50 results found.
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 126: Nov-Dec 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Icy Comets, Oceans, Life Our thought, expressed in SF#125, that the icy-comet controversy might be winding down was premature. P. Huyghe, coauthor with L. Frank of The Big Splash, responded to SF#125 with three recent articles. Two reply to major criticisms of the icy-comet theory; the third gives geological and geophysical reasons why there must have been icy comets or some other substantial influx of water and carbon to the earth's surface down the geological eons. No instrumental artifacts. The basis for the 1985 claim of L. Frank et al that small, icy comets continually bombard the earth's upper atmosphere came from photos taken far above the earth from the Dynamics Explorer 1. Large, transient "holes" appeared in the atmosphere. These were attributed to vapor clouds created by small, icy comets. (SF#44) Critics claimed that these "holes" were no more than instrumental errors. L.A . Frank and J.B . Sigwarth have investigated this possibility and have rejected it. (Frank, J.A ., and Sigwarth, J.B .; "Atmospheric Holes: Instrumental and Geophysical Effects," Journal of Geo physical Research, 104:115, 1999. Cr. P. Huyghe) Navy radar search used incorrect cross sections. A more recent attack on the icy comets came from S. Knowles et al ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 118: Jul-Aug 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Broadside Against Small Icy Comets In a late-1997 issue, Geophysical Research Letters published a group of five papers that detailed five different lines of evidence that are inconsistent with the claim by L.A . Frank and J.B . Sigwarth that the earth is bombarded daily by 30,000 house-size icy comets. If such bombardment has really been occurring, scientists would have to rethink the origins of the earth's oceans, terrestrial life, and the formation of the solar system. No wonder the icy-comet hypothesis is strongly challenged! Three of the more interesting points made by this group of papers are as follows: Our moon could not escape the icy-comet bombardment. Roughly 1,000 craters 50 meters in diameter and splashes of debris 150 meters in diameter must occur each. There is no evidence that the moon is thus afflicted. Comets also carry the noble gases argon, krypton, and xenon. These gases should accumulate in the atmosphere as the comets disintegrate. The amounts of these gases actually measured are 10,000 times less than those the postulated bombardment would produce. The icy comets should break up near the earth and produce clouds of ice crystals. Sunlight reflected from such 30-ton clouds would be brighter than Venus and easily visible before they disperse. Such objects are rarely seen, implying that small icy comets do not exist in the numbers claimed. Preceding this series of five ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 79: Jan-Feb 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Mercury's polar caps and icy minicomets Mercury, closest planet to the sun, should be baked bone dry, seeing that equatorial temperatures reach 800 F. When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury in 1974, its camera eye reinforced the baked-cinder model. To everyone's surprise, recent radar images obtained with powerful earth-based antennas, revealed a highly reflective patch at Mercury's north pole. Could it be ice, for ice reflects radar waves well? Quite possibly, for when Mercury's polar temperatures are calculated, away from the sun's direct glare, they plunge to -235 F. This means that some of the water vapor in the planet's thin atmosphere might freeze out in the poles, creating ice or frost caps. Wouldn't Mariner 10 have seen such a remarkable deposit? Not necessarily, for the spacecraft viewed only half the planet and, if the 640 x 300-kilometer ice patch were covered with dust, it could have been invisible to the camera. But it would still be a bright patch on terrestrial radar scopes, because radars see through thin dust layers. So, polar ice is not physically impossible on Mercury, although it is defi nitely surprising so close to the sun. All that is needed is a little water in the planet's atmosphere. Mainstream thinking is that "passing comets and asteroids" might bequeath Mercury some of their H2O ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 44: Mar-Apr 1986 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Atmospheric Footprints Of Icy Meteors Serendipity triumphs again. From a dayglow experiment aboard NASA's satellite DE-1 (Dynamic Explorer-1 ) comes an unexpected discovery of considerable potential importance. Looking down on the earth, the DE-1 records the light emitted by atmospheric oxygen at altitudes of about 200-300 kilometers -- this is the so-called "dayglow." The experimenters, L. Frank, J. Sigwarth, and J. Craven, all at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, have found that their dayglow images are speckled with transitory dark spots. "According to Sigwarth, each hole expands like a drop of dye spreading out in a glass of water; within about 30 seconds the dayglow intensity drops by about 95 percent over an area of about 3,000 square kilometers. Then, over the next 3.5 minutes, the dayglow intensity increases toward its normal value as the hole grows to an area of about 25,000 km2 ." The Iowa group thinks that the holes or spots are created by meteors hitting the upper atmosphere because the spots follow the same time distribution as meteors. For example, they are more frequent during the well-known meteor showers. The theory is that the dark spots are formed when ice associated with the meteors is turned into water vapor, which reacts with the atmospheric oxygen producing the dayglow, in effect removing temporarily part of the light ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 112: Jul-Aug 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Icy minicomets caught by a satellite camera?A geophysicist really risks his or her reputation if he or she suggests that the earth is bombarded each by 20 house-size, icy minicomets. Well, L. Frank, University of Iowa, did just that in 1986. He was duly pilloried for his trouble. But, at the 1997 spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Frank presented new data to back up his previous assertions. The most startling of his new evidence came from a camera aboard a NASA satellite. Time-lapse photos imaged two objects streaking into the atmosphere over Poland and Germany. Frank identified these as clouds of water molecules from disrupted icy minicomets. The clouds had expanded from the house-size minicomets to clouds 3550 miles wide, weighing 20-40 tons. Frank thinks the minicomets come from a cloud of such objects orbiting the sun from earth out to Jupiter and beyond. Why don't they evaporate in the sunlight and near-vacuum of outer space? Perhaps, thought Frank, they are protected by a thin coating of carbon. (Roylance, Frank D.; "Space Snowballs Theory Gains Credence," Baltimore Sun, May 29, 1997. Also: Monastersky, R.; "Is Earth Pelted by Space Snowballs?" Science News, 151:332, 1997. Thanks to all who sent in clippings. There are too many to mention here. Frank' ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 60: Nov-Dec 1988 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Icy comets evaporating?To keep the scorecard up-to-date, we here record the probable obliteration of observations of excess hydrogen in the inner solar system. Mentioned in SF#58, this excess hydrogen was observed from Voyager 2, as it cruised toward Mars and looked backward towards earth. Al-though the amount of excess hydrogen detected was only l/10,000,000-th of that required by the small icy comets postulated by L. Frank et al, the result was surprising and gave a boost to the icy comet theory. Unfortunately, perhaps, the "excess" hydrogen evolved from a clerical error, when a student miscopied a figure during the data analysis. (No PhD for that student!) Frank's icy comets are in even deeper trouble, since independent analysis hint that his satellite data may be attributable to instrument noise. (Kerr, Richard A.; "Comets Were a Clerical Error," Science, 241:532, 1988. Also: Hall, D.T ., and Shemansky, D.E .; "No Cometesimals in the Inner Solar System," Nature, 334:417, 1988.) From Science Frontiers #60, NOV-DEC 1988 . 