Both sides, one list
Sources
Given so they can be pulled, not so they can be counted. Where a work is contested, that is marked rather than hidden, and the critical literature is here alongside the rest because a ledger that lists only friendly sources is not a ledger.
The frontier
Where the claim is made.
| Work | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Next End of the World | Ben Davidson, Space Weather News, 2020. 109 pages, six chapters. The primary statement of the claim, running from the history of catastrophism through the excursions and the micronova to the next cycle. |
| Observer Supplement 2022/2023 | April 2022. 112 pages. Updates the above and the solar textbook. Section 2c holds the 6,000-year cadence, 4a the "happening now" case, 4b to 4e the current observations. Heavily cited with reference numbers. |
| Weatherman's Guide to the Sun | Third edition. The solar physics textbook the other two are built on. |
| The daily programme | SpaceWeatherNews.com, Suspicious0bservers.org, and the channel. |
| "The Disaster Cycle" | The documentary the eight-rung cadence card comes from. |
Collaborators appearing in the argument: Billy Yelverton on bench electromagnetics, Dr August Dunning on comparative mythology and lunar material, Dr Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos on plasma physics, Douglas Vogt on cycle length, Robert Felix on extinction and DNA, Randall Carlson on catastrophe geology.
Antecedents cited: W.B. Walker's Cyclical Deluges (1871) and Ken White's World in Peril (1994), both readable free on the Internet Archive; Georges Cuvier; Frank Hibben and the challenge to explain all the evidence; Charles Hapgood and the Einstein foreword; Chan Thomas; Immanuel Velikovsky.
The settled floor
Mainstream, checkable.
| Work | Where |
|---|---|
| Scaringi et al., "Localized thermonuclear bursts from accreting magnetic white dwarfs" | Nature 604, 447-450, 20 April 2022. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04495-6 |
| Vasilyev et al., "Sun-like stars produce superflares roughly once per century" | Science, 13 December 2024. doi:10.1126/science.adl5441. Preprint arXiv:2412.12265 |
| Miyake et al., the 774-775 CE radiocarbon spike | Nature, 2012, and the Miyake-event literature since |
| The 12,350 BCE candidate | Subfossil Scots pine, French Alps. About 14,300 calibrated years before present. |
| Panovska, Constable and colleagues, global field models | LSMOD.2 and GGF100k. "Robust Characteristics of the Laschamp and Mono Lake Geomagnetic Excursions", Frontiers in Earth Science 7:86, 2019 |
| Nowaczyk et al., Mono Lake and Laschamps in Drake Passage | JGR Solid Earth, 2025. doi:10.1029/2024JB029835 |
| Finlay, Livermore and Fournier, "Gyre-driven decay of the Earth's magnetic dipole" | Nature Communications 7, 10422, 2016 |
| ESA Swarm, South Atlantic anomaly growth | Mission releases from 2014 onward |
| NOAA and the British Geological Survey, World Magnetic Model 2025 | Including the first high-resolution version, and the annual report |
| Supernova feedback and the overcooling problem | The standing result in galaxy formation: gravity and cooling alone overproduce stars, and stellar feedback is what makes simulated galaxies match observed ones. See for example the kinetic supernova feedback and blastwave feedback literature from 2008 onward. |
| Parker (1992), and Hanasz et al., the cosmic-ray-driven galactic dynamo | Cosmic ray buoyancy plus Coriolis force, differential rotation and reconnection amplifying the galactic magnetic field through the Parker instability. The first numerical model drove it with cosmic rays injected in supernova remnants, amplifying on a timescale near 250 million years. Astrophysical Journal, 2004, and the parameter studies since. |
| Tajitsu et al. (2015), Izzo et al. (2015), and the nova lithium literature since | Beryllium in Nova Delphini 2013 and lithium in Nova Centauri 2013, followed by detections in many further novae. "Novae: An Important Source of Lithium in the Galaxy", ApJ, 2024, and "Viability of Novae as Sources of Galactic Lithium", ApJL, 2022. |
| Opher et al., the Solar System's passage through a cold interstellar cloud | Nature Astronomy, 10 June 2024. The heliosphere compressed to about 0.22 AU, inside the Earth's orbit, roughly 2 million years ago. A second likely episode at the Local Bubble edge near 7 million years ago. |
| Laskar, Joutel and Robutel, "Stabilization of the Earth's obliquity by the Moon" | Nature, 1993. Without the Moon the tilt could roam between roughly 0 and 85 degrees. Note the dependence: the stabilisation works through the precession rate, which is a function of lunar distance and Earth's spin, so it is a property of the present arrangement rather than a law. |
