Episode #097: Bonneville Megaflood / Starting an Ice Age / CO2 Benefits Ignored

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You get, you know, Randall, don't you write something for the newsletter each time there's something written? Oh, yes, I do. I pull together some topical stuff that's going on out there of interest to the kinds of things we like to follow and usually do a synopsis of three or four or five, you know, current papers or articles that are out there in the literature that are interesting. And, yeah, you know what we do? We did for the Patreon members. We made, what was I believe last year we did a bundle of maybe it was 2022 newsletters that we sent out in PDF form to everyone. We need to do an update on that. Right. You caught everybody up. If they weren't there from the beginning, you made the whole series of them available, correct? Yeah. So we've accumulated quite a few since then. I bet you we're up to a year now. So, yeah, we should look and get that archived again and get that out to folks that are interesting because there's a lot of the stuff even from a year ago is still ongoing. It's still very interesting stuff. Yeah. Go ahead and, you know, make the SGI statement up front here because, you know, a lot of people don't make it to the very end and that's really got to get cleared off the books there. That's that's gone on too long. That has gone on way too long. Yeah. So I'm sure some of you know what that's about. For those of you don't, there's a site out there, Sacred Geometry International, that I was tried to partner with a number of years ago. And then that just went south because of a lot of things that are going to soon be disclosed. But in any case, the guy has been the administrator of the site's been selling my work for at least four or five years now with no remuneration to me whatsoever. And he lets people believe they're buying my work, which it is my work. But people do believe that they're buying from me, that I'm receiving money for it. I'm not. I haven't received a penny in at least four and a half years from the sales of my work. And he's been served twice with two cease and desist letters and is probably as a result of getting the second one. He left the state and moved to another state. And then shortly after there, relaunched the website on a Malaysian host where it's much more difficult to get copyrights shut down. So it's right now all use and sales of my work from that website, Sacred Geometry International, is fraudulent and illegal. So just we've gotten that out of the way. And let's get back to the good stuff. So there will be a new Sacred Geometry series of courses. Oh, yes. Classes that will be much better versions of what were beta tests there that he's still selling that weren't even really supposed to be sold, but he's still putting them out there and offering sales 50 off, which means he's not paying Randall the 50 that he's supposed to. Right. Right. So, yeah, it's it's I think it comes very much under the definition of embezzlement. Anyhow, yeah, so he is selling a unfinished beta version of the Sacred Geometry course, which is why that website was launched in the first place, was to try to serve as a venue to put Sacred Geometry courses out there. And so a long train of things, which I'm sure as legal proceedings go forward here, all of that detail will come out exactly what went down. People will be able to see for themselves. So anyways, don't buy anything from that site, and if you feel so inclined, let people know Sacred Geometry International is fraudulently selling Randall Carlson's work. So the Facebook account, the Twitter account that's purported to be Randall, people think it's him making posts. He has not done any of that, any of the years, and that's continued. So, yeah, we got to get that ended. So I want more people to know, yeah, another frustrating thing about the Rogan show that didn't come out, but Randall made an announcement about that to really try to get it spread widely, and that hasn't come out. We're going to get there. Yeah, we're going to get there. Okay, so there we go. You know, there we are. I lost you. So what happens sometimes is I was looking at the file I'm going to pull up. It puts you guys in a thumbnail, but it puts you in this little thumbnail, and I guess what happens is it gets lost up there. And, you know, I've got this astronomical desktop, and up in the stars in the Milky Way, it's like you guys are this little thumbnail, and I'm like, where did you guys go? Oh, and then I look up there, and I see that little thumbnail kind of coming through the Milky Way galaxy, you know. Okay, there you are. Space is big. Space is big, yeah. Well, yeah, we can work on some of your settings for that if that's what you're doing with the new. Yeah, Randall's got a new super fast computer that Russ built, and he's working off three monitors now after dealing with just one for a long time. So, yeah, we need to work on those settings, though, because, yeah, there's ways to make it so they're not tiny, tiny. Still know you're talking to some people. You need to get that monitor set up with a flight simulator. Yep. There we go. Have a lot of fun, because you can fly around over some of these places you talk about. Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, some of the actual places using – what software do you use for that? Well, I know the – I think Microsoft Flight Simulator is actually really good. A lot of people use it. Yeah, so I would say just Flight Simulator, yeah. Yeah, Peter Zelenka has told us about that multiple times. Just don't get so distracted by the geology that you crash, you know. That could happen, I guess. Yeah. Randall's like, do you turn the plane upside down? I see that better, and then, yeah, slam into a mountain. Well, Brad will testify to this. We've been up in some rather harrowing situations in small, you know, single-wing aircraft, and it's like 50-mile-an-hour gusts. And I'm trying to hang out to the side and take pictures. And then, oh, man, yes. That was actually flying up over the Snake River. That's right. Yep. But we did get some good shots. You know, the one that I quite frequently show of the Snake River in the big, big, gooped-out canyon? I've shown it many times. The classic underfoot river image, yeah. Yeah, that was taken during that harrowing flight. See, so Brad and I are out. They're risking our lives. I mean, people need to know that. This is not just armchair stuff. So let me see, Bradley, let me look at there. Let me think, what river are we looking at there? That's got to be the Flathead River? That's not the Mission Mountains in the background. No. Is that from our Montana trip when they had the dam open? Oh, sure. There you go. That's the Clark Fork River. Clark Fork. Yeah. Just below the dam. Yeah. That was pretty awesome, wasn't it? Looking west, northwest, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that was incredible. Yeah, that was like day one, I think. That was one of our first stops on the trip, wasn't it? Uh, second day, because, yeah, we were in Bonners Ferry there. Yeah. That was on the way over to, over to Polson. So we're going to do that again, aren't we? A Montana trip? Absolutely. Coming up in September. And we've talked now about the Bonneville. We haven't organized a Bonneville trip, but that would be a good one. I'm going to put some road miles in on that. Yeah. I heard Brad was working on an itinerary. In April and early May, yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to revisit, uh, several places that we've been to, you know, 18, 20 years ago. Actually, we went in 2000, right after we got going on this, was our first, uh, traverse of the Bonneville flood zone. And what I thought, yeah, I thought that a really awesome trip would be start, you know, would do the whole rafter team. You know, we're sitting, we're in our raft on Lake Bonneville. The dam ruptures up at, um, Red Rocks Pass. And all of a sudden the water starts gushing out of there 300 feet deep and a half a mile wide. And so the spigot opens up and we're sitting in our raft and we notice, hmm, what's going on? And we see the water level starting to drop and then we start feeling the current and then it starts carrying us northwards. Now we would happen, we would be roughly, say, we're floating in our raft roughly where Great Salt Lake is now. The city, the city of Salt Lake, not the, yeah, Salt Lake City, that's what I'm trying to say. So then the raft would start drifting forward and as it moves north, the farther north it gets, the faster it'll be moving. And pretty soon we're going to be in this massive white water, you know, 300 feet deep, probably moving at, you know, 50 miles an hour, 40 miles to 50 miles an hour, rushing through Red Rock Pass. We're hanging on for dear life. And then it goes through the pass and then it makes a sharp turn to the west, literally a 90 degree turn to the west. We're like swept up on the sides of the cliffs, sweeps out, and then it comes out, opens onto Snake River Plain right there by American Falls Reservoir where the town of Pocatello now is. And now the, for temporarily we get a little reprieve because as the water's spreading out, it's slowing down, it's getting shallower and we're thinking we've survived. But just when we think we've survived, all of a sudden we find ourselves being swept down as it's carving out Snake River Canyon, which is half a mile to a mile wide, up to what, 500 feet deep, I think. And we're swept along all the way across southern Idaho, turns north, and then we're swept through Hell's Canyon. And at the same time that it sweeps through Hell's Canyon, it's probably deepening it by another, at least a few hundred feet, at least. Because if it could carve out, like there by Perrine Bridge or any of the canyon along there, if it can carve, if one flood can carve out four to 500 feet of bedrock, hard basalt bedrock, you know it's got to have deepened Hell's Canyon, which is now the deepest canyon in North America. And then the water rushes through Hell's Canyon, comes out there by Lewiston, Idaho, Clarkston and Lewiston, and then it flows on in and then it eases up a bit and then we're riding along and then pretty soon it takes us into the Columbia. So that would be a really cool trip to start at Great Salt. That's what we did. We started at Great Salt Lake and then we followed the pathway up through the paths where it burst out, saw the sedimentary plug, what was left of it, up there in red rocks, literally red rocks. And it goes through and we were able to follow it all the way through and then you follow the canyon across southern Idaho and it's pretty spectacular. A lot of things, interesting things happening there. What we didn't do was we've done this now, we've gone up to the southern entrance to Hell's Canyon, but the road dead ends there because there's no roads along Hell's Canyon. You can only get through there by boat. And we've come from the top end, the north end down to its outlet. But so now what we would do is for a tour, the climax of the tour would be that boat trip