"Is it possible that something close to a conspiracy is at work in
science to prevent the proper consideration and wide public uptake
of catastrophist ideas?
We've seen what happened to
J. Harlen Bretz.
The frosty and deeply
unpleasant reception initially given to his findings, the years that
he spent in academic limbo afterwards, the repeated, persistent ,
efforts made by a host of scholars to dismiss his evidence entirely,
or, failing that, to account for it by gradualist means, and then at
last, years later, when all that had failed and the notion of
outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula had offered itself as a
solution, the realization that he had been right all along.
But not
right, not right under any circumstances, not right in any
imaginable universe, on the issue of the single cataclysmic "debacle" that his instincts had originally led him to!
If J Harlen
Bretz was to be right, then it was necessary that he should be right
in a politically - correct way - in other words, in a way that could
be redacted by skilled uniformitarian spin-meisters to edit out any
hint of a global catastrophe lurking between the lines!
Since 2007, however, hints of just such a catastrophe have returned,
and with a vengeance, in the form of a new scientific theory, the
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which,
"proposes that a major cosmic
impact event occurred at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) 12,800
years ago."52
The proponents of the hypothesis suggest that the
agency was a giant comet that broke up into multiple fragments
either before or during its entry into earth's atmosphere, and
suggest also that North America was the epicenter of the resulting
cataclysm with several of the largest fragments of the bolide
impacting directly on the North American ice cap.
The epoch which geologists call the Younger Dryas (after a species
of Alpine flower that flourishes in cold conditions) has long been
recognized as mysterious and tumultuous.
When it began 12,800 years
ago the earth had been emerging from the Ice Age for roughly 10,000
years, global temperatures were rising steadily and the ice caps
were melting.
Then there was a sudden dramatic return to colder
conditions - nearly as cold as at the peak of the Ice Age 21,000
years ago.
This short, sharp deep freeze lasted for 1,200 years
until 11,600 years ago when the warming trend resumed with
incredible rapidity, global temperatures shot up again and the
remaining ice caps quite quickly melted away, dumping all the water
they contained into the oceans and raising sea level significantly
all around the world.
What set these upheavals in motion?
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is a comprehensive attempt to
answer that question and is the work of 63 highly-qualified
scientists from 55 universities in 16 countries, collaborating as
the Comet Research Group.53
Members include,
-
nuclear analytical
chemist Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory
-
world-renowned oceanographer Jim Kennett of the
University of
-
Wendy Wollbach Professor of Inorganic
Chemistry and Geochemistry at DePaul University
-
Albert Goodyear,
Professor of Archaeology at the University of South Carolina
-
Geophysicist Allen West
-
Astrophysicist Malcolm Le Compte
-
Geologists James Teller and Ted Bunch,
...and more than 50 other
leading researchers from a wide range of disciplines.54
Such a stellar assembly, cannot be dismissed as
"lunatic fringe" - usually the easiest way for defenders of the gradualist status quo
to denigrate catastrophists. Comet Research Group members, clearly,
are not fringe people!
On the contrary, they're as mainstream as can
be, and they have adhered throughout to rigorous methods and
protocols.
The world of science has therefore been obliged to take
their evidence seriously - even though it very clearly points in a
dangerous and radical direction and, as Jim Kennett puts it:
"challenges some existing paradigms within several disciplines."55
Ideas that challenge paradigms typically don't get official funding,
so it's no surprise that Comet Research Group members have received
none.
This, however, has not deterred them from continuing with
their research - which has been consistently of such high quality,
yielding such striking results that the gradualist establishment has
been unable to prevent publication in a wide range of prestigious
scientific journals including the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Geology, Quaternary
International, and Nature's Scientific Reports.
These in turn have
led to stories in the scientific and popular press putting the
information in front of a much wider audience.
The first headline that caught my eye was in the British magazine
New Scientist of 22 May 2007 and asked provocatively:
"DID A COMET WIPE
OUT PREHISTORIC AMERICANS?"
At that time, 2007, I was taking a break from the lost civilization
mystery that had absorbed my energies, and been the subject of so
many of my books, for so long.
The New Scientist article tweaked my
curiosity, however, because it referred to the exact epoch that I
had focused on in my books. The article didn't speak of a lost
civilization, but began with a reference to the so-called "Clovis"
culture of North America (named after the type site at Blackwater
Draw near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the characteristic "fluted point" stone weaponry of the Clovis culture was first
found).56
This culture mysteriously vanished from the archaeological
record during the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
The article addressed the mystery:
"The Clovis people flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery
of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant
threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant
short-faced bears. It's unlikely, however, that they thought death
would come from the sky.
"According to results presented by a team of researchers this week
at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico,
that's where the Clovis people's doom came from.
Citing several
lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled
into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago [N.B. that date
would later be revised downwards by a hundred years to
12,800 years ago], fractured into pieces and exploded in
giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield
as Europe.'
"Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and one of the team''s three principal investigators,
claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the
aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing
an abrupt end to the Clovis culture.
'"The entire
continent was on fire,'" he says.
"Lead team member Richard Firestone, a nuclear analytical chemist at
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, says the
evidence lies in a narrow 12,900-year-old carbon-rich layer of
sediment found at eight well-dated Clovis-era sites and a peppering
of sediment cores across North America, as well as one site in
Belgium.
"Probed as to why no crater had yet been identified with this
hypothetical impact 12,900 years ago, a third team member,
Arizona-based geophysicist Allen West, suggested that smaller,
low-density parts of the comet would have exploded in the
atmosphere, while larger fragments might have crashed into the mile
deep ice cap that covered North America at that time.
'Such
craters,' West observed, 'would have been ice-walled and basically
melted away at the end of the last ice age',' leaving few traces.57'
The article went on to explain that the sediment samples the team's
evidence focused on contained several different types of debris
that could only have come from an extraterrestrial source, such as a
comet or an asteroid.
The debris included nanodiamonds, created by
the shock and heat of impacts, tiny carbon spherules that form when
molten droplets cool rapidly in air, and carbon molecules containing
the rare isotope helium-3, far more abundant in the cosmos than on
Earth.58
""You might
find some other explanation for these individually,'"
says Firestone, '"but taken together, it's pretty clear
that there was an impact.'"
""The team says the agent of destruction was probably
a comet, since the key sediment layer lacks both the high nickel and
iridium levels characteristic of asteroid impacts."'59
Last but not least, the New Scientist article confirmed, all the
evidence pointed to North America as the epicentre of the disaster:
"Levels of the apparent extraterrestrial debris, for example, are
highest at the Gainey archaeological site in Michigan, just beyond
the southern reach of North America's primary ice sheet 12,900 years
ago. Moreover, levels decrease the further you go from Gainey,
suggesting that the comet blew up largely over Canada..." '60
In other words, largely over the ice cap that covered the northern
half of North America during the Ice Age - the source of all the meltwater that scarred and hacked the scablands of Washington State
in "Bretz's flood" (whether or not that meltwater came exclusively
from Lake Missoula or gushed forth in far larger quantities than
Lake Missoula, alone, could ever have held).
Bretz himself, as we've
seen, was forced to abandon his own strong intuition that there had
been a single, massive meltwater flood in favor of multiple
flushings of limited amounts of meltwater out of Lake Missoula again
and again over thousands of years.
The primary reason he embraced this theory, however, was not that he
had become a convert to gradualism, but because he was never able to
explain how a large enough area of the ice-cap to supply all the
vast amounts of water needed for his flood could simply have melted
all at once.
He had proposed two possibilities
- dramatic overnight
global warming on the one hand, or volcanic activity under the ice
cap on the other - but, as the reader will recall, he very quickly
conceded there was no evidence for either.
What Bretz did not
consider, and could not consider - because the relevant data only
began to come in quarter of a century after his death - was the
possibility that the ice cap could have undergone cataclysmic
melting as a result of a comet impact.
If only Bretz had
known...
A few months after the article appeared in New Scientist, the Comet
Research Group published a detailed paper on their findings.
It
appeared in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (PNAS) on 9 October 2007.
Despite the sober setting, the
headline was dramatic:
"EVIDENCE FOR AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL IMPACT 12,900 YEARS AGO THAT
CONTRIBUTED TO THE MEGAFAUNAL EXTINCTIONS AND THE YOUNGER DRYAS
COOLING".
'A carbon-rich layer,'
summarized the team:
"dating to around 12,900 years ago, has been previously identified
at Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous
with the abrupt onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling.
The in situ
bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool
assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above
it.
Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of
Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we
provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event close to
12,900 years ago, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental
changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological
reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioural
shifts at the end of the Clovis Period.
Clovis-age sites in North
America are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak
abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic
microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules,
(vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes
with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and
associated biomass burning circa 12,900 years ago...
We propose
that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over
northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice
Sheet and triggering YD cooling.
The shock wave, thermal pulse, and
event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning
and food limitations) contributed to megafaunal extinctions..." '61
Nor were the mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, camels,
giant beaver and other megafauna alone. In total, it is particularly
striking that no less than thirty-five genera of mammals (with each
genus consisting of several species) became extinct in North America
between 12,900 and 11,600 years ago, i.e. precisely during the
mysterious Younger Dryas cold event.62
Looking at the data, the implications of this new research were
immediately obvious to me.
What it offered, if it checked out, was
an elegant and potentially revolutionary explanation both for the
sudden onset of the Younger Dryas itself and for the accompanying
extinctions, and perhaps for much else besides - including the
cataclysmic flooding that left its scars on the channeled scablands
of Washington State.
This seemed all the more plausible when I learned that Firestone,
Kennett and West's proposal for their comet was that it was a
conglomeration of impactors including one that might have been as
much as 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) in diameter.63
Furthermore, that
four-kilometer object would itself have been just one amongst
multiple fragments resulting from the earlier disintegration - while
still in orbit - of a giant comet up to 100 kilometers or more in
diameter.64
Many of the fragments of the parent comet remained in
orbit. Those that hit the earth at the onset of the Younger Dryas
underwent further explosive fragmentation (accompanied by powerful
airbursts that would themselves have had cataclysmic effects), as
they entered the atmosphere over Canada.
Nonetheless, the authors thought it likely that a number of large
impactors, up to two kilometers in diameter, would have remained
intact to collide with the ice-cap.65 There, as West had earlier
told New Scientist, any craters would have been transient, leaving
few permanent traces on the ground after the ice had melted.
"Lasting evidence," the PNAS paper added,
"may have been limited to
enigmatic depressions or disturbances in the Canadian Shield, e.g.
under the Great Lakes, or Hudson Bay."66
Summarizing the damage, the authors envisaged:
"a devastating, high-temperature shock wave with extreme
overpressure, followed by underpressure, resulting in intense winds
travelling across North America at hundreds of kilometers an hour,
accompanied by powerful, impact-generated vortices.
In addition,
whether single or multiple objects collided with the earth, a hot
fireball would have immersed the region near the impacts...
At
greater distances the re-entry of high-speed, superheated ejecta
would have induced extreme wildfires which would have decimated
forests and grasslands, destroying the food supplies of herbivores
and producing charcoal, soot, toxic fumes and ash."'67
And how might all this have caused the dramatic cooling of the
Younger Dryas?
The authors offered many mechanisms operating
together, amongst the most prominent of these being the huge plume
of water vapor from the melted ice cap that would have been cast
into the upper atmosphere, combined with immense quantities of dust
and debris "composed of the impactor, ice-sheet detritus, and the
underlying crust" as well as the smoke and soot from continent-wide
wildfires.68
Taken in sum, it's quite easy to understand how so much
lofted debris could, as the authors propose,
"have led to cooling by
blockage of sunlight"; meanwhile the water vapor, smoke, soot and
ice would have promoted the growth of "persistent cloudiness and
noctilucent clouds, leading to reduced sunlight and surface cooling... [thus reducing] the solar insolation at high latitudes,
increasing snow accumulation and causing further cooling in the
feedback loop."69
Severe and devastating enough in themselves, these factors
nonetheless pale into insignificance when compared with the
consequences of the hypothesized impacts on the ice cap:
"The largest potential effect would have been impact-related partial
destabilization and/or melting of the ice -sheet. In the short term
this would have suddenly released meltwater and rafts of ice into
the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, lowering ocean salinity with
consequent surface cooling.
The longer-term cooling effects would
have resulted largely from the consequent weakening of thermohaline
circulation in the northern Atlantic, sustaining YD cooling for
[more than] 1,000 years until the feedback mechanisms restored ocean
circulation."'70
Impact-related partial destabilization and/or melting of the ice-sheet!
And to such an extent that it was capable of disrupting the
circulation of the world's oceans for more than a thousand years!
What was envisaged here, clearly, was a cataclysm - a debacle! - on
a truly massive scale. But what struck me most forcefully in the
paragraph quoted above was that the authors had only considered the
consequences of the huge quantities of icebergs and meltwater dumped
into the oceans north, west and east of the North American epicenter
of their proposed comet impacts.
