CHOWAN COUNTY, N.C.
Rockyhock Bay was pretty obvious, even from the road. It was a dense cluster of tall trees and short shrubs, a dark green oasis in a flat plain, encircled by an unpaved road. It was also enclosed by a tall chain-link fence.
"That does not deter me," George Howard said, but forays up farm roads dead-ended long before the bay was in reach. Abandoning the SUV, the three researchers struck out through a melon field that sloped gently up from the fence.
"I wonder if that's not the rim right there," Malcolm LeCompte mused. "That's the white sand."
Allen West knelt and began to fill a plastic bag.
Howard has never been deterred by much. An overwhelming personality, he has a business, a family, a mammoth tusk over the plasma TV, an unmatched ability to find things online and a deep interest in Carolina bays, which he heard of while working in environmental affairs for Congress. His boss at the time was a North Carolina senator, who had a topographical map.
"I saw these odd-looking ellipses on it," Howard recalls, "and I said, 'What in the world are those, senator?' and he said, 'Oh, meteor holes.' "
An avocation was launched. Now Howard co-owns a wetlands restoration business, whose first job was restoring a series of drained Carolina bays. In his spare time, he and a friend dig and mail soil samples from the bays to West, a geophysicist who lives in Arizona.
West analyzes them for diamonds.
Across North America and in at least two European countries, the start of the Younger Dryas cold spell is marked in the soil by a layer called a black mat, although it may also be white or bluish in color. The mat is topped by a layer of sediment holding few or no human artifacts, indicating a lack of occupation for many years after it was deposited.
Clovis artifacts and Pleistocene bones are found directly below the black mat, never above it.
Fourteen kinds of minerals, gases and other materials have been found in the black mat, and in every Carolina bay tested, more than a dozen so far. They are extraterrestrial markers, and they have been found at all of the Clovis sites studied by the team, at the point in time when that culture basically vanished.
The markers include charcoal and heavy metals, plus the element iridium. Iridium found in a worldwide soot layer deposited 65 million years ago was key to linking dinosaur extinctions to the Chicxulub impact crater under the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.
Other markers found in the Carolina bays include spiky glasslike pieces of carbon; fullerenes, which are round objects that resemble soccer balls because of their six-sided pattern; helium-3, an isotope not found naturally on this planet; and hollow balls of carbon.
The clincher, as far as West is concerned, is nanodiamonds, so named for a good reason - 10,000 would fit across the width of a human hair.
"What we have found is, several big Carolina bays are lined with diamonds," he said. "This is the first time extraterrestrial materials have been found lining the bays."
West has found diamonds inside the carbon spherules and trapped in the glasslike carbon. He says that suggests, but does not yet prove, that an extraterrestrial impact created the bays.
"Even though the diamonds are the strongest of those 14 markers, it's the collective weight of all 14 of them that's important," West said. "It's very difficult to argue that all 14 of them, in the same layer across two continents, is accidental. It wasn't accidental when the dinosaurs went extinct, and it's not accidental now, we think."
Diamonds found in the bays and at Clovis archaeological sites across the country are rounded and strangely shaped because they were created within seconds, unlike slow-forming diamonds in the ground. There is, West said, no way to explain it other than an impact. Such diamonds have been found in one other location on Earth: in an oil field surrounding the Chicxulub crater.
He finished filling the plastic bag with sand. If lab tests reveal carbon spherules, they will be examined for nanodiamonds.
"A single carbon spherule is about the size of a period at the end of a sentence," he said. "And in that, there may be as many as a billion diamonds."
He strode back to the SUV through sand hot enough to burn skin.
"I can't tell you how long I've had this dream to come to Rockyhock Bay," West said.
"Right up there with the pyramids," Howard said.
"Actually, I like this better than the pyramids."
"About the same temperature," Howard replied, and drove out of the field.
Critics of the impact theory say the 14 markers rain down on Earth all the time as dust from outer space. West says the markers in the black mat and in the Carolina bays are many times more abundant than those normal background levels. Such high levels are found only in association with cosmic impacts, he said, but not everyone is convinced.
As further evidence for the impact theory, the group cites the work of other scientists. Some have reported finding Clovis tools and mammoth tusks gouged on just one side by radioactive grains of dust, all dug in from the direction of the Great Lakes. Others have concluded that floods up to 1,000 feet deep roared across the Northwest states. Still others have studied the loss of ocean circulation and found Hudson Bay sediments off Africa and Europe, carried there, they think, by icebergs flushed into the southern seas by the influx of fresh water from the melted ice sheet.
West and his colleagues presented their impact hypothesis at the American Geophysical Union meeting in October 2007. (An entire morning of the meeting was devoted to papers, pro and con, about it.) Shortly thereafter, hearkening back to the great debates of the mid-1900s, the journal Science published the first criticism of it.
In May, the Geological Society of America published another paper that called the evidence "a Frankenstein monster, incompatible with any single impactor or any known impact event." The rebuttal from Firestone and West, published in the same issue, concludes: "The truth may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true."
In June, a rebuttal to the rebuttal, published online, warns against "a few markers collected in good faith from an abundant background, combined with a good story and some wishful thinking."
A paper about the diamonds has been submitted to two major international journals. West hopes it will be out soon.
In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. As it plunged toward the planet, the comet broke apart until there were at least 20 pieces. One by one, they disappeared into the gaseous planet. Huge scars began to appear like open wounds, and the marks remained visible to telescopes on Earth for many months.
