Customer Reviews

Cataclysm!: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C.

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Previously titled - When the Earth Nearly Died & republished by Bear & Co. under this title. This is an excellent, well-documented book that basically disproves the ice age as it has been believed in the last 200 years. Methodically explores mythology, biology, geology, botony, astronomy and so much more to show there is no scientific proof for a long ice age or series of ice ages and that most of what is blamed on an ice-age and moving glaciers is in error. Shows the probable explanation is that an extraordinary event occured involving some type of body entering our solar system and effecting each planet and ultimately the earth causing major axis shifts, global earthquakes, land upheavals, hurricanes, floods, tidal waves, fires, and so on. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in earth mysteries, sacred sites, mythology, geology and more.

Some comments about this book:

1.) A book with an odd or even incorrect theory can be of enormous utility if it illustrates, documents and footnotes a large number of scientific anomalies. Aside from the many books of William Corliss, this book must be near the top of the heap in that category. You can enjoy this book and even cherish it without accepting the specific theory that the book proposes as an explanation of all the anomalies it reports.

2.) The book proposes a cosmic cataclysm about 11,500 BC. In order to get a wonderful primer on how these authors may indeed have the "best and last laugh" even regarding the essential correctness of their theory..., use Google to find a set of videos on YouTube with these search terms: Comet Catastrophe 12,500 BP (before present). There are seven video segments with almost an hour of material from a recent, (May 2007) meeting of professional geologists (the American Geophysical Union meeting). Watch these video segments, and then buy a copy of Cataclysm! Then also buy the Book by Richard Firestone. If you buy and read both of these books, I think you will agree that some of the reviewers who have slammed Cataclysm may find themselves changing their minds. Yes there were ice ages, but there were also sudden extreme events - such as the one that brought on the so-called Younger Dryas, a 1200 year cold spell before the end of the last ice age.

3.) In the 4th segment of YouTube video: Comet Catastrophe, note that one of the scientists answers a question from the audience about whether there were any North American Indian legends that might contain recollections of the event. His answer is yes. And if you buy Cataclysm!, you will be able to read alot of excerpts of such stories. And if those excerpts intrigue you (as they did me), the copious footnotes will help you find the original source materials.

What other books should you buy if you find that you like this one? Buy all the books by Irish Dendrochronologist Mike Baillie and his co-authors. These books will introduce you to how long tree-ring chronologies are telling us about several abrupt, global climate disasters in the past 5000 years that may have been caused by impacts or interactions with comets. Buy a used, hardcover copy of Ragnarok by Ignatius Donnelly, wherein you can read a wonderful summary of evidences from human mythologies that led Donnelly to opine (in 1880 !!!) that Earth has been hit by a comet at least once during the tenure and written memory of mankind. (Donnelly was so far ahead of his time, that he is still ahead of ours...) And then familiarize yourself with the wonderful body of work on the K/T boundary through a tome like GSA Special Publication 356 or something like it. The reason for the latter is because Firestone and his colleagues are going to precipitate the same type of revolution in paleontology that Alvarez and his co-workers wrought in the 1980's by hypothesizing and then proving that Earth was struck by a speeding asteroid. Alot of the evidence for the Younger Dryas event is similar, and some of the same investigators who found critical chemical clues in the K/T boundary layers are doing so again in the end-Clovis "black mat." Also, I recommend all the books by Clube, Napier and Bailey - most especially Cosmic Winter, Cosmic Serpent and the Origin of Comets.

Lastly, keep your eyes open for a Discovery Channel special with a similar title: Comet Catastrophe. This special, which has apparently already aired in Canada, will feature Dr. Dallas Abbott and a colleague Dee Breger in program that will discuss powerful evidence of an Indian Ocean impact about 5000 years ago that left an 18 mile crater under 2.5 miles of water, and a 1/4 mile thick tsunami deposit 45 kilometers across on the southern shores of Madagascar.

So what does all this mean? It means that the surface of the Earth is a more dangerous place than most astronomers (especially on this side of the Atlantic) think. It means that there have been significant impact events at least once and perhaps dozens of times during the written memory of men on the Earth. It means that it would be really smart for us to pay attention to all these scientific developments and to respond in thoughtful ways to the warning being delivered by living voices, and also the warnings delivered to us in many myths and legends.

I am very interested in earth's past and the untold history of our species. And this book surpasses everything I have seen to date. It's erudite, and comprehensive. The author's break new ground in many areas.

I can't relate to the debunker's claim of pseudo science. That's become the mantra of dogmatists, of late, those who prefer not to look at the anomalous data. The flowers found in the mouths of the frozen Siberian mammoths and mastodons and other evidence of flora adapted to a temperate climate rules out the possibility that some of the carcasses date to 30-45,000 years. No, 11,500 years BP must be the actual date. The idea they were frozen mummies does not compute with the anecdotal reports that the flesh was fresh enough for humans and dogs to eat. The debunker has attempted to trivialize this extremely important evidence. Also, the debunker fails to understand the distinction between precession and the earth's 23 degree tilt. The two are separate characteristics.

