Saturday, July 13, 2019

THE ENCKE WINDOW (PART 2): EPISODIC BOMBARDMENT, KOYAANISQATSI, & 'CATACLYSMIC EVOLUTION' - A TELEOLOGICAL SYNCHRONICITY

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE, 2 JULY, AS SEEN FROM CHILE

"As Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, 'Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing  asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.' In short, you would see not a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects—'all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.' Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can’t see it."

from 'Bang', A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (2003)

"Clear the battlefield and let me see,
all the profit from our victory.
You talk of freedom, starving children fall,
are you deaf when you hear the seasons call?

Were you there to watch the Earth be scorched,
did you stand beside the spectral torch?
Know the leaves of sorrow turned their face,
scattered on the ashes of disgrace.

Every blade is sharp, the arrows fly,
where the victims of your armies lie.
Where the blades of grass and arrows reign,
there will be no sorrow, be no pain."

'Battlefield', Tarkus, Emerson Lake and Palmer (1972)

Sunday, June 30, 2019

THE ENCKE WINDOW (PART 1): COMETS, ASTEROIDS and ROGUE CIVILIZATIONS - AN ON THE BRINK SPECIAL REPORT

HALE-BOPP (1997)

"Comet, comet shining bright
On the highways of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare comprehend your starry sky?

Comet, comet shooting fast,
Borne in distant aeons past,
Bringing water, ice and stone,
And maybe life: are we 'alone'?

Comet, comet please come quick,
Mother Earth is very sick.
Comet, comet please come now
To cleanse the Earth of us, somehow."


PLEIADES/MATARIKI/SUBARU/'SEVEN SISTERS'

"Think of the Earth’s orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don’t know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. We don’t know where they live, what sort of hours they keep, how often they come our way. All we know is that at some point, at uncertain intervals, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-six thousand miles an hour."

from 'Bang', A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (2003)

Welcome to broadcast #284 of On the Brink Radio, recorded beneath Grandmother Pohutakawa here on Aotea, Great Barrier Island, New Zealand. Today is the 111th anniversary of the Tunguska event, and this show is about what I am calling 'the Encke Window' and the huge role that comets and asteroids have played and continue to play in the existence, evolution and extinction of life as we know her here on the only planet we know for sure who has life as we know her. This topic is astounding in scope and significance for being here now, yet due to its somewhat heavy implications is not on the public radar or even on peoples' minds much other than mine and a few dozen assorted astronomers and paleo-catastrophists.

This area of inquiry is of great personal significance to me, and in honour of that I am working on a comprehensive blog post that will be in progress all this coming week. I will also being Part Two of this show next week, going into greater detail and sharing the work of some leading researchers in this area.

Encke was the name of the astronomer who first calculated its orbit, and it was the second periodic comet to be discovered after Halley's. Encke comes around every 3.3 years and at its brightest is almost visible to the naked eye. Of the thousands of comets known today, Encke is unique not only in the frequency and proximity of its terrestrial encounters, but more importantly, due to its peculiar orbital characteristics, unlike most of the other comets who pass within the solar system, it is not gravitationally affected by Jupiter or Saturn. These gas giant planets are major drivers of cometary and asteroidal perturbation and/or eventual ejection from the heliocosm, but Encke is immune to these influences.


Very interestingly, the Encke of today is believed to be a mere remnant or 'daughter fragment' of what was once a true super-comet with a nucleus of 100 km in diameter. This is an Earth-shattering story, forgive the pun, and I won't go too deeply into it here, but in my blog post and next week's show I will be elaborating on the work of legendary UK astronomers Victor Clube and William Napier, whose brilliant research paved the way for the whole 'impact origin of mass-extinctions' theory, which the father-son team of George and Luis Alvarez got most of the credit for.





