Prof. Ted Bryant reveals Australia’s coastlines hold evidence of ancient tsunamis—angular boulders deposited inland by waves like Krakatoa’s 1883 40-meter surge—while warning of future risks, such as Hawaii’s "Great Crack" potentially unleashing 10-meter Pacific waves or a Canary Islands collapse threatening North America with 4–5 meter tsunamis. He explores nuclear war’s seismic fallout, including Cold War-era Black Sea tests that could trigger tsunamis, and dismisses galactic rotation theories for debris impacts, noting random solar system entry. Mars’ lost atmosphere and buried water hint at past catastrophes, but Earth’s geological record lacks clear signs of advanced pre-human civilizations. Bryant’s research on tsunamis, comets, and nuclear-induced quakes underscores how underrated natural hazards could reshape history—yet humanity remains unprepared for their worst-case scenarios. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, uh so that's you know, that's what I've been tossing around in my own mind.
I have some pretty big doubts about this.
I mean who wouldn't?
How often do you get a anybody who uh goes out on a limb like that and is saying virtually tomorrow night between nine fifty and midnight the biggest UFO event of the century is going to happen.
Pretty far out on a rope I'd say.
Far enough that it it doesn't necessarily make sense to me that he would do it.
Well, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.
So there you have my comments on it, for what they're worth.
This is a pretty interesting story.
The amount of ice around the world's highest mountain has declined in a spectacular fashion, providing the startling evidence of the damage caused by global warming.
A group of mountaineers returning from a special UN-backed expedition to the Himalayas said all this.
Everything they said about the impact of climate change was there to see.
There is no doubt about it.
Climate is in the Himalayan ranges has become warmer and wetter.
We're talking here about Mount Everest.
The expedition to 6,189 meters, that's high island peak, only 8 kilometers south of Mount Everest, was part of an attempt by the UN Environment Program to mobilize climbers to make a practical contribution to observations on climate change.
Payne, who headed the group, said the mountain received its name from the first climbers to ascend the mountain in 1953, same year as Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Everest because it stood out as a peak emerging from an island of ice.
Where you go to that mountain right now, you don't see rising as an island in a sea of ice.
You see rising out of an island of rubble, told reporters.
He noted that a few ponds which used to surround Island Peak had grown into a two-kilometer-long deep lake.
A lot of melting going on there, folks.
The ice fields that had helped Hillary and Sherpa Tensing on the first ascent of Everest have also shrunk, moving back.
Yet this, folks, six kilometers back in 1953 when Hillary and Tencing set off to climb Everest, they stepped out of base camp and straight onto ice.
Today, they would have to have walked today far more than two hours.
Two hours before they even would get to the ice.
So I'd sort of drop that on you.
That comes, by the way, from Space Daily.
Space Daily News.
And can you imagine that?
They'd have to have walked now two hours to get to the ice that they stepped on right away when they came out of their tent.
So changes, they just keep on coming, folks.
All right, we're going to have open lines coming up to the top of the hour, and then it's tsunami time.
I'm R. Jell.
right where you are.
unidentified
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Sweet dreams are made of this.
When my youth desired me, I traveled the world and the seven seas.
Everybody is looking for something.
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them ones are getting...
*Dramatic music*
*Dramatic music*
Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First-time callers may rechart at 1-775-727-1222.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, Bombard Kingdom of Nive.
Tomorrow night's going to be interesting, I've got to admit.
I mean, what if he's right?
What if he's right?
Then we have this giant UFO sighting.
Well, there are a lot of people all prepared to call me up, of course, and give me the immediate as it happens kind of report.
And naturally, we'll have that on the air here.
Right, my own backyard.
Well, if it's that high and that big, I'm just 65 miles away, so we'll see it from here, right?
If it happens.
It's just, I like looking a little behind an event of this sort, trying to figure out psychology, but it doesn't work for me.
I can't figure it out.
Why would he do something in the short term like this?
So we'll see.
Interesting to speculate about, though.
It literally begs speculation, doesn't it?
Stay right where you are.
The speculators and commenters are coming up next as we've got a little bit of open line directly ahead of us.
By the way, the scientist that I've got coming up, Ted Bryant, at the time of the hour, any of you have read my book, The Coming Global Superstorm.
He says he can talk about a storm that is bigger than mine.
So that should be interesting.
We'll see what he has to say.
He's an expert in the area of climatology and particularly tsunamis.
Particularly tsunamis.
All right, so let's go to the line, see what's out there.
Wildcart line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
You know, if Chris misses tomorrow night, he's going to be 0 for 2 in the prediction department.
After George Bush was elected president, which he did predict, I believe.
Oh, yeah, he did predict that, but he made a secondary prediction.
He said within a short time after Bush's inauguration, some Hollywood actress was going to come forward and accuse Bush of having had a sexual affair with her.
And then I'll let the webcam run and take a picture every minute or something?
Sure.
Why not?
I'll crank up the night vision camera tomorrow.
I point it at Vegas.
I can do that.
Very good thought, sir.
I don't understand the psychology of this.
I mean, yeah, sure, you can figure that 50 grand in a lot of ways.
You know, Kreskin, I'm sure, has 50 grand to burn.
So I'm not looking at it from that point of view.
You know, if you're coming at it from a skeptical point of view, which I am, then it doesn't make sense because it's too short term and the downside is too big if you're wrong.
Sure, yeah, you can stand out there in the middle of the desert at midnight and say, well, I was wrong.
See you guys.
You know.
But the guy from Sydney, Australia, he's probably not going to be too happy about that.
So, I mean, there's got to be a big downside to this.
If you're wrong, it's such a short term.
And the psychology of it as I tried to play it out in my own head doesn't make sense.
Unless you really know something.
Again, my listeners are a pretty damn sophisticated bunch of people.
They would even know a launch from Vandenberg.
They'd know what that looks like.
They've seen it out here.
See them all the time.
Satellites?
Please.
We've seen those.
The space station is pretty spectacular when it comes across, but it's got to be a little closer to sunset to be really spectacular.
But still, you know what that is moving at a steady rate across the sky.
He's talking about craft.
You know, three or four craft.
And the biggest UFO sighting in a century.
So, I don't know.
I can't figure it out myself.
And I've really tried to think about it from his point of view.
Could I really have a hell of a test or let's make a skill?
Make a prediction.
I don't think so.
unidentified
Could they be using this to introduce a fear factor into people?
I personally.
This is between you and I. If I looked up and I saw three craft or four craft or even one big craft, I would say, yeah, okay, I think I'm seeing what I'm seeing.
What am I to do about it?
Turn left, turn right, jump up and down, go hurrah.
Well, actually, I can answer that question for you.
How did it affect you?
I can answer that question for you.
Just listen.
I'm happy to do that.
It did happen to me.
It happened to my wife and myself.
And it was of a gigantic magnitude.
Really, really, really big.
I've told the story enough times that I don't really feel like telling it again, but we were, you know, not far from home here.
And my wife was in the passenger seat, and I was the driver.
And we were coming back from KWN in Las Vegas after a Sunday night show.
And we were, oh, I don't know, half a mile, quarter mile from home out here in Prum.
And my wife said, What the hell is that?
And she was looking over her shoulder.
She somehow caught a glimpse of something enormous coming up behind us.
