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Dinosaur Extinction Was A |
By Yoichi Shimatsu |
| Nobody should burst out with laughter on this solemn sixth anniversary
of the Fukushima reactor meltdowns, not while this garden of a planet is
being reduced to a lifeless desert. So please forgive me for convulsing
with vitriolic euphoria at the sight of those evil clowns of climate science
who’ve slipped on a banana peel. With the gaping-mouth shock of Jim Carey,
the Fukushima deniers known alternatively as climate scientists are astonished
that their rigged studies are being dropped from the websites of federal
agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land
Management and NOAA. A slash in funding for fake science uplifts my spirits after scrimping for 12 field-research trips into the Fukushima nuclear-exclusion zone for independent radioactivity readings to counter the totality of falsehood from TEPCO, the Japanese government, the IAEA and the US Department of Energy, along with the rest of the nuclear lobby and its climate-change cheerleaders. Some of that deep-in field research required peddling a bicycle into the forbidden zone to evade nuclear-security guards and spending nights outdoors on a hammock under a tarp in the radioactive rain. In those same difficult years the climate hacks at major universities and research institutes were comfortably enthroned inside their labs and flew business class to UN climate summits, expenses and salaries paid with taxpayer funding. Meanwhile average families, worried about the health risk to their children, were bamboozled by the high priests of phony science who did absolutely nothing to protect the innocents. Those charlatans knew all along that every attempt to stem the radioactive bleed into the Pacific Ocean, with expensive but flawed technologies from TEPCO, the DOE, GE and AREVA, had failed miserably. My repeated urging to bore a network of tunnels into the Abukuma Plateau for storage of radioactive water was ignored in tone-deaf silence. Instead of hearing out the findings and advice from citizen researchers, the arrogant professorial caste engaged in media censorship by countering facts with factoids to dismiss the nuclear threat as “alarmism” while their paid trolls mocked citizen researchers with insulting comments at online news sites and in letters to editor. The climate-change hucksters further violated the standards of science ethics by organizing a physical assault on Canadian marine researcher Dana Durnford and then filing a lawsuit to complete the character assassination. The grand deception of dire global warming began at the 1997 Kyoto Summit, which was primarily funded by TEPCO and Toyota to promote a future of electric cars recharged with nuclear energy. That I know for a fact as an editor in Tokyobecause I did much of the publicity work on the kick-start of the Kyoto Protocol. At long last two decades later, thanks to the Trump team, the apologists for the nuclear industry will soon feel the lash of budget cuts and now it’s their turn to be hunted down like wounded quarry. No quarter asked and none given. The Sixth Mass Extinction The battle between climate scientists at their desks and citizen researchers in the field is a continuation of the historical debate between the dominant ideology of Darwin-Lyell “uniformitarianism” in geology (which greatly influenced the gradualist theory of biological evolution) and the “catastrophism” advocated by pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Here, I examine the Fukushima meltdowns as a catastrophe-in-progress pushing toward the Sixth Mass Extinction. It is also as an “impact event” strangely similar to the Yucatan meteorite that exterminated the dinosaurs. Despite a hostile reaction from geologists and climate scientists during its first two decades, the Alvarez theory of a meteorite-caused dinosaur extinction has since become accepted as the most substantive explanation for the demise of the dinosaurs. The most recent of the Big Five extinction events, the catastrophe that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs and heralded the Rise of Mammals is known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction (K/Pg, formerly called K/T or Cretaceous-Tertiary). Analysis of the thin layer of iridium that separates mammalian remains from dinosaur fossils was conducted by physicist Luis Alvarez, his son the geologist Walter, and nuclear chemist Frank Asaro and Helen Vaughn Mitchell, who together authored the 1980 research paper “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction: Experiment and Theory”. Their argument is based on distinguishing two types of Earth changes. On one hand, there’s the slow-developing cumulative transformations