The Younger Dryas Impact Debate - Is It Settled Yet?

https://www.ancient-origins.net ^ | UPDATED 30 JUNE, 2021 - 22:58 | MARTIN SWEATMAN

[qam1]

Supporters of pre-existing theories for the demise of the American megafauna and the occurrence of the Younger Dryas mini ice age have, naturally, been highly critical of this recent interloper into their long-standing stalemate.

As they should be

All impact caused xx extinction hypothesis fail in one regard, and it's the same issue the Noah's flood people have. Where are the bodies?

The fossil record should be littered with bodies of extinct animals at the time of impact, but no where is this the case. With the YD impact, most species in most areas went extinct thousands of years after the fact (and not coincidentally whenever man showed up). With the Dinosaurs they were long gone before their supposed extinction level impact. Of course the answer to this is more & more epicycles impacts.

The YD impact hypothesis is just a bad attempt to keep alive the Noble Savage myth.

[TigersEye]

There may be debate about what caused the Younger Dryas period, including the question "was it one event or several?", but there should be no debate that something big happened between 14.5k and 12k years ago.

Bigger than anything that has happened since then.

Also not debatable; burning "fossil fuels" is a climate nothing burger.

[TigersEye]

The remains of animals very rarely become fossils. The conditions that create fossils from bones only exist in certain geographic areas during certain climactic conditions and geologic conditions that have to remain stable for many thousands of years.

And then finding fossils is an even more difficult proposition. A lack of remains from a tiny slice of time 10k years ago means nothing.

[TigersEye]

Here is an hour and twenty minute interview with Martin Sweatman.

Interviewing Martin Sweatman, author of 'Prehistory Decoded' - UnchartedX Podcast #5 video podcast

[PIF]

(Or am I just not a libtard, back-stabbing academic stuck in an intellectual dungeon of my own creation?)

—
Got it in one.

[Oatka]

An impact like that would melt the glaciers really, really fast.

I always thought that the Grand Canyon was cut by melting glacier water rushing to the ocean and not by "millions of years" of gradual river erosion.

Velikovsky's book "Earth in Upheaval" has many examples of something beating Hell out of the Earth in earlier days.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Red Badger. That Ancient Origins website though, still kind of a pile of coprolite.

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The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: review of the impact evidence | Martin Sweatman | School of Engineering | Earth-Science Reviews | 19 May 2021

Abstract | Firestone et al., 2007, PNAS 104(41): 16016-16021, proposed that a major cosmic impact, circa 10,835 cal. BCE, triggered the Younger Dryas (YD) climate shift along with changes in human cultures and megafaunal extinctions. Fourteen years after this initial work the overwhelming consensus of research undertaken by many independent groups, reviewed here, suggests their claims of a major cosmic impact at this time should be accepted. Evidence is mainly in the form of geochemical signals at what is known as the YD boundary found across at least four continents, especially North America and Greenland, such as excess platinum, quench-melted materials, and nanodiamonds. Their other claims are not yet confirmed, but the scale of the event, including extensive wildfires, and its very close timing with the onset of dramatic YD cooling suggest they are plausible and should be researched further. Notably, arguments by a small cohort of researchers against their claims of a major impact are, in general, poorly constructed, and under close scrutiny most of their evidence can actually be interpreted as supporting the impact hypothesis.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Red Badger. It was a toss-up between this one and one of the coprology topics for the GGG digest topics, btw.

[Texan5]

Thanks-very, very interesting article...

[gleeaikin]

Time for THE BOOK. The first part of the article says there are no craters. Obviously they have never seen the picture of the bottom of Lake Michigan with either 2 or 3 craters. Two at either end of the lake and a small one between them. Also, in a quick read I did not see anything about the Carolina Bays which may have been caused when gigantic ice chunks were thrown off as Lake Michigan bolides hit. The fact that the trajectory lines converge to one side of Lake Michigan can be explained by the amount the earth rotated while the chunks were in the air while traveling to their landing sites. Why do these scientists have to keep reinventing the wheel when Firestone and his crowd did such a good job. They should be building on this work, not theorizing from scratch. As to missing mega-fauna. The Clovis people pretty much disappeared. Probably all big animals were not killed off then, but on the other hand were so reduced in abundance that as the human population reinvigorated, they were finally killed off.

[ckilmer]

The geology reports I’ve read are that there was repeated massive flooding in the pacific northwest as ice dams broke and then reformed again repeatedly. That happened in only the last 12 thousand years.

The grand canyon was something different. It was created starting about 4 million years ago as the land rose. Then over several million years—in pretty much the same fashion as the niagra falls is creating the falls canyon there—the falling water wore backwards creating the grand canyon.

[SunkenCiv]

I hope I posted it already, but it’s possible that I was sleep surfing and dreamed the whole thing. ;^)

[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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