And so I stopped the car, Lou Geo Metro car, and got out, and we bought out, and she came around to my side, and the damnedest thing coming up behind us was this monstrous thing like out of, you know, close encounters of the third kind.
It was triangular.
It was so quiet that night you could hear crickets a quarter mile away.
I mean, it was dead silent in the desert, you know, no traffic.
And this damn thing came right over our heads.
I mean, passed directly over us.
It looked like you could throw a rock at it.
Perfectly triangular, silent.
Totally dead flat.
I mean, it didn't make a sound.
It just didn't make sound.
You'd still hear the crickets, you know, and it passed right over us.
And then it passed right over the Prom Valley and kept on trucking.
And we stood there and watched it with our mouths open for probably five minutes.
Floating, not flying.
Couldn't have been doing more than 30, 40 miles an hour monstrous.
You know, the sun or the moon, which was almost full, and the stars all went away when it passed overhead.
So what happens to you is you go into a sort of a shock.
You go into a form of shock, and you're asking each other, did you see what I saw?
And you're saying, yeah, of course I did.
Do you understand what we just saw?
And my wife still doesn't really like to talk about it very much.
She wasn't really wild about this happening.
And I'm neutral on the subject.
But at times, I can tell you, to answer your question, I went into shock, a kind of shock, that lasted quite a while.
And took me quite a while to come to terms with it.
So what I saw either was an extremely advanced craft indicating that we have learned how to defy gravity.
This thing was monstrous.
Or it was one of them.
Either one, probably equally possible, but in answer to your question, you go into a kind of shock, which will last for quite a while.
Well, listen, I think it's very interesting that you tell your story over and over, and I think it's very good, Christie, because just as you mentioned, I don't think the people that haven't seen UFOs can understand how the shock that would rearrange your psychic universe.
And I can only say that in relation to Kreskin, I don't know if it will happen, but I hope it does, because it seems to me that this could happen at no better time in our history.
If it happens, if it really were to happen, then Kriskin's stock would go right through the roof.
No question about it.
unidentified
I think the important effect to me, though, would be more the important effect it would have on our world leaders at this time in our history with this war we're talking about in East Asia.
I think even if there wasn't, I think Bush would be, you know, he would simply be overwhelmed by this news would just simply take over everything if it was well documented.
Yeah, they're threatening to pick up sticks and leave.
unidentified
Yeah, and I can only beg you to have this gentleman, Philip, I forget his last name, yes, back on your show, because to me, this is the most amazing, shocking news that you've had for us so far.
And I think, you know, if these people are actually communicating this to us, we need to hear about this.
Just before we move on, sir, I mean, what they said boiled down was, if you're going to do this, then screw you, we're leaving, and we don't care what happens to you, and you're never going to join the big club.
unidentified
I know.
I can think of a witness, several witnesses they've told, one I can think about reading about in the 50s, they told her that they were very worried about us using atomic weapons and destroying the atmosphere, and they told them that they were not going to intervene.
They said our attempts to intervene in the past have never been successful.
So that should be a lesson for us all.
The thing I wanted to tell you about is I heard an interesting thing I think you'll find fascinating.
There's a gentleman called Dr. Travis David Travis at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.
I just heard this the other day.
He did a very in-depth study recently with the three days after 9-11 where we grounded all of our jets.
And he found out, studying tremendous depth of weather data for the last 30 years, that there was a 1 to 2 degrees centigrade change over the entire U.S. for that temperature rise for those three days.
Well, you know, President Bush, it's my understanding, is now trying to suggest that he refutes that report, that it, quote, came out of the bureaucracy and he doesn't endorse it or believe it or anything else.
unidentified
I could certainly agree that he probably would now be happy about it.
One other thing I just heard, I heard a very interesting report about people up north, and they interviewed someone on the edge of the Beaufort Sea in northern Canada who was a native Eskimo.
And they've noticed robins up there recently.
And they asked the gentleman, he said, Well, there is no word for robin in our language.
I've just got a message here from London that plants are blooming up to two weeks earlier this spring, according to British researchers who analyzed 47 years of flowering data.
I think it's obvious whatever he says about the report.
I'm told that on Russia's height yesterday, there was, actually I read it, that the president was deceiving this, saying that it's not really his.
And that he didn't agree with it.
You've got to wonder, I guess the major question now is whether the people who sent this report out under the Bush administration's name are going to be pushing up paper clips at a new location probably in the far north somewhere or back in the private life again.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
What I wanted to call about was something that has never been mentioned as far as I can see.
Yes, if we had an old ancient civilization that had achieved technological greatness just a few clicks beyond where we are right now, they might have had unicorns and all kinds of other strange things that we only now carry as myth.
But the myth would have survived the physical demise of the unicorns and its brethren, huh?
unidentified
Yeah, well, of course, you know, the stories always live on past the civilization.
And if it's of that magnitude, then my being here in Prum 65 miles away with darker skies, I'll be in a better place to view it.
If it's right over their heads, I mean, if it's really close in, then I won't see it, I suppose, from here.
unidentified
For example, say I don't know what the history of UFO sightings is so far this century.
You know, we've only had one or two years, and he could just be, you know, playing a word game, and no matter what happens, you know, he's going to have, he's guaranteed to have hundreds or thousands of people to see this.
And it could well be the biggest UFO event of this century.
Oh, what a guest we've got coming up all the way from the other side of the world, New Zealand, Woolagong, New South Wales, where it's like 17 hours different than here.
If we can maintain the phone connection, it should be extremely interesting.
My guest is Ted Bryant, and he's a physical geographer with a broad interest in geomorphology and climatology.
He is currently a member of the Quaternary Environments Research Center.
That's where the C. Ongoing research interests involve the definition and mapping of the geomorphic signatures of tsunami, global climate change and sea level rise, and climatic and oceanographic natural hazards.
That's interesting.
In the past, Ted was keenly interested in the causes of sand beach erosion and the quaternary evolution of coastal sand bodies along the New South Wales coastline.
That's where he is.
The beach studies involved mapping accurately changes using oblique amateur photographs over an 80-year period.
While the quaternary research included one of the most comprehensive sets of thermoluminescence chronologies obtained from coastal sand deposits anywhere in the world, Ted also has been involved in assessing the health impact of climate change and the economic cost of ozone depletion for the Australian federal government.
That's interesting.
He worked on evaluating the level of environmental health assessment within Australia.
He has worked in the Northern Territory along the east coast of Canada, in the Canadian Arctic, and around the New Zealand coast as well.
Ted has an international reputation with his research on catastrophic tsunami, being one of the first researchers to identify a wide spectrum of signatures of such events in the coastal landscape, meaning it's happened before, it's going to happen again.
In addition, Ted has published a successful undergraduate textbook on natural hazards with Cambridge University Press and recently released a second textbook with Cambridge on climate process and change.
Within the School of Geosciences, Ted currently teaches in coastal environments and climate and natural hazards.
One natural hazard is trying to read his bio.
We'll get to Ted, and this should be a very interesting program indeed.
And by the way, it's Australia, not New Zealand, and I don't worry too much, but if you're in Australia and New Zealand, New Zealanders would be offended, as would Australians.
And this coastline, it has a coastal plain that goes from a couple hundred meters to about five kilometers, and it has this escarpment behind it that's about 300 to 400 meters high.
