Ep052 Meteor Crater Blast Wave / Monumental Erosion -Kosmographia The Randall Carlson Podcast

this is cosmographia the randall carlson [Music] podcast [Music] and welcome back ladies and gentlemen to cosmographia the randall carlson podcast we are joined by all the usual suspects this time mike is back with us how you doing mike hey buddy gives us the wave the normal guy wave hi there guys brad how are you doing i'm good man i'm good yeah good all right i know you guys don't care but black and gold black and gold pittsburgh steelers eight and oil okay the pittsburgh yeah never mind yeah yeah you don't care enough all right well last week we talked about our trip randall we're going to keep doing that a little bit before we get into some other topics yeah and i think well there was several auxiliary topics that could come out of the trip things we didn't really even hit upon which we're going to be covering you know from time to time in future podcasts because there was a lot there um you know we kind of just went through a sightseeing portfolio last week we didn't really get into discussion too deep about um the forces at work so that would be a continuing theme us but yeah there was a couple more things i mean you had a really beautiful panorama of meteor crater kyle and i would like to say though that after after spending that week on the road and seeing all that stuff seeing valley of the gods the moki dugway meteor crater seeing rock art canyon stuff man i was so out there in the cosmos that being back here being on a podcast seeing normal guy again it's just helping me to kind of come back to earth so yes thank you mike for that you're welcome the reality of an election cycle yeah we always i think those of us who get out there into the fringes occasionally we do need to check in and have some kind of a substrate of reality that's right as normal as normal people recognize it that is i'm happy to provide a reference point yeah that's yeah so a lot of people have been wondering about what is quiet guy mike really there for and this is i want to just so we're clear on that because mike mike is the scale man for you know human psychology yeah that's it these silver tether the three on the top from what i know so far do have occasions where they might get way out there yeah think of mike as like the control group right yeah the control group that's him that's right well so that you know when we're wondering about like what are the rest of normal earth people doing what are they like then we have mike yeah we have a good reference they like mike yeah we have our so now that we've clarified that maybe kyle you could show us that great panorama of meteor crater and the yeah this is not bad mars that is awesome yeah yeah there's how many shots did you take to do that uh my phone has a panorama setting so you turn it on and it's like you're taking a video as you as you move the pan the phone yeah i mean you can just go all the way in a circle or as far as you need to and stop and no stitching necessary that's right that's very cool yeah so that's you know obviously looking into the crater um and that's from like one of the highest points in the resort there are yeah there's a circular area there with a telescope where you can look down in there yeah and what i particularly like about this picture is you can really clearly see the uplifted rim right and how it's raised above the desert floor by what maybe a couple of hundred feet yeah it's i saw i would assume yeah at least uh so this is from let me see well and the in the the person in the right black shirt there it kind of looks like they're holding onto a book or something but that's actually a platform a lower observation deck with some uh you know not binoculars but some siding equipment to point out some things in the bottom so yeah we we helped randall did probably a 20 25 minute uh presentation down that little observation deck down there yeah that's good you zoomed it in there yeah yeah those are the walkways yeah people down there that's the lower so just for clarity this is not a giant holding holding a a that's right he's not holding a model of people standing on a platform that's actually either he's a giant or he's got some little miniature people that he's that's right yeah but when you zoom out yeah that's what it looks like looks like he's looking at a map or something and then you look close and there's there's little hominids on it so this one is when we left we pulled over and looked back and and this is a a slight panorama as well uh but that's just to get the uplift you can see it out there yeah that's the rim out there the rim of the crater and we pulled over here to look at the this is i don't know maybe a mile from it or at least yeah oh yeah yeah and we pulled that entrance road is five miles long you don't realize it i know yeah it's five miles but we we were we were looking for a good area to pull over to kind of look at the look at the ground so that's what we were doing there but unless you unless you know that that's out there you have no idea that that's what's on the horizon but once you've been there and you know that that's there and then you see it it's uh it's pretty stunning and that was my my first experience my wife and i drove to it russ suggested it we were driving back from california and he was like man you got to stop by here on your way back um so we went and we were driving down the road and i'm like where's the hole i just you know i didn't know anything about crater structure or anything at that time and it finally you know i'm seeing this mountain in the in the background getting bigger and bigger and i'm like wait a minute and when i finally realized that that's what it was it blew my mind for sure i'm looking here at my uh one of my references uh which is a paper i think i'll come back to by david a crane who back in 1997 did a study on the um the forces involved in the creation of meteor crater and he does here give that that the rim is 60 meters so that's right at 200 feet yeah yeah above the desert um yeah he said that's a good climb the 600 foot depth does that include that 200 feet i wonder the 200 foot rim yeah um that's a good good question it it seems like yeah they would measure the depth from the inside edge because yeah it'd be from the inside yeah yeah so he gives here it's the size excuse me of a crater forming impact event that is expected to occur once every 1600 years whoa really yeah which is interesting and and what year was that written 1997. wow so that those that's probably increased then i would think so in other words the span of time actually got less less yeah since then yeah yeah and most of them probably aren't uh iron rich nickelodeon right that was my going to be my next point yeah there's far more abundant low density objects of that size that wouldn't make complete the passage through the atmosphere to blast a hole in the ground yeah ah what we've been talking about is tunguska yeah so tunguska may have been the most recent object of that type yeah um so i imagine the hole that it makes in the atmosphere looks a lot like that briefly right like that's a frozen hole in a solid material but as like the bolide or something is coming in and explodes in the atmosphere you probably if you could see the atmosphere well yeah and it would have be a very transient event right very transient but it would the structure would probably be very similar to the frozen structure we see in the solid and you would have a similar transient crater in an oceanic impact right yeah but of course it would only last from seconds to a couple of minutes depending on the diameter but it's going to when it impacts into the ocean it's going to displace a lot of water and create this transient space probably a vacuum right but at some point that water is going to rush back in um and that's actually been given a name it's called the resurge wave we've mentioned that before the research wave yeah that's right and i think we have to if we're talking getting back to the subject which we will be perennially getting back to which is the idea of impacts into that great ice sheet that is one of the things we have to be kind of thinking about um is this the research wave there would be a research wave uh undoubtedly have to be uh you know so yeah at some point this the scenario we need serious modeling of a of a uh ice sheet impact scenario right yeah an ice sheet impact would also be transient but a little bit it would be less so it'd be in between the water and the ground correct correct yeah yeah i also remember i also remember reading that uh in terms of just in terms of energy absorption for the uh for the earth itself or for the biosphere or whatever you would call it the range the area between the ground and the sky in terms of energy absorption from an impact you get more from a water impact than you do from the ground because a lot of it from a ground impact into solid ground a lot of the energy can actually go back out into space if it's big enough but with a water impact the research wave comes back over the crater before most of the energy can be reflected back out and so the water absorbs all of it which results in all that energy ending up in the biosphere which i found really interesting yeah well then what would be which so then where would an ice sheet impact fit in there yeah i don't know i remember reading it about the difference between a ground and a water impact but yeah i guess an ice sheet impact would might be somewhere in the community in fact it's going to be very complex because a you're going to have vaporization you're going to have melting you're going to have mechanical fracturing of the ice you're going to have a lot of things going on yeah that's going to imagine it would be somewhere in between in terms of energy absorption it you know it must be it would be the same way as it would be in between it like it wouldn't be as much reflection back out into space as a regular ground impact but it would be yeah well and think about that reflection in terms of the central uplift in a in a large act event large astra bling it's almost like yeah that's what's happening the energy is being rebounded right yeah and it's uplifting first it compresses but then it's almost like the land bounces back yeah and rises up and and it's typically in a plastic state as it's coming back up