Critics say impacts are so infrequent that the Younger Dryas must have been caused by something else. They say there is no visible crater near the Great Lakes. Supporters point to Shoemaker-Levy 9, and to the fact that impact craters on Earth have been recognized for only a few decades, and may be more plentiful than anyone knows. Since 1960, 174 have been listed in the Earth Impact Database.
Over dinner in Kitty Hawk one June evening, LeCompte and West discussed the Tunguska event of 1908. From miles away, witnesses reported a brilliant flash and huge explosions over a remote region of Siberia. Twenty years later, when researchers finally reached the site, they found 772 square miles of dead trees splayed in a radial pattern, and elliptical-shaped bogs aligned with the center.
Today, it is widely accepted that a piece of a comet or a small meteor exploded. There is no visible crater. Less well-known is a suspected impact on Aug. 13, 1930, in remote Brazil near the Peruvian border. A monk arriving five days later reported that native Indians said three fiery balls from space had exploded, obscuring the sun with dust and setting fires that were still burning. Researchers have pointed out that the event occurred during the annual Perseid meteor shower, which is caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.
LeCompte, a remote imaging specialist from Elizabeth City State University, says the danger to Earth from comet debris and other small cosmic objects seems to be greater than officially calculated.
"These things still remain a threat, and that threat is not well known," he says. "It's a very political issue. So this whole thing about the Younger Dryas impact is going right in the face of that whole issue because it suggests that the impacts are more frequent than the models might suggest."
The Algonquin Indians tell a story they say is the oldest of their people. In it, the Great Spirit warned that a star would fall, and the people who listened hid themselves in deep mud. An object appeared in the sky, as bright as a second sun, with a long, glowing tail that enveloped the Earth. Trees burned, lakes and rivers boiled, rocks shattered.
After the star had climbed back into the sky, the people emerged to find their world completely changed. The giant animals had died, leaving only their bones behind. The Great Spirit warned that the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star would someday return.
"In this story, this long-tailed bright object, which sounds a whole lot like a comet, the tail was responsible for killing giant animals," West said. "They actually have those in the story, giant animals. It killed many of the people; they say it was so hot it caused the ice to melt off the mountains, it caused rocks to melt, and it caused all the trees to catch on fire."
Then there is the predictive part of the story, he said: "If our orbit, and the orbit of this object that we think hit us coincided once, then the odds are extremely high that it would coincide again. There are astronomers that have looked at the orbits of some of these heavily fragmented comets, and Earth crosses several of them every year."
These coinciding orbits create the Leonid, Perseid, Geminid and Taurid meteor showers every year.
"So it certainly is conceivable that some of the shooting stars that we see today are remnants of the object that we think hit us 12,900 years ago," West said.
"You look up in the sky, you see those old fireflies coming in, well, multiply them by a thousand times and that's possibly what the Clovis people would have seen."
If lines are drawn along the long axes of the Carolina bays, then extended several hundred miles, they converge at two spots: one near the Great Lakes, and one in southern Canada. This holds true for the bays that are north of Virginia, because they point a little more westerly, and the bays that are south of South Carolina, because they point a little more to the north.
West sketched out the location of the Carolina bays along the East Coast, their long axes aligned toward the Great Lakes.
Then he added the "rainwater basins" of Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, which are baylike depressions oriented toward the northeast, with the long axes pointing to the same spot near the Great Lakes. The two areas fan out like butterfly wings on either side of the central point.
It is the same shape made by impact spatters on the moon and Mars, when material is flung out of a forming crater, West said.
"The implications of this research are that this is a type of impact that was unknown before," West said, "and is very much like the impact when Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter. No one knew that could happen, either. So it appears that these kinds of things, because they leave so little evidence, that they are quite likely far more frequent than space scientists have known in the past.
"That poses substantial danger for the culture. If these things even happen every 50,000 years or 100,000 years, then at some point in the future one of them's going to happen, and then it's going to seriously disrupt our civilization.
"This is one thing - unlike al-Qaida, unlike the bird flu, unlike probably global warming - that has the potential to end our species. Any enlightened civilization cannot let these things hit it. We need to do something about it."
Back on the highway, Howard turned again onto Sandy Ridge Road.
"There's a sandy ridge there, all right," West observed, consulting a map of the Carolina bays. "The rim runs right under that house."
He pondered a cornfield that filled another bay. The white sand rim dipped into dark soil at the
center of the field, then rose at the end of the row into white sand again. West wished for a sample to test.
"If we're going to prove this hypothetical comet, it's incumbent on us to find the evidence," he said. The small plastic bags that might hold it were sitting in the back seat.
The afternoon sun blazed. Smoke smudged the air, drifting from a peat fire to the south that was burning between two Carolina bay lakes. As the highway rolled by, West pointed out signs for Two Mile Desert Road and Great Desert Road. Not really desert, said the Arizona resident.
"Desert means pocosin," Howard explained, "because it's monotonous."
"One man's monotony is another man's Carolina bay," West replied, and the road dipped, just a little, to cross another one.
Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com
After the star had climbed back into the sky, the people emerged to find their world completely changed. The giant animals had died, leaving only their bones behind. The Great Spirit warned that the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star would someday return.
"In this story, this long-tailed bright object, which sounds a whole lot like a comet, the tail was responsible for killing giant animals," West said. "They actually have those in the story, giant animals. It killed many of the people; they say it was so hot it caused the ice to melt off the mountains, it caused rocks to melt, and it caused all the trees to catch on fire."
thanks for posting, I enjoyed every word!