From the University of California – Santa Barbara
Study finds new evidence supporting theory of extraterrestrial impact
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– An 18-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has discovered melt-glass material in a thin layer of sedimentary rock in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Syria. According to the researchers, the material –– which dates back nearly 13,000 years –– was formed at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200 degrees Celsius (3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit), and is the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.
These new data are the latest to strongly support the controversial Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) hypothesis, which proposes that a cosmic impact occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas. This episode occurred at or close to the time of major extinction of the North American megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths; and the disappearance of the prehistoric and widely distributed Clovis culture. The researchers’ findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“These scientists have identified three contemporaneous levels more than 12,000 years ago, on two continents yielding siliceous scoria-like objects (SLO’s),” said H. Richard Lane, program director of National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. “SLO’s are indicative of high-energy cosmic airbursts/impacts, bolstering the contention that these events induced the beginning of the Younger Dryas. That time was a major departure in biotic, human and climate history.”
Microscopic Images of Grains of Melted Quartz
Morphological and geochemical evidence of the melt-glass confirms that the material is not cosmic, volcanic, or of human-made origin. “The very high temperature melt-glass appears identical to that produced in known cosmic impact events such as Meteor Crater in Arizona, and the Australasian tektite field,” said Kennett.
“The melt material also matches melt-glass produced by the Trinity nuclear airburst of 1945 in Socorro, New Mexico,” he continued. “The extreme temperatures required are equal to those of an atomic bomb blast, high enough to make sand melt and boil.”
The material evidence supporting the YDB cosmic impact hypothesis spans three continents, and covers nearly one-third of the planet, from California to Western Europe, and into the Middle East. The discovery extends the range of evidence into Germany and Syria, the easternmost site yet identified in the northern hemisphere. The researchers have yet to identify a limit to the debris field of the impact.
Photos of Melt Glass Known as Trinitite
“Because these three sites in North America and the Middle East are separated by 1,000 to 10,000 kilometers, there were most likely three or more major impact/airburst epicenters for the YDB impact event, likely caused by a swarm of cosmic objects that were fragments of either a meteorite or comet,” said Kennett.
The PNAS paper also presents examples of recent independent research that supports the YDB cosmic impact hypothesis, and supports two independent groups that found melt-glass in the YDB layers in Arizona and Venezuela. “The results strongly refute the assertion of some critics that ‘no one can replicate’ the YDB evidence, or that the materials simply fell from space non-catastrophically,” Kennett noted.
He added that the archaeological site in Syria where the melt-glass material was found –– Abu Hureyra, in the Euphrates Valley –– is one of the few sites of its kind that record the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmer-hunters who live in permanent villages. “Archeologists and anthropologists consider this area the ‘birthplace of agriculture,’ which occurred close to 12,900 years ago,” Kennett said.
“The presence of a thick charcoal layer in the ancient village in Syria indicates a major fire associated with the melt-glass and impact spherules 12,900 years ago,” he continued. “Evidence suggests that the effects on that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe.”
Other scientists contributing to the research include Ted Bunch and James H. Wittke of Northern Arizona University; Robert E. Hermes of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Andrew Moore of the Rochester Institute of Technology; James C. Weaver of Harvard University; Douglas J. Kennett of Pennsylvania State University; Paul S. DeCarli of SRI International; James L. Bischoff of the U.S. Geological Survey; Gordon C. Hillman of the University College London; George A. Howard of Restoration Systems; David R. Kimbel of Kimstar Research; Gunther Kletetschka of Charles University in Prague, and of the Czech Academy of Science; Carl Lipo and Sachiko Sakai of California State University, Long Beach; Zsolt Revay of the Technical University of Munich in Germany; Allen West of GeoScience Consulting; and Richard B. Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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[SNIP: Sorry, Nerd, but this goes to places Anthony just doesn’t want to go. -REP]
Leaving aside the local problems these impacts cause,presumably the impact sent a dust cloud into the atmosphere and led to a world wide cooling. I always thought mammoths became extinct because the Ice Age ended and they could not cope with higher temperatures!
