Could the Gulf stream stop and plunge the Europe into a mini ice age?

I was looking up climate predictions and came across this..

Sea change: why global warming could leave Britain feeling the cold.

No new ice age yet, but Gulf Stream is weakening, Friday October 27 2006

Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.

Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004.

The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight.

Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.

Warm water brought to Europe’s shores raises the temperature by as much as 10C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier.

Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the 10-day hiatus. “We’d never seen anything like that before and we don’t understand it. We didn’t know it could happen,” said Harry Bryden, at the National Oceanography Centre, in Southampton, who presented the findings to a conference in Birmingham on rapid climate change.

Is it the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt? “I want to know more before I say that,” Professor Bryden said.

Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as “the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record”.

He added: “It only lasted 10 days. But suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days, when do you ring up the prime minister and say let’s start stockpiling fuel? How can we rule out a longer one next year?”

Prof Bryden’s group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years.

The study prompted the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council to set up an array of 16 submerged stations spread across the Atlantic, from Florida to north Africa, to measure flow rate and other variables at different depths. Data from these stations confirmed the slowdown in 1998 was not a “freak observation”- although the current does seem to have picked up slightly since.

The warm water of the gulf stream shown in orange and yellow.

The idea is that global warming could cause the gulf stream to just stop permanently, significantly lowering the temperature in Europe, possibly making places like Iceland and Finland uninhabitable, and the UK with temperatures more like Moscow, as we are on a similar latitude to them (see link  for a map) and much less rainfall. Could this mean an ice age for Europe, a la ‘the day after tomorrow’? Or just more white Christmases?

Personally, I suspect warmer summers and colder winters are the most likely outcome, a more continental weather system as the gulf stream weakens (warmer summers) and fails to bring as much winter warmth. I’m getting a real fireplace put in.

The Stephenville UFOs on camera

Stephenville residents report more UFO sightings

 October 25, 2008

STEPHENVILLE — Over a three-month period this summer there were 1,000 UFO sightings filed with the National UFO Reporting Center.

Some 75 of those UFOs were reported over the state of Texas.

Stephenville is one hot spot we’ve shown you before.

Now the small town is getting buzzed by UFOs again and we have the video.

“You could see the oval shape. Got my friend, I said ‘dude, you got to come look at this,'” said Andy Monrreal.

Monrreal was hanging out with his Dublin High School friends when they all saw something they say looked like a UFO.

“You could see a shape. It was like a complete circle,” said Monrreal.

He rolled off a half minute of video on his mom’s digital camera.

His dad saw it too.

“I never seen nothing like that in my life. Big lights and everything,” his father said.

So did mom.

“It was a round thing. You could see lights around it, flickering and changing. It was awesome. Just turning and flickering,” she said.

Back in January, Erath County went UFO crazy after a handful of people reported similar lights over Stephenville.

International press and UFO hunters descended on the town.

This time, many more eye witnesses are phoning the Stephenville Empire Tribune or the ET.

Reporter Whitney Ashley said many people don’t want to talk publicly, like several workers at the paper, who also saw the lights.

“I’ve got at least 10 right now willing to go on record,” Ashley said.

“The sheriff’s department got lots of calls in the southern part of Erath County.”

The Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth confirms seven F-16s training in the area at the time.

Several witnesses told us they saw the fighters, after they saw the mysterious lights.

Why is it no-one ever gets a good shot, and they are always blurred? I have to say, the lower one looks like an air balloon with navigation lights on it.

UFO video from Haiti.. is a hoax

Some French guy made it as a showcase for his skills for getting an SFX job in the movies.

Barzolff, Sam said, wished to remain anonymous, but he was prepared to share the full story of the videos. I agreed not to reveal his real name. Then I was all ears as Sam began parroting into the phone the words I could hear Barzolff saying in the background.

The 35-year-old Barzolff is a professional animator who attended one of the most prestigious art schools in France and has a decade of experience with computer graphics and commercial animation.

