https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/13/a-perfect-storm-of-fire-and-ice-may-have-led-to-...

Researchers have pinpointed the start of what’s known as the Sturtian snowball Earth event to about 717 million years ago — give or take a few 100,000 years. At around that time, a huge volcanic event devastated an area from present-day Alaska to Greenland. Coincidence?

Harvard professors Francis Macdonald and Robin Wordsworth thought not.

Geological and chemical studies of this region, known as the Franklin large igneous province, showed that volcanic rocks erupted through sulfur-rich sediments, which would have been pushed into the atmosphere during eruption as sulfur dioxide. When sulfur dioxide gets into the upper layers of the atmosphere, it’s very good at blocking solar radiation. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which shot about 10 million metric tons of sulfur into the air, reduced global temperatures about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a year.

Sulfur dioxide is most effective at blocking solar radiation if it gets past the tropopause, the boundary separating the troposphere and stratosphere. If it reaches this height, it’s less likely to be brought back down to earth in precipitation or mixed with other particles, extending its presence in the atmosphere from about a week to about a year. The height of the tropopause barrier all depends on the background climate of the planet — the cooler the planet, the lower the tropopause.

“In periods of Earth’s history when it was very warm, volcanic cooling would not have been very important because the Earth would have been shielded by this warm, high tropopause,” said Wordsworth. “In cooler conditions, Earth becomes uniquely vulnerable to having these kinds of volcanic perturbations to climate.”

***

Another important aspect is where the sulfur dioxide plumes reach the stratosphere. Due to continental drift, 717 million years ago, the Franklin large igneous province where these eruptions took place was situated near the equator, the entry point for most of the solar radiation that keeps the Earth warm.

So, an effective light-reflecting gas entered the atmosphere at just the right location and height to cause cooling. But another element was needed to form the perfect storm scenario. After all, the Pinatubo eruption had similar qualities but its cooling effect only lasted about a year.

The eruptions throwing sulfur into the air 717 million years ago weren’t one-off explosions of single volcanoes like Pinatubo. The volcanoes in question spanned almost 2,000 miles across Canada and Greenland. Instead of singularly explosive eruptions, these volcanoes can erupt more continuously like those in Hawaii and Iceland today. The researchers demonstrated that a decade or so of continual eruptions from this type of volcanoes could have poured enough aerosols into the atmosphere to rapidly destabilize the climate.

“Cooling from aerosols doesn’t have to freeze the whole planet; it just has to drive the ice to a critical latitude. Then the ice does the rest,” said Macdonald.

The more ice, the more sunlight is reflected and the cooler the planet becomes. Once the ice reaches latitudes around present-day California, the positive feedback loop takes over and the runaway snowball effect is pretty much unstoppable.

Comment: Back to terrible events on Earth which were necessary to create the livable Earth we have today. God uses evolutionary processes which today can be dangerous to humans. We are learning to predict earthquakes which are a necessary part of plate tectonics. Hurray for big brains!


> I am so thankful that you posted these experiences, even if I am a few years behind in reading them(I only joined this site a few months ago). I have a few experiences of my own that people don't understand, or just won't believe.-
> Thank you again, BBella, for sharing your experiences, and thank you to everyone else for allowing me to share mine.-My wife is just like you. I have described a number of experiences she has had, including dreams, and also events aa few minutes later shown on TV as fresh news. I am convinced these are real psychic episodes, and, as Sheldrake has shown in his experiments that some of us can communicate at a different reality level.(See, "A Glorious Accident", by Wim Keyzer, 1997, especially the discussion of crossword puzzels.)) I believe there is a human species consciousness, and this is how information is delivered in NDE's. Please don't feel funny about it; my wife does to some degree. I think of you as part of a normal sub-group of human beings, and I think you are lucky to have that ability.


