This startling discovery is important to me, because it helps confirm the theories presented in Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps.

Professor Wuzong Zhou, Professor of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews has discovered that around 1.5 million diamond nanoparticles are created every second in a candle flame as it burns, says this article on PhysOrg.com.

Using a new sampling technique and assisted by his student Mr Zixue Su, Professor Zhou was able to remove particles from the centre of the flame. To his surprise, he found that a candle flame contains all four known forms of carbon.

“This was a surprise because each form is usually created under different conditions,” said Dr Zhou. At the bottom of the flame, it was already known that hydro-carbon molecules existed which were converted into carbon dioxide by the top of the flame.

Now both diamond nanoparticles and fullerenic particles have been discovered in the centre of the flame, along with graphitic and amorphous carbon.

“Unfortunately the diamond particles are burned away in the process, and converted into carbon dioxide, but this will change the way we view a candle flame forever,” Dr Zhou added.

Helps confirm theories presented in Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps

This startling discovery is important to me, because it helps confirm the theories presented in Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps.

As I say in chapter 13, “nanometer-sized diamonds (one-billionth of a meter) have been found in K-T boundary clays all over western North America.”

Where did those miniature dinosaur tombstones come from?

Many scientists try to explain them away by blaming a meteor. The K-T diamonds are “relict interstellar diamond grains carried to earth by a meteor or asteroid,” they insist.

But I disagree. I think those nanodiamonds were produced by giant fireballs in the sky right above the dinosaur’s heads, giant fireballs triggered by a geomagnetic reversal.

Not only at the K-T boundary, nanodiamonds also rained to the earth just 12,000 years ago at the mammoth extinction.

The evidence for these nanodiamonds, presented by nuclear physicist Dr. Richard Firestone and geologist Dr. Allen West at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2007, came from more than two-dozen sites across North America.

Diamonds drizzled down by the tons

“Diamonds drizzled down by the tons,” said West. The skies must have rained precious stone and metals for several months. “These would have been like ten thousand Tunguskas going off at once.”

The minuscule diamonds, along with high levels of iridium, were found embedded in a black mat of carbon spheres and carbon glass deposited at the start of a major cooling period about 12,000 years ago known as the Younger Dryas.

Again, the majority of scientists like to blame a meteor. They just love their meteors.

I don’t buy it.

Let’s remember the Gothenburg magnetic excursion, which took place at almost the same time about 12,000 years ago.

A more logical explanation for those nanodiamonds that mark the mammoth’s demise, is that the Gothenburg  magnetic excursion triggered millions of explosions above the mammoths’ heads.

See entire article:
http://phys.org/news/2011-08-candle-flames-millions-tiny-diamonds.html

Thanks to Andrew S for this link

Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps

Basic Preparedness (includes DVDs)

Ice Age Now – The DVD

“An 11-year-old boy from Russia’s north has stumbled upon a well-preserved woolly mammoth, in what scientists describe as the best such discovery since 1901,” says this article on rawstory.com.

The animal’s “tusk, skin, an eye and an ear were clearly visible” said Alexei Tikhonov, director of the Saint Petersburg-based Zoological Museum, who rushed to the tundra after the boy’s family notified scientists of the historic find.

The mammoth’s “one-metre-long penis is also intact so we can conclude that this was a male,” said Tikhonov.

The mammoth died at about 15-16 years old around 30,000 years ago, Tikhonov added.

It would be interesting to know if this mammoth died at the Lake Mungo magnetic excursion of 33,500 years ago. That date corresponds with an extinction event, a period of intense volcanism,  a short-term period of ice build-up, a beryllium spike, a Glacial Lake Missoula Flood, a Lake Bonneville Flood and the disappearcne of the Neanderthal. (“Not by Fire but by Ice,” p.199 and “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps,” p.103)

It would also be interesting to know if this mammoth was discovered with any nanodiamonds nearby, or other forms of carbon, or excess amounts of beryllium.

See entire article (includes photo):
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/05/11-year-old-russian-boy-stumbles-upon-wooly-mammoth- find-of-the-century/#.UG9uMbV-5dc.facebook

Thanks to Ralph Fato for this link

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Normal_and_Reversed_Polarity © Dr. habil. Norbert R. Nowaczyk / GFZ

In a press release today, the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences described the connection between the Laschamp magnetic reversal, the Phlegrean Field (Campi Flegrei) volcanic eruption that devastated most of southeastern Europe, and periods of frequent rapid cooling and warming.