It took Barzolff a total of 17 hours to make both the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos. He did it all by himself using a MacBook Pro and a suite of commercially available 3-D animation programs, including Vue 6. The videos are 100% computer-generated.

The videos, he said, were intended as research for a feature film project he’s been working on with Partizan, the France-based production company responsible for, among others, Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

When contacted to verify the story, “Eternal Sunshine” producer Georges Bermann said it was all true, and that Barzolff was “an absolute genius” who could “make anything look entirely real.”

To prove that he was truly behind the videos, Barzolff agreed to provide the L.A. Times with a new spacecraft video. Called “Proof,” the video depicts a small version of one of the spacecraft floating above a Paris street. As the camera pans over, the viewer sees two elderly women at a cafe, one of whom is holding a remote control device. Humorously, of course, this video makes use of computer graphics as well.

The movie Barzolff is working on for the big screen is about two guys who create a UFO hoax so realistic that it spirals out of their control. “For better or worse,” said Barzolff, who cited being “overwhelmed” by the response to his video as one of the reasons he didn’t want to go public with his name.

Barzolff stressed the videos were not intended as a viral marketing ploy. His movie is still in the idea phase, and he created the hoax strictly as a “sociological experiment” — in other words, just to see what would happen.

What happened far exceeded his expectations.

After he finished producing the videos, he posted them and went to bed. “I thought they would reach perhaps 2,000 people,” he said through Sam.

“When I woke up the next morning there were 70,000 views,” on the Haiti video. “Twenty minutes later it was up to 130,000 views. It grew exponentially from there.”

Barzolff called the results of his experiment “entertaining, thrilling, completely addictive, and a little scary.”

The scary part, he said, was that in spite of the evidence, “many people refuse to believe it’s a hoax”.

And here is his quickly knocked together ‘proof video’. And his channel on youtube.

UFOs over Birmingham and the Black Country

UFO photograph from the black country.

UFOs over Birmingham and the Black Country

Source Birmingham post

A Wednesbury woman who had a close encounter outside her front door and a mysterious orange object which trailed a plane to Birmingham Airport are among the incidents recorded in Ministry of Defence UFO files which have been opened to the public.

The reports were recorded by MoD officials and stored as part of a massive collection of unexplained incidents which is now being published under the Freedom of Information Act. Around 4,500 separate pages of material have been released, most of then reports by civilians which were impossible to verify or disprove.

An MoD report from 1988 records an account by a woman from Wednesbury, who had a close encounter with a UFO outside her house. The object headed straight for her house “as though going to crash” before suddenly stopping and hanging 40 feet in the air. It was square, with a dome on top which had three windows – through which mysterious figures could be seen.

The report said: “There were three people in front, two sitting and one standing, all appeared to be wearing white suits.”

The eyewitness ran inside her house and the vehicle flew off.

Another report in the files records the sighting of a “very bright orange light” which hung above a civilian aircraft for approximately three minutes as it flew to Birmingham Airport. As the plane approached the runway, the light “veered off rapidly” and disappeared.

The archive includes a number of letters from amateur UFO enthusiasts who heard reports of mysterious objects in the sky – and hoped to discover what the authorities really knew about them.

For example, the British UFO Research Association wrote to the Ministry asking about an incident in Rowley Regis, the Black Country, in 1979, when a woman reported “an egg-shaped object about eight feet long” which had flown down and landed in her garden. According to the association, “this object left prominent ground traces which were subsequently photographed and measured.”

But most of those seeking details of the nation’s official UFO studies were disappointed, as the official policy was not to investigate reports unless there appeared to be a threat to Britain’s national security.

Even UFO believers were sometimes convinced the objects had down-to-earth explanations.

In 1998, the Midlands branch of the British UFO Association wrote to the MoD about large, slow-moving triangular objects which had been reported over central and northern England, including Staffordshire.

They complained: “We are all concerned about the use of aircraft (possibly Stealth or its variants) operating under the disguise of UFOs over populated areas, particularly in darkness.”

