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Minds in Ablation, Part One: Ice Cores and Ideology
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Copyright © 1998, 1999 by Sean Mewhinney (df736 at freenet.carleton.ca).
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Ice Cores and Ideology

You can knock down one after another specific argument for believing
Velikovsky's claims, but his followers just substitute other reasons
for believing, or different scenarios. It becomes a habit of thought
that they no longer question, or are even capable of questioning. But
there is physical evidence which shows, as clearly as any evidence
possibly could, not only that Velikovsky's specific scenario did not
take place, but that any similar planet-juggling scenario involving
the earth could not have happened within the past many thousands of
years. That evidence consists of various kinds of paleoclimatic data,
especially from ice cores.

I didn't pay much attention 20 years ago when R.G.A. Dolby proposed
ice cores as a test of Velikovsky's theories. ^1 But seven years
later, Leroy Ellenberger took up the issue in his series, "Still
Facing Many Problems," concluding that the evidence "presents a
serious challenge" to Velikovsky's thesis. ^2 This brought a response
from Lynn Rose, who led off in his best nit-picking style, at
Ellenberger's expense, by pointing up some derivative phrasing and a
couple of slips in wording in Ellenberger's prose. He then offered
several unconvincing excuses why evidence of Velikovsky's catastrophes
might have removed itself from the ice cores, accused Ellenberger of
gross misrepresentation and distortion, and generally impeached the
reliability of ice-core research. ^3 It was difficult to believe that
these two men were talking about the same subject, so drastically
different were the pictures they painted. I stopped in the middle of
Rose's account, because I knew I would have to see the original
sources for myself before I could decide whose version was closer to
the truth -- not that I found the two equally credible, from previous
experience, but I had to know, because the issue was obviously
important. I read about 25 ice-core papers before I felt that I knew
enough about the subject to judge who was closer to reality, then I
finished reading Rose. By then I already knew that I was going to
write on the subject myself.

The evidence itself is straightforward enough. Virtually every kind of
analysis that you could think of asking for to test Velikovsky's
theories has already been performed. There is no trace of the
petroleum or meteoritic dust that Velikovsky said fell on the earth in
great quantities, or of the manna that shrouded the planet in darkness
for 40 years as it fell, feeding the Israelites, no layer of soot from
worldwide conflagrations, no sulfates such as would be produced from
the simultaneous eruption of thousands of volcanoes, no sign of any
exchange of atmospheres with other planets in bubbles of ancient air
trapped in the ice, no layer of salty, bubble-free ice from a giant
wave. We didn't pick up any chlorine from Saturn or argon from Mars.
We didn't lose any oxygen burning hydrogen from Saturn.

The best evidence, though, is in the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes of
the ice itself. Water molecules composed of the heavier isotopes are
more sluggish than their neighbors. They are somewhat slower to
evaporate from the oceans, and they condense and fall to the ground
more readily. There is a net atmospheric transport of water vapor from
the tropics, where most evaporation takes place, to the higher
latitudes. So water in the atmosphere becomes progressively more and
more depleted in the heavier isotopes as it moves toward the higher
latitudes and cools off. There is a very strong correlation between
depletion in the heavier isotopes and colder temperatures, higher
latitudes, higher elevation above sea level, and greater distance from
the source of precipitation. The local correlation over Greenland and
Antarctica is a little less than one part per thousand depletion in
oxygen 18 for every degree Celsius fall in the temperature of
precipitation. (See Fig. 1.) Any significant change in temperature,
latitude, or elevation of the site, or in the distribution of land and
sea, will affect the oxygen-isotope ratios of the ice. This means that
any change in the earth's orbit, axis, inclination, speed of rotation,
or sea levels will show up in a gross, obvious change in isotope
ratios. Amazingly, after years of debate about ice cores, there are
major figures in the Velikovskian movement so hermetically isolated
that they are still not aware of this.

