Posted on 07/23/2009 7:00:35 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Researchers have found shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds on one of California's Channel Islands, which they say is the strongest evidence yet that a comet exploded in the atmosphere above North America, causing widespread extinctions there around 12,900 years ago... In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a "black mat" of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an airburst. The controversial theory also gibes with the 1908 Tunguska atmospheric detonation (also thought to be from a comet or meteorite) that leveled trees in Siberia, and it echoes the extraterrestrial impact widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Today, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same team reports on shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds, known only from meteorite and other impact events, in a soot layer from Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island in California. The canyon is famous for containing the earliest human remains in North America, dating back to 13,000 years, and the soot layer coincides with the disappearance of the pygmy mammoth from the island. In a documentary shown earlier this year on the Public Broadcasting Service's NOVA science show, the team also claimed that they discovered similar diamonds from the Greenland Ice Sheet dating to the same period.
What does the research team have to say about their doubters? "I'm so skeptical about the skeptics," says marine geologist James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "We work in a different paradigm where different materials result from different kinds of impacts."
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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No, George Bush did. Ask Odumbo, he inherited it.
No, actually I believe it was due to an early Cro-Magnon man named Al-a-Goric.
It would make more sense for us to develop the technology to detect and deflect comets and asteroids than to go back to the Moon or Mars.
How would I know?
Ruminant grazers survived the extinction, non-ruminants were wiped out.
You need a theory to accomodate this.
One little problem..... The end of the American megafauna also involved whatever created the gigantic muck deposits in the North and it’s not even obvious to me that a worldwide flood could do that, much less any sort of interaction with a comet.
No it was a GREAT BIG FLOOD about 6,000 years ago.
Silly comet theory. It’s CAVEMAN’S FAULT. Those damn SUV’S they drove caused global warming.
Why do *I* need one?
Gigantic muck deposits? I live maybe twenty miles from the muck farms, which are flat, former lakebeds, which have of course long been empty of the lake waters.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Geico insurance AlgoreCo offset credits
I meant it as a plural "you" for apocalyptic scientists.
Physicists that come up with this stuff really need to hang around animals more.
First things first.
Where was Ted Kennedy when this happened and can he prove his wherabouts?
Space PING
It seems pretty likely that’s what happened. And during an ice age, so that explains the lack of crater. There’s a whole layer of nanodiamonds right around that time period.
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