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Dr Mike Baillie is a Professor Emiritus of Palaeoecology in the School of Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen's University of Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Baillie is a leading expert in dendrochronology, or dating by means of tree-rings. In the 1980s, he was instrumental in building a year-by-year chronology of tree-ring growth reaching 7,400 years into the past.
Upon examining the tree-ring record, he noticed indications of severe environmental downturns around 2354 BC, 1628 BC, 1159 BC, 208 BC, and AD 540. The evidence suggests that these environmental downturns were wide-ranging catastrophic events; the AD 540 event in particular is attested in tree-ring chronologies from Siberia through Europe and North and South America.
Since then, he has devoted much of his attention to uncovering the causes of these global environmental downturns. He believes that impacts from cometary debris may account for most of the downturns, especially the AD 540 event. This hypothesis is supported in work by British cometary astrophysicists, who find that earth was at increased risk of bombardment by cometary debris in the AD 400-600 timeframe.
To provide further support to his cometary debris theory, Dr Baillie has searched the written record and traditions embodied in myths. There he has found evidence that the dates of the environmental downturns listed above are often associated with collapses of civilizations or turning points in history. The AD 540 event, for example, may have been associated with a catastrophe that ushered in the Dark Ages of Europe.
His book, Exodus to Arthur (Batsford, 1999), relates the findings of his tree-ring studies to a series of global environmental traumas over the past 2500 years that may mark events such as the biblical Exodus, the disasters which befell Egypt, collapses of Chinese dynasties, and the onset of the European dark ages. His latest book, The Celtic Gods: Comets in Irish Mythology (2005), co-authored with Patrick McCafferty, focuses on the AD 540 event as recorded in the historical records and myths of Ireland.
External links
- Transcript from NOVA PBS based documentary, Catastrophe! Part 1