Winchell calculated, though even his figure was regarded as much too low.
_On the basis of three earlier accurate surveys {of the Bear River in Canada} made between the years 1909 and 1927, G. Hanson in 1934 calculated with great exactness the annual growth of the delta through deposited sediment. At the present rate of sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years____ old."
__[FLORIDA FOSSILS]
_p.91. The Sierra Nevada chain rises between the Great Basin to the east and the Pacific, cutting off the drainage to the ocean. Abert and Summer lakes in southern Oregon have no outlets. They are regarded as remnants of a once large glacial lake, Chewaucan. W. van Winkle of the United States Geological Survey investigated the saline content of these two lakes and wrote: "A conservative estimate of the age of Summer and Abert Lakes, based on their concentration and area, the composition of the influent waters, and the rate of evaporation, is 4000 years____."
_To the east of Sequoia National Park and Mount Whitney in California lies Owens Lake. It is supplied by the Owens River and it has no outlet. At some time in the past the surface level of the lake, because of a greater water supply, was so much higher that it overflowed its basin. H. S. Gale analyzed the water of the lake and of the river for chlorine and sodium and came to the conclusion that the river required 4200 years____ to supply the chlorine present in the lake and 3500 years____ to supply its sodium.
_Lahontan and its residual lakes were explored anew by J. Claude Jones, and the results of his work were published as "Geological History of Lake Lahontan" by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.4 He investigated the saline content of Pyramid and Winnemucca lakes and of the Truckee River that feeds them. He found that the river could have supplied the entire content of chlorine of these two lakes in 3881 years____. "A similar calculation, using sodium instead of chlorine, gave 2447 years____ necessary."
__[TREE RINGS]
_p.93. The oldest trees that started life about 3200 years____ ago offer insight into the influence on their growth, as caused by a series of later climatic disturbances on the global scale that, according to the pollen analysis, took place in the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, or 2700 years____ ago.
_The Carnegie Institution published in 1919 a graph drawn by A. E. Douglass, then director of Steward Observatory, who studied tree rings in order to discover the solar activity of the past.1 The graph actually reveals a spurt of oscillations in the annual growth of the tree rings around the year —747 (the identification of the rings as to their years is approximate). There is an unusually high crest in the last years of the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh century. After a record high crest of six-year duration there is in —687 a precipitate drop.
__[SEA LEVEL CHANGE]
_According to Daly, "This increase of the ice-cap or caps has been tentatively referred to late-Neolithic time, about 3500 years____ ago. At that approximate date there was some chilling of the northern hemisphere at least, following a prolonged period when the world climate was distinctly warmer than now. Late-Neolithic man lived in Europe 3500 years____ back." As to the date of the sudden drop of oceanic level, Kuenen writes: "The time of the movement was estimated by Daly to be probably some 3000 to 4000 years____ ago. Detailed field work in the Netherlands and in eastern England has shown a recent eustatic depression of the same order of magnitude as deduced by Daly. Here the time can be fixed as roughly 3000 to 3500 years____ ago." Thus the work in the Netherlands and in England confirmed not only Daly's finding but also his dating.
_p.99. Thus, according to Godwin's analysis, in the period between 2000 and 500 before the present era, the plain north of Cambridge was more than once invaded by the North Sea under circumstances that we would interpret as catastrophic. In many places all around England and Wales there are submerged forests which are dated as "probably PostGlacial or Recent."
__[THERA VOLCANO ERUPTION]
_p.101. At that time villages were buried by lava, pumice, and ashes; the excavated cultural remains showed that the great explosion took place "between 1800 and 1500 B.C.," or at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt. The erupted masses were so vast that a German scholar offered in recent years a theory according to which the Egyptian plague of darkness was caused by the eruption of the Thera volcano, six hundred miles northwest of the Delta.