1988-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 52: Jul-Aug 1987 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Small Icy Comets And Cosmic Gaia L.A . Frank and his associates at the University of Iowa have speculated that the earth is continuously and copiously bombarded by small, icy comets. Not just a few now and then, but a steady rain so intense that over geological time some major geological consequences must ensue. (See SF#44.) Some observers commented that surely these scientists have thrown away their careers by suggesting something so ridiculous. But the data are there -- in the form of dark spots on satellite images of the earth's dayglow -- and late results continue to support this far-out interpretation, ridiculous or not. "The mass of these objects is estimated at about 108 gm each, and the total flux is about 107 small comets per year. If this flux is representative of the average flux over geologic time, then the water influx is sufficient to fill the Earth's oceans. The fluxes of these objects are also large for all the planets outside the orbit of Earth. Considerations of thermal stability imply that the fluxes of comets that impact Venus are considerably less. The outer giant planets may be significantly heated relative to solar insolation by the small-comet impacts. For example, the total energy input due both to solar insolation and comet impacts may be similar for Uranus and Neptune. Thus it is possible that the temperatures of these two planets are similar, even though ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 72: Nov-Dec 1990 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Icy minicomets not so dead!An item in the June 1990 issue of Scientific American is entitled "Death Watch." In it, J. Horgan plays dirges for four phenomena that have received considerable attention in Science Frontiers: (1 ) minicomets; (2 ) cold fusion; (3 ) abiogenic oil; and (4 ) the fifth force. (Apparently Benveniste's "infinite dilution" work has already been in terred.) (Horgan, John; "Death Watch," Scientific American, 262:22, June 1990.) But wait, there is a microwave flicker of life remaining in the minicomets. J.J . Olivero and his colleagues at Penn State have been monitoring the sky with a microwave radiometer in their search for emissions from high-altitude gases. During more than 500 days of observations, they detected 111 sudden bursts of water vapor. Olivero et al suggest that these bursts occur when small, icy comets vaporize at very high altitudes. These minicomets are of the same size (about 100 tons) and frequency (20 per minute over the whole atmosphere) as those predicted by L.A . Frank. Frank's icy comets have been received with about as much warmth as "cold fusion." One reason for the unpopularity of icy comets is that they would have provided sufficient water to fill the ocean basins, thus undermining the accepted view that our oceans derived ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 49: Jan-Feb 1987 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Halley's confounding fireworks "Serendipitous discovery in science so often comes as a surprise, even when it might reasonably be expected. Such was the case with Comet Halley in the wake of an observation program that dwarfed all preceding efforts. The surprises included sudden outbursts in the presumably steady vaporization of its icy nucleus and a periodic, complex pulsation of the comet's brightness. Whether this pulsation reflects the rotation of the nucleus, or some still unimagined phenomenon became a controversial focus of the recent meeting on the Exploration of Halley's Comet in Heidelberg." Some of the data presented and some of the attendees at this conference supported a rotational period of 2.2 days; others favored 7.4 days; a few liked a 2.2 -day period with a 7.4 -day wobble superimposed. (Kerr, Richard A.; "Halley's Confounding Fireworks," Science, 234:1196, 1986. Also: Campbell, Philip; "How Fast Does Halley Spin?" Nature, 324:213, 1986.) Halley's fireworks (visible outbursts) have also stimulated comet model-making. The latest is an icy-glue construction of sorts. See the accompanying figure and the accurate but not-particularlyenlightening caption. (Gombosi, Tamas I., and Houpis, Harry L.F .; "An Icy-Glue Model of Cometary Nuclei," Nature ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Earth's water not imported?That the earth is continuously bombarded by icy minicomets is unpopular in the Court of Science. Even less acceptable is the notion that over the eons these house-sized chunks of ice contributed substantially to our planet's inventory of water. In what will surely be hailed as the death knell of the icy comet theory is the discovery by K. Muehlenbachs, of the University of Alberta, and F. Robert and M Javoy, from the University of Paris, that the water contained in the earth's rocks, both ancient and recent, is isotopically different from the water found in meteorites. Meteoric water is assumed to be isotopically the same as cometary water. Conclusion: comets could not have contributed substantially to our planet's water inventory in the geological past. (Anonymous; "Earth's Water Did Not Come from Comets," New Scientist, p. 19, June 20, 1992.) Comment. Of course, the isotpic measurements have to be weighed against all the data supporting the icy comet theory Icy comets could, after all, be a recent phenomenon. Also, no one has ever actually analyzed a piece of cometary ice; it is simply assumed that it would be similar to meteoric water. From Science Frontiers #83, SEP-OCT 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 114: Nov-Dec 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects It can't be true because it violates our ideas!This was the collective opinion of many atmospheric scientists when a satellite experiment found approximately 50% more water vapor at an altitude of 75 kilometers than well-established theory predicted. That was back in 1991. Now, a second satellite experiment of different design has confirmed the existence of this "excess" water vapor. Most geophysicists are perplexed, to say the least. Not L. Frank, though, because these experiments are in line with his theory that the upper atmosphere is continuously pelted by house-size, fluffy, icy comets -- some 20 each minute. (SF#112) Frank asserts: "When you get that excess of water vapor up there, it just can't come from the Earth. It must come from space." Even so, other geophysicists are reluctant to accept Frank's icy comets -- that would be too much "crow" to eat! One point levied against Frank's