The solar flare of AD774/5 (sometimes AD776) is the subject Mike Baillie has earmarked for his 2013 AGM talk - but I'm sure it will include lots of other interesting add-ons. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters might be worth having a look at - go to http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/12/solar-proton-event-seen-in-tree-ri... ... has worked out it was one order of magnitude more powerful than a solar flare in 1989 and such events are not as rare as people might imagine.

See the article at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50222/abstract/

The resonant orbit of the Russian meteor and the bigger piece of space rock prompted member William Thompson to send in some information on Patten and Hatch, well known from Marvin Luckerman's defunct journal Catastrophism and Ancient History (they wrote several articles) and books and articles on the orbit of Mars and how it may have affected Earth on several important occasions in the past. The articles in CAH can be accessed via www.catastrophism.com or if you have a thick wallet, by purchasing the Catastrophism CD Rom (on sale on this web site).

This story is at http://phys.org/print282294394.html ... and concerns the discovery of a hidden network of rivers flowing beneath the Greenland ice sheet, potentiallly catastrophic as far as the stability of the ice sheet is concerned. Published in Nature Geoscience it seems fairly cut and dried - but is it?

At www.gsbkerala.com/saraswati.htm ... the lost river Saraswati is the the main theme and begins by saying climate change and geotectonic movements (earth movements) led to migration and abandonment of settlements. Some of the drainage systems have been lost as a result of being buried beneath silt (changing river courses) and this appears to be the position with the Saraswati. There is also evidence of flooding at the end of the Ice Age, it seems, which in the artticle is attributable to melting Himalayan glaciers - but could equally be due to other reasons.