But others have heard the news, though they may not believe it. The
ice-core evidence is flatly incompatible with Velikovskian-style
planetary catastrophes. And so once critics had introduced it into the
debate, those in the movement who give any thought to physical
evidence, however dimly, realized that they had a problem to deal with
-- the evidence must be discredited one way or another and
incorporated into the disbelief system. Anyone can participate in this
effort. The work of the ice-core researchers is already suspect in
advance, of course: They are not working under the right "paradigm" --
i.e., they did not set out expecting to find positive evidence of
planetary catastrophes, and are therefore presumed to be biased. In
the course of their training they have been brainwashed with
"uniformitarian" doctrines -- defined very broadly. They have vested
career interests to protect. They may be careless, incompetent, or
dishonest. But some more specific reasons must be found for rejecting
their research, which can then be cited by adherents when the issue is
raised by critics. Ideally, some way might be found of reinterpreting
the results in a way that confirms a Velikovskian scenario, letting
them have their cake and eat it too. The Velikovskian who contributes
to this effort can expect approval and recognition from his peers.

Lynn Rose, who often likes to repeat Velikovsky's injunction to ask
oneself, in the words of Seneca, "What part of this work is committed
to us?", took a leading role. His writings on ice cores continued to
appear in installments. ^4 In his two- part "The Greenland Ice Cores,"
Rose takes an excursion through the ice-core literature. It was not
undertaken to learn or to inform, only to cull passages which, lifted
out of context and combined with Rose's insinuations, might seem to
call into question the accuracy, reliability, and coverage of ice-core
testing. For example, he pretends that the "brittle zones" of the ice
cores -- hundreds of meters in length -- have never been analyzed,
which is a grotesque falsehood. The reader gathers virtually nothing
about the objectives of each study, the kinds of analysis performed,
or the findings. It would be less perverse, and certainly less tedious
to invent references outright and manufacture quotations out of thin
air, than to so misuse, mangle, and misrepresent the words of these
authors, as Rose has done. But after all, he was only telling his
readers what they wanted to hear.

The details are covered in Part II of my "Ice Cores and Common Sense."
I wrote it to give a clear introduction to the field of ice-core
research, explain its relevance for Velikovskian claims about recent
planetary catastrophes, and refute most of the sillier statements made
about ice cores in the Velikovskian literature up to then. I was not
naive enough to think that there would be mass defections, but I hoped
it was possible to reach at least some of the people who read
Velikovskian journals with reason, when the evidence was so concrete
and unequivocal. The manuscript was ignored by Kronos, ignored by
David Talbott at Aeon, circulated in pamphlet form, and later
published in Catastrophism and Ancient History. ^5 It had no more
impact on the movement than a minor speed bump on rush-hour traffic.
The only honest, rational response from a Velikovskian was made
privately, in a letter to Henry Bauer from Ian Johnson, who said the
ice cores had finally convinced him, and referred to his years of
involvement in the movement as "two decades of cheap thrills."

The ice cores called a lot of bluffs. As Dolby observed,

It is always possible to find some way of questioning the
scientific presuppositions of any conclusions that are drawn into
the discussion of Velikovsky's ideas. If it turns out that the only
way to avoid regarding it [information about ice cores] as a
falsification is to make new ad hoc and implausible assumptions,
then this will reveal something about the difficulties of the
theory... ^6

It would also reveal whether the Velikovskians were serious or not.
Well, the results are now in: they are still bluffing.

Rose's "The Fracture Zones in Deep Polar Ice Cores" was published in
Aeon after my "Common Sense" came out. ^7 The entire paper seems to
have been written in a mental fog. Rose claims that the brittle zones
lie in ice formed between 2700 and 3500 years ago, and sees that as a
confirmation of Worlds in Collision, but he fails to give a coherent
causal explanation. I may find time to say something about this paper
later, but it does not seem to have aroused much interest among
Velikovskians at the time, and is largely forgotten today.

A New Champion

In the meantime, a new champion has come along to tackle the ice cores
and make the world safe for silliness -- Charles Ginenthal. He has
been a prolific writer on a wide variety of topics in physical science
-- "The Origin of Craters on the Moon...," "Proof of a Celestial
Counterforce to Gravity," "Comparing Magnetic Fields: Neptune and
Uranus," "Is Space a Superconducting Medium?," "The Nature of Venus'
Heat," "Dark Matter," "The Flood," The Extinction of the Mammoth, and
more. He publishes them in his own journal, The Velikovskian (they're
listed on its web page), or as books. Other Velikovskians seem
impressed with his work. Some even call him a genius. He seems
prepared to play a major role in the complete reordering of scientific
knowledge.