__[CHANGE IN NILE FLOW]
_"We obtained the remarkable result that about 4000 years____ ago the Nile used to rise at that point, on an average, twenty-two feet higher than it does at present." This dropping of the high-water level must be ascribed either to a change in the quantity of water in the Nile or to a change in the rock structure of Egypt. However, if the Nile contained so much more water in the past, many residences and temples would have been regularly inundated. I omit the references to cities swallowed by the ground in Egyptian literature; yet the enigmatic and rather regular signs of fire in graves of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, as if from the presence of some volatile substance that penetrated there and became inflamed by the heated ground, is worth mentioning.
__[ALPS GLACIER]
_p.105. The Rhone Glacier in the Alps started to melt 2400 years____ ago, in the middle of the first millennium. This calculation of De Lapparent coincides with that at which we arrived by dating the last catastrophe in —687. In this catastrophe many older glaciers melted, and the subsequent increased evaporation and precipitation built other glaciers that before long also started to melt, a process that has been going on ever since. Many glaciers of the Alps, it was recently learned with surprise, are less than 4000 years____ old (Flint).
__[FLORIDA FOSSILS]
_p.106. The Florida fossil beds at Vero and Melbourne proved - by the artifacts found there together with human bones and the remains of animals, many of which are extinct - that these fossil beds were deposited between 2000 and 4000 years____ ago.
_From observations on beaches in numerous places all over the world, Daly concluded that there was a change in the ocean level, which dropped sixteen to twenty feet 3500 years____ ago; KLuenen and others confirmed Daly's findings with evidence derived from Europe.
__[SOUTHWEST LAKE & TAR PITS]
_p.108. According to [Claude Jones's] analysis of the salt accumulation in the residual lakes of the larger Lake Lahontan, this glacial lake came into existence only 3500 years____ ago, and the fauna found in it deposit could not be older. This compelled further vacillations. J. R. Schultz, writing on the fauna of the tar seeps in California, says that in view of the established correlation of the fauna of La Brea and the fauna of Lake Lahontan it is now possible "to reconcile the veterbrate evidence" even with the opinion of Jones "as to the relatively late age of the lake." Would this really signify that the extinct animals of the asphalt pits are only 3000 or 4000 years____ old?
__[RECAP]
_p.140. Professor R. Daly of Harvard University found that 3500 years____ ago all over the world the level of the oceans suddenly dropped. He thought it might be due to a sudden sinking of the crust. And in an authoritative work, Marine Geology (1950), Professor P. H. Kuenen of the Netherlands finds that "this recent shift is now well established" on observations in many places of the world, and he, too, assigns this catastrophic drop of the ocean level to 3500 years____ ago.
_The investigation of the delta formation of the Bear River (on the Alaskan border), very carefully made by Hanson, showed that "at the present rate of sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years____ old." A. de Lapparent, the leading French geologist of the beginning of the century, calculated that, since the time the Rhone glacier started to melt, less than 3000 years____ have passed. Modern research confirms that many of the alpine glaciers are less than 4000 years____ old. Professor Flint of Yale refers to the redetermination of the age of the Upper Great Gorge of Niagara Falls and writes (1947): "The age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years____— and to obtain even this [low] figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times." 7
__[LABRADOR CRATER]
_p.141. A circular meteoric crater (Chubb crater) was discovered in the summer of 1950 in northern Labrador; it covers an area of four square miles. It is much larger than the Arizona crater, which is four fifths of a mile in diameter (two thirds of a square mile in area); whereas the Arizona crater could accommodate two million people in its amphitheater, the Chubb crater could accommodate twelve million people. It must have been created by the impact of an asteroid. According to the published opinion of geological authorities, the asteroid must have fallen about four thousand years____ ago.
__[ASTEROIDS & COMETS]
_p.142. The origin of asteroids, or small planets, that circle between Jupiter and Mars, some of which cross the orbit of Mars and even that of the earth, has lately been explained as the result of the explosion of a planet and more recently (1950) as the result of a collision between two planets in an early age (Kuiper).
_F. Whipple, upon calculating the orbits of the asteroids, came to the conclusion (1950) that two collisions occurred between these bodies and a comet, once 4700 years____ ago and the second time 1500 years____ ago, or within historical times.
