Friday 6 April 2012

It Seems I've Opened a Can of Younger Dryas-Aged Mega-Annelida

     Who knew? Who knew that a seemingly innocent attempt to make sense of some anomalous observations would have led to such a palaeo-can of worms? Most of you, probably! Dwight Simons is expecting me, at the end of the day, to cast *cough* doubt on one species of these explanatory worms--the near-earth object impact or near miss hypothesis. One of you, who shall remain nameless [Iain!], wants me to treat all of the competing hypotheses and counterhypotheses with a certain equanimity of which I fear I'm only barely capable. Still others want me to just shut up and get back to the Middle Palaeolithic and the issues that got me into so much hot water in the first place.
     Well I'm not gonna play that game! Er. I'm not going there! Umm, I won't fall for that old trick. Oh, all right. But you must understand...this has turned out to be a far more complex, long-standing, and multi-disciplinary investigation than I ever thought it would. It encompasses material going back into the early 90s, and of necessity will require a familiarity with more recent geological observations and interpretations with which I have been only tangentially familiar up 'til now--e.g. Antarctic ice cores; Greenland ice cores; eastern Pacific Ocean foraminifera (for staters, with the rest of the globe close behind); some very arcane geophysics and sedimentary geology (nanodiamonds, microspherules, magnetic so-and-sos, and micromorphological smizmies); and more.
     So, as I've said before, bear with me, please, whilst I commiserate with the swamis of about 10 non-archaeological disciplines to come up with a reasoned assessment of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Wish me luck!

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