Is there nothing too absurd? Finally, is there nothing too outlandish or instantly wrong that the blogosphere won’t parrot it as The Truth?
This time it’s a laughably wrong press release from an otherwise-credible British university who’d do very well to distance themselves from this quackery very quickly. An impact event, which may have been the root of the Biblical disaster of Soddom and Gomorrah (and here’s us thinking all along it wer them thar queer folk, y’all). Go on, have a read. I’ll wait.
Back? Good. I’m about to tear it to pieces so small they’ll leave no trace…
(Their words in italics)
There’s a giant landslide in Köfels, Austria which some early researchers thought was possibly related to an impact event. This was around the time of Eugene Shoemaker’s work on impacts and the first time we started to actually realise that yes, Earth should have been hit quite a few times in its past.
But this view lost favour as a much better understanding of impact sites developed in the late 20th century. In the case of Köfels there is no crater, so to modern eyes it does not look as an impact site should look. However, the evidence that puzzled the earlier researchers remains unexplained by the view that it is just another landslide.
I did a bit of background reading here, what evidence puzzled us? It turns out that there’s a lot of glass in the landslide material as well as shocked quartz. You don’t get shocked quartz quite like this from any other process. Not even a supervolcano has the amount of pressure required. If you have shocked quartz, you have an impact, it’s that simple.
Or is it?
Well, no it isn’t. Quartz is very hard and highly resilient. It survives most erosive processes and can be transported by them for thousands of miles. Shocked quartz tells you there was an impact event and, if enough of it in a given stratum, when it happened. Of crucial importance, it doesn’t tell you where.
There is a large (by normal standards, you can find shocked quartz literally anywhere from any one of the millions of impacts Earth has suffered) quantity of shocked quartz in the material from the Köfels landslide. It being a landslide, of course, we don’t have clearly demarcated strata to give us a date. The quartz could have been formed millions of years ago.
The glass, however, was not. We can date that quite accurately. We use numerous methods and put an upper and a lower bound, independently, on it. We get bounds of 16,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago. That’s fairly recent, but glass is formed all the time on Earth. A good landslide has a lot, a hell of a lot, of energy. This actually melts the rock inside it and forms glass! All that rock rubbing against each other during the landslide, powered by a mighty fall, manages to heat through friction hot enough to melt. We should expect glass at such a landslide and indeed we find it. This is not evidence of an astrobleme (a formation caused by an impact event).
Of course we learned a lot about astroblemes and their effects on Earth since Shoemaker’s pioneering work. Glass and shocked quartz can only form from a ground impact. Not only that, but a pretty hard one. The Köfels site is quite a bit larger than the famous Barringer Crater in Arizona which, a Google Image Search will quickly tell you, is very recognisable. It’s also five times older than the Köfels event.
That’s the summary. Here’s the rebuttal, where I get my fun.
It was found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the Royal Place at Nineveh, and was made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC. It is an astronomical work as it has drawings of constellations on it and the text has known constellation names. It has attracted a lot of attention but in over a hundred years nobody has come up with a convincing explanation as to what it is.
Nobody knows what it is in over a hundred years, but it’s an astronomical work. Eh? Assyrian scribes used well understood languages and even at 700BC, pre-dating the Old Testament, the language wasn’t that archaic that we can’t translate it. If we don’t know what it is, how do we know it’s astronomical?
With modern computer programmes[sic] that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).
Go download Stellarium. It’s free, open source and very good. Planetarium software has been around for the last twenty years that I know of and most likely much longer. That’s your “modern computer programme”. Now, why would an Assyrian scribe be copying out the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer 2,400 years before him? Why would he even know the language? Could you read a language we used 2,400 years ago, such as Ancient Hebrew; No, you can’t, not perfectly or without ambiguity. If you could, there are a LOT of Biblical theologians who’d like a very close chat with you. Can you imagine how difficult it’d be for a scribe in 700 BC to manage such a feat?
No reason is given for our Assyrian scribe’s diligent historical documentation.
Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night, but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space.
There are two points here. First, “the same as any other night” means we have a lot more ‘pages’ from this notebook, but we’re given our answer…
…has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time…
Woah, maybe not. Now is this tablet mysterious and untranslated, or do we have a whole load of other tablets to compare it to? We can’t have both, yet this is exactly what the press release just said.
Now secondly we have an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it’s in space. If I quickly do a spot of maths, we can put it, say, 1,000km up and it’d be about 4km across and still discernible as a distinct shape. It could be 500km up and 1km across, that’s fine too, if possibly moving a little bit too fast; Consider that a lower bound since at orbital velocity it’d cover that 500km in about three seconds. No problems there, but do take notes.
