Posted on 06/02/2007 3:14:23 PM PDT by blam
Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?
Sid Perkins
Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say.
IT'S IN THERE. A layer of carbon-rich sediment (arrow) found here at Murray Springs, Ariz., and elsewhere across North America, provides evidence that an extraterrestrial object blew up over Canada 12,900 years ago. The hallmarks include lumps of glasslike carbon (top), carbon spherules (middle, in cross section), and magnetic grains rich in iridium (bottom). West; (middle inset): Cannon Microprobe
At sites stretching from California to the Carolinas and as far north as Alberta and Saskatchewan—many of which were home to prehistoric people of the Clovis culture—researchers have long noted an enigmatic layer of carbon-rich sediment that was laid down nearly 13 millennia ago. "Clovis artifacts are never found above this black mat," says Allen West, a geophysicist with Geoscience Consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The layer, typically a few millimeters thick, lies between older, underlying strata that are chock-full of mammoth bones and younger, fossilfree sediments immediately above, he notes.
New analyses of samples taken from 26 of those sites reveal several hallmarks of an extraterrestrial object's impact, West and his colleagues reported at the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco, Mexico.
Samples from the base of the black mat yield most of the clues to its extraterrestrial origin, says Richard B. Firestone, West's coworker and a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley (Calif.)
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
I don’t know if it was in “Earth in Upheaval” or one of his other books, but Velikovsky also reported numerous finds of great heaps of shredded and broken large animal bones in Canada, and flash frozen Mammoths with undigested buttercups in their stomachs in Siberia, of the right age.
Regarding bay formations, could great chunks of ice have been blown all over the place causing gouges, and/or sitting and melting and forming pools which which would subsequently be modified by wind and frost?
For more than 30 years I have thought that the Younger Dryas could have been caused by a boloid impact. I thought it might have been in the North Atlantic after I read something about tectites found in our southern states oriented to the northeast of the right age. Unfortunately I have been unable to refind this information.
I would guess no because of the heat.
I knew you would post this. Look forward to the comments. Can you put me on your C&GGG pinglist?
Can you recommend a good book on this sort of stuff that is simultaneously mainstream, but includes this sort of degree of controversy, w/ maybe some more controversial stuff thrown in?
I had some disaggregated schist last week, but a little Pepto-Bismol cleared it right up.
The other difficulty with the freeze-thaw theory is that, in the Carolina coastal plain where these bays are found, you'd be hard-pressed to find a rock. The nearest loose rocks to be found are probably fifty or a hundred feet straight down, or westward to the nearest granite upthrust (about to I-95).
I always associated the iridium layer with the punctuated equilibrium theory (Alvarez?) that stated the earth goes through some sort of asteroid complex about every 90 million years (relax, we are in the middle of a cycle) which leads to a catastrophic extinction of a lot of species.
No doubt a residual differential between grain sizes of the sand in the area would be sufficient to give this effect.
People advocating a celestial origin for the Carolina Bays still need to answer two questions: 1) If the bays were formed in an impact event, why is there no deformation or fracturing of the soil layers below the bottom of the bays? The geology underlying the indentations shows no deformation at all, suggesting that the bays were deposited, dug, or eroded through some mechanism. 2) Why do core samples of the bays indicate wildly different ages for the indentations? According the sedimentary core samples taken from the bays, they were formed over a span of at least 30,000 years, and possibly more.
No celestial explanation can satisfy those issues. Personally, I’ve always thought they looked like thaw-basin ponds myself. Open Google Earth and look at the lakes south of Barrow Alaska. They are NOT hexagonal. Extremely wet marshland will form a hexagonal pattern because the “ponds” all durectly contact each other and it’s an efficient pattern for sharing stress as the ice expands in each. In the flatter and slightly drier plains, the result is an oriented series of shallow oval shaped ponds, with their direction selected by the prevailing wind. Warm these ponds up, cover them in a swampy forest, and you end up with a spitting image of the Carolina Bays.
Bryan Sykes is easier to read but Oppnheimer's book has the most data.
Origins Of The Bristish (Stephen Oppenheimer)
Saxons, Vikings And Celts (Bryan Sykes)
A great impact structure was recently discovered in the vicinity of the lower Chesapeake Bay (Poag, et al., 1992). Another large crater is possibly suggested by seismic reflection data approximately 60 miles offshore from Atlantic City. These craters are the probable source of tectites (impact ejecta) found in sediments of Late Eocene age (~35 million years ago) and younger sediments throughout the Coastal Plain region.
this website may be of interest.
First you have to have permafrost.
There is no evidence of such on the coastal plain of the Carolinas.
It is the ejected material, as shown to the left of the pictured strike, that would be propelled at a low angle....this ejected material could account for the Georgia formations....
Nothing bug ice shaped rocks around here ~ gazillions of them too.
Actually the Chesapeake crater, which is 34 million years old, ranges from Exmore on the DelMarVa Peninsula to Norfolk, about 50 miles in diameter. There is a 9 mile diameter crater off Atlantic City of the same age. Also the Popigai Crater in Siberia of the same age about 60 miles in diameter. The tectites I was referring to, which I may remember wrongly from 30 years ago, I thought were about 12 thousand years old.
The info on the Chesapeake event leads me to the thought that there may have been more than one boloid strike at the start of the Younger Dryas. This could explain certain anomolies.
If you have not yet read the book Chesapeake Invader by C. Wylie Poag, you might want to check it out.
The splash material could well be directed radially from the crater. If the Carolina bays are divots from the splash material, a substantial round crater should be discovered in the direction indicated by the orientation of the ponds.
By great chunks of ice, I meant chunks that might have been blown out of any crater blown into the ice sheets. Like water dropping into a puddle splashes out water from the puddle.
bump
It would be fascinating to see the location of these 26 sites, and the possibility of a "pattern".
Having read extensively about the Sudbury crater, Ontario Canada, made me wonder if it is only one of hundreds of impacts and/or explosions that occurred over a very brief period of time, spraying North America with evidence.
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