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

trees would function in terms of crossmatching. Unfortunately, an attempted experiment, involving the removal or addition of one or more rings, at random places, had to be abandoned, because of inordinate time-consumption, after 20 contemporary bristlecone pine series had thus been altered at a rate 20-50 rings apart. While the crude perturbations did not, by themselves, completely erase the earlier (correct) crossmatchings, or enable the resulting crossmatches to pass all the gateway statistics, they did add to the absolute numbers of plausibly-high-t candidate-“bridge” series. 2. Enhancing the Sophistication of Experimental Tree-Ring Disturbances The ring-width alterations, whose positions are shown in Table 1, have been rather primitive. My faux master chronology was based on monotonic 75% ring-width reductions and, in my discontinued experiment, on random perturbations that had been limited to the insertions and deletions of 1-3 consecutive rings. The experiments should be extended to more modest prescribed disturbances that occur over several consecutive rings. For instance, with respect to the original widths, the first ring could be reduced 75%, the second 50%, the third 25%, and the fourth increased 50% (a simulated “rebound” effect). Trees, by virtue of differential survivorship, could themselves skew the record of disturbances, and this should be tested experimentally. For instance, what if trees cannot survive two disturbances within, say, two years of each other? What if a tree usually dies whenever a disturbance takes place during an already- bad growth year (impending narrow ring)? This would mean that the longest surviving subfossil tree-ring series—the ones most desirable for crossmatching attempts—would be the very ones most likely to have initially-random disturbances recorded at decidedly nonrandom intervals. Instead of just random-linear, ring-disturbances should also be of other distributions (e. g, log-normal). So should Markovian and non-Markovian ones. The occurrence of disturbances themselves, in nonrandom patterns, should especially be evaluated experimentally. For example, what happens if the introduction of a disturbance increases (or decreases) the likelihood of another disturbance several prescribed years “downstream” in the tree-ring sequence? The potential “stickiness” of disturbances should, most of all, be factored. What happens, for instance, if a disturbance that lands on the 7 th value in a decade induces the next disturbance to occur within rings 6-8 (in the next decade) at an 80% probability, and for the next disturbance to occur, in the successive decade, at a 60% probability, within rings 6-8? How long could such a “chain” of disturbances proceed before it would introduce telltale cyclicity into the data? What, furthermore, happens when one, more than one, or all ten places, per decade, are “sticky”, moreover in either the same or different way from the other “sticky” sites? All of these sophisticated large-scale experiments would probably lead to a proliferation of “bridge” series that are endowed with longer overlap, higher-t with and without the longer overlap, greater sample depths, and (especially) a greater tendency to “self-add” (at the standard P2Aut t≥70 and OVL≥70 years.) How far could this go? As an extreme, could it dispense with clusters (“cores”) entirely, so that the “bridge” series become an end in themselves—a faux long chronology consisting of “bridge” series alone? 3. Evaluating Biological Agents of Convincing Climate- Independent Tree-Ring Crossmatches The agencies causing sets of disturbances in ring widths (Figs. 1 and 2) need not be entirely physical, or even physical at all. Consider cockchafer* infestations. They have been found to introduce previously-unsuspected false crossmatches, in both ancient and modern oak trees, until their 3-5 year cyclicity, and effects on wood anatomy, gave them away (Kolar et al. 2013, and works cited therein). But if there are, or were, species of insects that could systematically alter tree ring widths without collateral traces, and moreover do so with ever-changing periodicities as they move from tree to tree over a time span of many centuries, they could have realized the Migrating-Disturbance Hypothesis (Figure 1). On the other hand, if there were differing subspecies of the same insect, each of which infects trees at predictable (but not cyclic) intervals, and each of which operated only on its own geographic territory, this would have generated geographically-demarcated sets of reciprocally-crossmatching perturbed trees, satisfying the Disturbance-Clustering Hypothesis (Figure 2). Finally, in the most conservative situation, if insect infected-trees were numerous, but were not imprinted by any kind of consistent disturbance, this alone would be useful. It would increase the numbers and diversity of candidate tree ring series for the “bridging” of the clusters that arise by other means (Figure 2). Now consider ants. The proximity of ant nests to trees can reduce their tree ring widths (Frouz et al. 2008). If edaphic* factors, governed by subsurface chemistry, could cause “bands” of ant nests to migrate over centuries, or to self-consistently “mark” tree growth within distinctive geographic territories, this would respectively fulfill both hypotheses (Figure 1 and 2). Additionally or alternatively, mildly ant-distorted tree ring series could supply candidate series for “bridging” (Figure 2). 4. Automated Creation of “Bridges”, Overhangs, and “Bridged” Submaster Chronologies The production of possible “bridges” (ensembles in Table 2) is very time-consuming. It is also for this reason that the contents of Table 2 are largely, but not entirely, limited to simple combinations (1F2, 1F3…1Fn). In order to overcome this labor-intensiveness, a computer program should be developed that could automatically generate and “look at” vast numbers of ensembles, of varying sophistication, and identify those that have good crossmatching characteristics within the matrix (including little or no bifurcation), ones that produce a large master chronology effect without any hint of a “warning low outlier effect”, etc. The next step would involve the automated trial additions, of all the many different satisfactory ensembles, as overhangs*, at every physically-possible point in FIN. The latter could be realized by having the computer chop-up the FIN master chronology into several thousand successively-lagged 100-year segments (5633 BC—5534 BC, 5632 BC—5533 BC, 5631 BC—5532 BC,… 1994—2003, 1995—2004), and then trial-attach each ensemble at both ends of each 100-year segment. The computer would then Woodmorappe ◀ Tree-ring chronology shortening via disturbances ▶ 2018 ICC 669