icy comets is that they would introduce more than three times the amount of water vapor actually measured. M. Summers, a theoretician at the Naval Research Laboratory, summed up mainstream opinion: "There's definitely something very unusual going on in the mesosphere that we don't understand at all, but I'm not even close to saying this supports the small-comet hypothesis." (Kerr, ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 58: Jul-Aug 1988 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects One of the most astonishing discoveries of modern science!We take this title from P. Huyghe's recent overview of the "oceans from space" controversy, printed not surprisingly in Oceans . (See p.000.) As readers will recall, we have been following this debate for over two years. Rather than retrace all the details, it is sufficient to say that the scientific community has been generally negative and often condemnatory about L. Frank's assertion and evidence that each year some 10 million icy comets, each averaging sixty compact cars in weight, strike the earth's atmosphere and, in the fullness of time, help fill the ocean basins. In his article Huyghe reviews the considerable evidence that has accumulated supporting Frank's claim: The water in Halley's comet had the same abundances of two key isotopes as the earth's oceans; The rocket detection of unexpected amounts of water vapor in the upper atmosphere; The microwave detection of unusual water-vapor events in the upper atmosphere; The Lyman-alpha detection of hydrogen concentrated near the earth; and The photographic detection of small, incoming objects with the characteristics of the debated icy comets. (Huyghe, Patrick; "Oceans from Space -- New Evidence," Oceans , 21:9 , April 1988.) Item 5. has been reported in other publications: "Using a telescope with a moving field of view ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 58: Jul-Aug 1988 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A COSMIC CAUSE FOR THE OZONE HOLE?Wouldn't you know it? Now they are blaming the polar ozone holes on Frank's icy comets -- or something very much like them! M. Dubin and I. Eberstein, two NASA scientists think that small icy comets can account for the seasonal ozone hole and the mysterious polar strato spheric clouds that form during the winter. They propose that ozone molecules bond to tiny ice particles in the winter and, when spring arrives, solar ultra-violet radiation converts water (ice) plus ozone into oxygen and hydroxyl ions. (Anonymous; "A Cosmic Cause for the Ozone Hole?" Sky and Telescope, 75:465, 1988.) From Science Frontiers #58, JUL-AUG 1988 . 1988-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Antarctic ice sheets slipping?Geologists have generally assumed that the ponderous Antarctic ice sheets do not change their behavior rapidly. But, according to NASA's R. Bindschadler, an ongoing study of the Antarctic coast near the Ross Ice Shelf casts doubt upon this assumption of long-term stability. Measurements of one ice stream flowing down from the mountains to the sea in dicate a sudden unexplained, 20% reduction in speed over the past decade. Perhaps even more significant is that, even with this reduction in flow velocity, this particular ice stream carries ice into the sea 40% faster than ice accumulates up in the mountains. The sudden, rather large velocity change is alarming because it may signify widespread instability in the continent's icy mantle. Researchers state that there is even a chance that much of the Antarctic ice cap could collapse into the sea in the next few centuries -- a catastrophic event that would raise global sealevels by 6 meters! (Anonymous; "Antarctic Ice Potentially Unstable," Science News, 137:285, 1990.) Comment. In addition to looking at future consequences of collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, we should mark that what might happen in the future might also have happened in the past. Obviously, we refer to the often-discussed speculation that the Antarctic was nearly ice-free within historical times. In this connection, we cannot escape mentioning that remarkable ancient map of Piri Re'is that, some say, shows an icefree Antarctica, mapped presumably by ancient mariners. ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 136: JUL-AUG 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects 2000 CR105 and Planet X 2000 CR105 is a supercomet some 400 kilometers in diameter. It is one of hundreds of icy TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects) that normally populate the Kuiper Belt girdling the solar system just beyond the orbit of Neptune. The problem is that 2000 CR105 is not normal. Its orbit is highly eccentric, with an aphelion 13 times farther out than Neptune's . This massive object (probably mostly ice) takes 3175 years to circle the sun. 2000 CR105 is real; it has been photographed; it is not Mirror Matter; no one blames any terrestrial extinctions on it. Nevertheless, we can and must wonder how its orbit became so badly distorted. Often in past years, whenever astronomers detected cometary orbits gone awry, they invoked Planet X; that is, some undiscovered massive body plying the outer reaches of the solar system. Indeed, there have been several intense and unsuccessful searches for Planet X over the years. (See Chapter AX in The Sun and Solar System Debris.) History seems to be repeating itself with 2000 CR105. Astronomer B. Gladman proposes that 2000 CR105 was forced into its present eccentric orbit by an encounter with a Mars-size Planet X that now orbits the sun at a distance about 15 times that of Neptune. From the standpoint of celestial mechanics, this perturbation of 2000 CR105's orbit is certainly within the realm of possibility. But two associated ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 60: Nov-Dec 1988 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Ogam, Ogam, Everywhere Unbelievable Baalbek Astronomy Why Didn't Galileo Resolve Saturn's Rings? Asteroids That Turn Into Comets A New Face on Mars? Biology Anomalous Geographical Distribution of Diabetes Mellitus Purposeful Evolution? Lop-sided Evolution Update on the "infinite Dilution" Experiments Geology Mysterious Stone Rings Global Fire At the K-T Boundary Another "Cookie Cutter" Hole Collision/eruption/extinction/ Magnetic Reversal Geophysics Mystery Glow on the Sea Floor Airborne Observations of the Marfa Lights Spiral-circle Ground Patterns in Field Crops Icy Comets Evaporating? General How Genius Gets Nipped in the Bud ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 72: Nov-Dec 1990 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology The clovis police Birds of burden Astronomy Nature, hypothesis, and the big bang At last, a theory of everything! Biology 1989 SIGHTINGS OF OGOPOGO Hypermutation rather than Geology Baikal's deep secrets Is the arctic ice cover thinning? Impact crater beneath lake huron Wagnerian sands of the desert Geophysics Icy minicomets not so dead! CROP CIRCLE UPDATE: WHAT ARE "THEY" TRYING TO TELL US? UPWARDLY DIRECTED LIGHTNING FROM CLOUD TOPS Psychology HYPNOTIC SUGGESTION SUPERIOR TO SALICYLIC ACID General The belgian flying triangle updated ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 20: Mar-Apr 1982 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Something hot beneath small saturn-satellite surfaces Crater-density studies of the small, icy Saturn satellites Rhea, Dione, Mimas, and Tethys reveal important non-uniformities in crater distribution and age. The anomalies are so large that astronomers have concluded that these objects must have undergone considerable evolution after they were formed by accretion (the currently accepted mode of formation). Unfortunately these four satellites are so small that they could not have accommodated any reasonable energy source capable of causing the observed crustal evolution. The authors suggest strong local concentrations of radioactive heat generators rather than uniformly distributed radiogenic substances, such as those that helped mould the earth's surface. (Plescia, J.B ., and Boyce, J.M .; "Crater Densities and Geological Histories of Rhea, Dione, Mimas and Tethys," Nature, 295:285, 1982.) Comment. Interestingly enough, local concentrations of radioactivity have been discovered on the moon. From Science Frontiers #20, MAR-APR 1982 . 