_p.143. Professor S. K. Vsehsviatsky. His research reveals that periodic comets, as observed during recent decades, are losing their luminosity and their matter at a rate so rapid that fifty or sixty revolutions suffice to disintegrate a comet completely. Thus the Halley comet can hardly go back beyond 3500 years____, or the year 1500 before the present era.
VELIKOVSKY'S QUOTES ON DATING CATACLYSM
[from] EARTH IN UPHEAVAL
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arch ... heaval.pdf
__[ARCTIC MUCK & MAMMOTHS]
_P.10. 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.
_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." * Worked flints, characteristically shaped, called Yuma points, were repeatedly found in the Alaskan muck, one hundred and more feet below the surface. One such spear point was found there between a lion's jaw and a mammoth's tusk.6 Similar weapons were used only a few generations ago by the Indians of the Athapascan tribe, who camped in the upper Tanana Valley.7 "It has also been suggested that even modern Eskimo points are remarkably Yuma-like,"8 all of which indicates that the multitudes of torn animals and splintered forests date from a time not many thousand years____ ago.
_In 1797 the body of a mammoth, with flesh, skin, and hair, was found in northeastern Siberia, and since then bodies of other mammoths have been unearthed from the frozen ground in various parts of that region. The flesh had the appearance of freshly frozen beef; it was edible, and wolves and sledge dogs fed on it without harm.1
_The ground must have been frozen ever since the day of their entombment; had it not been frozen, the bodies of the mammoths would have putrefied in a single summer, but they remained unspoiled for some thousands of years____. It is therefore absolutely necessary to believe that the bodies were frozen up immediately after the animals died, and were never once thawed, until the day of their discovery.
__[FOSSILS IN] THE CAVES OF ENGLAND
_p.18. Buckland was concerned "to establish two important facts, first, that there has been a recent and general inundation of the globej and, second, that the animals whose remains are found interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of high north latitudes.*'
_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 tune 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, Dolo-mieu, and Cuvier, each of whom presented his own reasons.
__[WHALES IN MICHIGAN]
_p.32. In bogs covering glacial deposits in Michigan, skeletons of two whales were discovered. Whales are marine animals. How did they come to Michigan in the postglacial epoch? Whales do not travel by land. Glaciers do not carry whales, and the ice sheet would not have brought them to the middle of a continent. Besides, the whale bones were found in post-glacial deposits. Was there a sea in Michigan after the glacial epoch, only a few thousand years____ ago?
__[HIMILAYAN GLACIATION]
_p.47. R. Finsterwalder, exploring the Nanga Parbat massif in the western Himalayas (26,660 feet high), dated the Himalayan glaciation as post-glacial; in other words, the expansion of the glaciers in the Himalayas took place much closer to our time than had been previously assumed. Great uplifts of the Himalayas took place in part after the time designated as the Ice Age, or only a few thousand years____ ago.6
__[MEGALITHIC CITY IN THE ANDES]
_p.50. [Bellamy said:] All this happened millions of years before our moon was caught by the earth, and thus the ruins of the megalithic city Tiahuanacu are millions of years old, that is, the city must have been built long "before the Flood." This theory is bizarre. The geological record indicates a late elevation of the Andes, and the time of its origin is brought ever closer to our time. Archaeological and radiocarbon analyses indicate that the age of the Andean culture and of the city is not much older than four thousand years____. Not only the "built before the Flood" theory collapses; so does the belief that the last elevation of the Andes was in the Tertiary, or more than a million years ago. Sometime in the remote past the Altiplano was at or below sea level, so that originally its lakes were part of a sea gulf. The last upheaval, however, took place in an early historical period, after the city of Tiahuanacu had been built; the lakes were dragged up, and the Altiplano and the entire chain of the Andes rose to their present height.