And when we're in drought and it's sunny and the ocean's blue and unpolluted, it is incredibly scenic.
We were seeing in a sheltered location some angular bits of rock jammed into a crevice at the back of a rock platform, only about two meters above sea level.
But usual waves would round boulders over time.
So we knew that the boulders hadn't been subject to wave action much because they were angular.
And they were just jammed tight into this crevice.
Yeah, they were uptight and we couldn't move them.
And so we needed a storm wave, but yet if we had storm waves up there, they would have rounded the boulders.
Then we started looking at where the boulders came from and realized they'd fallen off a cliff and it was quite a sheltered location.
And so we just couldn't put it down to ordinary processes that we saw along the coast.
And I thought, oh, just a small tsunami about a meter in height and both, one of them, just one would do.
And as soon as we then realized that the coastline, an Australian coastline, nothing really happens in the way of tsunami, as soon as we tweaked that maybe tsunami were important or could move things or do things, then we visited some other sites and tsunami was the easiest explanation for what we were seeing.
And it just got bigger and bigger, this tsunami event.
And then we tweaked that there was more than one, which was disturbing.
And we went chasing dates and looking at more and more coastline, a good excuse to get out and look at coastline around Australia.
And everywhere we went, we kept on seeing the S, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Well, one was a warning issued that a big part of a volcano in Hawaii might be close to falling in the Pacific Ocean, which they said actually would cause a tsunami that would be so big that it would touch every country in the Pacific rim.
Another one that hit our press was reported on NBC television, in fact, was the sudden discovery of some big, I can't exactly remember, like a crack or something or another in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that they said could slide or change or something would happen there and a gigantic tsunami, you know, and they showed cities getting wiped out, that kind of stuff.
They're talking about the area islands, and they're the other set of volcanic islands that have been known to have chunks separate and slip into the ocean.
And unfortunately, the way that the Canary Islands have broken up in the past, most of the direction of the landslide is towards North America.
So the east coast of the U.S., I would tend to think, would be more susceptible from these volcanic islands that every once in a while just become unstable and collapse.
Yes, as long as they aren't cliffs at the ocean edge, as long as you are not on a big hill, which is a headland sticking out into the ocean, they're not safe at all.
If you're on a tidal flat or a delta, then this wave gets up on the delta.
The delta may only be several feet, 10 feet above sea level.
The waves just treat it as shallow topography, and tsunami can go long distances inland.
They can go five miles, ten miles.
So a four-meter wave in the deep ocean comes ashore, rising maybe to a height.
A water displacement that's 20 meters above sea level, that wave on a bolter could go 10 miles inland, 20 miles inland.
Really, I guess I'm saying something about my age.
I would gather I'm a little bit older than you, but I can remember the 1960s tsunami.
And that made for an interesting couple of days.
I was only early teens, and we didn't have the TV coverage, but we had very good newspaper coverage, and we'd race out to make sure our newspaper to read about how this wave was coming into various sections of coastline.
That would probably be the last major tsunami of global significance.
So we haven't had big one.
Well, the Alaskan earthquake generated a tsunami in 1964, but it wasn't as extensive as 1960.
And we have sat around with a lot of small ones, killing 1,000 people here, 10 people here.
But we haven't had an event that has affected the Pacific since 1960.
Because when we move to an even larger magnitude of effect, I mean you've got volcanoes, you've got earthquakes, then you also of course have the possibility of a great big rock, probably mostly iron, slamming in from space, coming in through the atmosphere, not burning up enough, and in the ocean.
Yes, I thought they were in our studies, I thought they were quite rare, and these things never really occurred.
I mean, you had to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
And in our work, the evidence we found is so enormous that we have to have only one source, and that has the meteorite impact.
And what we're finding is that we've had repetitive events quite recently.
And so I'm sitting here as a very calm person telling you quite sensational things that I probably, in my upbringing, would never conceive of or believe in, but I have to believe the field evidence, and this is the conclusion we've come to.
If it hit land, it would certainly leave an impact crater.
And that would put enormous amounts of dust into the atmosphere.
It would send out or heat the atmosphere, it would send out a fireball in a radio direction from the point source.
Depending upon the rock it hit, if it hit carbonate, it would vaporize the carbonate, and carbonate is the coral reef and stuff made out of shell.
And that would put enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
If it hit the ocean, it might not leave an impact in the ocean because the ocean is just like at a high speed, and these things come in about 10 miles a second.
And then it would start generating a tsunami from the point source.
And the two effects, the tsunami for a one kilometer 0.6 mile diameter object would, if it hit in the middle of the Pacific, say, would us up a wave conceivably 10 meters in height when it got to any shoreline around the Pacific.
And the other, I mean, don't even conceive about what would happen.
What happens to those billions of tons of water that's been vaporized, and it must fall back to the Earth's surface as rain or precipitation because it's not in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
It would rain over the next few weeks, and it could rain globally, but it would probably rain in the immediately adjacent areas.
And it would rain like you've never seen rain before.
Take the biggest flood you've ever witnessed, biggest flood in historical records, and we think you just crank it up by a fact, you know, double it, triple it.
And we think we've got in Australia evidence of these type of flood events.
Well, we've got in the Northern Territory, that's getting towards the tropics around Darwin, we've got waterfalls.
And the waterfalls are very spectacular.
But when you look at them, you can see evidence of waterfalls that are three, four times wider.
And you can do some theoretical calculations of how much rain must fall in a half hour to an hour to two hours in order to fill up a river channel.
And when we do these theoretical calculations, at the maximum level for the atmosphere at present, we can't get enough water to go over these waterfalls.
So we're looking for, I think, or not looking for, I think we're seeing evidence that we've had enormous amounts of precipitation and we can't generate that by climatic processes like hurricanes or enormous thunderstorms, but we can generate it by putting billions of tons of vapor into the atmosphere.
You know, Ted, there are a lot of people, particularly people that listen to this program, who believe that it's possible that previous civilizations in billions of years may have actually, life may have sprung forth on Earth before, even come to some sort of technological degree, and then been essentially wiped out by something like what you're talking about.
And of course, many years ago, there probably would have been more Earth-crossing-type large rocks that would have been perhaps able to do this.
And so could all, if a big enough rock were to hit Earth, big enough, could it literally wipe out an entire civilization and most signs of it?
I guess the analogy I would take would go to the Cretaceous tertiary extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
And that was an object that was several miles in diameter.
And we're pretty certain it had a worldwide impact.
But it still left dinosaur bones and it still left wood debris from tsunamis that at the time it landed in the Yucatan Peninsula, or that was the area.
And at the time, it was a shallow ocean.
And enormous tsunami waves swept through the southern part of what was the United States at the time.
And it wiped out forest, and that debris was then preserved in what we call submarine backwash tsunami deposits.
So we know that big events like that, some of the evidence is preserved.
If you then wanted to say that there were civilizations at the time that were completely ectic, I would find that a bit different being a geologist, why we haven't tripped across something in the geological record that looks like.
But indeed, it would more or less, particularly Something really, really big would, I've heard, could extinguish life down to the microbial level if it was big enough.
It could, but then we have nothing in the geological record for probably 200 million more years that shows any sign of an object that big that you would require.
