Exodus to Arthur

Description

Professor Mike Baillie, an expert in "dendrochronology" and palaeoecology from Queen's University, Belfast, provides a fascinating scientific detective story. The story starts with the description of a collaborative effort - over many decades - by scientists in several countries to develop a complete record of world-wide, climate modulated, annual tree growth as recorded in tree rings (dendrochronology), from the present back to several thousand years BC. The author then notes several unusual patterns in these records, separated by hundreds of years, which point to multi-year events with very poor growing conditions. This sets up the principal story in the Exodus to Arthur, as the author describes his efforts to explain these anomalies. The Professor Baillie uses as evidence historical records left by - among others - Irish, Mediterranean, Chinese and Mayan writers and story-tellers, and archeological evidence including boats and trees recovered from Irish bogs and well preserved building timbers from long abandoned Anasazi pueblos in Utah. Attention is also given to those cases in which some anomalies in tree ring records do not match well across great distances, for example, between Europe and the American southwest. Most of the severe climatic events that demarcate prehistory and the Dark Ages were probably caused by comets rather than volcanoes. I was particularly interested in the implications for the date of the Santorini explosion. The tree-rings give a pretty clear date for a major climatic minimum of 1628 BC, but the Egyptologists have difficulties with Thera blowing its top any earlier than 1540 BC. Baillie doesn't spell it out, but he implies that the (global) event in 1628 BC could have had an extra-terrestrial cause, meaning that Thera could indeed have gone off in 1540 BC, but that it only affected the climate in the eastern Mediterranean.