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Posted on 09/07/2008 6:57:55 PM PDT by baynut
Interesting article. Don’t leave us hanging so please post the next installments. ;)
Interesting SC ping, y’all! :-)
What would cause them to deflate, and deflate so uniformly?
I was going to say "meteorites" but dang! I can't come up with a better (sillier) theory than the good doctor.
Earth in Upheaval, pp 98, The Carolina Bays
Peculiar elliptical depressions, or oval craters, locally called bays, are thickly scattered over the Carolina coast of the United States and more sparsely over the entire Atlantic coastal plain from southern New Jersey to northeastern Florida. These marshy depressions are numbered in the tens of thousands and, according to the latest estimate, their number may reach half a million.
The larger bays average 2,200 feet in length, and in single cases exceed 8,000 feet. A remarkable feature of
these depressions is their parallelism: the long axis of each of them extends from northwest to southeast. These oval depressions may be seen especially well in aerial photographs. The swarm of meteorites must have been large enough to hit an area from Florida to new Jersey.
That’s it; Clube. Interesting stuff. Velikovsky may not have been entirely wrong; he might have been mostly right except it wasn’t about planet Nemesis, but good old-fashioned comets.
:’) It was Raup et al wrote about Nemesis. There are those who say its existence has been disproved by Hubble or other tools, but that’s probably not true. Nemesis is not incompatible with Clube/Napier.
I stand corrected; I do recall Velikovsky’s theories involved a mysterious rogue planet, did they not? Or was he theorizing that one of our known planets were responsible? I have a couple of his books, but they don’t deal with the main thesis about colliding planets, which I don’t have (but have been meaning to get). Remind be what Nemesis is.
I meant to reply to your post yesterday but got sidetracked somehow -- happens all the time. But yes, I have noticed the same feature you have and it's a curiousity of sorts. Some unusual colors in parts of it in places. If it's the same feature we're talking about, Montgomery Alabama sets right in the middle of a part of it, no?
Best guess is that it's an artifact left over from the uplift of the Appalachians. Pure guess though.
Venus and Mars, but they’re alright tonight.
/rimshot
Nemesis: Does the Sun Have a ‘Companion’?
SPACE dot COM | 03 April 2001 | By Robert Roy Britt
Posted on 02/10/2003 11:03:23 AM PST by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/839980/posts
Mass limit on Nemesis
Bull. Astr. Soc. India | after 10 February 2005 | Varun Bhalerao and M.N. Vahia
Posted on 08/03/2006 9:24:16 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1677507/posts
A Catastrophical Scenario for Discontinuities in Human History
Journal of New England Antiquities Research Association, 26, 1-14, 1991
First version published in 1985 as Quaderno 85/3 | Emilio Spedicato - University of Bergamo
Posted on 04/19/2002 12:42:27 PM PDT by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/669263/posts
What We Can Learn From The Biggest Extinction In The History Of Earth
Science Daily | 8-10-2007 | Stanford University
Posted on 08/09/2007 7:47:19 PM PDT by blam
33 posted on 08/10/2007 3:08:28 AM PDT by timer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1879059/posts?page=33#33
Thanks for those sources. Will now have some reading to do when the McCain Palin excitement settles down. Always been interested in catastrophism.
mark for later
CHOWAN COUNTY, N.C.
Rockyhock Bay was pretty obvious, even from the road. It was a dense cluster of tall trees and short shrubs, a dark green oasis in a flat plain, encircled by an unpaved road. It was also enclosed by a tall chain-link fence.
"That does not deter me," George Howard said, but forays up farm roads dead-ended long before the bay was in reach. Abandoning the SUV, the three researchers struck out through a melon field that sloped gently up from the fence.
"I wonder if that's not the rim right there," Malcolm LeCompte mused. "That's the white sand."
Allen West knelt and began to fill a plastic bag.
Howard has never been deterred by much. An overwhelming personality, he has a business, a family, a mammoth tusk over the plasma TV, an unmatched ability to find things online and a deep interest in Carolina bays, which he heard of while working in environmental affairs for Congress. His boss at the time was a North Carolina senator, who had a topographical map.
