A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact? Almost Certainly Not….
Posted on April 1st, 2008 by blue collar scientistThe University of Bristol has a press release out yesterday reporting that a Sumerian clay tablet provides an account of an impact event at Köfels, Austria.
I call bullshit. Here’s why, starting with some background information.
Köfels does not have a crater; it has what looks like a giant landslide, about half a kilometer thick and five kilometers in diameter. In the mid 20th-century, the impact hypothesis was raised to explain the formation. Apparently there is a lot of glass in the formation, which some geologists think could have been formed when rock melted in the landslide, and others think is more plausibly from an impact. There’s no doubt that other impact events have created quite a bit of glass. The age of the Köfels glass has been measured using radiometric methods, so we know the glass was formed between 8,000 years to 16,000 years ago.
Perhaps the strongest evidence for an impact origin of the Köfels structure is the reported presence of planar deformation features in quartz taken from the site. (But see the update at the end of the post!) PDFs, as they are called, are microscopic features of silicate (e.g., quartz, feldspar) grains, and they are basically very thin planes of glass arranged in parallel sets that have particular orientations with respect to the containing crystal’s structure. They are utterly diagnostic of impact events - no other geologic event can form them, not even highly energetic volcanic eruptions1. They look like this (NASA image):
The presence of shocked quartz - quartz with PDFs - means that this quartz, at some time, was in the neighborhood of an impact event. If the big landslide-looking formation at Köfels was formed by impact, then the shocked quartz could have been formed then. Or it could be from an older impact, and was transported by later geologic events, such as huge landslides. The shocked quartz will survive a lot longer than an impact crater, given the way the Earth covers such structures up relatively quickly, so this may well have happened. However the shocked quartz got where it is found today, we know that it was formed when a meteoritic body impacted the ground. Shocked quartz does not form from a meteoritic airburst - a meteorite that explodes before impact - it requires a ground impact.
Science marches on, and the impact hypothesis to explain the origin of the Köfels formation fell out of favor as we discovered more and more about impacts. The main problem was the lack of parallels between the Köfels features and other known astroblemes - namely, there is no crater at Köfels, and there darn well ought to be if there is 8-16 kiloyear-old glass and shocked quartz from an impact event at the site. Here’s a picture of a smaller impact that is five times that age:
Notice how fresh and recognizable that crater is?
Currently, the consensus of scientific opinion is that Köfels is not from an impact. It is not listed in the Earth Impact Database, not even as a possible impact site. Googling “Köfels impact” turns up a zillion outlets parroting the Bristol press release, but there’s almost nothing else about it on the net.
So, where does this Sumerian tablet come in?
The researchers say the tablet dates from 700 BCE, or about 3,000 years ago. They hypothesize it is a copy of an earlier work:
With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).
I happen to have some software that can do that. Starry Night, Skymap Pro, or Stellarium, among numerable others, can do the job. So this isn’t rocket science. Anyone know where I can get a high-quality photograph of the tablet that I can use to test their hypothesis from my own reseources?
But a better question might be:
Assuming that the original source is a “night notebook” of a Sumerian astronomer, why is it being copied by a scribe 2,423 years later? No reason is given for this remarkable act in the press release, at least. Already it sounds a little fishy to me.
The press release continues:
Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night….
Wait a second. Do we really know that half the tablet records conditions “the same as any other night?” Because if we do, that means we have a bunch of other examples of this genre of tablet to compare this tablet to. And if so, that’s fine, but then why does the press release say this:
A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time.
They can either have their cake, or eat it: Either the tablet was mysterious and untranslated; or we can’t really know that this tablet is a typical nightly astronomical report of sky conditions, just like any other.
The problems continue:
…but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space. The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.
Okay, I guess - something 500 kilometers away and 1 kilometer in diameter will be a tenth of a degree across, which is just about big enough to determine shape; and it could have been closer and still been in outside the atmosphere. And it is possible to record a trajectory to better than a degree using naked-eye methods.