and as it's coming back up at some point it'll finally solidify and there you've got that central uplift peak but we don't have that in meteor crater because it's not big enough right so there might be there could well there could be one right but it may be covered in sediment is that possible i don't think so i don't think so so so how old is meteor crater and how big would the objective field be well how about let's get into that a little bit the the dating of it here now this of course 1997 he gives it as a 49 000 plus or minus 3 000 years but i've seen some pretty widely divergent dates on it including as young as 20 to 25 000 years yeah and in the museum we went there they said that it had recently been dated as far back as maybe 62. yeah so yeah it's hard to tell so it's not millions of years no no it's very young no no no it is definitely not millions of years what about the objective field okay well um it does say here um in this paper which is sort of now taken as the definitive paper on the on the forces involved in the impact he says here uh there were coniferous woodlands at the time so to determine how this event may have affected the environment surrounding the crater the topography vegetation and animal life that existed at the time of the impact they've reconstructed they've modeled what the environment was and then what the uh effects of the impact would have been on those the animal life the vegetation and so on um so uh says that the air blast would have flattened the coniferous forest out to 16 to 22 kilometers so 22 kilometers is about 13 to 14 miles so that actually is fairly pretty much ballpark of the tunguska right so we're understand that that was about how far away winslow was so the little town on the interstate would have just gotten barely affected there at 13 15 miles yeah yeah shockwave would have nailed it but well that would have been it it would have stopped knocking the trees down 16 miles away but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be doing a lot of damage i think like right i mean yeah probably could still knock people down yeah you know a a a a blast wave that's going to knock down a two-foot tree is going to easily knock down a person yeah yeah and um unless it's brad he's pretty he's pretty strong pretty staunch so in the krill paper he gives i remember reading this years ago um harvey harlow ninja who was considered one of the first comatologists comet experts of the 20th century while you're sitting there kyle you could pull up his bio but i'm going to read a um a quote by niniger from way back in 1956 would have been arizona's meteor crater past present and future and it is 232 pages and they have it in the american meteorite museum of sedona arizona and so this is what ninja had to say and and even though it was written in 1956 it's still reasonably accurate depiction of what the events would have been so he says that the grazing bands of deer elk and antelope face southwest into the roaring wind as twilight deepens across the grassy plain suddenly the fields are lighted with the brilliance of noonday a deafening swishing roar from out of the northern sky brings each head erect and frightened eyes watch as 20 miles away a giant blazing sun screams downward spewing an exploding trail of fiery sparks as if from a raging blast furnace a blinding flash a billowing fountain of flame and a swirling blazing mushroom cloud shoots skyward into the stratosphere 5 10 15 miles and up it goes while a deadly pawl of smoke and dust covers the spot where the blazing sun dived to its doom the wide eyes stare their terror stricken owners frozen into statues sharp ears strained forward to catch the faintest sound of the momentarily quiet air but then a searing blast of heat and wind the straining ears are deaf the sharp eyes sightless bulges on the crushed and roasted heads the herds have vanished in a stench of burning hair and flesh and on this charred grass so lightly green like twisted blackened hulks insensible to roaring wind into the warm drizzle of tiny molten droplets which are blanketing the land and 20 miles away steam and smoke swirl from the gaping mile wide hole and from the mountain of shattered rocks and twisted bits of metal that now strew the land very melodramatic well mike i'm sure that if you were standing 20 miles away and witnessed it firsthand you would be considering it a fairly melodramatic event in your life well okay fair points okay so yeah i've got to wonder mike how would you describe it if you had witnessed this from 20 miles away as a journalist how how do normal people exp describe such things mike uh normal people for an event like this is just a casual everyday occurrence yeah i think my reaction would be more like holy mike now come on why watch the language there that's perfect so uh yeah flattened trees within a 16 to 22 kilometer radius that's going back to to the paper itself david david crane's paper uh would have damaged the trees over an area of up to 8 500 square kilometers so right again right there in the same ballpark no because tenguska was about 800 square miles 820 square miles about 2000 square kilometers yeah of course that that's the area where the old growth forest was was knocked down yeah here he's saying that perhaps the area of trees flattened would have been about 4 100 square kilometers trees damaged 8 hundred square kilometers yeah uh hey this is cool uh this is the uh wikipedia page for harvey nininger yep january 17th 1887 to march 1st 1986 harvey ninja was an american meteoritist meteoriticist meteoriticist and educator and although he was self-taught he revived interest in scientific in the scientific study of meteorites in the 1930s and assembled the largest personal collection of meteorites up to that time self-taught that's cool well sometimes that's the best way yeah new science really i know somebody like that no i fear i've had many many teachers just not so much in a formal setting although a number in formalized settings as well but my problem with normal education is it's too damn slow i'm like come on let's get to it get to it get to it you know i can learn faster on my own because i can go at my own pace so um so let's go on here talking a little bit more about meteor crater because it's some interesting stuff here um the distance over which damage occurred would have been at least two times larger in some directions around the crater because of additional effects produced by the ballistic shock wave uh but he says since the trajectory of the projectile is not well known the direction of the ballistic shock wave effects cannot yet be determined um so what he did was he goes on here uh nininger did not try to quantify the effects he described but it is clear that he was influenced by the qualitative effects of nuclear explosions which of course in 1956 we were in the middle of testing atmospheric nuclear testing and ironically that provided us a lot of data that has direct application to understanding impact events so that's a case where a bad thing turned out to at least have some positive consequence to it which the things that we learned from nuclear weapons testing really can teach us a lot about impacts yes indeed oh here it goes on indeed miniature ninja visited yucca flats at the nevada test site in 1953 and drew analogies between the shock metamorphic products there and those at meteor crater shoemaker that would have been jean shoemaker co-discoverer of shoemaker uh levy9 the late great gene shoemaker in 1960 also drew comparison between meteor crater and the craters produced by nuclear explosions specifically the 90 meter diameter craters produced by the one kilo ton teapot and jangle uncle explosions see see kyle see if you can find a picture of that that's actually a pretty impressive um yeah the teapot look up the teapot nuclear test all right so building on this analogy with nuclear explosion craters the effects of one of the environmental perturbations the air blast will be quantified below for the meteor crater impact event using scaling relationships derived from nuclear explosions yeah in the case of the 1908 tunguska event for example the air blast damaged trees throughout approximately 2150 square kilometers of siberian tiago the damage associated with the meteor crater impact event could conceivably have been more severe than that produced by the tengooseka event because the energy of the explosion may have been larger on the other hand other factors like the topography around the impact site can alter the severity of the blast damage did you find something there ralph i i i am finding a lot but i don't know specifically what you're wanting but to show i thought maybe there are some very impressive craters that were formed from nuclear explosions okay let me look let me look at this yeah we're seeing the explosions wait look at the craters in the explosive collision the produced meteor crater most of the local damage would have been produced by a blast wave that radiated across the landscape from the point of impact at any particular point on the ground the pressure would have increased nearly instantaneously when the shock front arrived the pressure produced by the shock front is usually characterized in terms of over pressure which is the amount of pressure that exceeds the ambient atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psi right um which is standard at sea level uh relatively small amounts now get this relatively small amounts of overpressure can be catastrophic for example an 8 to 12 inch thick concrete or cinder block wall can be shattered by over pressures of only 1.5 to 5.5 psi that seems hard to believe but yeah but that's drawn directly from nuclear weapons tests which set up a whole variety of of um structures uh at various distances from the epicenter of the blast to see what would happen as the shock front traveled away from the point of impact the peak overpressure would have decreased edge yeah of course eventually the overpressure behind the shock front would have become negative and a partial vacuum would have been created a strong wind with the capacity to injure or destroy plants and animals would have been produced when the blast wave arrived at any particular point along the ground a peak overpressure of 5 psi for example could produce wind velocities of 260 kilometers per hour the velocity of a hurricane force