The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

chronology-compressing welter of multiple annual rings, if it could occur, would require their deployment in specific patterns that cause repeated “collapsing antenna” series-sliding crossmatches of tree ring sequences with each other. This, too, is uncharted territory. Multiple annual rings, moreover those occurring on a sustained , extensive scale, have no chance of realization unless the genetics of bristlecone pines, and that of all the other long-chronology- forming trees, was very different after the Flood from what it is now. Interestingly, the oldest bristlecone pines tend to show larger rings than all but the most recent ones (Salzer et al. 2009), and the latter is interpreted in terms of (what else?) climate change. Could it, instead, mean that older bristlecone pines were governed by a different set of genetic “rules” from their more recent counterparts? Unfortunately, it appears that virtually nothing is known about the genetics that govern multiple-annual-ring-formation, much less about how any such genetics could potentially change over time scales limited to a few thousand years. Until this at least begins to happen, it behooves us to work with more productive hypotheses that do not depend upon multiple annual rings, and that is what I have been doing. 2. Disturbance-Caused Narrowings and Widenings of Individual Tree Rings Many different environmental influences (for example, waterlogging or chemical poison: Baillie 1995) can cause the ring growing a particular year to be either narrower or wider than it would have been if determined primarily by the growing season’s climatic signal. This, by itself, is unremarkable. Such alterations are normally too episodic in time and too discordant, from tree to tree, to overprint the climatic signal that governs the crossmatching of trees, much less to create convincing alternative crossmatches. My research focuses on what happens if they did. But how difficult would it be for a physical process to “overrule” the annual climatic signal? Not difficult at all, as I once found out. (One can be heartened by the fact that some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come about by accident.) When I had begun my studies of dendrochronology decades ago, I had incorrectly saved a tree-ring-width file as Word (.doc) instead of .txt. Cofecha “forgave” my mistake, read the file, and performed the crossmatches—but only after mutilating the data. The results were astonishing. The highest crossmatch was an obviously-false one—but at an extraordinarily-high t>13.0. It turned out that Cofecha had arbitrarily changed every tenth ring to a zero-value before performing the crossmatching operations. The cyclicity in the data was apparent: Each next-best crossmatching point was offset ten years from the previous one, and, instead of one clearly- demarcated high crossmatching value [as illustrated in Figure 4], there was an obviously-cyclic descending “staircase” of high t-values (13, 9, etc.). All this, of course, was dendrochronologically nonsensical, and so it disqualified this specific mechanism from being considered further. Yet this salient fact remained: Impressively-high but totally-false crossmatches could be generated from relatively infrequent changes in tree ring series that ordinarily would never plausibly, much less strongly, crossmatch with each other. This inadvertent finding established a “probable cause” for the tree-ring disturbance alternative, and became the Woodmorappe ◀ Tree-ring chronology shortening via disturbances ▶ 2018 ICC 660 Figure 6. My Reconstruction of the Entire Finnish Long Chronology in Terms of Submaster Chronologies That Are Created by P2Aut* Entirely at t≥7.0. A few subchronologies (#3-#4 and #6-#7) already crossmatch adequately with each other, and so are ready to be merged. But some have OVL* too short for crossmatches (#1-#2 and #9-#10). The remainder (#2-#3, #4-#5, #5-#6, #7-#8, and #8-#9) have correctly-located crossmatches that flunk one or more gateway statistics*. Thus, seven of the nine junctures are in need of additional (manually-added) series before their crossmatches become adequate so that all ten subchronologies can be merged into a single near-8,000 year chronology. [The “z” is not a typo: It serves an alphanumeric- sorting purpose.]