CHICXLULB, YUCATAN PENINSULA MEXICO
http://discovermagazine.com/2016/oct/drilling-to--doomsday


I am learning more about this every day, but as I understand it now, the Alvarez's work focused primarily on one impact event which is now known as the Chicxulub site on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, and is believed to be what triggered the mass-extinction sequence of 65-66 million years ago. The work of Clube and Napier, both of whom are professional astronomers unlike the Alvarez team, on the other hand, investigates a much bigger picture involving the origin of super-comets as a function of the sun's motion through the arms of the Milky Way. Clube and Napier's work, moreover, enables a degree of chronological awareness providing a predictive capability.

In a nutshell, the Earth intersects the orbit of Encke twice a year, which I am calling the 'Encke windows'. Right now on 30 June we are smack in the middle of one of these windows, which runs from late June into early July, and is associated with the beta Taurid and zeta Perseid daytime meteor showers, detectable by radar.  I am giving it a week each way, but what we're describing is a probability distribution more than an astronomical alignment. The other 'Encke window' is in late October and early November; this is when the northern and southern Taurid meteor showers occur.


These two periods of time are when the Earth passes through the path of all the fragments and debris that remain from the disintegration of the primary super-comet body; logically, these are the most likely times that we would experience an impact from any Encke-related object.


LAKE CHEKO, TUNGUSKA, SIBERIA

Note that today, 30 June, is the 111th anniversary of the Tunguska Siberia event, the largest explosion ever witnessed or recorded on Earth. Believed to be an airburst from an inbound comet or asteroid, entire forests were leveled and burned for thousands of square kilometers and seismic shock waves measured around the world. No object remained for examination, but a circular lake marks the spot today.

"One hundred and eleven years ago, [on 30 June 1908] hundreds of reindeer and a few dozen humans witnessed an —although they didn't know it at the time. An explosion left a scene in Siberia, Russia, with little evidence of its origin except flattening 500,000 acres of uninhabited forest, scorching the land, creating "glowing clouds" and producing  that were detected around the world. Newspapers reported this may have been a volcanic explosion or a mining accident or—a far-fetched idea—that this might have been an asteroid or comet hitting Earth."

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-tunguska-revisited-year-old-mystery-impact.html

Two years ago a team of Czech astronomers published the results of their research which led them to believe that a great number of large daughter-fragments of Encke exist but are not visible to us due to being obscured by clouds of dust and debris, making another Tunguska-level event much more probable than had previously been believed.

I had a very freaky experience in 2015 here on Aotea. I'd been swimming with a pod of dolphins every day for a week right here, and was deeply connected with them...something I cannot put into words but could...and can...feel quite powerfully. One afternoon I had just returned from the ocean and was sitting at my art table when WHAM! Out of the blue this extraordinarily clear image appeared in my mind's eye, unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I knew that this image had been telepathically transmitted to me by the dolphins (they are known for this kind of thing), but what really blew me away was not just that it was from them, but what it was an image of:  it was an impression of what a comet or asteroid might look like seconds before impact if it were on a trajectory directly toward the observer, that is, coming straight at you. Implicit in this transmission was not only that ancestors of the dolphins of today had witnessed something like this and had lived to share it (and now its stored within their collective memory) but even more significantly, that something like this was about to happen again in the near future. I can't give any dates or numbers but the message was clear as a bell and its urgency has stayed with me ever since it happened.



"SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FUSH!"


IMAGE TRANSMITTED TO ME BY DOLPHINS,
IMPRESSION OF SECONDS BEFORE IMPACT

[NOTE: I am working on a painting of this now!]

When did this transmission from the dolphins occur? On 25 October 2015, right in the middle of the Oct-Nov Encke window.






Right now here in New Zealand the Maori New Year called Matariki is being celebrated. Matariki is their name for the Pleiades, and it is around this time of year that they are seen to rise in the darkening evening sky. The November Encke window meteor stream of early November emanates from within the constellation Taurus, hence the name Taurids, and the Pleiades are the shoulder of Taurus the Bull. The June-July Encke window has Pleiades on the horizon, and the Oct-Nov window has them at the zenith. The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, figure heavily in the mythology of many indigenous cultures, often thought of as 'where our ancestors came from.' Very interesting food for thought, the connections between the Pleiades, Encke, the origins of water and life as we know her...and the fate of civilization?