Either the RAF or the US Air Force was testing “some new form of aircraft”, the correspondent claimed.

Incidents recorded in the files include:
* The British UFO Research Association wrote to the Ministry asking about an incident in Rowley Regis in 1979, when a woman reported “an egg-shaped object about eight feet long” which had flown down and landed in her garden.
  According to the association, “this object left prominent ground traces which were subsequently photographed and measured. [She] then found that her eyesight was adversely affected and her general well-being so disturbed that her GP advised her to stay off work for a fortnight.”
 Two police stations, Oldbury and West Bromwich, had records of the incident.

* One eye-witness wrote to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street claiming to have seen a UFO in the skies over Shropshire.

The correspondent said: “During early November last year, myself and next door neighbour were standing outside by the stables when I looked up into the sky and did see a round, red circular object travelling at great speed.

“Then again one appeared from west to east.”

The same correspondent reported that their mother had seen “a brilliant shining silver ring” which disappeared into the clouds.

Attempts to report the incident to the police, a university academic and the media had been rebuffed, leading the eye-witness to write directly to the Prime Minister in 1987.

I have to say, I think the UFO in the picture looks a lot like a stealth bomber. I think it’s probably a test run of a new plane.

Ex-RAF man tells of UFOs on radar

Ex-RAF man tells of UFOs encounter.

It was out of the blue on a clear summer’s afternoon when the UFOs came.

Retired RAF air traffic control supervisor Alan Turner, from Shrewsbury, remembers it only too well – it’s a moment he has kept secret for more than 35 years.

“The radar room was completely darkened and you had the glow of the radar tubes and there were six people on three consoles, then myself and a duty NCO, plus the co-co-ordination team, so there were ten pairs of eyes in total,” says Alan recalling the scene in the air traffic control operations room at RAF Sopley, Hampshire, in 1971.

“I was sitting at a desk waiting to see if anything might happen when I heard somebody shout ‘What was that?’ I leaned over to the chap who had shouted and he pointed to four blips coming into radar cover east of the Salisbury Plain danger area, an area where the military fire guns.

“We had blips coming into radar cover at 3,000 feet climbing very fast and tracking south east at speed, and you had six or seven of them, all climbing, with one in excess of 60,000 feet. It was constant for about 20 to 25 minutes – that means there would have been 35 to 40 of them.”

Now aged 67, Alan says “UFOs are a fact and I don’t care who knows” and is suspicious of the shroud of secrecy thrown up in the wake of his experience.

He says normally controllers would be told in advance of any aircraft flying in the area that might initially seem to be unexplained and which could cause alarm, but on this occasion there was no word, no explanation from the MoD.

As the supervisor of the control room, he immediately contacted Heathrow Airport to see if they knew anything.

“They could see the same thing,” says Alan. “I contacted fighter control at Suffolk and they could see them as well.”

At his home in Monkmoor, he tells how he scrambled a bomber to fly in and take a closer look. A quarter of a mile from the suspect objects the pilot became concerned, telling Alan over the radio: “I don’t know what that was but it was shifting like the clappers.”

Alan impounded the radar tapes and submitted his operations report to the squadron leader.

Everyone who’d been in the radar room that day was also filed reports on what they had seen and a couple of days later were summoned to an interview with two faced men who did not identify themselves.

“Everybody was interviewed separately and as supervisor I was first and last,” Alan continues. “I was introduced to them as Flight Officer Turner – I had no idea who they were. We were all told later – in no uncertain terms – not to talk about it, so we didn’t.”

Of course, Shropshire has become a hotspot for UFO sightings and groups flock to the county, but on the whole these have been anecdotal and largely explained in some quarters as being aircraft taking part in military operations from one of the nearby RAF airbases.

On the wild side, there have even been reports of people claiming they have been abducted by aliens – not a belief that Alan subscribes, although when he delivers a keynote speech to the International UFO Conference tomorrow in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, he admits that he has been asked to meet one woman who says that just this happened to her.