through Hell's Canyon. I mean, I can't think of any other way to finish off that trip. That would be that would be something. Hell's. Yeah. And, you know, Hell's Canyon deeper than the Grand Canyon. You know, there's a mammoth recovery site up there also between the outlet and Lewiston Clarkston up there. You know, before you get to Tammany Bar, I wasn't aware of that. So I saw a sign driving through there last year, last fall. So I need to look that up. But, yeah, I don't think it's a mass grave or mass boneyard. But there was a pretty sure it's a mammoth, not a mastodon. But, yeah, it might be worth a stop, too. Well, yeah. A place to check out. Yeah. One diversion off could be going a little ways up and going south and going checking out the Bruno River and the Bruno Sand Dunes that we talked about. I think we talked about that in the live stream. We did. Some of the highest sand dunes in North America. They're, like, up to 400 feet high. That would be an interesting thing to see in itself. So there's a lot of little side stuff. Often, of course, there's, like, Craters of the Moon, which could be a little side trip off of the main following the flood route. You guys know? All those. Yeah, man. Yeah. We'd want to do all those. Absolutely. Yeah. So that could be a pretty awesome tour. Yep. And we could even, we could divert, well, we could, we did this before, we could divert by Bear Lake, perhaps, and make that, remember, we made that loop around, and we came out on the cliff overlooking Red Rock Pass, and you could get this great view to the west of the whole pass. And, yeah. But we're not taking the mountain road to get down to it. That was gnarly. Oh, that's right. It was gnarly, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. There were some ice caves back there in Boulder Field, and, yeah, some interesting stuff. But, yeah, it wasn't easy access back into the, over to Red Rock Pass. Yeah, we had one of the guys that, right, remember, he, like, got out of the, got out of the truck. It was so close to the edge that he wouldn't stay in the vehicle. He walked behind us. He did that twice. Well, that was two different trips, but he did the same thing twice. Yeah. Yeah. We're not taking three vans. I do remember that. We're not taking three vans of people down that crazy road. Anyway, yeah, more examples of us getting out there and risking all to study this stuff. Well, yeah, the other time, I remember this fella, a good fella, but, you know, that other time that he got out of the van, he went down the road, I guess. Did we give him a walkie-talkie or what? But he got down to the bottom, and then we went ahead and drove on down. We get down there, and I guess he was, thought he'd heard a mountain lion stalking him. So, he got back in. He decided that the lesser of two evils was taking his chance on the narrow road with the cliff over being stalked by a mountain lion. So, I was never convinced that there really was a mountain lion. I think, was that Schnebley Hill Road going down into the side of Sedona when it was still passable? You can't take a normal vehicle on that road anymore. No, you can't. Jeep tours only. Yeah, it's a crazy bad road. Anyway. Yeah, we were, well, Kyle, didn't we? Yeah, we were up there. You had your truck, didn't you? At Schnebley Hill, and we were all going to try to get up Schnebley Hill, and we had to turn back? We tried to get our rental vehicles up there. That's right. I had a truck? Yeah, you did, too. You had a little Dodge SUV or something. Oh, Daniel's truck. No. Because he came. No. That was in Idaho. That was a different one. Yeah, you were in like a little Dodge Journey or something. We were in like a Lincoln Navigator or something. It was some rental. I don't know what it was. We rented like the most hardcore SUV that they had, which was like almost, you know, a glorified bubble. I had like eight inches of clearance, maybe. Yeah. And we were like, yeah, we'll take this road. And we went down there for a while, and I was like, I don't know about this. And some guys coming the other way were just like, ain't going to make it to it or not. Yeah. SUV-shaped bubble. That's right. Yeah, that was the pink Jeep tour guys were like, no. Yeah. He's like, yeah, we just pulled somebody out that was in a Pathfinder or a Forerunner or something. He's like, you're not going up there. It was like more awesome than your glorified bubble. So this was like, there was some kind of like conspiracy going on here, wasn't there? Because didn't these guys somehow persuade to not keep up the road or something? Because they wanted it all to them. Something like that, yeah. Oh, so that they could run their tours? They'd be the only ones that could get up there. People wouldn't have to pay for the tour. Okay, you guys, okay. You guys don't want to be controversial. Okay, so we won't be. From now on, no more nothing. Let's not be controversial. Let's talk about climate change. No more controversy. We're done with controversy. A little ice age. So we were talking about the other side of the carbon dioxide equation, the one we don't get to hear about. All we hear about is that carbon dioxide is going to cause catastrophic warming, and we're all doomed. We're in the midst of a climate crisis, and we're in the midst of a sixth great mass extinction. It's going to be as great as the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction that wiped out 75% of all life on Earth, including all the dinosaurs, and it'll be right up there with the Permian-Triassic mass extinction when 90 to 95% of all life terrestrial and marine, all life, was almost decimated completely 100%. The planet came within a hair's breadth of becoming sterilized. But, yeah, we're in a crisis comparable to the Permian-Triassic, the late Ordovician, the late Devonian, the Triassic-Jurassic, the Cretaceous-Tertiary, the Eocene-Oligocene. Yeah, and now we are in the midst of something that's the equal. Although, be the Holocene-Oligocene boundary. And you know what? You know what? I think, okay, right now I'm going to make a commitment that we're going to devote one episode at least to looking in detail at the Great Five. How does that sound? That would be great. That would be good. The Great Five. Yeah, these are the ones I just named off. Actually, the Eocene-Oligocene isn't one of the Great Five. The Terminal Pleistocene is not one of the Great Five because we're talking all species. Now, we're looking at 100 species of mammalian life lost at the end of the Ice Age. But there was very few smaller species that became extinct, right? Because, see, that's what makes this extinction so unique in its way is that it really went for the top of the food chain. You know, the biggest animals, the ones that dominated the predators, the omnivores that dominated their particular ecological niche, half of them, actually more than half of them gone. I kind of think that makes sense, right? The stronger or more powerful the extinction event, the farther down the food chain it reaches. Exactly. That's exactly it, Russ. That's exactly right. So when you got one that reaches all the way down and only leaves the bottom 5% or 10% of the food chain, that's hell on earth. Hell on earth. And, you know, my advice has always been consistent with the folks promoting the sixth great mass extinction event. You know, and I like to use the Cretaceous Tertiary as sort of an analog because it's pretty much ranked of the great five, the KT, which is now called the Cretaceous Paleogene. But that's a mouthful. Well, I like and I'm used to Cretaceous Tertiary, and I'm going to learn, I learned how to say that properly years ago, and I'm going to keep saying that instead of Cretaceous Paleogene, okay? Plus, it's a syllable or two less. So anyways, the Cretaceous Tertiary is right in the middle of the five in terms of lethality, the mortality factor. It's after the Permian Triassic and after the Terminal Ordovician. And then comes the KT. I'll call it the KT because that's what it's been known as for decades, the KT boundary. But when you look there and you go through the literature, which, of course, I've done exhaustively, you know, what you find is, good God Almighty, you know, you had biomass burning that consumed up to half the biomass on the planet, which puts so much soot and particulate matter alone into the atmosphere that it would have cut off sunlight. But then you add to that the material that was blasted into the atmosphere as the result of the single crater, the crater, the Chichalube crater, which is the big one, you know, off the Yucatan Peninsula that's associated with that impact. However, there's evidence pretty convincing that it wasn't a singular impact event, but a multiple impact event, whereas the one in the Yucatan was probably the biggest and most dramatic. But there's considerable evidence that Indian geologists have found when we get into the mass extinction events, we can look at that. They call it Shiva crater, which is off of, I think it's in the Bay of Bengal. I don't remember exactly where it is, but it looks to be on the same size scale as the KT. Anyhow, so now you've got massive global wildfires, you've got months of darkness, because with the particulate matter from the impact itself goes into the atmosphere, now you've got billions of tons of particulate matter injected into the atmosphere, you've got the soot and the smoke, which circles the whole globe, cuts off photosynthesis in the process, and then after the fires have burned themselves out, now you're going to get the cosmic winter that sets in, and you're going to have at least several years of pretty much the whole planet being in an ice age. So, and then on top of that, you're going to have all of the toxins, the dioxins and everything that's pumped into the atmosphere, which causes acid rain, you're going to have global acid rain. That's another one of the things that's been documented, and we're talking a pH of one. Literally, that's the estimate. And when we get into this, I'll pull up all of the references, all the data, and we'll look at it. But you think about global acid rain, pH of one, cosmic winter, months of darkness, global scale firestorms, and we are supposed to believe that we are now literally, literally in the midst of a mass extinction event that's on the same scale of severity as the Great Five. It just doesn't make any sense at all. And my response to these people that are promoting this is, look, you guys, before you look at any data, before you actually read the science about these Great Five, just go outside for a little while. Go outside! And guess what? If you look up at the sky, it'll be blue. 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Made with no artificial ingredients or fillers, just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to. So if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious, try any of Aloha's protein bars. Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. Anyhow, so did we leave it? So I'll pick up with this study. I think this is maybe where we left off. Elevated carbon dioxide ameliorates the effects of ozone on photosynthesis and growth. Species respond similarly, regardless of photosynthetic pathway or plant functional group that appeared in the New Phytology, Volume 138, in the year 1998. Did we reference that? Yes. I thought we did. That's kind of where we left off, I believe, kind of right in there. So, yeah. So what they were addressing, I don't know how much detail we went to it. I'll just briefly cover it that you've got. So what the authors did, they selected six perennial species consisting of two types of trees, quaking aspens and red oaks. Okay, two species of grass from the C3 group, western wheatgrass and prairie junegrass, and two species from the C4 group. While you're there, would you look up C4 photosynthetic pathway? And we'll get a little more clarification. So what they did was they took a variety of different kinds of plants. And so C3 plants, yeah, basically what it boils down to is they have a different method of extracting carbon from the carbon dioxide molecules. So that's what the C3 and the C4 actually represents is that different, the different mechanism involved in extracting the carbon from that carbon dioxide molecule. What did you find, Kyle? So the C4 photosynthetic pathway is a photosynthetic process used by plants to turn light carbon dioxide and water into sugars that fuel plant growth. Begins in mesophyll cells and ends in bundle sheath cells, where PEP carboxylase attaches an incoming carbon dioxide molecule and produces oxalacetate, I don't know, a 4-carb. Oxalacetate, oxalacetate. But yeah, we don't need to get into that. The key point is that there are two different plants have two different mechanisms by which they extract that carbon from the carbon dioxide molecule. So that's the key. So you've got the C3 plants, the C4 plants. C3 plants are more adapted to an arid type of environment where there's going to be less available water. The C4 plants encompass most of our food crops. Okay. So anyways, the idea is to get in this study was to get a relatively diverse cross-section of plants to perform the experiment conducted at the University of Wisconsin. 64 seedlings of each species were planted in two controlled environment growth rooms. Each room was divided into four individual chambers for the purpose of testing the different treatment regimes. So then now this is quoting from the paper itself. In industrial regions, current ambient levels of O3, which is ozone, right? O subscript three, reduce photosynthesis in many and probably most plant species. Chronic ozone pollution commonly results in increased respiration rates, which means more water loss, shifts in the carbon allocation, decreased leaf retention, and shortened leaf longevity. And current levels are known to be high enough to reduce the growth and yield of agricultural crops and trees. So then they report the results of their studies where they increase the amount of ambient carbon dioxide to see how that interacted with the effects of ozone on all these different kinds of plants. The first thing that they noticed was that, and I quote here from the paper, in all six species used in this experiment, plants grown at ambient carbon dioxide were smaller and had a lower relative growth rate when exposed to an elevated level of ozone-induced reductions in the in-situ photosynthesis at ambient CO2. End of quote. So in other words, under a concentration of CO2 equal to present atmospheric concentrations, the presence of ozone caused stunted growth in the test plants. But then listen to the quote that goes on here. Examination of the interactive effects of carbon dioxide and ozone reveal that elevated carbon dioxide reduced the deleterious effects of high ozone on both photosynthesis and growth. So in their conclusion, they state that an elevated carbon dioxide environment seems to ameliorate the adverse effects of elevated ozone on both photosynthesis and growth, regardless of photosynthetic pathway or plant functional group. The amelioration of ozone by carbon dioxide concentrations forecasted for the next century may have important consequences for both individual and interactive species responses. So the point being is we can add that function to many other functions of elevated carbon dioxide in promoting the well-being of the plant world, of the biosphere, right? So I think then we got into the idea of looking at the 1980s, early 1984 paper. When they started, did we get into this paper? It came out in 84. Increasing atmosphere carbon dioxide, tree ring evidence for growth enhancement in natural vegetation. I don't think we did. Sound familiar? I don't recall about the tree rings getting into that one. Yeah, I don't think so. So this appeared in the journal Science, 1984. Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, colon, tree ring evidence for growth enhancement. So there was two types of trees in this study. Bristlecone pines that grew near the tree line at altitudes typically around 10,000 to 11,000 feet above sea level. Earlier studies by the author of this paper discovered the tree ring thickness and hence tree growth rates began accelerating after about 1840. Coincident with the transition out of the Little Ice Age. It was assumed that this was due exclusively to the warming climate. However, later studies up to the 1980s showed continued accelerated growth rates in spite of the fact the climate began to cool during this period and continued to do so through the 60s and 70s. That's something we are going to kind of come back to when we look at a more in-detailed graph of adjusted climate temperature increases over the 20th century. What you actually will see, and I think we've looked at this before, is that you actually see that the 30s, the 20s and the 30s was a big peak of warming, with the 30s being the warmest decade out of the whole 20th century. Then it kind of leveled off, except then, between the late 40s and the 70s, the climate actually cooled. There was a cooling period, interestingly, that coincided precisely with the post-World War II jump in fossil fuel consumption, right? And this is partly what was responsible for the fear in the 70s for an oncoming Ice Age. Remember that? Yeah, I remember reading articles about that in the 70s, clipping those out, but global warming imminent, or global cooling imminent. Yes, global cooling was imminent. But here's the interesting, kind of an ironic thing in my mind. I kind of think that there was a legitimate basis to that, to thinking that. I mean, it was wrong, but here's the two factors. One is that, yes, when those articles came out in the 70s, there had been at least 25 years of cooling climate. The other thing was, is, you know, coming up from the 1950s, once with radiocarbon dating started becoming a tool that could be used to date these events, it had become apparent by that time that the Ice Age was a much more recent event and much faster event. So it became apparent that rather than one long, protracted period of ice in massing, you had multiple episodes where the ice would grow for a period of, you know, 10 or 15 or 20,000 years, then it would contract. The contraction was called an interstadial. The growth was called a stadial. If it grew to the extent that it was at the late glacial maximum, say, 20,000 years ago, that was a glacial, a full glacial. If it melted away to the point where it was equivalent to what we've got today, here's your two prototypes end-to-end of this continuum. Late glacial maximum 20,000 years ago, full glacial. Currently, the amount of glacial ice in the world, interglacial, right? An interglacial is not defined as being, I suppose it could be, but, you know, getting rid of all of the ice in the world, which now there is evidence that suggests there were times when the ice, total ice volume on planet Earth was considerably diminished from what it is right now. But in any ways, for purposes of definition, we've got an interglacial now, full glacial 18,000, 20,000 years ago, with more than double the amount of glacial ice in the world. Then within that, you have a stadial, which is a cooling and an increase of the ice, and an interstadial, which is a shrinking back of the ice. During an interstadial, there's more ice than there is in an interglacial. In a stadial, there's less ice than in a full glacial, a full glacial period. Does that make sense? So you've got, if we look at the brackets, glacial, interglacial, and then you'd have stadial, interstadial. So during an interstate, the ice is going to diminish, but it's not going to diminish to the extent that it is now. Okay, we've talked about this, but just to reiterate that. Okay, so going back to the 20th century, you have these two things, these two factors. The fact that there had been a quarter century of cooling, and now the realization that the frequency of glacial, interglacial pulses was a lot greater than anybody had imagined. So there was kind of almost a legitimate basis for the fears of global cooling. Of course, then what happened is the 80s came along, and what happened in the 80s? The temperature started going up again, right? So then in 1988, that's the year James Hansen went before Congress. I think it was a hot, hot day in July, maybe, when he went before Congress. Some of his cohorts snuck into there the night before and turned off the air conditioner. I don't remember the details of that, but yeah, that actually happened. They deliberately turned off the air conditioner in the Senate hearing room where they were meeting, and so they're all in there sweating copiously during this really hot day while James Hansen is delivering this, this, you know, this scenario that we're all doomed from global warming. And a lot of things were said in the next few years. You know, as a result of that particular meeting, that summer of 1988, you know, the IPC was launched, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and that's when this whole thing began to steamroll, post-1988. And, of course, what was used to legitimize it was the fact that from the 80s and then on into the 90s, the climate was warming. It was going through a warm phase. However, the increase in warming between the 70s, let's say, and the late 80s, was not as great as the warming, say, in the early 20th century when we came out of the Little Ice Age and went into the 1930s, the period of these extended droughts, the Dust Bowl, you know, the migrant workers having to leave because they're basically their topsoil all blew away, which partly was the result of the fact that the, I believe it was the Farm Bureau came in, the agricultural department came in. Like overgrazing and all that kind of stuff, too. Well, you know, they came in and they, it was, who was it? I forget the, might have been John Deere, I don't, or whoever it was, was working with politicians to get farmers to buy, you know, tractors, farm tractors, and plowing equipment and so on. So the agricultural department goes in and facilitates. It was sort of like you had the agricultural department, you had the banks, and you had the, I believe it was one of the big tractor manufacturers, went