wind this would have been a transient wind that soon reversed its direction after the overpressure became negative and the momentum of the air moving away from the point of impact it dissipated so that's when you get the negative pressure and it collapses back on itself um so the phase of negative over overpressure would have also passed and the wind would have again blown away from the point of impact before ambient wind conditions returned uh so then he talks about dynamic pressure the which is another way of characterizing the blast wave and it's proportional to the square of the wind velocity and the density of the air behind the blast wave this pressure reflects the fact that the degree the degree of damage to objects is sometimes a function of a drag force which is in turn a function of the shape and size of an object or its components um so yeah for example then it gives an obvious example to drag on a deciduous tree with leaves in the summer months would be greater than the drag on the tree when it is barren in the winter months um so then let's see he gets into the uh ah there we go which one is this or plowshare um i guess is there any anything in there we can see for scale there is some stuff at the bottom it looks like there's a tower or something right here but no people any kind of people even if there were people they would probably be almost too small to see this this is obviously a road right here two standard vehicle tracks there okay this i'm quite sure this is the crater that they used in uh mulholland falls which great detective movie set in the 1950s and it's a mystery around the uh the the the fallout effects of testing the nuclear uh in the desert so they're the the detectives are um you know they're investigating a murder and they so they get into this whole conspiracy thing but there's a point where they're out in the desert and they come upon this hole right here and it's a pretty impressive scene it's the best part of the whole movie actually is when they walk upon and i'm pretty sure it's this this crater right here so yeah this is out there in fact i think tourists can go and see this yeah there's a couple of them in nevada at least that you can go see i'm pretty sure yeah and i bet i bet you this is one of them okay so put that on the list kyle all right good lord look at this yeah these are the tested grounds for multiple high explosives i don't know if they were all nuclear but well and i think this is the same hole we were just looking at right right yeah but there you can see all the other ones around it so maybe it is the same spot well yeah it is the same area yeah yeah that's the nevada flats that's where they tested all the the bombs so the other thing i pulled up here was this uh i don't know how to say it widman statin staff yeah vidman statin uh i think this is really fascinating that these oh it is yeah these patterns show up in these nickel iron meteors when you etch them with acid after you write them open yep that's one of the characteristic proxy uh kinds of evidence that you look for to show that there has been tremendous shock that this material has been subjected to tremendous shock forces right i mean i see an elephant i don't know it does look like it's fluffy clearly yeah it is isn't it it's fluffy fluffy we were talking earlier just some people know we were talking earlier about um you know that it's very plausible that within the next decade or so that uh you know biologists are going to have figured out and geneticists are going to figure out a way to uh clone the woolly mammoths bring them back reanimate some mastodons yeah so a bigger uh doggy door yeah so so yeah so uh i was wondering who we could apply to to uh i would like to have a wooly mammoth for a pet okay i mean i would you might have to move out of the suburbs first yeah yeah just say a bigger backyard i want a woolly mammoth okay i'm just gonna put that out there now if anybody's listening anybody has any connections or anything a live one yeah yeah a live preference take them for a walk with a couple of drum liner bags in your pocket you know and and uh if i if there's not a woolly mammoth available i will take a mastodon okay i'll take a saber tooth you can use the mastodon to clear land i mean when i get my crystal spaceship we'll try and transport you one all right there we go okay now mike let's let's get on now see we're actually talking realistic possibilities here i mean we're still in the real world mike we're talking cloned woolly mammoths here this is not as far-fetched as you may happen to think so uh yeah wouldn't that be something wouldn't that be something but yeah that's an idea that i think is a really interesting idea though this idea that you know ice age people's is it possible i mean initially it sounds like you know a story line or something but look why couldn't they have had necessarily domesticated some species of extinct probably yeah i think they did i i just can't imagine that they didn't it's really i think well considering that they were so abundant right there were so many mammoths and mastodons in the world at the time coexisting with our ancestors yeah why not and and the number one way that you get the first you know pet is that you kill the mother when you're hunting and then there you find the calf and you're like oh and yeah there's something that starts following you around because you petted or touched it or something and now it's riding you and you're like hey so there's baby fuzzy wuzzy the woolly mama yeah and you come he comes back to the camp and yeah and then you find out he's really useful for come on come on fuzz [Laughter] so yeah so mike it's not so far-fetched as you may think okay but i don't know maybe crystal spaceships are not so far-fetched either but right don't actually i mean these are way out there we have those today i mean metal is a crystal that's right well yeah there we go okay we okay bring it back hey man titanium zirconium aluminum absolutely man let's okay so where were we before we got off on fuzzy wuzzy the woolly mammoth yeah i'll help bring it back because i got a little aside here just an interesting point yeah because you brought up gene shoemaker right on your documentary fire from the sky in 1999 you made it at uh premiered in 97 early 97 when hale bob was coming around he was he was interviewed for your documentary on site there at meteor crater at media crater yeah and so he's he's shown in the documentary and you know he was responsible for training and doing some educating with the apollo astronauts right there to get them some clue what they might see on the moon right and then it was only a few months after that documentary came out that he was killed in a in a car accident in australia so yeah that was a tragedy totally so yeah you know some kind of passing of the torch there but yeah i wonder if that was the last you know public or uh tv series interview that he did because well it might have been later yeah it might have been yeah yeah that was a shocker to me he was one of my heroes no doubt yeah huge amount of input into the into the field yeah that was a loss to science when he was and that was a really a free you know here you are how do you you get killed in a collision when you're in the most remote outback area of australia how does that happen it's pretty odd pretty odd i don't know the specifics of it um but yeah that was it was a tragic loss to science he's talking about all the types of megafauna that would have been living in the area at the time and that area is not too far away from the petrified forest but i suppose those petrified trees are supposed to be much much older right than the meteor crater oh yeah yeah they're much older okay okay so here we go um if a grassland community occupied the impact site the grass and possibly soil would have been stripped away near the crater by the more than thousand kilometer per hour winds so we're looking at more than 600 miles per hour so that would be enough force kyle to knock you off your feet it would also be enough force to pick you up like a piece of chaff like you were nothing and fly you around yeah i don't know maybe rip all your hair out in a few limbs too yeah yes that's right we gotta have our squirrel suits ready for the apocalypse if the impact site was instead composed of a woodland community then juniper and pinyon trees would have been flattened over radial distance of up to 19 call it 20 kilometers so that would be about 12 miles out from the impact site by the blast wave um so yeah that's lesser damage corresponding to 30 percent tree fall would have extended out to about 26 kilometers greater damage was probably produced by the ballistic shock wave but since the trajectory of the iron asteroid is not known the direction of this damage cannot be estimated did you say 600 miles an hour yes okay that's 880 feet per second that's pretty fast oh yeah i don't there's not much that could withstand a wind like that right no 600 miles per hour that's um what is peak hurricane winds about 180 miles an hour typically tornado winds tornado winds can get up to i don't think they even get up to 600 miles no they don't maybe 300 but yeah that's what i'm thinking yeah really powerful yeah yeah so um another factor to consider um another factor to consider is the effective peak overpressure which could potentially be more important than either the rise time of the pressure pulse or the duration of the positive phase of the blast wave previous analysis of blast injuries indicate that when the positive phase of the blast wave is longer than several tens to a few hundred milliseconds then the injury caused by the blast is largely a function of the effective peak overpressure so in the case of the meteor crater impact event in which the duration of overpressure was in the range of tens of milliseconds the effective peak over pressure would have been an important factor but not necessarily the dominant one um so yeah that's uh basically saying that what would happen to to the animals that were in the trees that were in the in that vicinity went in that 12 mile range the effect of peak overpressure that produced lung damage or death have been estimated based on injuries to both large and small animals including steersboros sheep goats monkeys swine dogs cats rabbits chickens rats hamsters and mice now this is a horrible horrible