Other people have reported unidentified lights in the sky that have been verified by independent sightings.

“Shropshire is a major area for aircraft training so you get a lot more activity – I’m sure 99 per cent of sightings can be explained but there’s always that odd blip that can not.”

With any so-called UFO sightings there are sceptics and theorists. Alan was taken to task by a professor at Sheffield University who claimed the ‘blips’ he witnessed were most probably Lightning aircraft.

“I wrote him three sides of A4 as to why they were not aircraft,” he says, explaining that the MoD at the time had a total fleet of only around 40 and there wouldn’t be a commander on earth who would fly the lot at the same time.

“And Lightnings are loud – are you telling me that Joe Public would not have heard something?”

Until recent weeks, Alan, who later rose to the rank of Wing Commander, has only talked about what he saw that day on his radar screen with close pals. He reveals that an RAF colleague from Church Stretton who manned the north of England radar had seen similar unknown objects on their screens – objects that “defied all logic”.

He also knows people in the county “with all their brain cells in the right order” who have seen unexplained objects with the naked eye, and whose reports Alan believes in.

If he never talked about his own mystery sightings, his curiosity about them never waned. Now he wants the public to know that UFOs – whatever they are – quite possibly do exist.

“I had no idea what they were but I do keep an open mind – I tracked something that was unknown. I would like to think they were aircraft but I don’t think it was. You cannot get that many in the same place without somebody knowing about it.

“I did not speak about it until I retired because of professional integrity. People look at you and say ‘you are mad’.

“Well I’m not mad.”

He adds: “I think it’s arrogant to think that we are alone. I don’t think we are but I’ve got no proof.”

By Ben Bentley

Seems like a reliable witness to me.

A very British tsunami, 1607

Not well known, is that in January 1607 an 8m high tsunami swept up the Severn estuary on the South West coast of England, killing about 2,000 people. A plaque in a church marks the high water mark, and reads:

“An inundation of the sea water by overflowing and breaking down the Sea banks; happened in this Parish of Kingstone-Seamore, and many others adjoining; by reason whereof many Persons were drown’d and much Cattle and Goods, were lost: the water in the Church was five feet high and the greatest part lay on the ground about ten days. WILLIAM BOWER”

Never assume that these things happen ‘in other places’. Link. All coasts are vulnerable.

Killer tsumani in the Ancient Mediterranean

Link

Tsunamis are known to destabilize soft marine sediments, the team notes, leaving telltale coverings of clay deposits after they reach land.

These deposits identify Mount Etna as the source of the tsunami and discount other possible causes, such as an asteroid strike or an undersea earthquake, the team says.

 The researchers also speculate that a Neolithic village just off the coast of present-day Israel was hit by the tsunami.

The well-preserved Atlit-Yam settlement, which due to altered sea levels today lies submerged, “shows evidence of a sudden abandonment” 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, the researchers write.

These signs include a pile of gutted fish that had been processed and then “stored for future consumption,” which was discovered buried under a layer of clay.

Further research by the Pisa-based team will investigate whether secondary tsunamis were set off by the sediment flows triggered by the initial tsunami from the Mount Etna collapse.

Pareschi said the probability of a new big collapse on Etna is low, but she added, “the eastern sector of the volcano is sliding toward the sea, and we have to understand very well the triggering mechanisms.”

If the Etna tsunami had happened today, she said, the impact would be catastrophic, because the eastern Mediterranean coast is so densely populated.

(Read “Etna Volcano Becoming Dangerous, Experts Warn” [February 6, 2003].)

Some ten percent of tsunamis worldwide occur in the Mediterranean.

The most recent volcano-triggered tsunami was caused by a landslide on the Italian island of Stromboli in the Tyrrhenian Sea in 2002.

The volume of the landslide “was however a thousand times smaller than the Mount Etna one,” Pareschi said.