__[NORTHWEST VOLCANISM]
_p.52. Only a few thousand years____ ago lava flowed there over an area larger than France, Switzerland, and Belgium combined; it flowed not as a creek, not as a river, not even as an overflowing stream, but as a flood, deluging horizon alter horizon, filling all the valleys, devouring ail the forests and habitations, steaming large lakes out of existence as though they were little potholes filled with water, swelling ever higher and overtopping mountains and burying them deep beneath molten stone, boiling and bubbling, thousands of feet thick, billions of tons heavy. In 1889, on the occasion of the boring of an artesian well at Nampa, Idaho, on the Columbia Plateau near the Snake River, a small figurine of baked clay was extracted from a depth of 320 feet, penetrated after piercing a sheet of basalt lava fifteen feet thick. G. F. Wright described the find and wrote: "The well was tubed with heavy iron tubing six inches in diameter, so that there could be no mistake about the occurrence of the image at the depth stated." He also added: "No one has come forward to challenge the evidence except on purely a priori grounds arising from
preconceived opinions of the extreme antiquity of the deposits." 4
__[MAGNETIC REVERSAL]
_p.80. 8 Manley speaks of "the possibility of its [earth's magnetic field] reversal in historical times, 2500 years____ ago, to be cleared up by more research." However, the more exact date is, according to the original works of Folgheraiter and Mercanton, the eighth century before the present era, or shortly thereafter.
__[PATAGONIAN VOLCANISM]
_p.81. In Patagonia volcanic eruptions have occurred down to fairly recent times, and the land between the Atlantic and the Andes is covered in many places with lava flows. All in all only about four or five hundred volcanoes on earth are considered active or dormant, against a multiplicity of extinct cones. Yet only five or six hundred years ago many of the presently inactive volcanoes were still active. This points to very great activity at a time only a few thousand years____ ago. At the rate of extinction witnessed by modern man, the greater part of the still active volcanoes will become inactive in a matter of several centuries.
__[METEORITES]
_p.83. According to a hypothesis offered by Swinne and referred to by H. Pettersson, "meteorites should be a relatively recent occurrence, limited to the last 25,000 years, and have been absent during preceding millions of years. 8
__[SWEDISH GLACIERS]
_p.84. Of the methods used to find how much time has passed since the ice cover started to melt, the "varve" method, until recently, was thought to be fairly precise. This method was introduced by G. de Geer, who counted the annual bands of silt and clay ("varves") deposited, coarse in summer and fine in winter, under the ice in the coastal lakes and rivers of Sweden, once covered by the glacial sheet of the Ice Age. De Geer calculated that it had taken about 5000 years____ to melt the ice cover from Schonen, at the southern tip of Sweden, to the place in the north where there are still glaciers in the mountains. In no place are there five thousand overlying varves; but De Geer looked for similar series or patterns of thick and thin varves from one lake to another, about fifteen hundred outcrops altogether, always with the thought that a varve series found high in the deposit of some southern lake would repeat itself closer to the bottom of a lake to the north. Additional figures used in De Geer's evaluation of the time that passed since the end of the Ice Age are of a more hypothetical nature. For the preceding period, the time allegedly needed for the ice to retreat all the way, from Leipzig to southern Sweden, where no varves are found, De Geer offered, as a surmise, a span of 4000 years____. Then he surmised further that the end of the melting of the ice cover coincided with the beginning of Neolithic time, which he placed 5000 years____ ago, thus arriving at the final figure of 14,000 years, or 12,000 years before the present era. The area of Stockholm was freed from ice about 10,000 years ago.
__[WISCONSIN GLACIATION]
_p.85. H. E. Suess of the United States Geological Survey reported recently that wood found at the base of inter-bedded blue till, peat, and outwash of drift, and ascribed by its finder to the Late Wisconsin (last) glaciation, is, according to radiocarbon analysis, but 3300 years____ old (with a margin of error up to two hundred years both ways), or of the middle of the second millennium before the present era. Still more recently Suess and Rubin reported that "a glacial advance in the mountains of westem United States was determined to have occurred about 3000 years____ ago.