His "Ice Core Evidence," published in The Velikovskian and posted on
the web ^8, is frequently touted by Velikovskians in their encounters
with skeptics. It claims not only to dispose of the arguments raised
by critics, but to pull the rabbit out of the hat and find proof that
Velikovsky was right in the ice itself. It's bristling with personal
taunts and challenges, and the level of distortion is so wild, it
makes even Lynn Rose look tame. When I received a copy of it on floppy
disk and briefly scanned it, I found it so morbidly depressing that I
laid it aside without looking at it again for several months.

When I finally decided to answer it, it was not with the hope of
dissuading Velikovskians from their beliefs. The prospects for doing
so are essentially nil. The most one can hope for is to temporarily
cause them some embarrassment. And if one could do so, they are the
sort of people who would probably only gravitate to some other equally
silly ideological movement. Nevertheless, the effort may be worthwhile
for other reasons, one of which is intellectual curiosity. The science
itself is interesting, and there are few research problems more
important than trying to understand the workings of the climate
system. There is the opportunity to put some information on record for
those who seriously want to be informed. And there is the possibility
of learning something about the cognitive processes involved in
maintaining and elaborating individual and collective belief systems
from a case study.

Ginenthal's position is that the ice-core researchers haven't got a
clue what they are doing, that they don't understand even the most
basic relationships of the parameters they are measuring, that they
fake their hopelessly corrupted data. How does he intend to show this?
One can get some idea from looking at his references. There is the
expected Velikovskian literature, including four of his own works,
published or threatened, a couple of creation-science tracts, a couple
of other pseudoscientific works, three encyclopedia articles, two
newspaper or magazine articles, a phone call to a friend, then we get
to the science. There are about 30 titles, including a couple of
popular science books, most of which could be classed as meteorology
or paleoclimatology. But only half a dozen of these are glaciology,
and only three of them deal with ice cores. And some of the titles are
seriously out of date. So we see that Ginenthal is going to use other
kinds of climate studies to attack the ice-core researchers, without
paying much attention to what they actually say. You know he's going
to be fuzzy on the details. But it's just as well that he doesn't read
the ice-core literature. It didn't help Lynn Rose. The more they read,
the more they distort. The problem is not that the learning curve is
so flat; the problem is that the slope is negative.

Ice Ages and Isotopes

"...Ginenthal interprets scientific papers just as he likes, not
giving any penny to the proposed facts. This I would call not
citation but fantasy."

-- Gunnar Ries ^9

For starters, Ginenthal doesn't accept that the Greenland and
Antarctic ice sheets are over 3500 years old. He has a complicated,
multipart argument to reach this point, but once you get there, all
the negative evidence against Velikovsky disappears at one stroke. So
he leads off with an attack on the chronology, not just of ice cores,
but of several other major, linked paleoclimatic data sets. It's an
incoherent attack, and it's hard to see how anyone could take it
seriously.

Most of his attention is focused on three long oxygen-isotope records:
the SPECMAP (Spectral Mapping group) marine sediment-core record, the
Vostok ice-core record from Antarctica, and the Devil's Hole calcite
record from a fissure in the Great Basin of the southwestern U.S. Each
of these three cores reflects climatic conditions in a different
locale. Each is linked to global climatic changes, though by different
mechanisms. And in spite of regional differences, each reflects broad
global trends. But they are not synchronized. Peaks and troughs in the
other two records lag behind the new and more accurately dated Devil's
Hole record by thousands of years. What is more, trends in the Devil's
Hole record do not show the expected effects of fluctuations in
insolation at high latitudes, widely believed to be the driving force
in climatic change, calling into question the Milankovitch theory.

In a disjointed summation, Ginenthal describes the situation this way:
"What we have here are three dating methods, measuring oxygen-16 and
oxygen-18, which contradict each other: one in ice layers in
Greenland, one in an oceanic deep sea core and one in calcite layers
in Nevada..." ^10 This makes a hash of it. Not one of these cores is
dated with oxygen isotopes. Rather, isotope ratios are an indicator of
climate. Vostok is in Antarctica, not Greenland. It is dated by
ice-flow calculations, not counting annual layers, and no great
accuracy was claimed for the Vostok chronology. Even in Greenland,
annual counting is not possible over the long stretches of time
covered by these cores. The Devil's Hole record was dated by isotopes
of uranium, thorium, and more recently, protactinium. The marine
record is dated by a combination of direct and indirect methods. For
the last 40,000 to 50,000 years, the sediments are radiocarbon-dated.
Geomagnetic reversals, radiometrically dated in terrestrial rocks,
provide fixed control points on the chronology, but they are widely
spaced -- the most recent reversal took place about 780,000 years ago.