1982-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 79: Jan-Feb 1992 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology A TERRESTRIAL RIDDLE A MARTIAN RIDDLE Astronomy MERCURY'S POLAR CAPS AND ICY MINICOMETS Memories of 1913 Whence the x-ray background? Biology The louse line Siberian lake monster Those slippery (adult) eels Geology Deeply-buried life Black gold -- again Spooky spike Geophysics The ups and downs of spook hill Milky sea Revolving sphere of light Man-killer lightning A LUMINOUS-TUBE PHENOMENON CROP CIRCLES: IF SOME ARE HOAXES, ARE THEY ALL HOAXES? Psychology Telepathic rabbits Chemistry & Physics New kind of cold fusion ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 27: May-Jun 1983 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The solar-system dust bin For hundreds of thousands of years, miscellaneous rocky debris swirling around the sun has been falling upon the icy wastes of Antarctica. The motion of Antarctica's ice sheet carries these meteorites conveyor-belt fashion out towards the encircling seas. But where Antarctic mountains get in the way, the rocky cargo tends to get concentrated. Several thousand meteorites have already been picked up at these favored spots. In just a few brief summers of searching, these massive finds have posed unexpected questions. Here is a sampling. The terrestrial ages (times since arrival on earth) measure between 1,000 and 700,000 years, implying that the Antarctic ice sheet may be at least 700,000 years old. This is unfortunate for several proposed scenarios of recent catastrophism, which envision an iceless Antarctica. At least 20 amino acids appear in the more than 40 carbonaceous chondrites picked up with sterile equipment. These meteorites are dated as 4.5 billion years old, or 1 billion years older than the earliest terrestrial life found in the rocks. These finds highlight the old question: Did meteorites seed life on earth? The much-publicized "lunar" meteorite, supposedly blasted out of the moon's crust by asteroid impact, thence falling to earth, shows little evidence of mechanical shock. If this meteorite, with a composition so similar to the Apollo samples is not from the moon, where ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 44: Mar-Apr 1986 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology How the Incas Worked Stone Checking Out Those Australian Pyramids Astronomy Neptune's Partial Rings Space Spume Star Sludge Tunnelling Towards Life in Outer Space Biology Evolving on Half A Wing (And A Prayer?) Signals in the Night The Moon, the Stars, and Human Behavior Geology Squirrels As Measures of Geological Time Northwest Indian Tradition of A Large-scale Sea Inundation Of Dust Clouds and Ice Ages Geophysics Atmospheric Footprints of Icy Meteors Unusual Double Sun Unclassified Unidentified Flashing Object ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 112: Jul-Aug 1997 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology We've known it all along! Japanese mini-pyramids Astronomy A TWISTED COSMOS? Signals from the sun and, eventually (? ), other entities Biology You may become what you eat Dolphin refrigerators From the depths of the amazon Archea: tough and different Sea turtles: from one end to the other Geology Large rotating ice discs on ice-covered rivers The kind of fault you like to find Geophysics Icy minicomets caught by a satellite camera? Apparent circular lightning Pschedelic phenomenon Physics When like charges attract Cold-fusion pro-fusion Unclassified Computer con-fusion http://www.shakespeare.unduplicated ...
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... All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Star Sludge All of a sudden it seem that astronomers are finding dark -- even "charcoal-black" -- materials in unlikely places in the solar system. Three "sludgy" sites have been high-lighted in the recent literature. (1 ) Comets. "Black" comets certainly defy our expectations. Are all those pictures of white, flaming apparitions wrong? Not really. The comets approaching the sun are made visible by sunlight reflected from the gases and dust in the coma and tail, plus some direct emission. However, the heart of the comet, its nucleus, has long been considered a "dirty snowball"; that is, a mixture of dirt and ices. Now it appears that comets are more like "icy dirtballs"! And some of that dirt is pitch black. New measurments of the bare nuclei of comets, using a visual-infrared technique, find that the nuclei reflect as little as 2% of the incident sunlight. They are indeed charcoal black. Comet nuclei, according to W. Hartmann and his colleagues, are colored by a brownishblack primordial organic sludge, and have the appearance of "a very dark Hershey bar." The use of the adjective "organic" may be premature, but in light of the next item, maybe not. (2 ) Carbonaceous chondrites . This well-known class of meteorites sometimes appears tarry and is characterized by carbon contents of up to 2% and more. The Japanese have just reported the analysis of Yamoto 791198, a carbonaceous ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 70: Jul-Aug 1990 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects "TAIL WAGS DOG" IN SOLAR SYSTEM The Oort Cloud of comets hovering at the far frontiers of the solar system is, as we know from SF#57, not without its anomalies. Here, let us assume that it really does exist, even though we cannot see it. From a new book by I. Asimov (title below), we learn that this remote haze of icy fluff, the Oort Cloud, may really have about 90% of the angular momentum of the entire solar system. It was already sufficiently anomalous to discover that the planets possess fifty times the angular momentum of the much more massive sun. (See ABB3 in The Sun and Solar System Debris.) Astronomers have been attempting for years to explain this 50:1 split. Now, with the Oort Cloud apparently having ten times the angular momentum of the planets, the situation is much worse. According to Asimov, the solar-system angular momentum is split as follows: Oort Cloud 90% All of the planets 9.8 % The sun 0.2 % The total mass of the Oort Cloud is estimated to be roughly that of Saturn. The recent flyby of Halley's Comet created this dilemma. It was discovered that Halley was a chunk containing 140 cubic miles of ice - much larger than anticipated for this "typical" comet. If the estimated 2 trillion comets are, on the average, Halley' ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 118: Jul-Aug 1998 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Archeological revisionism Astounding undersea structure near okinawa More bones