A tsunami early warning system is currently being developed for the Mediterranean and the northeastern Atlantic. Due to become operational in December 2007, it will form part of a global tsunami warning system coordinated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The measure follows in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, caused by an earthquake in December 2004, which struck coastlines with little or no warning.

Pareschi says the ancient Etna tsunami would have been comparable with the 2004 event, which claimed around 275,000 live.

I got caught in a very minor tsunami in the Med about ten years ago. When in the water, a big wave just surged right up the beach and unceremoniously dumped us all onto the sand. A bit scary, but not more than a half a metre high. The only thing to distinguish it from a big wave was the drawback and the fact it surged right up the beach. All this reading about tsunamis makes me edgy about living half a male from the sea on a dead flat piece of coast.

The theory being knocked around at present is that the melting ice at the end of the ice age caused mega tsunamis because the shifting weight triggered earthquakes, that started the tsunamis. This would really have put a dent in any civillisation that was trying retreating from rising sea levels. The regular tsunamis might explain why there’s a big stone ships achor half way up a big hill in the near east too.

Mega tsunamis strike ‘every thousand years’

Well technically, as an average. We’ve had ten in a ten thousand year period.

 Mega-Tsunami Hit Earth 10,000 Years Ago;

Washington, D.C. — Scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the United States have come up with evidence of massive objects having struck the Earth’s oceans thousands of years ago, causing tsunamis that dwarf the ones experienced in recent times.

There have been up to 10 such impacts in the past 10,000 years, claimed Australian geomorphologist Ted Bryant of the University of Wollongong, Assistant Professor Dallas Abbott from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and New Zealand-based tsunami expert Dr Mauri McSaveney of GNS Science.

Bryant was quoted by ABC Online as saying that the mega-tsunamis of yore were at least 10 times bigger than the December 26, 2004 Asian tsunami.

“Aceh (in Indonesia) was a dimple compared to what we’re looking at,” says Bryant, who used satellite images from Google Earth to identify inland dunes in the shape of arrowheads that he says are signs of the mega-tsunamis.

The tsunamis would have displaced marine deposits containing marine fossils, he says, dumping them inland as ‘chevron’ dunes.

“We’ve found that chevrons are everywhere, everywhere around the world’s coasts,” he says.

Abbot used sea surface altimetry, which measures the height of the sea surface to get an image of the seabed, to identify possible underwater craters, which could be evidence of the impact that caused the tsunamis.

Bryant says Abbot also looked for melted material in cores from the seabed around the craters to confirm impacts caused them.

Bryant says chevrons about 4800 years old around the Indian Ocean are associated with a 29-kilometre wide impact crater located thousands of kilometres to the southeast of Madagascar.

Bryant says other evidence of a mega-tsunami as recently as 500 years ago has been found on the eastern coast of Australia.

None of the research has been published but some of it will be presented at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco next month

However, Earth scientist Professor Richard Arculus of the Australian National University and marine sediment specialist Dr Bradley Opdyke believe that more evidence is required to corroborate this view.

They, however, accept that Bryant’s claims are “perfectly plausible”, but need substantiation. (ANI)

If you were wondering were all the flood myths come from, there’s your answer..

It’s possible that mega tsunamis could totally destroy coastal towns beyond the point of archeaological reconstruction.

Noah’s flood; dated to May 10th, 2807 B.C.

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.

Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every 1,000 years.

The researchers, who formed the working group after finding one another through an international conference, are based in the United States, Australia, Russia, France and Ireland. They are established experts in geology, geophysics, geomorphology, tsunamis, tree rings, soil science and archaeology, including the structural analysis of myth. Their efforts are just getting under way, but they will present some of their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco.

This year the group started using Google Earth, a free source of satellite images, to search around the globe for chevrons, which they interpret as evidence of past giant tsunamis. Scores of such sites have turned up in Australia, Africa, Europe and the United States, including the Hudson River Valley and Long Island.

When the chevrons all point in the same direction to open water, Dallas Abbott, an adjunct research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., uses a different satellite technology to look for oceanic craters. With increasing frequency, she finds them, including an especially large one dating back 4,800 years.