__[CANADIAN STRIATIONS]
_p.86. "Another indication that the final melting of the ice sheet upon British America was separated by only a very short interval, geologically speaking, from the present time is seen in the wonderfully perfect preservation of the glacial striation and polishing on the surface of the more enduring rocks. ... It seems impossible that these rock exposures can have so well withstood weathering in the severe climate of those northern regions longer than a few thousand years____ at the most."2
__[NIAGARA FALLS]
__p.87. The date of the end of the Ice Age was not changed whenv subsequent examination of records indicated that since 1764 the falls had retreated from Lake Ontario toward Lake Erie at the rate of five feet per year, and that, if the process of wearing down the rock had gone on at the same rate from the time of the retreat of the ice cover, seven thousand years____ would have been sufficient to do the work. However, since in the beginning, when the ice melted and a swollen stream earned the detritus abrading the rock of the gorge, the erosion rate must have been much more rapid, the age of the gorge must be further reduced. According to G. F. Wright, author of The Ice Age in North America, five thousand years____ may be regarded as an adequate figure.1 The erosion and sedimentation of the shores of Lake Michigan also suggest a lapse of time reckoned in thousands, but not tens of thousands, of years____ since the beginning of the process.2
_We are obliged to fall back on the Upper Great Gorge, the uppermost segment of the whole gorge, which appears to be genuinely postglacial. Redeterminations by W. H. Boyd showed the present rate of recession of the Horseshoe Falls to be, not five feet, but rather 3.8 feet, per year. Hence the age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years____-— and to obtain even this [low! figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times."4
_p.88. If we follow the principle of quantitative analysis and accept De Lapparent's figure as approximately correct, the maximal extension of the Rhone Glacier dates from a point well within the bounds of human history. The recent field work in the Alps actually revealed that numerous glaciers there are no older than 4000 years____. This startling discovery made the following statement necessary: "A large number of the present glaciers in the Alps are not survivors of the last glacial maximum, as was formerly universally believed, but are glaciers newly created within roughly the last 4000 years____.
__[MISSISSIPPI RIVER]
_As early as 1861, Humphreys and Abbot calculated the age of the Mississippi by evaluating the detritus borne by it and the sediment deposited in the delta. They arrived at the low figure of 5000 years____ as the age of the delta, its birth thus being related to about the year 2800 before the present era.1 However, when at the close of the Ice Age the ice cover melted in the north, multitudinous streams must have earned an enormous amount of detritus into the Mississippi and its tributary, the Missouri, and for* this reason the above figure, if otherwise properly calculated, must be appreciably reduced.
_p.89. The Falls of St. Anthony on this stream at Minneapolis have excavated a long gorge by removing the bedrock. In the 1870s and 1880s N. H. Winchell made this falls the subject of a study. Comparing topographical maps covering two hundred years, he concluded that the falls had retreated 2.44 feet yearly. If this was the constant rate of retreat, the falls must have started 8000 years____ ago.2 But here, too, a larger stream carrying abundant detritus, which abraded the bedrock, must have flowed when the ice cover melted. J. D. Dana, studying the area of Lake Champlain and of the Northeastern states in general, came to the conclusion that prodigious floods of almost unimaginable magnitude accompanied the melting of the ice cover: in the lower part of the Connecticut River the floods rose two hundred feet above the present high-water mark.8 And if this is true for those regions, it must be true also for the valley of the Mississippi. Consequently the gorge of the Falls of St. Anthony must be of more recent date than ^Winchell calculated, though even his figure was regarded as much too low.
_On the basis of three earlier accurate surveys {of the Bear River in Canada} made between the years 1909 and 1927, G. Hanson in 1934 calculated with great exactness the annual growth of the delta through deposited sediment. At the present rate of sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years____ old."