It is also possible to integrate a bunch of orbits that intersect with Köfels, and it is plausible to believe that some of those orbits might be consistent with the observation of a celestial object that is hypothesized to be recorded in this copy of a hypothesized tablet that existed 5,000 years ago, and it is plausible to believe that some of these orbits would have the object out of Earth’s atmosphere when it was observable over Sumeria.
But really, this is beginning to look a bit like a house of cards, yes? Let’s read on.
The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.
The bit about the Aten asteroids being resonant is just wrong. Many are resonant, some more strongly than others; but Aten asteroids are defined as those with a semi-major axis of less than one astronomical unit. An AU is, in lay terms, the average distance between the sun and the Earth. A semi-major axis is simply the distance of the long axis of an ellipse, divided by two. Almost all Atens have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit - in other words, most Atens get both closer to the sun than Earth, and farther away from it, depending on what part of its orbit it is in. That’s all - you don’t need the asteroid to be in a resonant orbit to be an Aten.
And a resonant orbit certainly doesn’t lead to a craterless impact, as I initially read the following as claiming:
This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.
What??
This is just preposterous.
First, you’re going to find plenty of evidence of the impact at Gamskogel if this were true. Any impact significant enough to badly disrupt an asteroid-type impactor, which is what the researchers hypothesize, is going to take out a big chunk of the mountain, cause all sorts of fracturing, landslides, and other highly noticeable effects. The physics of impact are such that, if the impact were truly strong enough to liquify or vaporize a >1 km asteroid, the mountain would have been converted into a crater - much like we see countless times on the moon.
Test of hypothesis number one: Is there a huge crater on the mountain, or has the mountain been obliterated by a huge crater?
The impact of an asteroid with a mountain will result in the classical shock wave in the impact medium and create an ejecta blanket. If the impact hypothesis is true, we should see planar deformation features on the mountain and ejecta more or less symmetrically around it.
Test of hypothesis number two: Is there shocked quartz on the mountain?
Test of hypothesis number three: Is there an ejecta blanket around the mountain?
Next, why would an impactor become a fireball? We all know that meteors in the process of burning up are hot, but they are not, literally, fireballs2. The researchers claim that that an asteroidal-type meteorite, after clipping the mountain, was “not a solid object” - but why? And how? How do you get an asteroidal impactor hitting so solidly that it vaporized it, but so softly that it doesn’t shock quartz or create a crater?
Sorry, but you just can’t.
You don’t solve any problems by breaking up an impactor into a million pieces - it still impacts. So you end up with a bunch of smaller craters - the total energy is the same. Here’s an example of either a binary impactor, or disrupted impactor, on the Earth:
and an example on the Moon:
Supposing you can disrupt a 1-km asteroid impactor into pieces no larger than molecular size. What happens then? You still get craters:
That’s a microcrater in glass, too small to be seen by eye.
Maybe the press release is saying that the low angle of impact, supposedly of only six degrees, would not result in the formation of a crater. But that’s wrong too. Highly oblique impacts - thought to be considerably shallower than 6° - produce elongated craters:
So, there’s gonna be a crater, or two, or a billion, no matter what you do to the impactor3. Just because the asteroid “clips” a mountaintop on its way to its final resting place doesn’t mean there will be no crater. There will be one, or many, period.
Test of hypothesis number four: Go find the crater(s).
Test of hypothesis number five: Go find fragments of the impactor. There will be some, even if the main impactor vaporizes.
Let’s read on:
Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.
“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“
Ok, so there’s no crater because the impactor “wasn’t solid,” but there was enough ejecta - which only comes from craters - to kill people, and cover an area thousands of miles around, including northern Egypt and the Levant, where we should be able to go today and find - ummm, ejecta.
Test of hypothesis number six: Let’s go find ejecta, or evidence of widespread burns, in strata that we can date, using, e.g., pottery shards, to around 3100 BC in multiple archaeological digs in both Egypt and in the Levant. The strata should be iridium-enriched compared to terrestrial facies, ought to include shock products if the impact were powerful enough to spread material over that wide an area, and ought contain impact glass.