The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.
Certainly possible even by naked eye methods. We can ignore the atmosphere because it’s just not going to alter the path of something larger than about 500m travelling between 20km/s and 50km/s, it’s through the atmosphere in a matter of seconds. Then we can just integrate back into an orbit. An error of one degree is pretty huge for an orbit, but we can get a very vague idea of the direction the object was travelling (but we can only guess at its velocity really). So tell us more…
…the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth[sic], that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.
Uh oh. Atens do not orbit “close to the earth”, they simply have a semimajor axis inside Earth’s orbit. They cross Earth’s orbit, that’s it. Some of them do anyway. There’s nothing about resonance and, indeed, a resonant object would never impact Eath, because it’s resonant!
This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming[sic] angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point.
Wow. Just…wow. It’s not possible to be more wrong in a single sentence than the sentence beginning “The in coming…”, it just can’t be done.
First off, we have to vapourise AT LEAST a kilometer wide asteroid. Now remember Newton’s laws? Of course you do. Whatever force vapourised that asteroid was IMMENSE, provided by the mountain. However, there’s an equal and opposite force provided by the asteroid on the mountain. The mountain would be not just rubble, but a crater at least seven kilometers wide. You cannot “clip” a mountain at over twenty kilometers a second, vapourise an entire kilometer (remember, that’s a lower bound) asteroid and still be left with a mountain or, indeed, anything near the mountain.
Refutation one: The mountain still exists and it should not. An impact solid enough to vapourise that much rock (or metal, if iron-nickel asteroid) is more than enough to vapourise five mountains.
As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide).
Continuing the trainwreck, we have a five-kilometer ball of superheated plasma, rock fragments and general badness, presumably with a sizable proportion of its initial 20-50 kilometer PER SECOND velocity. Everything between that mountain and Köfels would have been utterly obliterated by the air shockwaves alone. We’d see a layer of soot in the valley floor, recently of course, about a foot thick.
Refutation two: The valley is just as it was when the last glaciers were retreating 10,000 years ago. It should not be.
Refutation three: The valley should contain tremendous proportions of sidereophile elements, such as iridium. It does not.
When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.
Well this wasn’t written by a geologist that’s for sure. It doesn’t matter if you hurl a ton of rock or a ton of feathers at a surface, you still hit it just as hard with just the same energy. Just pulverising the rock? Five kilometers down, perhaps, but locally on the surface? No. A five kilometer wide ball of twenty kilometer per second superheated debris is going to leave a hell of a mark. We call these marks craters. It doesn’t matter if you get one crater, or two, or six, or sixty thousand microcraters (in, for example, quartz, sand and glass). At that kind of speed, you get craters. And when you get craters, you get the stuff blown out of them. The stuff blown out doesn’t much care for the initial direction of the impactor as to where it goes, it’s more or less symmetrical along the line of flight, as much goes back as goes forwards.
Refutation four: WHAT? You can’t support a point using physics that doesn’t work! The ejecta blanket would be at least twenty metres thick, where is it?
Refutation five: We see oblique craters on the Moon, Mars and Mercury too, but they’re only formed by impacts under around three degrees, not six.
No amount of literary sleight of hand or abuse of physics can hide a complete ignorance of the laws of physics. So okay, let’s burden on through this cesspool of wrong.
Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.
He’s clumsily describing an ejecta fall-out. Molten rock falling from the sky after being blasted up there by…by the formation of a crater. Oops. Also, where are the burns? We’re quite interested in the archaeology of 4,100 years ago and do numerous digs, but we don’t find people immolated, we don’t find soot and ash from trees. The predictions made by this theory just are not supported by evidence.
Why, also, do people not record the next ten years or next century as “the years without summer”? I don’t care how you do it or what happens on the way in, you dump the kinetic energy of a kilometer of asteroid on Earth and you’re going to make a hell of a mess. Stuff’s going to go flying everywhere and fine dust will linger in the high atmosphere for decades. A few poxy volcanoes can trigger global temperature drops, imagine what a kilometer (at least!) of asteroid can do!
Guess what? Our two researchers (one a rocket engine engineer, the other a space infrastructure engineer, NEITHER geologists or linguists) have a book for sale about it all! They never do explain why the glass was formed at least 8,000 years ago and their magic happened 4,100 years ago.
Because a hillside falling away as the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago is just too boring and happened in too many places around Europe.