> At some point in time the whole DNA/RNA story will be known during Evolution on Earth. -DNA studies continue and have turned up 'huge' DNA in marine viruses.-http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57776/

There is a fascinating article by Paul Davies in today's Guardian, concerning the search for alien life. It's too long to quote in full, and I can't find a link, so I will quote the most salient section:
> 
> "The problem is that even the simplest living thing is already so stupendously complex that if such an entity were to be thrown together by chance, it would be a fluke of such magnitude as to be unlikely to happen twice in the observable universe, vast though that may be.-
The recent article on DNA repair gives a glimpse into this "stupendous complexity":-
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100311123522.htm

[/i]David says that the healer released my father's energy, and the "strength" came from my father's brain.
 
> I can see what you mean. Most forms of medicine work, I suppose, in conjunction with the patient's power of self-healing. But there still has to be something that passes from the outside to the inside, in this case from the healer to my father, in order to stimulate that power. Sorry, but I appear to have inherited a streak of my father's stubbornness! - I'm just as stubborn. Your father's innate healing powers were stimulated by the 'healer'. But how? By a passage of quanta thru the skin? They can pass through solid walls. I still say, if you believe in this type of psychic magic from the healer's faith, it's not much of a jump to accept a deity. I realize bone fide medical attempts failed. What inappropriate method did they try? I've seen lots of awful medical practice. The surgery I described, I believe, was available then. Let's not used the failed medicine as a comparison. I agree with the following: the healer directly influenced your father to use HIS own powers.

You were kind enough to tell us the story of your own out-of-body experience, and although I don't want to pressurize you, I for one would be very interested to hear more. Perhaps there are also other people out there who might like to recount their experiences. - Thank you dhw for you patience...I have taken the time and chosen from the many experiences my family and I have had and put them in two parts. - This first post is my experiences and the second will be my family's experiences. I will try and recount them according to a time line to the best of my remembrance.
 
1. My earliest experience with anything considered unexplained or paranormal (outside of myself, explained in #4) happened one night in the early 70's when I was around 17. I awakened startled from a sound sleep with the feeling of a presence in the room. I turned to look beside my bed and I saw a very dark tall figure standing beside my bed seeming to be slightly bent down over me. The figure was illuminated by the moonlight coming thru the window behind it. I immediately turned on the light and there was no one there and nothing to explain the dark figure as my door and windows in the room were all locked.
 
2. In the mid 80's I was walking my younger brother ( about 18) out onto the deck of my house to say goodnight just after mid-night and, as we were talking, I looked up to admire the beautiful clear night sky, and almost directly above my head there was, what appeared to be, stars moving very slowly in a straight line from east to west. There had to be many hundreds if not thousands as they were as far as the eye could see from east to west ( I live in the deep woods in the foothills surrounded by pines and large trees on top of a hill, so couldn't see either horizons). The "stars" moved with no sound and were about the size of small, not tiny, stars. We watched for about 15 min or so until my bro decided to go ahead and leave. He said he thought they were probably something to do with the military. But, to this day, I still wonder why we didn't both wait longer to see if the line ended and, wonder too, why we weren't more curious about such a phenomenon? I don't even think we had ever told anyone till years later. I can't even imagine how the military could be that far up with that many flying vehicles that close together with no sound in absolute perfect formation as if someone had drawn dot to dots across the sky. 
 
3. When I became very ill in the late 90's early 00's, I would often wake up hearing and seeing (from the glow of the moonlight) someone open the door and come in my room or someone standing beside me, but there was never anyone there when I would turn the light on or call out to them. This seemed to happen several times a month at least. I was on no meds or sleeping pills, as nothing given me could take even the slightest amount of pain away and, I've rarely ever had any problems sleeping altho I've always been a light sleeper. But, one night, I awoke to a presence in the room and looked and saw a tall being standing at the foot of my bed. It was dressed in gold armor from head to toe which was made up of small square plates and some seemed to have writings or symbols on them, altho I'm not sure, could have been indention's. Altho there was no light in the room at all, I could see it as plainly as if the room was lit. It also had a helmet/headdress and a staff and just stood there not moving or say anything, altho, the gold did seem to shimmer as if it were reflecting moving light. The room was pitch dark as no moon was out that night. When I turned on the light it wasn't there. I immediately wrote down what I had seen so I could remember it vividly the next day. When I finally turned off the light, I again noticed it was pitch black in the room. None of these things have happened since and it wasn't too long after this that I had the vision that gave me relief of my pain.
 