UCY.TV'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEGocUztnYtS-I2kk97AWqA

LISTEN AND/OR DOWNLOAD ANYTIME ARCHIVE LINK FOR THIS SHOW

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

TASMANIA AS GONDWANALAND / LIESBET VERSTRAETEN HAPPY BIRTHDAY :)

LIESBET AT BOTTLE NECK BAY FLINDERS ISLAND TASMANIA

"Reading the country was once essential to Aboriginal people's survival. It has become something of a lost art, which is a great pity. Mostly natural processes are slow and subtle and remain unseen and ignored. The danger is that by failing to pay attention to the forces, large and small, which shape our landscapes, not only do the landscapes suffer but we are impoverished in spirit ourselves."

John Landy

PETER DOMBROVSKIS, LAKE OBERON

Welcome to On The Brink radio comin' atcha from the central highlands of Tasmania. This week's show is in honour of 'little Tassie' as not only the place where I've had some of my most powerful and amazing adventures and where some of the most interesting and coolest people I know live, but also as an extraordinarily unique land with some of the most beautiful and spectacular landscapes in all of Australia as well as endemic florae and faunae, some of whom have been alive since the 'break-up' of the ancient super-continent called Gondwana by geologist Edward Suess.

GONDWANA SUPER-CONTINENT (so we think!)

The first half of this show gives a run-down of my visits to Tasmania since 2001 and the truly legendary people I've met and places I've been honoured to be able to visit; the second half gives an overview of the unique plants, animals and landscape ancestors who comprise what is to me the real Tasmania.

Tasmania was the birthplace of Australia's first wilderness photography as well as Australia's environmental movement. Olegas Truchenas and Peter Dombrovskis shared the beauty and power of Tasmanian landscapes, catalyzed resistance to the damming of Lake Pedder and stopped a subsequent project to dam the Franklin River.

LAKE PEDDER, MID-1950'S BEFORE DAMMING
PETER DOMBROVSKIS, COX BIGHT, SOUTH COAST

PETER DOMBROVSKIS PHOTOS
http://aniwaniwa-lokahi-renavigation.blogspot.com/2014/10/wild-island-tasmania-gallery-peter.html


Tasmania is just as maritime of an environment as New Zealand, but she lacks the oceanic awareness that most Kiwi's take for granted. Tasmania in no way needs the tourism gimmickry of the whale-watching business or the 'swim with sting-rays' mentality that would make Sir Peter Blake roll in his davey jone's locker...but she could use a bit of enhanced acknowledgement on the part of the people who live here that, yes, Tasmania is surrounded by a lot of ocean in every direction, an ocean teeming with myriad and wonderful life-forms.


AUSTRALIA'S OCEAN CURRENTS


TASMANIA'S OCEAN CURRENTS

"NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH:  TASMANIA'S MARINE NATURAL VALUES"
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/marine/pages/609/attachments/original/1500603668/NowhereElseOnEarthReport.pdf?1500603668


 HUMPBACKS AND SOUTHERN RIGHTS
 BOTTLE-NOSED DOLPHINS
 RED HAND FISH
WEEDY SEA-DRAGON

Tasmania also has on occasion two of the most awesomely magical and beautiful gifts Mother Nature has to share with us, bio-luminescence and the aurora, in this case, australis, both of which I've witnessed but not in Tasmania.





LISTEN AND/OR DOWN-LOAD ANYTIME ARCHIVE LINK FOR THIS SHOW
https://soundcloud.com/user-272031059/on-the-brink-radio-275-tasmania-today-gondwana-is-alive


And I'd like to wish a beautiful happy birthday to Liesbet Verstraeten, with whom I was very lucky to share five amazing years. As far as I know, she is living somewhere in Tasmania, picking fruit when it's the season and hopefully painting rocks and playing her flute. Today when I sat down to send her a birthday email I looked out the window to see the first rainbow or 'aniwaniwa' I'd seen in months...a very symbolic synchronicity as Liesbet and I were always huge fans of rainbows. I can tell the ancestors and nature devas are smiling on us now as much as ever.