Certainly if you went back to the early Earth, billions of years, and then we're talking about, well, we haven't even got the rock deposits because the Earth is a unique planet that manages to recycle its crust.
So there's very little that is going back a couple of billion years.
But there's a man named Zachariah Sitchin who is, I think, world famous.
You might have heard of him even New South Wales.
Who talks about this rogue planet that he believes passed by Earth some time ago.
He calls it the 10th planet or planet X or whatever.
And interestingly, there was this ABC News story not very long ago that said there may well be something out there, not all that far away by galactic standards, that could pass by Earth.
And it could be a burned-out sun.
It could be something as large as a large planet or a burned-out sun.
They're really not sure, but there was sort of an article about that.
And there are people who speculate that a large body every X number of years could pass by the Earth and have a devastating effect on the Earth, you know, even tilting it on its axis and doing all kinds of, you know, have a very large effect, indeed, not necessarily hitting Earth.
But after all, scientists do believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, you know, that got stripped away by some sort of event like that.
Yeah, I guess I'd have to say that that's possible because from what we've seen with our evidence, and when we went and talked to astronomers, they said, look, we've got a comet that came into the inner solar system within the last 10,000 years and fragmented.
And the Earth does pass through these debris tails from comets, and they give rise to these meteorite showers that we see at particular months of the year.
One is the Leonids in November, another one is the Taurids.
And the astronomers say it's the Taurids is the debris trail of this comet that came in and broke up.
And it's got a nucleus where the comet broke up.
And if we pass through that nucleus, we get big objects.
We only need them a few hundreds of feet to do the type of things that we can see.
So when you pose the question, are there objects out there that have come into the solar system that can do damage, I would be naive to say no, there never have been.
Because I know from the best explanation for the tsunami evidence that we're seeing, it calls out for comet or meteorite debris that has come into the inner solar system.
And there's a lot of debris out there.
And if you want to then invoke an object that's sitting further out from the solar system that can come by, the little bit of astronomy that I would know would have to say, well, yep, why not?
But if I went into the geological evidence you're looking at, I mean the Cretaceous tertiary extinction and the crater that was found, that was one of the ones.
And then you have to go back into what we know here is the Permian, getting back 200, now you've got me on time, it may only be 120 million years, 200 million years.
And we're still looking for the crater impact of that one.
And part of the problem is that we just do not have we start to recycle a lot of crust in 200 million years.
Over the 200 million year period, we get a big object on average about every 1 million years.
We can buy a big object, an object that would be big enough to perturb the atmosphere, dropped in the ocean, would sap a tsunami that would affect most of the coastline around an ocean.
Over geological time, they're not that rare.
When we come up to modern times, people thought, well, they're very rare.
The sky is perfectly clear.
And what I know is the sky is not clear.
We've had debris that's fallen in well and truly in the last 2,000 years, but not on the big level that you're talking about with this nemesis star.
Mars, the recent satellite data, I'm sure you've heard about this.
There's so much water on Mars, they just found out that if it were to melt, it would cover the surface of Mars all the way around to a distance of 1,500 feet.
Now, that's a lot of water, frozen water.
So Mars once had an atmosphere, probably, and a lot of water above it, and all the rest of it, and there could have been life there.
And if an event of the kind you're talking about that occurs even once a million years, or even worse than that, occurred, you know, a lot of people figure that Martians, if they were all advanced, would have figured out a way to get the hell off Mars.
And the most logical, simple place to come and bring the seeds that some people believe are us would be here.
You know, to Earth would be the easiest place for Mars.
And most logical, too, because, you know, we're going to have an atmosphere.
And hopefully they had developed, if that happened, they had developed a civilization to a stage where they could have got off the planet.
And it wouldn't be more technically advanced than ours because we haven't managed that capability yet.
On Earth, we can get to the moon, but we can't get beyond it.
And I don't think we could, if we put all world effort into trying a segment, a small sampling, a few hundred people off planet Earth because we knew that a comet was going to hit that was going to be large enough to wipe out civilization, I don't think we could do it in our present civilization.
No, but in the kind of time spans that you're talking about, you know, millions of years, that boat is not very far ahead of us from that point of view.
I mean, it's I would be naive to say, because we haven't been to Mars and we haven't mattered great enough detail to see what's on the surface necessarily.
We've landed one or two craft on it.
But it's quite, you know, the world is open to all kinds of interesting scientific discoveries.
And I couldn't, what you're talking about, I would be naive and unscientific if I couldn't conceive of that happening.
I've been following it recently, and I've got up to the bit like there's a lot of water.
I didn't know how much, if you spread it over the surface of the planet, what the depth of water would be.
But as soon as you say that, gee, that explains a lot of the remnant shorelines that we find in some of the basins.
And if you put that onto the surface of the planet, it's got to evaporate and form an atmosphere, and you've got to have rain.
And then you start talking about flood events.
And recently, my book on tsunami got reviewed and said, here is some evidence on Earth that explains the evidence that we found on Mars for enormous catastrophic flooding.
Yeah, so yeah, there's been water on Mars, and if you have 1,500 feet of it spread around the planet, goodness it fits in nicely with what we've seen from satellite images and interpreted yet.
And that's the part that didn't, you know, I suppose, turn into atmosphere which got blown off into space.
Something catastrophic had to occur for that much water to be beneath Mars right now, frozen, they think.
That's another interesting thing, by the way.
There may be under Mars temperatures that would have perhaps even liquid water involved because you'd have some sort of tectonic or volcanicity down lower or just a natural heat source as you go into Mars, just like as you go into Earth, right?
Not as much on Mars because it's only about half the size of the Earth and it doesn't generate much heat.
And one of the reasons why we know it doesn't, it's got volcanism, but it's never been able to set up recently for a couple billion years the type of continental drift that we see on Earth.
And so you have bits of the Martian crust that has some of the signatures of continental drift.
It's very old.
And the reason why we think it's very old is that Mars has lost most of its heat from the core.
Bearing in mind that I've always told you you've got to be damn careful about what you read in the press about the possibility of nuclear war, we've got some breaking news on Matt Drudge's site right now.
Boy, you've got to give it to Matt.
He gets it before anybody else.
I don't know what the hell he does, but he gets it before anybody else.
The headline is, India Plans War Within Two Weeks.
Now, this story was filed in New Delhi, 6-6, 2002.
That's now, just now.
It says, India's military is seeking final authorization to invade the Pakistani side of the Divati Kashmir in the middle of the month to destroy the camps of Islamic militants.
I wonder if we're supporting that, don't you?
The planned campaign Would be similar to the American attack in Afghanistan, in which airstrikes would be followed by ground assaults by special forces transported by helicopter and military sources.
Said yesterday, smart bombs, other advanced ordnance are reported to have been loaded onto French-made Mirage 2008 and Russian-built MiG-27 aircraft at bases in northern and western India.
As Jack Straw, the Secretary, strengthened his warning for Brits to leave the region, military planners in Delhi expressed confidence that a war would not boil over into a nuclear exchange.
A senior Indian official accused Britain, America, and other Western countries of adding their weight to Pakistan's nuclear blackmail by telling their citizens to leave and so on.
But the story, the headline, is that India plans to unleash it within two weeks.
Now, this is probably important enough that I've asked Keith to add an immediate under what's just go to what's new on my website if you can get there.
