Thanks Gunter!

Interesting read but science doesn't have the technology to accurately date most of that stuff to possibly determine if there was a cycle of that length. NO WAY!

It's sort of funny that science can't tell us if a virus came out of a lab or not just over a year ago or whether cloth masks work to stop a virus and tells us that a greening planet is being killed by the thing greening it up......... but wants people to believe that it can time events every 27.5 years for the last 260 million years.

Not every 27 million or 28 million years but 27.5 million.........which suggests more precision.

And all the science magazines pick up on it because its makes for a great story.

I'm not saying there are no longer term cycles but considering the events appear to be unrelated, if they actually could do what they claim........date long ago events with precision and it did show several at a regular interval, they would more likely than not be caused by random variation.

If you flip a coin and it lands on heads 3 times in a row......is that a pattern?

Random variation based on INDEPENDENT odds for each coin toss...... which is totally expected.

The chance of heads is still 1 out of 2 but nobody would ever expect every head to be followed by a tail.

You get streaks of 2,3, 4 and many more from random variation. This happens in most realms but the coin toss is easiest to understand.

In all likelihood here, there are some random variation occurrences that by sheer coincidence lined up to be around the same time frame apart(based on GUESSING the time that they happened), along with scientists exercising speculative creatively to turn it into something that they can't possibly know.

I would be ok with it if that's how it was presented..........that its unlikely but possible.

Hi metmike,

I have been around cycle analysts for many years. For a long time, I had a membership in the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.

Cyclic events are rarely ultra-precise. Very often the numbers fluctuate. For example, in the linked article they talked about a variation of 26-30. When cycle analysts have a number of data points that seem to be cyclical, they then calculate an average and give that cycle a name, using this average.

This name 27.5 is then not meant to say that they have that much precision in their measurements…. No, it’s only a name they give that cycle so that they can talk among each other with ease, and everybody knows what they are talking about. And the next event can be a bit earlier, or a bit later

I don’t know what science they are using to determine geological plate shifts or “extinction events”…. neither do I know how climate scientists determine the temperatures during the Holocene or Medieval Warming periods.

However, I assume that these scientists have methods they believe in, to come up with data of ancient times. (extinction events should be relatively easy to discover)

The extinction of the dinosaurs is often blamed on an asteroid impact. However, if other extinction events can be discovered (and apparently they did), and these events come in cyclic patterns, then we have to look for other causes.

What are the causes of cyclical events?

We all know, the travel of the earth around the sun causes most of our ‘annual” cycles.

The travel of the moon around earth causes daily tides, and monthly events.

Most people don’t know that the moon travels around the earth on a different plane than the earth around the sun. Not only that, but this path wobbles, and, in addition, has a counter-clockwise rotation. This rotation comes back to the point it started every 18 years.

Ed Dewey’s book lists a number of events in nature, as well as in man’s social activities that also show a 18-year cycle.  Strange coincidence, or not?

Sun spots have an 11-year cycle. We don’t know why.

Why a 27 mill year cycle? We don’t know.

Our sun travels around the center of the galaxy, probably not in a circular trajectory, but in an elliptical trajectory, taking 230 mill years. Who knows what forces are  out there, in our universe.

Either way, talking about a 27 mill year event is just for scientific fun… it doesn’t mean much in our lives.

But then, a Mayfly (with its 24-hour lifespan) would not have a comprehension of a 4-week lunar cycle either..