They did not consider the effects
of that gigantic icy flood on the lands lying immediately south of
the ice cap - which most certainly would not have been spared.
Once again I found myself wondering how J Harlen Bretz might have
reacted if information about a possible comet impact had been at his
disposal during his lifetime. I cannot prove it, of course, but I
think he would have been much less likely to be distracted by Lake
Missoula gradualism and much more likely - now that a credible heat
source had been provided - to stick to his catastrophist guns.
A
single, cataclysmic meltwater flood on a truly gigantic scale coming
directly off the ice cap to scour the scablands begins to look very
feasible indeed in the light of the case made by Firestone, West,
Kennett and the large team of scientists working with them.
Meanwhile my own hypothesis of an advanced civilization of
prehistoric antiquity obliterated from the face of the earth during
the Younger Dryas "window", is also strengthened by their work. For
if their calculations are correct the explosive power of the Younger
Dryas comet would have been of the order of ten million megatons.71
That makes it two million times greater in its effects than the
former USSR's Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested,72
and a thousand times greater than the estimated explosive power
(10,000 megatons) of all nuclear devices stockpiled in the world
today.73
A global disaster of such magnitude at exactly the time I
suggested in my 1995 book
Fingerprints of the Gods does not prove
the existence of a lost civilization of the Ice Age but does at
least provide us with a mechanism large enough - if such a
civilization did exist - to have obliterated it almost entirely from
human memory.
The evidence continues to mount
Since it has such important ramifications for almost everything we
think we know about the safety and security of the earth's cosmic
environment, and about our own past, it is reasonable to ask how
solid the Younger Dryas comet impact theory really is.
Since 2007,
when it was first proposed, how has it stood up to scientific
scrutiny and what new evidence has been brought forward in support
of it?
The answer is that it has stood the test of time well and benefitted
from a steady accumulation of new evidence set out in the proper way
in the scientific literature and subject to rigorous peer review.
There is neither space nor need, here, to explore this extensive
literature in depth, but to give the general picture I will list the
dates and titles of a few of the more important papers, with brief
summaries of the conclusions and full references in the footnotes:
2008 (Quaternary Science Reviews):
Wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California's Northern
Channel Islands at the Allerod-Younger Dryas Boundary. 'Evidence for
ecosystem disruption at 13,000 to 12,900 years ago on these offshore
islands is consistent with the Younger Dryas Boundary cosmic impact
hypothesis.'74
2009 (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences):
Shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in Younger Dryas Boundary
sediments. 'The presence of shock-synthesized hexagonal and other
nanometer-sized diamonds in YDB sediments in association with soot
and other wildfire indicators is consistent with a cosmic impact at
12,900 years ago, and the hypothesis that the Earth crossed paths
with a swarm of comets or carbonaceous chondrites producing
airshocks and/or surface impacts that contributed to abrupt
ecosystem disruption and megafaunal extinctions in North America.'75
2010 (Journal of Glaciology; Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society; Sedimentary Geology):
Discovery of a nanodiamond-rich layer in the Greenland ice sheet.
'The presence of rounded nanodiamonds and lonsdaleite in Greenland
ice suggests that a large cosmic impact occurred... The existence
of this layer… appears consistent with the occurrence of a
major impact event that correlates with the nanodiamond-rich YDB in
North America at 12,900 years ago.'76
Palaeolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex.
'Intersection with
the debris of a large (50-100 km) short-period comet during the
Upper Palaeolithic provides a satisfactory explanation for the
catastrophe of celestial origin which has been postulated to have
occurred around 12,900 years ago and which presaged a return to Ice
Age conditions of about 1,300 years duration.
The Taurid Complex
appears to be the debris of this erstwhile comet; it includes about
19 of the brightest near-Earth objects.'77
Evidence for a Cosmogenic Origin of fired glaciofluvial beds in the
Northwestern Andes: Correlation with Experimentally Heated Quartz
and Feldspar.
'Fired
sediment, considered equivalent to the '"Black Mat'"
impact of 12,900 years ago has been located and analyzed
in the Andes of Northwestern Venezuela.
The '"Black
Mat'" refers to possible fallout from the comet airburst
presumed to have occurred over the Laurentide Ice Sheet,
the impact spreading ejecta over large portions of North
America and Europe, making it an interhemispheric event
of considerable magnitude...
The presence
of copious monazite in the carbonaceous coatings is
considered part of the incoming ejecta, as it is not a
common indicator mineral in the local lithology...
The
intergrowth of carbonaceous '"black mat'" material with
thermally disrupted and fragmented quartz and feldspar,
a '"welded'" patina of 100-400nm thickness, could only
occur with temperatures in excess of 900 degrees Centigrade, the
event here interpreted to be of cosmogenic origin.'78
2011 (Earth & Planetary Science Letters):
Framboidal iron oxide: Chondrite-like material from the black mat,
Murray Springs, Arizona.
'At the end
of the Pleistocene a Younger Dryas '"black mat'" was deposited on top of the Pleistocene
sediments in many parts of North America.
A study of the magnetic
fraction from the basal section of the black mat at Murray Springs,
AZ, revealed the presence of amorphous iron-oxide framboids in a
glassy iron-silica matrix. [Our] data suggest that the observed
textures are... due... to a shock event that fractured and
largely amorphised the grains...
Therefore, we argue that these
particles are the product of a hypervelocity impact event.'79
2012 (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences):
Evidence from central Mexico supporting the Younger Dryas
extraterrestrial impact hypothesis.
'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... We... 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 airbursts and/or ground impacts at 12,900 years ago.'80
Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic
airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago.
'We examined sediment
sequences from 18 dated Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) sites across
three continents...
All sites display abundant microspherules in
the YDB with none or few above and below. In addition, three sites... display vesicular, high-temperature siliceous scoria-like
objects, or SLO's, that match the spherules geochemically...
Our
observations indicate that YDB objects are similar to material
produced in nuclear airbursts, impact crater plumes and cosmic
airbursts, and strongly support the hypothesis of multiple cosmic
airbursts/impacts at 12,900 years ago.
Data presented here require
that thermal radiation from air shocks was sufficient to melt
surface sediments at temperatures up to or greater than the boiling
point of quartz (2,200 degrees centigrade).'81
2013 (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Journal of
Geology):
Large Pt anomaly in the Greenland ice core points to a cataclysm at
the onset of Younger Dryas.
'One explanation of the abrupt cooling
episode known as the Younger Dryas (YD) is a cosmic impact or
airburst at the YD boundary that triggered cooling and resulted in
other calamities.
We tested the YD impact hypothesis by analyzing
ice samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core
across the Bolling-Allerod/YD boundary for major and trace elements.
We found a large platinum (Pt) anomaly at the YDB... Circumstantial evidence hints at an extraterrestrial source... [perhaps] a metal impactor with an unusual composition…'82
New Evidence from a Black Mat Site in the Northern Andes Supporting
a Cosmic Impact 12,800 years ago.
'The spherules from Venezuela are
morphologically and compositionally identical to YDB spherules
documented elsewhere... on three continents, North America,
Europe and Asia, confirming the YDB magnetic spherule results of
previous researchers. Their microstructural texturing indicates they
formed from melting and rapid quenching...
Thus the most likely
origin of the spherules seems to be by cosmic impact/airburst 12,800
years ago with interhemispheric consequences.
The site in Venezuela,
along with one in Peru, are the two southernmost sites currently
known to display evidence for the YDB impact event, and these sites
represent the first evidence that the effects of the impact event
extended into South America, even into the Southern Hemisphere.'83
2014 (Journal of Geology):
Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major
Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP.
'A major cosmic-impact event has
been proposed at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling episode at
12,800 years (plus or minus 150 years) before the present, forming
the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) Layer distributed across up to 50
million square kilometers on four continents.
In 24 dated stratigraphic sections in 10 countries of the Northern Hemisphere,
the YDB layer contains a clearly-defined abundance peak in
nanodiamonds (NDs), a major cosmic impact proxy...
The large body
of evidence now obtained about YDB NDs is strongly consistent with
an origin by cosmic impact around 12,800 years ago and is
inconsistent with formation of YDB ND by natural terrestrial
processes, including wildfires, anthropogenesis, and/or influx of
cosmic dust.'84
Taking on the dogmatic uniformitarians
By 2014, after seven years of publishing their data in leading
scientific journals, and with such an impressive accumulation of
evidence, one would have thought that the Younger Dryas impact
theory should, by now, be fully accepted and that researchers would
have moved on to a broader consideration of the implications of such
a recent and hitherto unsuspected global cataclysm for our
understanding of the history of the earth and of our own species.
However, we've already seen from the example of J Harlen Bretz how
scientists wedded to the uniformitarian and gradualist reference
frame react with extreme negative force to catastrophist theories.
Nor was Bretz an exception.
Alfred Wegener, who first proposed the
notion of continental drift - plate tectonics - was similarly
pilloried, as, subsequently, were,
Luis and Walter Alvarez (the Chicxulub,
'K-T' impact), Steven J. Gould (punctuated equilibrium),
Victor Clube and Bill Napier (coherent catastrophism), and James
Lovelock, Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina and Lynn Margulis for their
contributions to geophysiology and the Gaia theory.
It should come
as no surprise, therefore, that Richard Firestone, Allen West, James
Kennett and others who have followed the evidence and stuck their
necks out to suggest that a comet impact caused the Younger Dryas,
have also come under sustained and bitter attack.
Indeed the triumphant crowing of critics who clearly believe they
have done away, once and for all, with the heretical catastrophism
of Firestone, West and Kennett, has filled the academic air several
times in the past few years.
On each occasion you can almost hear
the collective sigh of relief as if to say "thank God; we finally
got those bastards"; but then a few months later comes the
devastating and absolutely convincing refutation that forces the
critics back to the drawing board.
It's quite noticeable, reviewing the literature, that academics form
themselves into gangs. The ringleaders in the "anti-YD-impact" camp,
whose names appear frequently at the top of critical articles,
include,
Mark Boslough, a physicist on the technical staff of Sandia
National Laboratories, Nicholas Pinter, a geology professor at
Southern Illinois University, Tyrone Daulton, a research physicist
at Washington University's Institute of Materials Science and
Engineering, and Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University
of Wyoming.
In 2012 they teamed up with half a dozen colleagues to publish a
paper entitled "Arguments and Evidence Against a Younger Dryas
Impact Event".'85
And a year earlier Pinter, Daulton and some of the
authors of the 2012 attack had joined forces to write a paper
hubrisistically entitled: "The Younger Dryas Hypothesis: A
Requiem".86
To paraphrase Mark Twain,
reports of the death of the comet theory
had been greatly exaggerated.
For example, one of the key critiques made in the 2012 paper was
that:
"Magnetic
microspherule abundance results published by the impact
proponents have not been reproducible by other workers.
Analyses of the
same YD site stratigraphy by Surovell et. al. [2009] could
not replicate observations for two of the impact markers
published by Firestone et. al. [2007].
The study by
Surovell et. al. [2009] found no peaks of abundance unique
to the YD time interval.87"
But the impact proponents were later able to show that the authors
of the 2012 paper "neglected to cite nine independent spherule
studies on two continents that reported finding significant YDB
[Younger Dryas Boundary] spherule abundances."88
More damning,
though, was the fact that when other scientists repeated the
analysis of Surovell et. al., their findings did indeed support an
impact.
The scientists concluded that:
"the inability of Surovell et. al. to find YDB spherule peaks
resulted from not adhering to the prescribed extraction protocol.'
For example, Surovell et. al., did not conduct any analyses using
scanning electron microscopy, a necessary procedure clearly
specified by Firestone et. al.".'89
A separate independent study by Macolm LeCompte, Christopher Moore
and others noted that the authors of the 2012 paper
"collected and
analysed samples from seven YDB sites, purportedly using the same
protocol as Firestone et .al., but did not find a single spherule in
YDB sediments at two previously reported sites."90
LeCompte et .al.
set out to examine this discrepancy.
After a thorough investigation
of all the evidence their results cast the conclusions of the 2012
paper into even deeper shadow:
"We conducted an independent blind investigation of two sites common
to both studies, and a third site investigated only by Surovell et
.al.
We found abundant YDB microspherules at all three widely
separated sites consistent with the results of Firestone et .al. and
conclude that the analytical protocol employed by Surovell et .al.
deviated significantly from that of Firestone et .al.
Morphological
and geochemical analysis of YDB spherules suggest they... formed
from abrupt melting and quenching of terrestrial materials and... are consistent with...
a previously proposed cosmic impact 12,900 years ago... "91
Unsurprisingly, after all this, Pinter and Daulton's 2011
"requiem"
for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis turned out to have been
premature. In this paper they claimed to have sampled the YDB layer
at a location "identical or nearly identical"" with the location
reported by Kennett et. al., as part of three studies that reported
finding no YDB spherules or nanodiamonds.