__[FLORIDA FOSSILS]
_p.91. The Sierra Nevada chain rises between the Great Basin to the east and the Pacific, cutting off the drainage to the ocean. Abert and Summer lakes in southern Oregon have no outlets. They are regarded as remnants of a once large glacial lake, Chewaucan. W. van Winkle of the United States Geological Survey investigated the saline content of these two lakes and wrote: "A conservative estimate of the age of Summer and Abert Lakes, based on their concentration and area, the composition of the influent waters, and the rate of evaporation, is 4000 years____."
_To the east of Sequoia National Park and Mount Whitney in California lies Owens Lake. It is supplied by the Owens River and it has no outlet. At some time in the past the surface level of the lake, because of a greater water supply, was so much higher that it overflowed its basin. H. S. Gale analyzed the water of the lake and of the river for chlorine and sodium and came to the conclusion that the river required 4200 years____ to supply the chlorine present in the lake and 3500 years____ to supply its sodium.
_Lahontan and its residual lakes were explored anew by J. Claude Jones, and the results of his work were published as "Geological History of Lake Lahontan" by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.4 He investigated the saline content of Pyramid and Winnemucca lakes and of the Truckee River that feeds them. He found that the river could have supplied the entire content of chlorine of these two lakes in 3881 years____. "A similar calculation, using sodium instead of chlorine, gave 2447 years____ necessary."
__[TREE RINGS]
_p.93. The oldest trees that started life about 3200 years____ ago offer insight into the influence on their growth, as caused by a series of later climatic disturbances on the global scale that, according to the pollen analysis, took place in the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, or 2700 years____ ago.
_The Carnegie Institution published in 1919 a graph drawn by A. E. Douglass, then director of Steward Observatory, who studied tree rings in order to discover the solar activity of the past.1 The graph actually reveals a spurt of oscillations in the annual growth of the tree rings around the year —747 (the identification of the rings as to their years is approximate). There is an unusually high crest in the last years of the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh century. After a record high crest of six-year duration there is in —687 a precipitate drop.
__[SEA LEVEL CHANGE]
_According to Daly, "This increase of the ice-cap or caps has been tentatively referred to late-Neolithic time, about 3500 years____ ago. At that approximate date there was some chilling of the northern hemisphere at least, following a prolonged period when the world climate was distinctly warmer than now. Late-Neolithic man lived in Europe 3500 years____ back." As to the date of the sudden drop of oceanic level, Kuenen writes: "The time of the movement was estimated by Daly to be probably some 3000 to 4000 years____ ago. Detailed field work in the Netherlands and in eastern England has shown a recent eustatic depression of the same order of magnitude as deduced by Daly. Here the time can be fixed as roughly 3000 to 3500 years____ ago." Thus the work in the Netherlands and in England confirmed not only Daly's finding but also his dating.
_p.99. Thus, according to Godwin's analysis, in the period between 2000 and 500 before the present era, the plain north of Cambridge was more than once invaded by the North Sea under circumstances that we would interpret as catastrophic. In many places all around England and Wales there are submerged forests which are dated as "probably PostGlacial or Recent."
__[THERA VOLCANO ERUPTION]
_p.101. At that time villages were buried by lava, pumice, and ashes; the excavated cultural remains showed that the great explosion took place "between 1800 and 1500 B.C.," or at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt. The erupted masses were so vast that a German scholar offered in recent years a theory according to which the Egyptian plague of darkness was caused by the eruption of the Thera volcano, six hundred miles northwest of the Delta.
__[CHANGE IN NILE FLOW]
_"We obtained the remarkable result that about 4000 years____ ago the Nile used to rise at that point, on an average, twenty-two feet higher than it does at present." This dropping of the high-water level must be ascribed either to a change in the quantity of water in the Nile or to a change in the rock structure of Egypt. However, if the Nile contained so much more water in the past, many residences and temples would have been regularly inundated. I omit the references to cities swallowed by the ground in Egyptian literature; yet the enigmatic and rather regular signs of fire in graves of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, as if from the presence of some volatile substance that penetrated there and became inflamed by the heated ground, is worth mentioning.