| Tidal evolution and the end of the stabilisation | Tidal recession is expected to drive Earth's rotation into the chaotic zone within 1.5 to 4.5 billion years, with obliquity excursions above 80 degrees becoming likely thereafter. |
| Ćuk, Hamilton, Lock and Stewart, tidal evolution of the Moon from a high-obliquity, high-angular-momentum Earth | 2016, and the follow-up modelling. A giant impact leaving Earth with a spin period under 2.5 hours and an obliquity above about 61 degrees, with the Moon accreting in the equatorial plane of a highly oblique Earth and the Laplace plane transition shedding the excess angular momentum. Proposed because it explains the Earth-Moon isotopic similarity, which is the standing problem with the classic model. |
| Apollo 12 Passive Seismic Experiment | 20 November 1969. The ascent stage impacted about 72.5 km from the seismometer and the Moon vibrated for over 55 minutes. Explained by the megaregolith: kilometres of impact-fractured, extremely dry rock that scatters seismic energy rather than damping it. Hollow is excluded by the Moon's mean density. |
| Khatuntsev et al., Venus Express cloud-top winds | Cloud-top wind speeds rising from around 300 to nearly 400 km/h between 2006 and 2013, tracked across 45,000 features by hand and 350,000 automatically. Described by the lead author as never before observed on Venus and not yet understood. |
| Roman et al., Neptune's stratospheric temperatures | Planetary Science Journal, 2022, from two decades of thermal infrared including Gemini North and Subaru. Cooling of at least 7 K to 2018, then roughly 11 K of south polar warming by 2020. Cause unknown; candidates offered include seasonal chemistry, weather variability, and the 11-year solar cycle. |
| Tiranti et al., JWST and the Uranian ionosphere | Geophysical Research Letters, 2026. doi:10.1029/2025GL119304. Fifteen hours of NIRSpec observation on 19 January 2025. The upper atmosphere has continued cooling across thirty years, now near 150 degrees. |
| Pluto occultation record | Twelve occultations 1988 to 2016 showing a threefold pressure rise, then a roughly 21% drop by 2019, at the edge of what the measurement can resolve, attributed to nitrogen refreezing in Sputnik Planitia as models predicted, though larger than predicted. |
| Fenton et al., "Global warming and climate forcing by recent albedo changes on Mars" | Nature, 2007, plus the published erratum. Regional dust-driven albedo change, 0.65 K total across roughly two decades rather than per year. Widely misused as evidence of solar-system-wide warming. |
| InSight seismicity and S1222a | Over 1,300 marsquakes recorded. Kawamura et al. and Fernando et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2023: the largest event, magnitude 4.7 on 4 May 2022, released as much seismic moment as everything previously catalogued combined, and is tectonic rather than an impact. |
| Solar Cycle 25 progression | NOAA SWPC. Forecast in 2019 at a maximum sunspot number near 115 for mid-2025, revised upward in 2023, actual smoothed peak near 161 in October 2024 with counts at a 23-year high and an X9.0 flare on 3 October 2024. |
| Parker Solar Probe | NASA, launched 2018. Crossed the Alfvén critical surface at 18.8 solar radii in April 2021, the boundary where the Sun's atmosphere ends and the solar wind begins, so the spacecraft has flown inside the corona rather than past it. Since December 2024 it has held a closest approach of 6.1 million km, about 3.8 million miles or roughly 9 solar radii, at 690,000 km/h. That is near 190 km every second, Sydney to Melbourne in under four seconds. Twenty-sixth close approach in December 2025. The limit is structural: one spacecraft samples one point at a time, so what it returns is the corona it happened to fly through rather than the corona as a whole. |
| SOLAR-1 (formerly SWFO-L1) | NOAA. Launched September 2025, arrived at the L1 point in January 2026, commissioned mid-2026, and operational with a 24/7 real-time downlink. Carries a Compact Coronagraph, a magnetometer, a suprathermal ion sensor and a solar wind plasma sensor. Before it flew, operational warning rested on ACE (1997) and DSCOVR (2015) for the wind, and on LASCO aboard SOHO (1995) as the only coronagraph in the chain. SOLAR-1 is the first redundancy for that instrument. |
| Vigil | ESA, planned for launch in 2031, stationed at L5, about 60 degrees behind the Earth in its orbit, carrying a NOAA Compact Coronagraph. From there an ejection is seen side-on before it is Earth-directed, which is a different measurement from watching one come at the camera. Not yet flying. |