It's slowing up a little bit right now.
And under what's new, you're going to see the headline, India plans war within two weeks.
I suggest you read it.
We'll ask our guests tonight about all of that, too.
A lot of territory to cover.
Stay right there.
My guest is Ted Bryant, ostensibly talking about tsunamis and things.
The End Okay, so here we go once again with Ted.
Let's pick up where we left off.
My question was going to be, Ted, about terraform, whether if our civilization gets very much more advanced and has capabilities that you might imagine, knowing all that water is on Mars, would there be a way to begin some kind of process that someday would make that planet habitable for us?
Our oxygen on Earth is a product of biological activity, taking the carbon dioxide and taking the oxygen out of the carbon, putting it into the atmosphere.
So if you had a process that could undergo photosynthesis, it's quite conceivable you could start using the reservoirs of CO2 on Mars to pump oxygen into the sphere.
We know Mars used to have oxygen.
I think pretty certain it did because a lot of that withered red soil that we see is an indicator that it had probably oxygen involved in the weathering process and reacting with iron.
I don't know the scale.
You would have difficulty if you wanted to not terraform, but I guess you'd have to put a Martian word in there, to convert the whole planet, you would probably have difficulty.
Just as a matter of curiosity, thinking that Mars once had an atmosphere, pretty good one, with oxygen and so forth, and obviously water and probably flowing water and all the rest of that sort of thing, what would it take to ruin all that the way it got ruined?
that we We don't tend to, and now I'm getting a little bit out of my depth, but from memory, we don't see big meteorite impact craters that would sort of be where we could point a finger and say that's the one that wiped out the atmosphere.
We do see lots of meteorite impact craters.
The general theory would be a gradualist one that Mars just slowly lost its atmosphere and the processes were such that the CO2 cooled and froze into the ice caps and the water went with it.
I think something with that explanation, something's missing.
It may be that the gradualist approach is what happened.
But if you're talking about 1,500-foot depth of water over the whole planet being locked up under the southern South Pole, that's a lot of water to start hiding.
If you had dust storms, and there are dust storms on Mars, there are ways of putting a lot of dust into the atmosphere and start covering up ice.
But you're talking about a lot of covering up, and we've got evidence there of enormous flood channels that obviously were pumping water into something.
They had to go into an ocean.
And the question begs the question, where did that water go and how did it go?
Well, the only sudden ones I can think of, I can think of sudden ones that would get rid of the atmosphere, and I can think of sudden ones that would get rid of a body of water.
I mean, if you, Mars, say, had a small ocean, you dropped a comet in it or near it and heated it up very quickly, you could vaporize it, and then you could conceivably eject that water vapor high enough into the atmosphere to just disappear.
All right, Ted, you're in New South Wales, so you're Closer to the action potentially than we are here.
But you heard what I just did at the top of the hour there.
We've got this fellow who breaks news stories, and they're saying that India is going to invade Kashmir in two weeks, and they've got these planes ready and stocked and bombs and all the rest of it.
There's an awful lot of people, Ted, that think if a conventional war begins, say in two weeks, between India and Pakistan, that there's going to be a nuclear exchange.
You know, they're going to very quickly within even two days of a conventional beginning of a conventional war become nuclear because Pakistan just can't would have no other choice.
And so if there was a nuclear war, you know, a lot of us have been wondering, atmospherically speaking, what it would mean for those folks, for you, for North America, for the world in general, if they had an exchange of, you know, 50 or 100 nuclear weapons.
We actually, climatically, we have an analogy to that, and that goes back to the testing that the former USSR did in the USA before the Nuclear Test Man Treaty went into force in 1963.
And everybody tested, well, not everybody, the U.S. and USSR tested a lot of devices over a very short period of time.
And the USSR ones were very large.
And I pointed out just recently to a class in an exercise studying temperature records, and we speculated about could you track down the social, political, economic history of the late 20th century from the climate records.
And the students put on their thinking caps, and with a little bit of prodding, you can start seeing things.
And one of the things I point out is the 63 dip.
Globally, and especially in the northern hemisphere, temperatures were in that period of time.
And the theory is that there were all kinds of nitrogen oxides put into the upper atmosphere.
And they had the effect of cooling the lower atmosphere.
And just recently I have a post-grad who's looking at a strange topic called geomagnetic activity variations from the sun affecting climate on Earth.
And he's got some periods in which he finds it a little difficult to explain.
He's still looking for a cause and effect.
And some of his stuff takes off, with the correlations, take off about 64, 63, 64.
And he said, why?
It just triggered then.
He doesn't know.
We're talking about something that's a forcing mechanism, but it has a trigger mechanism.
It just sends it over the edge and then off it goes.
And I just mentioned to him, I said, well, you know, that 63 was the nuclear testing.
And it was up in the upper atmosphere.
And he said, oh, so he's gone away to think about it.
So we do have analogy, and a lot of people back off that that nuclear testing didn't affect climate.
You won't find much if you do an internet search or you start looking at the literature where people are speculating that that testing had an effect on climate.
But I think the signature is there.
So if you want to look at Pakistan and India going to war and lobby nuclear bombs at each other and having an effect on climate, one, they haven't got many.
Not so much, Ted, from a direct effect on climate, although that's an interesting question in unto itself.
We're more curious about these would probably be rotten, dirty bombs that would be probably detonated on the ground, and so there would be all this radiation-laden stuff thrown into the atmosphere.
And the more immediate concern is, where would it go and who would it kill?
Yes, it's into the Indian monsoon now, so the jet stream is starting to go north of the Himalayas.
So it would probably take a path that would go through China, Japan, and then it would probably up across the northern Pacific Ocean.
And you've got to be a little bit careful when you think in terms of those generalities.
When Chernobyl went up in the mid-80s and it swept this pollution, it was a nuclear reactor, and it was very dirty, and it swept a lot of pollution back across Eastern Europe and in Wales and back into France.
But a couple of days afterwards, there was a follow-up in Hawaii, and we realized then that our circulation is very much like a smoke plume.
Well, could I tell you an interesting little story?
I live in America, Ted, near Death Valley, not far from Death Valley.
Closer to that than Las Vegas, actually.
And about a year ago, I think it was, Ted, all of a sudden, our skies here in southern Nevada turned a dirty yellow.
The visibility became so low that you could not see mountains.
You could see, in fact, it was like a London fog, a Ted, around here, except that it was yellow in color.
And the local weather forecasting people on television for several days were puzzling and saying, we have no idea what this is.
Well, a little while later, it turned out that it was a dust storm on the Gobi Desert, the Gobi Desert, mind you, that had gotten up into the prevailing winds, a jet stream, and was dumping right down on us to the degree that it was that dense to have right here.
You've pointed out some climate dynamics of atmospheric circulation that you don't read much about in textbooks because what we Tend to do, we tend to smear everything and generalize.
And a lot of the circulation in the atmosphere is based upon movement of air that is very well defined, tracks very nicely and is very self-contained.
And it's quite possible if you have a strong enough mass of air coming out of what is Siberia and across Agobe that it tracks in a very narrow, well-defined way and puts stuff up in the atmosphere and it comes down over your area.
And that could happen with radiation in a war.