The largest volcanic eruption in the Northern hemisphere in the past 100,000 years, the Campi Flegrei eruption pumped out some 84 cubic miles (350 cu km) of rock and lava and distributed ash over the entire eastern Mediterranean and up to central Russia.

Some researchers think these eruptions drove the Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for anatomically modern humans – Homo sapiens – to thrive in Europe and Asia.

Today, the Campi Flegrei is an eight-mile-wide volcanic caldera on the outskirts of Naples, Italy, a city of nearly a million people.

As with the Yellowstone super volcano, the Campi Flegrei is a popular tourist attraction. Filled with lakes of boiling mud, sulphrous steam holes and small volcanic features, its name comes from the Greek word for ‘burning.’ The ancients believed the area to be the gateway to hell.

The Campi Flegrei’s last major eruption took place about 12,000 years ago.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Gothenburg magnetic reversal also
occurred about 12,000 years ago.

“What is remarkable is the speed of the reversal,” the press release says.

“The field geometry of reversed polarity, with field lines pointing into the opposite direction when compared to today’s configuration, lasted for only about 440 years, and it was associated with a field strength that was only one quarter of today’s field.”

“The actual polarity changes lasted only 250 years. In terms of geological time scales, that is very fast.”

I’ve been telling you for years that magnetic reversals occur very quickly, and can be so short-lived that they are difficult to detect in the geologic record. Here’s confirmation.

During this period, the field was even weaker, with only 5% of today’s field strength. As a consequence, Earth nearly completely lost its protection shield against hard cosmic rays, leading to a significantly increased radiation exposure.”

Do you think “significantly increased radiation exposure”
might cause a few evolutionary leaps?

With our magnetic field strength having decreased by about 2/3rds in the last two thousand years, and with the rate of that decrease speeding up, I fear that we’re headed for another magnetic reversal right now.

Here’s the entire press release, entitled “An extremely brief reversal of the
geomagnetic field, climate variability and a super volcano.”

41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occurred. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north.

Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, prove that this polarity reversal was a global event. Their results are published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

What is remarkable is the speed of the reversal: “The field geometry of reversed polarity, with field lines pointing into the opposite direction when compared to today’s configuration, lasted for only about 440 years, and it was associated with a field strength that was only one quarter of today’s field,” explains Norbert Nowaczyk.

“The actual polarity changes lasted only 250 years. In terms of geological time scales, that is very fast.” During this period, the field was even weaker, with only 5% of today’s field strength. As a consequence, Earth nearly completely lost its protection shield against hard cosmic rays, leading to a significantlyincreased radiation exposure.

This is documented by peaks of radioactive beryllium (¹⁰Be) in ice cores from this time, recovered from the Greenland ice sheet. ¹⁰Be as well as radioactive carbon (¹⁴C) is caused by the collision of high-energy protons from space with atoms of the atmosphere.

The Laschamp event

The polarity reversal now found with the magnetisation of Black Sea sediments has already been known for 45 years. It was first discovered after the analysis of the magnetisation of several lava flows near the village Laschamp near Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central, which differed significantly from today’s direction of the geomagnetic field. Since then, this geomagnetic feature is known as the ‘Laschamp event’. However, the data of the Massif Central represent only some point readings of the geomagnetic field during the last ice age, whereas the new data from the Black Sea give a complete image of geomagnetic field variability at a high temporal resolution.

Abrupt climate changes and a super volcano

Besides giving evidence for a geomagnetic field reversal 41,000 years ago, the geoscientists from Potsdam discovered numerous abrupt climate changes during the last ice age in the analysed cores from the Black Sea, as it was already known from the Greenland ice cores. This ultimately allowed a high precision synchronisation of the two data records from the Black Sea and Greenland.

The largest volcanic eruption on the Northern hemisphere in the past 100,000 years, namely the eruption of the super volcano 39,400 years ago in the area of today’s Phlegraean Fields near Naples, Italy, is also documented within the studied sediments from the Black Sea.

The ashes of this eruption, during which about 350 cubic kilometers of rock and lava were ejected, were distributed over the entire eastern Mediterranean and up to central Russia.

These three extreme scenarios, a short and fast reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, short-term climate variability of the last ice age and the volcanic eruption in Italy, have been investigated for the first time in a single geological archive and placed in precise chronological order.