| Flux transfer events | Magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause joining the Sun's field to the Earth's, forming flux ropes roughly the width of the planet with one end out in the solar wind and the other rooted in Earth's field. Under a favourable interplanetary field orientation one opens about every eight minutes. Measured directly by ESA's four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS probes. |
| Coronal hole high-speed streams and corotating interaction regions | Quasi-stationary structures that turn with the Sun rather than erupting from it, so they come back round on roughly a 27-day beat and can persist through five to ten rotations. Most prominent in the declining phase of a cycle and near solar minimum at low helio-latitudes. They drive recurrent Forbush decreases in galactic cosmic ray flux, through stronger convection and reduced diffusion, while raising geomagnetic activity at the same time. Worth noting for any test that expects cosmic ray flux and geomagnetic activity to move together: here they move opposite ways, on a schedule. |
| Heliosphere compression by a cold cloud | Opher et al., Nature Astronomy, 2024, plus "The Passage of the Solar System through the Edge of the Local Bubble" (ApJ, 2024). Encounter with the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds about 2 to 3 million years ago, cloud density around 3,000 cm-3, sufficient to compress the heliosphere inside Earth's orbit and leave the planet descreened. Miller et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2024, model the mesospheric consequence, with global noctilucent clouds and an induced cooling proposed. A 2026 preprint proposes cosmogenic beryllium-10 as a tracer for confirming the encounters. |
| Electromagnetic filtering of interstellar dust | Ulysses in-situ measurements over sixteen years, plus the filtering models. Interstellar grains entering the Solar System are sorted by the interplanetary magnetic field through the Lorentz force; particles below roughly 0.03 micrometres are excluded entirely, with the cut-off size depending on solar cycle phase. Measured dust flux varied by about a factor of four across the mission, tracking solar magnetic reversals rather than anything in the dust population. The heliosphere functions as a dust filter whose setting cycles with solar magnetic activity. |
| Cosmic rays and explosive volcanism | Ebisuzaki, Miyahara, Kataoka, Sato and Ishimine, "Explosive volcanic eruptions triggered by cosmic rays: Volcano as a bubble chamber", Gondwana Research, 2011. Eleven silica-rich eruptions from Mt Fuji, Mt Usu, Myojin-sho and Satsuma-Iwo-jima across 1700 to 2005, with nine falling in solar minimum, significant at about 96.7 per cent, which is modest. Mechanism: silica-rich magma is highly supersaturated because high surface tension suppresses spontaneous bubble nucleation, so cosmic-ray muons can nucleate via ionisation loss. The correlation is absent for silica-poor magma such as Izu-Ohshima, which is the differential the mechanism predicts. Small sample; the differential is the reason to take it seriously. |
| The neutron monitor network | A worldwide array of ground stations measuring cosmic ray flux in real time, published free. It matters for the row above: the volcanic mechanism runs on flux, and most attempts to test it stand sunspot number in as a proxy. The monitors measure the quantity itself, which makes the test a data exercise rather than an inference. |
| Solar wind and earthquakes | Marchitelli, Harabaglia, Troise and De Natale, "On the correlation between solar activity and large earthquakes worldwide", Scientific Reports, 2020. Twenty years of SOHO proton density against the ISC-GEM catalogue, reporting correlation with M > 5.6 events at a one-day lag. Contested: a formal Matters Arising rebuttal was published, and the USGS and mainstream seismology do not accept the correlation. Follow-up work continues on both sides, including machine-learning retrospectives and total electron content studies. Keep separate from the volcanic case above, which is a different claim with a different mechanism. |
| Smong, Simeulue island | McAdoo, Dengler, Prasetya and Titov, Earthquake Spectra, 2006, plus the disaster-risk literature since. Simeulue sat about 60 km from the 2004 epicentre and lost seven people from a population near 70,000, against roughly 170,000 deaths in Aceh. The island had no warning system. It had smong, an oral tradition dating from the 1907 tsunami, carried in poem, song, bedtime stories and grave inscriptions, whose payload is operational: strong earthquake, then the sea withdraws, go to high ground and do not go to look. |