"I saw these odd-looking ellipses on it," Howard recalls, "and I said, 'What in the world are those, senator?' and he said, 'Oh, meteor holes.' "
An avocation was launched. Now Howard co-owns a wetlands restoration business, whose first job was restoring a series of drained Carolina bays. In his spare time, he and a friend dig and mail soil samples from the bays to West, a geophysicist who lives in Arizona.
West analyzes them for diamonds.
Across North America and in at least two European countries, the start of the Younger Dryas cold spell is marked in the soil by a layer called a black mat, although it may also be white or bluish in color. The mat is topped by a layer of sediment holding few or no human artifacts, indicating a lack of occupation for many years after it was deposited.
Clovis artifacts and Pleistocene bones are found directly below the black mat, never above it.
Fourteen kinds of minerals, gases and other materials have been found in the black mat, and in every Carolina bay tested, more than a dozen so far. They are extraterrestrial markers, and they have been found at all of the Clovis sites studied by the team, at the point in time when that culture basically vanished.
The markers include charcoal and heavy metals, plus the element iridium. Iridium found in a worldwide soot layer deposited 65 million years ago was key to linking dinosaur extinctions to the Chicxulub impact crater under the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.
Other markers found in the Carolina bays include spiky glasslike pieces of carbon; fullerenes, which are round objects that resemble soccer balls because of their six-sided pattern; helium-3, an isotope not found naturally on this planet; and hollow balls of carbon.
The clincher, as far as West is concerned, is nanodiamonds, so named for a good reason - 10,000 would fit across the width of a human hair.
"What we have found is, several big Carolina bays are lined with diamonds," he said. "This is the first time extraterrestrial materials have been found lining the bays."
West has found diamonds inside the carbon spherules and trapped in the glasslike carbon. He says that suggests, but does not yet prove, that an extraterrestrial impact created the bays.
"Even though the diamonds are the strongest of those 14 markers, it's the collective weight of all 14 of them that's important," West said. "It's very difficult to argue that all 14 of them, in the same layer across two continents, is accidental. It wasn't accidental when the dinosaurs went extinct, and it's not accidental now, we think."
Diamonds found in the bays and at Clovis archaeological sites across the country are rounded and strangely shaped because they were created within seconds, unlike slow-forming diamonds in the ground. There is, West said, no way to explain it other than an impact. Such diamonds have been found in one other location on Earth: in an oil field surrounding the Chicxulub crater.
He finished filling the plastic bag with sand. If lab tests reveal carbon spherules, they will be examined for nanodiamonds.
"A single carbon spherule is about the size of a period at the end of a sentence," he said. "And in that, there may be as many as a billion diamonds."
He strode back to the SUV through sand hot enough to burn skin.
"I can't tell you how long I've had this dream to come to Rockyhock Bay," West said.
"Right up there with the pyramids," Howard said.
"Actually, I like this better than the pyramids."
"About the same temperature," Howard replied, and drove out of the field.
Critics of the impact theory say the 14 markers rain down on Earth all the time as dust from outer space. West says the markers in the black mat and in the Carolina bays are many times more abundant than those normal background levels. Such high levels are found only in association with cosmic impacts, he said, but not everyone is convinced.
As further evidence for the impact theory, the group cites the work of other scientists. Some have reported finding Clovis tools and mammoth tusks gouged on just one side by radioactive grains of dust, all dug in from the direction of the Great Lakes. Others have concluded that floods up to 1,000 feet deep roared across the Northwest states. Still others have studied the loss of ocean circulation and found Hudson Bay sediments off Africa and Europe, carried there, they think, by icebergs flushed into the southern seas by the influx of fresh water from the melted ice sheet.
West and his colleagues presented their impact hypothesis at the American Geophysical Union meeting in October 2007. (An entire morning of the meeting was devoted to papers, pro and con, about it.) Shortly thereafter, hearkening back to the great debates of the mid-1900s, the journal Science published the first criticism of it.
In May, the Geological Society of America published another paper that called the evidence "a Frankenstein monster, incompatible with any single impactor or any known impact event." The rebuttal from Firestone and West, published in the same issue, concludes: "The truth may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true."
In June, a rebuttal to the rebuttal, published online, warns against "a few markers collected in good faith from an abundant background, combined with a good story and some wishful thinking."