Ok, we’re done. Just to sum up, here’s why we can be pretty sure this press release promotes a wrong conclusion.
The researchers hypothesize:
- That Sumerians made regular celestial observations (probably true);
- One of them observed a large body very close to Earth before it had entered the atmosphere (very improbable - whereas seeing a very bright meteor is not only probable, but certain, if you keep looking)
- They recorded the trajectory to an accuracy of +/- one degree or less (plausible)
- The tablet they recorded this on was reproduced by a scribe 2,423 years later (possible, but why?)
- Even though apparently no other nights’ observations were similarly copied (why not? There would have been TONS of interesting stuff, and just as correlated with significant happenings on Earth - not by causation, but by coincidence)
- And this tablet has never been translated before (I’ll stipulate that this is true even though I don’t really know)
- Two researchers - one a space infrastructure engineer, the other a rocket engine engineer, and neither linguists - translated it (huh? how?)
- And the tablet records an impactor (maybe)
- even though the impact glass found at the site is 8,000 to 16,000 years old (not 5,000 years old as the hypothesis says)
- And the impactor was a >1 km Aten asteroid (seriously, people, it requires several hours or days of precise, modern astronomical observations to determine if an asteroid is an Aten - you need either triangulated observations over a short time, or observations over a longer period of time, to extract that kind of data from the observations they say the Sumerians recorded)
- And that impactor landed at Köfels (maybe, but you need triangulated observations of incoming impactors to really determine where and if a possible impactor landed, because you can’t tell celestial distances or radial velocities - motion toward or away from you - by just looking)
- But not before “clipping” a mountain (oh, come ON! can we say “ad hoc hypothesis?”)
- Which turned it into something other than a solid (I’ve heard of shock melting, but turning an entire 1 km impacting asteroid into a liquid with a glancing blow with a mountain is beyond the pale, and turning it all into gas would be even more ludicrous)
- Which then created no craters when it landed (it still should have)
- But which did distribute ejecta all over the eastern Mediterranean (you don’t get ejecta without a crater)
- Which ejecta has not been found anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean (ouch)
I’ll add one more thing: This “research” hasn’t cleared peer review - the authors are trying to sell a direct-to-paperback book for $25 (USD). The press release says it is being published by Alcin Academics, but I can’t find them on the web and I can’t find any other book they’ve published. A quick look at the Amazon page for the book shows that the real publisher is WritersPrintshop - a self-publishing company. I’m thinking if this were a plausible hypothesis supported in a well-written book, they’d have gotten a real publisher to release it.
I’m not buying it - the book or the zany hypothesis. If anyone wants to change my mind, send me a copy of the book, and I’ll read it and reconsider.
Oh - and one more thing: Shame, shame on you, PhysOrg for credulously running this ridiculous story but ignoring the asteroid names announced last week.
Sources for Köfels background information:
- Graham, Bevan and Hutchison, “Catalogue of Meteorites”, 4th Edition, (1985)
- Kurat, Richter; Meteoritics, vol.4, p.192, 1969
- Störzer et al.; Meteoritics, vol.6, p.319, 1971
Update: I’ve been pointed to some additional references regarding the Köfels formation, which somewhat changes what I’ve written above. First, shocked quartz, with PDFs, have not been found at Köfels as some have claimed; quartz with lamellar deformation features typical of tectonic processes were found instead. Also, the Köfels formation was not a single landslide, but a result of several landslides at different times. These are both further blows to the already discredited impact hypothesis for the origins of the Köfels formation, and casts even more doubt onto the conclusions that Sumerians observed a greater than 1 km wide Aten asteroid that impacted at Köfels.
New references:
- Deutsch, Koeberl, Blum, French, Glass, Grieve, Horn, Jessberger, Kurat, Reimold, Smit, Stoffler, Taylor; The impact-flood connection: Does it exist? Terra Nova. vol. 6, 1994, pp. 644-650.