More on next post.

It's even possible that certain people have a form of ESP that enables them to make contact with the "energy constellations" which you believe may survive the death of the physical body. In our thread on The Arts, I posed the question of where our ideas come from. It's all the same mystery: what is the origin and nature of these astonishing powers? But like everyone else who is interested enough to log on to this website, I would like to know more! That's why other people's experiences and explanations are of immense interest and value to me, and of course it's the whole purpose of the forum. - I've had one startling ESP event: I was driving home from a day at the clinic, idly listening to a talk radio program with rambling comments about Houston heat and sunburn. As I stopped at a redlight ( and I know exactly where to this day 20+ years later), the lady on the phone said she a a great sunburn treatment. The host had to take a commercial break, and she was put on hold. Into my head popped: soak a T-shirt on stong tea and put it on the person with the bad sunburn. Remember that what I was hearing has a 10-20 second delay to screen out obvious things that should not go over the air. When she resumed, that is exactly what she had said. I had not thought of or heard of that method before, but tea is a tanning agent and a reasonable suggestion. - How did I get the message? All electric wires broadcast electromagnetic waves. That is how radio and TV send out signals. Did my brain wires pick up her message as they were sent over phone wries to the radio station? That is my theory. - One day my wife said she had just 'seen' (she meant in her brain) that a building 'climber' in Houston had just jumped off a tall building, purposely jumping backwards from a corner high up on the outside of the building. I rushed to the TV and described to her what was being reported, as I saw the man leap away, and that is exactly how she 'saw' it. Did she pick up a TV transmission? Or did she 'see it'? When I lose something, I ask her what it is on. She will usually be able to tell me color or pattern. I was looking for a halter in the barn I couldn't find. She told me it was on brown plaid. I went to the tack room, lifted up a saddle blanket from a stack, where the edge of a brown plain saddle blanket could be seen underneath. There was the hidden halter. I have no idea how that works. Does anyone?

I have absolutely no doubt that humans possess at least the potential for extraordinary powers ... and my father's cure was evidence of this ... but I don't know where they come from. just as your wife may have extrasensory powers, I am suggesting (especially because of my father's scepticism) that it was the healer himself who had a special, active gift. - Humans have extraordinary powers. Our intellect and consciousness appeared recenty in evolution, way beyond what we need to survive against nature and natural selection. The artifacts from the Neanderthals do not indicate minds of our type. There was no 'call' for intellect of this magnitude from natural selection; the odds against chance are extraordinarily large. We do not pass quanta by the laying on of hands. We pass them through mentation and suggestion, by stirring up quanta in the other person's brain. The strength is in THAT brain.
 
> I like your example of the desperate man who finds the strength to lift a car off an injured pedestrian. That is the sort of potential (over a wide range of fields) that I think is in all of us, but it's more highly developed in some than in others. I don't need any kind of religious faith to believe that the healer was able to release some kind of energy to cure my father. - Yes, the healer released energy, your father's energy. It is the brain that releases adrenalin to lift the car, or endorphins to dull shoulder pain.

No-one could seriously doubt that the mind has a huge influence on the body (and vice versa), or that placebos often work for that very reason. However, my father's frozen shoulder, which nowadays you say would be treated under anaesthetic, with the shoulder being forcibly stretched and the scar tissue being broken up, was first relieved and then cured, according to my father, by a simple placing-on of hands. In any case, the removal of warts by hypnosis is scarcely comparable. I must again stress that my father ... who was a very stubborn man ... was totally sceptical, which is not the sort of mindset conducive to autosuggestion. There can be no doubt that the healer himself, whom I met a couple of times, believed that his power came from God, and the point that remains most vividly in my memory is his response to my father's scepticism: namely, that it was he the healer who had to have faith, and not the patient. 
 