caused by tectonic movements, sedimentary flows, the growth of coral reefs, and changes in atmospheric oxygen levels due to vegetation or, conversely, carbon dioxide build-up By contrast, impact events are sudden and unpredictable shocks from off-planet sources, for instance, a burst of gamma radiation from the explosion of a distant quasars or large meteor strike. Further on, I explain why radioactive meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima are, in their essence, impacts of off-planet origin like the Chicxulub meteor that hit Yucatan some 66 million years ago. The Alvarez theory suggests that the Chicxulub meteor, which crashed down at a sharp angle from the east, caused vast plumes of dust that blocked sunlight around the planet, halting photosynthesis for long enough to starve vegetation-eating dinosaurs. In an otherwise coherent theory about the Fifth Extinction, the effect of the dust cloud is sketchy and dubious. Luis Alvarez was much too intelligent to have believed that the consequent dust storm led to the permanent loss of most dinosaur species by starvation. The fodder for the giant beasts, the flowering trees that had developed during the previous Jurassic era, continued to thrive to this day and haven’t changed much between then and now. Although the Chicxulub crater was vast at 180 km in diameter, dinosaurs on the other side of the planet could have easily climbed to higher elevations in search of leafy matter inside mountain valleys or along shorelines where they could have subsisted on algae, which require less sunlight than shrubbery. Another nagging question is: Why did frail mammals and the earliest birds survive en masse if there was no vegetation? Or, for that matter, the snakes, lizards, crocodiles and turtles? All these burrowing species received less sunlight that the great dinosaurs such as the T-rexes, brontosauruses and triceratops roaming the land surface. The fact is that most types of dinosaurs survived and only after an overtime period of thousands of years vanished from mysterious causes. The dust cloud hypothesis, in short, was an official smokescreen to obscure the far more probable cause of dinosaur extinction, which is genetic damage from radioactivity. A Hidden Cipher Concealed like a code or cipher within the Alvarez theory is a dark secret that conveys a stern warning, which the U.S. national security establishment had motive to suppress: The Chicxulub meteor was an incoming nuclear bomb that imploded on impact and the radioactive fallout caused mutations, expressed in cancers, malformations and still births in eggs, which eventually broke down the chromosomes of the descendants of surviving dinosaurs. Fossilized nests of unhatched eggs found in the western desert of China perhaps offer a clue as to their finale demise. Other than the apparent censorship due to national security related to nuclear-weapons policy, the K/T impact theory is a masterpiece of deduction and forensic analysis. Luis Alvarez (1911-1988) was a brilliantly creative nuclear physicist who had conducted R&D at the Lawrence laboratory at U.C. Berkeley, the MIT radiation lab, and the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, where he created the electric detonator for the symmetrical implosion of the hydrogen bomb that obliterated Nagasaki. His invention of that trigger for the plutonium device that destroyed up to a quarter-million human lives is probably what accounted for his fascination with mass extermination by radioactivity and its long-term consequence of species extinction. Alvarez is remembered for his letter to a Japanese research colleague. One minute before the B-29 “Bockscar” released the Fat Man plutonium bomb over Nagasaki, a companion aircraft named “The Great Artiste” released three canisters containing identical shockwave sensors and facsimiles of a handwritten letter, unsigned but unmistakably scrawled by Luis Alvarez’s hand. Headquarters Atomic Bomb Command August, 1945 To: Prof. R. Sagane From: Three of your former scientific colleagues during your stay in the United States. We are sending this as a personal message to urge that you use your influence as a reputable nuclear physicist, to convince the Japanese General Staff of the terrible consequences which will be suffered by your people if you continue in this war. You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material. Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working 24 hours a day, will be exploded on your homeland. Within the space of three weeks, we have proof-fired one bomb in the American desert, exploded one in Hiroshima, and fired the third this morning. We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders, and to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all your cities, if continued. As scientists, we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold in fury. To my friend Sagane With best regards from unsigned (Louis W. Alvarez) That letter warning of total annihilation of humans and other life-forms on the Japanese archipelago is the key to unlocking the mystery of what Alvarez suspected in the thin layer of isotopic traces from the Fifth Mass Extinction, the greatest-ever ecocide, which ultimately eliminated the dinosaurs from the face of the Earth. Alvarez’s words of warning to Japan and the rest of the world remain even more valid today given the relentless radioactive releases from Fukushima. In the subsequent postwar era, Alvarez was a member of JASON, the elite defense science group and, therefore, had the highest-level security clearance, notably in an era of mutual-assured destruction (MAD) at the brink of a global nuclear war that could indeed wipe out all life on Earth. By chance or call it karma, his son Walter was a geologist conducting field research on the K/T boundary along a limestone canyon in Italy during the early 1970s. On a visit to see his son in Italy, Luis Alvarez sent a soil sample to his former colleagues, the nuclear chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Vaughn Michel at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Their expertise in neutron activation analysis involved bombarding any mixture of metals with neutrons to create their respective radioisotopes, which emit radiation of different wavelengths that can be quickly measured to identify the component metals. Violent and Senseless Slaughter Alvarez senior introduced not only a novel technology, but more significantly a perspective based on his previous work with the A-bomb project at Los Alamos, which is catastrophism. At the time of publication of “Extraterrestrial Cause” in 1980, geology was dominated by the uniformitarianism of Darwin’s mentor Charles Lyell, who had suggested that Earth changes are so gradual as to be hardly noticeable. Now think of layers of sediment painting the seabeds, generations of coral creeping toward the ocean’s sparkling surface, or volcanic ash wafting down onto terraced fields. Calmness suited the temperament of a gifted amateur (Lyell was a lawyer by profession) in the mild climes of England. An avid admirer of Lyell, Charles Darwin based his famous hypothesis on the incremental formation of coral atolls. Likewise his theory of evolution presents life in slow motion, with subtle environment factors gently prodding the herd in favor of one characteristic over the other, like a Shropshire breeder culling his flock of sheep. Survival of the fittest is based on ever-so slight advantages, with the loser falling by the wayside and dying childless with a polite whimper like a spinster in a BBC period costume drama. The more sinister aspect is, of course, Social Darwinism, the ideology of the British Empire against all rivals with the colonialist policy of rather unnatural selection, whereby calico looms in India were deliberately smashed to favor textile imports from Lancastershire and slavery installed in the American South to supply the cotton. In an ideal flock of Darwinian sheep all the rams except the bellwether are castrated and after being sheared of wool, dispatched bleating to the abattoir. Roast leg of mutton for Easter supper, it is just so bloodless. In stark contrast, the catastrophism envisioned by Georges Cuvier suggested robust expansion, violence and often just senseless slaughter, like the Napoleonic Wars that engulfed the Continent from Moscow to Waterloo. Cuvier studied in university under Jean Baptiste Lamarck, the founder of early evolution theory who had the temerity to suggest that species can degenerate and die off. In those days of Christian morals, the notion of extinction was considered a heresy against God’s Creation. Cuvier seized upon the concept of extinction as ending the reign of a dominant biological group while, at the same time, creating a space for the rise of new species. Cuvier was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, the bastard child of biology and geology. He delighted in the excavation of the fossils of monstrous creatures that no longer roamed the Earth, and supervised the first systematic digs for a mastodon, giant sloth and pterodactyl. On orders of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was appointed to the new National Museum. Cuvier was a man of his time, the French Revolution and Bonaparte regime, which was a rupture from the traditional order of aristocracy and clergy with their illusive desire for eternal stability. In revolutionary times, one needed only imagination and courage to create the radically new. As famously