- Hermanns, Blikra, Naumann, Nilsen, Panthi, Stromeyer, Longva; Examples of multiple rock-slope collapses from Köfels (Ötz valley, Austria) and western Norway. Engineering Geology. vol. 83, no. 1-3, 2006, pp. 94-108.
The “French” in the first one is, I’m pretty sure, the same Bevan M. French who has done so much geological work on the moon and terrestrial planets.
There is additional discussion of the geologic findings here, where these two works are also cited among others, and I think the person who brought them to my attention is a member of that forum.
Update #2: Some very specific claims were raised by Mark Hempsell in the comments below; I’ve responded to them here.
- The can be, and are, formed by nuclear explosions, however. [↩]
- Amateur astronomers’ slang is to call bright meteors “fireballs,” but this refers to visual appearance, not physical constituency. [↩]
- It is ridiculous to assert a 100% efficient vaporization of the impactor. The Barringer impactor was vaporized, but fragments of the impacting body remain. [↩]
Tags: asteroid, Aten, crater, impact, Kofels, sumer, sumeria
April 1st, 2008 at 7:32 am
Read the book - all these points are addressed.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:58 am
Excellent post,
I too was skeptical of the claims presented in the general internet article - I found your comments very insightful. There have got to be craters. I don’t buy their hypothesis either. Sounds more like a chance to sell books that do exact science - they must need the publishing fame. I bet it’ll backfire just like the “cold fusion” brouhaha a number of years ago.
Kris
April 1st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Mr. Hempsell, if you will send me a copy of the book, I will gladly read it, and I promise to follow up with a posting of my reactions here.
But I’m not going to buy the book; although I can easily afford it, I’d rather spend the money on books that have more certain science content.
April 1st, 2008 at 7:06 pm
[...] Original post by blue collar scientist [...]
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 am
If anyone wants to see what a 1 km in diameter asteroid does when it impacts, they can go to the “Earth Impact Effects Program” by
Robert Marcus, H. Jay Melosh, and Gareth Collins at:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
This program not only calculates the size of the crater produced, but the effects of such an impact for any distance from the point of impact.
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 pm
One thing people should do is look up the “Earth Impact Effects Program” by Robert Marcus, H. Jay Melosh, and Gareth Collins on Google or other search engine. It is at:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
I played around with using the below variables taken from various newspaper articles about the so-called “Köfels impact event”:
1. Projectile diameter = 1 km or 1,000 m
2. Projectile Density = 3,000 kg/m3 for dense rock (stony) asteroid and 8,000 kg/m3 for iron asteroid
3. Impact Velocity = 17 km/s (typical velocity for meteorites and asteroids)
4. impact angle = 6 degrees
5. Target type = “Crystalline Rock”, local Köfels geology.
and 6. Distance from Impact = 1,800 miles, the approximate distance from central Israel to Köfels, Austria.
In case of either stony or iron asteroid, which is 1 km in diameter, its impact in Köfels, Austria has no significant effect in central Israel, 1,800 miles away. According to the basic laws of physics, it is impossible for an impact of a 1 km in diameter asteroid in Köfels, Austria to significantly effect anywhere in central Israel. In fact, in most people in central Israel would be completely unaware that either an impact or airburst had occurred in Köfels, Austria according to the estimates of environment effects provided by the “Earth Impact Effects Program”.
The “Earth Impact Effects Program” by Robert Marcus, H. Jay Melosh, and Gareth Collins is a very fun and revealing online calculator that can estimate “the regional environmental consequences of an impact on Earth.” This program can estimate “the ejecta distribution, ground shaking, atmospheric blast wave, and thermal effects of an impact as well as the size of the crater produced.”