Since this has only just been discovered it could not have been as calamitous for the planet as the evnt 65,000,000 years ago that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Which means that the Younger Dryas was not part of a “natural rythm”, that the natural rythm induced ice age ended 20,000 years ago and not 12,000 years ago. Implications: we are now due for the next ice age.
“He added that the archaeological site in Syria where the melt-glass material was found –– Abu Hureyra, in the Euphrates Valley –– is one of the few sites of its kind that record the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmer-hunters who live in permanent villages. “Archeologists and anthropologists consider this area the ‘birthplace of agriculture,’ which occurred close to 12,900 years ago,” Kennett said.
“The presence of a thick charcoal layer in the ancient village in Syria indicates a major fire associated with the melt-glass and impact spherules 12,900 years ago,” he continued. “Evidence suggests that the effects on that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe.”
I just knew Von Däniken gods nuked Sodom and Gommarra. :-))
Some four decades ago, I purchased a cassette tape album at a science fiction convention titled Minus Ten and Counting: Songs of the Space Age, on which was featured a tune written by singer Leslie Fish.
Seems appropriate to quote the lyrics here right now:
Emphasis included in the performance.
Very interesting. I agree with Vince, above, in that the natural climate cycle was interrupted. It is certainly cold here in the UK and June already. The UK Met. Office blame the jet stream.
Interesting – but I’m confused. The article says “Morphological and geochemical evidence of the melt-glass confirms that the material is NOT cosmic, volcanic, or of human-made origin.”. But then they go on to state that the widely distributed material was “likely caused by a swarm of cosmic objects that were fragments of either a meteorite or comet”.
Aren’t those things “cosmic”?
LearDog says:
June 13, 2012 at 4:46 am
Interesting – but I’m confused. The article says “Morphological and geochemical evidence of the melt-glass confirms that the material is NOT cosmic, volcanic, or of human-made origin.”. But then they go on to state that the widely distributed material was “likely caused by a swarm of cosmic objects that were fragments of either a meteorite or comet”.
Aren’t those things “cosmic”?
The objects that hit were cosmic, but the melt-glass is terrestrial. The airbursts (since we haven’t found any craters) essentially melted the ground beneath them and the shock waves carried the molten material outward from “ground zero”…
What’s interesting is that a major cooling from an impact causes a semi-permanent shift to an ice-age-like climate. The impact effects themselves couldn’t have lasted more than a couple decades, yet the climate-change lasted 1000 yrs. This prb’ly happened by similar mechanisms to the “regular” transitions to glacial conditions from interglacials, just faster.
andrewmharding says:
June 13, 2012 at 4:04 am
Leaving aside the local problems these impacts cause, presumably the impact sent a dust cloud into the atmosphere and led to a world wide cooling. I always thought mammoths became extinct because the Ice Age ended and they could not cope with higher temperatures!
Since this has only just been discovered it could not have been as calamitous for the planet as the evnt 65,000,000 years ago that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Andrew, I think, as usual, that the evidence is still a little sparse but it remains a serious possibility. The reasoning goes like this :
The mamoths that have been found frozen have been found with food still preserved in their stomachs. For that to happen the animal would have to have been frozen extremely rapidly. Bearing in mind the size of the animal, the russians have calculated a temp of -120°C would have been needed almost instantaneously because the food would have fermented rapidly while the body cooled slowly.
Also, the mamoths would have needed a large supply of food to live where they were frozen. This indicates that the climate was as warm as, or warmer than today. The comet hypothosis for a rapid freeze of this nature seems reasonable but so does a large volcanic eruption if we bear in mind that the YD episode was short lived and very sudden. The previous hypothosis of a glacial block in the US also stands up to a little scrutiny.
