Mark Boslough is a scientist who studies the physics of asteroid and comet impacts on Earth. He wrote, for example, the first 3D code to simulate the behavior of a Tunguska-like impact, and has written many papers on similar events.

He also is a tireless debunker of bad impact science; the latest has been from a group of pseudoscientists who promote the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. They claim (with very bad evidence and huge conclusion-jumping to) airbursts — explosions from incoming space rocks that occur well above the ground — wiped out the Clovis people about 13,000 years ago, explains biblical accounts of cities wiped out in the Middle East, and triggered a glaciation period that lasted about a millennium (actually, evidence is piling up that a series of massive volcanic eruptions may instead be the culprit). Mark has been the loudest voice debunking this bad archaeology/geology/planetary science.

He and I chat back and forth about this stuff fairly often, and he let me know he’s the lead author on a new paper published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science about the problem of pseudoscience and the spread of misinformation [link to journal paper]. He and his coauthors (including many other impact scientists) cover the topic as it relates to their field, but extrapolate it to others as well. It’s a pretty interesting paper, with examples from their own experience dealing with relatively benign Tunguska misinfo up to the shenanigans of the “Comet Research Group”, a collection of pseudoscientists who publish really bad papers in ways that avoid the usual mainstream peer review process — for example, they publish in their own bespoke journal.

They tend to have splashy results, like when they claimed a comet airburst (when the nucleus explodes high above the ground due to ramming the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds) destroyed the area around the Tall el-Hammam site in Jordan. This has been roundly debunked (they claim it’s connected to Sodom, which telegraphs their own personal bias in this, in my opinion), but when they made the announcement in 2021 it got a lot of coverage. I remember this; I read the paper and was very interested, of course, but as I was taking notes I got the feeling things weren’t adding up. Within days I heard from Mark about it, and yup: it’s nonsense. They also play very fast and loose with evidence; there is photo alteration going on in their images, for example, which is part of the reason the Scientific Reports journal wound up retracting the paper.

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Anyway, Mark’s paper is interesting in that it divides the misinformation into three broad categories in a way I hadn’t seen before^* . The first is short-term misinfo, like things that affect a single news cycle. This spreads rapidly since it’s usually some sexy result like the Tall el-Hammam “study”. Their remedy to help staunch this flow of nonsense is for scientists who tend to be asked by the media for interviews to keep a handy network of scientists in other fields and specialties, and refer to them for things they cannot immediately answer. That way, better info gets out there, with specific debunkings to prevent further spread. 

Medium-term misinfo follows the publication cycle, so months to a year or so. This can be mitigated, they advise, by scientists submitting comments to journals where a sketchy paper has been published, or review platforms like PubPeer. They point out a lot of retractions have resulted from such actions, which is great.

The final category is long-term misinfo, which reaches over many years. Think folklore, or “common knowledge”. They give an interesting example: the claim that 80 million trees were felled in Siberia by the Tunguska impact, a claim I have seen many times, and may be guilty of repeating myself (I didn’t find anything I had written specifically but a lot of websites and such have done so over the years). They show this is an exaggeration based on an early “educated guess” on how many trees would be knocked down so that an estimate of the Tunguska energy release could be determined. It’s been repeated as actual fact over the decades. Their remediation for this is perhaps the hardest of the three: don’t take such things as granted, but investigate them and try to find their provenance.

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