New evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the start of the Younger Dryas

Watts Up With That 'blog ^ | Monday, March 12, 2012 | Anthony Watts

[SunkenCiv]

We report the discovery in Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico of a black, carbon-rich, lacustrine layer, containing nanodiamonds, microspherules, and other unusual materials that date to the early Younger Dryas and are interpreted to result from an extraterrestrial impact. These proxies were found in a 27-m-long core as part of an interdisciplinary effort to extract a paleoclimate record back through the previous interglacial.

Our attention focused early on an anomalous, 10-cm-thick, carbon-rich layer at a depth of 2.8 m that dates to 12.9 ka and coincides with a suite of anomalous coeval environmental and biotic changes independently recognized in other regional lake sequences.

Collectively, these changes have produced the most distinctive boundary layer in the late Quaternary record. This layer contains a diverse, abundant assemblage of impact-related markers, including nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, and magnetic spherules with rapid melting/quenching textures, all reaching synchronous peaks immediately beneath a layer containing the largest peak of charcoal in the core. Analyses by multiple methods demonstrate the presence of three allotropes of nanodiamond: n-diamond, i-carbon, and hexagonal nanodiamond (lonsdaleite), in order of estimated relative abundance.

This nanodiamond-rich layer is consistent with the Younger Dryas boundary layer found at numerous sites across North America, Greenland, and Western Europe. We have examined multiple hypotheses to account for these observations and find the evidence cannot be explained by any known terrestrial mechanism. It is, however, consistent with the Younger Dryas boundary impact hypothesis postulating a major extraterrestrial impact involving multiple airburst(s) and and/or ground impact(s) at 12.9 ka.

[SunkenCiv]

The PDF:

• Evidence from central Mexico supporting the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis, Isabel Israde-Alcántara, James L. Bischoff, Gabriela Domínguez-Vázquez, Hong-Chun Li, Paul S. DeCarli, Ted E. Bunch, James H. Wittke, James C. Weaver, Richard B. Firestone, Allen West, James P. Kennett, Chris Mercer, Sujing Xie, Eric K. Richman, Charles R. Kinzie, and Wendy S. Wolbach

(correspondence to James L. Bischoff)

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

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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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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Thud!

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[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Thud! To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Publius6961]

OK you win.

That's a humungous reference list. I thank you.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Please put this into plain English. If it weren’t for 5 years of Anthropology, Archaeology and 3 years of geology, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what this article was about.

In plain English, a big-assed meteor/comet/asteroid hit the earth and its’ impact ring covered a wide geographic area, leaving behind identical impact fragments/evidence that could be dated.

[SaxxonWoods]

I’m starting to love that blog. It’s going on my favorites list.

[muawiyah]

Always with the lists ~ they're getting longer and longer too.

Lots of archaeological work going on in the Americas. I think it's a function of UNEMPLOYMENT ~ keeps the grad students going out to the field to earn those stipends ~

Now, back to this discovery ~ that's a good one. The chunks with the gold in them are back up the way toward Ontario. They were mostly destroyed "back in the day".

This thing hit the ice right on top of one of Canada's greatest gold bearing regions and stripped off the top layers and blew them all over the Midwest, and probably Mexico, and probably even Northern South America and MesoAmerica.

NO gold of any kind has been found in the bed of former Lake Erie ~ which stretched from West of Fort Wayne Indiana to where it is now. It's there, but no one has dug down the 50 feet or so of muck to get to the Younger Dryas layer. I'm sure it can be done ~ that lake was still there 4,000 years ago BTW so a lot of it is now allegedly dry land. 50 feet guys~! a vast treasure in Canadian gold ~ all in the form of "gold flour".

[djf]

An angled impact in the Iowa/Illinois area would explain the Carolina Bays...

[muawiyah]

IT exploded in the atmosphere or within a residual hunk of the great Ice Sheets that'd covered Canada entirely up to 1500 years earlier.

When you have a comet or meteor hit a chunk of Big Ice it's going to 'splode like nobody's business in SECONDS.

It would excavate a great mass of the underlying earth ~ rocks, dirt, gold bearing sands (quartz and otherwise), and everything else.

That mass would go flying out for thouands of miles and come down where it could be found later and "mined", ploughed under, or whatever.

My theory is that there was enough recoverable gold in the debris that the debris was mostly dissipated and destroyed as evidence even in Paleo-Indian times, and certainly by Spanish and other European gold hunting periods. That gold was sent to Europe for the most part after the Spanish conquest.

This stuff shouldn't be all that deep ~ hence the easy access.

The goldbearing region in Virginia was REVEALED by a larger asteroid that hit the DELMARVA peninsula several million years back. That is different ~ and explains why all the gold in Virginia and south into the Carolanas is kind of along the Fall Line!

[muawiyah]

The Carolina Bays are much more recent.

[SunkenCiv]

Ooooh, you will like that book!

[SunkenCiv]

I’ll write the mods, see if they’ll change the title. ;’)

[djf]

The article says 12.9 ka.

About 13,000 years ago.

That’s less than a blink of an eye in geologic terms.

[SunkenCiv]

No, they’re not. The bays were formed and the black mat was laid down at that time; various erosional events came later, and uniformitarian jokers messed up the dating, even when they actually did field work.

[SunkenCiv]

[’Civ holds up both gloves and struts around the ring]

;’)

[SunkenCiv]

I should add it to the list of GGG sources, it may be a good one to visit more often.

[BrewingFrog]

As you should...

After reading the Firestone book, I was thoroughly convinced. Now there is this very nearly irrefutable evidence of an impact which will open up many minds to such events. They have happened. They may happen in the future.

I remember a story about geologists or archaeologists doing core samples off the western Florida coast and pulling up the remains of a charred pine forest, with some of the debris so well preserved you could still smell the sap in the wood. Seems that the dating on this wood was close to the impact period. Do you remember this article?

[muawiyah]

Why not do it this way ~ they didn't happen at the same time because they came in from the WRONG direction. On the other hand, if this was merely the debris left over from a broken up comet and we went through the debris belt several times over a number of trips around the Sun, you could, of course, have the same sort of events ~ big holes ~ but the entry angle would be different each time.

Figuring out how to get different entry angles for a single event is rather difficult. Two events explain things easier, and a comet breakup is a well known phenomenon. In fact, many of our best shooting star events are simply us taking a trip through a comet's path (over and over and over).