Thread by @MarkBoslough

Whenever I look at Bunch et al #Sodom #airburst paper I find more problems. I already documented the authors’ profound misunderstanding of airbursts (see link). Now I see that they get much of their information about #Tunguska from creationist literature.

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1442310167022895105?s=20

In their subsection entitled “Comparison to Tunguska cosmic airburst” they make several false assertions. In re-reading it today, another claim jumped out at me: “The airburst generated a pressure wave that toppled or snapped >80 million trees, some up to 1-m in diameter..”

I wasn’t aware that there were any trees a meter in diameter that had been toppled. I didn’t see any meter-wide trees when I visited explored the Siberian taiga in the blast zone 13 years ago. None of the surviving trees we cored were that big.

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status/1441465130852573191

I also hadn’t seen trees this large described in the published expedition results. For example, K P Florenskiy described an experiment measure how felling moment depends on tree diameter. 95 trees were studied. The largest were only 30 cm in diameter. tunguska.tsc.ru/ru/science/bib…

A one-meter tree is quite a bit bigger than a 30 cm tree. To find out if there were really trees that big that were blown down by the airburst in 1908, all I should have to do is look at the source the cited, right? It’s reference number 178.

I’ve studied Tunguska & published papers about it for nearly a quarter century. I’ve never heard of anyone named Brazo or Austin doing Tunguska research. I also never heard of a journal called Origins. And 1982 is a little dated. But I found the paper.
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…

From the author notes: “Mark W. Brazo is a research associate in Geology at the Institute for Creation Research. “Dr. Steven A. Austin .. is well known as a Professor of Geology at the Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, California.”

The paper is in a journal called “Origins,” a publication of the Geosciences Research Institute, described by Wikipedia as “a creationist institute of the Seventh-day Adventist Church founded in 1958..”

“..In keeping with the teachings of the church, the institute is young Earth creationist, with beliefs based on a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative. It uses pseudoscientific arguments to reject the scientific theory of evolution..”

So Bunch et al got their information about Tunguska from a young-earth creationism journal that is neither peer reviewed nor scientific. To make matters worse, most of the assertions made by creationist authors Brazo & Austin have no cited source, or are cited incorrectly.

Brazo and Austin’s figures are not properly attributed. For their Fig. 1 they cite “Sullivan, W. 1979. Black holes, the edge of space, the end of time. Doubleday.” (not peer reviewed). But it was originally by Voznesenskij (1925) & reproduced by Krinov (1949 & 1965).

Brazo and Austin, for their Fig. 1, also cite “Kridec, E.L. 1966. Giant meteorites. Pergamon Press, Oxford.” (not peer reviewed). But an earlier version shows up in Florenskiy (1963).

Bunch et al made claims about “trees, some up to 1-m in diameter,” citing young-earth creationists Brazon & Austin, who asserted “trees up to three feet in diameter had snapped like toothpicks” w/o any evidence or citation whatsoever. Is this how peer review works in @SciReports?