Table of Contents
This Gaia film takes flood stories as two disaster memories, not one boat voyage. The earlier memory is a dark age closing, and cultures are said to turn over about every five thousand years rather than climb one slope. A Maya split of the equinox wobble is one clock for that. New finds are said to push ruins far past the usual line, and the film looks to the sky for the cause. Ice from Greenland and a Russian camp in East Antarctica is offered as a long climate diary. A frozen epoch yields to the warm one near eleven and a half thousand years ago, in a ragged join that includes the Younger Dryas. The favored cause is the Clovis proposal, a comet or asteroid in many pieces rather than one local crater, with platinum scarce in earthly rock and a Greenland scar of that age. Seas rise from about thirteen thousand years ago. A smashed planet once set between Mars and Jupiter, recalled in a Babylonian poem, is offered as the source of the rubble.
Key points
- Flood tradition is split here into two memories, the first of them a dark age reaching its end.
- Cultures are said to rise and fall on a rhythm near five thousand years, with a Maya division of the equinox cycle as one tally.
- Polar ice is the archive named for a very long climate record and for a messy entry into the present warm spell.
- The Younger Dryas cold is blamed on comet fragments, platinum dust, and a Greenland scar, rather than on one neighborhood impact.
- Higher oceans after about thirteen thousand years ago, plus debris from a lost planet, complete the film’s picture of earlier worlds erased.
Short quotes
One of those themes is that civilization is cyclic rather than linear.
Gaia, Floods, ice, and a broken comet
Repeating stories are taken as proof that cultures turn over, rather than advance in one climb. Watch at 1:47
Starting in the early 20th century, scientists have been studying ice core samples from the polar regions of the planet.
Gaia, Floods, ice, and a broken comet
He points to polar ice cores as the record scientists have been reading since the early twentieth century. Watch at 4:56
The mineral platinum, for example, is relatively rare on Earth, but you find it in comets.
Gaia, Floods, ice, and a broken comet
A metal rare in crust and common in comets is the clue used to argue for a sky breakup. Watch at 9:37
Video by Gaia. Watch on YouTube.