that don't belong The mysterious terras pretas Paradigm assaults from way down under Astronomy The "stealth" region of mars The day the laws of phsics changed Biology Lunacy in trees Two creations of life? Biological miscellany Geology The song of the earth Glitches in the terrestrial conveor belt Geophysics Unidentified light Phosphorescent rings and wheels Broadside against small icy comets Psychology Measuring beauty Monogrammic determinism Tactile ventriloquism ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 47: Sep-Oct 1986 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Oceans from outer space?Back in SF#44, we related how L.A . Frank, at the University of Iowa, had detected dark spots on satellite images of the earth's dayglow. Frank thought that the spots might be due to clouds of water vapor released as small, icy comets hit the atmosphere. P. Huyghe has recently written more about Frank's discovery, his theory, and its reception by the scientific community. "These comets are not occasional visitors, he [Frank] says, like the one that comes by every 76 years and -- lucky for us -- never actually drops in. No, these are very small, cometlike objects that enter our atmosphere at a rate of 20 per minute, he says. These comets, which he believes must contain about 100 tons of water apiece, vaporize on impact with the atmosphere and fall as rain or snow. Now that may seem like one sizeable cold shower, but on a yearly basis he says it's actually only a tiny fraction of the annual preciptation. Then again, over a span of 4.5 billion years, which is about how old the earth is, that's enough water, he says -- trumpets blaring -- to create the oceans." Naturally, such a theory is very disturbing because it runs counter to the widely accepted idea that the oceans were created by the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 126: Nov-Dec 1999 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology A PARADE OF EARLY VISITORS TO AMERICA Ancient stage design Astronomy It's all in the seeing It's all in the believing Biology Swimming up the wrong streams Knismesis and gargalesis Geology Flotsam on the great sand sea Geophysics Towering shafts of light Icy comets, oceans, life Psychology The number module The vegetable connection ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 47: Sep-Oct 1986 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A True Fish Story "It happened during a smelt storm in early spring with the Rhonda K foundering dead in the icy water amid terrifying six- and eight-foot waves off Lake Huron's Thunder Bay light near Alpena." Wait a minute! A SMELT STORM? "' Spookiest thing I even saw,' Stiles said of the small fish carried from the water by the winds. 'Something I never heard of before. Smelt started falling from the sky. Thousands of smelt falling like a silver rain, and thousands of gulls going after them. The gulls were all around our heads picking up the smelt.'" (Barton, John; "A True Fish Story," Ann Arbor News, July 24, 1986. Cr. C.R . Engholm.) From Science Frontiers #47, SEP-OCT 1986 . 1986-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... possible ignition of voluminous methane burps. 65-million years ago. This was the time of the well-publicized, but still hypothetical, asteroid impact. It is said to have wreaked havoc on our wounded planet and, especially, the dinosaurs. Volcanos spewed out vast lava fields and filled the air with greenhouse gases and dust. It was a bad time for many life forms. Actually, It may have been far worse than generally advertised. In addition to the volcanic activity and climate change, the shock of the asteroid impact could have been sufficient to destabilize the immense amounts of methane hydrate that have long been locked up, frozen and dormant, in oceanic sediments all over the world. According to this scenario, once the shock of the asteroid impact released the methane from its icy prison, it rose to the surface of the oceans in a world-wide burp. Methane, unfortunately for the dinosaurs and many other life forms, is highly flammable. Lightning could have ignited it almost immediately if it was concentrated enough. A colossal firestorm might have then enveloped the entire planet. The whole atmosphere could have been afire. This, according to B. Hurdle and colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory, who speculate that the dinosaur hegemony may ended suddenly in flames rather than in a long, drawn-out whimper. (Day, Michael; "Hell on Earth," New Scientist, p. 5, November 20, 1999) 55 million years ago. Ten million years after the dinosaurs may have roasted in a global firestorm, another methane burp may have ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 133: JAN-FEB 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Strange Snow Sculptures The most familiar snowflakes are those feathery, six-armed dendritic crystals. However, snow sometimes falls as needles and plates. In GWP3 in Tornados, Dark Days..., we also catalog three observations of conical snow. These conical forms seem to be aggregates of tapered needles of ice. However, none of the foregoing shapes can surpass in strangeness the "snowflake" in the accompanying illustration. Here we see the hexagonal symmetry retained in column form and again in the plates at each end of the icy dumbbell. What those peculiar iceworms projecting from the plates are is anyone's guess. (Kaiser, Jocelyn; "Snow Up Close," Science, 289:503, 2000. Comment. It is difficult enough to explain the formation of the common six-armed flakes; the worm-terminated dumbbells are even more puzzling. What sort of mechanism in the atmosphere can scuplt such complex shapes in prodigious quantities? From Science Frontiers #133, JAN-FEB 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy. Lobster . The journal of intelligence and political conspiracy (CIA, FBI, JFK, MI5, NSA, etc) Homeworking.com . Free resource for people thinking about working at home. ABC dating and personals . For people looking for relationships. Place your ad free. ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 51: May-Jun 1987 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Forests Frozen In Time Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic is only 700 miles south of the present North Pole. Little grows there today, but there is on these icy shores the remnant of a forest that flourished 45 million years ago, according to conventional geological dating of the strata. A University of Saskatchewan scientist, J. Bassinger, has been studying the 15-20 layers of stumps, some with diameters of 3 feet, and logs up to 30 feet long. Even rather blackish leaves survive in the soil. This once lush forest boasted trees like dawn redwoods and water firs; being analogous to Florida's Cypress Swamp in the Everglades. So excellent is the preservation of the forest that its wood cuts as if it were recent lumber and burns readily. (Howse, John; "Forestry Frozen in Time," Maclean's Magazine, p. 55, September 8, 1986. Cr. B. Ickes) Comment. Question 1: Even if the earth was warmer 45 million years ago, could a tropical-type forest survive the nearly six months of total darkness at Axel Heiberg Island? Question 2: Can wood be preserved so well for so long? In the postulated warmer climate, there must have been many chemical and biological agents to promote rotting. Also relevant is the discovery, reported below, that wood that floats and burns with ease has been found in Antarctica. This Antarctic ...