I left your whole quote so I could dissect it from my viewpoint. The mind does have a huge influence, which is my point. A person lifts a car off an injured pedestrian high enough to pull him out. Yes, adrenalin underlies, but the mind drives it. My point about the warts is the amazing power of suggestion. I'm like your father, and doubt I can be hypnotized, but I have identified some placebo effects in myself. If it is the healer who must have the faith in God and you saw your father's miraculous result, why don't you believe in God? You have seen His power. I believe in a greater power, but do not believe that the greater power stepped in to help your father recover. Some form of suggestion helped your father to help himself. - > I'm fascinated by your equation of the "immaterial world" with the quantum layer. In OBEs and NDEs, the dead person not only retains his identity, but is also able to see and hear what is going on in the room and even elsewhere, as well as encounter other dead people. I can't see much difference between calling this perceiving identity "virtual energy" or an "energy constellation" and calling it the "soul" or the "spirit". If you believe that this constellation does survive death, then can I presume that you also believe in ghosts and in spiritualism? I'm sorry if I seem to be pushing you on this, but for me it's all part of the same complex, and I'd like to know where you draw the line (and why). - I don't know about believing ghosts, spiritualism, or seances, but I awoke one night and saw the 'spectral' outline of my wife dancing slowly with another woman I did not recognize shining red from the light thrown by our clock. I sat up in bed, made sure I was not sleeping, and in a short while they faded away. My wife was lying next to me sleeping quietly. As factual and scientific as I try to be, I know I saw this. My wife has documented ESP and precognition. Lets just say I am skeptical in this area. But quanta are what made the outline of my wife. Photons are quanta we see. Other quanta may become material in our reality and then disappear again. That is the other layer I am talking about. So if there are ghosts, they pop in and out of the other layer.

However, I have had experiences which prevent me from completely sharing your scepticism in one area. As a doctor you are convinced that healing powers are a "misconception", so I will tell you of an experience that is not in the Brief Guide. My father suffered from 'frozen shoulder', and the doctors could not help him. Totally against his will, and in desperation,he allowed himself to be persuaded by my mother to see a faith healer who had been recommended> - Let me explain your father's experience first. The proper medical treatment is to anesthetize the patient and forcibly stretch the shoulder, breaking up scar tissue around the muscles of the shoulder joint. The 'healer' used psychology or suggestion or mild hypnosis to get your father to gradually stretch his shoulder against pain. The healing powers were within your father. Whatever was done by the healer reduced his pain so that he could stretch. - About hypnosis: Warts are caused by a virus. I know the doctor who proved this. What is amazing is despite the fact that direct medical treatment is difficult, hypnosis works, and in fact the hypnotist can ask the patient to cure the warts on his left side but not the right side and it happens! Or on the right side and not the left. The healing powers are within the patient. That is why placebos work. I once stopped giving a hospitalized patient her pain shots because it was obvious she was getting hooked. We substituted saline, which worked. Three days later I confronted her with what I did. She fired me as her MD. I didn't want her as a patient anyway, but I'd made my point. - > Finally, I'm intrigued by what you say about OBEs and NDEs, together with your statement that "the immaterial world is "material"'. If perception, identity and thought can survive independently of the brain (which is clinically dead), what is their material basis? - The "immaterial world" is the quantum layer, which underlies our reality, and it is real but not material in our ability to sense things. It is virtual energy. I'm sorry that quantum theory is so counterintuitive, like Lewis Carroll in Thru the Looking Glass; it is there but not there. This is what George was suggesting as the source of our universe: a vacuum quantum fluctuation, resulting in our universe popping into existence from the virtual vacuum of our spacetime. This is the source of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Quantum mechanics makes real and accurate results with its formulas, as averages of what all the particles are doing, but has no idea where each individual particle is or whether it is a particle or wave until measured. It really is both particle and wave at the same time, all the time. We can only measure one aspect or the other. - The reason for the NDE /OOB study you have described is because of the development of hospice care for the dying. Doctors are being exposed to hearing from patients who come back from NDE's and describe friends or acquaintances that have just died and the patient could not have known this in their sedated dying condition. And those people have just died! This corroborates the episode. I've heard a doctor in Houston describe one such story he was part of. With whom did the patient communicate during the NDE? - I believe consciousness is at the quantum level, and possibly stays as an energy constellation after death. After all TV and radio programs are electromagnetic energy (Quanta) and your set can interpret what it receives from a mass of organized quanta.