in there and convinced these farmers to mortgage their farms and buy these tractors. So that's what lots and lots of them did in that Oklahoma, Kansas area, the mid, you know, mid, you know, middle America right there, the Midwest. And it had come right at the end of a rainy spell, you know, the first, you know, late ice, late 19th century, early 20th century, there was copious rainfall in that, that belt there. Well, it dried up, you know, we went into the drought and that drought lasted for nearly 10 years. So what happened was they go in there, get the tractors, plow up the soil, then the drought comes, the soil dries out, the wind comes, blows the soil away, and that was pretty much the nuts and bolts of what happened there and why you had the Okies and the whole, you know, what was it, you know, John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, based upon that whole period of 1930s history. Interestingly, while nature was kind of going through this depression, this decline, so did we economically. And I think that there's some very interesting correlations looking at what happened to the economic world during the 30s and what happened to the natural world. I think there were connections there, but that would take us far off where we're going today. So anyways, here's what I'm kind of my wrap-up is that, you know, we've seen actually oscillations of climate within the last century, century and a half. We've seen that during this period from the 16 to 17 into the 1800s, glaciers worldwide became the largest they had been since the end of the Great Ice Age. And how do we know that? Well, because the terminal moorings left behind by the Little Ice Age glaciers. That's primarily how we know. And we can also see, you know, when you have a glacier filling a mountain valley and it starts to melt, you get a lot of water, meltwater flowing along in that interface, in that kind of channel between the glacier ice and the hillside or the cliffside of the mountain. Can you picture that? So when you're melting off, you're getting a lot of water through there, right? That water will erode and it'll etch a line into the hillsides or the mountainsides that you can then use as a proxy to go, okay, well, the glaciers were this thick. They were up to here because the water was here. Once the glaciers began to melt away and they're only half as thick, you know, now those little shorelines or strand lines that are being cut by that water are going to be much lower. And so you can actually see that those meltwater streams along the margins of the glacier will put lines in the hillside so you can now know, okay, the glacier was up to this level. That makes sense, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And so it's there once you recognize what it is. And that's how, so you've got, you know how thick the glaciers were, you know where they terminated because the Little Ice Age terminal moraines were built. And since those Little Ice Age glaciers have receded back, those moraines are the biggest moraines that have been formed since the great moraines that were produced, you know, at the end of the Great Ice Age 10 to 12,000 years ago. And so what would be the terms that you would use to describe that? Were we in an interglacial and went towards glacial? So would that be what? Well, I mean, during the Little Ice Age. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was going towards a glacial. And but what stopped the process? I don't know. That's the interesting thing. And it's an unresolved question. How do you start a great ice age? Does it start with something like a Little Ice Age and then some threshold is breached and it? No pun intended. And what? Nothing. Sorry. What was the pun? I said it snowballs. That was a bad pun. It snowballs. Snowballs. Yeah, it snowballs. Exactly. Well, an appropriate pun. The answer is I don't know. I don't know. And I don't know if anybody, I mean, there's ideas out there. Yeah. But that's one of the conundrums. I mean, I think that's something it's a it's a very significant scientific question to know, because that's the thing I've been saying all along. Well, how can we say, you know, oh, there's a consensus and, you know, it's all figured out. But we don't can't explain the beginning or the end of an ice age. You know, you can you can go ahead and attempt to use the Milankovic forces, but those are so slow acting. And we don't see that. We see catastrophic shifts in climate change, in ice volume, in temperature. You know, these these things are happening very quickly, very severely. Could it be something like Milankovic cycles and yet there are thresholds in the climate so that there's this long, slow shift, but then a threshold is reached. And so the change happens quickly. Well, that would probably be the argument. But I, you know, I've never seen anything that would really quantify that to to a credible extent. I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, you got to say, yeah, what, what, what the nature of the you got to tell me what there's a reason for the see, I think there's thresholds. Yes. But I think the threshold is like, for example, you got a huge volcanic eruption or you have an asteroid impact. Yeah. Something like that, that, that, that, that can push the, the, the typical balance over a threshold. Yeah. But I think it takes an outside force or an inside, well, outside meaning perhaps exogenic could be asteroid, maybe the sun. See, there's, there's that possibility. And this is another conversation we need to have is there's some really interesting data that's come about, out about the sun in the last decade or two that we haven't really looked at yet. So there's, we need to go there for sure. Absolutely. It could be something like the Milankovitch cycles. If it's in the right place, if that long 40,000 year cycles in the right place, then something like a massive volcanic eruption causes an enormous ice age. Or if the Milankovitch cycles in a different place, it causes a short one. Well, and, and see the, the, the paradox of a neon seven of an ice age that we've talked about is that you have to precipitate a whole lot of snow over a very large area. Yeah. And then that snow can't melt. Yeah. Because that's what it does now. You know, you figure out how many square miles is, is Canada. And, and so you figure all of Canada and maybe 10% of Northern United States was covered by ice. So how many square miles is that? That's a lot of maybe five, six million square miles, something in that range. I, you know, so the problem is, is now you've got to precipitate a whole bunch of snow. It can't melt away, but in order to affect that precipitation, you have to get the, the water vapor into the atmosphere, but that requires heat. Right. So you've got a whole lot of water vapor in the atmosphere, precipitating out rapidly as snow. Um, and it does this enough to, because what will happen is once you cover 5 million square miles with fresh snow, it completely changes the albedo of a whole hemisphere. And that could then cause further cooling because now, you know, if you've got plants and, and, and, and all of that stuff growing there, it's, you know, it's reflecting a lot of, uh, it's absorbing a lot of, uh, radiation. Whereas now if it's all white, fresh snow, it's reflecting. So that's heat being reflected back to space. So that could be a factor. It probably is a factor. How much of a factor? I don't know, but it does change the albedo. But you can see the problem there is you've, in order to get that volume of water into the atmosphere, you have to have heat thermal energy, but then it has to be cold enough in the higher latitudes that, that, that snow falls and doesn't melt. You can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, summer has to be gone completely from the northern latitudes, or you're not going to get a buildup of, you know, thousands of feet of snow that ultimately compresses into glacial ice. So there's the problem. And that's why I think that we have to begin thinking outside the box, which is that let's think, okay, how could we simultaneously, is there a way we could simultaneously inject huge amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere? And then that could be followed perhaps by some cessation, something that then blocks the sunlight? Maybe, maybe an impact into an ocean or an ice sheet would do exactly that. This, but this, this kind of thing needs to be tested. And I don't know to the extent that it really has applied this, the question of say an impact into an ocean or an ice sheet. Well, let's say if you have a multiple impact event, some of the impact glaciers, we'll see. Wait, say that again, Kyle. Nuke the glaciers and we'll find out and we'll see if it, what it does. Well, you see that you brought that up. That's really kind of almost what we're talking about, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, that's what an impact would do basically. Yeah, it is. Although, although, you know, I, I don't know if that would be such a good way to test the hypothesis, Kyle. A great way to test it. It's the only way to test it. It could be dangerous. Like you're saying, there's so much snow would build up, right? And then there's tectonic stresses, et cetera. And you have an earthquake and a volcanic eruption or a series of eruptions, you know, the whole cascade range, you know, some places like that, the Pacific ring. And then, yeah, you can fill the atmosphere with dust. So an impact into an ice sheet or ocean would initially put a whole bunch of water vapor into the atmosphere. Then the question would be how long, you know, given, given a certain velocity, a certain mass, certain energy release, how much equivalent water would be converted to vapor? How, you know, the physics of it, you know, we're just going to require some computer modeling to determine that. But, you know, then if the atmosphere is, if turbulence is induced in the atmosphere, it might more effectively distribute that water vapor. But I think that it's clear that we see evidence of intense, intense pluvial events all over and not necessarily in glaciated terrain. I mean, the whole southeast and southwest has the imprints of these extreme pluvial events, extreme rainfalls, way beyond anything in modern times. You know, that was the interesting thing about this 1969 James River event when Hurricane Camille, which had come up from the Gulf and it stalled over Virginia, over the headwaters of the James River. And it dumped, over a period of two or three days, it dumped so much water onto these, particularly one county up there that just got inundated. And what it did was, and Brad and I have actually gone up there and looked at some of this material, and you can still see scars on the hillsides up there along the, on the Appalachian Mountains. You still see the scars from this event. And so what it did was, it triggered a whole bunch of mass wasting and, and reshuffling in, in, in boulder deposits. It created boulder deposits. The interesting thing is, and I've got a paper written on this study talking about the, the, the