| Derinkuyu underground city | Cappadocia, central Anatolia. Eighteen levels reaching roughly 85 m below the surface, estimated capacity up to 20,000 people, with dwellings, stables, cellars, wells and more than 50 ventilation shafts. Stone doors sealing from the inside. Rediscovered in 1963 when a resident broke through a basement wall. Used as refuge by Christian communities during persecution and later raiding. The architecture is explicitly defensive and built for extended occupation. |
| Mammoth steppe productivity | Zimov et al., "Mammoth steppe: a high-productivity phenomenon", Quaternary Science Reviews, 2012. Animal biomass and plant productivity estimated from skeleton density in frozen northern Siberian soils, coming out close to African savanna values. The competing explanations, keystone-herbivore maintenance versus a drier and windier glacial climate, are both live. The term "productivity paradox" is the field's own for reconciling the mammal community with apparent vegetation biomass. |
| Mammoth steppe diet and vegetation | Willerslev et al., Nature, 2014. Sedimentary DNA from permafrost cores at 17 sites across northern Russia, Canada and Alaska spanning 50,000 years, with 18 preserved stomach-content and coprolite samples from mammoth, woolly rhino, horse, reindeer and elk. Flowering forbs about 63 per cent of plant content against about 27 per cent grasses, overturning the grass-plain picture. Forbs are protein-rich and more digestible. |
| Woolly mammoth cold adaptation | Genomic studies reporting selection on lipid metabolism, thermogenesis, and adaptation to extremely varied light and dark cycles. The last of these is the latitude-specific one, since photoperiod is a function of latitude alone. Genomic inference rather than direct measurement. |
| Betelgeuse, the Great Dimming | Dupree, Montargès et al. Visual magnitude fell below 1 in December 2019 to a historic minimum near 1.65 between 27 January and 13 February 2020. Interpreted as a surface mass ejection in September to November 2019, principally from the south to southeast quadrant, condensing into obscuring dust. A stellar companion was probably direct-imaged in 2025 and its expanding wake reported in 2026. |
| Detached circumstellar shells around carbon AGB stars | Maercker et al. and the ALMA programmes since. R Sculptoris: a thermal pulse about 1,800 years ago lasting roughly 200 years, gas shell radius about 19.5 arcseconds expanding at 14.3 km/s, dust and gas coincident. U Antliae: a remarkably thin, overall spherically symmetric detached CO shell with barely resolved filamentary substructure, read as instability in the interaction zone between winds of different outflow velocity. One shell per thermal pulse, so the ejections are periodic and set by the star's own interior. |
| Iron-60 and nearby supernovae | Knie et al., Wallner et al. and the literature since. Live iron-60 (half-life ~2.6 Myr) recovered from deep-sea sediments and ferromanganese crusts in three oceans, from lunar samples, and reported from Antarctic ice in 2026. Two deposition windows: 3.2 to 1.7 Ma spread across roughly 1.5 Myr, and a second peak near 6 to 8 Ma. Interpreted as several supernovae across the last ten million years. The source is hypothesised rather than identified: members of the Scorpius-Centaurus association are the leading candidates, with the events placed toward Libra and Lupus, and published distances range from roughly 10 parsecs to over 100. That order-of-magnitude spread matters, because the low end and the high end imply very different consequences at Earth. Plutonium-244 co-deposition constrains r-process yields (Science, 2021). |
| Apollo 13 mission patch | Designed by Lumen Martin Winter from a concept by commander Jim Lovell. Three horses drawing Apollo's sun chariot across space with the Moon below, motto "Ex Luna, Scientia" (from the Moon, knowledge), itself a parody of the US Naval Academy's "Ex Trident, Scientia". One of only two Apollo patches without crew names. The sun disc is rendered red-orange, which is a convention rather than the Sun's actual colour (white). |
| Apollo 13 patch variants | Documented by patch collectors: production runs with distinctly different thread colours for the horses; a variant with distinctly orange thread rather than the usual yellow-orange; later reproductions with all horses the same colour. Multiple manufacturers, including AB Emblem for the crew version and Lion Brothers, whose version has longer sun rays and the number 13 hidden in the left horse's mane. The colour variation between versions is real and normal for mission patches. |
