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90 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pseudoscience and poor use of secondary sources, July 5, 2001
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.
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