Smut Clyde, for reasons we shall not discuss here out of politeness, is strongly attracted on old white male cranks with enormous egos and very silly theories drifting off into paranoia because nobody serious takes them seriously.

That is why Smut would like to take you now on a journey to the Earth’s core, which is somehow also about chemtrails in the sky.

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Set the Controls for the Heart of the Earth

by Smut Clyde

Isn’t it always the same? You wait years and years for a serious, carefully-thought-out plan to explore the innermost heart of the Earth and stabilise the convection-current dynamo that generates geomagnetism and deflects charged-particle radiation; then three two such plans come along all at once in 1993–1995.

But not everyone was satisfied by the solutions that Professors Preuss and Rosa offered for the challenge of keeping space open within (respectively) a piloted vehicle and an Alkahest-drilled tunnel, against the gratuitous pressures one must expect with umpteen thousand kilometers of rock overhead. In particular, David J. Stevenson worked through the trivial details and determined that the probe should be solid; constructed from refractory alloys; and about the size of a grapefruit. That way, if one dumped a whopping great 10⁴ m³ depth-charge of molten iron into a hole in the ground so that it sluiced rapidly Core-wards along a self-propagating fissure cracked open by its own weight, it would wash the probe along in the slipstream. The energy required for the initial hole in the ground (as Stevenson calculated) “is equivalent to … a nuclear device with a capability that is within the range of those currently stockpiled“. Transmitting the observations from the on-board instruments back up to Ground Control will be all fugitive telemetry but hey, we’re still getting signals from Voyager.

But Stevenson’s 2003 scheme arrived too late to divert the makers of a rare 2003 Hollywood CGI-stinkfest not directed by Roland Emmerich, from their piloted-mission plotline. Let us draw a discrete veil over The Core and never speak of it again… pausing only to pass on a report that the film-makers accepted a certain J. Marvin Herndon as scientific advisor to ensure the realism of their depiction of Earth’s interior.

“The 58-year-old Herndon offered to be an unpaid consultant after seeing a trailer for the movie last year, and he participated in its final editing.”

“At The Movies“, Science (2003)

But I seem to have buried the lede! The lede shouldn’t have got in the way while I was operating the back-hoe so it wasn’t my fault. Anyway, I’ll come back in. The REAL topic here is in fact the Chemtrail belief system. This being a remarkably stupid but also contagious brainfail – a communicable prion disease as it were – serving as a synecdoche for conspiracist thinking in general, now adopted as official US policy (hence its brief cameo role in a previous blogpost).

Airliners can leave scratches on the sky as they take off or land if the air that they traverse is moist and cool enough for the wing-tip vortices to tip the moisture into condensing and be-clouding. But this is too simple for minds rotted by Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” and searching for sinister explanations for everything… contrails must be a recent phenomenon that prove the planes are SPRAYING SOMETHING. Don’t worry, more Herndon is coming.

From a 2015 interview with Herndon, introduced by the antivaxxer Catherine Frompovich as former “post-doctoral assistant to Hans Suess and Harold C. Urey” and current President of Transdyne Corporation in San Diego, with the perfectly sane title “Weather Geoengineering, Chemtrails, Aluminum and Alzheimer’s: The Four Horsemen of the Weather Apocalypse“:

“In the Spring of 2014, I began to see particulate trails across the sky that were increasing in frequency and in intensity. By November 2014 the spraying was taking place on a near daily basis sometimes obscuring the otherwise blue sky with dark artificial clouds.”

The belief system relies on a cohort of believers who went through their lives without ever lifting up their eyes unto the sky (whence cometh their help). Or they are willing to scrub past observations of contrails from their memories. My own memories of living in London 40 years ago include days when the sky was a veritable cat’s-cradle of criss-crossed contrails; and the reassuring knowledge that there was a net to catch me if gravity were suddenly to fail.

The believers are not unanimous about what is being sprayed, and why. One school of thought has it that chemtrails are climatic geoengineering: the cause of drought in countries that are the antagonists of an undeclared war. Or, it may be, the aerosols are intended to reflect sunlight and reverse the effects of climate change. Because ‘Snowpiercer‘ was a documentary. At the same time (since ‘climate change’ is a fraud intended to justify an all-controlling totalitarian government that could never take power otherwise) they absorb sunlight and create the non-existent Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). HAARP comes into it (being the other form of weather control), and the Venn-diagram overlap with antivaxxery is large. It is a Stupid Well with no bottom.