__[ALPS GLACIER]
_p.105. The Rhone Glacier in the Alps started to melt 2400 years____ ago, in the middle of the first millennium. This calculation of De Lapparent coincides with that at which we arrived by dating the last catastrophe in —687. In this catastrophe many older glaciers melted, and the subsequent increased evaporation and precipitation built other glaciers that before long also started to melt, a process that has been going on ever since. Many glaciers of the Alps, it was recently learned with surprise, are less than 4000 years____ old (Flint).
__[FLORIDA FOSSILS]
_p.106. The Florida fossil beds at Vero and Melbourne proved - by the artifacts found there together with human bones and the remains of animals, many of which are extinct - that these fossil beds were deposited between 2000 and 4000 years____ ago.
_From observations on beaches in numerous places all over the world, Daly concluded that there was a change in the ocean level, which dropped sixteen to twenty feet 3500 years____ ago; KLuenen and others confirmed Daly's findings with evidence derived from Europe.
__[SOUTHWEST LAKE & TAR PITS]
_p.108. According to [Claude Jones's] analysis of the salt accumulation in the residual lakes of the larger Lake Lahontan, this glacial lake came into existence only 3500 years____ ago, and the fauna found in it deposit could not be older. This compelled further vacillations. J. R. Schultz, writing on the fauna of the tar seeps in California, says that in view of the established correlation of the fauna of La Brea and the fauna of Lake Lahontan it is now possible "to reconcile the veterbrate evidence" even with the opinion of Jones "as to the relatively late age of the lake." Would this really signify that the extinct animals of the asphalt pits are only 3000 or 4000 years____ old?
__[RECAP]
_p.140. Professor R. Daly of Harvard University found that 3500 years____ ago all over the world the level of the oceans suddenly dropped. He thought it might be due to a sudden sinking of the crust. And in an authoritative work, Marine Geology (1950), Professor P. H. Kuenen of the Netherlands finds that "this recent shift is now well established" on observations in many places of the world, and he, too, assigns this catastrophic drop of the ocean level to 3500 years____ ago.
_The investigation of the delta formation of the Bear River (on the Alaskan border), very carefully made by Hanson, showed that "at the present rate of sedimentation the delta is estimated to be only 3600 years____ old." A. de Lapparent, the leading French geologist of the beginning of the century, calculated that, since the time the Rhone glacier started to melt, less than 3000 years____ have passed. Modern research confirms that many of the alpine glaciers are less than 4000 years____ old. Professor Flint of Yale refers to the redetermination of the age of the Upper Great Gorge of Niagara Falls and writes (1947): "The age of the Upper Great Gorge is calculated as somewhat more than four thousand years____— and to obtain even this [low] figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during postglacial times." 7
__[LABRADOR CRATER]
_p.141. A circular meteoric crater (Chubb crater) was discovered in the summer of 1950 in northern Labrador; it covers an area of four square miles. It is much larger than the Arizona crater, which is four fifths of a mile in diameter (two thirds of a square mile in area); whereas the Arizona crater could accommodate two million people in its amphitheater, the Chubb crater could accommodate twelve million people. It must have been created by the impact of an asteroid. According to the published opinion of geological authorities, the asteroid must have fallen about four thousand years____ ago.
__[ASTEROIDS & COMETS]
_p.142. The origin of asteroids, or small planets, that circle between Jupiter and Mars, some of which cross the orbit of Mars and even that of the earth, has lately been explained as the result of the explosion of a planet and more recently (1950) as the result of a collision between two planets in an early age (Kuiper).
_F. Whipple, upon calculating the orbits of the asteroids, came to the conclusion (1950) that two collisions occurred between these bodies and a comet, once 4700 years____ ago and the second time 1500 years____ ago, or within historical times.
_p.143. Professor S. K. Vsehsviatsky. His research reveals that periodic comets, as observed during recent decades, are losing their luminosity and their matter at a rate so rapid that fifty or sixty revolutions suffice to disintegrate a comet completely. Thus the Halley comet can hardly go back beyond 3500 years____, or the year 1500 before the present era.