put by Napoleon: “Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.” Just by touching and examining a single fossilized bone, Cuvier was reputed to accurately estimate the dimensions and shape of a still unknown creature. Is it any wonder then that an equally brilliant mind unexpectedly revived the notion of catastrophism? Although he did not intend it, Luis Alvares restored the prestige of Cuvier. Not all geophysicists or climate scientists were bowled over by his stroke of genius. One counter-theory proffered was the Deccan Traps conjecture, which suggests that mud flows from vulcanism in central India killed off the dinosaurs, while others argued tenaciously for climate change as the driver of dinosaur extinction, a baseless claim that has since been rejected. Uniformitarian habits of thinking die hard, which explains why the advocates of climate science stubbornly refuses to see, hear or speak, or acknowledge in any way the obvious truth that the catastrophic spread of Fukushima radioactivity is an infinitely greater threat to life than anthropogenic global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions resulting in less than a tepid 1 Celsius difference in average world temperature over a century. The Alvarez Cipher Now let’s crack the Alvarez Cipher hidden within the Chicxulub meteor strike. The K/T (K/Pg) boundary contains a strong concentration of iridium in much higher concentration than anywhere else on Earth. That iridium (Ir) is embedded inside clusters of osmium (Os), a platinum-group metal of extreme hardness. This mixture is jumbled with “shocked” quartz crystals, particles of chromium (Cr), microscopic diamonds and glassy spherules, all formed under extreme pressure and high temperatures. The compressed quartz and diamonds indicate a massive pressures created by the meteorite slamming down to the bedrock. Carbon was super-compressed into diamonds. The enormous heat of friction caused silicon sand to melt into glass. The shock of the meteorite strike was powerful even at the atomic level, stripping neutrons that fired off into the nuclei of osmium, to produce radioactive iridium-192. Likewise, neutron bombardment of manganese created the radioisotope chromium-51, with a half-life of 24 days. In the wake of the air strike at Yucatan, the radioactive iridium with its 74-day half-life could easily have circled the globe’s equatorial girth up to seven times, while the chromium might have completed three revolutions. Radioactive contamination by iridium and chromium radioisotopes would therefore account for the chromosome damage that resulted in the eventual extinction of the dinosaurs over subsequent thousands of years. For Alvarez the nuclear physicist and weapons designer, the dinosaur kill-off must have seem as a stern warning against nuclear war and the biological consequences of radioactivity exposure. His findings on radioactivity as the cause of mass extinction would have fundamentally challenged the rationale and mission of the U.S. strategic air command, ballistic missile force and the Atomic Energy Commission, which was to produce warheads to annihilate major cities. The full truth about the Chicxulub meteor was much too sensitive to disclose to the public or to international leaders. Therefore the Alvarez Cipher has remained secret. After doing Fukushima field research over the past six years, I’ve learned to recognized the taste, feel and sight of radioactivity, which are undetectable to others unfamiliar with its effects. I can visualize the aftermath at Chicxulub as clearly as a desert dawn because I’ve been somewhere like it, in Fukushima. So the question remains: How could anything have survived the radioactive fallout from Chicxulub? To put that nuclear event in a comparative context: If instead of osmium and manganese, the meteorite had contained uranium-238, which transmutes into plutonium-239 on impact, then a half-life of fissile plutonium of more than 24,000 years would have ended life on Earth. Fortunately for the mammals and birds in the K/T era, a fallout shelter was needed for only two months. Roaming on open land or in the shallows of water bodies, the great dinosaurs, clad with utterly non-protective scales, were vulnerable to constant radioactive exposure for up to 70 days in distant locales from the fiery and toxic crater. (The sea-going dinosaurs had better odds for survival, and thus the story of the Loch Ness monster.) The chthonic snakes, crocodiles, turtles and amphibians, whose sensory systems could detect the rising level of radioactivity, would have gone underground or wallowed in the mud during those most dangerous two months. The fishes were safe below the waves. The early mammals and incipient birds also burrowed in the soil or