chapter of american history that when they tested the nuclear weapons yes they put animals out there and to see what would happen but given that it happened it's historical we can't undo it i mean we might as well go ahead and learn from it right so for example a .005 second pressure pulse a population of sheep can withstand four times greater peak over pressure than can mice so it's scaling because of the of the body mass right all of the megafauna that existed 50 000 years ago fall into the broad category of large mammals and will be treated similarly here based on these studies the threshold for lung damage is 8 to 15 psi while severe lung damage occurs between 20 and 30 psi the threshold for death is 30 to 50 psi and increasingly larger fractions of the population will be killed with greater over pressures 50 of a population will be killed between 50 and 70 psi and a hundred percent of a population will be killed between or in excess of 75 psi if one scales these figures to radial distances of peak overpressures around meteor crater they suggest 100 percent leave that lethality within a radius of up to 3.2 kilometers so if you're any anything within two miles or a little bit further they're gone no 100 percent dead um lung damage with the radius out to 9.3 kilometers assuming a 20 megaton explosion in the case of a 40 and so in the in this modeling that he's doing he's estimating between a 20 and 40 megaton explosion now 40 megaton explosion is bigger than any tested in the american arsenal the largest was 20 megatons so and the largest in the uh soviet arsenal was sarbamba which was 55 megatons um okay so in the case of a 40 megaton explosion uh up to 4.1 kilometers anything within one that was 100 lethal radius so everything no matter how big or how little if it's a 40 megaton explosion is wiped out is killed um and serious damage up probably which would cause you not to die necessarily instantly but you'd probably die from your injuries up to uh 11.7 kilometers uh animals at larger distances could also been affected if they were near rocky outcrops or other types of reflecting surfaces that would have increased the effective peak over pressure in addition to these direct blast injuries animals or people if there were any also would have been injured when the blast wave hit them accelerated their bodies to velocities on the order of a few to tens of kilometers per hour and then slammed them back into the ground onto the ground or they collided with other objects field tests using animal cadavers of different sizes were once conducted to test the survivability of animals and humans when subject to these types of displacements for humans or animals the size of humans it is likely that casualties due to displacement would occur within 16 to 24 kilometers of the meteor crater impact site depending on whether the terrain was a grassland community without obstacles or a woodland community with obstacles so yeah it wouldn't have been pleasant so the blast wave would also have picked up broken branches rocks and other types of missiles that could impale lacerate or traumatize animals it is much harder to assess the injuries and deaths caused by this blast wave because the experimental database mostly involves broken glass which would not have been a factor in a natural setting 50 000 years ago so this study indicates that a peak overpressure of 8.5 psi can accelerate stones with a median mass of 0.22 grams which is p sized to a mean velocity of 314 kilometers per hour how many feet per second is that say compared to a rife the speed of a of a bullet and a handgun what you're 20 1200 feet per second rifle 2 000 up to 3 000 feet per second typical 3 314 muzzle velocity of a rifle kilometers per hour 300 314 kilometers so let's say roughly 200 and some miles an hour so you would not want to get hit with a pea-sized missile moving at 200 miles an hour i can tell you that much is it going to be enough to penetrate probably so but that would suck if you were in a storm of those things and you were getting pelted by dozens or hundreds of things like that moving at 200 miles per hour definitely easily blind you yeah um san francisco peaks are there north of flagstaff i don't know exactly how far that's away you can see it on the horizon but yeah i wonder if there's areas that are pelted you know that you could still see if there was some bombardment there but i guess after 25 50 000 years it's it's covered up but yeah i wonder if there's effects that far or or if it affected the volcano or you know any of the the seismic possibilities of things happening over there too 286 feet per second how much 286 feet per second okay so those little pebbles yeah so it's considerably slower than muzzle velocity yeah but still but still yeah as it says here it is not clear how fast other objects such as larger stone sticks etc can be carried nor have specific injury and casualty rates been estimated nonetheless one can imagine that if a few salad of approximately 1500 pea-sized stones were to hit a standing mammoth at 314 kilometers per hour it could blind if not kill the animal um yeah based on these data and the range of peak overpressures expected around the meteor crater impact site it seems that additional injuries may have been caused by missiles over distances of at least 10 to 13 kilometers from the impact site the distribution of canyon diabolo meteorites around meteor crater indicate that additional iron projectiles rained down within the inner 9.5 kilometers of this area after the blast wave passed uh-huh finally it is possible that these direct and indirect blast effects may have been compounded by thermal radiation in the case of the 1908 tunguska event the cambrian on the sides of the trees facing the explosion were damaged for several kilometers around the epicenter these injuries sometimes associated with charred branches are thought to have been produced by intense thermal emission or flash fire so interesting stuff very so that's a little bit kind of a little bit of the context about meteor crater well we're about ready for a break randall if you want to take a break and then we can come back and or did you have something else to say about this topic no this is probably a good point for a break all right i think yeah well i say we take a break sounds good all right [Music] and welcome back ladies and gentlemen cosmography of the randall carlson podcast back from the break and uh before we get into the conclusions of the cream paper i want to mention once again cbd from thegods.com you guys uh go there check it out and if you order something cb uh rc ships free can't forget that put that in there it's the promo code and you'll get free shipping and uh so randall you're still taking it how's it going for you great and i was certainly glad i in the rush to get off um to our trip i had the my bottle set out i had a dedicated bottle i set it out on the desk and then i don't know what happened i realized when we were already 400 miles from home that i left it behind so i was getting really panicky and then rust stepped in and said i've got some that's right i brought mine i refuse to turn around i speak facetiously but in reality i you know when i especially the first few days of the trip i have a really hard time sleeping and that was my main my main reason for wanting to have it and so every night before bed before russ tucked me in he would give me a shot of cbd oil that's right and i would just drift off into a happy deep sleep no but seriously i did he would give me i got a dropper full every night and it really and i slept yeah what i remember was saying hey randall i brought mine you were like oh good i thought well i'll just take one shot to the last whole week that's right seriously though yeah i i thank you for that russ and i got every i'll replenish your supply or i will contact someone of great authority and importance and get your supply replenished excellent yeah get the handler to do it yeah get the handler to do it i use it every night it's man i i i love it i'll probably be using it for the rest of my life now well and my wife is using up all the sav you know because i've told you you know her she did 30 years of electrical work and all the turning of screws and wrenches and everything she started getting bad arthritis in her hands about five or six years ago yeah so she could not got to the point where she couldn't you know when you come home with the new uh like uh pressure sealed bottle of something that you're trying to open you know it takes quite a bit of torque and she couldn't so whenever she had one of those she'd call me i'd have to come in and open it and now she's opening and i say what do you attribute that to and she goes the sap and she's rubbing it on her hands so i'm gonna start using i haven't been using it every day but i've got i'm gonna start using it on several things you know when i took that fall out there i i took a tumble out there at rock art ranch because i think i mentioned that i there was i thought it was this much it was dark and i recalled that it was it was this much a few feet over but where i stepped off it was like this much yeah the canyon is actually like 80 feet deep yeah you just it was yeah so i got banged up a bit i mean yeah 80 feet that's uh that'll bang you up yeah yeah it's a good thing you guys were there to haul me out but so i used some of the salve on my wound uh and uh helping yeah i think so i mean i i'm not gonna pull up my pants leg and show people how no no don't do that i'm not gonna do that but it's an impressive wound i'll just say that i'll leave it to people's imaginations and uh but yeah i think i think what i think it's is that it really helped with the pain that's what i'm getting at here in in a roundabout way because that night i was expecting after i did i thought oh i'm not going to sleep tonight i'm going to be laying there all night and it's going to be hurting i put the saf on went to sleep no pain that's that's the bottom line no pain now i've had some pain i had more pain two days later than i did the day after but it's it's done very well healing up i mean it was a fairly significant gash on my shin and you know it hurts when you hit your shin no yeah yeah so um anyways that's all i've got to say about that matter i'm going to continue using it i think that cbd oil is really going to turn out in the long term