But back to the authors: one of their biggest contributions is their provocative suggestion that the earth's axis was more vertical to the ecliptic (the plane of the orbiting planets in the solar system)prior to the cataclysm. They suggest the earth gained its 23 1/2 degree tilt in the encounter with Marduk (Phaeton). This could explain how the polar regions were more temperate before, because a vertical earth (they assert) would have a smaller polar cap. We will have to wait and see if this turns out to be correct.

I especially loved the way the authors compare and relate the geological record with the record of the great literary epics, the Edda, the Kalevala, the Avesta, Vedas, Bible, etc. Their understanding of the classics is phenomenal -- and asute. I learned a great deal and will rely on their interpretations in the future.

I do have several critical comments. I was disapointed that the authors never discussed Charles Hapgood's contribution regarding the shifting of earth's crust. They mention this as one of the effects of an encounter with Marduk, but no not include adequate discussion. A crustal shift would of course explain why the orientation of the pyramids and ancient sites of meso America are aligned east of north -- a fact no one has ever explained. Obviously, these sites are older than N-S aligned Giza and thus are human testaments that the crust really did move.

The authors are in my opinion wrong that all of earth's mountain ranges were low hills before the Phaeton disaster. If this were true, how to explain the alpine flora: wild flowers, liverworts, grasses, mosses and lichens? I agree that much mountain building occurred at this time, but not all.

Nor do the authors ever finally succeed in explaining the Greenland ice sheet. It remains a mystery.

The author's astutely conclude that a comet could not have caused the Phaeton disaster, because a cube of ice does not have the necessary mass to cause the gravity induced effects. However, Allan and Delair are unaware of scientist Jim McCanney's Plasma Discharge Comert Model, which is in process of revolutionizing our understanding of comets. If McCanney is correct, comets are not dirty snowballs, but are asteroidal and can be extremely large. We will know more next summmer when NASA's Deep Impact space probe causes a collision with the comet Tempel 1 -- an attempt to confirm the ice model. When NASA fails to find the ice, it will be time to junk the current model. No doubt about it, Phaeton was a comet!

Despite these criticisms, I heartily recommend this book. We have barely begun to understand the mind boggling power and wonder of the cosmos...

The hard evidence that horrendous events did once happen to Earth seems unassailable. Caves packed with violently fractured bones of all sorts of fauna, Alaskan "muck" filled with remains of both tropical and sea animals, whale skeletons found on mountain tops - all these facts should be included in high school and college curricula. The authors present these facts readably and convincingly and in detail. Such evidence is found all around the world and the authors tell you where. However, one can read and accept all of this data and agree that disasters did indeed befall our planet - which the "uniformitarian mainstream" seems to find inconvenient (and tries to supress?)- and yet not quite be convinced of the validity of the exact cause proposed by the authors. The book still should be required reading for any well rounded person in today's world.

Thought provoking? Absolutely. Am I sold on their theory of an interstellar chunk of stellar material playing havoc on the Earth? I have my reasonable doubts, but there was more than enough footnotes for me to check it out for myself. And the more I research, the more I become convinced that *something* happened to this biosphere ~12K years ago. That said, this endeavour has shaken my education to its foundation. Indeed, there are numerous instances that the authors bring to light that make one question what one has been taught in school. As an anthropologist, I believe that myth (and especially the Deluge myth) was founded on reality and filtered through the limited understanding of ancient peoples. Any anthropologist worth his salt realizes that different peoples of tribes, locals, even continents, have myths of remarkably similar themes, these make one wonder WHY the common thread; and WHY is this so easily dismissed? Those who dismiss myth as fantasy ought to remember that history is manipulated thru the perceptions of the author, a modern myth. It's very sad that the modern-day religion of science takes the position of dismissing reasonable factoids on the general principal of "doesn't compute with current theories so talk to the hand." Read it for yourself. Take it to a local library and research the bibliography for yourself. You might find yourself doing a remarkable thing, becoming a questioning being and not a rote automaton.

Cataclysm! is advertised as a book which "calls into question many current geological theories." Unfortunately this volume turned out to be one of a genre of literature that mimics science but ignores the scientific method to draw exciting, but untenable conclusions. These type of books are often wonderfully crafted; capable of tricking very intelligent people.

Cataclysm! is riddled with flawed logic and pseudoscience. It is impossible to mention all the ignored data, incorrect information, and outright deception in a short review, but what follows is a brief summary.

