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

inspiration for my experiments and hypotheses in this and earlier works (Woodmorappe 2003a, 2003b, 2009). To test my finding, I attempted to evaluate the crossmatching characteristics of a handful of privately-acquired tree ring measurements from obviously-disturbed trees. It was encouraging to see some of them adequately crossmatch with each other in an obviously climatically-nonconformist manner. Unfortunately, however, ring sequences from disturbed trees are not archived for general usage, and hence my pilot study could not be expanded to any meaningful decree. I also learned, from personal communications with dendrogeomorphologists, that no studies had ever been conducted on non-climatic tree-ring crossmatches caused by subtle disturbances (or even by obvious disturbances). This is not surprising, as research in general tends to be paradigm- driven, and nothing in uniformitarianism prompts curiosity in such crossmatches. Owing to this disappointing lack of basic research on the relevant phenomenon, my dendrochronology works are necessarily theoretical. However, a lack of direct evidence for the mechanism behind a suspected process should not tempt one to discount the process itself. Gregor Mendel is instructive. He discovered the laws of genetics even though the specific modus operandi had to await the emergence of cytological and molecular genetics nearly a century later. An important clarification is in order. The kind of geomorphic disturbances envisioned in this, and my earlier papers, should not be confused with the usually-severe ones normally utilized in dendrogeomorphic studies. The latter features tree deaths, multiple-year suppressions followed by many-year recoveries in the obviously-injured trees, wood-vessel anomalies, tilted tree- trunks and ensuing growth-ring asymmetries, the formation of reaction wood, etc. None of these severe “insults” usually apply here. In contrast, and according to the classification scheme of dendrogeomorphologists Stoffel and Corona (2014, p. 10), we are dealing with what they call “weak GD (growth disturbances).” These are defined as disturbances that are limited to decreases in ring width <60%, growth-release increases in ring-width <50%, and growth suppressions and releases limited to only a few years each. Such mild disturbances are “under the radar”: That is, they usually are subsumed under the guise of the normal climate- governed tree-ring formation, and hence normally go unnoticed in conventional dendrochronology. Also for this reason, they are of no interest to dendrogeomorphologists. Yet they are at the heart of the two hypotheses discussed here. The foregoing statements do not mean that the postulated disturbances left no independent evident of their occurrence. Far from it. For instance, the oaks comprising the European long chronologies regularly display a striking pattern of normal growth interspersed with prolonged growth depression (reviewed by Scharnweber et al. 2015). The root death that commonly initiates the bark-stripping modes of growth in bristlecone pine is often associated with soil disturbances (Boyce and Lubbers 2011). At other times, the “collateral damage” from the postulated disturbances, though of course not conventionally recognized as such, is even more extreme. Prehistoric tree samples in chronology- building routinely have a rejection rate of 10-25% and even 40- 45% (Brown and Baillie 2015; Edvardssson et al. 2012; Eronen et al. 2002; Krapiec and Szychowska-Krapiec 2016; Woodmorappe 2003b). Even if visually normal, they had evidently been so traumatized that they are not cross-datable at all. Significantly, disturbances that perturb tree ring growth are quite variegated. For example, Malik et al. (2016) showed that slow- moving time-transgressive landslides can proceed as little as 1 cm a year, and cause surface displacements so inconspicuous that they show no geomorphic evidence of their existence, and show up only in the tree rings. The disturbances themselves can be shallow or deep-rooted, mediated or not mediated by external factors (rainfall, pore-water pressure, height of the water table, etc.), and take place in regoliths of widely divergent compositions. For these reasons alone, the postulated disturbances, in my two hypotheses, are broadly applicable. 3. Demystifying the Migrating-Disturbance Hypothesis Woodmorappe ◀ Tree-ring chronology shortening via disturbances ▶ 2018 ICC 661 Figure 7. “Weak Links” in the 5633BC—1000BC Interval of the combined TRN and FIN (790 Series Total; Each At Least 100 Years Long). Top: Lacunae in the chronology that appear upon the successive removal of the worst “Few6Matchers”—that is, series having only (0, 1, 2, … and then 8) crossmatches, with other series, at P2YrsL t>6.0. Bottom: Lacunae in the chronology that appear upon the iterative removal of series with relatively low crossmatches with the master chronology; that is, at P2YrsL t<=10.0 (white star), <=11.0 (striped star), <=12.0 (half-black star), and <=13.0 (black star).