to be of tremendous tremendous benefits and value and it's great that we're finally evolved enough in a society where we can start you know start reaping the benefits of mother nature's healing modalities once again once again thousands of years of yeah right yes long overdue long overdue check them out cbd fromthegods.com okay so we were reading from the crane paper which was 1997 and he was the one who did the the studied the blast effects and the regional and environmental effects of of what this would have done i skipped over a whole most of it actually where he talks about what kind of uh probably what kind of vegetation was dominant what kind of animals were there at the time what species of animals pretty much a pretty good cross-section of the late place to see megafauna would have been uh native to the area but his conclusion i think is uh uh pretty important to consider and since 1997 23 years ago the points that he makes in the conclusion are even more important and more relevant than they were then 23 years ago he says as shown in figure 10 showing he has a map just a simple line drawing map of arizona with circles showing blast radii right so he's showing on this uh yeah let's see winslow yeah by by the time you get to flagstaff you're outside the zone of destruction but uh let's see mormon lake winslow yeah there's oh nope you'd have been up you know what creek if you were in winslow yeah okay so anyways this is what he says yeah winslow yeah your toast as shown in figure 10 meteor crater occurs in an area that now contains several small towns into small city which of course is windslope if the impact were to occur today in the same location it would probably produce human casualties of course when compared to other areas of the world the region of the colorado plateau is relatively uninhabited in a more densely populated area the effects of an impact this size could be more catastrophic for example if one superimposes the effects of the meteor crater impact event on kansas city one sees that the blast wave would have completely destroyed the entire metropolitan area almost all of the metropolitan area is within a 40 kilometer diameter region that corresponds roughly to the mean uh or severe to moderate woodland damage calculated for 20 and 40 megaton blasts the peak over pressures within this region are 4 psi or greater which would have the capacity to shatter glass windows shatter corrugated asbestos siding cause connection failure and buckling of corrugated steel and or or aluminum paneling shatter eight to twelve inch thick concrete or cinder block walls cause some eight to twelve inch thick brick walls to collapse and blow out wood siding panels used in house construction reinforced structures would fare better but the damage would still be extensive tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people even millions in more densely populated areas would be killed in an impact event of this size if it occurred unexpectedly when gauging these effects and the possibility that they may occur in modern times it is important to recall that meteor crater is a relatively small impact event and thus the type of event that is relatively common as described in the introduction current estimates suggest that an impact event comparable to that which produced meteor crater occurs on average every 1600 years this is a time scale that is both meaningful and memorable in terms of human history and should probably be kept in mind when evaluating the hazards of objects in or entering near earth space yeah that would be the prudent approach i would suggest i think so yeah that's 1600 years still is that's pretty startling yeah and like you said what we've learned in the pre in the interim the 23 years would suggest it is probably more frequent than that more frequent which will be subject of of our future discussions and investigations that the the specific evidence that does point to even a greater frequency like perhaps every 500 years right so if that's the case then now like he makes the point an event of that scale is not going to cause a global catastrophe but think about this think about an event of that scale occurring in a densely populated area and a million people are killed instantly and how many more injuries traumatic injuries at least two or three times that many now that would have a very significant economic and cultural impact no question i mean we're still you know picking up the pieces from katrina right i mean new orleans is not fully recovered from katrina at this point so i mean even a small event like that is still going to have far-reaching consequences and that's why it's so important that we start thinking big like mike likes to frequently say we need to be thinking bigger than we are we need to be thinking cosmically right because whether we like it or not we are this planet that we live on is part of a cosmic environment and as we now know without any question without any ambiguity whatsoever that cosmic domain impinges upon this terrestrial domain here below far more frequently than we had previously imagined but as our ancestors were well aware of see we've kind of come full circle with our realization that we're part of this cosmic environment because our ancestors knew it well and that's why ancient peoples all over the planet were obsessed with the sky and what was going on in the sky because yeah because the earth and the sky interact in multiple ways far more frequently than we've recognized within the last century or two and see part of the problem here is that modern science has sort of created a closed model of the earth yes the sun plays a role certainly and this has been allowed but think about the the the the concept of the solar role in terrestrial history well what we have now is the entrenched view of the solar constant right which basically implies that the that the variability of the sun is so relatively minor that we can just discount it we don't need to pay any attention to it right that's that's that's the the outcome of that thinking based upon the solar constant right well and we haven't talked about this much yet yet but there's a ton of evidence out there to suggest that the solar constant isn't nearly as constant as the assumption has has concluded so that being part of it what we're having to realize now is that yeah there's been a lot of changes going on and a lot of those changes on earth involve changes in the cosmic domain of which the earth is embedded or is a part of and so uh yeah that's i think where we really need to be trying to get our thinking towards that much bigger picture and again doesn't that idea of a bigger picture kind of actually conform more to the ancient model where there was a cosmic plan and that it was the it was the ignore ignorance the ignoring of this cosmic plan that brought about the disasters i mean when you start looking at the mythic themes and archetypes about these great cosmic disasters that's part of the moral implications that come over and over again is this this tuning out of the bigger the bigger picture and by tuning it out you're now becoming vulnerable to it so now we're in a position where we have access to these tremendous technologies that are we can use to jump start a whole new realm of cosmic understanding and let's keep up that momentum let's not shut things down now and say well we i don't want to get off into that track we'll come because we're going to come back to it the idea though that this steady state that's what i'm getting at modern civilization it is assumed in modern science and the modern thinking about models of earth history basically assumes a steady state that's again solar constant fits right in with the uniformitarian idea fits right in with the gradualists the darwinian incremental evolutionary model right that everything happens so so uh infinitesimally small leaps that that you don't really even notice it it just keeps going and it unfolds over hundreds of thousands and then millions of years and eventually you get this cumulative change right so we can see that yeah the world is a different place now than it was a million years ago or 10 million or 60 million years ago what's not appreciated though is how dramatically and profoundly different the world is now from what it was a mere 12 or 13 or 14 000 years ago you see because now we're within the the human realm we're within you know history is is halfway back to the younger dryas so we've got recorded history then we have that interval between the beginning of recorded history and the end of the previous world epoch that geologists have called the pleistocene right the the demarcation of that's the younger driest and so we have the younger dryas and we have this interval between the younger driest and the rise of history what happened during that interval see this is the slow now that's the slow recovery of of in the slow rebuilding of a new world and it finally reached the point where at 5 000 years ago roughly it had it had evolved to the point where now it suddenly emerges and we find the visible record we find the visible imprint of this world that has been recreated but it took 5 000 years from the younger dryas to the point where uh now we've got cities and we have a labor force that we can draw on to start building huge infrastructure that mimics the sky the only anomalous thing in that is gobekli tepe which dates almost to write it almost at the very end of the younger driest just a little after it right and that to my understanding might be the youngest dates yes it's the it's the most recent one because it's the date of the burial yeah yeah so when was the original structure yeah that's no one knows well clearly you know and one of the themes of of where i think where we're going with our understanding of the world and our place in it is that the human story is a lot deeper a lot richer and a lot more complicated and complex than it previously assumed that there was a whole lot more going on back in the prehistoric times than than we've realized and we're just now beginning to see the the the unavoidable indisputable evidence that there was something because there's just too much that doesn't fit within that framework of the conventional framework of history and what we've just been talking about here like using meteor crater as an example i think is clearly uh uh an indication of how we need to be thinking because we're given with tunguska we're given one isolated event with meteor crater were given another isolated event what's interesting about those two it's like where those are like in a sense kind of bookends on the one end tunguska which was probably barely more than the density of a snowball of ice right i mean the estimates of ton goose gets maybe a gram per cubic centimeter an iron asteroid six seven grams per cubic centimeter so those are like the two endpoints of this continuum of stuff that the earth could potentially encounter well depending on where in that density range where in the in the compositional makeup of these objects which direction it comes from you know does it come perpendicular to the surface of the earth or does it come tangential a tangential uh encounter is going to be very different than one normal as to use the the mathematical term which means perpendicular right well there's a lot of stuff to figure out here and and we're at the point now where this realization has has come about you know because of the the the wealth of the evidence that shows constant influence constant effects of of such things and so what we have to do in a sense is to rethink everything i mean and that's why i think why there's a reluctance on the part of established academia establish scholarship because yeah once we start expanding our thinking to that domain yeah then we've got to rethink everything history has to be completely rethought and there's there's a lot of entrenched interests that just don't want to have to deal with that so it's up to the to the mavericks and the outsiders and those who aren't afraid to but the the trick is that we're we're kind of you know we're walking on the edge of the sword because on the one hand we're exploring some really fringe stuff peripheral stuff right on the other hand it's important that we we stay well grounded in science when we speculate and to differentiate between well this is well established here this is this is uh supported evidence this is speculation so you know the stuff that we were just looking at as far as meteor crater that's pretty well established i mean you know the the fact that uh the the air velocity the the the peak overpressures all that well because we have the data from nuclear weapons tests that we can use and it is probably a legitimate transference of data from one to the other um and so even though we're not at you know engaging atmospheric testing anymore or even underground testing we still have this tremendous wealth which by the way a lot of that is being declassified now which um which could turn out to be valuable for researchers and and people studying and investigating this kind of phenomena going back randall to the sixth every sixteen hundred years so if meteor crater is you know fifty thousand and tongues a little over 100 112 now you know where's where's the other 30 impacts in those 50 000 years i mean where we we don't have any clearly identified nice bold craters like like out there in arizona so is that can we go by that or is that just a guess i mean are they all stoneys in the interim and they don't leave a mark i mean it's no i mean in here well here's the thing you know when you look at when again when you go back to the to the range of these the density range of these objects the lower densities are 10 times more abundant than the irons the chondritic meteors are much more abundant than the iron so what that means is you're going to have a lot more atmospheric explosions than you are ground impacts when you're talking about that size range from say a 100 to 200 feet in diameter 300 feet you're going to have more atmospheric detonations than ground impacts now ground impacts well the thing about the thing about meteor crater is is because of that unique particular desert environment it's it's conducive to preserving you know for example if you had an equivalent event in brazil you know in the rain forest it could be there and we have no idea and obviously if an impact like that's in the ocean we have no idea and nearly three quarters of such impacts would be in the ocean right so you know so what's the most recent one we do know of then one one in iraq or is there i think there's one in australia uh that might be 30 000 years old it's a little lake i remember reading it in context of aboriginal myths right like a fire dragon from the sky created it and then later that when they studied it they found out it was a crater is it a half mile wide though uh yeah i don't know i'm trying to find out i'm trying to look right now i know i know there's a little grouping of like three or four out there i've seen that i think are fairly recent but yeah they're pretty small yeah those are real small i think this is a okay yeah i just you know i don't think we've had 30 of them so i don't know how everything most of them would hit the water most of them would hit the ocean yeah yeah and i have a lot of data on tsunamis it's it's there's been a remarkable number of large tsunamis which could very well be i mean a lot of them could be undersea volcanism or seismicity but a lot of them maybe are the result of oceanic impacts sure okay that'd be something worth looking into because yeah tsunamis have played an important role i mean clearly you know if you have a port city that you know when you start when society's dispersed around the globe start interconnecting it's through trade and it can be overland but a lot of it on a global scale is only because you can sail the oceans which sailing the oceans you've got to have a port city and to have a port city you have to have a pretty much sustainable ocean level which earth didn't really have until seven to eight thousand years ago right because there was still residual rising even nine thousand ten thousand years ago from the melting of the ice sheets because there was still a considerable considerable amount of glacial ice remaining on the landscape and that didn't finally all melt away until seven to nine between seven and nine thousand years ago so at that point sea levels were would have stabilized and hence coastlines would have stabilized and at that point you can start you know establishing communities on the coastlines so all that and that was only our first stop yeah that was only our first stop right we're going to go some other places today but yeah well i want to go towards spend the whole time on meteor crater i'm sure well let's go from our first stop to our last stop remember our last stop no i think he's talking about the sunset of an age let's see horizon uh let me let's see here we go okay i'm going to share a screen with everyone here beyond the tour okay well maybe it wasn't an official part of the tour but here we go [Laughter] i have to say uh i did not expect the the feeling the effect the effect the emotional effect that i got when i saw that dark line in the sediment yeah having all the contextual right understanding that i've gained you know what what i can uh and then walking down there and seeing it for the first time it was like a very powerful uh well when you understand that that black line marks one of the most significant time transitionary time periods of the last three or four or five million years that it's the literal dividing line between two world ages that's when it really hits you yes and that's what that is it's the it sure did it's the it's the ashes of the old world it's like it's you know it's the remnants so everything below this is pleistocene everything above it is hollising this is the black mat marking out the younger driest boundary that dates to roughly 12 900 years ago which period is time we're going to have to come back and have considerably more discussion because i have reason to suspect that that span of time 12 900 years has been encoded in various ways from ancient times what's the composition of the black man is it soot i mean is it just pure there's some soot in it it's carbonaceous it's it's like a peat deposit it's as if there was a lot of rainfall for a short period of time and organic debris laying on the landscape that then kind of got compressed by the overlying sediment and at the base of it is the the impact proxies okay the magnetic grains the nanodiamonds and so on i'm just surprised that it's not thicker well in some places it is thicker and if we were not losing daylight and had more time to spend here we could have found thicker outcrops but yeah i mean it's uh yeah that was that picture was taken it was almost dark it was almost dark yeah yeah you blinded me with the flash i think [Laughter] so uh and that's near tucson right that that is near tuesday right now yes so ends up one of the uh guys on the trip well there was a couple actually and uh they lived they lived quite nearby and hosted us yeah knew he knew exactly where it was and was waiting for us at the gate don't close this joint important people are coming in that's right yeah if we'd had more time it would have been because it was kind of you know it's been the site's been exposed for a long time so you can see that it uh yeah i've been smeared a little bit uh it would have been nice to be able to sort of clean off a spot and really get it sharp but right it would have been but we found it yeah we found it and there it is it's you know it's not monitored in any way it's and where is this this is in southern arizona i mean how close are we to the mexican border here a few miles i mean it's not far yeah because you got that you got that aerial thing that was photographing the border so yeah there was a mountain in the background that we could see that was actually in mexico yeah yeah not quite a stone's throw but you know not not more than 10 miles five miles maybe so yeah that was a an interesting stop and we've got a small sample that we would like to get analyzed so where else did we go there's a couple of other interesting places we went to valley of the gods and i think you had a couple of pictures before we move on maybe we could share some of those pictures that you had there uh kyle that we didn't see last last week sure um one second all right that's not what i'm meaning to share hold on no but but while you're there okay yeah this was briefly chevron canyon yep this is the second stop and i got a couple of petroglyph pictures here just briefly but there's the pyramid cinderella wow birthing mother yeah we saw that last last week and there's one of the volcanic diet dreams and notice in the far background on the horizon you see el capitan and then in between you've got two two other volcanic extrusions and they're pretty much along a line and it's likely that that line is a pretty much a i'm not sure if it was a fault line or a fracture line um do you understand the difference between a fault line and a fracture line no sir okay or a fault i could guess well yeah try to take a guess so i would a fault line is between two separate tectonic plates and a fracture is a is a crack within a single tectonic plate um no okay no the difference is simply a fracture just a crack like a crack a static crack and a fault line is a crack along which there's movement and the movement can be this way it can be this way you know it can be this way there's any number of different ways that that but yeah i mean a fault line is not necessarily associated with the rim of a tectonic plate okay it can be within you know that but that's the simple difference fracture is just a crack and there's no relative movement between the two sides of the crack and the fault line there is relative movement so i don't know if this is a fracture or fault line but either way it could have been a zone where uh basaltic magma because magmas could have extruded and the thing is that when these were extruded and do you have a i think we looked at the picture last week of el capitan didn't we yeah i don't have one of that so yeah 1500 that what you see in the horizon in the far distance is el capitan or agotha which is which is about 1500 feet in height well what that means is that at one time there was 1500 more feet of bedrock over where we're standing as a as a minimum now this one of course isn't 1500 feet high but it it's it's uh illusory uh that it actually is is very big you would barely see a person standing next to it yeah that's probably 25 or 30 miles away what this no i think it's yeah the the baton in the back there yeah yeah el capitan this is not this is probably no then it would be really really big but you would still barely see a person standing next to it if they were down there yeah well if it was 20 miles away i wouldn't think you would not see anybody at all now i haven't looked to see if shiprock is on an alignment with these hm i need to do that now ship rocks over in new mexico we didn't get there that's over 1700 feet high and now that's an impressive diet dream but anyways that's what these are these are volcanic diet dreams they're composed of basalt which is a much harder rock than the layers of shale and sandstone which were mostly uh the the ex the bedrock that has been eroded away so the thing that of course really is interested me is the erosional process even more so than the depositional process i mean you know the depositional process you have um very interesting themselves but we're looking at events that happen say spanning from the permian to the triassic that that basically created these layers that you see here these are mostly sandstone layers and if you look at the lowest layer there where it kind of flares out that's that's oregon rock shale it's called and then above that you've got the diche sandstone and then on top of that you had the moen copy shale and finally on the very top the cap rock is a shiner rump siltstone so you then had to remove all of that stuff um in in between these buttes and maces if you go back to the oregon rock which is the oldest that's the permian and then if you come forward and they're found all over the colorado plateau and then if you come forward from that you know you'll see that the duchet sandstone has cross bedding in it um that is primarily characteristic of wind blown sand so that would suggest deserts um and this for example if you if you were to solidify or if you were to lithify um what's it called the great sand dunes national monument then and then looked at a cross section you would see the same type of stratification that you see in this um duchet sandstone as it's called um and then the moen copy is a a lower triassic formation and it's very typical throughout all of monument valley and it's it's the reddest stuff so anyways that's what we're looking at there and so all of that material had to be eroded because if you if you you know if you're looking at go back to your uh your image there kyle yeah see over here you've got the mitten as it's called um and then you've got this mesa here this is a mesa not a butte because it's much wider than it is high um it may be let's see it i know there's a cutoff between mesa and table land and i've forgotten the exact transition but anyways here's my point you've got some eight nine hundred thousand feet of sandstones and shales that were removed between these so at one point the surface of the land was the top of this mesa and where we're standing now where this picture was taken would have been 800 900 a thousand feet below the surface of the ground minimum so you'd been buried down into bedrock so clearly there's been a lot of erosion here well is that erosion occurring one grain of sand at a time i mean that's my question and this is the question i've repeatedly raised when we start looking at this the the extreme level of erosion you find over the entire colorado plateau so extreme that the early geologists as we mentioned in in past episodes looked at this and just marveled at the amount of material stripped away from this land and they referred to it as the great denudation that the land had been denuded of huge masses of bedrock that were stripped away through some kind of process now the question that we raise here is was this process a strictly gradual process so incremental and so gradual that it's barely noticeable i mean so in other words if you go back and you look at a john wayne movie made in 1947 shot in monument valley it doesn't look a whole lot different than it does now right pretty much the same the same place right you can instantly recognize it so whatever change it is now undergoing is very gradualistic very uniformitarian i think it's a legitimate question though to raise and to ask was this process the ongoing process or has this slow imperceptible pace of change occasionally or even frequently interrupted by much more uh extreme processes highly accelerated rates of erosion now look at this this is valley of the gods this is basically the same layers you've got in monument valley which if you zoom in on the horizon you can see monument valley way off in the horizon yeah yeah there it is there's monument valley 25 30 miles from monument valley and again it's it's you're looking at the same sandstone same shale layers in my in valley of the gods as you are in monument valley and again what you're seeing here is remnants these are remnants that are still existing so now when we envision this process of erosion well first of all we're not going to have the erosion beginning when this uh when the colorado plateau is at sea level because now here's another thing that you have to bear in mind above these layers there was also limestones that are gone now those limestones imply that at one point um this was down below sea level well if if the colorado plateau is below sea level it's going to be an environment of deposition not an environment of erosion as it uplifts now it becomes it makes this transition from a depositional to an erosional environment and only when it gets up to some extent and the higher it gets above sea level and we're looking at colorado plateau is a mile to two lap miles typically above sea level so the higher above sea level it gets the more potential energy there is to affect erosion but again what we're seeing here is remnants like you look at these pinnacle rocks in the distance here and they're just remnants of a former landscape that's basically not there anymore because again i can't emphasize this too much all of this was at one time continuous layers of sandstone you can trace the diche uh sandstone the mohan copy formation and all of those throughout each of these objects each of these form features all the way down to monument valley so i'm asking what was the erosional process and up to this point if you read the textbooks you realize how this the whole emphasis is basically upon the environment of deposition yes we can talk about when there were permian shales and what kind of an environment prevailed when those permian shales were were deposited what is not being talked about or or really considered is the erosional process it's just the assumption that what we're seeing here is the end result of some low long drawn out continuously incremental gradualistic process that you only are going to see the changes over a long period long millennia of time but now here here's another point that we were talking about when we were out there now to the extent that the colorado plateau does have seismic and volcanic activity i mean we know not far from here we have sunset crater and we have volcanic fields the presence of volcanoes is clearly going to be indicating seismic some level of seismicity well when you look especially when you see some of those those pinnacle rocks close closed up they're not even continuous rock they're just like almost like stacks of boulders right the question becomes what kind of a force would it take to topple those things what kind of a force would it take to topple those things some of them are pretty skinny and look pretty darn fragile right would a small earthquake a six or a seven on a richter scale be enough to topple them well maybe so it raises the question of how long have those have those pinnacle rocks been there you know have they been there a million years and if they have been then the implication is that there has been no seismic activity significant enough to topple those fragile pinnacle rocks see my point and no real deposition of anything else yeah so that's what i was wondering earlier when i earlier when i pointed out that that blade and and asked about that exactly mike you see that that doesn't look like it would take much to stop all that and when you see it firsthand yeah you're impressed with the size and magnitude of it but then at the same time you realize i mean how much seismic shaking i mean you know we could pull up and look at some of the the imagery of the great alaskan earthquake from um 1964. do you remember you remember that um were you you guys weren't around then i guess right i was i remember the 64 alaska quake yeah we just left alaska before that yeah you got out of town just in the nick of time didn't you that's right okay so i want to show you guys something here so you can see what they what it what a large earthquake can actually do to the surrounding landscape and i think you'll see what i mean here um okay let's get this this is uh i've always been impressed by this particular i'm sure there's something from alaska yeah yeah from the alaska earthquake yeah yeah all right here we go this this might this might give you a okay yeah here we go imagine you're you're sleeping away you're having a nice calm sleep and then man yeah look at the trees yeah look at that okay so i mean would an earthquake that can do this kind of damage leave those delicate pedestal rocks intact it doesn't seem like it i mean it seems like at least it would start tilting them over and tops of them would fall off and stuff yeah well that's certainly what it would seem like so i mean i haven't seen any i've looked maybe i haven't looked enough to find studies um but yeah so what's the size of you says make history of monument valley well there that's the question i don't know the answer to that um but i have certainly certainly been been wondering um i mean yeah but you would be able to see in the layers of stuff that it was tilted and you know if it had been fractured and tilted like those images you didn't see any of that it was all nice flat you know parallel lines yeah see oh yeah here we go once you come on let's here we go except for that one monocline which was very interesting where the whole strata just seemed to slope down very steeply and into where mexican hat was uh-huh and then it it comes back out of that valley and then levels off again that was wild yeah and the way it eroded you know that sloped part eroded left the colors and the in the in the strata lines in these extremely elongated forms very very beautiful uh formation there it was all right take a look take a look at this now this is also from let's see here uh woof yeah that could be a little startling you wake up in the middle of the night with that going on is that anchorage or somewhere else well it's alaska i don't know if it's anchorage it probably is but you know my point in this is is that you know clearly i would think an earthquake of this magnitude is not going to leave those pedestal rocks standing and and i think that what we have to conclude from that then is that well however long those pedestal rocks have been there there have not been large magnitude earthquakes uh and again i don't know what the study would be that could lead us to conclude what size earthquake would be necessary to topple those rocks those pedestals but clearly such level of seismic activity has not happened since the erosion left those pedestals in its way does that imply that the erosion of those landscapes is a lot younger than one might think well see that's why i think that a correlation between rates of erosion and and landscape stability would be really critically important to try to determine um you know how susceptible is that area of the colorado plateau to seismic activity on a significant scale but yeah that that would be a hell of a geez look at that yeah so there is a list of they're all very small of earthquakes in that area that i've found in the past 40 years for just 40 years in the past 40 years there's a whole list of them but they're all like you know one on the one and two and three on the richter so and yeah one and two and three but not four or five or six right so yeah so the right they're not enough to really even feel probably yeah just says nearest earthquakes by distance centered near monument valley utah over the last 40 years data courtesy of usgs but there have been there have been some seismic activity even though it's very low level that's right but clearly i think we can include no high intensity seismic activity right nothing where is the cut off that's what i'd like to know i guess what i'm yeah i guess what i'm pointing out is there is earthquakes just none of them have been strong enough in in recent times so and again i don't know what the numbers would be but if you could say for example that oh this region is subjected to a seven or eight earthquake every 100 000 years yeah well then can we conclude from that that there probably hasn't been one i mean well i mean i don't know that's what i'm getting at is because clearly there's not been a significant level of seismicity capable of toppling these fragile delicate right pedestal rocks that we see throughout like for certain mexican hat that balanced thing yeah there's no way it could be what would it take to topple mexican hat yeah can we show mexican hat as our concluding final photo final photo since brad has his hat on yeah the hat of kronos well it seemed to me like several of the formations in valley of the gods had kind of changed shape and maybe some of the things had fallen slightly and it you know faulty memory but it did look like the little spindle that mexican hat was sitting on was even smaller i mean it's really precarious up there well um yeah okay i got one if you don't oh i have one but there it is you got it yeah there it is yeah no see now now just on just thinking rationally when what what universe would that last millions of years exactly exactly well and in what time stream would that last eons well yeah that's the point and and what brad was just saying you know if if if you've already noticed that that these things you know if some rocks boulders have fallen off and they're already undergoing decay just under normal because we know there hasn't been any earthquakes there since the last time we were there right at least not more than not yeah they're all small they're all very small tremors so if you just got basically gravity and wind and an occasional rainstorm and they're still starting to fall apart that just reinforces my point that a major earthquake is they're not there anymore they're piles of boulders on the ground right so then that raises the question how long have they been there if they've been there for millions of years then clearly there's been no significant seismic event for millions of years i think would be a safe conclusion wouldn't be too outlandish to make that conclusion or on the other hand that thing looks like a strong storm would push it off there it's got to be stronger than it looks well yeah you know they get they you know they get strong wind storms or hell let's put some kind of pressure on that if it hasn't knocked it off there it's got to be a little stronger than it looks but yeah but those strong wind storms are going to be especially if they've picked up granular material and and they're going to be relatively sandblasting that's right they're going to do the job eventually yeah that hat is 60 feet wide and 12 feet thick wow what about the what about the stem [Laughter] yeah i don't even think that's showing the narrowest point though i think right it's probably messing up at it yeah yeah just the angle but that's clearly imagine 60 feet wide yeah that thing is huge yeah a pretty big party on so so mike you even if you climbed up there and pushed on it with all your might i don't think you'd be able to push it over push on it with all your mic without sure [Laughter] all right guys we got to wrap this up we got to wrap this we'll conclude by saying that uh yeah the whole uh great denodation phenomena is a mystery that i think we need needs to be revisited you know monument valley for example has uranium deposits so when geologists have gone out there to look at monument valley they're more interested in the uranium deposits they're not really interested in the erosional processes so much as they created it and then the historical geologists are more interested in recreating the depositional environments right and and what's been neglected is the question the specifics of the erosional processes it's just the assumption has been given enough time modern processes and rates of erosion are going to be sufficient to do the job but that's totally dependent upon having adequate time to do that where i'm saying that perhaps we need to be revisiting that and look at um that we may be looking at at two scales of change juxtaposed upon one another and that there may be intervals where the uh the normal rates of change are vastly accelerated all right good finale yeah good fun yes all right yeah and that's all this is about mike it's having fun having i i'm you know i'm happy to provide the entertainment here good i'm glad you did finally mike likes one yeah he's giving us an approval after 50 shows finally mike says he likes one of them yeah we must be getting better at our jobs guys all right well there's lots more folks and i want to say thank you to all the patrons that have been helping us out here and we're going to be using any resources we get to just upgrade and improve our presentation of this whole story so thank you again for all of you that have given your support to what we're attempting to do here and there'll be some noticeable upgrades soon and uh we're gonna we're gonna probably make a separate little video to introduce a few things and uh yep to tell everybody what we're up to that's right and uh the don't forget randall carlson.com for everything randall carlson and cosmographia the website is constantly being updated we're still working on it but there's lots of great stuff there uh cosmographia1618 gmail.com if you want to get a hold of us and there will be new and better emails soon to sort of separate into topics but for now that's the catch-all email so keep using that thank you guys and uh once again there are links for the paypal or the patreon donations in the in the show notes links for everything else all the relative stuff so thank you guys so much all the patreons out there and all you listeners thank you guys thanks very much many thanks yup good night good night good night bye guys [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Randall Carlson

Views: 56,779

Keywords: Randall Carlson, Kosmographia, Bradley Young, Cosmography, astronomy, geology

Id: fpeK_IrP1zQ

Length: 106min 0sec (6360 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020