Hopefully it would come down over the Pacific, not over a populated area, but I am certain that if you started looking at records in 1963 that you find when those individual bomb blasts went off, I mean, I can remember as a kid, you didn't drink any milk seven days after.
You know, you hear one go off in the USSR and you think, yeah, I'll drink milk now.
I'll pour milk on my cornflakes.
And it's got seven days later, and I abandoned milk on several days.
I can remember doing that, and I dreaded it because I love milk.
But you knew that, I mean, it's probably foolish because the milk came out of a cow three days before, and I didn't quite damp the pathway down correct.
But what I mean is, gee whizzo, it could dump that kind of density half a world away to the point where it limits our visibility severely here, and then an event like that were to happen, and it would carry radiation the same way, the amount of radiation coming down or in our atmosphere could, under those conditions, be so thick that people would drop dead over here.
No, and I can give you another example, and now I'm touching on very touchy things.
In Australia, I mean, the British, where did they test?
They tested in the desert in Australia, just a little bit north of Adelaide.
And quite frankly, they didn't care one bit about where the wind systems went.
And wind systems over Australia are a little bit finicky, but usually you would hope on a window day that it would blow it away.
But goodness, there's populated cities downwind, Sydney, and Melbourne, probably not, but Brisbane.
And there was considerable amount of fallout from those Birdie's tests in the Australian desert.
And when I came to first Australia, I was intrigued by the number of young women who had what I called the thyroid mark, the little slit across the neck where they'd had a thyroid operation because they had thyroid cancer.
And I hadn't met that as much in North America.
I could count on half my hand, the number of people I met.
But when I came to Australia, it was very obvious.
You'd see these people, and they're all the same age, and they were all small children when that British testing was going off in the late 40s.
And the people would be now about my age.
They're in the 50s.
And it's very intriguing.
I noticed it.
It was impressionable on me.
And I don't think we know the amount of follow-up that was put into populated areas.
And there was not a word mentioned about the intensity, about what it was affecting.
And I've always wanted to ask somebody like yourself, Ted, whether the scenario that they laid out in the movie or in the book, that there would be a transfer from the prevailing winds from the northern hemisphere down to south, and that I'm sure they're not participating directly in such an all-out war.
It wouldn't be pulverized, you know, or there would be no explosions there, but in a matter of months, you'd have warning that you were going to die.
You have to differentiate between two aspects about what gets in the atmosphere.
You have to differentiate between a gas and dust.
And gases tend to mix with atmospheric circulation and over a two-year period would tend to spread out evenly around the globe given the atmospheric circulation.
I mean, if you're in the middle of an intense El Nino event, then you can move things very quickly across the tropics and up into you could say there was a nuclear reactor was built in Indonesia and it went like Chernobyl, then that radiation would very quickly, in an active El Nino event, go across the Pacific and up the coastline of western U.S. and South America.
So you could mix fairly quickly some of the gases.
But you have to, if you put up radiation in the form of dust, and that's what most of it would be, then you have to start looking at what volcanoes have done and the dust distribution.
And there we know that some parts of the world are virtually immune from the fallout and radiation blocking effects of dust from volcanoes like Krakatoa in 1883.
While it did suppress temperatures around most of the world, the effect, because it was in the northern hemisphere, was concentrated mainly in the northosphere.
And you had Pinatubo that went up in the Philippines, and its effect was noticeable in Australia, but it was more noticeable in the northern hemisphere.
So in other words, a northern hemisphere war, an all-out war like that, they argued in that movie about whether the radiation would remain circulating in the northern hemisphere or would eventually begin to trade off with the southern hemisphere and be everywhere.
But whether you would pick up the same intensity everywhere is debatable.
If you had a northern hemisphere nuclear war and you had enough radiation, then darn it, you don't want to be downwind of the explosions.
And then you mentioned the plume effect, and I'm sitting here in Australia thinking, oh, I think I would be safer because especially in the northern hemisphere summer, most of the circulation doesn't mix with the southern hemisphere too well.
And hopefully by the time it comes to your winter and you have the supercirculation, that most of that radiation has settled out of the atmosphere.
And most volcanic dust will go out in a two-year period.
Although if you have a big one and it takes a big one, it goes up in the atmosphere.
And after three or four years, it definitely has settled out.
And so if you had a nuclear war and you're putting things fairly low down over a city, like a kilometer above a city, two kilometers above a city, to get maximum explosive effect, you don't want to put these things too high in the atmosphere.
The atmosphere would absorb most of the explosive effect.
So you detonate them at a lower elevation.
Then a lot of the dust is not going up into the stratosphere.
It's not going out of the lower atmosphere.
And if it is kept in the lower atmosphere, then a lot of that dust will simply wash out with rain and condensation will form around the radiation particles and form moisture and drop out as rain.
So then probably if something like this were to occur, then you'd probably be on Australian television assuring the Australian population that in all likelihood the maximum radiation would actually be lower atmospheric and probably not be of deadly proportions when it finally does mix and get to Australia.
If you target the nuclear reactor, then you've got a Chernobyl type event.
And those are very dirty.
Now, in Australia, to my knowledge, we didn't have any fallout from Chernobyl.
If you had a nuclear war in India, Pakistan, you had one of the nuclear reactors anywhere, a nuclear reactor that was Destroyed or opened up, then you would get enormous amounts of pollutant.
And you have to be careful about where you are in a nuclear war.
The country that is upwind has an advantage.
The country that is downwind doesn't have an advantage.
And India is, to my mind, a little bit downwind of Pakistan.
So if it lobs nuclear arms into Pakistan, then it's going to get the follow-up.
If Pakistan lobs the arms into India, it can wait for a couple of weeks before that radiation goes around the globe, and hopefully most of it washes out in the Indian monsoon and falls in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia and Japan and China.
It's a scary synagogue because the one thing about mutually assured destruction, or it's called mad, in the Cold War, you knew that if you attacked the 80 other Cold War person, that you couldn't get everything before they could attack you.
And so when you went to war, you knew that you were going to cop it as well.
You couldn't do a sneak attack first.
You couldn't wipe out them before they could wipe out you.
And that sort of kept both the USA and USSR in line.
Now, India and Pakistan don't have that mentality.
They have a few bombs, and now they've got more.
And do they think that they could wipe out India think they could wipe out all of Pakistan?
Or Pakistan think they could wipe out all of India?
And there is probably in the rationale that there is possibility of the first leak that would have a very good effect.
About 200 million Pakistanis from memory and about a million Indians.
You're going to wipe them all out, but you're certainly going to disturb the infrastructure, the transport, the communications, the social structure, the agriculture.
And to what extent that that affects those societies if both of them start logging bombs around?
No one, I don't think, has thought too much about that.
We've always thought in terms of, yeah, war, nuclear war, if it happens, it's global.
Everybody gets mutually destructive.
But what happens if you have two regional areas, very close to each other, by the way, start logging things back and forth?
I mean, it'll be like the USA trying to go to war with Canada.
Canada had nuclear arms and lobbing bombs in the U.S. and the U.S. was lobbing them back into Canada.
And we've never considered that type of nuclear war.
Even with Europe going to war with USSR, we always knew it would be global.
USA would get involved and log bombs across markets.
I mean, I haven't been that much in touch with it.
We're going, I think, into an El Nino event.
And El Nino events, one of the precursors, the things that occurred before it, is the failure of the Indian monsoon.