So far, astronomers are skeptical but are willing to look at the evidence, said David Morrison, a leading authority on asteroids and comets at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. Surveys show that as many as 185 large asteroids or comets hit the Earth in the far distant past, although most of the craters are on land. No one has spent much time looking for craters in the deep ocean, Dr. Morrison said, assuming young ones don’t exist and that old ones would be filled with sediment.

Astronomers monitor every small space object with an orbit close to the Earth. “We know what’s out there, when they return, how close they come,” Dr. Morrison said. Given their observations, “there is no reason to think we have had major hits in the last 10,000 years,” he continued, adding, “But if Dallas is right and they find 10 such events, we’ll have a real contradiction on our hands.”

Peter Bobrowsky, a senior research scientist in natural hazards at the Geological Survey of Canada, said “chevrons are fantastic features” but do not prove that megatsunamis are real. There are other interpretations for how chevrons are formed, including erosion and glaciation. Dr. Bobrowsky said. It is up to the working group to prove its claims, he said.

William Ryan, a marine geologist at the Lamont Observatory, compared Dr. Abbott’s work to that of other pioneering scientists who had to change the way their colleagues thought about a subject.

“Many of us think Dallas is really onto something,” Dr. Ryan said. “She is building a story just like Walter Alvarez did.” Dr. Alvarez, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, spent a decade convincing skeptics that a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Ted Bryant, a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, was the first person to recognize the palm prints of mega-tsunamis. Large tsunamis of 30 feet or more are caused by volcanoes, earthquakes and submarine landslides, he said, and their deposits have different features.

 Deposits from mega-tsunamis contain unusual rocks with marine oyster shells, which cannot be explained by wind erosion, storm waves, volcanoes or other natural processes, Dr. Bryant said.

“We’re not talking about any tsunami you’re ever seen,” Dr. Bryant said. “Aceh was a dimple. No tsunami in the modern world could have made these features. End-of-the-world movies do not capture the size of these waves. Submarine landslides can cause major tsunamis, but they are localized. These are deposited along whole coastlines.”

For example, Dr. Bryant identified two chevrons found over four miles inland near Carpentaria in north central Australia. Both point north. When Dr. Abbott visited a year ago, he asked her to find the craters.

To locate craters, Dr. Abbott uses sea surface altimetry data. Satellites scan the ocean surface and log the exact height of it. Underwater mountain ranges, trenches and holes in the ground disturb the Earth’s gravitational field, causing sea surface heights to vary by fractions of an inch. Within 24 hours of searching the shallow water north of the two chevrons, Dr. Abbott found two craters.

Not all depressions in the ocean are impact craters, Dr. Abbott said. They can be sink holes, faults or remnant volcanoes. A check is needed. So she obtained samples from deep sea sediment cores taken in the area by the Australian Geological Survey.

The cores contain melted rocks and magnetic spheres with fractures and textures characteristic of a cosmic impact. “The rock was pulverized, like it was hit with a hammer,” Dr. Abbott said. “We found diatoms fused to tektites,” a glassy substance formed by meteors. The molten glass and shattered rocks could not be produced by anything other than an impact, she said.

“We think these two craters are 1,200 years old,” Dr. Abbott said. The chevrons are well preserved and date to about the same time.

Dr. Abbott and her colleagues have located chevrons in the Caribbean, Scotland, Vietnam and North Korea, and several in the North Sea.

Hither Hills State Park on Long Island has a chevron whose front edge points to a crater in Long Island Sound, Dr. Abbott said. There is another, very faint chevron in Connecticut, and it points in a different direction.

Marie-Agnès Courty, a soil scientist at the European Center for Prehistoric Research in Tautavel, France, is studying the worldwide distribution of cosmogenic particles from what she suspects was a major impact 4,800 years ago.

