"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 26 May 2004 05:27:02 -0500, "Gordon Couger"
wrote:
"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
.. .
I recall reading an article by someone who had studied a lamination
series in sediment rock (I think the site was down somewhere in the
Flinders Range, but perhaps it is a mix-up in memory with a rather
strange regular lamination I've seen there myself, north of Wilpuna)

Anyhow, in that article the author had meticulously mapped and
measured the laminations in the rock bed laid down over a period of
many hundreds of years, and he indeed linked the patterns in them to
the solar cycle you mention. Of course lamination in _sediment_ rock
could only be linked to the solar cycle by the cycle itself being
linked to rainfall. Another startling thing I remember about his
observations was, that if true, that would mean that our fat old Sun
had very much the same activity cycle when that sediment ws layed
down, many hundreds of thousands of years ago, as it has to this day.
Torsten,

Where was this? I would be very intersted in seeing the work.

Gordon, this was an article I read in Scientific American almost
40 years ago, and I no longer remember the name of the site.
I think the name had 'creek' in it (talk about a minimal clue :-)
and I am pretty sure it was somewhere in the semiarid land north
of Adelaide, in Flinders Range or further out, beyond the black
stump. I got the impression that the site was kinda famous for its
exposure of a very long sediment series with peculiarly regular and
eyecatching laminations in the rock. Again, from memory, the author
argued that the long term stable arid/semiarid climate at the site
was crucial in making it at all possible to discern this alleged
solar cycle influence on the sedimentation -- that is, in a less arid
environment chaotic rainfall would have drowned out the signal.


That is enough to find the article. At worst I will have to look through the
indexes published every 5 or 10 years to find the article if I can find the
index on line. I was a very regular reader of SA 40 years ago so I may
remember it if I start looking though the index.

I can do it while I am waiting on my wife when I pick her up at work here
collection goes back to the 30's. The main library has it back to the teens
when the university opened. I expect it will be one of the journal cut by
vet med the next time around. It don't bear on their subject and it is a
duplicate. And money is getting very thin. The book on research was half the
size as last year and it was inflated a good deal. Republicans are not good
for research. But democrats have not been much better. We have been cutting
public funding of research in agriculture like there was no more to do. Just
when we were getting the tools to do a lot in many way they decide that it
can be better spent on social programs and their own salaries. Agriculture
doesn't buy many votes. Even our state has baled out and agriculture and oil
are the big money in Oklahoma and the are pulling the plug on both.

Gordon