nestled between rocks, like today’s gophers and puffins, a habit to avoid smaller predatory dinosaurs. In addition, mammals were covered with hair and birds with feathers. The natural fibers provide protection against radioactivity, absorbing free neutrons and radioactive particles. The telomere protein that wraps around our chromosomes has the same protective function against free-radical ions. Human Death Wish One huge uncertainty is whether the K/Pg radioactive fallout implanted the ticking time bombs of defective gene sequences, or so-called “death genes”, in the DNA of mammals and bird types, which eventually trigger their extinction thousands or even millions of years later as in, for example, the inexplicable demise of the saber-toothed tiger, an otherwise superb predatory species. Perhaps the mutation that led to inordinate brain size and memory capacity in the simian ancestors of humans, was installed with a shut-down switch. To combine psychiatry into biological determinism, what Sigmund Freud called “thanatos” or the death drive may well be the expression of a radiation-caused defect in the human genome, inserted during into our unwitting mammalian ancestors during the K/T event. This mental defect could be what triggers that irrational burning desire for nuclear power as the instrument of our species’ mass suicide. If so, we’ve learned to embrace our psychosis. The Chicxulub nuclear catastrophe was a rough-around-the-edges accident of nature, and so it took the best efforts of man to build Fukushima as a more efficient mechanism for species elimination. There is no other way to explain Fukushima denial. To paraphrase Voltaire: “If genocide did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent it.” In the history and philosophy of science, the Alvarez team’s K/Pg boundary analysis is a triumph of catastrophism over uniformitarianism and its subsidiary gradualist theories like evolution and climate change. The extinction of the dinosaurs was a tragedy of epic dimension, whereas the self-destruction of humans and our mass killing of the entire circus is an absurd farce staged by evil clowns. Round-up of Kill-offs Am I being alarmist? Hardly, since I am much too cautious and timid, and nowhere in the same big league as the bold Cuvier and astute Alvarez or as cynical as Sigmund Freud. The start of this ongoing mass extinction is based on eyewitness evidence and radioactivity readings of bio-accumulation especially along both coasts of the Pacific Ocean. These explorations started with my September 2011 discovery of masses of beached tunicates (sea squirts that dwell on the ocean floor) gasping on a sandy beach south of Fukushima and then were continued with professional diver Dana Durnford’s epic voyages on a rubber boat along the Canadian west coast, where he found only 200 out of 2,000 marine species still surviving or barely hanging on. Tide pools from British Columbia down to Southern California are stripped clean by last summer (2016), and deaths of marine mammals from sea lions to whales have duly noted by animal rescue centers for more than three years. Fisheries are depleted, with whole species missing in spite of decades of marine pollution controls and fishing bans. Based on radioactivity readings of red crabs washed ashore in their millions in Orange County, I’ve analyzed how radioactive isotopes have moved up the marine food chain from algae to crustaceans and zooplankton and then into pelagic fish like tuna and the sea mammals. There can be zero doubt that Fukushima and other nuclear releases are the cause of this biological cataclysm. The flow of contaminated water from Fukushima was augmented by secret sea-dumping of high-level nuclear waste, shipped from fishing ports in that prefecture to the Philippine Trench, very well possibly fomenting record-scale typhoons, and hauled aboard whaling vessels to be dropped overboard in the Southern Sea between New Zealand’s South Island and the U.S. research base at McMurdo, Antarctica. In addition, I’ve twice flown over the Arctic icecap in late winter, in 2013 and 2017, first above the coast of Greenland where NOAA claimed the thickest region of ice is unbroken and, just recently, over the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait. Contrary to the claims of the climate-change fakers, the icecap is not melting so much as it has fragmented. The cause of long rifts and “ice cubes” is Fukushima-produced tritium, a type of radioactive heavy water produced in reactor, which has a freezing point of minus-252 Celsius. The fact that tritium remains in a liquid state accounts for the cracking of the ice. The fragmentation of the ice cap has doomed the polar bears, whose population numbers have been halved since 311. However, the