A paper about the diamonds has been submitted to two major international journals. West hopes it will be out soon.
In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. As it plunged toward the planet, the comet broke apart until there were at least 20 pieces. One by one, they disappeared into the gaseous planet. Huge scars began to appear like open wounds, and the marks remained visible to telescopes on Earth for many months.
Critics say impacts are so infrequent that the Younger Dryas must have been caused by something else. They say there is no visible crater near the Great Lakes. Supporters point to Shoemaker-Levy 9, and to the fact that impact craters on Earth have been recognized for only a few decades, and may be more plentiful than anyone knows. Since 1960, 174 have been listed in the Earth Impact Database.
Over dinner in Kitty Hawk one June evening, LeCompte and West discussed the Tunguska event of 1908. From miles away, witnesses reported a brilliant flash and huge explosions over a remote region of Siberia. Twenty years later, when researchers finally reached the site, they found 772 square miles of dead trees splayed in a radial pattern, and elliptical-shaped bogs aligned with the center.
Today, it is widely accepted that a piece of a comet or a small meteor exploded. There is no visible crater. Less well-known is a suspected impact on Aug. 13, 1930, in remote Brazil near the Peruvian border. A monk arriving five days later reported that native Indians said three fiery balls from space had exploded, obscuring the sun with dust and setting fires that were still burning. Researchers have pointed out that the event occurred during the annual Perseid meteor shower, which is caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.
LeCompte, a remote imaging specialist from Elizabeth City State University, says the danger to Earth from comet debris and other small cosmic objects seems to be greater than officially calculated.
"These things still remain a threat, and that threat is not well known," he says. "It's a very political issue. So this whole thing about the Younger Dryas impact is going right in the face of that whole issue because it suggests that the impacts are more frequent than the models might suggest."
The Algonquin Indians tell a story they say is the oldest of their people. In it, the Great Spirit warned that a star would fall, and the people who listened hid themselves in deep mud. An object appeared in the sky, as bright as a second sun, with a long, glowing tail that enveloped the Earth. Trees burned, lakes and rivers boiled, rocks shattered.
After the star had climbed back into the sky, the people emerged to find their world completely changed. The giant animals had died, leaving only their bones behind. The Great Spirit warned that the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star would someday return.
"In this story, this long-tailed bright object, which sounds a whole lot like a comet, the tail was responsible for killing giant animals," West said. "They actually have those in the story, giant animals. It killed many of the people; they say it was so hot it caused the ice to melt off the mountains, it caused rocks to melt, and it caused all the trees to catch on fire."
Then there is the predictive part of the story, he said: "If our orbit, and the orbit of this object that we think hit us coincided once, then the odds are extremely high that it would coincide again. There are astronomers that have looked at the orbits of some of these heavily fragmented comets, and Earth crosses several of them every year."
These coinciding orbits create the Leonid, Perseid, Geminid and Taurid meteor showers every year.
"So it certainly is conceivable that some of the shooting stars that we see today are remnants of the object that we think hit us 12,900 years ago," West said.
"You look up in the sky, you see those old fireflies coming in, well, multiply them by a thousand times and that's possibly what the Clovis people would have seen."
If lines are drawn along the long axes of the Carolina bays, then extended several hundred miles, they converge at two spots: one near the Great Lakes, and one in southern Canada. This holds true for the bays that are north of Virginia, because they point a little more westerly, and the bays that are south of South Carolina, because they point a little more to the north.
West sketched out the location of the Carolina bays along the East Coast, their long axes aligned toward the Great Lakes.
Then he added the "rainwater basins" of Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, which are baylike depressions oriented toward the northeast, with the long axes pointing to the same spot near the Great Lakes. The two areas fan out like butterfly wings on either side of the central point.
It is the same shape made by impact spatters on the moon and Mars, when material is flung out of a forming crater, West said.
"The implications of this research are that this is a type of impact that was unknown before," West said, "and is very much like the impact when Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter. No one knew that could happen, either. So it appears that these kinds of things, because they leave so little evidence, that they are quite likely far more frequent than space scientists have known in the past.
"That poses substantial danger for the culture. If these things even happen every 50,000 years or 100,000 years, then at some point in the future one of them's going to happen, and then it's going to seriously disrupt our civilization.
"This is one thing - unlike al-Qaida, unlike the bird flu, unlike probably global warming - that has the potential to end our species. Any enlightened civilization cannot let these things hit it. We need to do something about it."
Back on the highway, Howard turned again onto Sandy Ridge Road.
"There's a sandy ridge there, all right," West observed, consulting a map of the Carolina bays. "The rim runs right under that house."
He pondered a cornfield that filled another bay. The white sand rim dipped into dark soil at the
center of the field, then rose at the end of the row into white sand again. West wished for a sample to test.
"If we're going to prove this hypothetical comet, it's incumbent on us to find the evidence," he said. The small plastic bags that might hold it were sitting in the back seat.
The afternoon sun blazed. Smoke smudged the air, drifting from a peat fire to the south that was burning between two Carolina bay lakes. As the highway rolled by, West pointed out signs for Two Mile Desert Road and Great Desert Road. Not really desert, said the Arizona resident.
"Desert means pocosin," Howard explained, "because it's monotonous."
"One man's monotony is another man's Carolina bay," West replied, and the road dipped, just a little, to cross another one.
Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com
After the star had climbed back into the sky, the people emerged to find their world completely changed. The giant animals had died, leaving only their bones behind. The Great Spirit warned that the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star would someday return.
"In this story, this long-tailed bright object, which sounds a whole lot like a comet, the tail was responsible for killing giant animals," West said. "They actually have those in the story, giant animals. It killed many of the people; they say it was so hot it caused the ice to melt off the mountains, it caused rocks to melt, and it caused all the trees to catch on fire."
thanks for posting, I enjoyed every word!
As did I. FWIW, I gave baynut about half a day head start on the 3rd part to see if he wanted to post it. I didn't hear anything, so...
Anywho, it's truly mind boggling to realize that walking, talking, eating, breathing modern humans probably witnessed such events. AND that even more modern(?) Man wants to pretend it's all the result of early peoples of America, and elsewhere, chewing peyote -- and seeing pictures. No mountain too high; no river to wide for the contemporary scientific community®. Thoroughly modern aren't we???
the evidence is there, though one has to sift a lot of chaff to find the wheat - and allow for the Problems with Radiometric and Carbon-14 Dating.
Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling
Communicated by Steven M. Stanley, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, July 26, 2007 (received for review March 13, 2007)
Abstract
A carbon-rich black layer, dating to ≈12.9 ka, has been previously identified at ≈50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of 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 at ≅12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period.
Clovis-age sites in North American 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 at ≈12.9 ka.
This layer also extends throughout at least 15 Carolina Bays, which are unique, elliptical depressions, oriented to the northwest across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. 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 end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in North America.
This is really troubling. Renfield has stated and I've also read in several places that the C Bays are not all the same age, in fact, several thousand years separate their ages according to various dating techniques. Not having a good deal of faith in the scientific community™ anyway, I wonder that if there isn't some chicanery afoot, what else might cause the anomalous dates.
...(e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in North America.
Not to mention the apparent stampede of millions of megafaunal critters to various burial grounds around the world. Alaskan river beds in North America and northern Russian islands probably being the most notable.
The stampede was sarcasm in case you didn't catch it. The beasts, along with everything else, would had to have been washed there by prodigous amounts of water. Big wave anyone???
An impact, or near impact on the ice sheet would have created all manner of challenges for man and beast alike, no? How much of the ice was converted into water and steam???
I don't quite know how to say this, (it's a shocking idea) but I'm not yet convinced there was any ‘ice age’ to start with...not before the earth was tilted, not before there were ten months of 30 days each, in a year of 360 days. Think of all the evidence there is regarding adjustments to calenders worldwide.
If you go back to EiU and read ‘The Birth Of The Ice Age Theory’ you will find:
It is often said that Agassiz added from half a million to a million years to the recent history of the world by inserting the Great Ice Age between the Tertiary, or the age of mammals, and the Recent (comprising the Late Stone Age and historical times.) It should be borne in mind, however, that the million-year span for the Ice Age is Lyall’s estimate, and he interpreted Agassiz's theory in the spirit of uniformity.
FYI
If global catastrophism is on trial, so is the doctrine of uniformitarianism
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