The position that Ginenthal seems to be trying to articulate is that
since there are discrepancies between these different chronologies, we
should chuck 'em all out, in favor of Immanuel Velikovsky's oracular
revelations. But he is not consistent, because he is more interested
in attacking the Milankovitch theory than ice cores. To a
Velikovskian, mentioning the word "Milankovitch" is like waving a red
flag in front of a bull, because the theory is based on the assumption
that the earth's orbit has changed only very slightly and gradually
for millions of years.

According to Ginenthal, the ice sheets are only 3500 years old, not
hundreds of thousands of years, and they were built up to a great
depth in the course of only a few months. The oceans, in his
imagination, were so agitated by the flux and reflux of tsunamis that
their sediments were stirred up and did not settle for months. In
defiance of observation, Ginenthal is on record that ocean sediments
were resorted -- "heaviest on the bottom, lightest on the top." ^11 So
these three oxygen-isotope curves should bear no resemblance
whatsoever to each other.

Everyone who has looked at these three isotope curves has remarked on
the close resemblance between them -- both supporters and opponents of
the Milankovitch theory. (See Figs. 2a and 2b.) Winograd and his
colleagues write, "major features of the DH-11 (or Vostok) record
appear to closely mimic the major features in the marine record..."
^12 Shackleton states that "Almost every detail in the SPECMAP stacked
delta ^18O record can be recognized in this precisely dated [Devil's
Hole] core." ^13 Imbrie, another Milankovitch proponent, notes, "The
general resemblance of the Devils Hole delta ^18O record to that of
the ocean is striking. Indeed, the coherency is so high that it is
tempting to overlook how different the physics underlying each record
must be and jump to the conclusion that they are in fact synchronous."
^14 One would expect Ginenthal to deny this resemblance. Indeed, near
the end of Part IX, he says that if the isotopes truly reflect
climate, "the oxygen- 16 and oxygen-18 layering of the ice cores
should be exactly correlated with that of Devil's Hole, which it is
not." Yet strangely, he has reversed himself. In e-mail messages he
has called the Devil's Hole core "the best climate archive of the past
half million years." ^15 To my amazement, he has emphasized that it
"was found to correlate with Vostock [sic] core linearly which is 114
degrees away from it [in latitude] by 92 percent and with SPECMAP by
86 percent." ^16 A correlation is not a percentage, but never mind.
Imbrie et al. give the Devil's Hole/SPECMAP correlation as .85,
"adjust[ing] the ages in one curve to give the best match with... the
other." ^17 Ginenthal vehemently insists that the Devil's Hole curve
is a global record. ^18 That being the case, what miracle of divine
providence accounts for its close similarity to the other two oxygen
isotope curves? This is completely irrational, and we could just stop
looking at this silly farce right here. No further refutation is
necessary. But let us continue.

There is a large body of evidence supporting the Milankovitch theory,
but most of it is statistical. No long, continuous series of climatic
data has been dated with sufficient accuracy to conclusively determine
the phase relationships between global warming and cooling trends, and
the calculated peaks and troughs in insolation. So scientists have
analyzed the data for dominant periodicities in fluctuations of
climate. They have found that the dominant periodicities closely
resemble those expected from variations in the inclination,
eccentricity, and precession of the earth's orbit. Now Isaac Winograd
and his colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey have a well-dated
half-million-year-long record from Devil's Hole, and it leads the
marine and ice-core records, as well as the insolation curve. The
feature most often compared in the curves is the so-called termination
II, or warming at the end of the next to last glaciation. The Devil's
Hole core gives a date of about 147,000 years to this event, while the
SPECMAP core assigns a date of 130,000 years. Over most of the rest of
their combined length, the fit is considerably better.