However, they are rightly
taken to task by James Wittke and others in a paper in PNAS in 2013
which investigated their evidence and found that it was not at all
what it claimed to be:
"the published Universal Transverse Mercator coordinates reveal that
their purported continuous sequence is actually four discontinuous
sections.
These locations range in distance from the site
investigated by Kennett et. al. by 7,000 m, 1,600 m, 165 m, and 30
m, clearly showing that they did not sample the YDB site of Kennett
et al.
Furthermore, this sampling strategy raises questions about
whether Pinter et al. sampled the YDB at all, and may explain why
they were unable to find peaks in YDB magnetic spherules, carbon
spherules, or nanodiamonds."'92
In 2012-12103, in an effort to limit the scope for poor or
misleading scholarship to be cited as though it discredits their
work - when in fact it does no such thing - Jim Kennett, Richard
Firestone, Allen West and a formidable group of pro-impact
scientists launched,
"one of the most comprehensive investigations of
spherules ever undertaken".93
The investigation
focused on
eighteen sites across North America, Europe and the Middle East (the
latter represented by Abu Hureyra in Syria), and conducted more than
700 analyses on spherules using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy
for chemical analysis and scanning electron microscopy for surface
microstructural characterization.
The results, published in PNAS on 4 June 2013, took advantage of
recent advances in radiocarbon technology to refine the date of the
Younger Dryas impact from 12,900 to 12,800 years ago94 and enabled a
much more detailed map of the YDB field to be drawn up, covering
close to 50 million square kilometres of North, Central and South
America, a large segment of the Atlantic Ocean, and most of Europe,
North Africa and the Middle East.
Calculations indicate that the
impact deposited around ten million tonnes of spherules across this
vast strewnfield.95 Nor, was there any doubt in the researchers'
minds that an impact had been at the heart of the matter:
"The analyses of 771 YDB objects presented in this paper strongly
support a major cosmic impact at 12,800 years ago...
Spherules... are (i) widespread at 18 sites on four continents; (ii) display
large abundance peaks only at the YD onset at around 12,800 years
ago; (iii) are rarely found above or below the YDB, indicating a
rare event; and (iv) amount to an estimated 10 million tonnes of
materials distributed across around 50 million square kilometers of
several continents, thus precluding a small, local event".'96
Despite the annoying ability of the Younger Dryas comet to keep on
proving itself, and of its proponents to keep on refuting all
attacks, Nicholas Pinter, lead author of the 2011 "Requiem" paper,
felt moved in an interview with NBC News in September 2013 to
attempt yet again to cast the hypothesis into scientific limbo.
"My
only comment," he said, "is that the pro-impact literature is, at
this point, fringe science being promoted by a single journal."97
A number of observers with no particular axe of their own to grind
were puzzled by this remark.
First of all, as National Geographic
correspondent Robert Kunzig noted, it smacked a little of wishful
thinking, even desperation, on Pinter's part. "Some opponents of the
hypothesis," wrote Kunzig, '"want so badly for it to go away that
they have attempted to declare it dead."98
Secondly, the journal
that Pinter accused of promoting fringe science was none other than
the revered, utterly mainstream, and extensively peer-reviewed
Proceedings of the National Acadeamy of Sciences (PNAS).99
Thirdly,
although a number of articles by Kennett, West, Firestone and their
team have appeared in PNAS, it is simply not true to suggest that
PNAS is promoting their cause.
On the contrary, at the time Pinter
blurted out his protest to NBC the critics of the YD comet
hypothesis had published ten times in PNAS, whereas the proponents
of the hypothesis had published there only eight times. Likewise
Pinter's claim that the hypothesis is only being presented in a
single journal could hardly be more wrong. By September 2013, in
addition to their eight papers in PNAS, proponents had published no
less than fifteen papers in thirteen other journals.100
The scholarly fight over the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH)
is far from over.
After Pinter and Daulton's attacks in 2011 and
2012, and after the comprehensive refutation of their criticisms in
2013, the next assault by critics of the hypothesis appeared in PNAS
in May 2014 and was entitled "Chronological evidence fails to
support claim of an isochronous widespread layer of cosmic impact
indicators dated to 12,800 years ago".
Reading the paper one could
easily be led to believe that it dealt a death blow to the YDIH:
"According to the
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), ∼12,800 calendar
years before present, North America experienced an
extraterrestrial impact that triggered the Younger Dryas and
devastated human populations and biotic communities on this
continent and elsewhere.
This supposed
event is reportedly marked by multiple impact indicators,
but critics have challenged this evidence, and considerable
controversy now surrounds the YDIH.
Proponents of the
YDIH state that a key test of the hypothesis is whether
those indicators are isochronous and securely dated to the
Younger Dryas onset. They are not.
We have examined
the age basis of the supposed Younger Dryas boundary layer
at the 29 sites and regions in North and South America,
Europe, and the Middle East in which proponents report its
occurrence… Only 3 of the 29 sites fall within the temporal
window of the YD onset as defined by YDIH proponents.
The YDIH fails
the critical chronological test of an isochronous event at
the YD onset…"
As ever the critics were over-eager.
When their seemingly
devastating claims of non-synchronous dates were investigated they
could not be substantiated and a mass of new evidence emerged
supporting the view that a single, very large-scale, very rapid
event, "a moment in time called an isochron", had indeed
occurred.101
In July 2015, therefore, PNAS published a full
refutation based on 354 dates from 23 stratigraphic sections in 12
countries on four continents under the title "Bayesian chronological
analyses consistent with synchronous age of 12,835–12,735 Cal B.P.
for Younger Dryas boundary on four continents".
These dates, the
study concludes, support,
"a causal connection between the impact
event and the Younger Dryas."102
Such exchanges amongst scientists often take a long time to resolve,
with the result that erroneous claims - as in the May 2014 paper - can remain on the record sometimes for a year or more before being
corrected.
Another example, which was published online on 16
December 2014 and in print in January 2015 in the Journal of
Archaeological Science, is a paper by P. Thy, G. Willcox, G.H.
Barfod and D.Q. Fuller, entitled "Anthropogenic origin of siliceous
scoria droplets from Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites
in northern Syria". 103
The essence of the argument in this paper is
that siliceous scoria droplets (composed mostly of glass matrix and
bubbles together with partially melted mineral grains) from Abu Hureyra in Syria
- cited by pro-impact scientists as evidence for
their case - were nothing to do with the comet but were instead a
product of ancient buildings destroyed by house fires:
"We therefore conclude that melting of building earth in ancient
settlements can occur during fires reaching modest temperatures.
There is no evidence to suggest that siliceous scoria droplets
result from very high temperature melting of soil and are the result
of a cosmic event."'104
"For the Syria site the impact theory is out," boasted lead author
Peter Thy in a press interview headlined "Study Casts Doubt on
Mammoth-Killing Cosmic Impact"'.105
Yet it seems that, once again,
the bluster was premature.
Allen West is listed as the corresponding
author on the majority of scholarly papers published by the team of
scientists working on the Younger Dryas impact, so I emailed him to
ask if he and his colleagues had any response to the critique by Thy
et .al.
West replied as follows:
"We agree with Thy et .al. that hut fires can produce glass, but it
does not follow, therefore, that all glass comes from hut fires, as
they conclude.
We have analyzed natural glasses supplied by one of
the authors of that study, and the 12,800-year-old glass from Syria
is only superficially similar. Instead it matches known cosmic
impact glass, as well as high-temperature atomic bomb glass.
"Most importantly, those authors did not discuss or look for the
evidence of abundant high-temperature minerals presented in our
previous papers on three sites on two continents (Pennsylvania,
South Carolina and Syria) where we found suessite that melts at
around 2,300 degrees Centigrade and corundum at around 1,800 degrees
Centigrade.
Now we have even stronger evidence from the Syrian site
and are working on a new paper…
The 12,800-year-old Syrian glass
contains a range of minerals that melted at extraordinarily high
temperatures. See the table below from our new paper:
Melted minerals Formula Est. melt T (°C)
Chromite (Fe)Cr2O4 ≈2265
Quartz SiO2 ≈1720
Chert impure SiO2 ≈1720
Magnetite Fe3O4 ≈1550
Native Fe Fe ≈1530
Chlorapatite Ca5(PO4)3Cl ≈1530
'Those
temperatures are sufficient to melt steel. Furthermore the
same glass-rich layer at the Syrian site contains large
peaks in nanodiamonds, nickel and platinum.
No building fire
can duplicate that range of evidence - such fires can't
produce nanodiamonds or platinum enrichments.
All this evidence
refutes the hypothesis of Thy et. .al.. that this glass was
produced in low-temperature building fires.'106"
When the new paper by West and his colleagues is completed
- scheduled for the latter half of 2017107 - I have no doubt that it
will, effectively, refute the arguments of Thy et. .al,. - just as
all previous attacks have been successfully refuted.
But I also have
no doubt that those, who for whatever reasons of their own are
philosophically opposed to the notion of a cataclysm 12,800 years
ago, will publish yet more so-called "requiems" for the Younger
Dryas impact hypothesis in the years ahead, even while the constant
discovery of new evidence means that it continues to thrive and
grow. Indeed the most recent salvos in the ongoing scientific war
took place in late 2016 and early 2017 and fully confirmed this
trend.
Thus on 19 December 2016 the Journal of Quaternary Science published
two papers co-authored by Nicholas Pinter and Tyrone Daulton
- who
the reader will by now recognize as long-term critics and opponents
of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
Andrew Scott is also listed
as a co-author on the first paper and as lead author on the second
paper.
Entitled "Comprehensive analysis of nanodiamond evidence relating to
the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis", the first paper rakes over
some very old (and long ago refuted) chestnuts favoured by Pinter
and Daulton when it finds,
"no evidence for londsdaleite in YDB
sediments and… no evidence for a spike in nanodiamond concentration
at the YDB layer to support the impact hypothesis."108
Predicatably,
the second paper, "Interpreting palaeofire evidence from fluvial
sediments: a case study from Santa Rosa Island, California, with
implications for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis," also finds,
"no evidence for an extraterrestrial impact".109
Given the slow process of academic publishing, a year or more may
elapse before the Comet Research Group is able to respond fully to
these papers.
In January 2017, however, members of the group
released the following initial comments (in which the first paper is
referred to as "Daulton et.al" and the second paper as "Scott et.al":
1. NANODIAMONDS: The Daulton et. al. paper makes it sound like there
is no evidence for nanodiamonds at all, when in fact they admit to
the opposite.
On page 22, they write,
"While there is evidence of
cubic nanodiamonds in Late Pleistocene sediments, their presence
does not provide evidence of an impact because they have not been
linked to impact processes."
The only way they can make that claim
is to ignore all of the other evidence that we have such as
high-temperature melted spherules and meltglass.
LONSDALEITE: We wrote in Kinzie et al. (2014) that YDB
"lonsdaleite-like" particles have all the characteristics of
lonsdaleite, but there are too few of them for us to confirm that.
We agree with Dalton that these particles are still debatable, and
we agree that we misidentified some of them, but not all.
PEAKS IN NANODIAMONDS: Daulton disputes that we have identified
peaks in nanodiamonds, but frankly, that is just a nonsensical
argument.
While it is true that we cannot tell how many nanodiamonds
are in the peaks, nevertheless, we know that there are qualitative
peaks. Here's a real world example of why Daulton is wrong. Let's
say that I look out the window onto a pond and I don't see any
ducks. Next day, I look out and there are lots of ducks.
There are
too many to count, but I know that there are a lot more than zero.
The next day the ducks are gone. By definition, there was a peak in
ducks on the previous day. The same applies to Daulton's claim that
we don't have a peak in nanodiamonds.
He is simply wrong
- the peak
has been confirmed by independent groups, including Bement et al. in
Oklahoma and in Belgium by Tian et al., who are critics of the YDB
hypothesis.
NANODIAMONDS AND IMPACTS: Daulton and others keep repeating,
"Yes,
the diamonds are there but that doesn't prove there was an impact."
While that is true, technically, there is no other known way to have
nanodiamonds appear in sediment except by an impact. To use the same
analogy as above, if they look like ducks, they probably are.
2. The Scott et al. paper looked for wildfire evidence in just one
area, the Channel Islands in California. They found lots of charcoal
and carbon spherules in many strata, and they state on page 11,
"Carbonaceous materials from Arlington Canyon do not require
extraterrestrial input or ignition, or in some cases preclude such
an event," in contradiction to their press release, which makes it
seem like they have completely refuted the YDB hypothesis.
Just to
be clear, they're saying that they can't rule out an
extraterrestrial impact.
They also argue that the carbonaceous
materials indicate low-temperature wildfires which, they assume,
precludes extraterrestrial impacts.
That assumption just shows their
lack of knowledge of impact wildfires, such as those that
occurred
at Tunguska in 1908, where low-temperature wildfires were triggered
beneath the fireball.