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... possibility of their being related to meteors, I reconsidered this relation after eliminating other possible causes such as reflections from aircraft lights and tricks of vision. Their meteor-like behavior suggested that perhaps these events might be caused by clouds of exceedingly small meteoroids, visible only because of their numbers and compact grouping. Because such a formation would be unlikely to be maintained long in space, it appeared necessary that the particles involved must have maintained some weak physical contact until just prior to becoming visible. Perhaps some type of 'cosmic dust bunny,' disrupted by air resistance, might be the cause of these events." These moving patches of light also resemble the "auroral meteors" cataloged under GLA3 in Lightning, Auroras, Nocturnal Lights. Physically, they might be related to the small, icy comets postulated by L.A . Frank to account for the transient "holes" seen in satellite ultraviolet images of the earth. (See SF#60 and #72 for more.) (Gallagher, John S.; "Diffuse Luminous Objects Having Angular Velocities Similar to Meteors," Strolling Astronomer , 36:115, 1992. Cr. P. Huyghe) References. The above phenomenon is cataloged in AYO8 under "Nebulous Meteors" in our book: The Sun and Solar System Debris. Ordering information for this book and Lightning, Auroras (mentioned above) may be found here . From Science Frontiers #86, MAR-APR 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... exogenous; that is, derived from extraterrestrial materials. Once again, comets seem to be the culprits. C.F . Chyba has examined the lunar impact record and derived an estimate of the total mass of objects impacting the moon during the (hypothetical) period of heavy bombardment 3.8 to 4.5 billion years ago. This allowed him to calculate the mass influx for the earth during this period. His conclusion: if only about 10% of the incoming mass consisted of comets (mostly ice), the earth would have acquired all its ocean water. (Chyba, Christopher F.; "The Cometary Contribution to the Oceans of Primitive Earth," Nature, 330:632, 1987.) Comment. Frank claims that the earth today is continually bombarded by small icy comets, which down the eons may have kept the ocean basins full. So, we have two possible extraterrestrial sources of oceans -- both of a cometary nature. It was only yesterday that the idea of ice surviving in outer space was ridiculed; no one even dreamed that our oceans could be composed of space ice! From Science Frontiers #56, MAR-APR 1988 . 1988-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 61: Jan-Feb 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Sodium Surges Over Illinois An advanced lidar device, located at Urbana, Illinois, has been sending pulses of light up into the atmosphere and measuring the reflections from atmospheric atoms and molecules. To the researchers' surprise, this instrument detected sudden appearances of clouds of sodium atoms at about 85 kilometers altitude. The clouds quickly dissipate, but where do they come from? The best guess is that their source is meteors vaporizing in the upper atmosphere. (Raloff, Janet: "Sudden Sodium Surges Seen over Illinois," Science News, 134: 238, 1988.) Comment. Could these sodium clouds have any connection with the controversial icy comets? From Science Frontiers #61, JAN-FEB 1989 . 1989-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... . Both cold fusion and the re-cent excitement over high-temperature superconductivity demonstrate that a largely unexplored universe exists in the electrochemistry of the solid state. Favorite theories lie in shambles; faces are very red; the most elite of our scientific institutions were caught with blinders on! Beyond these amusements, the practical import for energy production is enormous, and who know what else will eventuate? But what about science itself? First, cold fusion will doubtless generate a brand new crop of anomalies which we are only able to guess at now. Pertinent to our effort to catalog anomalies, it is possible that cold fusion may be occurring deep in the earth giving rise not only to heat but the upwelling flux of helium-3 , now called "primordial" perhaps in error. The icy planets Jupiter and Saturn generate heat, too, and may also be cold fusion reactors! Even the sun, which is undeniably hot (at least on the surface!), may be fusing light elements in ways we have yet to grasp in our stellar models. After all, no one has yet explained that deficit in solar neutrinos! There will be egg on a lot of faces if our notions of stellar energy generation are widly in error. We may be overreacting here; but we predict with confidence that the future will bring a good many scientific papers that begin with those all-toofamiliar words, "We now know that..." If physicists must now develop a new appreciation of electrochemistry, should not the biologists, too? At the risk of going too ...
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... The point here is that time-of-solidification may not be the same as time-of-fall. At stake is the prevailing theory, now dogmatically proclaimed, that tektites are created when a large asteroid impacts the earth, ejecting molten droplets of rock which shower back to earth as solidified tektites. No one has ever found a suitably large crater ( 200 miles in diameter) assignable to the Australasian tektite strewn field. Nevertheless, the impact model prevails; and the young geological age of the tektites is dismissed as erroneous. A Soviet scientist, E.P . Izokh, has recently proposed a radically different scenario that would produce both the young and old dates. If a moon, or Jupiter, or some similar body, explosively ejected the glassy tektites, embedded in an icy cometary body some 700,000 years ago, the tektites could, after cruising through space for millenia, have fallen to earth recently and over a wide area. Thus, both geologists and geophysicists would be satisfied! (Sullivan, Walter; "New Answer Proposed for Tektites: A Comet," New York Times, November 28, 1989. Cr. R. Adams) Comment. Russian scientists have long suggested that comets may be ejected from solar-system bodies and have been laughed at by American scientists for their trouble! Reference. For more on tektite anomalies, refer to category ESM3 in our catalog: Neglected Geological Anomalies. Ordering information here . An Ablation-sculpted australite, one type of Australian tektite. From Science Frontiers #67, JAN-FEB 1990 . 1990 ...
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... iridium) and encounters with asteroids and cometary tails (too infrequent to account for the long periods of high dust levels). Rather, the dust source may have been the same event that created the recently discovered dust ring between Mars and Jupiter, which is believed to be only a few tens of thousands of years old. The nature of the "event" is not specified. (LaViolette, Paul A.; "Evidence of High Cosmic Dust Concentrations in Late Pleistocene Polar Ice (20,000-14,000 Years BP)," Meteoritics, 20:545, 1985.) References. See our catalog volume The Sun and Solar System Debris for more on the flotsam and jetsam of outer space. This book is described here . Also see the following item on "icy meteors" which is also pertinent. From Science Frontiers #44, MAR-APR 1986 . 1986-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 119: Sep-Oct 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Auroral Maps!Auroral arcs are created by electrical currents flowing high in the ionosphere -- usually higher than 100 kilometers according to current [! ] thinking. Therefore, scientists do not really expect to see terrestrial topography reflected in auroral geometry. Nevertheless, T. Pulkkinen of the Finnish Meterological Institute reported to the May 1998 meeting of the American Geophysical Union that coastlines somehow coax auroral arcs to align with them. In some 200 hours of observation along the Norwegian coast, there were nine clear-cut cases where auroral arcs lined up northsouth directly above the coastline. These alignments lasted 5-10 minutes. L. Frank (of icy-comet notoriety) confirmed this effect with observations from NASA's Polar satellite. Sometimes auroral arcs aligned themselves parallel to the Greenland coast for hundreds of kilometers. Auroral arcs that fanned out east-to-west seemed to hit a barrier when they reached the Greenland coastline; they seemed to be deflected by it, even though the coast was more than 100 kilometers beneath them. (Hecht, Jeff; "Leading Lights," New Scientist, p. 16, May 30, 1998.) From Science Frontiers #119, SEP-OCT 1998 . 1998-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... ., to perpetuate and perhaps improve itself are highly anomalous, because the Gaia hypothesis is far out of the scientific mainstream. (Lovelock, James E.; "Geophysiology," American Meteorological Society, Bulletin, 67:392, 1986.) Comment. Our secret purpose here is to use the Lovelock article as an excuse to out-Gaia Gaia! Lovelock's article plus those preceding on Martian life, cosmic life, "geocorrosion," etc., made us wonder if Gaia as a closed terrestrial system (see diagram), is not too limited. If Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are correct, the diagram should have a box labelled "outer space," with an inwardly directed arrow carrying life-forms (Hoyle's space viruses and bacteria), meteorites, icy comets, etc. Likewise, the earth can contribute life-forms to the cosmos via impact and volcanic ejecta. Where does geocorrosion fit in? Life-as-a -whole could control terrestrial magnetic field reversals geochemically. This sounds more and more like science fiction, but life-as-a -whole must "want" to evolve to make itself more adaptable and capable of controlling and exploring the cosmos. (These are anthropomorphic desires we assign to life-as-awhole, which may have completely different objectives!) By occasionally reducing the earth's field to zero, bursts of space radiation would be admitted to stir the earth's pot of genes. We could also work in "selfish genes" and God, but it is time to go back ...