The isotope signal in the marine record reflects mainly the volume of
water withdrawn from the oceans and locked up in glacial ice sheets,
while the signal in ice cores and Devil's Hole groundwater reflects
mainly the temperature of local precipitation. It takes a long time
for massive ice sheets to melt, so the marine isotope record should
lag behind the other two, if not by so many thousands of years. It has
generally been assumed that times of greatest ice volume must be
nearly, if not exactly coincident with times of greatest cold. Until
recently, I would have said that most likely the records are
essentially synchronous, and the discrepancy is probably to be
explained by some systematic error in the series of Devil's Hole
dates. But new, even more precise AMS protactinium dates have
confirmed not only the Devil's Hole dates, but the timing of a high
sea-level stand recorded in Barbados coral at around 127,000 years
ago, supporting the SPECMAP chronology. ^19 Both sets of dates were
obtained with the same method, and it is consistent with earlier
uranium-thorium dates. And another calcite core from Jewel Cave, South
Dakota, yields a date of about 130,000 years ago for Termination II --
"pretty much nailed exactly where the ocean-core people put it." ^20
The fault is not in the dating methods. Whatever the fate of the
Milankovitch theory, it now seems evident that the differences in
timing are real, and that they must be explained by differences in the
response to global climate shifts in different regions or at different
latitudes. It is already known that climate in the Great Basin was out
of phase in one respect -- while climate over most of the rest of the
world was at its driest in late glacial times, the southwestern U.S.
experienced heavier rainfall than today (as will be discussed in the
section on pluvials).

It is not enough just to say that insolation forces climate change, or
even that insolation at a given latitude, or in a given season, is the
effective agent of change. The Milankovitch theory may turn out not to
be an all or nothing proposition. It may be that a decrease in
insolation is more effective at inducing cooling than an increase is
at inducing warming. It may be that the sensitivity of climate to
solar forcing depends on how far glaciation has advanced. Or it may be
that the most sensitive point in the climate system shifts from one
latitude or one hemisphere to another at different stages in a glacial
cycle.

No clear solution to the puzzle is yet in sight, but scientists are
debating the issue rationally on the evidence. However it turns out,
there is no aid or comfort from Devil's Hole for diehard
Velikovskians. Velikovsky's claims -- and Ginenthal's with them --
fall, regardless of whether the Milankovitch theory stands or falls.
Velikovskians seem to expect scientists to predict all the features of
complex systems from first principles. Whenever they find something
unexpected, the Velikovskians cry "anomaly -- wrong paradigm," and
pretend they could do better. But Velikovskians are very tolerant of
basic contradictions in each other's logic.

All three isotope curves show the same basic pattern -- some in finer
detail, some with longer coverage. Over the course of a glacial cycle,
there is gradually deepening cooling, followed by rapid warming.
Superimposed on this is a series of short-term sawtooth fluctuations.
The maximum range of climatic variation, from the depth of glaciation
to the height of interglacial warmth, has been remarkably constant
over the last two million years. The last few glacial cycles have a
period of around 100,000 years. This is the pattern that any theory of
climate change has to explain. The Vostok ice core now extends over
four glacial cycles, or nearly 400,000 years, though not all of this
has yet been published. The two new Summit ice cores from central
Greenland cover two complete glacial cycles, over a good quarter of a
million years, well above the depths of any folding or other possible
disturbance. Annual layers in these two ice cores have been counted
back to the end of the last glaciation some eleven and a half thousand
years ago. The longest Devil's Hole core covers half a million years,
from around 60,000 to 566,000 years ago. The marine record spans
millions of years.

The climate machine is rather like a Chinese puzzle, with its
intricately interlinked pieces. Push on one piece, and another moves.
There are myriad positive and negative feedback loops between the
components of the system -- biomass, carbon dioxide, clouds, dust, the
geothermal heat flux, meltwater, methane, ocean currents, ocean
nutrients, pack ice, salinity, sea level, snowfall, water vapor, wind
-- with long- or short-term lags varying by orders of magnitude. Some
of these linkages are obvious, and some are very poorly understood.
Any theory of climate change must take into account not only external
influences, but the internal dynamics of the climate system.

Velikovskian planetary encounters could at best explain abrupt
transitions between different climatic states at irregular intervals,
with a separate deus ex machina required for each event. They could
not explain the observed quasi-regular 100,000-year periodicity of
glacial cycles. They could not account for the gradual onset of
increasing cold in each cycle, or the constant, relatively narrow
amplitude of variation in temperature. A little further from the sun,
and the earth would experience runaway glaciation -- the oceans would
freeze over completely. Forget about the fantasy of earth as a
companion of Saturn. And the sheer number of glacial cycles requires a
ridiculous number of planetary encounters. How is it that over
millions of years, none of these celestial encounters flung the earth
completely out of the solar system? Rather than explain the phenomena,
Velikovskians spend most of their time trying to explain them away.