At Tunguska, the highest temperatures were
generated closest to the fireball, and temperatures dropped off
exponentially with distance, meaning that at Tunguska and
presumably, any other impact event, there are both high-and
low-temperature fires.
In line with the ups and downs that we have documented so far,
recent papers have not been confined to Daulton and Pinter's ongoing
project to discredit the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, nor even
to the Comet Research Group's initial response to the December 2016
papers, but have also included papers by other scientists that are
highly supportive of the hypothesis.
Of these, the first, by research chemist Antonio Zamora, is entitled
"A model for the geomorphology of the Carolina Bays" and was
published online in January 2017 in the journal Geomorphology, ahead
of the April 2017 print edition.110
The second paper, co-authored by
Christopher Moore, Allen West, Malcolm LeCompte and others, is
entitled "Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger
Dryas onset in North American sedimentary sequences" and was
published on 9 March 2017 in Nature'sScientific Reports.111
Let's begin with the paper on the platinum anomaly discovered across
North America which has the potential, in itself, to settle the
debate around the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis definitively in
favor of the proponents of the hypothesis.
This is the case
because, as Christopher Moore, lead author of the study comments,
"Platinum is very rare in the Earth's crust, but it is common in
asteroids and comets,"112 and because the newly discovered North
American platinum anomaly dates precisely from the Younger Dryas
Boundary 12,800 years ago and reinforces an earlier study (by Pataev
et al) which found an identical platinum anomaly at the identical
date in Greenland ice cores.113
"Previously," Moore et. al. note,
"a large platinum (Pt) anomaly was
reported in the Greenland ice sheet at the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB)
(12,800 Cal B.P.). In order to evaluate its geographic extent,
re-assay and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (FA and
ICP-MS) elemental analyses were performed on 11 widely separated
archaeological bulk sedimentary sequences.
We document discovery of
a distinct Pt anomaly spread widely across North America and dating
to the Younger Dryas (YD) onset.
The apparent synchroneity of this
widespread YDB Pt anomaly is consistent with Greenland Ice Sheet
Project 2 (GISP2) data that indicated atmospheric input of
platinum-rich dust…
This study finds no evidence to contradict the
conclusions of Petaev et al. that the Greenland Pt enrichment most
likely resulted from an extraterrestrial source…
In addition, our
findings show no contradiction with the Younger Dryas impact
hypothesis."114
The language is cautious and understated but the implications for
critics of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis are profound.
Those
critics have spent years splitting hairs and picking nits in their
efforts to contest the nanodiamond, microspherule, synchroneity and
other evidence put forward by proponents of the hypothesis, but now,
suddenly, across North America, they find themselves confronted by a
widespread platinum anomaly - clear and unambiguous evidence of a
cosmic impact - at the Younger Dryas boundary.
If the debate around
this subject were purely objective and rational, the Pt layer
should, at a stroke, take all the other evidence of impact out of
the "disputed" category, where Daulton, Pinter and others have tried
so hard to constrain it, and move it decisively into the "accepted"
category.
This, in turn, would open the way
- at last! - for proper
consideration of the implications for the paradigms in various
disciplines that will have to be revised, or completely discarded,
in the light of the impact evidence.
An extinction-level event just
12,800 years ago really does change everything in fields as varied
as astronomy, paleo-oceanography, paleo-climatology, geology, and - of the greatest significance for our purposes here
- archaeology.
This becomes all the more obvious in the light of the second of the
two 2017 papers, Antonio Zamora's "Model for the geomorphology of
the Carolina Bays", which adds greatly to our understanding of the
truly cataclysmic and earth-changing nature of the Younger Dryas
impacts.
To be clear, the proponents of the hypothesis have always argued
that the most plausible agent of the cataclysm was a disintegrating
giant comet.
According to their calculations, at least four of its
largest fragments - in some cases more than a kilometer in diameter
- impacted directly, with a kind of "scatter-gun" effect, at
different points on the North American ice cap.
The trajectory of
the incoming fragments was roughly east to west and some remained
aloft long enough to cross the Atlantic ocean and hit the northern
European ice cap with further impacts traced eastward at least as
far as Syria.
The Younger Dryas Boundary strewnfield
(after Wittke et al 2013, and
Kennett et.al 2014).
The area enclosed within the red boundary
defines the current known limits of the YDB field
of cosmic-impact
proxies spanning
50 million square kilometers.
Amongst the impact proponents, there has never been any doubt that
North America was the epicenter of the disaster, but Antonio
Zamora's paper offers an entirely new and alarming perspective on
the scale of the event, implicating not just the blast and shock
waves propagating from the impacts themselves, but also the ejecta
thrown up into the upper atmosphere by the force of the impacts.
Such ejecta, usually consisting of rock and capable of travelling on
ballistic trajectories for distances of thousands of kilometers
before returning to earth, are associated with all documented cosmic
impacts.
In the case of the Younger Dryas, however, the primary
impacts in North America were on an ice-cap - still more than a mile
deep 12,800 years ago115 - and thus the ejecta would have consisted
not of rock but of ice.
Zamora takes up the case, drawing our attention to two extensive but
previously unexplained features of the North American landscape - the so called
"Nebraska Rainwater Basins" in the Midwest and the
so-called "Carolina Bays" in the Southeast.
The two regions are
widely separated geographically, but in both cases we are confronted
by huge numbers of large, very similar and often overlapping
geometrical elliptical depressions in the earth that first became
apparent from aerial surveys undertaken during the 20th century.
The
orientation of the "Basins" is from northeast to southwest and the
orientation of the "Bays" is from northwest to southeast but, as
Zamora puts it, the elliptical shape of the "Basins" is so similar
to that of the "Bays" that "it is necessary to consider that they
formed contemporaneously with the Carolina Bays by the same
mechanisms."116
Zamora then gives a brief synopsis of the Younger Dryas impact
hypothesis, with its proposal that at least four large comet
fragments impacted at various points across the North American
icecap.
He notes that in 2009-2010 there were attempts by the
proponents of the hypothesis to argue that the strikingly regular
orientation of the Carolina Bays was consistent with their formation
by a shockwave coming from vicinity of the Great Lakes - which were
not lakes 12,800 years ago but deeply buried depressions entirely
covered by the icecap.117
However, their arguments and evidence were
dismissed by Pinter, Daulton and others in their 2011 "Requiem"
paper which, though subsequently refuted as to nanodiamonds and
microspherules, made reasonable and seemingly irrefutable points
about the Carolina Bays.
Despite the initial promise suggested by
their orientation, subsequent investigations failed to identify any
trace of meteoritic material within the bays themselves and - even
more damningly - indicated that the bays were of widely differing
ages and therefore could not have been formed by a single event
12,800 years ago.118
There the matter would have been allowed to lapse into obscurity
were it not for Antonio Zamora who decided to explore a hitherto
neglected possibility - namely that the Carolina Bays, and also the
Nebraska Rainwater Basins, had been caused by secondary impacts of ejecta thrown up from one of the primary impact sites on the North
American icecap.119
In constructing his hypothesis, Zamora
references the work of two earlier researchers, orbital analysts
Michael E. Davias and Thomas Harris.
They deployed the science of
ballistics and triangulation to demonstrate that an impact over the
enigmatic and now water-filled inlet presently known as Saginaw Bay,
Michigan (which, as the reader will recall, was not a bay 12,800
years ago but solid land covered by glacial ice a mile deep) would
have produced ejecta and secondary impacts in a "butterfly-wing"
pattern precisely over the Nebraska Rainwater Basins, to the
southwest, and the Carolina Bays to the southeast.120
Suggested impact site
in Saginaw Bay Michigan.
After Davias and
Harris 2015
Davias and Harris
describe Saginaw Bay (see illustration below) as the result ,
"a unique singular event that cuts through the central
bedrock".
While conceding that the bay is
"commonly attributed to
erosion by the Saginaw glacial lobe penetrating through the
Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Cuestas" they note that it shows
many of the characteristics that we would expect of a structure
caused by a large oblique impact on glacial ice with shock effects
passing through the icecap and into the bedrock below.121
Saginaw Bay is an enigmatic, now water-filled,
depression in
Michigan's distinctive "Mitten",
separating the
"hand" of the
mitten, to the left,
from its
"thumb" to the right.
When Davias and Harris published their paper in 2015 they seemed
unaware of the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis and tentatively
suggested an age of 786,000 years for the formation of Saginaw Bay.
While drawing on their excellent ballistics and triangulation work,
Zamora's presentation of his own "Glacial Ice Impact Hypothesis" in
his 2017 paper in Geomorphology rejects so great an age and offers a
compelling case that Saginaw Bay is an impact structure made just
12,800 years ago by one of the several fragments of the hypothesized
Younger Dryas comet122:
"The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered the convergence point determined
by Davias and Harris (2015) in Saginaw Bay with a thickness of
approximately 1500 to 2000 m of ice during the Pleistocene.
An
impact by a meteorite at this location would have ejected chunks of
ice in ballistic trajectories, and the heat of the impact would have
melted some ice to produce water and steam. The Glacier Ice Impact
Hypothesis describes four processes that must have occurred in a
specific sequence for the creation of the Carolina Bays"123:
-
Extraterrestrial impact ejects glacier ice boulders in ballistic
trajectories
-
Secondary impacts liquefy unconsolidated soil
-
Oblique impacts on liquefied soil create slanted, conical cavities
-
Viscous relaxation converts cavities into shallow, elliptical bays
"Experiments of high-speed impacts on ice sheets using NASA's Ames
Vertical Gun," Zamora goes on to report, "demonstrate that ice
shatters when a projectile hits it. Pieces of ice are ejected
radiating from the impact site in ballistic trajectories and the icy
layer reduces the extent of subsurface damage124…
We've already seen that Michigan's Saginaw Bay is a likely candidate
structure for the primary extraterrestrial impact envisaged by
Zamora's hypothesis.
As to Nebraska and the Carolinas, he notes that
"ballistic equations, scaling laws relating crater size to impact
energy, geometrical analysis and statistical analysis provide a
mathematical foundation for explaining the shape of the bays and
their origin from secondary impacts of glacier ice ejected from the
Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered Michigan."125
Having reviewed and rejected all other explanations for the
formation of the bays and basins by wind or water, Zamora therefore
concludes as follows:
"The radial orientation of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater
Basins toward a convergence point in Michigan, and the elliptical
shapes of the bays with specific width-to-length ratios can be
better explained by impact mechanisms than by terrestrial wind and
water processes.
The Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis… has been supplemented with an
experimental model demonstrating that oblique impacts on viscous
surfaces can reproducibly create inclined conical cavities that are
remodeled into shallow elliptical depressions by viscous relaxation.
This makes it possible to model the Carolina Bays and Nebraska
Rainwater Basins as conic sections whose width-to-length ratio can
be explained by the angle of impact.
Unlike the eolian and
lacustrine hypotheses of bay formation that cannot be tested, the
impact hypothesis uses mathematics and a physical model that can be
used to demonstrate stratigraphic restoration by viscous relaxation
and the remodeling of conical impact cavities on viscous media." 126
Zamora addresses the issue of the great diversity of dates for the
Carolina Bays obtained by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL),
noting that this has hitherto been the most significant barrier to
acceptance of the impact hypothesis with reference to the Bays.
As
he rightly points out, however, the basic assumption behind the use
of OSL has been that the subsurface of the Carolina Bays was exposed
to light at the time of bay formation.
His experimental model
refutes this by demonstrating that impacts on viscous surfaces are
plastic deformations that do not expose the subsurface to light:
"Therefore, OSL can only determine the date of the terrain, but not
the date of formation of the bays. If all the Carolina Bays and
Nebraska Rainwater Basins formed contemporaneously, it will be
necessary to find a different way of dating them.
"The Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis explains all the features of the
Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins, including their
elliptical shape, radial orientation, raised rims, undisturbed
stratigraphy, absence of shock metamorphism, overlapping bays, and
the occurrence of bays only in unconsolidated ground."127
Finally, and chillingly, Zamora's paper in Geomorphology notes:
"The great surface density of the bays indicates that they were
created by a catastrophic saturation bombing with impacts of 13 kt
to 3 MT that would have caused a mass extinction in an area with a
radius of 1500 km from the extraterrestrial impact in Michigan.
This
paper has considered mainly the ice boulders ejected by an
extraterrestrial impact on the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the
Pleistocene, but the impact would also have ejected water and
produced steam.
Taking into consideration the thermodynamic
properties of water, any liquid water ejected above the atmosphere
would have transformed into a fog of ice crystals that would have
blocked the light of the sun.
Thus, the time of formation of the
Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins must coincide with an
extinction event in the eastern half of the United States and the
onset of a period of global cooling.
This combination of conditions
is best met by the disappearance of the North American megafauna,
the end of the Clovis culture and the onset of the Younger Dryas
cooling event at 12,800 cal. BP.