See entire press release along with a map of the polar migration:
http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/gfz/Public+Relations/Pressemitteilungen/aktuell/121016_PolarReversal?template=gfz

Thanks to Wanda, Bill Childs, Neil Love and Greg Mantle for this link

Journal Reference:

1. N.R. Nowaczyk, H.W. Arz, U. Frank, J. Kind, B. Plessen. Dynamics of the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion from Black Sea sediments. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2012; 351-352: 54 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2012.06.050

The Earth’s magnetic field, which shields us from deadly solar radiation, may be a lot more fragile and febrile than one might think, says this article from Reuters.

Illustration shows magnetic reconnection in the magnetotail triggering the onset of substorms, sudden violent eruptions that release solar energy trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field and trigger the Northern and Southern Lights.

“Scientists say earth’s magnetic field is weakening and could all but disappear in as little as 500 years as a precursor to flipping upside down.”

This, of course, is what I say in both Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps and Not by Fire but by Ice.

“Magnetic north has migrated more than 1,500 kilometres over the past century,” said Conall Mac Niocaill, an earth scientist at Oxford University. “In the past 150 years, the strength of the magnetic field has lessened by 10 percent, which could indicate a reversal is on the cards.”

As the field dies away, the solar wind would be able to strip the atmosphere away, which would allow more cosmic radiation to make it to the surface,” said Niocaill. “Both of these things would be bad news for any life that might have formed on the surface – either wiping it out, or forcing it to migrate into the interior of the planet.”

This also is what I say in both books.

“The European Space Agency is taking the issue seriously. In November, it plans to launch three satellites to improve our fairly blurry understanding of the magnetosphere.

The project, named Swarm, will send two satellites into a 270 mile (450 km) high polar orbit to measure changes in the magnetic field, while a third satellite 318 (530 km) high will look at the influence of the sun.

DESCENT INTO CHAOS

Ciaran Beggan, a geomagnetic specialist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said studies have refined our understanding of how the field reverses.

While the entire reversal process (supposedly) takes 3,000-5,000 years, latest research suggests the descent into a chaotic state could take as little as 500 years, although there are significant holes in scientific understanding.

“Although electricity grids and GPS systems would be more vulnerable, we are not really sure how all the complex things that are linked together would react,” said Beggan.

See entire article:
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre8920x6-us-earth-magneticfield/

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/03/earths-magnetic-field-overdue-for-a-chaos-causing-possibly-life-altering-flip/

Thanks to Steven Woodcock, Laurel, Ryan Hendrix and Brian Boyle for these links

“Read both of your books and loved them,” says Brian. “I don’t buy into the AGW at all. This is an article I read in the National Post recently.. Thought you would be interested. Cheers!”

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that variations in the long-term reversal rate of the Earth’s magnetic field may be caused by changes in heat flow from the Earth’s core.

The scientists focused on the time interval between around 200 and 80 million years ago, when magnetic polarity started reversing very frequently – up to 10 times every million years. However 50 million years later, it stopped reversing altogether for nearly 40 million years. (The Liverpool scientists appear to be ignoring the 11,500-year cycle of magnetic excursions altogether.)

“We suspect that this process … changed the pattern of heat flowing out of the core in such a manner as to cause the magnetic field to first become less stable, with lots of reversals, and then become much more stable – and stop reversing,” said Dr Andrew Biggin, from the University’s School of Environmental Sciences.

The team conjectures that this big drop in the frequency of reversals may also be related to a similar decrease in the number of ‘large igneous provinces’ (LIPs)* or concentrated outpourings of magma from the Earth’s core, 50 million years later.

The last LIP happened around 16 million years ago and produced the Columbia Plateau in the North West US.

I think they have it backward. I think the magnetic reversals triggered the volcanic activity, not the other way around.

See entire article:
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Scientists_probe_link_between_magnetic_polarity_reversal_and_mantle_processes_999.htm

Thanks to Wanda for this link

* According to Nature.com, large igneous provinces (LIPs) are known for their rapid production of enormous volumes of magma (up to several million cubic kilometres in less than a million years), for marked thinning of the lithosphere, often ending with a continental break-up, and for their links to global environmental catastrophes.

