Well, not entirely. The Alaska "bays" are not nearly as uniform in shape or length/width dimensions. Seems the folks studying the Alaska bays haven't reached a conclusion yet as to what actually creates their bays either. Butt crack ice(cracking the bedrock) and thawing seems to be the most widely accepted hypothesis.
...if you drill down through the various stranded barrier dunes and back-barrier flats along the coast of South Carolina today, you will find buried carolina bays.
You're talking barrier islands/strips? Backfilled by wave action? Hurricanes? Tusnamis? Rising oceans? Even so, does that necessarily rule out aerial fireworks? Like I said, you'll need to go slow with this ol' East Texas country boy ;^)
BTW, I'm sure you're familiar with the other "bays" around the world. After doing some additional searching, there seems to be a bunch of these things around. MANY of them nowhere near a present or historic/prehistoric shoreline. Some aligned parallel with a shoreline; some at elevations of a thousand feet; maybe more. Thoughts? Best I can tell the one thing they seem to have in common is they have been located(the visible ones?) on soft soil. Sandy lome and the like??? I suppose if sand dunes didn't change so much they might be good candidates for finding visible bays.
This is giving me a headache. Think I'll take a nap.
"...You're talking barrier islands/strips? Backfilled by wave action? Hurricanes? Tusnamis? Rising oceans? ..."
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and more. Once sea level becomes relatively stable for a while, barrier islands form along continental edges of low gradient (such as along our eastern and southeastern coasts). Backbarrier areas accrete soil and soil-forming material rapidly; this includes wind-and wave-deposited mineral material, as well as organic detritus from saltmarsh vegetation (and the saltmarsh vegetation itself acts as a filter to trap suspended sands, silts and clays). One of my colleagues at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, in neighboring Anne Arundel County, has measured >14 feet of Holocene deposition (mostly organic) in a saltmarsh along the Chesapeake Bay. This rate of deposition is by no means unusual.
By the way, I'm convinced that earth is frequently (on a geologic time scale) bombarded by various metorites and cometary fragments. I just don't think such bombardment is responsible for Carolina Bays.
"....Well, not entirely. The Alaska "bays" are not nearly as uniform in shape or length/width dimensions..."
Perhaps not all of them are, but the ones I saw on that poster were very uniform, and appeared to be perfectly elliptical. I was struck by their uniformity and symmetry.
"...Seems the folks studying the Alaska bays haven't reached a conclusion yet as to what actually creates their bays either. Butt crack ice(cracking the bedrock) and thawing seems to be the most widely accepted hypothesis...."
Well, perhaps. Geologists and geomorphologists tell me that there was no permafrost, and no glacial ice, in the Carolinas and Georgia, even during the glacial maxima. It would be surprising if two wildly divergiant geomorphic mechanisms produced such similar results. I suspect that when we finally solve this puzzle, we will find tht the bays of both areas have the same, or very similar, causes.