| Apollo Program insignia (a different image) | A large letter A with the constellation Orion positioned so its three belt stars form the crossbar, Earth to the right, the Moon to the left, and a double trajectory passing behind both spheres. No horses. Not to be confused with the Apollo 13 mission patch above. |
| Auroral oval latitude and dipole strength | As the Earth's dipole moment weakens, the equatorward boundary of the auroral oval moves to lower latitudes; a stronger dipole would require a stronger storm to produce the same geographic auroral extent. Note the regional caveat: a 2020 study in JGR Space Physics finds the northern auroral oval shrinking, so secular variation is not symmetric between hemispheres. |
| The VLF bubble and the radiation belts | NASA, Van Allen Probes, 2017. Very low frequency radio transmitted from ground stations for submarine communication extends beyond the atmosphere, forming a bubble whose outer extent coincides closely with the inner edge of the Van Allen belts. That inner boundary sits considerably further from Earth than in 1960s satellite records, when VLF transmission was more limited. See also the "Anthropogenic Space Weather" review, arXiv:1611.03390. |
| Peratt, "Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity" | IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 31(6), December 2003, doi:10.1109/tps.2003.820956, with Part II on directionality and source in 35(4), August 2007. Eighty-four petroglyph morphologies compared against laboratory high-current Z-pinch plasma instabilities, with the same forms reported worldwide. Interpreted as an intense aurora consistent with a solar wind one to two orders of magnitude above present. Real peer review, in a plasma physics journal rather than an archaeological or geophysical one. |
| Lituya Bay, 1958 | Measured run-up to 524.6 m in a confined inlet, against a ceiling near 30 m for ordinary tsunami. Relevant to any criterion that tests inland reach against ordinary tsunami scale. |
| Bourgeois and Weiss, "Chevrons are not mega-tsunami deposits: a sedimentologic assessment" | Geology 37, 403-406, 2009. Against the Holocene Impact Working Group's reading of chevron bed forms in Australia, Madagascar, the Bahamas and Egypt as mega-tsunami deposits from oceanic impacts. The argument is geometric: chevrons lie at a high angle to the shore rather than parallel to it as a wave would leave them, and occur too far inland. Conclusion quoted as the claim being unable to withstand simple but rigorous testing. |
| Nunn and Reid, "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago" | Australian Geographer 47(1), 2016. Twenty-one accounts from twenty-one locations around the whole Australian coast, nineteen from written collections and two from interviews, describing the sea taking land. Sea level around Australia reached its present position roughly 7,000 years ago, so the accounts must predate that. Described by the authors as empirical corroboration of postglacial sea-level rise, across roughly 300 generations. The transmission mechanism is kin-based responsibility for knowledge plus cross-generational cross-checking by elders. |
| Klamath oral tradition and Mount Mazama | The collapse of Mount Mazama about 7,700 years ago, described in Klamath accounts as red-hot rocks the size of hills through the air, fire over the forests, the mountain falling and the hollow filling with rain. Human sandals have been recovered from beneath the Mazama ash. |
| The 1700 Cascadia earthquake and the orphan tsunami | A tsunami reaching Japan on the night of 26 January 1700 with no local earthquake, recorded in Japanese documents; Pacific Northwest oral traditions of floods, shaking and a fight between Thunderbird and Whale placing the event on a winter night, documented by Ruth Ludwin and colleagues; and ghost forests plus tsunami sand deposits on the American coast. Magnitude estimated between 8.7 and 9.2. |
| Geomythology | The study of oral traditions encoding real geological events, named by the USGS geologist Dorothy Vitaliano in 1968. |
| The Five Suns | Nahua and Aztec tradition. Four previous suns ended by jaguars, wind, a rain of fire and a flood; the current fifth, Four Movement, is held to end in earthquakes. |
| The Hopi four worlds, and a caution | Widely reported as fire, ice and flood destroying three previous worlds. Most popular retellings derive from a single 1963 book compiled by an outsider from statements attributed to twenty-seven elders, which Hopi people have publicly objected to and which anthropologists have criticised. Report it as contested, and as a book about the tradition rather than the tradition. |