The Siberian Traps and Deccan Traps, where huge amounts of magma poured out of the earth, were both synchronous with large mass-extinction events – the Great Permian extinction and the dinosaur extinction.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7364/full/nature10385.html

Researchers from GNS Science have already collected samples of the pumice, which will be analyzed to determine where the rocks came from, the Navy wrote on its Facebook page.

“Recent studies have suggested that pumice floats played an important role in the evolution of life on Earth,” says this article on Business Insider. Since these “islands” can drift over long stretches of ocean, they can ferry animals, plants and even colonies of microbes across water barriers.

Maybe. But I’m thinking that there probably won’t be any animals or plants on that pumice that was so recently hundreds of degrees hot. Then again, perhaps it cooled tremendously before reaching the surface of the ocean.

Whichever it was, it certainly must have pumped massive amounts of heat into the ocean.

Gee, I wonder what is heating our seas?

See entire article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/pumice-island-in-the-pacific-2012-8
Thanks to Bill Sellers for this link

Two intrepid researchers dig into one of the mysterious Carolina bays. Carolina bays (www.georgehoward.net/cbays.htm) are more than 50,000 shallow elliptical depressions found along the Atlantic Coastal Plain from New Jersey to Florida.

Carolina bays are proposed to be linked to the Younger Dryas Impact Event which may have led to the extinction of large mammals, such as mammoths, and the Clovis people, first inhabitants of North American.

Many researchers says the Carolina Bays were created by an extraterrestrial impact. I say they were blasted into the ground by explosions in the sky triggered by the Gothenburg magnetic reversal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f0y7HkX_Fw&feature=related

Thanks to Steven Rowlandson for this link

Auroras occur when bursts of charged particles hit Earth's atmosphere — but there is no record of these occurring at the same time as the 14C increase in tree rings. ©NASA

In the late eighth century, Earth was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, say Japanese scientists.

A team led by Fusa Miyake of Nagoya University found that radioactive carbon-14 levels in two cedar trees were much higher in 774 and 775 compared to other years,  and was far bigger than any known flare from the Sun.

Earth is constantly battered by protons and other sub-atomic particles blasted across space by high-energy sources. The particles collide with nitrogen-14, which then decays to radioactive carbon-14 . This background radiation produces a continuous source of carbon-14 for radiocarbon dating.

But if not from the Sun, then where did that cosmic ray blast originate? asked Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist.

The other possibility is a supernova, or a star that explodes at the end of its life in a welter of gamma radiation. But there is no documented record in the northern hemisphere of a supernova at around 775.

“With our present knowledge, we cannot specify the cause of this event,” Miyake admits.

The team intends to fine-tune their search by looking at telltale traces of beryllium and nitrate isotopes.

They also plan a wider search of historical documents to see if, 1,237 years ago, anyone noted a strange flare in the sky.

The researchers reported their finding in the journal Nature on Sunday.

The team found that carbon-14 levels in the two cedars were about 1.2 percent higher in 774 and 775 compared to other years.

Compare this to the Gothenburg magnetic reversal of 11,500 years ago, when carbon-14 levels shot upward some three to four times normal.

Or look at the Mono Lake magnetic reversal of 23,000 years ago, when carbon-14 levels soared to four to five times normal. (“Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps,” p. 103)

http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radiation-burst-
recorded-in-tree-rings-1.10768

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/mystery-
8thcentury-cosmic-blast-captured-in-trees-20120604-1zr8k.html

Thanks to David Newton, Benjamin Napier and Steven Woodcock for these links

Miyake, F., Nagaya, K., Masuda, K. & Nakamura, T. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11123 (2012).

 Reader Duster sent this additional info:

“The article notes that an historic record from the time notes what sounds like profoundly increased aurora or something similar, and oddly, a separate source (The Daily Mail citing New Scientist):

“… the only contemporaneous record is from a 13th-century English chronicler, called Roger of Wendover, who, according to New Scientist, is quoted as saying: ‘In the Year of our Lord 776, fiery and fearful signs were seen in the heavens after sunset; and serpents appeared in Sussex, as if they were sprung out of the ground, to the astonishment of all.’

See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2154406/Mystery-giant-cosmic-explosion-774AD-left-absolutely-trace–deep-rings-cedar-trees.html#ixzz1wzWe5oyO ”

“My take would be a solar flare or flares,” says Duster. “If a single one, it would have to have been more powerful than a Carrington Event. Not sure where the snakes came from.”