Has anyone else noticed an increase in the last few decades of catastrophism for explaining several significant geologic and historic events, a departure from continued application of uniformitarianism? This appears to be what more recent field evidences are suggesting.
to respond to beng –
I wonder whether the impacts were so severe as to cause ice age conditions – or of the impacts merely lowered the temperature to just beneath whatever the threshold is to cause the shift to an ice age. Note also that the original 12.9k impact theory suggested that one occurred just over the massive ice shelf covering the Hudson bay, that this caused a massive flush of melt water into the Atlantic ocean, affecting the ocean circulation as well as throwing up a dust cloud for a year or more.
What is most interesting to me about this article is that it gives evidence that the impact was in fact multiple impacts. So just how many were involved? So far there is evidence for at least three (North America, Germany, and Syria), but there may possibly have been a dozen or more of various severity.
It has been interesting seeing how this theory has changed as more information became known. Initially they were proposing a supernova as being responsible – however directly or indirectly – for causing the comet impact (1), and back then then [2005] they still believed it was just one impact – possibly directly upon the last major ice sheet over the Hudson Bay. Now they are suggesting multiple air bursts, and I do not recall seeing even one mention of a supernova in the article. On the other hand, there was at least one other article, from 2007, that suggested a more active sun instead of a supernova accounted for some of their suggested evidence of a supernova (2), although as I’ve only been able to find mention of that article at one site on the net, I am not sure as to how accurate or not it may itself be.
(1) http://phys.org/news6734.html
(2) http://starburstfound.org/mammoth-extinction-due-supernova-explained-giant-solar-flares/
Interesting and much more supportive of a bolide than the previous misinterpretation of mold spores as carbon spherules. But, still no real PGE anomaly… or any other physical differentiation of the Younger Dryas from the other late Pleistocene glacial stadials related to the Dansgaard-Oesschger cycle.
If these scoria can’t be explained with terrestrial causes, they might be evidence of some type of bolide.
What, no models? Must have been one big explosion to eliminate so much CO2 that it caused an ice age! Seriously though, I’m happy to see some real digging and speculating on what is found. The whole thing appears quite plausible to me and I’ll be happy to read more (but I must add, I’m just an accountant, not a scientist). But the minute “global warming” is mentioned, I’ll turn on the authors in a heartbeat.
Leardog, the point of the article is that heat from cosmic impacts melted terrestrial material.
The source of the material is terra firma. The source of the heat was cosmic.
The signatures for volcanic or human heating are also different from what is seen in these samples.
Nerd says:
June 13, 2012 at 4:00 am
[SNIP: Sorry, Nerd, but this goes to places Anthony just doesn’t want to go. -REP]
I agree with Nerd.
An asteroid that hits Syria and Pennsylvania at the same time? Hello?
Could it be that the “cosmic” items some how “parted the atmosphere” and opened the surface of the Earth directly to the vacuum of space. This is the only way the temperature could fall ~200F instantaneously [Sun pointing away or cooking (bbq mammoth) would have occurred]. A volcano or Earth shift could not do this!
Finally, an explanation for how the Mammoths froze. Climate “science” is settled except for those pesky cosmic events….
So as I understand it there were cosmic bodies impacting Earth resulting in melt-glass forming at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200C. The hottest lavas are only 1,200C. No wonder there was a thick layer of charcoal – it must have set vast areas on fire. Does anyone know if melt-glass was formed as a result of the Tunguska event?
That it is found in California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Arizona, Syria, Germany and Venezuela suggests a widespead event and a large number of impacts. There must be some evidence of the original source.
@ur momisugly J Crew
Your obervation is correct. “Punctuated equilibrium” is the phrase coined by Stephen Jay Gould to describe this viewpoint. I believe it also is useful in describing climate history.
Most of the blast-effected materials they’ve found so far are the kind of tektites, and particulates one might expect to see as distal ejecta falling out of atmospheric suspension as dust. The extreme temps required for the formation of the kind impact glass they’ve found exceed what can happen in volcanic processes; as well as any anthropogenic cause. Only an impact event can produce those temps.