largest size of the boulders moved during this James River event where, or this Hurricane Camille event, when there was so much water, so much rainfall dumped, that literally birds, I think it was, I think it was like up to 30 inches in a, in a 24-hour period. But there were like birds that were sitting on tree branches and after it was all over, they found the birds dead under the trees because they had literally drowned. There was so much rain coming down and people, yeah, say you, you couldn't, you couldn't see, you know, feet in front of your face because the rain was so intense. And so here's the thing, there are ancient boulder deposits all throughout the Southern Appalachians. Those boulder deposits, when you look at the, the boulders that were moved by Hurricane Camille, drenching, torrential rainfall, the biggest ones are approaching some of the smaller boulders in these ancient boulder deposits. And I mean, we're talking about boulders that weigh thousands of tons that are, you know, in mantling the, the, the, the, the hollows and the, the, the, the stream channels and stuff all over the Southern Appalachians. And the modern creeks would be completely incompetent to move those boulders, right? Maybe even after the, the, the, the, um, uh, the break we'll, we'll actually, I'll show you a few pictures of these and you get the idea immediately. So here's, here's what I'm getting at is that there's a whole lot of proxy type of evidence that tells us very clearly that in the past, there have been these rainfall events that have probably been 10 to a hundred times greater than anything we've seen in, in modern times or have been measured, you know, since we've had meteorological data coming in. And since we've been collecting this data, well, how would you explain something more intense than what happened with hurricane Camille over the James river? See, that's where it gets really interesting. So it pretty much clearly we can, we can acknowledge, yeah, there have been these tremendous rainfall that have completely just inundated the landscape. And, you know, what do we call them again, Brad, the, um, the slumps that we see out in the Western cliff faces. Um, there's, we've several prominent ones on Hopi lands that we've seen in Arizona. Yeah. Yeah. Something with a B I know we've got hung up on that. We get hung up on that every time, but yeah. Yeah. So then we can go to the Southwest in those deserts out there. And you know what you're looking for, we can see very similar type of evidence. We can see slumps where cliff faces have slid down because they're so completely oversaturated that they lose all cohesiveness. And there's a certain, um, type of geometry that what will happen when the cliff, we may have sun on our trips. I think we've seen some of those. Yeah. Yeah. I think we talked about this. We did early days on the podcast too. We sure did. We did down and, and actually folds back towards the hill. So yes. Like it slides out like that, like, like that. So there's a slope going towards the new cliff face. Yes. Slid down. It's yeah. Yep. And that's the effects of when those, that ground becomes oversaturated, but you can see that those things have happened and then they haven't been modified since. So whatever that rainfall was, whenever it was, it did this incredible geomorphic work. And then since then, and that's the thing about these catastrophic events, they, they're, they're, they're, they're few and far between, but when they happen, they completely, they'll, they will rearrange the geomorphology more intensely than say 5,000 or 10,000 years or more 20,000 years of normal incremental change. And that's what we see there out west. We can see the same thing in, you know, in Southwestern deserts, we can see the, um, the Southern Appalachians. In fact, we could say this all over the non-glaciated part of North America that is now America, pretty much everywhere you look, if you know what to look for, you can find evidence of these ancient mega events. So brings us back to the question, how do you, how do you start an ice age? Well, I would say that maybe a fruitful way to, to explore that question would be to consider the effects of a multi-impact event, where initially you have large volumes of, of water vapor injected into the atmosphere. And then this is followed perhaps by injection of particulate matter, uh, firestorms that are then putting stuff into the atmosphere, volcanic events like Brad just was mentioning, all of these things now combining to, you know, to create this, um, uh, shield that's reflecting sunlight. And so now we go into a kind of a cosmic winter, so an impact event, and then that's followed by a cosmic winter, the impact, if it's an impact, obviously into the landmass, you're not going to have that huge injection of water vapor. But in the studies that I've read through on oceanic impact, that is one of the consequences, is injection of mega scale amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere. And then the, the, the rain out that has to follow as a consequence of that. But I haven't seen studies that have equivalently, maybe there might be some out there. I would think that I'd have heard of them, say, if nothing else from George Howard by now, but looking at something equivalent, what happens if you have an impact or even a multi-impact event into an ice sheet. And that's what we need to look at. And that's what we need to be modeling. Absolutely. Well, you, you ready to take a break? Sure. Sure. Let's do that. Well, I was able to look that up quickly. They're called, uh, Toreva. Toreva. Slump blocks. Toreva slump blocks. Slump blocks. But Toreva, I think, is the nearby town there in Arizona. And T-O-R-E-V-A. What were you thinking? Flank failure. But is that just coastal? Well, no. Flank failure. It would be a type of flank failure. Absolutely. Mass wasting flank failure. Yeah. Yeah. Or Toreva slump blocks. Sure. In our Atlanta stuff, we looked at flank failures along the Canary Islands and along the coastline of Africa and so forth. But yeah, those would be different, but they're all, you know, in a sense, related. Just different types of slides. Is it the kind of thing you see in these videos from the West Coast where we've had a lot of mudslides or cliff slides and it'll form, it'll slide down and then form a hump at the end of the slide? Is that what you're talking about? Similar. Yeah. Similar. It's not mud, though. Yeah. They're actually rocks and the whole rock layers will drop down. Yeah. So it's different than just the soil would create. All right. Well, let's go ahead and take the break. Let's do. And we'll be right back. We're an hour in. All right. A Mochi moment from Sadie, who writes, I'm not crying. You're crying. This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi, because I didn't have to convince him I needed a GLP-1. He understood, and I felt supported, not judged. I came for the weight loss and stayed for the empathy. Thanks, Sadie. I'm Myra Ameth, founder of Mochi Health. To find your Mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com. Sadie is a Mochi member compensated for her story. This podcast is sponsored by Nurture Life. Hey, it's Danielle Fischel from Podmeats World, and as a mom to two growing boys, I know how chaotic mealtime can get. No matter how confident I am with what I'm serving them, my kids will always find a way to call the meal gross or stinky or yuck. It's true. They can be wildly picky about new foods. And with my busy schedule, I don't have the time to become America's next top chef. And so that's why I love Nurture Life. It's a meal delivery service that actually caters to kids, ideal for ages eight months to eight years, fully cooked and ready to serve in just one minute. It's the problem solver I've been praying for. It's the top meal delivery service for babies, toddlers, and kids. 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Even if you aren't a parent with young kids, you might have parent friends who struggle with mealtime. Make sure to share our code P-O-D with them. Remember, put your little ones first with healthy meals from Nurture Life. That website, one more time, is NurtureLife.com slash P-O-D pod. Welcome back to Cosmographia, ladies and gentlemen. I want to mention, before we get back to the main topic, the Earth Origins Conference that's coming up. And I think Randall and Brad have the details. Yeah, the Earth Origins Conference is going to be April 21st through 23rd. It's going to be near Sedona in a really nice place in the valley there, north of Phoenix, south of Sedona. Yeah, it's going to be a pretty intense event. I mean, there's going to be a great lineup of people there. You know, Scott, my good friend Scott Walter is going to be there. You know, he did the America on Earth series with, was it History Channel? He's been doing great research on ancient America, looking at the Templar connections. He was deciphered the Kensington runestone in Minnesota, which has been controversial for many years. William Henry is going to be there. He's an investigative mythologist. He's an art historian, and he does really interesting work. He's going to be presenting there. He's, let's see, something like 18 books maybe he's written. Let's see, who else is going to be there? Brian Forrester, who's traveled the world researching ancient megalithic works. He's going to be there presenting on his work. Elias Arjan, I think I'm pronouncing his last name. I had a conference with him. I had a conversation with him. But I don't remember how to pronounce his last name. Sorry, Elias. But anyways, he is working in the field of human lifespan extension and longevity. And so he's been immersed in the strategies and technologies and things that could potentially help some of those of us who are doing this kind of important work to live up quite a bit longer, which sounds really good to me. And Martin Gray, also a world traveler who has done some amazing photography work researching ancient sacred sites and has some incredible books out there. He calls himself an Earth Pilgrim, and I think that's a good title for him. He's going to be there presenting, and he's really done some amazing documentation. Probably nobody's documentation of ancient sacred sites even comes close to what Martin has done. Other names, Carl Coleman's going to be there presenting, Dan Rogers. Yeah, Dan Rogers and I are going to be actually doing a little conversation that we're going to record. By the time you're seeing this, that conversation from us will have already come out. So Dan is doing really great work in looking at natural law. And very much he's into the whole. Like John Locke type stuff? Yeah, yeah. So he was with, for decades, he was with the, in the aerospace and defense industry and developing advanced technologies that they were using. But now he's on this mission, as he says, to responsibly hitch mankind's minds and machinery to nature's wheel work. Gregory, Gregorio Acuna, Knight of Shaman, he's a speaker and a storyteller. He's going to be there sharing some of his traditions. It goes on. It's