most dangerous mega-catastrophe from Fukushima is the opening of a massive ozone hole over the Arctic Circle and the northern hemisphere during April-to-June 2011. Ionizing radiation has a destructive effect on ozone. In addition to the huge opening from the North Pole down to Scandinavia, there are four major new or expanded ozone holes today: - the mid-Atlantic space, spun off from Scandinavia - a telltale ozone hole off the Pacific coast of Japan, obviously seared open by Fukushima - a major hole off the west coast of North America created by radioactive air flows from Fukushima - the fourth being the enormous expansion of the Tibetan ozone hole, formerly the “Third Ozone Hole”, now swollen to stretch from Xian in the east to Turkey-Arabia in the west. The threat of these new ozone holes is an unchecked flow of cosmic radiation and solar particles into the Earth’s atmosphere and onto our heads. Australians and New Zealanders have suffered higher skin cancer rates due radiation pouring down through the Antarctic ozone hole, and now much of the Northern Hemisphere is suffering the same. Have you ever felt uncomfortably hot of late, despite cool outside temperatures, as if your body is being microwaved? The loss of ozone is also the reason for unseasonal weather effects, including winter tornadoes, flooding and hail storms of record proportion hitting Europe and North America. A Martian Fate for Mother Earth The downward flow of high-energy waves and charged particle is threatening the Earth’s electromagnetic field that prevents the escape of the atmosphere into the vacuum of outer space. An extraordinary menace is arising from cosmic radiation energizing thunderheads, which can trigger a “gamma-ray burst” (the “death ray” of science fiction), like the one that felled 353 reindeer in Norway in August. The possible loss of the Earth’s electromagnetic field due to such ruptures, to be followed by the rush of our atmosphere and oceans into outer space, would be a repeat of the fate of once-hospitable Mars, whose waters were sucked away some 3 billion years ago following massive bombardment by uranium meteorites. Seen from satellites or even from a high-flying jetliner, the atmospheric shield is just a thin skin of gas. Mars is the father of life on Earth, for its lost water and air were recovered by the gravity of its nearest planet, then a hot arid ball of volcanic flows. The bombardment of ice asteroids containing dissolved air transformed an overheated Earth into a Garden of Eden. Fortunately, the uranium meteorites that originated from the explosion of a single distant star, folllowing the devastating Mars, sank deep into the Earth’s silica soil to rest on the bedrock. Safely protected from the buried radioactivity,the surface of the Earth blossomed, safe from catastrophe. Only when an ambitious dominance-crazed beast, in its quest to mass murder fellow simians and slaughter and enslave lesser species, dug up that uranium and enriched it to generate heat and explosive power did the Atomic Age begin in earnest. Today, 80 years on, the foolhardiness of our fathers has released onto this home planet the same titanic force that devastated Mars. And thus, we have doomed ourselves, any progeny and all those innocent species. The geological fact that the green stones known as uranium were not of earthly origin but descended like fallen angels from a shattered star is why the Sixth Mass Extermination is in essence an impact event of space origin like the meteor that fell onto Yucatan. The temptation of the green alien substance has doomed this Garden of Eden to total destruction. The only two possible explanations for what Fukushima has wrought are the medieval doctrine of original sin or the chilling realization that our species is psychotic. Perhaps in our minds, as suggested by the ancient prophets, we possess the fatal flaw of diabolical pride. The dinosaurs, by comparison, were innocent bystanders when the angel of death known as the Chicxulub meteor fell onto the Yucatan Peninsula some 66 million years ago. That fifth great catastrophe, which gave the tiny mammals a reprieve from constant anxiety as short-lived protein, allowed these new lords of the Earth the serenity to turn their glistening dark eyes toward the night sky, the vast calender of the months, years and eons, and with that new sense of time the prospect of a destiny. Now at the premature close of our reign on Earth, look up with regret that we failed the promise and frittered away the gift of the sacrifice of the mighty dinosaurs. Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor with The Japan Times group in Tokyo, is a field researcher of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and forensic journalist at large. |