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ted stonehenge topics which have an ice age dimension the book some of the ideas discussed in this blog are published in my new book called the stonehenge bluestones available by post and through good bookshops everywhere bad bookshops might not have it to order click here wednesday 6 may 2026 six million views an erratic boulder is a large stone that should preferably have been somewhere else i have not kept my eye on the ball but we have sailed through the six million mark as i said when we went through the 5 million mark a lot of hits nowadays come from ai bots but with ai as with many otherc things popularity breeds even more popularity and the blog is now so well established that it is scanned all the time by bots looking for answers to a wide range of different questions ranging from glaciers to bluestones and stonehenge to pembrokeshire and east greenland to iceland so i ll keep going as before commenting on stonehenge matters scrutinising new publications and contributing original new science on a range of landscape and ice age related themes posted by brian john at 11 59 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday 2 may 2026 pythagoras klippe one of the great cliffs of the world google earth 3d image of the 4 500 ft pythagoras cliff located on the outside of the final bend in the fjord before it opens out into hall bredning the fjord water here is about 4 000 feet deep and the fjord wall passes downward beneath the surface without much change of gradient so this is not a true sea cliff cut by the processes of coastal erosion it should be compared with other great cliffs formed by glacial erosion i have been working on a new video about our kayak trip on nordvestfjord in 1962 and i am increasingly concerned that the massive coastal cliff that towered above us on part of the journey has not got the recognition it deserves the cliff is almost 4 500 feet high more than ten times the height of the highest cliffs in pembrokeshire in my narrative i describe the cliff like this on the western flank of this upland plateau is the pythagoras klippe at 4 500 ft one of the world s great cliffs it was cut by the nordvestfjord glacier and dominates the outer end of the fjord the enormous cliff is so high that if you were to plonk ben nevis britain s highest mountain out in the fjord you could stand on the clifftop and look down at the summit it s more than three times as high as the empire state building and twice as high as the famous pulpit rock cliff in norway it s also far taller than the famous el capitan rock wall in america the geology is similar to that of the staunings alps with granite and other crystalline rocks but there are no clean climbing walls here the cliff face is broken up by great chasms and fractures and rockfalls are frequent this giant forbidding lethal cliff stretches for about 4 miles running almost north south and as we shall see it plays a central role in our narrative to fully appreciate the scale of this cliff we can compare it with some of the famous and spectacular cliffs in nw iceland haelavikurbjarg cliff in hornstrandir is just 846 ft 257m high so the pythagoras klippe is about 5 times as tall the latrabjarg cliff in vestfirdir is just 441m high so the pythagoras klippe is more than three times as high because this wonderful cliff has been formed by glacial erosional processes where the rate of downcutting and sediment removal vastly outstrips the periglacial and proglacial processes of cliff degradation we need to see it as belonging in the same league as the high mountain climbing cliffs of the alps himalayas and andes mount thor on baffin island has a drop of 4 100 feet mount asgard also has a vertical drop of about 4 000 feet then we can think of cerro torre and torres del paine in south america about 900m or c 3 000 ft in south greenland there are several hugely impressive rock cliffs in tasermiut fjord there are endless lists of the highest cliffs in the world or the most dangerous climbs in the world but we won t get involved in those discussions suffice to say that pythagoras klippe is one of the select group of coastal cliffs in the world that is more than 3 000 feet high i don t think it has been climbed because it is too dangerous with too many crumbling rock faces and rockfalls but who knows there are some crazy guys out there mount thule mount asgard in the inner reches of nordvestfjord is the ingmikortilaq cliff 3 750 ft first climbed by alex honnold and hazel findley in 2022 pythagoras klippe is higher and probably far more dangerous ingmikortilaq by the way the name pythagoras klippe is a strictly informal one so it will not appear on any map the people of greenland may already have a name for this cliff and if so i hope it will be used to promote it as a place of wonder posted by brian john at 11 31 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday 10 april 2026 daw s miraculous statistics are worthless two small igneous erratics found near the higher path on baggy point altitudes c 45m and c 60m these were in the view of daw too high to be counted as low and too low to be counted as high they were rejected becausee they have been moved at least once and because they do not have a secure geological context but does any free glacial erratic have a secure context they are called erratics for a perfectly good reason and almost all of those on farmland will have been moved by farmers at some stage photos courtesy paul madgett in the context of ongoing attacks on my integrity and competence ex stonehenge tour guide tim daw likes to portray himself as a feisty defender of the truth but in the welter of his recent publications dealing with the devon coast he has become increasingly dependent upon ai bots he has also corrupted statistical methods to make inconvenient erratics disappear and has invented more than 30 phantom erratics all purely by chance at 5m od so as to boost his shoreline data set and to achieve his desired results it s amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to create pseudo scientific proofs for their rather wacky hypotheses and it s also amazing and more than a little sad that they often get away with it in the recent article by daw ixer and madgett much emphasis is placed on the supposed existence of just one high level erratic in the baggy point barnstaple area referred to as the ramson cliff erratic it s seen as an outlier or an anomaly with all other documented erratics lying on or around the altitude of the shore platform that is a false representation of the situation since there are abundant recorded erratics between 30m and 80m showing that glacier ice affected much of the local coastal environment undeterred daw asked grok for an independent analysis of his own paper and for a bayesian analysis of the likelihood of human transport over glacial transport as ever with ai bots grok faithfully delivered what was expected by its master some other examples from daw who is currently on a mission to demonstrate to the world that active glacial ice cannot possibly have had anything to do with the erratics scattered along the coastal zone of devon and cornwall the myth of bristol channel high level glacial erratics december 2024 considers the lack of a glacial imprint on boulders and argues their placement is more likely due to residual weathering than glacial action this is not a statistical study