The report of a platinum anomaly
typical of extraterrestrial impacts at the Younger Dryas Boundary
supports this scenario."128
In Killer Comet, a book published in 2016, Zamora elaborates on the
extent and true horror of the Younger Dryas cataclysm.
He considers
how the effects of the primary impact over Michigan would have been
massively compounded by the secondary impacts of glacier ice
boulders across the Carolinas.
It's instructive to spend a few
moments with the disturbing scenario that follows:
"All living things within 100 kilometers of the [Michigan] impact
died instantly. They were either burned by the heat blast or killed
by the shock wave.
[In the Carolinas], 1000 kilometers from the
impact zone, the blinding flash on the horizon was followed by a sky
that darkened ominously as it filled with the giant ice boulders
ejected by the impact.
Three minutes after the flash, the dark sky
advanced relentlessly, and the ground shook as the first seismic
waves from the extraterrestrial impact site arrived travelling at 5
km/sec.
"By this time, all animals and humans were aware that something
terrible was happening. The sky continued to darken, and then filled
with bright streaks as the ice boulders in suborbital flights
re-entered the atmosphere at speeds of 3 to 4 km/sec…
[As] the giant
ice boulders started falling… the thumping of the impacts sent shock
waves through the ground that travelled at 5 to 8 km/sec… The
shaking ground started to liquefy, trapping everyone. The ground had
turned to quicksand, making it impossible to walk or run…
At the
peak of intensity, a hail of glacier ice chunks, many as big as a
baseball stadium, left steam trails in the sky as they re-entered
the atmosphere at supersonic speeds and crashed into the liquefied
ground accompanied by the thunder of sonic booms.
The impacts
created oblique, muddy, conical craters… with diameters of one to
two kilometers…that swallowed whole villages and buried all the
vegetation.
The vibration of the ground quickly reduced the depth of
the conical craters and turned them into [the] shallow depressions
[that we know today as the Carolina Bays]…
"The comet itself had not killed the megafauna. The saturation
bombardment by the ice boulders that were ejected when the comet
struck the Laurentide ice sheet caused the extinction event…
The
landscape of the Eastern Seaboard had been transformed into a barren
wasteland full of huge, shallow mud holes…
The Carolina Bays have
remained as evidence of the glacier ice impacts on the soft, sandy
soil of the East Coast. No such evidence remains of the ice chunks
that must have fallen on harder ground, but the ice impacts in the
central and Midwestern states were equally merciless.
When the
colossal chunks of glacier ice hit the hard terrain, they shattered
and sent out ice fragments at high speed.
Any creature or vegetation
in the path of the fast-moving ice shards was destroyed. When the
ice finally came to rest, the ejecta blanket had covered one-half of
the contiguous United States with a thick layer of crushed ice… that
increased the albedo of the Earth and reflected a significant
portion of the dimmer light from the Sun back into space.
The
combined effect of the increased ice cover and the orbiting ice
crystals would make the land cold and inhospitable for many years…
The buried vegetation would freeze or remain dormant under the ice.
Grazing animals that had survived the glacier ice bombardment had no
access to their normal food sources and would soon starve. Predators
that were still alive would also soon die without their herbivorous
prey…
Eventually, North America would be repopulated by new land
animals and new humans, but the megafauna, and the ingenious Clovis
people that had crafted such fine stone projectiles were gone
forever."129
To this apocalyptic picture, which traces the origin of the Carolina
Bays to a large fragment of the disintegrated Younger Dryas comet
hitting the North American icecap over what is now Saginaw Bay and
throwing out a devastating barrage of ice boulders, must be added
the implications of primary impacts by other fragments of the same
comet at other points across the icecap. Zamora's research does not
consider these.
The reader will recall, however, that the scientists
of the Comet Research Group calculate there may have been as many as
four such impacts.
As we've also seen, it is highly plausible that
at least one of these other impacts was responsible for the radical
destabilization of the "Cordilleran" segment of the ice sheet above
Spokane unleashing the single, cataclysmic flood that Bretz's
instincts always told him had created the channeled scablands.
The single largest flood the earth has ever seen…
An icy bombardment…
Darkened skies…
Plunging global temperatures…
Mass extinctions…
Extraterrestrial platinum at the Younger Dryas Boundary not only in
the Greenland ice cores130 but also, as we've seen, across North
America…131
All of this, by any definition, amounts to a debacle
- and one we
desperately - and urgently - need to understand.
In my view a complete reconsideration of the channeled scablands and
of the "multiple Missoula floods" model for their formation is now
in order. Likewise, on the other side of North America, as Zamora
notes:
"Further study of the Carolina Bays may provide detailed insights
about the late Pleistocene and reveal information about near-Earth
objects that could destroy our civilization."132
Doorway to the mysteries
Concern for the future of our civilization is appropriate.
NASA, until now, has vigorously promoted the view that
extinction-level impact events are exceptionally rare in the history
of the earth, separated by tens of millions of years - and that
therefore we don't need to worry about them.
Confirmation that such
an event occurred as recently as 12,800 years ago, and on such a
gigantic scale, would comprehensively wreck that reassuring picture
and would mandate, as a matter of urgency, a much more detailed
investigation of the near-earth cosmic environment than has hitherto
been undertaken.
A need for urgency, however, does not mean embracing fear or gloom
and doom. The technology already exists to solve this
life-threatening and civilization-threatening problem.
It is just a
matter of the political will and the money - admittedly no easy sell
when governments prefer to focus public resources on the military
and on ever more sophisticated means for human beings to murder one
another, but by no means impossible.
Meanwhile, what about the origins of civilization?
Zamora's conclusion, quoted at length above, reminds us that the
Younger Dryas cataclysm coincides with the disappearance of the
so-called "Clovis" people. For a very long while, these people were
believed by archaeologists to be the first human beings ever to have
entered the Americas.
Their migration, across what was then (with
lowered sea levels) the Bering landbridge between Siberia and
Alaska, supposedly took place no earlier than 13,500 years ago.
Manifested through a distinctive, fluted-point stone-blade
technology, the "Clovis culture", then supposedly enjoyed a brief
but rapid efflorescence over much of North America before
mysteriously vanishing from the archaeological record around 12,800
years ago.133
By the 1970's these notions formed the ruling paradigm of American
archaeology - generally referred to in the literature as the "Clovis
First", paradigm. For decades thereafter those who disagreed, or
worse still reported the existence of possible pre-Clovis sites, did
so "at significant risk to their careers."134
Amongst them, as we
saw at the beginning of this article, was the Canadian archaeologist
Jacques Cinq-Mars, recently the focus of a prolonged piece of
revisionist apologetics is The Smithsonian.
There we read of his
work in the Yukon at the Bluefish Caves where he and his team:
"discovered something remarkable
- the bones of extinct horses and
woolly mammoths bearing what seemed to be marks from human
butchering and toolmaking. Radiocarbon test results dated the oldest
finds to around 24,000 years before the present."135
These finds were, of course,
"remarkable" because they directly
challenged the Clovis First paradigm, and the consequences for Cinq-Mars
were severe - indeed something that he has likened to an ordeal at
the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.136
The Smithsonian takes up
the story:
"At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his presentations,
giving short shrift to the evidence. Other researchers listened
politely, then questioned his competence.
The result was always the
same. 'When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves was] 24,000 [years
old], it was not accepted,' says William Josie, director of natural
resources at the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow.
In his
office at the Canadian Museum of History, Cinq-Mars fumed at the
wall of closed minds. Funding for his Bluefish work grew scarce. His
fieldwork eventually sputtered and died.
"Today, decades later, the Clovis first model has collapsed. Based
on dozens of new studies, we now know that pre-Clovis people
slaughtered mastodons in Washington State, dined on desert parsley
in Oregon, made all-purpose stone tools that were the Ice Age
version of X-acto blades in Texas, and slept in sprawling,
hide-covered homes in Chile - all between 13,800 and 15,500 years
ago, possibly earlier.
And in January [2017], a Université de
Montréal PhD candidate, Lauriane Bourgeon, and her colleagues
published a new study on Bluefish Caves bones in the journal PLOS
One, confirming that humans had butchered horses and other animals
there 24,000 years ago."137
Breaking news published in the prestigious science journal Nature
and widely reported in the media in late April 2017, raises the
possibility that humans were present in North America as early as
130,000 years ago.
The whole story of the peopling of the Americas
has been up for grabs for some time, and "Clovis First" will go down
in history as one of the greatest archaeological mistakes and
embarrassments ever, but this latest discovery really puts the cat
amongst the pigeons.
Expect a lot of opposition to it from those
archaeologists who are only now reluctantly willing to accept the
possibility of humans in North America 25,000 years ago!
Cinq-Mars' case, concludes The Smithsonian:
"raises serious questions about the effect of the bitter
decades-long debate over the peopling of the New World. Did
archaeologists in the mainstream marginalize dissenting voices on
this key issue?
And if so, what was the impact on North American
archaeology? Did the intense criticism of pre-Clovis sites produce a
chilling effect, stifling new ideas and hobbling the search for
early sites?
Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University
in Tennessee and the principal investigator at the Chilean site of
Monte Verde, thinks the answer is clear.
The scientific atmosphere,
recalls Dillehay, was "clearly toxic and clearly impeded
science."138
Even so hallowed a journal as Nature concurs in an Editorial which
notes:
"The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most
acrimonious - and unfruitful - in all of science…
One researcher,
new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics,
told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of
aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America
first.
'When people stop listening to arguments and stop looking at
data and instead just go with their own beliefs,' he said, 'that's
when it becomes completely crazy'."139
Credit for the research breakthroughs that have entirely demolished
the Clovis First model, Nature's Editorial continues:
"should go to openminded archaeologists, who were willing to
investigate preClovis sites seriously, and to geneticists, for
bringing fresh ideas and techniques to bear on the topic.
The recent
finds and the shift in the debate have triggered a renaissance in
ancient American archaeology.
Researchers are reopening sites,
reexamining specimens and searching for new sites to determine who
the early pioneers were, and how and when they arrived.
"As these ancient events are explored, some archaeologists should
examine their recent behavior. If what they lacked could be summed
up in one word, it might be respect.
Researchers must always
consider that they might be wrong, and should look carefully at
opposing data and conclusions.
At the same time, scientists who make
bold claims must marshal an extraordinary case, especially if they
seek to topple a dominant model built on many previous studies.
Such
prescriptions sound obvious, but many scientists forget them,
particularly in fields with limited data, such as archaeology."140
Meanwhile The Smithsonian approvingly cites Quentin Mackie, an
archaeologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia:
"Clovis First will, I believe, go down as a classic example of a
paradigm shift, in which the evidence for the collapse of an old
model is present for many years before it actually collapses,
producing a sort of zombie model that won't die."141
What's missing from all this, despite the calls for
"respect" and
for researchers to consider the possibility that they might be
wrong, is recognition that the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis also
has a bearing on the true history of the peopling of the Americas,
and contains the seeds of an even more significant paradigm shift
with even more profound implications for archaeology.
Since they
first proposed it in 2007, the team of scientists behind the
hypothesis have certainly made "bold claims" but they have also
marshaled "an extraordinary case" that, with the latest evidence of
a widely-distributed platinum layer at the Younger Dryas Boundary,
and intriguing support from Zamora's linked glacier ice impact
hypothesis, does indeed have the potential to topple the dominant
gradualist model built on many previous studies.
That model, at
least to my eyes, is beginning to look very much like a zombie
that's presently being kept alive by Nicholas Pinter, Tyrone Daulton,
Todd Surovell, Andrew Scott and others whose beliefs are radically
contradicted by the notion of a sudden cataclysm over North America
12,800 years ago.
And in just the same way that the toxic hostility
of Clovis First proponents choked off funding for what Nature now
recognizes as "open-minded archaeologists" and held back promising
new research for decades, so too the toxic hostility and premature "requiems" directed at the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis have
choked off funding, held back promising new research, and failed to
serve science.
It's high time for a change, indeed for a paradigm shift. When it
comes I suspect it will reveal not only the true cause of the
mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people but also vast and
previously unexplored vistas of American prehistory.
Archaeologists
whose responsibility it is to explore that prehistory have been in
the habit of regarding cosmic impacts, supposedly only occurring at
multi-million year intervals, as largely irrelevant to the
200,000-year story of anatomically modern humans.
When we believed
that the last big impact had been the dinosaur-killing asteroid of
65 million years ago, there was obviously little point in trying to
relate cosmic accidents on such an almost unimaginable scale in any
way to the much shorter time-frame of "history".
But the very real
possibility emerging from the Comet Research Group's work that a
huge, earth-shaking, extinction-level event occurred over North
America just 12,800 years ago, in our historical backyard, changes
everything.
So much more than Clovis was wiped away and obliterated during the
Younger Dryas cataclysm that - who knows? - perhaps even the traces
of a lost global civilization will be uncovered there.
Atlantis?