So I'm saying there could be a probability that the Indian monsoon hasn't been turned on.
But if the Indian monsoon is still a regular event this year, you're going to have a lot of rainfall.
A lot of that radiation and radioactive dust would get washed from the atmosphere, scavenged from the atmosphere before it probably got out of Southeast Asia.
If it got caught up in the extreme, then you might get a situation where you suddenly find an area that's quite a long distance downwind gets accelerated levels of radiation that it didn't expect.
When I say it's scavenged from the atmosphere, that's a broad paintbrush approach to climate dynamics.
If there's any I've learned, it's that the first casualty, it is said, of any war is information, correct information.
And so, you know, one day we hear that peace might be on the way, and then the next day we hear that war is very close.
And I don't believe any of that.
I don't think any of us really know what's about to happen and where the big powers like the U.S., for example, and Israel might well be almost winking and nodding at India to go ahead, you know, and route these rascals out of Kashmir and straighten things out over there.
So we don't really know the behind-the-scenes movements on all of this.
China might be saying to Pakistan, look, don't worry, we're there for you if something happens.
But, I mean, the last wars sort of followed this pathway where you've got Israel and you've got Afghanistan, U.S. going into Afghanistan, and the Allies, and then Indikistan.
And the last wars we had of that nature were global.
There's one other thing I want to ask you about, and that is perhaps in your area.
We were talking about kilometer-size impacts with Earth.
If by some awful chance the kilometer-size object were to impact an interesting area, for example, like the Antarctic, I wonder what the probable results there would be.
I had thought of that, and it would take the ice itself is insulating, and you have to start melting it.
And it's got inertia, in other words.
You just wouldn't melt all of it.
And so if you had a comet impact, it would vaporize, and a lot of the vapor is in the atmosphere, and you've got atmospheric features again.
So I thought about this, and I just wondered if it would be as dramatic as some people would think, oh, you have a comet which heats up the atmosphere to this incredible temperature, and it melts all the ice.
And anybody who's been through a snow melt will know that it takes time to melt ice and snow.
It has a capability of absorbing an awful lot of heat before it melts.
But it's conceivable that you could melt over a large area a lot of water, and that water would then come back into the ocean.
And the next question is, would you see a signature with sea level going up?
Probably not.
Now, a kilometer is big, but it's not that big.
If you went up to Yukon took a little bit of size, if you dropped something up to that size, two, three miles in diameter, and dropped it on the Antarctic to march out, it would probably vaporize most of the ice.
But that comes back as flooding rains, and that would up the ocean level, yeah.
Well, we know if we melted the West Antarctic cap, and we think it would take about 500 years to do that under global warming, it would raise sea levels globally three to five meters.
Now, we're going to shortly take telephone calls, and here's what I'm going to ask of you.
Because, of course, between here and the other side world, we have what's called a latency problem, which means that when you say something, it takes a whole bunch of satellite bounces before it gets to Ted, and so people tend to interrupt each other.
You've seen it, I'm sure, on CNN where they have to finish sentences and then say Ted at the end so they know to pick it up.
Well, so that kind of means you've got to ask your question, get it out, and then pause and receive your answer.
That's kind of how it has to work, or else everybody ends up talking on top of everybody else.
It's the downside of talking to the other side of the world.
So, as you pick up your telephone to ask a question, Ted is an expert in tsunamis, which are incredible things, just completely incredible, and we don't think about them a lot because they don't happen a lot.
And he's a climatologist, and so we've been talking about many, many things throughout the night.
If you have a question about any of these areas or anything you think Ted might address, then feel free to pick up the telephone because that's where we're going to the telephone here in a few, just a very few moments, just a couple of other quick questions, and we are going to go to the phone.
So, if you have a question, now would be a superb time.
All right, there was a great disturbance in the force two days ago here in the United States when it appeared as though the Bush administration had sent a big paper to the United Nations on global warming, and it really seemed to be a complete flip-flop for the Bush administration.
It was a shocking article, a New York Times article.
And before we did the show with Ted tonight, we sent him down a copy of the New York Times article.
And I'm curious, being a climatologist, what you thought yourself when you read that article.
Well, not in terms of anything we might do to ameliorate or change the event that they claimed was occurring, but certainly it was a change in policy if indeed the Bush administration was saying that man's hand was the primary thing responsible for what was about to happen or actually is happening right now.
I've actually had more international students, about 10% Of my class this year was international study abroad students, mainly from the United States.
They're pretty loyal because they're the bright students and they're here to learn.
But a lot of our local students are parochial, they're interested in their part-time job, and they've got other interests, and so they weigh up a lecture against a commitment or some extra catch job, and they take the job.
You know, it's funny, you really do remind me of that scientist from on the beach.
You have sort of an attitude about you.
All right.
All right.
Let's let the audience ask a few questions.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ted Bryant in New South Wales.
Where are you, please?
unidentified
This is Eddie from New York.
Good morning, Martin.
Good evening, Ted.
How are you?
I'll ask my question and then I'll let you respond.
I saw a report recently regarding, I don't know if it was the Canaries, the volcanic islands off the west coast of Spain.
And they said if these volcanoes should ever become active, that the stored water would heat up, causing the western slopes of the volcano to just fall right into the sea, which would cause a tsunami.
They said a super tsunami heading towards the east coast of America.
I was wondering how devastating would it be, what kind of warning, and if Teb was familiar with it at all.
And you don't necessarily have to have that volcano erupting to have a collapse of the flanks.
The Canary Island volcanoes are very steep-sided and quite high.
And they're built on unstable foundations because you have lava flows over time covering older ones which have weathered.
You get unbalanced material slipping a bit and they're full of cracks.
So they're typical high volcanoes that are not very stable.
And by not very stable over a period of a million years, you can guarantee that about four or five chunks will drop off the side of the flanks of the Canary Islands.
As I mentioned to Art, unfortunately, most of the flows that have come off the Canary Islands have gone westwards or to the northwest, and that directs them into the North Atlantic Ocean.
You would have a warning of these things for certain because the Canary Islands are inhabited.
I forget the exact modeling results, but just by the Lisdon earthquake back in the 1700s, it took about six, seven hours for the waves to go across the Atlantic Ocean.
So you would get six hours, and in six hours, you can evacuate most people in even large concentrations like New York away from the ocean and realize that not everybody in New York lives near the ocean.
I'd be concerned about Long Island.
It doesn't necessarily take a tsunami to go for Long Island.
You had a hurricane in 1939.
It had a storm surge that went halfway across the island.
Well, Ted, if I might interrupt again, thinking of Long Island, for example, which would essentially probably be washed away in a big event, that's a lot of people, and eight hours is not a lot of time.
And monitoring is in place.
In other words, how would we know how big a tsunami is in its way?
And how could we monitor it?
Would satellites monitor it?
Would it be buoys in the ocean that would suddenly disappear?
Ships that would disappear that would make us know on the way?
It's inhabited, and you probably lose contact with the towns and cities there.
It wouldn't take too long, unless it was in the middle of the night, for people to realize that there wasn't a major event.
And if you then had any knowledge whatsoever, your emergency services and realized a chunk of the volcano had slipped into the ocean, I would not play the odds.
I would hit the sirens and hit the buzzers and get people away from the ocean.