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... ready to chow down. Problem: What can you eat? A quick survey of the food chain isn't promising; you're it. Do you simply starve to death, ending your world's brief experiment with life? Not if a rust-colored substance called tholin is within reach. Tholin may have served as breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the first life on Earth." The tholins are hard, red-brownish substances made of complex organic compounds. They do not exist naturally on earth, because our present oxidizing atmosphere blocks their synthesis. However, tholins can be made in the lab by subjecting mixtures of methane, ammonia, and water vapor to simulated lightning discharges. Conditions like this probably exist many places in the universe. In fact, the icy moons of the outer solarsystem planets appear ideal places for tholin manufacturing. What would eat such stuff? Lab tests show that many kinds of bacteria love it and thrive on it. (Chaikin, Andrew; "First Foods," Discover, p. 18, February 1991.) Comment. A purposeless universe that just happens to create a substance for primitive life? Strange that things should be this way! From Science Frontiers #75, MAY-JUN 1991 . 1991-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 127: Jan-Feb 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects What's Cooking On Europa?Data streaming back to earth from the Galileo spacecraft encode a curious fact about Europa, one of Jupiter's large, Galilean satellites. The nighttime flow of heat from Europa's polar regions is 1 watt/meter2 higher than can be accounted for by all known mechanisms, such as the tidal heating created as Jupiter's powerful gravitational field flexes the satellite's integument. (Anonymous; "Cozy Nights," New Scientist, p. 27, June 5, 1999.) Comment. What is happening beneath Europa's icy surface? "Something wonderful"? Recall that in the film 2010, humans were "given" all worlds except Europa. Was A.C . Clarke prescient again? From Science Frontiers #127, JAN-FEB 2000 . 1997 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 49: Jan-Feb 1987 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Radar glories on jupiter's moons "Three ice-covered moons of Jupiter, in comparison with rocky planets and the Earth's moon, produce radar echoes of astounding strengths and bizarre polarizations. Scattering from buried craters can explain these and other anomalous properties of the echoes. The role of such craters is analogous to that of the water droplets that create the apparition known as 'the glory,' the optically bright region surrounding an observer's shadow on a cloud." Eshleman, Von R.; "Radar Glory from Buried Craters on Icy Moons," Science, 234:587, 1986.) From Science Frontiers #49, JAN-FEB 1987 . 1987-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... den Berg, place the event between the Kuriles and Sakhalin. The altitude of the center of the halo at the maximum observed size is estimated to have been greater than 200 miles, and the diameter of the halo is estimated to have been at least 380 miles. It seems unlikely that a groundbased explosion could produce this kind of effect. It is surprising to us that no official data have been provided by government agencies and that such a significant observation from a region of demonstrated military sensitivity was, and still remains, a mystery." (McKenna, Daniel L., and Walker, Daniel A.; "Mystery Cloud: Additional Observations," Science, 234:412, 1986.) Evidently the mystery cloud mentioned above is only one in a long series: "Large icy clouds, similar to plumes of gas that rise over volcanoes, have appeared over islands along the coast of the Soviet Union during the past several years, baffling experts, who cannot explain what they are or what causes them. "The clouds dissipate in a few hours vanishing as mysteriously as they appear. "Among the plumes are a series of massive clouds that during the past four years have periodically swelled over Novaya Zemlya, the Arctic island long used by the Soviets for nuclear weapons tests. "However, there appears to be no correlation between the clouds and known Soviet tests, which are usually detected by Western governments. Further, non-governmental scientists said the 200-mile-long plumes appear to be many times larger than the largest conceivable nuclear explosion could produce." ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 52: Jul-Aug 1987 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Costa rica's neglected stone spheres The calico debate, plus a little editorializing Astronomy Small icy comets and cosmic gaia Carbon in a new comet Meteorites also transport organic payloads Supernova confusion and mysteries "COMPACT STRUCTURES": WHAT NEXT? Biology Nose news Checklist of apparently unknown animals New vertebrate depth record Aggressive mimicry Parasites control snail behavior Geology Do large meteors/comets come in cycles? Complexities of the inner earth Geophysics Concentrated source of lightning in cloud More carolina waterguns More moodus sounds Inside a texas tornado Ship enveloped by false radar echo Psychology Dowsing skeptics converted Do dreams reflect a biological state? ...
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... Magnetic Ripple Hints Gaspra Is Metallic," Science, 259: 176, 1993.) At the low end of the density spectrum, we now find that Pluto's moon, Charon, and some of Saturn's moons have very low densities (1 .2 -1 .4 ), meaning they are probably mostly water ice. Such density figures come from direct observation of these objects' volumes combined with mass estimates from their orbital dynamics. (Crosswell, Ken; "Pluto's Moon Is a Giant Snowball," New Scientist, p. 16, November 21, 1992.) Comment. How did this curious mix of ice and iron objects originate? Did some ancient collision demolish a planet with an iron core (like the earth"s ) and an icy exterior? From Science Frontiers #86, MAR-APR 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 53: Sep-Oct 1987 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Three Planetary Notes From Saturn. Micrometeorites constantly chip away at Saturn's C-ring. Using current micrometeorite-flux estimates, the age of the C-ring is between 4.4 and 67 million years. Compared to the purported age of the solar system, 4.5 billion years, Saturn's C-ring (and perhaps the other rings, too) is a brand-new feature. Where did it come from? Is it related to the icy comets that seem to be raining down steadily on the earth's atmosphere? (Northrop, T.G ., and Connerey, J.E .P .; "A Micrometeorite Erosion Model and the Age of Saturn's Rings," Icarus, 70:124, 1987.) From Mars. Inside the vast Valles Marineris Canyon complex, Viking Orbiter photos have picked out wind-blown patches of dark material. These patches are strung out along faults for some 200 kilometers. Astronomers believe they are volcanic vents, which are a scant few million years old. (Anonymous; "Recent Volcanism on Mars?" Sky and Telescope, 73:602, 1985.) Comment. Another of the surprisingly large number of youthful features in the solar system. From Europa. The surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's large Galilean satellites, seems to be covered with a relatively smooth veneer of ice. Beneath this frigid ...