The idea is not as far-fetched as it might seem, particularly when
we remember that the Younger Dryas cataclysm was not a single event
but an epoch with two pronounced nodes of disaster:
-
the first,
12,800 years ago, accompanied by a humungous flood and abrupt,
extreme global cooling
-
the second,
11,600 years ago, again accompanied by another humungous
flood and this time by abrupt, extreme global warming
The Younger Dryas (YD) mystery.
At 12,800 years ago
there was a
sudden plunge in global temperatures
as measured in the Greenland
ice cores.
Then 11,600 years ago there was an equally
steep rise in
global temperatures bringing
an abrupt end both to the Younger Dryas
interlude
and to the Ice Age
There are several distinct and compelling curiosities about the
terminal Younger Dryas event and the global warming and flooding
that accompanied it.
First, just as was the case 12,800 years ago, and as noted above,
the date of 11,600 years ago coincides with an immense episode of
global flooding - nominated by geologists as Meltwater Pulse 1B - as
the remnant ice caps in North America and northern Europe collapsed
simultaneously amidst worldwide global warming. The late Cesare
Emiliani, Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the
University of Miami, carried out isotopic analysis of deep-sea
sediments142 that produced hard evidence of cataclysmic global
flooding "between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago".143
Secondly, and rather strikingly, The Greek lawmaker
Solon visited
Egypt around the year 600 BC and there he was told a very remarkable
story by the priests at the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta - a
story that was eventually handed down to his more famous descendant
Plato, who in due course shared it with the world in his
Dialogues
of Timaeus and Critias.
It is, of course, the story of the
great lost civilization of
Atlantis swallowed up by flood and earthquake in a single terrible
day and night nine thousand years before Solon's visit to Egypt144 - in other words in 9,600 BC, or 11,600 years before the present.
Since that date (give or take a margin of error of a few decades)
coincides with Meltwater Pulse 1B and is accepted by geologists as
the "official" end of the last Ice Age 145 - the end of the "Pleistocene" epoch and the beginning of our current epoch, the
"Holocene" - it is intriguing, to say the least, that it coincides
so precisely with the date that Plato gives us for the destruction,
and submergence beneath the sea, of the lost civilization of
Atlantis.
As I hope I have demonstrated in this article, historians and
archaeologists will go through Houdini-like contortions of reason
and common-sense rather than consider the possibility that any
aspect of their paradigm of prehistory might be wrong - so I am not
surprised that they have never attempted to investigate at face
value the Atlantis tradition of a devastating global flood 11,600
years ago.
However, there are scholars - trained in other disciplines and not
hobbled by the same preconceptions - who are more open to the
possibility that the flood tradition in general, and the Atlantis
story in particular, might be rooted in real events at the end of
the last Ice Age.
This view was, for example, entertained positively
by Cesare Emiliani,146 whose work on global flooding at the end of
the Ice Age was cited above. In the same vein, Robert Schoch,
Professor in the Department of Geology at Boston University, notes
the dramatic warming of the earth's climate that accompanied the
flooding - ushering in the so-called "Pre-Boreal", the first stage
of the Holocene - and observes that overall there is a:
"stunning line-up in time between the sudden warming of 9645 BC,
Emiliani's scenario of a massive freshwater flood pouring into the
Gulf of Mexico, and the date Plato ascribed to the sinking of
Atlantis."147
Likewise, science writer
Paul La Violette argues ,
"there may be
much truth to the many flood cataclysm stories that have been handed
down to modern times in virtually every culture of the world. In
particular, the 9600 BC date that Plato's Timaeus gives for
the time
of the deluge happens to fall at the beginning of the Preboreal at
the time of the upsurge of meltwater discharge."148
Photo by Nico Becker,
German Archaeological Institute.
Overview of
part of the excavations at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey,
conducted by the
German Archaeological Institute.
This astonishing megalithic site
dates back 11,600 years.
For the full significance of Gobekli Tepe
see
Graham Hancock's book
Magicians of the Gods.
Also striking is the fact that 9600 BC is the date established by
the German Archaeological Institute for the foundation of the truly
extraordinary
megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.
This
complex of massive circles of T-shaped stone pillars matches the
scale, scope and ambition of England's famous Stonehenge.
The
problem, however, is that Gobekli Tepe is seven thousand years older
than Stonehenge, and appears to emerge suddenly out of nowhere with
no background and no evidence of the gradual accumulation of the
architectural skills that were required to envisage and create such
a remarkable site.
Adding to the mystery, 9600 BC
- 11,600 years ago - is also the moment when agriculture suddenly appears in the archaelogical record in Turkey, fully formed, and again with no
obvious background.149
Although it is beyond the scope of this
article - I have considered the whole matter in depth in my book
Magicians of the Gods - the possibility must be considered that Gobekli Tepe does not signify the sudden invention of megalithic
architecture and settled agriculture by the hunter-gatherers who
then populated Turkey, but rather a transfer of technology from the
survivors of a lost civilization who had long before mastered all
the necessary skills and passed them on to the technologically
less-advanced people they took refuge amongst.
The beginning and the end
While the impact of comet fragments on the North American ice cap
12,800 years ago is now strongly supported by the mass of evidence
reviewed in this article as the cause of the beginning of the
Younger Dryas, there is much less clarity over what caused the end
of the cold interval and the renewed flooding and warming of 11,600
years ago.
A particularly noteworthy aspect of this mystery, as we have seen,
is that very radical climate changes occurred at both the onset and
the termination of the Younger Dryas. In both cases these changes
were global and were accomplished within the span of a human
generation.150
Again the comet hypothesis helps to make sense of this.
The
estimated combined explosive force of the impacts would have lofted
sufficient ejecta into the atmosphere 12,800 years ago to plunge the
earth into a long, sustained twilight, akin to a nuclear winter - the
"time of darkness" that so many ancient myths speak of - capable
of reducing solar radiation for more than 1,000 years.
The dramatic
warming that began 11,600 years ago would then be explained by the
final dissipation of the ejecta cloud coupled with an end to the
system-wide inertia that had beset thermohaline circulation in the
North Atlantic.151
Another possibility, not necessarily mutually contradictory with any
of the above mechanisms, is that 11,600 years ago the earth
interacted for a second time with the debris stream of the same
fragmenting comet that had caused the beginning of the Younger Dryas
12,800 years ago.
This is by no means implausible since the earth stillpasses through that debris stream twice a year. It is the
well-known Taurid meteor stream, now 30 million kilometers wide.
Travelling at around 2.5 million kilometers a day on its orbital
path, our planet passes through the Taurid stream for around 12 days
at the end of June and again for 12 days in late October and
early November. At both transits, meteorites - "shooting stars"
- in huge
numbers enter and are usually small enough to burn up in our
atmosphere (in October/November they are often referred to as the "Halloween Fireworks").
That sounds harmless enough but, as long ago as 1990, before any of
the physical, geological evidence for the Younger Dryas comet
impacts had been discovered, astrophysicist Victor Clube and
astronomer Bill Napier warned of the view:
"that treats the cosmos as a harmless backdrop to human affairs, a
view which Academe now often regards as its business to uphold and
to which Church and State are only too glad to subscribe."152
Such a view, in Clube and Napier's prescient 1990 opinion, is
dangerous in that its effect is to,
"place the human species a little
higher than the ostrich, awaiting the fate of the dinosaur."153
As can be seen from the reactions of some members of
"Academe" to
the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, this view, and what Clube and
Napier call the "great illusion of cosmic security"154 that it
engenders, are still powerful forces in the world today.
Much more
than the truth about our own past is at stake, however, for there is
a chilling convergence between Clube and Napier's findings on the
one hand, and the findings of Kennett, West and Firestone on the
other, as to what the Younger Dryas comet really means for humanity.
To understand the implications of this convergence properly it will
be necessary to review some of the discoveries made by Clube, Napier
and others in the 1980's and 1990's - discoveries, remember, that
are completely independent of the later work of the
Kennett/West/Firestone team on the Younger Dryas impacts.
To cut a
long story short, as I've already indicated, the burden of these
discoveries is that it is possible - indeed highly probable - that
we are not yet done with the comet that changed the face of the
earth 12,800 years ago.
Clube and Napier's work, with important
contributions also from the late Sir Fred Hoyle, and from
mathematician Emilio Spedicato and astronomer Professor Chandra Wickramsinghe, obliges us to consider the chilling possibility that
the Younger Dryas comet was itself only a fragment of a much larger,
giant comet - once perhaps as much as 100 kilometers in diameter - which entered the inner solar system about 30,000 years ago and was
captured by the sun and flung into an earth-crossing orbit.
It remained relatively intact for the next 10,000 years. Then around
20,000 years ago it underwent a massive "fragmentation event"
somewhere along its orbit that transformed it from a single deadly
and potentially world-killing object into multiple objects grading
down from 5 kilometers to 1 kilometer or less in diameter, each and
every one of which would still, in its own right, be capable of
causing a global cataclysm.155
The astronomers believe it was
several fragments on this scale that hit the earth 12,800 years ago,
causing the Younger Dryas,156 and that we can expect further
encounters with the remaining fragments in the future.157
"This
unique complex of debris," write Clube and Napier, "is undoubtedly
the greatest collision hazard facing the Earth at the present
time."158
The Taurid meteor stream, so called because its showers of
"shooting
stars" look to observers on the ground as though they originate in
the constellation of Taurus, is the most familiar and best-known
product of the ongoing fragmentation of the original giant comet.
"Shooting stars" are harmless - nothing more than tiny meteors
burning up in the atmosphere - so why should we be in the least bit
concerned about a meteor stream?
In the case of the fifty or so
distinct and separate meteor streams that have now been discovered
by astronomers - the Leonids, the Perseids, the Andromedids, etc - the answer to this question is that in most cases there is probably
no danger and nothing to fear. Since most of the particles that they
contain are indeed tiny, they represent no threat to the Earth.
But it is quite a different matter with the Taurid meteor stream. It
too contains countless trillions of tiny dust-sized particles that
produce nothing more dangerous than shooting stars when they enter
the Earth's atmosphere.
As Clube, Napier, Hoyle and Wickramsinghe
have demonstrated, however, the Taurid stream also contains other
much more massive material, sometimes visible, sometimes shrouded in
clouds of dust, and all of it flying through space at tremendous
velocities and intersecting the Earth's orbit twice a year, regular
as clockwork, year in year out.
Amongst these massive, deadly
members of the Taurid family are
Comet Encke, which is estimated to
have a diameter of around five kilometers.
But Comet Encke is not
alone.
According to Clube and Napier there are also:
"between one and two hundred asteroids of more than a kilometer
diameter orbiting within the Taurid meteor stream. It seems clear
that we are looking at the debris from the breakup of an extremely
large object.
The disintegration, or sequence of disintegrations,
must have taken place within the last twenty or thirty thousand
years, as otherwise the asteroids would have spread around the inner
planetary system and be no longer recognizable as a stream."159
In addition to
Comet Encke, there are at least
two other comets in the stream - Rudnicki, also thought to be about five kilometers in
diameter, and a mysterious object named Oljiato, which has a
diameter of about 1.5 kilometers.160 Initially believed to be an
asteroid, this extremely dark, Earth-crossing projectile sometimes
shows signs, visible in the telescope, of volatility and outgassing
and most astronomers now regard it as an inert comet that is in the
process of waking up.161
Comet Encke itself is known to have been
inert for a long period, until it suddenly flared into life and was
first seen by astronomers in 1876.162 It is now understood to
alternate regularly, in extended cycles, between its inert and
volatile states.
Clube and Napier's research had convinced them that an as yet
undetected companion to Comet Encke is orbiting amidst clouds of
harmless dust at the very heart of the Taurid meteor stream.163
They
believe that this object is of exceptional size, that it is a comet,
and that like Encke and Oljiato it sometimes - for very long periods
- shuts itself down. This happens when pitch-like tars that seethes
up continuously from its interior during episodes of outgassing
become so copious that they coat the entire outer surface of the
nucleus in a thick, hardening shell and seal it off completely - perhaps for millennia.164
On the outside all falls silent after the
incandescent "coma" and tail have faded away and the seemingly inert
object tears silently through space at a speed of tens of kilometers
per second.
But, at the center of the nucleus, activity continues,
gradually building up pressure. Like an overheated boiler with no
release valve, the comet eventually explodes from within, breaking
up into fragments that can become individual comets every one of
which threatens the Earth.
Calculations indicate that this presently invisible object at the
heart of the Taurid stream might be as much as 30 kilometers in
diameter.165 Moreover, it is thought likely that other large
fragments accompany it.
According to Professor Emilio Spedicato of
the University of Bergamo:
"Tentative orbital parameters which could lead to its observation
are estimated. It is predicted that in the near future (around the
year 2030) the Earth will cross again that part of [the Taurid
meteor stream] that contains the fragments, an encounter that in the
past has dramatically affected mankind."166
With this warning that an ancient enemy poses a real and present
danger to the near and immediate future of civilization, let us
return to the Younger Dryas and the possibility, after the first
encounter 12,800 years ago, that the earth interacted for a second
timewith some large and dangerous comet fragments orbiting in the
Taurid stream.