But Madagascar provides the smoking gun for geologically recent impacts. In August, Dr. Abbott, Dr. Bryant and Slava Gusiakov, from the Novosibirsk Tsunami Laboratory in Russia, visited the four huge chevrons to scoop up samples.

Last month, Dee Breger, director of microscopy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, looked at the samples under a scanning electron microscope and found benthic foraminifera, tiny fossils from the ocean floor, sprinkled throughout. Her close-ups revealed splashes of iron, nickel and chrome fused to the fossils.

When a chondritic meteor, the most common kind, vaporizes upon impact in the ocean, those three metals are formed in the same relative proportions as seen in the microfossils, Dr. Abbott said.

Ms. Breger said the microfossils appear to have melded with the condensing metals as both were lofted up out of the sea and carried long distances.

About 900 miles southeast from the Madagascar chevrons, in deep ocean, is Burckle crater, which Dr. Abbott discovered last year. Although its sediments have not been directly sampled, cores from the area contain high levels of nickel and magnetic components associated with impact ejecta.

Burckle crater has not been dated, but Dr. Abbott estimates that it is 4,500 to 5,000 years old.

It would be a great help to the cause if the National Science Foundation sent a ship equipped with modern acoustic equipment to take a closer look at Burckle, Dr. Ryan said. “If it had clear impact features, the nonbelievers would believe,” he said.

But they might have more trouble believing one of the scientists, Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C.

Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, “and we’re not there yet.”

Link

So it would seem there are reasons behind the ubiquitous ‘flood myths’. I’m particularly interested in the date 2807 BC. This could explain the biblical myth, as this is compatible with a early Judaic era (when they were polytheists) and could easily have made a big impression on their religious beliefs.

Burckle crater= red dot.

This information is comaptible with the dating of the Sumerian flood layer from between 2750 and 2900 BC. The great flood is described thus..

All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful,
Attacked as one,
At the same time, the flood sweeps over the cult-centers.
After, for seven days,
the flood sweeps over the cult centers.
After, for seven days and seven nights,
The flood had swept over the land,
And the huge boat had been tossed
About by the windstorms on the great waters,

Sounds like a mega tsunami with simultaneous heavy rainstorms. It seems pretty clear from this text that the rain didn’t cause the flood, but happened at the same time.

Tsunami clue to Atlantis found

Tsunami clue to ‘Atlantis’ found 
 
A submerged island that could be the source of the Atlantis myth was hit by a large earthquake and tsunami 12,000 years ago, a geologist has discovered.

Spartel Island now lies 60m under the sea in the Straits of Gibraltar, but some think it once lay above water.

The finding adds weight to a hypothesis that the island could have inspired the legend recounted by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago.

Evidence comes from a seafloor survey published in the journal Geology.

Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, found a coarse-grained sedimentary deposit that is 50-120cm thick and could have been left behind after a tsunami.

Dr Gutscher said that the destruction described by Plato is consistent with a great earthquake and tsunami similar to the one that devastated the city of Lisbon in Portugal in 1755, generating waves with heights of up to 10m.

 Some think the Atlantis legend was inspired by real events
The thick “turbidite” deposit results from sediments that have been shaken up by underwater geological upheavals.

It was found to date to around 12,000 years ago – roughly the age indicated by Plato for the destruction of Atlantis, Dr Gutscher reports in Geology.

Spartel Island, in the Gulf of Cadiz, was proposed as a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis legend in 2001 by French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard.

It is “in front of the Pillars of Hercules”, or the Straits of Gibraltar, as Plato described. The philosopher said the fabled island civilisation had been destroyed in a single day and night, disappearing below the sea.

Sedimentary records reveal that events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake occur every 1,500 to 2,000 years in the Gulf of Cadiz.

But the mapping of the island carried out by Dr Gutscher failed to turn up any manmade structures and also showed that the island was much smaller than previously believed.

This could make it less likely that the island was inhabited by a civilisation

Personally I’d suspect either a massive earthquake in the Canaries region or an asteroid splashing down in the Atlantic as the cause.