The authors ignore much of the geomorphologic evidence for ice ages. Entire fields of study such as lake sediment cores and deep sea floor drilling are barely mentioned or left out of consideration. Ice core drilling in the major ice caps are ignored except to claim that cores from Greenland go back only 10,000 years. The famous Vostok core of Eastern Antarctica is not mentioned at all in this book. The Vostok core has been established to show a continuous record of the last 160,000 years of the earth's climatic history. Drilling was completed on this core in the early 1980s and it is one of the most discussed pieces of evidence for the earth's climatic history in the Late Pleistocene. Since Cataclysm! was published in 1997, one would think there would be some reference to this important data. Other important evidence for ice ages such as glacial rebound are also ignored. Remarkably, glacial features such as fjords are attributed to faulting (p. 35).

The authors provide numerous references for their claims, but many of their references date to the turn of the century and much older. The reader is not told of much more recent writings on the subjects mentioned. Similar treatment is given to plate tectonics and continental drift. Only papers before the mid-1970s, when the idea was still being debated, are mentioned. More recent works on tectonics are ignored. This is a large field of geology in which thousands of articles are published yearly.

Questionable data is often presented as if factual. For example the Calavaras skull hoax is presented as factual, even though its fraudulent nature is well-known. Figure 6.3 illustrates what is purported to be a metal chain preserved in sedimentary rock. Most geologists would consider this object to be a concretion that only superficially resembles a chain.

Rather disturbing are examples of outright lying to be found in Cataclysm! The authors deny that polishing and striations on rocks are evidence of glaciation, claiming that similar striations exist on rocks blasted by volcanic ash from Mt. Pelé. This ignores that most examples of rock with glacial striations and polishing are not associated with volcanism. The most outrageous case of outright deception are the glacial grooves from Peru which are claimed to be "fault-grooves" in Figure 1.5. Similar glacial grooves can be found in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, far from any major faulting.

Allan and Delair misrepresent both the age and the preservation of the frozen mammoths of Siberia and Alaska. They claim that all the carcasses are about 11,500 years old and display "virtually unimpaired" flesh. The reality is that the frozen mammoths date to two periods of time, one ranging from 45,000 to 30,000 years ago and the other from 14,000 to 11,000 years ago. The flesh on frozen mammoths has undergone a desiccation process similar to freezer burn, the term "frozen mummies" being more appropriate.

Other examples of egregious "science" used by the authors include a sudden detachment and shifting of the earth's crust which is confused with the precession of the earth's axis. They never ask how much energy would be needed to accomplish such a sudden detachment, not to mention how much heat would be released.

Using older literature, the authors claim that cave deposits show a mixing of tropical and glacial animal and plant remains. More recent science reveals that these deposits are not mixed, but represent both glacial and warm inter-glacial periods in distinct layers.

Cataclysm! assigns the origin of asteroids and meteorites to an exploded planet between Mars and Jupiter. This idea has not been widely accepted since the 1960's. Predictably, they only cite the older literature, ignoring the last 30 years of research.

The book's thesis seems to be that the Vela supernova of 11,500 years ago shot a planet-size body into our solar system creating various catastrophes and accounting for almost every anomaly of planetary astronomy. Since the remnants of the Vela supernova are about 1,300 light years away this planet-sized object would have to be moving at relativistic speeds to arrive so soon after the supernova. They fail to ask how much energy would be required to accomplish this voyage.

Amusingly, Allan and Delair illustrate an ancient Babylonian cylinder seal (p. 220) and interpret the various dots on it as different planets and the asteroid Chiron. One of the dots is claimed to be Uranus (almost invisible without binoculars). Another is claimed to be Neptune (invisible without a telescope). Chiron is extremely faint, discovered by astronomers using photographs in 1977. Apparently the Babylonians had excellent eyesight.

Figure 4.13 (page 228) summarizes the odd thesis. The entire solar system is shown, but unfortunately not to its true scale. The figure depicts planetary pinball as the authors envision the story with most of the planets lined up on one side of the sun so the planetary body from Vela can do its damage. A diagram of the solar system at its true scale would impress upon the reader how unlikely this tale of cosmic catastrophism would be.

Modern geology is willing to accept catastrophic events when the evidence is good. Efforts such as this appalling book are not taken seriously because the authors take a pick and choose attitude to the data, playing fast and loose with evidence. Caveat lector.