For a pdf document that details the observations, assumptions, and equations upon which this program is based, go look at:
Collins, G. S., H. J. Melosh, and R. A. Marcus, 2005, Earth Impact Effects Program: A Web-based computer program for calculating the regional environmental consequences of a meteoroid impact on Earth. Meteoritics & Planetary Science. vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 817–840 at:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~marcus/CollinsEtAl2005.pdf
April 5th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I think you cannot make a case against a book based only on a succinct press release. Is like a critic doing a movie review based only on a trailer.
Definitely, there are many problems with this theory, but the book surely contains additional data to support it.
So, if the film critic surely pays for his ticket, you should pay for yours too.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Marco,
When a movie trailer sucks, it doesn’t prevent people from thinking the movie might not be worth seeing. And in this case, since the press release trumpets a lot of implausible and impossible science, there’s no reason to believe the book is any good.
“So, if the film critic surely pays for his ticket, you should pay for yours too.”
But the film critic does not buy their own ticket - you just have to read elsewhere in this blog to learn that! And neither do book reviewers buy the book. Out of all the book reviews I’ve had in published magazines, the book was always supplied by the publisher. So I’ll reiterate - I’ll gladly read the book, if I am sent a copy.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Nice piece Blue Collar, thanks.
The fact that Dr. Hempsell responded to your blog by basically saying “buy my book”, underscores the point that its about the money. A responsible scientist would have at least attempted to refute some of your claims if they are indeed off-the-mark. The fact that offered not even a word or two is fairly good confirmation that you are raising the right questions.
April 7th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Michael, this is not meant as a criticism of Mr. Hempsell (or of you), but he does not have a doctorate, as indicated by his University of Bristol staff page. He is of course highly qualified in his field, as are many of us who don’t have doctorates, myself included.
April 7th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Blue Collar;
As a scientist, I believe it prudent not to make bold assertions outside of ones field, otherwise, it’s a hobby. Also as scientists it is vitally important that alternative explanations be presented in such a way that build upon our knowledge so that correct conclusions can be drawn. This process should be open and dialog welcome.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Ok, two things.
First thank you for addressing this. I saw the article and my bullshit detector went freaking nuts. Yea, this is bullshit. There was no such kill off int he Levant, certainly there is no evidence for it.
Second, while I am not a Mesopotamian expert, I can say that they did often copy earlier works. It is possible that they would copy a 2,000 year old document. (Though it seems questionable that they would have a 2,000 year old document, it would actually require many copies over a period of time probably). However, such copies often record that they are copies, their original sources location, and information about the scribe or the king who requested etc. I would find the story much more believable if it had some of this information.
April 9th, 2008 at 7:10 am
[...] readers to Archaeolog’s discussion on Indiana Jones as the American image of archaeology and Blue Collar Scientist’s post on a recent claim of a Mesopotamian tablet telling about a European asteroid [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 7:36 am
[...] my story about the supposed 1-km Aten asteroid that supposedly hit Austria and supposedly - well, just read it. I’m very pleased to have made the cut, because my post is anthropological only topically, [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
[...] next article comes from the Blue Collar Scientist, who writes about a new theory which states that a Neo-Assyrian text talks about an asteroid impact [...]
April 10th, 2008 at 3:47 am
I’m not a specialist in Sumerian writing, but a date of ca. 3100 BC for such a tablet seems wildly off. pre-3000 tablets were bookkeeping documents, mere lists of good received or dispatched. Around 3000, personal names began to be added to these acounting documents ( who gave or received the goods). By the time of the Royal Cemetery of Ur (2nd quarter 3rd mill.) one gets a few objects inscribed with names and (rarely) added titles: the longest inscription reads: Akalamdug, King of Ur, Ashusikildingir, wife.
Only around the middle of the 3rd mill. do you get longer texts and the use of verbs and real syntax.
So I’d agree that the BS quotient seems fairly high on textual grounds too.