Ginenthal wants to find as many ways as possible in which the records
may be said to disagree. He uses a review article on two
carbon-isotope studies in coral to take an oblique swipe at
dendrochronology. Ginenthal's discussion ^21 follows in its entirety,
with my comments interspersed:

There is another method of dating the past: carbon-14 to carbon-12
ratios in the annual growth bands of corals.

The coral is dated by simply counting the annual growth bands. Only
one piece of coral was used in each study, in each case spanning about
200 years. So there is no cross-matching, and carbon-14 has nothing to
do with the dating.

However, pre-1950, when atomic bomb tests produced additional
carbon-14 in the atmosphere, it was found that coral ring and tree
ring data disagreed substantially with one another.

That is, the isotope ratios do not follow the same trends. There is no
good reason why they should. Near the poles, because of its greater
density, cold seawater sinks to the ocean floor. Following tortuous
bottom currents, it wells up to the surface about a thousand years
later in the tropics. Cold water absorbs carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere, and warm water releases it. Cosmic rays continually
replenish the supply of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, where it is
rapidly mixed, but the "old" water rising to the surface in the
tropics is depleted in this isotope. Surface water is affected by
exchange with the atmosphere, but also by older water mixing from
below. Carbon concentrations, and carbon isotope ratios, are much more
heterogeneous in the oceans than in the atmosphere.

Even coral ring carbon ratios from close contact areas, such as
Bermuda and the Florida Keys, differ substantially with each other.

One of these studies used coral from Bermuda; the other from the
Florida Keys. In this sentence Ginenthal calls them "close contact
areas" and questions why they should differ. Actually they are about a
thousand miles apart -- one in the open ocean, the other near the
coast. A few sentences later, he calls them "separate areas" "hundreds
of miles apart."

It has been suggested that deep sea, non-atmospheric upwelling of
deep ocean water could account for these discrepancies. However,
there is no upwelling of deep ocean water at either Bermuda or the
Florida Keys.

Here Ginenthal cites the review article in Open Earth no. 3 (April,
1979), p. 30. He is wrong. Druffel and Linick, the authors of the
Florida Keys study, state that "Upwelling is non-existent in this
area." ^22 But Nozaki et al. state that there is upwelling at Bermuda,
although they describe the "exchange rate with deep water in this
region" as "relatively small," ^23 and they conclude that before 1900
there may have been "enhanced local upwelling" or "increased vertical
diffusion." ^24 So we see that gaseous diffusion between different
depths also influences carbon isotope ratios at the surface. Druffel
and Linick also point out that "Diffusion of older waters from
intermediate depths, with an apparent age of approximately 600 to 900
years, dilutes the radiocarbon levels in the ocean's surface layer."
^25 They also mention that North Equatorial Current water, which is
subject to upwelling, enters the Gulf Stream system which bathes the
Florida Keys. ^26 So not only is there upwelling at one of these two
sites, there are other mechanisms which deliver old carbon to surface
water, which Ginenthal disregards.

Researchers assumed that there was local upwelling in Bermuda, but
the Florida Keys coral showed the same disconfirmation of tree
rings as that found in Bermuda, starting at the same time (1900)
and going back in time.

It is Ginenthal who assumed that there is no local upwelling at
Bermuda. He is contradicted by the sources. Ginenthal is referring to
the carbon-14 dendrochronological calibration curve. No
disconfirmation is implied by the facts, and this sentence is a
complete non sequitur.

These measurements were based on carbon-14 to carbon-12 and
carbon-13 to carbon-12 measurements, the same ones used to date
tree rings.

Wiggles in the calibration curve have been used to confirm
cross-matching of tree ring sequences by separately measuring the
carbon-14 in each successive growth ring.

Therefore, the tree-ring chronology often touted as support for
understanding the past is contradicted by coral ring measurements.

A completely irrational conclusion arrived at by massive confusion and
misstatement of fact. Warning: there will be no improvement as we
continue. He has no lucid intervals. It's going to be rather like one
of those Mr. Magoo episodes.
_________________________________________________________________

Notes

1. R.G.A. Dolby, "On the Possibility that Ice Cap Cores May Form an
Empirical Test of Some of Velikovsky's Ideas," Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies Review Vol. II, no. 2 (Dec., 1977), p. 31.