 FIRST ANIWANIWA I'VE SEEN IN MONTHS :)
 LIESBET WITH CUPPA and HUNDERTWASSER CARD,
BALARNIA, FLINDERS ISLAND, 2011

"We must strive for a peace treaty with nature, the only superior creative power on which man depends. This peace treaty with nature would have to contain at least the following points:

1) We must learn the language of nature in order to reach an understanding of her.

2) We must give back territories to nature which we have misappropriated and devastated. For example, according to the principle:  everything which is horizontal, under the open sky, belongs to nature, including, for example, roof, roads.

3) Tolerance of spontaneous vegetation.

4) The creation of man and the creation of nature must be reunited. The schism of these creations has had catastrophic consequences for nature and man.

5) Life in harmony with the laws of nature.

6) We are only the guests of nature and must behave accordingly. Man is the most dangerous pest ever to devastate the Earth. Man must put himself behind ecological barriers so the Earth can regenerate.

7) Human society must again become a waste-free society. For only he who honours his own waste and re-uses it in a waste-free society transforms death into Life and has the right to live on this Earth. Because he respects the cycle, and allows the rebirth of life to occur."

FRIEDRICH HUNDERTWASSER, "PEACE TREATY WITH NATURE"

 OUR 'CHICKEN ROCK', FLINDERS ISLAND
SHADOWS OF TOGETHERNESS :)
GIFT FOR LIESBET FROM ME, 2012
 "HUNAB HIKU", PAINTING FOR ROB ALLISTON, HOBART, 2007
"S'AHA DJED", MURAL FOR BRUCE ROBERTS, HOBART, 2003
ROB ALLISTON AND ME HITCHING TO CRADLE, 2015

Rob Alliston was (and is) a true spiritual brother, a genuine legendary Tasmanian and one of the loveliest people I have known here. I'd known him since 2001 until he passed away in November 2018, from complications of his Parkinson's syndrome.  He was an avid environmentalist and had a great respect for the indigenous people of Australia, and he was a great supporter of me and my work, especially concerning the whales and dolphins and my art, and was also a great supporter of Liesbet and I when we were together.

Here is a link to listen to an interview I did with him on my radio show:

And a blog post in his honour:

LIESBET'S GIFT TO ROB :)


LIESBET'S VERY FIRST PAINTING, BELGIUM, 2007
MANAPOURI NZ MURAL, JEFF AND LIESBET, 2011
SOME OF LIESBET'S ROCKS, 2015

See my main site for more of our work together

https://dolphinmatrix.com/Jeff

Tasmania in general and Flinders Island in particular have some of the most beautiful and unique landscapes in all of the Australia that I've come to know and love since 2000.

OLD MAN'S HEAD, FLINDERS ISLAND, 2011

Here are some selections of my Flinders Island photos. Note that Google has been threatening to take down their awesome Picasaweb platform, so these photos could disappear at any time. I am currently in the process of looking for a new photo-sharing platform to put my work on.

"NOSE ROCK", FLINDERS ISLAND







MOTHER EARTH TEMPLE, FLINDERS ISLAND 2011
(facing east from crown chakra medicine wheel)

In 2011 Liesbet and I lived at our friend's remote property on Flinders Island for over four months, during which time we conceived, embarked on and completed what is still the biggest and most comprehensive art project I've ever undertaken. We called it our 'Mother Earth Temple.' It contains, among other things, over 1000 rocks, 100+ of them painted; a metric ton or more of sand; symbols, designs and  motifs honouring several indigenous spiritual traditions and cosmologies; and over 1200 person-hours of exclusively manual labour.


This is the story of the freakiest thing not only that ever happened to me in Tasmania, and not only in Australia, but maybe in my whole life.

"THE GHOULEST AND THE COOLEST: A REAL HITCH-HIKING ADVENTURE" JEFF PHILLIPS
http://synthaissance.blogspot.com/2009/07/ghoulest-and-coolest-real-hitch-hiking.html

CUSHION PLANT WITH LOT'S WIFE,
PETER DOMBROVSKIS