The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture

''The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes tells a fascinating, remarkable, and scientifically convincing story that will change how we look at our world. The important conclusion that catastrophes like this could happen again at any time should inspire a united global effort to confront this serious danger to Earth.'' --Professor Anders Nilsson, Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, Stanford University, and the Department of Physics, Stockholm University, Sweden ''Reads like a mystery novel while presenting hard evidence for a cosmic catastrophe 13,000 years ago that rendered mammoths and many other large North American animals extinct. This is serious research presented in an easy-to-read style.'' --Bob Kobres, Carolina Bay Archivist, University of Georgia Libraries There are a number of puzzling mysteries in the history of the earth that have yet to be satisfactorily explained by mainstream science: the extinction of the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, the vanishing of ancient Indian tribes, the formation of the mysterious Carolina Bays, the wild temperature swings at the end of the Ice Age, and the cause of huge underwater landslides that sent massive tsunamis racing across the oceans millennia ago. Eyewitness accounts of these events are chronicled in rich oral traditions handed down through generations of native peoples. The authors' recent scientific discoveries link all these events to a single cause. In The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith present new scientific evidence about a series of prehistoric cosmic events at the end of the Ice Age. Their findings validate the ubiquitous legends and myths of floods, fires, and weather extremes passed down by our ancestors and show how these legendary events relate to each other. Their findings also support the idea that we are entering a thousand-year cycle of increasing danger and possibly a new cycle of extinctions. RICHARD FIRESTONE holds a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry and has been part of the Isotopes Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1979. ALLEN WEST, Ph.D., was the owner and CEO of an international scientific consulting company. SIMON WARWICK-SMITH was a field exploration geologist and mining geologist in Australia and now heads Warwick Associates, a book consulting and publicity firm. Richard Firestone and Simon Warwick-Smith live in California and Allen West lives in Arizona.