If the thickness of the impact layer is a function of the proximity to the epicenter of one of the cluster airburst impact zones, keep in mind that the impact layer found in Lake Cuitzeo, in Central Mexico is a full 10 cm thick. It should also be noted that the stuff in Lake Cuitzeo is consistent with what you’d expect to see if a hypervelocity object large passed directly overhead, and was already well down into the atmosphere.
So one of the primary impact zones must be in Mexico, and within a couple of hundred miles of Lake Cuitzeo. The problem for researchers there is the amount of volcanic activity, and materials at that distance from the lake. And since no uniformitarian geologist of the past could’ve imagined such violence coming from the sky, there is a very good chance that most, if not all, of the melt formations, and planetary scarring of the Mexican impact zone are misdefined on geologic maps as volcanogenic.
DirkH says:
June 13, 2012 at 6:57 am
An asteroid that hits Syria and Pennsylvania at the same time? Hello?
***************************
Remember the series of impacts of comets into Jupiter about a decade ago? They were widely spaced around a much bigger planet.
@DirkH Not a discreet “asteroid,” Dirk, but a swarm of bodies from a disintegrating comet. The fact that many big bodies are well known to slowly disintegrate into a wide pack(s) of smaller bodies, which can return each year, is widely ignored in the impact community. There is one coming around later this year: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0605a/ And Bill Napier has given us model to produce impacts of this kind for a sustained period(s) across much of the earth. Anyone reading this one paper for the first time, will increase their understanding of earth and human history many times overs: http://www.scribd.com/george1202/d/27825834-Napier-Astro-Model-Ras
DirkH,
FYA the researchers at the Younger Dryas Boundary layer quit thinking about single bolide, solid body, impacts a long time ago. The evidence is pointing to airbursts of large clusters of smaller fragments such as Linear 1, or Schwassmann Wachmann 3. And as W.M. Napier pointed out in ‘Paleolithic extinctions and the Taurid complex’ the breakup of comets is now a well recognized path to their destruction.
We saw SL-9 breakup into a “string of pearls” before returning to impact Jupiter. And most folks tend to refer to SL-9 as a model for a typical breakup mechanism. But in fact, to breakup a comet and stretch it out into a long string of fragments that way requires the concentrated tidal forces of a close passage to a very powerful gravity well; an unlikely scenario in the inner solar system.
The mechanism that caused the breakup of Comets Linear, and SW-3, was something different. Each produced large clusters of smaller fragments, not a string. And the mechanism that did so did not require the gravitational influence of any planet. It appears that the ices holding them together sublimated in the warmth of the sun, and they simply ‘came unglued’ like the wings of Icarus.
The impact evidence that’s been accumulating from the YD boundary layer is pointing to the Earth having collided with the debris from multiple large clusters of smaller fragments, such as those two objects; soon after the complete breakup of a good sized comet. And a very compelling case can be made that the parent body was the progenitor of the Taurid complex.
this explains how mammoths were quick frozen in spite of their hairy coats…an animal of that size requires a lot of food..therefore the climate there must have been much warmer with lush vegetation
[eternally grateful to attend Anthony’s world wide science class]
Add in some more anamolies….Mammoths were dining on temperate dandilions at the same latitude as the presumed, three mile thick Canadian ice sheet. One speculated scenario is that a possible impact occured over this ice sheet, hiding the impact crater. There is also a NA layer of nano-diamonds in this sediment layer. NASA recorded a meteor break up with multiple impacts on Jupiter, so this is a proven phenomena. The mammoths showed bone fractures consistent with direct vertical impact loads and the undigested food matter suggests near instant flash freezing. A massive, largely CO2 meteorite would be solid ‘dry ice’ in the 2.7K outer space, burst in the atmosphere and could have rained chunks of still frozen dry ice on our departed wooly mammal friends. Our web classroom has allowed us to find and share Truth beyond our greatest dreams. If left unmolested, humanity will ‘web’ our way out of all of our ignorant nightmares.