I found WHEN THE EARTH NEARLY DIED to be a fascinating book. Certainly as a scholarly work it is very well done, exquisitely researched and documented. The authors do present compelling evidence for the hypothesis that one or more great cataclysms have happened to this planet during the tenure of our species upon it, and that these have been memorialized in legend and lore all over the world. Up to that point, I found it an outstanding piece of research, and would have given it five stars -- and _then_ found that a) they had postulated that only _one_ such cataclysm had occurred, that 11,500 years ago; b) <sigh> that it caused an extremely rapid (within days) shift of the Earth's pole of rotation such that areas in the tropics were shifted to the temperate or arctica zones and vice-versa; and c) <double sigh> made a great many mistakes that those well-trained in history and the sciences would not have, such as referring to George Gamow, the great astronomer and cosmologist, one of the pioneering proponents of the Big Bang theory of cosmological evolution, as a "geologist." Concerning a), there now exists a tremendous amount of hard evidence to show that our planet has been repeatedly bombarded from space by comets and asteroids as well as undergoing atmospheric explosions of really large comets ever since it first began cooling out of its molten phase, at the end of the Hadean Eon, some 4 billion-plus years ago. For example, a barrage of four or more of these was responsible for the end of the Cretaceous Period/Mesozoic Era of Earthly life, 65 million years ago. Another, far larger such barrage was probably the cause, or one cause, of the Permian catastrophe, the largest Great Extinction of life on Earth, which terminated the Paleozoic Era of life, around 250 million years ago. In fact, such barrages, whether large or relatively small, seem, given the cratering that can still be seen on our world as well as corroborating evidence from the fossil record, to have been responsible for most or all of the terminations of various geological periods from the beginning of the Phanerozoic Eon of life onward and almost certainly before then, all the way back to the formation of our world, 5 billion years ago. Such terminations occur many times during the Cenozic Period, from 65 million years ago to the present. It would be strange if several, relatively minor such impacts and attendant disasters hadn't occurred numerous times throughout human history and prehistory -- one such may in fact have precipitated the Dark Ages, just 1500 years ago. So why just _one_ such disaster? To fit all the geological and other evidence of multiple cosmic disasters that have happened to our wrold into just one such, and that relatively recently, the authors had to conflate and confabulate their data nearly to death, thus destroying its usefulness. As for b)-- can you say "torque," children? If the Earth were to suddenly (within a few days or even less time) somehow "tip over" so that its axis of rotation was thereby noticeably shifted from its original position, by at least five degrees, as a result the Earth's crust would be peeled off its mantle like the rind off an orange, and melt down to the mantle in the process, thanks to the phenomenon of "torque," which is the resistance of a rotating, moving object to any change in angular momentum (which would perforce occur with a pole-tipping of the sort the authors postulate). Nothing would have been left of life on Earth after such a disaster, because the resistance of the Earth to such a change in its movement would liberate so much kinetic energy over such a short time that for a while, at least, what was left of this planet would be a very close approximation of Medieval ideas of the hotter parts of Hell. Obviously that hasn't happened since the Hadean eon; life has hung around here for over 4 billion years, so no such rapid change of the world's axial tilt, or of the positions of its tectonic plates relative to the poles of rotation, could have occurred in all that time. Back to the drawing board, gang . . . And as for c, mistakes such as those make it clear that the people who did such heartbreakingly careful work on their scholastic research weren't well-grounded in scientific method, the various scientific models and hypotheses pertinent to their subject, or important changes in those models since about 1985, when Luis and Walter Alvarez and their associates first revealed the results of their ground-breaking research on the Terminal Cretaceous Event to the world. Nice try, gang, and you certainly deserve an "E" for effort -- but you get a D+ for lack of scientific acumen, education, and awareness.

Occasionally one can make an educated guess as to the positive worth of a book (prior to reading it) by the simple expedient of reading the negative reviews. This appears to be one of those cases. The majority of the 1/5 reviews appear to have been written by the same hand, or at least from the same set of talking points. Additionally, at least two negative reviews are by the same person, using two different Amazon iDs (yes, I'm talking to YOU, "Daniel Phelps." That's an Amazon no-no - and indicates an axe to grind other than a simple negative review for a book that someone found to be not helpful or just plain wrong.

So the next question would be: WHY does a person (or persons) feel they need to construct an organized campaign against this book?

That question then leads to the conclusion that there is, perhaps, something of value to be gleaned from this book.

Dear readers:

This book is a republication of "When the earth nearly died"
Just thought you would like to know in case you already have a copy.

I take cognizance of the criticism expressed by other reviewers, such as the claim that the authors have ignored the results of more recent scientific research.

Even so, this is a fascinating book which makes one think, in the vein of Graham Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods" but with greater emphasis on the natural sciences although mythology and legend are also briefly discussed.

It is refreshing to see scientific orthodoxy challenged, and although the authors may err in some of their assumptions, there is still enough here of value to make you think and wonder.

Every chapter has an extensive bibliography and the text is amply illuminated with maps, tables and figures. There are seven appendices and a detailed index.

What I found particularly fascinating is Map 2A: "A tentative reconstruction of the pre-catastrophic Pleistocene World," showing much larger continents and smaller, scattered seas.

I highly recommend this book for its multi-disciplinary approach, its bold rejection of the ice age theory (called "the icy chimera") and the interesting alternative history it proposes. Read it to broaden your outlook on our planet's unknown recent past.