| Geomagnetic storms since May 2024 | Severe (G4) events in October 2024, November 2025, 19 January 2026 (NOAA SWPC) and late July 2026, plus a strong (G3) event in early July 2026 with aurora reaching New Mexico. This row will go stale; check current NOAA SWPC records before quoting. |
| Hayakawa and colleagues, historical low-latitude aurorae | A body of work reconstructing extreme storms from written records. The September 1770 storm from 111 East Asian documents, with displays below 30 degrees magnetic latitude across nine nights. The February 1872 Chapman-Silverman storm from more than 700 auroral records worldwide, reaching about 20 degrees latitude in both hemispheres, with a conservatively estimated minimum index of -834 or lower and an auroral boundary suggesting it may have exceeded 1859 and 1921. Also the 1859 low-latitude aurorae, the July 1959 equatorward extensions, and auroral evidence for great storms in the 990s. |
| The uncertain intensity of the Carrington storm | Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, 2024, plus a 2026 deep-learning reconstruction. Estimates span roughly -685 to -2000 nT, with about -949 +/- 31 nT among the commonly cited figures. The uncertainty is the point. |
| The May 2024 storm in a 375-year context | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2025. Places the 2024 event against auroral activity across the past 375 years. Minimum index -412 nT, sixth largest since 1957. |
| The May 2024 geomagnetic storm | First G5 since October 2003. Merged CMEs from active region 13664. The largest coordinated satellite manoeuvre on record across roughly half of about 10,000 low-orbit payloads, record ionospheric depletion, and one Starlink re-entry accelerated by about 11 days. |
| Finlay et al., eleven years of Swarm on the South Atlantic Anomaly | Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, 2025. Expansion by an area near half of continental Europe since 2014, faster weakening since 2020 south-west of Africa, and a structure that behaves differently towards Africa than towards South America. |
| Beyond EPICA, the oldest continuous ice | 2025. A 2,800 m core to bedrock in East Antarctica carrying an uninterrupted sequence of climate cycles back at least 1.2 million years. EPICA Dome C previously gave 800,000 years across eight cycles. NGRIP in Greenland is undisturbed to 123,000 years and NEEM continuous through the last interglacial to about 128,000. |
| Antarctic position and glaciation | The continent reached its present polar position around 83 Ma and became ice-covered around 34 Ma at the Eocene-Oligocene transition, with mountain glaciers in the Transantarctic Mountains earlier still. |
| The Toba ice-core identification problem | Zielinski et al. (1996) on the GISP2 record; Crick et al., Climate of the Past 17, 2119 (2021) on sulphur isotopes; Svensson et al., Quaternary Science Reviews (2023) on bipolar constraints. Four candidate peaks, T1 to T4, across NGRIP, GRIP, GISP2, EDC and EDML, all within the radiometric age uncertainty. |
| The Moon in the magnetotail | The Moon enters Earth's magnetotail about three days before full and takes roughly six days to cross, encountering the plasma sheet. Surface charging on the lunar nightside reaches hundreds to thousands of volts. |
| Bell, lunar modulation of geomagnetic activity | Journal of Geophysical Research, 1964 and 1966. Geomagnetic activity runs roughly 4% below average for the seven days before full moon and 4% above for the seven days after, with a further dependence on the Moon's distance from the ecliptic plane. |
| Ide, Yabe and Tanaka, "Earthquake potential revealed by tidal influence on earthquake size-frequency statistics" | Nature Geoscience 9, 834-837, 2016. The probability of a large earthquake is greater at times of maximum tidal stress amplitude. Deep tectonic tremor in subduction zones tracks tidal stress closely. Contested at the top of the magnitude range, where a separate study of M8+ across four centuries found no lunar-phase relationship. |
| Schultz and Gault (1975), and the antipodal terrain literature | Seismic energy from a major impact focusing at the antipode and disrupting the surface there. Mapped on Mercury opposite Caloris (the "weird terrain", with modelled vertical ground movement near 1 km) and on the Moon opposite Imbrium. Later work finds focused guided waves, including mantle waves trapped between the core and the surface, matter more than direct body waves. |
| Kirschvink, Ripperdan and Evans, "Evidence for a Large-Scale Reorganization of Early Cambrian Continental Masses by Inertial Interchange True Polar Wander" | Science 277, 541, 1997. The published ninety-degree claim. Contested since: re-analysis of the palaeomagnetic pole selection, new data from Laurentia and Baltica, and a revised Cambrian timescale point against it. |