“Nonsense!” says another school of thought: the sprayed chemicals are to pacify populations into sedated, obedient tranquillity (you can see how well that is working in the US). This notion is a legacy of the doctrine among John Birch Society cultists that fluoridated water is a mind-control drug, originally invented by Nazis or Communists (but I repeat myself) to keep the slave workers in a suitable zombie state while they laboured in the secret moon-base. Every classic case-study of delusive paranoia involve an Influencing Engine of some form and collective paranoia is no exception.

I add for the sake of digression that the Birchers started out as Health Freedom med-fraudsters, and their original issue with the Evil Socialistic Government was that it stood in the way of debulking the pockets of cancer patients with Laetrile / Amygdalin / Vitamin B17. Which is how med-fraud became synonymous with “far-right spittle-spraying ranting-uncle crankiness”. Now after a half-century of obloquy the grifters have captured the US Department of Health & Human Services, and the cash registers ring out like Christmas bells.

There are videos from Chemtrail believers showing themselves spraying the air around with vinegar to neutralise the plane-sprayed airborne toxins. Was this performative stupidity, a self-imposed purity test to display one’s fealty to the cult? Are these people genuinely that brain-fried? It is a distinction without a difference, or perhaps vice versa.

As noted previously, this ineffable jibber-jabber became the official policy of the US Department of Disease under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – with a preference for the Geoengineering recension of the belief system (though banning fluoridation is also on RFK Jr’s agenda because conspiracy theories never conflict). Even now they are headhunting suitably deranged members of the conspiracist movement for a fact-finding Task Force. I look forward to their examination of a 747 while they look for spaces where the tanks of sprayable chemicals might fit. But right now, to accommodate the nonlinearity of my cognitive patterns, we return to the Earth’s core.

Just as letting cats out of bags is sometimes not the good idea it seemed at the time, nor pigs out of pokes, so thinking is not always improved by the absence of a box

Opinions are divided as to exactly what Stevenson’s probe will find there. Some say “An inner core of iron-nickel alloy, in solid phase (despite the immense heat) on account of the even immenser pressure”. Rival experts, however, prefer “Living creatures formed from a denser form of matter, to whom the outer rocks are as tenuous as the atmosphere to us” (the Official Secrets Act prevents me from mentioning CODE DEEP SEVEN). Others expect “A colossal arthropod larva that has accreted the Earth around it in the manner of a plant gall, and will split open the crust and hatch when it has fed on human flesh for long enough”. Then there is the more speculative “Empty void containing a smaller planet, constructed as a prison for the inimical insectoid Bleak” theory. Few people accept Professor Ellison’s “Beast Shouting Love” theory, though none dare argue with it due to his pugilistic reputation.

What concerns us here, is Dr Herndon’s heterodox notion that slap in the centre is a breeder georeactor 8 km in diameter, formed from uranium which concentrated there (due to its greater density) rather than dissolving in the outer layers as less-heretical geochemists believe. The reactor is diluted with other minerals, and is controlled by its own fission products, which is why the chain reaction has spluttered along for four billion years rather than burning all its fuel in a single super-critical blast.

“Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?”

Discover magazine (2002), [Betteridge’s Law of Headlines has entered the chat]

Herndon is a maverick among mavericks – his qualifications include Masterate of Maverication from the University of Mavericia – and the georeactor is just one thread of a larger heterodoxy hairball. Two generations of geologists spurned Wegener’s ‘continental drift’ explanation for the neat match between the coastlines of far-separated continents until it finally became the consensus in the late 1960s (with plate tectonics as the mechanism). Herndon (born 1944) made an audacious leap of innovation and rejects it even more! Instead he invokes ‘terrestrial decompression‘: the Earth was initially much smaller than it is now, and had no oceans until it tore the continents asunder by expanding in the manner of a Beauchêne skull. See also Wikipedia.

That does leave the ‘initially much smaller’ postulate crying out for explanation in turn, but everything makes sense when you remember that the Earth was in fact another gas giant when the solar system first condensed, the size of Jupiter – an immense orb of progressively deeper, denser layers of hydrogen-helium atmosphere that collectively crushed the heavier elements (all settled at the centre of the orb) into a sphere that was only 64% of the present terrestrial radius. This was all that remained when solar flares stripped away the lighter gases and yeeted them into interstellar space. The surviving gas giants have georeactors too!

Alternative Title: The Man whose World Expanded

Herndon is sufficiently established in the geosciences for his self-penned Wiki-entry to pass the ‘notability’ test and survive the hostile scrutiny of skeptical editors (as chronicled in the Wiki Talk meta-page). Nonetheless, his account of planetary origins and transformations and internal structure did not attain the mainstream acceptance they deserve; and the only channel of publication left open to him (censorship! cancel culture!) was [checks notes] PNAS.

