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

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

[SunkenCiv]

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

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

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

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

[SunkenCiv]

The PDF:

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

(correspondence to James L. Bischoff)

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Thud!

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[SunkenCiv]

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

[Publius6961]

OK you win.

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

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

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

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

[SaxxonWoods]

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

[muawiyah]

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

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

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

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

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

[djf]

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

[muawiyah]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[muawiyah]

The Carolina Bays are much more recent.

[SunkenCiv]

Ooooh, you will like that book!

[SunkenCiv]

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

[djf]

The article says 12.9 ka.

About 13,000 years ago.

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

[SunkenCiv]

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

[SunkenCiv]

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

;’)

[SunkenCiv]

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

[BrewingFrog]

As you should...

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

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

[muawiyah]

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

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

[exDemMom]

I don’t understand why the debris layer should be 10 cm thick. That isn’t all debris from the space object, is it? I’m thinking that it would take a huge amount of debris to cover the earth with 10 cm of dust, and that much additional mass would certainly have caused the rotation of the earth to slow.

[SunkenCiv]

The Carolina Bays and the similar formations elsewhere in North America began simultaneously as ejecta craters from an event located in the midwest.

[SunkenCiv]

If it was published in the past ten or so years, I’m sure blam posted it on FR. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

The debris layer they studied in lakes was 10 cm; the thickness of the layer depended on the distance from the impact, depths iow varied. :’)

[Yollopoliuhqui]

Then too there is that pesky Tsunguska “impact” that left no crater yet blew down trees in a 60 mile radius. This and many other conundrums can be easily solved if one assumes that the incoming comet/meteor was carrying a hugely different static electrical charge that arced to earth before impact with enough force to vaporize the object and knock over the trees without digging a crater. But associating electricity with objects in space is taboo, let’s just keep calling the solar electric current the “Solar Wind”.

www.thunderbolts.info
http://sites.google.com/site/dragonstormproject/

[aruanan]

This layer contains a diverse, abundant assemblage of impact-related markers, including nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, and magnetic spherules with rapid melting/quenching textures, all reaching synchronous peaks immediately beneath a layer containing the largest peak of charcoal in the core.

Also consistent with effects of the Z-pinch aurora in which there would have been massive arcing to ground in the Northern Hemisphere as well as a level of incoming radiation that would have been sufficient to kill off large mammals unable to take shelter in caverns.

[aruanan]

This layer contains a diverse, abundant assemblage of impact-related markers, including nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, and magnetic spherules with rapid melting/quenching textures, all reaching synchronous peaks immediately beneath a layer containing the largest peak of charcoal in the core.

As I wrote to Anthony Peratt in 2010: Recently I read that some believe the North American megafauna were doomed by an asteroid or comet near impact in Canada around the end of the last ice age ~12,000BCE, near impact because no impact crater could be found. They did find, however, evidence of widespread burning and nano-diamonds they cite as evidence of the extraterrestrial origin. I've read that high energy electric discharge can create nano-diamonds. Is it not possible that what they observed was the result of heavy arcing to the earth from the northern auroral zone? Have there been any attempts to survey the general latitude around the world for similar evidence?

He indicated that their experimental evidence showed that nano-diamonds could, indeed, be formed by such heavy arcing and that in summer they would be examining the nano-diamonds in situ. But I haven't heard anything recently.

[bert]

-——evidence that could be dated.———

the date was 12.9 ka whenever the hell that was in BP years

[muawiyah]

500,000 of them ~ all up and down the Atlantic Coast.

I liked the note that pointed to their having an origin somewhere about SE Indiana and SW Ohio.

I have hope for the volcano South of Seymour, Indiana having had intermittent activity within the last 100,000 years ~ that'd explain all your "bays".

That would also make them land features and not bays at all since sea level would have been lower than the bottoms of those bays through that period.

There's another lurking cauldera in the vicinity of Paoli, Indiana and up to Martinsville, Indiana.

These things are supposed to be OLD and inactive, but there's a heat source still cooking water for them.

[exDemMom]

Ah, thanks.

They had mentioned that people have found similar sites on other continents; from that, I had assumed that the sites were all from the same impact. It would seem not.

[baynut]

Civ, et al., make sure to bookmark this blog for all things black mat and Younger Dryas Impact: www.cosmictusk.com

[baynut]

Civ, et al., make sure to bookmark this blog for all things black mat and Younger Dryas Impact: www.cosmictusk.com

[SunkenCiv]

I was very surprised to learn about the North American splash sites other than the Carolina Bays, simply because I’d never heard of them at all when reading about the CBs, or just generally.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks baynut, I also added that to my FR links page.

Time to trim that links page down a bit, I believe.