On this hypothetical second occasion, however, the
scenario proposed by the astronomers suggests that the primary
impacts were not on land, or onto ice, but into the world's oceans
throwing up vast plumes of water vapor and creating a "greenhouse
effect" that caused global warming rather than global cooling.167
According to Sir Fred Hoyle:
"The difference between a warm ocean and a cold one amounts to a
10-year supply of sunlight.
Thus, the warm conditions produced by a
strong water vapor greenhouse must be maintained for at least a
decade in order to produce the required transformation of the ocean,
and this is just about the time for which water, suddenly thrown
into the stratosphere, might be expected to persist there.
The
needed amount of water is so vast, 100 million million tons, that
only one kind of causative event seems possible, the infall of a
comet-sized object into a major ocean.'168
The Greenland ice cores, those invaluable windows into the past,
tell us that 'temperatures rose in less than a decade at the climate
transition marking the end of the Younger Dryas cold interval and
the beginning of the warmer Holocene epoch 11,600 years before the
present.'169
"In less than 20 years, the climate in the North
Atlantic region turned into a milder and less stormy regime, as a
consequence of a rapid retreat of sea-ice cover. A warming of 7
degrees Centigrade was completed in about 50 years."170
Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University prefers the date of
9700 BC - 11,700 years ago - for the sudden warming and flooding at
the end of the Younger Dryas but agrees that this event was
extremely abrupt. Indeed:
"given our inability to resolve the finest details of something that
happened so long ago, it may literally have happened overnight…"171
Schoch considers but does not accept Hoyle's proposal that this
radical climate change was set in motion by a "comet-sized object"
hitting a major ocean and instead has advocated the view that
unusual solar activity was to blame:
"In the past, much more powerful plasma events sometimes took place,
due to solar outbursts and coronal mass ejections (CME's) from the
Sun, or possibly emissions from other celestial objects.
Powerful plasma
phenomena… hitting the surface of Earth could heat and fuse
rock, incinerate flammable materials, melt ice caps,
vaporize shallow bodies of water,
creating an extended deluge of rain,
and send the climate into a warming spell.
The release of pressure that
follows the melting of thousands-of-meters-thick ice sheets can
induce earthquakes and even cause hot rock under pressure to melt
and erupt to the surface as volcanoes…
"The plasma event of 9700 BC eradicated advanced civilizations and
high cultures of the time… This could be the basis for the nearly
universal myth of a Golden Age…
The 9700 BC event may be the
original basis for the Atlantis legends; the timeframe fits well
with Plato's account."172
Schoch makes an interesting contribution to the debate with this
notion, and he might ultimately be vindicated in his proposal that
it was,
"solar outbursts and accompanying catastrophic cataclysms",
...that caused the abrupt ending of the Younger Dryas around 11,600 or
11,700 years ago.173
On the other hand it is also perfectly possible that Hoyle will be
vindicated and that comet impacts are implicated not only at the
beginning but also at the end of the cold episode.174
More research certainly needs to be done to establish the exact
mechanisms, in all their complexity, that brought about the sudden
termination of the Younger Dryas, but the effects on global climate
are already well understood. Just as much as the events of 12,800
years ago, the events of 11,600 years ago were, as J Harlen Bretz
might have put it, "a debacle".
Could it be that those events, with North America standing squarely
at their epicenter, were indeed the final straw that destroyed a
great advanced civilization of prehistoric antiquity?
As we've seen, all the old archaeological certainties regarding the
peopling of the Americas have now been thrown out with the
recognition that Clovis was very far from being "first".
Perhaps the
lost civilization that I have spent the last quarter of a century
trying to track down had its most significant outpost, possibly even
its heartland, in North America in the period BEFORE the Younger Dryas cataclysms of 12,800 to 11,600 years ago?
1
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/
2
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/channeled-scablands/
3 J Harlen Bretz, The Channeled Scabland of Eastern Washington,
Geographical
Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, July 1928, p. 446.
4 John Soennichesen, Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a
Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood, Sasquatch Books,
, Seattle, 2008, p. 17.
12 J Harlen Bretz, The Channeled Scablands of the Columbia
Plateau, The Journal of Geology, Vol. 31, No. 8, Nov-Dec 1923,
p. 621-622.
14 John Soennichesen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 131.
15 David Alt, Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods,
Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Montanan, 2001, p.
17.
18 J Harlen Bretz, The Spokane Flood beyond the Channeled
Scablands, The Journal of Geology, Vol. 33, No. 2, Feb-March
1925, p. 98.
19 Cited in Stephen Jay Gould, 'The Great Scablands Debate',
Natural History, August/September 1978, pp. 12-18.
20 Cited in Victor R. Baker, 'The Spokane Flood Controversy and
the Martian Outflow Channels, Science, New Series, Vol. 202, No.
4734, 22 December 1978, p. 1252.
21 Cited in Stephen Jay Gould, 'The Great Scablands Debate', op.
cit.
22 Cited in John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 192.
23 Cited in Stephen Jay Gould, 'The Great Scablands Debate',
Natural History, August/September 1978, pp. 12-18
27 Bretz, cited in Victor R. Baker, 'The Spokane Flood
Controversy,' op. cit, pp. 1251-1253.
28 Bretz, cited in ibid., p. 1251.
29 Victor R. Baker, ibid., p. 1253.
30 Bretz, writing in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of
America, No. 39, 1928, p. 643, cited in Victor R. Baker, 'The
Spokane Flood Debates: Historical Background and Philosophical
Perspective', Geological Society, London, Special Publications
2008, Volv. 301, p. 47.
31 Bretz et. al. writing in the Bulletin of the Geological
Society of America, 67, 957, 1956, cited in Victor R. Baker,
'The Spokane Flood Controversy,' op. cit., p. 1249.
32 J Harlen Bretz, The Spokane Flood beyond the Channeled
Scablands, II, The Journal of Geology, Vol. 33, No. 3,
April-May, 1925, p. 259.
33 Bretz, Outline for a Presentation before the Geological
Society of Washington, January 1927, p. 5, cited in John
Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 185.
34 John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 185.
35 Lake Missoula and the Spokane flood [abstracts], Geological
Society of America Bulletin, 1 March 1, 1930, Volv. 41, Nno. 1,
pp. 92-93, cited in John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit.,
p. 206.
36 The Grand Ccoulee, by J. Harlen Bretz, New York, N.Y.,
American Geographical Society, 1932 , cited in John Soennichsen,
Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 210.
37 Cited in John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 222.
38 Cited in John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., pp.
222-223.
39 Bretz, Washington's Channeled Scabland, p. 53, cited in John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 227.
40 John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 229.
41 Stephen Jay Gould, 'The Great Scablands Debate', op. cit.
42 John Soennichsen, Bretz's Flood, op. cit., p. 231.
43
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz.
44 J Harlen Bretz, 'The Lake Missoula Floods and the Channeled
Scabland', The Journal of Geology, Vol. 77, No. 5, September
1969, pp. 510-511
45 Victor R. Baker, 'The Spokane Flood Debates', op. cit., p.
46.
46 J Harlen Bretz, 'The Channeled Scablands of the Columbia
Plateau',' op. cit., p. / 649.
47 J Harlen Bretz, Presentation of the Penrose Medal to J Harlen
Bretz: Response, Bulletin of the Geological Society of America,
Part II, 91, 1095, cited in Victor R. Baker, 'The Spokane Flood
Debates', op. cit., p. 48.
48 See, for example, discussion in James E. O'Connor, David A.
Johnson, et. aAl., 'Beyond the Channeled Scabland', Oregon
Geology, Vol.ume 57, No. 3, May 1995, pp. 51-60. See also
Gerardo Benito and Jim E. O'Connor, 'Number and Size of
last-glacial Missoula floods in the Columbia River Valley','
Geological Society of America Bulletin, 115, 2003, pp. 624-638;
Richard B. Waitt Jr., 'About Forty Last-Glacial Lake Missoula Jöokulhlaups through Southern Washington', The Journal of
Geology, Vol. 88, No. 6, November 1980, pp. 653-679; E.P. Kiver
and D. F. Stradling, 'Comments on "Periodic Jökohuklhlaups from
Pleistocene Lake Missoula',' Letter to the Editor, Quaternary
Research 24, 1985, pp. 354-356; John J. Clague et. aAl.,
'Palaeomagnetic and tephra evidence for tens of Missoula floods
in Southern Washington',' Geology, 31, 2003, pp. 247-250;
Richard B. Waitt Jr., 'Case for periodic colossal jöohkulhlaups
from Pleistocene Glacial Lake Missoula, Geological Society of
America Bulletin, Volv. 96, October 1985, pp. 121-1286; Keenan
Lee, The Missoula Flood, Department of Geology and Geological
Engineering School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, 2009.
49 Vic Baker, in an interview with John Soennichsen, Bretz's
Flood, op. cit., pp. 251-252.
50 David Alt, Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods,
op. cit., p. 25.
51
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/channeled-scablands/
52 Charles R. Kinzie, et .al., 'Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across
Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800
Cal BP', The Journal of Geology, Vol. 122, No. 5 (September
2014), pp. 475-505.
53
https://cometresearchgroup.org/
54 For a full list see:
https://cometresearchgroup.org/scientists-members/
55 James Kennett, quoted in Julie Cohen, "Nanodiamonds Are
Forever: A UCSB professor's research examines 13,000-year-old nanodiamonds from multiple locations across three continents",
The Current, UC Santa Barbara, 28 August 2014:
http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014368/nanodiamonds-are-forever
56
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture
57 Heather Pringle, New Scientist, 22 May 2007:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11909-did-a-comet-wipe-out-prehistoric-americans.html
61 R.B. Firestone, A. West, J.P. Kennett, et al, 'Evidence for
an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to
the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling', PNAS,
Vol. 104, No. 41, 9 October 2007, p. 16016.
64 The parallel is Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which broke up into
multiple fragments that hit the planet Jupiter with spectacular
effect in 1994.
65 R.B. Firestone, A. West, J.P. Kennett, et al, 'Evidence for
an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to
the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling', op.
cit, p. 16020.
69 Ibid., p. 16020-16021.
72
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba.
73
http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm.
74 D.J. Kennett, J.P. Kennett, G.J. West, J.M. Erlandson, et.
al., in Quaternary Science Reviews, Vol. 27, Issues 27-28,
December 2008, pp. 2530-2545.
75 Douglas J. Kennett, James P. Kennett, Allen West, James H.
Wittke, Wendy S. Wolback, et .al., in PNAS, 4 August 2009, Vol.
106, No. 31, pp. 12623-12628.
76 Andrei Kurbatov, Paul A. Mayewski, Jorgen P. Steffenson et
.al., in Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 56, No. 199, 2010, pp.
749-759.
77 W.M. Napier in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society, Vol Vol. 405, Issue 3, 1 July 2010, pp. 1901-1906. The
complete paper can be read online here:
http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/405/3/1901.full.pdf+html?sid=19fd6cae-61a0-45bd-827b-9f4eb877fd39,
and downloaded as a pdf here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.0744.pdf.
78 William C. Mahaney, David Krinsley, Volli Kalm in Sedimentary
Geology 231 (2010), pp. 31-40.
79 Mostafa Fayek, Lawrence M. Anovitz, et .al., in Earth and
Planetary Science Letters 319-320, accepted 22 November 2011,
Available online 21 January 2012, pp. 251-258.
80 Isabel Israde-Alcantara, James L. Bischoff, Gabriela
Dominguez-Vasquez et .al., in PNAS, 27 March 2012, Vol. 109, No.
13, pp E738-E747.
81 Ted E. Bunch, Robert E. Hermes, Andrew .T. Moore et .al., in
PNAS, June 2012, 109 (28), pp. E1903-1912.
82 Michail I. Petaev, Shichun Huang, Stein B. Jacobsen and Alan
Zindler, in PNAS, 6 Aug 2013, Vol. 110, No. 32, pp. 12917-12920.
83 William C. Mahaney, Leslie Keiser, David Krinsley, et .al.,
in The Journal of Geology, Vol. 121, No. 4 (July 2013), pp.
309-325.
84 Charles R. Kinzie, et .al., 'Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across
Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800
Cal BP', op. cit., p. 475.
85 Boslough, Daulton, Pinter et al, 'Arguments and Evidence
against a Younger Dryas Impact Event'.' Climates, Landscapes and
Civilizations; Geophysical Monograph Series 198, American
Geophysical Union, 2012, p. 21.
86 Nicholas Pinter, Andrew Scott, Tyrone Daulton et, al., 'The
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: A Requiem',' Earth-Science
Reviews, Vol. 106, Issues 3-4, June 2011, pp. 247-264.