going to be a great weekend. And it's actually going to be very complimentary to the Cosmic Summit that's coming up in June. If there's a kind of an overriding theme of the conference this weekend, and it's going to be my presentation, and I know that Dan Rogers and Scott Walter and myself have already kind of mapped out a strategy to bring in the thematic image of the Holy Grail. And it's connection with this particular time of year coming up and get into some of the background of that. And we will introduce some of the ideas that we're going to be getting into is the possibility and the exploration of the idea of ancient technologies. That won't be the full focus of it, but we're going to be laying the groundwork for further disclosures and revelations about the potential of bringing some of those ancient tech, resuscitating some of those ancient technologies. And some of the stuff that we were talking about over the break, I can't wait to share that with the Cosmographian listeners. What you were showing us, Kyle, is amazing to me, and it fits right in, dovetails right into that, the idea of ancient technologies that we may have forgotten or have been lost. An idea that seems to be very much anathema to the archaeological establishment for some reason. But whatever that reason is, it's like I think the old guard that is refusing to consider that there's a deeper, more complex history of civilization on this planet are going to soon be just basically left in the dust. So if you get a chance, if you can, you know, there are still seats available for this in person. If you can't get there, then it's going to be, the whole thing's going to be, the whole weekend's going to be live streamed via how-to. So people will be able to download it through how-to and participate that way. So it's going to be, I think, a lot of fun, and the presentations and the material and the information that's going to be shared is going to be amazing. So I would encourage people, yeah, do it, and it would be a great way to, well, to help connect with this community of people that is emerging worldwide, that is looking at things from the perspective of a much bigger and deeper and more complex picture and discovering that what the potential of our own civilization is going to be in the next few decades, what the potential might be for we as individuals in the next few decades, and what it might mean for life on Earth in general. So this, to me, is the fundamental secret of the grail itself. Again, the idea that we've talked about so much, the healing, the restoration of the wasteland, the restoration of the royal blood, all of these things are tied together. And we're standing on a threshold right now of potentially mind-boggling changes as far as where we can go in the next generation. If we just have, if we wake up and realize that there's more to this story and that the tools are right in front of us to do this. So this April thing is going to be, the April conference is going to be very much about segueing into that. And, of course, because it's going to be live-streamed, we're going to be live-streaming it out to the whole planet. And then the follow-up to that is going to be the Cosmic Summit in June. And I think the two are going to complement each other very powerfully. So some of the stuff that's being presented in the April conference will segue right into what's going to be presented in the Cosmic Summit in June in Asheville. This is really beginning to become a compelling idea. People are waking up to this. And I've made the comment earlier many times about, you know, how 10 years ago, 15 years ago, who knew the term Younger Dryas? Basically nobody, right? Outside of a small cadre of professional paleoclimatologists. Who knew the Younger Dryas? Well, I'll raise my hand. I did. Brad did. Because we were talking about the Younger Dryas in the late 1990s, actually. But nobody else to our knowledge was, other than a few, you know, geologists and glaciologists and paleoclimatologists. But now, I think millions of people out there, thanks to what we've been doing, thanks to people like what Graham is doing, thanks to George Howard, and a few others, millions of people now know at least something about the Younger Dryas. So, let me do a little screen share here. My first two words were Younger Dryas. I've been talking about it for a long time. Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, my first words, as I recall, at least from what my mother told me, was I was like probably six months old. No, maybe a little older, maybe nine months old. And I said, paleocurrent indicator. Paleocurrent indicator. You told us something different before. I was waiting if you were going to say the same thing. You said glacial fluvial. What's your first word? Glacial fluvial. Oh, that was my third word. That was my third word. My second word was streamlined erosional residuals. Yeah, well, mine was crypto explosion structure. That was the first thing. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, I didn't get to that. I thought it was like five or six for me. Mike's first word was. Yeah. Silence. Silence. Mike's. No, Mike's was. He comes out. First word, he gets out and he's in this new world. He's just been born and he goes. Normality. It's normal. Because it was abnormal prior to that. He was. Okay. This is getting. This is degenerating fast. Where are we going? Give me the main topic. How about imbrication? Ah, that's fun. One of my favorite topics because you know what? Speaking of paleocurrent indicators, imbrication is. Okay. Let me see if I can, if I can pull this off. Okay. Two. Here we go. I bet you I can do this. I'm getting good at this. Alrighty. Do we see a young man with a big floppy hat standing? Yep. Okay. We see some rocks stacked up there. Now this is up near, this is in Tennessee or North Carolina. It's right up there near the Tennessee, North Carolina border. In, I think this one, we're pretty sure we're in the, yes, we're in the smoky, great smokies national park. Now what you see here is imbrication. Imbrication is the way rocks get stacked up by water. And we've talked about this before, that they're a paleocurrent indicator because the way they're stacked, you know, is showing which direction the water is flowing. And we all here now know that this, we look at this and we know that the water was flowing from left to right. Right. And it just, the, the, the, the, the, the analogy that I use just as imagine a bookshelf and you've got the books upright and you push the books and they slide over so that they're tilted in the way they're stacked up, um, is imbrication, uh, almost like a deck of cards. So when you see rocks stacked up like this, you're going to know, okay, these rocks didn't just end up here randomly because of gravity. They were laying somewhere and they were picked up in a current and they were stacked. And when the current flowed away, this was what was left behind. So obviously at some point, and I don't know when it was, this piece of land right here was submerged under pretty vigorously flowing water because in order to move this rock here, I mean, that's probably five or 600 pounds anyway, right there, um, that rock. And then we won't even talk about what this is laying back here, but there's a big rounded boulder back there that I think goes back much further than this. And when we go to the next slide, you'll notice the imbrication. You've got three boulders here, but these boulders are like 5,000 tons each, but you see these, you can see the three of them and how they're stacked up. Current was exactly the same way as the modern creek that's right there, but you can see the creek in the background flowing from right to left. This creek did not emplace these boulders. These boulders are mute, incontrovertible evidence that there has been gigantic floods, at least submerging and inundating this particular piece of landscape here. However, this is just one section. If I go through, okay, this is Boone Fork Creek and you can see the modern stream right here and you can see the boulders that line this creek for miles. And so these boulders were not deposited by this water flow, clearly. So the question becomes when and how many events are we seeing represented here? Go to this. Look at, you see this rounded boulder? This boulder is nearly eight feet in diameter, right? Now it's sitting out and there's another one right back here. So this water here is not moving these boulders. Now, let's take the largest modern floods that have come through this stream valley here. Could they pick up and transport these boulders? Probably not. What could they do? Perhaps they could move the boulders a few feet. That might be a reasonable thing to imagine. But they're not going to pick up and entrain a boulder this size that we know of. Now, when I was talking earlier about the Hurricane Camille event up in Virginia over the James River, the largest size boulders were just getting up to maybe this size here. They were like five to six feet in diameter. But this is actually bigger. This is probably closer to seven or eight feet in diameter. If there was a person standing here, they wouldn't be as tall as this rock. So we can keep going on here. Again, more creek valleys. Look at the rubble and the rock piles that are lining these creek valleys. So this is a wasting, a mass wasting event. This rock undoubtedly slid from upslope somewhere, came to rest right here. The highway, when they cut the highway, they said, well, I think we'll go around that rock. We won't try to move it. But yeah, I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of valleys from North Georgia all the way up through Virginia up into Pennsylvania, you see the same kind of evidence of these massive boulder deposits where the modern creeks and streams would have had nothing to do with their emplacement. And then when you couple that with potholes that are not really being created now, but are the remnants. In fact, look here. You can see the remnant of a pothole. Look at the arc here. It has a matching arc over here. And if you draw those arcs, you will get a circle that originally was eroded as a huge pothole. And then, but subsequent flows then breached the rock. And you can see, look at the rocks that are stacked up here. The whole point here I'm trying to make is that the emplacement of these big boulders and the incising of the potholes has got to be the same event or similar events, because what this is showing is that you've had these gigantic flows through these creek valleys. Look here. You see this? This is a pothole. So this is colking. So what you have to visualize here is that you've got this thing is somewhere close to five feet in diameter. So you've got a vortex that's probably 30, 40, 50 feet tall in that depth of water, and it's moving really fast, and that flow is happening long enough so that this hole can be drilled into rock. Then the erosion of the force of the flowing water breaches. You can see here this whole section, about half of the original circle is gone, which would have been, you know, first