J M Herndon Substructure of the inner core of the Earth Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1996) doi: 10.1073/pnas.93.2.646 

It may be that bitterness about this outsider status is what drove him into the arms of the Chemtrail community… there he was welcomed in the manner of a penitent sinner returning to the fold (i.e. a once-scientist who slipped the surly bonds of reason), and interviewed by well-known antivax bullshit-artist Frompovich, as you saw above. Or perhaps he just went emeritus.

Herndon’s initial ventures into Chemtrail Science won the rare accolade of a MDPI Retraction; then one from Frontiers (as reported by Retraction Watch).

• J. Herndon Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2015) doi: 10.3390/ijerph120809375  (September 2015 Retraction)
• J. Marvin Herndon Human and Environmental Dangers Posed by Ongoing Global Tropospheric Aerosolized Particulates for Weather Modification Frontiers in Public Health (2016) doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2016.00139 (July 2016 Retraction)

Herndon was not well-pleased with these outcomes though he was inclined to blame the CIA rather than credit Jeffrey Beall. Deprived of those two congenial inlets for his outsights (or possibly vice versa), he went on to publish in Current Science – a frequent vehicle for his geodynamics (before it was captured by pirates, this had been the well-regarded journal of an Indian scholarly society). For further details and entertainment, I refer readers to a discussion thread at Metabunk that probably could have been adapted as a better Hollywood blockbuster than Core. The discussants were not kind about the quality of that science.

Evidently our man subscribes to the ‘Geo-engineering’ variant of the chemtrail mythos, and I like to think that the makers of Snowpiercer paid attention and recruited him as Advisor to ensure the scientific accuracy of the movie’s opening scenes. His element analysis of rainwater and sludge from ponds in India led him to single out fly-ash from coal-burning power-plants as the sprayant in question, on account of India lacking any other industrial activities that might feed by-products into pond sludge.

J. Marvin Herndon, Aluminum poisoning of humanity and Earth’s biota by clandestine geoengineering activity: implications for India Current Science, Vol. 108, No. 12, 25 June 2015

Alternative title #2: Fish-ponds and a madman’s honey

There are health implications from the aluminium and methyl-mercury that Herndon also detected in the water though they don’t seem to be the primary goal of the chemtrailing. I infer that the shadowy international agency behind it all is also tasked with finding an application for industrial waste, or else it operates on a shoestring budget and can’t afford aerosols specifically designed for the purpose; either way, it seems that burning coal for electricity is a really bad idea. I have no idea what coal-flies look like but you probably have to burn a lot of them to get enough coal fly-ash.

Herndon’s alternative geoscience is not winning many converts, but any scientific consensus needs a rival view to keep it honest. Unlike medical outsiders, he is not doing anyone any harm; he features here at For Better Science mainly so that when RFK Jr appoints him to the Chemtrail Task Force, readers can be all hipster-cool “We knew him before he went main-stream”. I am now trying to imagine a disaster movie involving Earth’s decompressive expansion as the planetary threat. If anyone wants to write the script, there’s someone who’d be the perfect Advisor to ensure the scientific accuracy of the accompanying Thermal Tsunamis.

CODA

Space did not allow me to describe Stevenson’s other proposal (2013) for sending a probe to the heart of the Earth, i.e. a completely solid, extremely dense nuclear reactor about the size of a battleship, white-hot from operating in a state of sub-criticality, so as to melt the rock out of the way during its 12-year China-Syndrome descent. If there isn’t a reactor at the core now, there will be. The Chthonians will not be well-pleased.

CODA TO THE CODA

There are far far crazier Expanding-Earth exponents. All this talk of “limited resources” and “conservation” is just another conspiracy to control the sheeple. Case in point, Anita Laurin (“AL”) Whitney, explaining ito fellow anticorruption transhumanists:

“Independent researcher Cliff High explained (in a recent interview) scientific principles that academicians don’t teach, but that prove we live on an ever expanding planet that actually creates its own matter – to include oxygen, water, oil and even gold. […]
This is more evidence that oil is not a finite resource, but is a renewable source of energy with an origin that is abiotic (not from living or formerly living matter). The ‘abiotic’ origin of oil was proven by Russian scientists many years ago and is referred to as “modern petroleum science”.”

AntiCorruption Society, (2012)

I see her point; who would want to know about the scientific principles that academicians do teach?

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