87 Boslough, Daulton, Pinter et al, 'Arguments and Evidence
against a Younger Dryas Impact Event', p. 21.
88 James H. Wittke, James P. Kennett, Allen West, Richard
Firestone et .al., 'Evidence for Deposition of 10 million tons
of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 years ago', PNAS, 4 June 2013, p. 2089.
90 Malcolm A. Le Compte, Albert C. Goodyear, et .al.,
'Independent Evaluation of Conflicting Microspherule Results
from Different Investigations of the Younger Dryas Impact
Hypothesis',' PNAS, 30 October 2012, 109 (44), pp. E.2960-E2969.
91 Ibid., pp. E2960 and E2969.
92 James H. Wittke, James P. Kennett, Allen West, Richard
Firestone et .al., 'Evidence for Deposition of 10 million tons
of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 years ago',
op. cit., p. 2089.
94 Ibid., p. 2088-2089.
97 Cited in Robert Kunzig, 'Did a Comet Really Kill the Mammoths
12,900 years ago?' National Geographic, 10 September 2013 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130910-comet-impact-mammoths-climate-younger-dryas-quebec-science/).
100 Cosmic Tusk, 'In desperate hole, Pinter grabs a shovel':
https://cosmictusk.com/nicholas-pinter-southern-illinois/comment-page-2/.
101 James Kennett, quoted in Julie Cohen, "Nanodiamonds Are
Forever: A UCSB professor's research examines 13,000-year-old nanodiamonds from multiple locations across three continents",
The Current, UC Santa Barbara, 28 August 2014.
102 J.P. Kennett, et.al., "Bayesian chronological analysis
consistent with synchronous age of 12,835-12,735 Cal B.P. for
Younger Dryas Boundary on Four Continents, PNASA, 27 July 2015
103 P. Thy, G. Willcox, G.H. Barfod, D.Q. Fuller, 'Anthropogenic
origin of siliceous scoria droplets from Pleistocene and
Holocene archaeological sites in northern Syria',' Journal of
Archaeological Science, 54 (2015), pp. 193-209.
105 'Study casts doubt on Mammoth-Killing Cosmic Impact',' UC
Davis News and Information, 6 January 2015:
http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=11117.
106 Personal correspondence between Graham Hancock and Allen
West. Email West to Hancock dated 18 March 2015.
107 Email from Allen West to Graham Hancock dated 22 March 2017
108 Tyrone Daulton, Nicholas Pinter, et.al., "Comprehensive
analysis of nanodiamond evidence relating to the Younger Dryas
Impact Hypothesis," Journal of Quaternary Science, 19 December
2016:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2892/abstract
109 Tyrone Daulton, Nicholas Pinter, et.al., "Interpreting palaeofire evidence from fluvial sediments: a caase study from
Santa Rosa Island, Caifornia, with implications for the Younger
Dryas Impact Hypothesis," Journal of Quaternary Science, 19
December 2016:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2914/abstract
110 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, Pages
209–216
111 Christopher R. Moore, Allen West, Malcolm LeCompte et.al.,
"Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas
onset in North American sedimentary sequences", Scientific
Reports 7:44031, 9 March 2017
112 Cited in:
http://www.heritagedaily.com/2017/03/discovery-of-widespread-platinum-may-help-solve-clovis-people-mystery/114320
113 "Large Pt anomaly in the Greenland ice core points to a
cataclysm at the onset of Younger Dryas", Michail I. Petaev,
Shichun Huang, Stein B. Jacobsen and Alan Zindler, in PNAS, 6
Aug 2013, Vol. 110, No. 32, pp. 12917-12920
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/12917.abstract
114 Christopher R. Moore, Allen West, Malcolm LeCompte et.al.,
"Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas
onset in North American sedimentary sequences", Scientific
Reports 7:44031, 9 March 2017
115 Dyke, A.S., et al., 2002. The Laurentide and Innuitian ice
sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum. Quat. Sci. Rev. 21
(2002), 9–31.
116 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p. 209
118 Nicholas Pinter, Andrew Scott, Tyrone Daulton et, al., 'The
Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: A Requiem',' Earth-Science
Reviews, Vol. 106, Issues 3-4, June 2011, pp. 250-251
119 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays",Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit
120 Davias, M., Harris, T., 2015. A tale of two craters:
Coriolis-aware trajectory analysis correlates two pleistocene
impact strewn fields and gives Michigan a thumb. Geological
Society of America, North-Central Section - 49th Annual Meeting
(19–20 May).
121 Davias, M., Harris, T., 2015. A tale of two craters:
Coriolis-aware trajectory analysis correlates two pleistocene
impact strewn fields and gives Michigan a thumb. Geological
Society of America, North-Central Section - 49th Annual Meeting
(19–20 May).
122 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.215
123 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.212
124 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.212
125 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.214
126 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.215
127 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.215
128 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.215
129 Antonio Zamora, Killer Comet: What the Carolina Bays Tell
Us, third paperback edition, 2016, pp 71-75
130 Petaev, M.I., et al., 2013. Large Pt anomaly in the
Greenland ice core points to a cataclysm at the onset of Younger
Dryas. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1303924110
(July 22, 2013).
131 Christopher R. Moore, Allen West, Malcolm LeCompte et.al.,
"Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas
onset in North American sedimentary sequences", Scientific
Reports 7:44031, 9 March 2017
132 Antonio Zamora, "A model for the geomorphology of the
Carolina Bays", Geomorphology, Vol 282, 1 April 2017, op.cit.,
p.215
133
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture. And see Andrew
Curry, "Coming to America," Nature, Vol 485, 3 May 2012, pp.
30-32
134 Christopher Hardaker, The First American, New Page Books,
2007, p. 9.
135
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/#A1zGtDKtgySyduU6.99
136 Cited in:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/#A1zGtDKtgySyduU6.99
137
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/#A1zGtDKtgySyduU6.99
138
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/#jyGxBcUL0Pe7Pzv1.99
139 'Young Americans", Nature, Vol 485, 3 May 2012, p. 6
140 'Young Americans", Nature, Vol 485, 3 May 2012, p. 6
141
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/#jyGxBcUL0Pe7Pzv1.99
142 Cesare Emiliani held a Ph.D from the University of Chicago
where he pioneered the isotopic analysis of deep-sea sediments
as a way to study the Earth's past climates. He then moved to
the University of Miami where he continued his isotopic studies
and led several expeditions at sea. He was the recipient of the
Vega Medal from Sweden and the Agassiz medal from the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States.
143 Emiliani, The Late Wisconsin Flood into the Gulf of Mexico,
Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 41 (1978), p. 159, Elsevier
Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
144 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, London, 1977,
p. 36.
145 Cited by Professor Klaus Schmidt of the German
Archaeological Institute, quoted in Graham Hancock, Magicians of
the Gods, Coronet, London, 2016, p. 23. Schmidt was drawing
attention to the foundation of the mysterious megalithic site of
Gobekli Tepe in Turkey 11,600 years ago. And see also:
http://www.colorado.edu/today/2008/06/19/greenland-ice-core-analysis-shows-drastic-climate-change-near-end-last-ice-age.
And:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period
146 Cesare Emiliani, The Scientific Companion, 251 and 257,
Wiley Popular Science, 1995
147 Robert Schoch, Voices of the Rocks, 147-148, Harmony Books,
New York, 1999
148 Paul LaViolette, Earth Under Fire, 183, Starburst
Publications, New York, 1997
149 Extract from interview with Professor Dr Klaus Schmidt
conducted by Graham Hancock at Goöbekli Tepe, 7 and 8 September
2013. The full interview appears in Graham Hancock's Magicians
of the Gods, op.cit, Chapter 1:
"Of course we
cannot say that Göobekli Tepe is a temple exactly," Schmidt
answers eventually, obviously choosing his words with care.
'Let us call it a hill sanctuary. And I do not claim that it
is rewriting history. Rather I would say that it is adding
an important chapter to existing history. We thought that
the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers was a slow,
step-by-step process, but now we realize that it was a
period when exciting monuments that we didn't expect were
made.…"
"And not just monuments," I prompt. "At the beginning the
local people were hunter-gatherers and there was no sign of
agriculture.…?
"No," Schmidt concedes, "none." He gestures expansively at
the circles of pillars.: "But the people who came to Goöbekli Tepe,
and who did all this work, invented agriculture! So we see a
connection between what happened here and the later
emergence of Neolithic societies dependent on farming.…"
My ears prick up at that word "invented". I want to be sure
I'm getting this right. "So," I emphasize, "you go so far as
to say that the people who made Goöbekli Tepe actually
invented agriculture?"
"Yes. Yes."
"Could you elaborate on that?"
"Because in this region we have the early domesticates, both
animals and plants. It's done in this region. So they are
the same people."
"And as far as you are concerned this is the first - the
oldest - agriculture in the world?"
"The first in the world. Yes."
150 Don J.
Easterbrook, John Gosse, et. aAl., 'Evidence for Synchronous
Global Climatic Events: Cosmogenic Exposure Ages of
Glaciations', in Don Easterbrook, Evidence-Based Climatic
Science, Elsevier, August 2011, Chapter 2, p. 54.
151 For further discussion of these possibilities, see W.C.
Mahaney, V. Kalm, et .al., 'Evidence from the Northwestern
Venezuelan Andes for extraterrestrial impact', op. cit, p. 54,
and William C. Mahaney, Leslie Keiser, et. al., 'New Evidence
from a Black Mat site in the Northern Andes Supporting a Cosmic
Impact 12,800 Years Ago',' The Journal of Geology, Vol. 121, No.
4 (July 2013) p. 317.
152 Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Winter, Basil
Blackwell, London, 1990, p. 12.
155 W.M. Napier, Palaeolithic Extinctions and the Taurid
Complex, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol.
405, Issue 3, 1 July 2010 pp. 1901-6. The complete paper can be
read online here:
http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/405/3/1901.full.pdf+html?sid=19fd6cae-61a0-45bd-827b-9f4eb877fd39,
and downloaded as a pdf here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.0744.pdf.
Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Winter, op. cit., pp.
150-3. See also Gerrit L. Verschuur, Impact: The Threat of
Comets and Asteroids, Oxford University Press, New York and
Oxford, 1996, p. 136.
156 See W.M. Napier, Palaeolithic Extinctions and the Taurid
Complex, op. cit. See also William C. Mahaney, David Krinsley,
Volli Kalm, 'Evidence for a Cosmogenic Origin of Fired
Glaciofluvial Beds in the Northwestern Andes: Correlation with
Experimentally Heated Quartz and Feldspar', Sedimentary Geology
231 (2010), pp. 31-40.
157 Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Winter, op. cit.,
pp. 244, 275-7. See also Duncan Steel, Rogue Asteroids and
Doomsday Comets, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1995, pp. 132-3.
158 Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Winter, op. cit.,
p. 153.
162 Jacqueline Mitton, Penguin Dictionary of Astronomy, Penguin
Books, London, 1993, pp. 84-5; Duncan Steel, Rogue Asteroids and
Doomsday Comets, John Wiley and Sons, 1995, p. 133.
163 Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Serpent, Faber and
Faber, London, 1982, p. 151; Bailey, Clube, Napier, The Origin
of Comets, Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd., 1990, p. 398; Clube and
Napier, The Cosmic Winter, op. cit., p. 150.
164 Sir Fred Hoyle, Lifecloud: Origin of the Universe, Dent,
1978, pp. 32-3.
165 Emilio Spedicato, Apollo Objects, Atlantis and other Tales,
Università degli studi di Bergamo, 1997, p. 12.
167 See in particular, Sir Fred Hoyle, The Origin of the
Universe and the Origin of Religion, Moyer Bell, Wakefield Rhode
Island and London, 1993, pp. 28-29. See also Fred Hoyle and
Chandra Wickramsinghe, Life on Mars? The Case for a Cosmic
Heritage?, Clinical Press Ltd., Bristol, 1997, pp. 176-177.
168 Sir Fred Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of
Religion, op. cit., p. 29.
169 Jeffrey P. Severinghaus et .al., 'Timing of abrupt climate
change at the end of the Younger Dryas interval from thermally
fractionated gases in polar ice',' Nature 391, (8 January 1998),
p. 141.
170 W. Dansgaard, et .al., 'The Abrupt Termination of the
Younger Dryas Event', Nature, Vol. 339, 15 June 1989, p. 532.
171
http://www.robertschoch.com/plasma.html
172
http://www.robertschoch.com/plasma.html
173
http://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/article/a-solar-induced-dark-age/
174 For the high probability that both the beginning and the end
of the Younger Dryas were caused by impacts of different
fragments from the same giant comet see Fred Hoyle and Chandra
Wickramsinghe, Life on Mars? The Case for a Cosmic Heritage,
Clinical Press Ltd., Bristol, 1997, pp. 176-7. See also Gerrit
Verschuur, Impact, op. cit., p. 139.