the pothole is cut. And, you know, remember, Kyle, when we were in the scab lands and we were up there by Deep Lake and you went in there and there was the big pothole and there was the cave in the bottom? Yep. That's how it starts right there. That cave is like the beginning of it breaching the side wall. Yes. And think about this. If that cave keeps enlarging but it doesn't completely breach the wall, you're going to have a rock arch. You're going to have a natural bridge. Can you visualize that? Yeah. An imbricate rock. It doesn't look very heavy if he's... Well, I mean, this kid had been working out. So, I mean, he just... But even then, he was only able to hold it up long enough for us to get the shot, and then he had to leap out of the way and the rock collapsed. No, not really. No, this rock is just stacked up and it's a great example of, okay, the modern stream did not put this rock here. You know, so then I would ask any gradualist uniformitarianist to explain to me how this rock... Explain to me exactly how that rock got there. Well, I can do it if you allow me to invoke, you know, 50 million cubic feet of water per second rushing through this stream hollow here. But let me hear what your explanation is. Now, if you reject my explanation, it's because you're rejecting that possibility that 20 or 30 or 40 million cubic feet per second might have been rushing through this stream valley. But if you accept that as a possibility, well, now, hey, now we've got a natural explanation for this kind of thing. Look at this. Now, this is up on the Tukasegee River in North Carolina. But you can see the kind of pothole erosion all over the place, which if we were to come back in a time machine, there was a point where there was such huge volumes of water rushing through this channel that for sustained periods of time, and I'm guessing it would have to be, you know, again, going maybe using the scab lands. If we think of Grand Coulee as being cut in two to three weeks, we could picture here that this might be something that would occur in three days to a week. And then once those floods have drained off, it leaves behind this evidence of its passage. But in 10,000 or 15,000 or 5,000, however many thousands of years it's been, you know, very little erosion has occurred on these features. But yeah, I mean, this is clearly evidence of extremely turbulent fast flows. And even if you had a modern flood that lasted for a few, let's say the modern creek, which in fact, upriver from this, there was a dam, and sometimes they'll let water out of the reservoir. But it's really only for a few hours. And when you come back after, you can't notice any difference in these pothole erosion features here. So it has to be really fast, really deep, and it has to be sustained for a long enough time that it can do this geomorphic drilling work, dislodge these great boulders. And it would make sense that the kinds of forces, shear forces within that flowing water that can cut these potholes is also fully capable of, you know, quarrying gigantic rocks and washing them downstream. So let's see, there's a, look, you can see the little human figure up here. And again, you look at these boulder deposits, and there's, you know, hundreds of boulders in here, thousands of them that are four, five, six, up to 10 feet in diameter, even bigger. And look up here, you can see that the modern forest growth is encroaching upon the boulder deposits. What you see here in the creek is only part of it. The boulder deposits actually extend onto both sides up into the forest and are gradually and slowly going to get covered up, you know, as the forests go through their cycles, the trees die, soil will build up. And eventually, you know, a few thousand, 5,000, 6, 7,000 years from now, these deposits are going to basically be underground. And you're not going to know that they're there unless you have subsurface, some kind of subsurface investigation, either ground penetrating radar, or you try to drill, or you excavate, or whatever. And you're going to think, well, this is limited to this, what you see right here. But you can see clearly it's not. It extends for a considerable distance on either side of the modern creek channel. Now, what are the chances that a single flood coming through here, even in modern times, that could submerge these rocks, actually would have been responsible for depositing these rocks up here? No, I think what we're seeing here is we're seeing the aftermath of really big water flows through here. And this will be, we're going to be visiting this on our tour. Yep. And, you know, I'm sorry to say we're sold out on that, the tour that we're starting next week. You know, but, you know, it's, well, there will be more. So, you know, yeah, for this one, it's going to be fun. Sorry, you guys. Russ and Kyle, I know you guys are what you're doing in Turkey. It's extremely important, but we'll miss you. It won't be the same without you guys there. No, thanks, man. Yeah, I wish we could go. Yeah, I mean, it just, you know, I'm already going, yeah, you guys aren't going to be around. I wish I could go to Turkey, man. Yeah, right. Then after that, we can go to the Canaries. There you go. And then to Geese. Well, I'm thinking, you know, we're definitely going to be having a conversation about the Atlantis tour to the Azores. Publicly, here we go. Well, I mentioned it, but all right, look at this. Now, what kind of forces, I mean, look, you can see these rocks are obviously been eroded. That's Jesse, yeah. Jesse's wearing the right kind of shirt. You got it. And Brad, Jesse and Brad, but look at these, look at these boulders here. For God's sakes, I mean, look at these. So ask yourself, what in the world scale of water flow is carrying these, this kind of stuff is sediment. And they're not blocky, sharp edges. You know, they've been rolling around, moving and breaking off. So they're quite smooth, even those huge ones. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see some of this on our Upper Cumberland tour. Yeah, this is one of the places we're going right here. And so, yeah, pothole erosion. So we've gotten into this some, and we're going to get back into it, because it's just super interesting stuff. And the studies are coming from a whole bunch of different directions, but they're all kind of leading, when you follow these different directions and these different studies, they all kind of, to me, converge on the same conclusions, is that catastrophic floods, and the evidence would suggest to me that they were, is pretty much honing in on the terminal ice age. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process, so you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. I love that line at the bottom of that paragraph. It said, have a very low frequency of occurrence. Yes. The transportation of coarse debris, the major work, and erosion of the valley floor and sides are accomplished during major floods that have a very low frequency of occurrence. Yes. Oh, well, look here. Yeah, the sequence of events that have occurred in the Little River Valley since 1949 suggests a mechanism by which many familiar features of the bottomlands and mountainous regions of the Appalachians are formed. So what he's saying right there is big floods with a very low frequency of occurrence. I mean, that's essentially what he's saying. Geomorphology and forest ecology of a mountain region in central Appalachians. I just love the understatement of that sentence. Oh, I know. I know. The Little River Valley, sorry, that's like the 400-foot gorge we went to on the Lower Cumberland trip, right? Yes. I mean, the Little River down there in Alabama. Yeah, so let's see. How did we get here? You started imprecation. Were you getting back to the slump blocks? Yeah, well, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so we'll look at the Torreva slump block, and then we'll go on, because we talked about it. I thought it would be interesting to actually pull up the slides, or a slide to show people what that is. And it's, you know, we'll come back to that, because it's so interesting and so important, but how we have documented the effect of gigantic floods in the southwestern deserts. So I'm going to pull that up right now. We started late here, so we're trying to kind of close her down. Is that where you were going, Russ? Yeah, I was basically saying, you know, we're running out of time, so if you were going to show those pictures and then maybe wrap up the ice age stuff we were talking about. Yeah, we'll do that. So let's see. That's slide 100. And let's get out of there and go back to slide 100. And this is what the Torreva block is that we were talking about that you can see in the southwestern deserts. That is evidence of oversaturation of the ground. Here we go. Okay, share screen. And there we go. Okay, are you seeing this? Yep. All right, cool. All right, well, you can see here's the original rock strata. Now, this is probably mostly sandstones in here, probably with some limestones, but lithology isn't that critically important. But the thing to see is that you've got the horizontal strata here, and this is the same rock in the same layers. But you can see it's dislodged, come loose, and it's essentially, you know, like you said, it's turned down. In other words, the rock is dipping or tilting. The rock surface is tilting downwards toward the cliff face. And what you can see then in front of it is if you look at the hummocky terrain, and you can see some of the same hummocky terrain infilling the crevice between the slump block here and the original cliff face. All of that is of the suite. And basically what it is is the result of this ground becoming super saturated. And then it becomes so saturated that the rock itself loses all cohesiveness, and big sections of the face of it then slump down in this fashion that I'll show you with my hands when we close the slide here. And then all of this material here is the lesser stuff, the debris stuff that was spread out and piled up in front. So all of this is of a suite. So that's all essentially evidence. So basically a block kind of breaks off the cliff and then tilts backwards towards the cliff it broke off from as it's sliding down, right? That's the idea. That's the idea, yeah. So it's like, you know, here's your layers. Here it is, and then it slumps off, and as it's going down, it does this. It slumps down like this. Right. Yeah. So that's your Tereva block right there. So let me get out of here for tonight. Go back to what we were talking about. About we were looking at the tree growth as a result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. And that, we're going back to the 1984 when this was really beginning to be recognized as something that was occurring in nature. And we discovered that there were two tree species studied for the researcher, bristlecone pines, and they grow near the tree line at altitudes typically around 10,000 or 11,000 feet above sea level. And earlier studies by Les Marches or Les Marches and others discovered the tree ring thickness, and hence tree