| Vaes et al., "Slow True Polar Wander Around Varying Equatorial Axes Since 320 Ma" | AGU Advances, 2025. doi:10.1029/2024AV001515. True polar wander as a live, mainstream, actively published field, and slow. |
| Williams, the high obliquity hypothesis | Formalised as high obliquity, low-latitude ice, strong seasonality in Earth-Science Reviews, 2008, with the obliquity-oblateness feedback mechanism in Nature, 1998. A published alternative to Snowball Earth in which the Earth's tilt exceeded 54 degrees, making the equator colder than the poles. The known hole: the Moon stabilises obliquity, and the proposed route back down has been invalidated. |
| Scott's Terra Nova party, the Beardmore Glacier fossils | Sixteen kilograms of rock collected below Mount Buckley in January 1912, containing Glossopteris leaves and coal, about 280 million years old. Early evidence for continental drift, and direct evidence that Antarctica was temperate and forested. |
| NOAA on the Bermuda Triangle | No evidence that disappearances occur there more often than in any other large, well-travelled stretch of ocean. The agonic line through the region is a line of zero declination, not a magnetic disturbance. Bermuda's antipode is in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia, not Japan. |
| Kursk and Bangui magnetic anomalies | The two largest crustal magnetic anomalies on Earth. Kursk reaches around 10,000 nT from banded iron formations. Bangui is roughly 700 by 1,000 km over the northern Congo Craton and its origin is genuinely contested: Girdler, Taylor and Frawley (1992) proposed a meteorite impact around 1 Ga; others have argued for major crustal fracturing or a large igneous body; recent gravity and magnetic imaging places banded iron and mafic granulites to about 38 km and argues against the impact. Current balance favours the geological source. Not a closed question. |
| Olivine, crystal symmetry and electrostatic behaviour | Olivine is orthorhombic, space group Pbnm, and centrosymmetric: its structure has a centre of symmetry, which rules out piezoelectricity, so squeezing it yields no voltage. Quartz has no such centre, which is why quartz does. What olivine does have is a distinct dielectric and triboelectric signature, taking the opposite charge to ilmenite and its neighbouring minerals when the grains rub together. That difference is the working basis of electrostatic mineral separation, and it is being engineered now for pulling resources out of lunar regolith. |
| Kaib and Raymond, "Passing Stars as an Important Driver of Paleoclimate and the Solar System's Orbital Evolution" | Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2024. arXiv:2402.08734. Prior modelling treats the Solar System as isolated; passing stars perturb the giant planets and shorten the window on Earth's orbital history by a further 10%. HD 7977 passed exceptionally close 2.8 million years ago. |
| Kaib and Raymond, "The Influence of Passing Field Stars on the Solar System's Dynamical Future" | 2025. arXiv:2505.04737. The Solar System about 50% less stable once flybys are included. Pluto around 5% destabilisation over 5 billion years, against a prior assumption of complete stability. |
| Laskar and colleagues, the astronomical solutions | Orbits diverge by a factor of ten every ten million years, setting a limit near 50 to 60 million years on any unique solution. Beyond that, geological data is needed to constrain the astronomy rather than the reverse. |
| Scholz's Star (WISE 0720-0846) | Passed about 52,000 AU, or 0.82 light years, roughly 70,000 years ago, through the outer Oort cloud. Identified in 2015. Mainstream reading is that the direct effect was slight. |
| Alves et al., "The Radcliffe Wave" | Nature, 7 January 2020. A rippling gas structure about 3 kiloparsecs long threading the Sun's neighbourhood. |
| Richerson, Boyd and Bettinger, "Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene?" | American Antiquity, 2001. The climate-stability explanation for why farming appears only in the Holocene. |
| Riley, "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events" | Space Weather, 2012. The much-quoted 12%-per-decade estimate for a Carrington-class storm. Later work argues for considerably lower figures, and both belong in an honest citation. |
| Dansgaard-Oeschger event magnitude | Greenland temperature jumps of 5 to 16 degrees within decades, synchronous with east Asian records inside 5 to 10 years. Absent from the Holocene. |
The contested middle
Live either way.