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... the microorganisms that would identify the ice chunks as falling off aircraft with leaky toilets. One frozen projectile hit an automobile, but the driver was not hurt; another glanced off the shoulder of an elderly woman living in Almeria. As to be expected, the Spanish news-papers played the phenomena for all they could. Also to be expected were a few fraudulent reports. It was all great fun, but scientific explanations for the bona fide hydrometeors are lacking. (Anonymous; "Fortean Ice," New Scientist, p. 5, January 29, 2000. We also referred to several items posted on the Web. Cr. E. Murphy and COUD-I .) Comment. It is extremely rare for ordinary meteorites to hit humans or their structures. Yet, in this icy Spanish fusillade involving only a small handful of ice chunks there were two humans Involved. Suspicious! From Science Frontiers #128, MAR-APR 2000 . 1997 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy. Lobster . The journal of intelligence and political conspiracy (CIA, FBI, JFK, MI5, NSA, etc) Homeworking.com . Free resource for people thinking about working at home. ABC dating and personals . For people looking for relationships. Place your ad free. ...
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... Frontiers ONLINE No. 125: Sep-Oct 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Two Non-Falls Sometimes things that are predicted to fall or respond dutifully to gravity's dictates do not. No house-size snowballs. Back in 1985, L. Frank saw dark spots on satellite images of the earth's atmosphere. He interpreted them as huge splotches of water created by incoming cometary snowballs. (SF#112, 114, 118, and earlier) Although some other data supported Frank's theory, many scientists scoffed. After some mildly acrimonious debate, a consensus decided that the spots on the satellite photos were merely instrument artifacts. Any lingering doubts as to Frank's house-size snowballs or "icy minicomets" impacting our atmosphere have been dispelled by a radar search by S. Knowles and his colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory. Using the Naval Space Surveillance System's powerful radar, their scans of the upper atmosphere detected nothing resembling giant snowballs. According to Frank's estimates of the flux of incoming minicomets, the radar should have seen 800-5 ,000 of them. If Frank responds, we'll let you know. This may be the end of this decade-long debate. (Anonymous; "No Snow Show," New Scientist, p. 25, June 12, 1999.) Where water and vehicles run uphill. "Chinese scientists are baffled by a slope in north-western Gansu province where water runs up the incline rather than down ...
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... The same New Scientist article supports the above speculation as follows: "Calculations show that more than enough deuterium finds its way into the upper mantle by this route (seawater in subduction zones) to account for the heat emitted by the Earth's core, although the heat obviously comes from other sources as well. The rate of fusion of deuterium nuclei required to produce the observed rations of helium-3 to helium-4 in rocks, diamonds and metals is similar to that observed by Jones in his experiments with electrolytes. Tritium can also be a product of the fusion of deuterium. Jones and his group say that the tritium detected in the gases from volcanoes is further evidence of cold fusion." Jones has also wondered whether Jupiter's excess heat could be generated deep within the icy planet via cold fusion. (Anonymous; "Rocks Reveal the Signature of Fusion at the Centre of the Earth," New Scientist, p. 20, May 6, 1989.) From Science Frontiers #64, JUL-AUG 1989 . 1989-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... DISTURBANCES GSW1 Unidentified Air Waves GSW2 Earthquake-Generated Air Waves GSW3 Meteor-Generated Air Waves Ionoquakes Eclipse-Generated Air Waves GW WEATHER PHENOMENA GWC UNUSUAL CLOUDS GWC1 The White-Sky Phenomenon GWC2 Cloud Arches GWC3 Polar Bands GWC4 Miniature Thunderclouds GWC5 Noisy Clouds GWC6 Noctilucent Clouds GWC7 Ring Clouds GWC8 Thunderclouds Affecting the Ionosphere GWC9 Circular Holes in Cloud Decks GWC10 Anomalous Cloud Lines GWC11 Dispersal of Clouds by the Moon GWC12 The Morning Glory Phenomenon and Other Roll Clouds GWC13 Long, Hollow, Cylindrical Clouds GWC14 Cloud Spokes Radiating from Thunderclouds GWC15 Excess of Ice Crystals in Cumulus Clouds GWC16 Cloud Brightness Changes GWC17 Anomalous High-Altitude Haze Green Clouds [GWH] Bright-Night Phenomenon High-Altitude Layers of Material Natural Sodium Clouds Bromine Pulses Arctic Plumes Stratospheric Water Flow and Reservoirs Miscellaneous Unexplained Clouds Holes in the Ionosphere (Icy Comets) Ozone Holes Ozone Clouds GWD DARK DAYS, FOGS, AND OTHER OBSCURATIONS GWD1 Dark Days GWD2 Pogonips and Other Ice Fogs GWD3 Mists and Epidemics GWD4 Dry Fogs and Dust Fogs GWF FALLS GWF1 Ice Falls or Hydrometeors GWF2 Stone Falls GWF3 Sulphur/Pollen Falls GWF4 Falls of Miscellaneous Inorganic Substances GWF5 The Fall of Manna GWF6 Unusual Falls of Hay and Leaves GWF7 Gelatinous Meteors or Pwdre Ser GWF8 Prodigious Falls of Web-Like Material (Angel Hair) GWF9 Falls of Miscellaneous Organic Substances GWF10 Fish Falls GWF11 Falls of Frogs and Toads GWF12 Insect Falls GWF13 Bird Falls GWF14 Falls of Miscellaneous Living Animals Sewage Falls Falls of Liquids and Goo GWH LARGE STORM SYSTEMS GWH1 Ozone in Hurricanes GWH2 Hurricane Geographical Anomalies GWH3 Thunderstorm Systems Hypercanes Unusually Intense Storms Large-Scale Oscillations of the Atmosphere Wind Storms in the ...
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