growth rates began accelerating after 1840. Now, this is right there coincidental with the exact timing that the Little Ice Age is ameliorating, right? Mid-19th century. So he's saying here, so it says, but later studies up to the 1980s showed continued accelerated growth rates in spite of the fact that the climate began to cool during this period. So we kind of got off on that tangent talking about that period between the 40s and the 70s and up to the 80s where the climate was cooling in the mid-century, and then it started warming again in the 80s. So what they noticed, though, was that the tree ring growth continued during this period of cooling, which led them to think, well, then it's not all attributable to the change in temperature. This is clearly a factor, but it's not fully explaining these nice big fat tree rings that they're finding in these bristlecone pines that are growing up at 10,000, 11,000 feet above sea level, right? So this is what they write in the abstract. To the article that came out in 1984, it was published in the journal Science. A response of plant growth to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, which has been anticipated from laboratory data, may now have been detected in the annual rings of subalpine conifers growing in the western United States. Experimental evidence shows that carbon dioxide can be an important limiting factor in the growth of plants in this high-altitude environment. In other words, lower the amount of carbon dioxide, and now you're going to restrict growth of these high-altitude plants. He goes on to say, the greatly increased tree growth rates observed since the mid-19th century exceed those expected from climatic trends, but are consistent in magnitude with global trends in carbon dioxide, especially in recent decades. Now, the importance of this particular paper is this is like some of the first initial recognition that carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere may be fueling plant growth, and hence a greening. And what I'm going to do, let's see, okay, let's do this. I will go to share screen again, go to screen two. So they're saying, are you saying that they initially were thinking that... It was exclusively from the warmth, the increasing temperature from the end of the Little Ice Age. But that when they looked at the actual... Actual growth, like I said, it far exceeded what they were projecting just from the increase in temperature. So this led them to go, well, what else could be promoting growth? And it was the obvious answer. Carbon dioxide has increased. So here's some interesting graphs that they published. Ring-width indices for limber pine, Mount Jefferson, Nevada, showing rapidly increasing growth since the 1960s. So it'd be interesting to see this, you know, because this, again, this is 1984. But what you're seeing here, of course, is pre-industrial. And then you see the, you know, as the industrial revolution and the consumption of fossil fuels is increasing, you get this here. And then, you know, from the 50s and 60s on, you know, when the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere really began to pick up, you see exactly corresponding with that, the increase in tree-ring width. And here's graphs from all these different places. So the assumption here is that there's two things driving this. Because we're looking here at, you know, again, we're going back here, and this is Little Ice Age back here, and pre-industrial amounts of carbon dioxide. Then we start getting into the, we start, you know, two things happened. Mid-19th century to the late 19th century, climate is warming out of the Little Ice Age. And then as we get into the 20th century, we start really putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then it accelerates after World War II and then really picks up in the 1960s. And every graph shows the same thing, this ascending curve here. And so, yeah, these are the growth records for bristlecone pines sampled from the White Mountains, California. They are typical of all samples gathered and studied by this team. Growth rates at the Sheep Mountain site increased by 106% between 1850 and 1983. At the Campito Mountain site, they increased by 73% during the same time interval. So 73, say 75, up to more than 100% increase in ring width. After careful consideration of all possible explanations, the authors state, we believe from the evidence now available that subalpine vegetation generally and upper treeline conifers in particular could now be exhibiting enhanced growth as a direct response to increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. They conclude by saying, although high-altitude subalpine forests constitute only a small fraction of the Earth's standing biomass, increased CO2 uptake and storage could now be occurring in these habitats. And subsequent decades of research has shown, absolutely, that carbon dioxide fertilization is taking place. It is fueling a greening of the planet. It is causing greater plant growth and plants to be hardier, more resistant to drought, more resistant to infestation of insects, more resistant to plant diseases and pollution like ozone, more efficient water uptake, and at the same time, their thermal capture ability is being exhausted. But their photosynthetic activity is still increasing and creating an improved, much more vigorous biosphere. So why is nobody talking about this? Why are they not? We've covered the whole, you know, logarithmic, inverse logarithmic heating capacity of increased increments of carbon dioxide. You guys remember that, right? Yeah. So what we've basically shown is that as far as the bimodal function of carbon dioxide, one is a greenhouse gas, the other drives photosynthesis. We've shown that its role as greenhouse gas really is in that first 100 parts per million, 150 parts per million. Interestingly, at the same concentrations at which it's not fueling photosynthesis, right? Because remember, when you hit 150 parts per million, the pressure of carbon dioxide is too low. The plants don't take it up anymore. At 150 parts per million, the biosphere begins to die. Yet, what happens is that first 100, 250 parts per million is where all of the greenhouse warming takes place. Once you get to 150 parts per million, the greenhouse function kind of gives way and the photosynthetic function takes over. And continues to increase biomass up until, well, you know, commercial greenhouses run CO2 at 1,000 to 1,200 parts per million. And you have people working in those greenhouses every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, showing no deleterious effects. We know the same thing in submarines. The carbon dioxide is much higher in submarines. You know, we could go down the list. My thought is, as we look further into the winery. Yeah, I bet it is. Your fermentation gets high. I bet it does. That's interesting. I hadn't even thought of that. But so, you know, here's the point. There's this whole other discussion about carbon dioxide that is not happening anywhere within mainstream media. You know, the only place you're going to find, you know, anybody who discusses this kind of science is immediately put in the box, climate change denier. And then that's all you need to do. We'll put the label on them, and then you don't need to look at the evidence anymore. Oh, they're climate change deniers. But hopefully this is a little bit of an antidote to that. So, anyways, yeah, I mean, we've just barely scratched the surface of this kind of research, which is amazing. It's showing, literally, that, you know, deserts are greening. Yeah. Yeah, that is fantastic. Yeah, I mean, it's good news. It is good news. It's going to make it harder to find pyramids, though. Yeah, yeah, we need deserts. They preserve things. Well, I guess you got a point. Well, yeah, I mean, look, it means we've got to get our asses in gear over the next 10 years or so before everything is swallowed up by jungle again, right? Yeah. Yes. All right. Thank you, Randall. Just again, remind everybody, RandallCarlson.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Keep an eye on the website for updates on trips and tours and events that Randall's going to be a part of. And the first page, when you go to the website right now, is the Sedona Earth Origins event. Yeah. Yeah, get out there, man. This is going to be some rich stuff. It is. And, you know, if you can't get there in person, you know, do the live stream. And you can still participate. I imagine we'll try to have some chat rooms set up and, you know, people can still participate. And again, the thing I want to emphasize here is that there's just this incredible network of alternate researchers and free thinkers that are coming forth from all over the world and going, wait a second. These old paradigms really aren't cutting it anymore. You know, they're putting humanity in a straitjacket. And the potential in front of us, especially, I mean, as we go forward into the future, I think that our reconnection with the ancient past becomes more and more important. And we'll be more powerfully influencing the where we go in the future when we begin to understand that the story of the human species and civilization on the Earth is much deeper, much more complex, far more interesting than the mainstream models have, you know, have recognized. And so these events like the Earth Origins event in April in next month and the Cosmic Summit are right at right at the interface with this shifting paradigm. And the more people that come around to this and realize that, yeah, there's a whole lot more to this story and our future really is going to what plays out in the next few years and decades is going to be largely influenced by us reconnecting with our lost past. And that's what we're talking about here. I think we're talking about a major, major historical, deep history that's been lost. But we see on so many fronts, you know, people bringing things forward that don't fit within the standard narrative, the status quo paradigm all over the place. We see this. So what's happening now, I think, is that many of these separate pieces of the puzzle that have been scattered around, they're all coming together now. And there's a there's a whole new picture, not only of our past, but of our future that we're beginning to see the outlines of. And it's amazing. It's amazing. I just want to encourage many people as possible to get involved and participate and learn about this and become part of this growing global network. Well said. Yes. Yeah. All right. I think that's a good good note to end it on right there. And when we reconvene for the next one, Russ and Kyle will have reports from Turkey, right? Is that right? Yeah. I can't wait to hear. I wish I was going with you guys, but. Wes, man, I wish you were coming up. We're keeping all of our secrets, though. Yeah. Well, just, you know, I hate you guys. All right, guys. Good night. Okay. Good night. Great. Good night. For everybody. I love those guys. We love you, too, buddy. Rob. Good night, everybody. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul.