This presentation gives an overview of my new book about the Carolina Bays and includes a reading of a few paragraphs from the chapter entitled My Retirement Projects, which has some information about my background.
Transcript:
This video gives an overview of my new book entitled The Neglected Carolina Bays: Ubiquitous Geological Evidence of a Cataclysm.
Five years have passed since I published "Solving the Mystery of the Carolina Bays". That book described in detail the mechanisms by which the Carolina Bays could have formed. Originally, I wanted to update my previous book as a new edition, but due to the large number of new topics, it made more sense to have a completely new book that combined some of the fundamental material with the new topics.
The title of the new book emphasizes that the Carolina Bays do not receive enough attention even though they are the most prevalent geological structures in the Atlantic Coastal plain. I feel that the bays are neglected by geologists, archeologists, historians and planetary scientists. Few geology books mention the Carolina Bays, and when they mention them, they dismiss them as if they were just sand dunes or thermokarst lakes. Nothing could be further from the truth!
If you have subscribed to my YouTube channel, you are probably familiar with many of the topics discussed in this book. The Carolina Bays are part of a bigger story and this book seeks to broaden our perspective to fit all the pieces of the puzzle. We need to be able to explain the extinction of the megafauna and the bottleneck in the human Y chromosome. We live in a cosmic shooting gallery where sometimes the Earth collides with large asteroids or comets.
The book describes the great controversy over the origin of the Carolina Bays and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, both of which I think are intimately related. One of the major topics of the book is the Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis, which proposes four mechanisms for the creation of the Carolina Bays. Each of the mechanisms is discussed in detail.
Emphasis is placed on the fact that the Carolina Bays have elliptical geometry. The bays are not just oval. They are precise elliptical conic sections. This mathematical attribute implies that the Carolina Bays originated as inclined conical cavities.
The book describes many of my impact experiments, including some that produce inclined conical cavities that look elliptical when viewed from above. The experiments provide support of the idea that the Carolina Bays had a similar impact origin.
The characteristics of an extraterrestrial impact on an ice sheet make it necessary to consider what happens to the air masses and the established wind patterns when the ejecta curtain expands above the atmosphere.
The book discusses radiocarbon dating and Optically Stimulated Luminescence dating. Both of these methods produce a wide range of dates for the Carolina Bays. The book explains the reasons why the dates obtained by these methods do not correspond to the date of formation of the bays.
Suppose that a hungry black hole devoured a crater on the Moon. We cannot see the crater any more, but we can still figure out where it was by looking for the convergence point of the ejecta rays. This is the same situation that we have with the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska Rainwater Basins.
The orientations of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins converge by the Great Lakes in Michigan. This is a big clue. There is no typical crater at that location, but if a comet fragment hit an ice sheet there, the ice sheet would have prevented the formation of a typical crater, and the subsequent melting of the ice would have washed away most of the evidence.
The book discusses the Y chromosome bottleneck that started at the Younger Dryas Boundary when temperatures plunged to glacial conditions. The book presents research showing that cold environmental temperatures reduce the number of males born in the human population. The females did not go through a similar bottleneck. In fact, the human population increased while the number of males decreased. Some researchers estimate that 17 women were born for every man during the bottleneck.
Thank you for your comments, questions, and criticism. The interaction through this YouTube channel has helped me to refine the Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis and it also has motivated me to consider new points of view and perform new experiments. I feel confident that the study of the Carolina Bays will eventually reveal many details of the great global catastrophe that destroyed human civilization 12,900 years ago leaving only those who could survive by hunting and gathering.
I would like to read a few paragraphs from the chapter entitled My Retirement Projects, which has some information about my background.
Some people have asked me how I came to be interested in the Carolina Bays and others have questioned my qualifications for proposing a hypothesis for the origin of the Carolina Bays. The real answer is that I was just curious. I tried to learn as much as I could, and I devised experiments to test my ideas.
Since childhood I was interested in science. By the time I was twelve years old, I knew that I wanted to be a chemist. I got a BS degree in chemistry from the University of Texas. The U.S. was involved in the Vietnam War and there was a mandatory draft. I was assigned to the medics, and because I had a degree in chemistry, the Army sent me to Medical Field Service School to learn medical technology, and I spent most of my military service drawing blood and doing hematology work at Army hospitals.
When I got out of the Army, I started working as an editor at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) in Columbus, Ohio. CAS published abstracts for all the world's chemical literature. The company was pioneering computer typesetting and it was introducing automated processes in the publication cycle. This got me interested in computers, and I started attending the Ohio State University, which has a campus just south of CAS. In a few years, I got a master's degree in computer and information science, and I changed careers from the editorial department to the research and development department, where I developed spellchecking algorithms for chemical text.
My research on natural language processing eventually led me to work for IBM, where I developed information retrieval systems and authored many patents. When IBM downsized, I was offered a retirement package and I started doing consulting work for private and government agencies in natural language processing until the government cancelled the contracts in 2011. By this time, I was almost 70 years old. I had health insurance from Medicare, Social Security income, and pensions from CAS and IBM. I was free to do whatever I wanted, but after a lifetime of doing creative work, I wanted to continue learning.
Retirement has been a continuous learning experience for me.