Well, you would probably have five hours with the U.S. East Coast, but goodness the thing occurs at 12 o'clock at night, and it reaches the U.S. about sunrise.
unidentified
And you're not going to evacuate many people in the middle of the night.
And when your gentleman's worried about his aquifer, the last thing I would worry about is my water supply.
If he's 500 feet, hopefully he's that height above sea level.
He's not within 500 feet of the ocean on flat land because these things will sweep over flattish land, marshes, deltas.
And it's a difficult environment.
When they get into...
And when it gets into a harbor, it doesn't matter if it's a harbor, it's Puget Sound, looks like a harbor, it just bounces around back and forth and can actually amplify in height and do a lot of damage.
Okay, it's also been glaciated, so I don't know if the sand comes from glaciation or it's actually been swept up by tsunami, but we have sand deposits swept up on cliffs here, and the cliffs are 80 meters.
But, I mean, if you have, if you have, I see why you asked the question.
If you have shells, you know, they're in your sand.
Well, first of all, if you have sand, I mean, right there, you know that something brought the sand there.
And then secondary to that, if there are shells in it, that would mean that there was marine life there, too, which would mean there was water there once before.
You can very easily just destroy, write a book review and just shatter it.
Some journals now request if you review a book but you don't say anything negative about the book, you write a positive review.
And so I've got a I think I met up with a few people like that who were unwilling to accept the fact that I wasn't in the tsunami circle, science people, so therefore I shouldn't be writing a book on tsunami.
And some people who didn't like the implications.
By the way, by the implications, the evidence, by the way, we brought the person who was the American who wrote up and discovered the channels on Mars that were catastrophic flood features.
And we brought him down our coast in March.
He asked to come here, and we showed him the sites.
And we never went past the first site before he could see he believed.
And at the end of it, he was talking about catastrophic large-scale tsunami effect on coastline.
So I was wondering, volcanoes collapse into the ocean and create tsunamis, right?
Right.
Is it possible that there could have been a series of volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that a long time ago when the Aztecs and the Egypts were thriving, that it collapsed into the ocean and wiped out both sides on either side of it was directed to the Aztecs in the Egypt and Mexico and in Egypt?
It certainly is possible, but I have to qualify that a bit.
What I've done and talked to astronomers, I would come up with a more likely scenario on the Dinen volcanoes collapsing.
The comet impact evidence, so if it isn't random over time, there are clustered events, and the frequency is about every 500 years, and not the same intensity every 500 years, but every 2,500 years or every 1,000 years, we go through more of this debris than another period.
And there have been numerous times when we have had debris come into the Earth's atmosphere system that could have dropped an object into the ocean that would have set up a tsunami and would have set up the climatic effects.
And the astronomers believe that Middle Eastern civilizations, when you go back through the Bible and look at the history created in the Bible, that several civilizations collapsed at the same time.
So when you talk about the Aztecs wiping them out and things like that, we're talking about civilization collapses.
And the astronomers believe that some of these could have been due to comet impacts in the ocean, the tsunami itself, and then the following up climatic change.
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But you don't think, because I look at a map and there's a ridge down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
And could that possibly be volcanoes?
If there was volcano islands there and they collapsed, it would send tsunamis in both directions and eventually wiping them out at the same time, right?
You know, there was a story about some undersea slippage that could happen in the Atlantic that would give very little warning to anybody, but they said it could happen.
There are areas along the continental slope on the east coast of the United States, but three or four, which are prime sites, which have been investigated and has had slippage.
And if the slippage is big enough, then it could kick up a tsunami towards after Papua New Guinea in July 1998, where the earthquake was too small that generated a tsunami wave.
And there it was almost a 15-meter, 45-foot high wall of water.
And the earthquake wasn't big enough, and it was submarine landslide.
It made a lot of people realize, hey, we better start steep slopes in the ocean because submarine slides may be underrated.
And I read this in the first hour of the program that you didn't hear there in Australia.
But the headline is, Melting Ice on Everest is evidence of global warming.
Now, they just had a Yen group went up, and you know what they noted?
They said the following, that the ice fields that had helped Hillary and Sherpa Tensing on the first ascent of Everest have shrunken, actually moving back about six kilometers.
And it says back in 1953, when Hillary and Tensing set off to climb Everest, they stepped out of their base camp and stepped right onto ice.
Now, today, if you were in that same tent they were in out of base camp, you would have to walk more than two hours before you'd get to the ice that they stepped straight onto back in 1953.
I was just wondering, do you, you, and Ted, I have a question.
Are you talking about a 5,000 time period that things are happening with the meteors and stuff like that?
Would there be a rotation with the galaxy or within our galaxy that we're coming in closer to the meteor belt that we might have a closer gravity pull of bringing meteors in close to us?
In other words, I guess he's asking, could the Earth move through, suddenly begin to move through some sort of area where we'd get hit by a lot of things?
I mean, where, you know, there's a lot of clutter in space.
Actually, if there were such a thing as aliens and they had spaceships and they had the ability to move rocks around, you wouldn't have to really attack the Earth at all.
You would just go out to a place and you'd move the orbit of a few very large rocks and just then wait and see what happened.
I know the fault line over in California is pretty unstable.
And I was kind of wondering if a large piece of space debris, say a comet or the size of the asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula, if that was to hit the Pacific Ocean, could that then set off the fault line and maybe California right off into the ocean?
I don't know about breaking off and falling in the ocean, but there is the San Andreas Fault and associated faults with it in California, which everybody worries all the time about here on the West Coast, Ted.
And he brings up an interesting point.
You would think an impact, whether it would be on land or water, in that area, would have a good chance, wouldn't it, of setting a fault of that size off?
We think of the Yucatan Peninsula comet that came in 65 million years ago, set up an enormous earthquake.
And we talk about things on the Richter scale, and Lisbon was about 9, about the biggest that we've ever conceived of in historical times.
We think that the Yucatan hit was up in 10, 11, and these things are going up on a log scale.
We've got in Australia, one, the Aborigines described perfectly a comet coming in, and it was in a debris.
It just wasn't a single object.
But they talked about the whole ground shaking.
And it's obvious that when these objects hit, they don't have to be that big, that they can generate earthquakes.
And if you've got this type of impact or debris impacting in an area like the San Andreas Fault, what do you need to trigger an earthquake?
I don't think you're going to slip half of California into the ocean, but you would certainly have the possibility of secondary effects like setting off and triggering an earthquake.
And one of the tsunami experts I met actually came from Bulgaria, and he was a Bulgarian tsunami expert on the Black Sea.
And I thought, the Black Sea doesn't have tsunami.
And he told me a lot about tsunami.
It certainly does.
He was the expert because they were worried that the U.S. in the Cold War would detonate a nuclear weapon in the underwater in the Black Sea.
It would set up a significant tsunami that would wipe out every port around the Black Sea.
So you could trigger an earthquake, but if you want to get out of coastal area, you don't necessarily detonate the nuclear bomb over a city or over the harbor.
You detonate it on wash or it will set up a tsunami that will well and truly impact upon that port.
Well, it was set up on, yeah, and probably then went into the 50% literature, but it probably then was put into the equations to see with a certain size bomb what type of waves you could generate.
And that was going to be used as a weapon in the Cold War.