Judith
–
Visit Zenobia’s blog at Empress of the East
April 10th, 2008 at 4:33 am
I agree with you generally about the apparent quality of the science here but as a textual scholar who’s spent some time wondering about issues of preservation, I have to say that these two points are not the strongest ones of your argument. There certainly would have been tons of interesting stuff; but we don’t have a whole lot of writing this ancient, period. We’re extraordinarily lucky to have as much as we do. Anything that does survive from this period has beaten the odds already so much that an argument ex silentio saying that there should be more is fairly weak stuff.
As to why it might be copied, I agree that it is puzzling; I think it is much more likely that the transcription and therefore the dating are faulty than that we really do have to explain this, and I wonder whether there’s an image of the tablet in the book. (I’m not going to check. I doubt any academic library I can get at will be buying it.) All the same, I think there’s no problem with explaining such a text being copied; it would serve someone as a description of the stars and constellations generally, even if not quite an accurate one. Would the reader have been sure of that, or just that this was too clever for him? But I’m quite prepared to believe Judith when she says that there’s good reason to suppose such a text could not exist from the original date. Just that, if it did, I bet it would be copied. Wouldn’t you, if you found it?
April 11th, 2008 at 6:46 am
[...] No Sumerian tablet records the impact of an Aten asteroid in Austria which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as has already been explained. [...]
April 11th, 2008 at 6:58 am
[...] story - not the best place to learn astronomy facts - the same UT contributor who posted the bizarre story about the Sumerian Aten asteroid “impact” reports: The planet has a mass five times the size of Earth, which makes it the smallest extrasolar [...]
April 13th, 2008 at 4:42 am
I don’t know much about the Sumerian’s but this post was extremely interesting to read. I can’t really make a judgment on the content of the post as I’m not familiar with the topic but nevertheless, this post did a good job of de-constructing some of the arguments in the original press release.
Skelliot.
April 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Setting aside for the moment all the other problems and focusing purely on the lack of crater, could a Tunguska style event causing similar results?
April 13th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Thank you for your article. Found it via Bad Astronomer.
You people do good jobs. First I thought it was the FSM responsible for the crater, but I am glad you showed it’s the Bible that is accurate. Godditit. Not a meteor.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:48 am
Some Dude: I don’t see how a Tunguska event could cause successive large landslides as observed at Köfels, so I would say no, it would not explain the observed geology there. The “hypothesis” of an impact at Köfels, resulting in widespread ejecta over Egypt and the Levant, would not fit with a Tunguska event either. Spreading ejecta around depends upon processes that form craters - specifically, the propagation of a shock wave through the ground. Tunguska was an airburst, and sent no significant shock energy into the ground - there was no crater. Airbursts would have to be hellishly powerful to spread ejecta in the suborbital way that this book seems to think happened, at any rate.
Textual folks: Thanks for weighing in on the subject of copying very old Sumerian texts. I defer to your expertise and grant that the possibility of copying is greater than I originally credited. I still have a little problem using a copy (of a copy of a copy?) of an observation to compute an orbit with a MOID smaller than Earth’s diameter. I’ve got some familiarity with textual criticism of the bible, and the kinds of transmission errors seen there, if committed in the Sumerian copy, would preclude the determination of an orbit so precisely as to characterize it as an Earth-impactor, or as an Aten-family asteroid, to say nothing of both. I guess what I’m saying is that solving the copying problem seems to me to strike another blow against the book’s hypothesis - we have one textual witness that preserves unknown transmission errors, from which the authors claim they have computed a particular kind of orbit, while modern astronomers find this same task daunting on a routine basis even when the data are generated to much higher precision and don’t contain errors….
April 14th, 2008 at 5:31 am
[...] of other stuff. Someone there, who hadn’t read it, asked me about my blog post about the supposed Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact. I gave a description of the problems with the impact hypothesis, as well as an explanation of why [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Minor error in an otherwise fabulous article.
I believe you misread that sentence. I think the actual meaning was
“The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit. An Aten is a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth.” The fact that the description was offset by commas indicates it was a modifying dependent clause interrupting the main clause. The resonant description was an additional bit of information besides the description as an Aten.