2. C. Leroy Ellenberger, "Still Facing Many Problems (Part I)," Kronos
Vol. X, no. 1 (Fall, 1984), pp. 87-102.

3. Lynn E. Rose, "Some Preliminary Remarks about Ice Cores," Kronos
Vol. XII, no. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 43-54, and "The Greenland Ice
Cores" (first part) on pp. 55-68 of the same issue.

4. Rose, "The Greenland Ice Cores" (second part), Kronos Vol. XII, no.
2 (Spring, 1987), pp. 49-58; "The Milankovitch Theory of the Ice
Ages," on pp. 59-72 of the same issue.

5. Sean Mewhinney, "Ice Cores and Common Sense (Part I),"
Catastrophism and Ancient History Vol. XII, no. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp.
5-33; "Ice Cores and Common Sense (Part II)," in Ibid., Vol. XII, no.
2 (July, 1990), pp. 117-146; Corrigenda to Part II in Vol. XIII, no. 2
(July, 1991), pp. 150-151.

6. Dolby, op. cit., loc. cit.

7. Rose, "The Fracture Zones in Deep Polar Ice Cores," Aeon Vol. 3,
no. 1 (Nov., 1992), pp. 55-71.

8. Charles Ginenthal, "Ice Core Evidence," The Velikovskian Vol. II,
no. 4, and online at http://www.bearfabrique.org/floods/ice.html.

9. Gunnar Ries, e-mail message to C. Leroy Ellenberger, quoted by
Ellenberger in a post dated November 11, 1997. An independent
assessment from a geology student, based on an examination of
different writings, which fully concurs with my own.

10. Ginenthal, "Ice Core Evidence," Part II.

11. Ginenthal, "The Settling of Sea-Floor Sediments," Kronos Vol. XI,
no. 2 (Winter, 1986), p. 94.

12. Isaac J. Winograd, Tyler B. Coplen, Jurate M. Landwehr, Alan C.
Riggs, Kenneth R. Ludwig, Barney J. Szabo, Peter T. Kolesar, & Kinga
M. Revesz, "Continuous 500,000-Year Climate Record from Vein Calcite
in Devils Hole, Nevada," Science Vol. 258 (Oct. 9, 1992), p. 257.

13. N. J. Shackleton, "Last Interglacial in Devils Hole," Nature Vol.
362 (April 15, 1993), p. 596.

14. J. Imbrie, A. C. Mix, and D. G. Martinson, "Milankovitch Theory
Viewed from Devils Hole," Nature Vol. 363 (June 10, 1993), p. 531.

15. Charles Ginenthal, e-mail message to Robert Bass, July 28, 1997,
forwarded by Bass the next day.

16. Ginenthal, e-mail to Robert Bass, forwarded August 8, 1997 by
Bass.

17. J. Imbrie et al., op. cit., loc. cit. The Devils Hole-Vostok
correlation, with no adjustment to the original Vostok time scale, is
reported by Thomas J. Crowley, "Potential Reconciliation of Devils
Hole and Deep-Sea Pleistocene Chronologies," Paleoceanography Vol. 9,
no. 1 (Feb., 1994), p. 3.

18. Ginenthal, e-mail to Bass, forwarded August 6, 1997 by Bass.

19. Richard A. Kerr, "Second Clock Supports Orbital Pacing of the Ice
Ages," Science Vol. 276 (May 2, 1997), pp. 680-681; R. Lawrence
Edwards, H. Cheng, M. T. Murrell, and S. J. Goldstein,
"Protactinium-231 Dating of Carbonates by Thermal Ionization Mass
Spectrometry: Implications for Quaternary Climate Change," in the same
issue of Science, pp. 782-786.

20. Derek C. Ford, quoted by Kerr, op. cit., p. 681. The paper has
been submitted to Geology.

21. Ginenthal, "Ice Core Evidence," Part III.

22. Ellen M. Druffel and Timothy W. Linick, "Radiocarbon in Annual
Coral Rings of Florida," Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 5, no. 11
(November, 1978), p. 913.

23. Y. Nozacki, D. M. Rye, K. K. Turekian, and R. E. Dodge, "A
200-Year Record of Carbon-13 and Carbon-14 Variations in a Bermuda
Coral," Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 5, no. 10 (October, 1978),
p. 827.

24. Ibid., op. cit., p. 828.

25. Druffel and Linick, op. cit., p. 914.

26. Ibid., op. cit., p. 915.
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