but in supposedly analysing a list of cited erratics daw simply decides that each of them is irrelevant because they are too low or of the wrong rock type or non glacial or lacking in cited evidence or lacking in geological context that s absurd the process is entirely subjective and lacking in any appreciation of glacial environments or processes analysis of claims regarding high level glacial erratics april 2025 uses a quantitative list of erratics and their altitudes to disqualify them as evidence of an ice sheet override this is essentially the same article but here published on researchgate without any peer review see the above comments chatgpt on competing transport hypotheses august 2025 monthly archive specifically the aic section includes a section where chatgpt was reportedly used to put competing transport hypotheses into a statistical model comparison aic to show that a non glacial model better explains the body of evidence this is a nonsensical exercise based on biased data sets and observations fed into the ai model rubbish in rubbish out the statistical improbability of a ramson cliff glacial erratic october 2025 this post uses a table of high level erratics to argue that their scarcity at specific altitudes makes a glacial origin statistically unlikely the data set is completely unacceptable daw seems to have chosen some erratics from the literature and to have ignored others that were deemed inconvenient he added several inland erratics from the fremington area all at 25m while completely ignoring the records of other erratics in the sediments near eastacombe up to 90m then he added approximately 30 other foreshore erratics at 5m od for statistical purposes in order to bulk up his shore platform group so he ended up with a synthetic data set malpractice as far as we know these additional erratics might not even exist his graph of the elevations of 14 chosen erratics is also nonsensical caution in attributing the fremington clay series october 2025 daw argues that the abundance of local devon and cornish erratics over far travelled ones is statistically consistent with a local origin rather than a distant glacial source revised and expanded on 4 april 2026 daw gets into a frightful tangle over the altitude of the ice dam that held up a lake in the fremington area and seems to assume bizarrely that the surface of the lake was at the same altitude as the varved lake deposits that are known in the literature up to 35m od that implies a lake surface level at 65m or even higher he goes out of his way to avoid referring to any of the fremington deposits as glacially deposited and misrepresents the views of those who have described the fremington till in detail he mentions fluvioglacial deposits at c 55m od and still insists that the ramson cliff erratic at c 85m od had nothing to do with glaciation in these articles and others tim daw seeks to use statistics to prove that the coastal erratics around croyde and saunton are ice rafted and that the ramson cliff erratic at about 85 m above sea level is an outlier that cannot possibly have been transported by ice it all looks terribly impressive and scientific until you realise that his methods are the stuff of statistical nightmares i m no statistician but i m not stupid and it is obvious from the outset that daw s methods are corrupt what we see is a classic case of selection bias called data scrubbing in the trade to achieve a predetermined result for example in his convoluted attempts to prove that the ramson cliff boulder is an outlier these are the statistical red flags 1 sampling bias cherry picking daw chooses to ignore or exclude the 45m and 60m erratics near baggy point recorded by berry and madgett on the grounds that they may have been moved and that they do not have a secure geological context that immediately introduces subjectivity and selection bias you could argue that every erratic in a farmed landscape has probably been moved at some stage and that every isolated boulder on the shore platform has also been moved by the waves and that they should all be eliminated from the study on that basis daw also chooses to ignore the 90m till at eastacombe although it is recorded by the bgs and is known from borehole records to contain erratics so daw is deliberately truncating the distribution by eliminating all boulders that he deems to refer to as contested and including all those that he deems to be uncontested that is to put it mildly completely unprofessional further if you consciously remove all data points between 25m and 75m the 80m point will mathematically appear to be an extreme outlier this is not a discovery it is a result of the filtering or sampling process itself 2 circular reasoning begging the question daw labels all high level stones as contested or anthropogenic because they don t fit the low level ice rafting model and then uses that cleaned model to prove high level glacial erratics don t exist this is a self fulfilling prophecy you cannot use a model to validate the exclusion of the very data that would disprove the model 3 arbitrary binning creating a shoreline group clustered around 5 25m and a high level group based on some arbitrary altitude rather than assuming the presence of a continuous gradient is known to statisticians as arbitrary binning this creates a false dichotomy in nature glacial deposition follows strict principles not yet fully understood but apparently random within a range by forcing the data into two bins and ignoring the middle daw is guilty of manufacturing a gap that does not exist in the raw geological or geomorphological record 4 small sample size power by using a small pool of verified or uncontested surface boulders of certain dimensions and shapes while ignoring the presence of inconvenient boulders and cobbles found in exposures and sub surface boreholes at fremington and elsewhere daw reduces the statistical power of the study a study that ignores the most robust institutional data bgs in favor of a curated or self selected list of surface stones is prone to a fundamental error falsely identifying a natural or expected occurrence as an anomaly or outlier 5 confirmation bias in bayesian analysis daw uses bayesian inference to claim a high probability of human transport in the case of the ramson cliff erratic bayesian outcomes are highly sensitive to initial assumptions if your starting assumption is that ice never reached 80m in the baggy point area the mathematics will always tell you an 80m stone is an anomaly rubbish in rubbish out terribly impressive until you realise that it s all manipulated nonsense in short daw is misrepresenting his selection criteria and pretending that he is telling us something important about the natural population of erratics in the baggy point barnstaple area it all looks terribly impressive and very scientific but it is essentially garbage posted by brian john at 12 19 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday 6 april 2026 the ramson cliff erratic much ado about nothing the location of the ramson cliff erratic which was found at about 85m od but which has now been moved to the lower edge of the field beware it is sometimes called the baggy point upper erratic a very strange article has been published in qn167 purporting to demonstrate that the ramson cliff erratic is an aberration having come from the cornubian aureole of devon or cornwall and having nothing to do with the g...