Not that it makes anything else you said incorrect.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:58 am
Given this blog seems to be going on longer than the many other websites can I once more make the point that there no issue or argument has been made here that is not covered by the book, including why the tablet was copied and the status of written language at the end of the fourth millennium, (and yes there are detailed reproductions of the tablet and King drawing of the tablet).
Also Douglas, the book includes the impact velocity which was 15 km/s for the best match orbit and goes down to 12 km/s for some alternatives. It is definitely neither stony nor iron (what Aten is?) indeed the impact dynamics suggest a density below 1000 kg/m3. The impact effect will be over estimated by Marcus, Melosh, and Collins because of the Alpine terrain. The way it reaches the south east Mediterranean is the back plume which is deflected by the low pressure region behind the object, an effect well documented during the Shoemaker/Levy 9 impact. Please also note the warning in the book that our analysis is rather crude and first order and ignores lift effects, therefore our estimate of the plume re-entry point may be out.
However I am not going to go through every point raised on every website. Alan and I have spent three years on the write up alone preparing the presentation of our arguments as we wish people to read them, and no-one on any website has yet come up with anything we have not considered and already carefully answered in the book. This is not an attempt to sell the book, which is simply an extended paper and about as gripping as the San Paulo telephone directory translated into Japanese, but if you want to publically slag it off as delusional pseudo-science please do us the courtesy of finding out what we are actually saying first. To date (and I know it is early days) I know of nobody who has actually read the book making this sort of criticism.
A final point on free copies; we have sent around 100 copies to journals and researchers in the field, (and in a strange reversal of the current argument several expressed surprise saying they had expected to buy it). I am sorry if you did not end up on that list, but I hope you can see the problem of sending copies to every anonymous web blogger. We have made every effort (including the use of self publishing) to keep the price low, and if even that is not good enough then get it from the library for free.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:58 am
A la gente Blue Collar Scientist les parecieron poco científicas las tesis expuestas en el artículo anterior de esta serie. Y las someten a una serie de críticas, de las cuales quizá la más importante es la falta de cráter en la zona de impacto —incluso habría datos que excluyen la posibilidad misma de un impacto—, mientras las otras críticas cuestionan y reducen la plausibilidad de las tesis restantes. [...] Pero hay más. Mark Hempsell, uno de los autores del libro, responde en los comentarios del blog [...].
April 16th, 2008 at 7:13 am
A final point on free copies; we have sent around 100 copies to journals and researchers in the field (deleted) I am sorry if you did not end up on that list, but I hope you can see the problem of sending copies to every anonymous web blogger.
But the author of this post is not anonymous. His name is disclosed here, and he’s an actual (gasp) asteroid researcher with (gasp) published, peer-reviewed results relating to asteroid dynamics and impact. He’s also written for the four largest astronomy magazines in the world, and was on staff at the second-largest. As a reviewer, as it happens.
And the 100 free copies of the book thing is silly. Post a preprint on the arXiv astrophysics server. Or send BCS a PDF. This doesn’t cost any money. I seriously doubt the book will do any better than the press release, but if you are so confident, start treating your colleagues, and ones who actually work in the field you are writing about, respectfully. Subject your work to review.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:10 am
[...] original takedown is here, and even though I wrote it before I realized that the Bad Astronomer, StumbleUpon, and other [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 9:12 am
For those still following this saga, I’ve just posted a response to the outlandish claims that Mark Hempsell has made above.
April 17th, 2008 at 5:41 am
[...] at Archaeoporn and Blue Collar Scientist’s look at a new book claiming that Sumerians observed an asteroid impact on Earth (hint: he doubts it very [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 8:42 am
[...] A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact? Almost Certainly Not…. [...]
December 31st, 2008 at 9:47 pm
[...] who’s passing the skeptics of the world mourned this year, covered this topic quite well here. Essentially, a clay tablet with no current translation was stated as representing an impact at [...]