| Work | Standing |
|---|---|
| Cooper et al., "A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago" | Science, 19 February 2021. The "Adams Event" paper. |
| Technical Comments on the above, and the authors' response | Science doi:10.1126/science.abh1878 and doi:10.1126/science.abh3655 |
| Channell et al., 2020 | The list of excursions proposed for the last 30,000 years that have not been accepted into the inventory: Sterno-Etrussia ~2.7 ka, Tianchi ~10 ka, Gothenburg ~12 ka, an Iberian Margin core ~13 ka, Hilina Pali ~19 ka, Lake Mungo ~26 ka, Rockall ~26 ka. |
| Liu et al., Earth and Planetary Science Letters 492, 174-185, 2018 | Black Sea record, 20-15 ka: "no evidence for the 'Hilina Pali excursion'?" |
| Nawrocki et al., Boreas, 2018 | Hilina Pali proposed in western Ukrainian loess at c. 18 ka, with a published Comment on reinforcement syndrome and a Reply |
| Scheidt et al., JGR Solid Earth, 2025 | Polar Ural lake cores on the proposed Hilina Pali excursion. doi:10.1029/2025JB032561 |
| Haflidason et al., Journal of Quaternary Science, 2022 | Polar Ural lakes, a distinct inclination event about 20,000 years ago. doi:10.1002/jqs.3391 |
| Kent et al., Earth and Planetary Science Letters 197, 151, 2002 | "Laschamp Excursion at Mono Lake?", the type-locality dating dispute |
| Mörner, Quaternary Research, 1977 | "The Gothenburg Magnetic Excursion", the original proposal |
| Plenier et al., Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2007 | Origin and age of the directions recorded during the Laschamp event, Chaîne des Puys |
| Barbetti and McElhinny, "The Lake Mungo geomagnetic excursion" | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 1976, plus the source-model follow-ups in Nature, 1977 |
| González et al., "Palaeosecular variation in Central Mexico over the last 30000 years" | Geophysical Journal International 130, 201, 1997. The Michoacán-Guanajuato record. |
| Marchitelli et al., "On the correlation between solar activity and large earthquakes worldwide" | Scientific Reports 10, 11495, 2020, plus the formal responses |
| Obrochta et al., "A re-examination of evidence for the North Atlantic 1500-year cycle at Site 609" | Quaternary Science Reviews 55, 23, 2012 |
| Freund and colleagues, peroxy defects and positive holes | Dormant charge carriers sitting in ordinary crustal rock, woken by stress and flowing out of the stressed volume at about 100 metres a second, roughly 360 km/h, the length of a football field in a second. At concentration they behave as a degenerate solid-state plasma and can break down the air at the surface. Offered as the mechanism behind earthquake lights and pre-seismic electromagnetic signals. Standing: the laboratory effect is reproducible and published; the forecasting application is contested, with frictional heating, piezoelectricity in quartz and triboluminescence all offered as competing accounts of the same field reports. |
| Panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory | Panpsychism, the position that experience is a basic feature of matter rather than something appearing only in brains, is held by working philosophers including Galen Strawson and Philip Goff and argued in the mainstream philosophy literature. Integrated Information Theory goes further and assigns a quantity to a physical system. Standing: sharply contested. An open letter signed by more than a hundred researchers in 2023 called IIT pseudoscience, and the letter itself drew substantial published pushback over whether that label was earned. The argument is live on both the theory and the labelling. |
The critical literature
Worth reading carefully.
The quality varies a great deal, and the difference is worth learning. Some of it is claim-by-claim work by named reviewers. Some of it is a list of things about a person.
| Source | What it is |
|---|---|
| Science Feedback reviews | Structured claim-by-claim reviews with named reviewers. The most substantive criticism available, and mostly about the solar-and-climate claims rather than the micronova. |
| RationalWiki entry | Largely about the person rather than the claims. Useful mainly as a specimen of the pattern in the catalogue. |
| SourceWatch entry | Biographical, focused on credentials. |
| Professor Dave Explains, 2020 | Video rebuttal. Mixed: contains real points and real attacks on the person in the same piece. |
| Skeptical Inquirer, "The Younger Dryas Impact: A Failed Hypothesis", June 2025 | On the adjacent claim rather than the micronova. |
| RealClimate, "Laschamps-ing at the bit", February 2021 | On the Adams Event paper. |
A note on reading the citations
Eighty-five still unopened.
The frontier books cite real papers with real reference numbers, and anyone can pull them. Some support exactly what they are said to support. Some are accurate about a finding and then carry more interpretive weight than the paper itself claims. Some are correct in the citation and wrong in the summary.
Checking them one at a time is slow, and it is the only way to know which is which.
Six of the ninety-one have been pulled and read: two hold as used, two say something different, and two point at something stronger than the use. Finishing the rest would be the most valuable next contribution anyone could make to this argument, from either direction.