DEEP IMPACT?: This 4 centimeter band of dark sediment uncovered at Murray Spring, Ariz., may indicate a cosmic impact or explosion that kicked off a period of global cooling and a mass extinction in North America. problem is, a researcher can’t find the nanodiamonds.
Via eurekalert: Impact hypothesis loses its sparkle
Shock-synthesized diamonds said to prove a catastrophic impact killed off North American megafauna can’t be found
About 12,900 years ago, a sudden cold snap interrupted the gradual warming that had followed the last Ice Age. The cold lasted for the 1,300-year interval known as the Younger Dryas (YD) before the climate began to warm again.
In North America, large animals known as megafauna, such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth tigers and giant short-faced bears, became extinct. The Paleo-Indian culture known as the Clovis culture for distinctively shaped fluted stone spear points abruptly vanished, eventually replaced by more localized regional cultures.
What had happened?
One theory is that either a comet airburst or a meteor impact somewhere in North America set off massive environmental changes that killed animals and disrupted human communities.
In sedimentary deposits dating to the beginning of the YD, impact proponents have reported finding carbon spherules containing tiny nano-scale diamonds, which they thought to be created by shock metamorphism or chemical vapor deposition when the impactor struck.
The nanodiamonds included lonsdaleite, an unusal form of diamond that has a hexagonal lattice rather than the usual cubic crystal lattice. Lonsdaleite is particularly interesting because it has been found inside meteorites and at known impact sites.
In the August 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists led by Tyrone Daulton, PhD, a research scientist in the physics department at Washington University in St. Louis, reported that they could find no diamonds in YD boundary layer material.
- Tyrone Daulton is pictured with the transmission electron microscrope he used to search in vain for shock-synthesized nanodiamonds, evidence that a extraterrestrial object such as a meteorite killed off North American megafauna
Daulton and his colleagues, including Nicholas Pinter, PhD, professor of geology at Southern Illinois University In Carbondale and Andrew C. Scott, PhD, professor of applied paleobotany of Royal Holloway University of London, show that the material reported as diamond is instead forms of carbon related to commonplace graphite, the material used for pencils.
“Of all the evidence reported for a YD impact event, the presence of hexagonal diamond in YD boundary sediments represented the strongest evidence suggesting shock processing,” Daulton, who is also a member of WUSTL’s Center for Materials Innovation, says.
However, a close examination of carbon spherules from the YD boundary using transmission electron microscopy by the Daulton team found no nanodiamonds. Instead, graphene- and graphene/graphane-oxide aggregates were found in all the specimens examined (including carbon spherules dated from before the YD to the present). Importantly, the researchers demonstrated that previous YD studies misidentified graphene/graphane-oxides as hexagonal diamond and likely misidentified graphene as cubic diamond.
The YD impact hypothesis was in trouble already before this latest finding. Many other lines of evidence — including: fullerenes, extraterrestrial forms of helium, purported spikes in radioactivity and iridium, and claims of unique spikes in magnetic meteorite particles — had already been discredited. According to Pinter, “nanodiamonds were the last man standing.”
“We should always have a skeptical attitude to new theories and test them thoroughly,” Scott says, “and if the evidence goes against them they should be abandoned.”
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“We should always have a skeptical attitude to new theories and test them thoroughly,” Scott says, “and if the evidence goes against them they should be abandoned.”
For some reason, I believe there will be numerous comments about that quote on this thread.
Yeah… no one can find the impactor. Odd how people forget misplaced chunks of iron such as the Willamette Meteorite No impact crater was preserved at the discovery site; it is possible that the meteorite landed in what is now Canada and was transported to the Willamette Valley during the Missoula Floods in ice as a glacial erratic or the Cape York Meteorite (and friends) one of the largest iron meteorites in the world. Est age 10,000 years ago.
Graphite, huh? Did they find any rubber eraser particles? That would account for the megafauna die off.
It took decades to find the extraterrestrial remnants at Tunguska.
Is there any known theory which can explain the negative correlation between the terms ‘climate’, ‘nano’, and ‘paleo’ and the scientific validity of a piece of research?
That poses an interesting question: From whence doth the graphene arrive?
If it was terrestrial, then it would —I would think— happen frequently.
If it was extraterrestrial, then let’s hope it doesn’t pay any more visits any time soon!
Now otherwise? 12,000 years ago …
Funny that such would conveniently coincide with the arrival of Cro-Magnon.
Key Twilight Zone music for effect …
This makes more sense than early hunters but then my opinion is not unbiased. We have seen other papers on this topic in recent years. So far interesting but not definitive. Another paper I will need to read.
So, what DID cause that 40 cm layer in the photo?
What would happen if a meteor strike took place on a kilometer of ice?
So what could cause a 40cm boundary layer containing graphene/graphane-oxides?
A 40cm layer seems too large to result from local phenomena like forest fires.
Volcanic eruption through carbon rich rocks?
We hold these things to be self evident:
“We should always have a skeptical attitude to new theories and test them thoroughly,” Scott says, “and if the evidence goes against them they should be abandoned”.
…not requiring additional comment. 🙂
O/T
In August 2010…..
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News
The Gulf Stream does not appear to be slowing down, say US scientists who have used satellites to monitor tell-tale changes in the height of the sea.
Confirming work by other scientists using different methodologies, they found dramatic short-term variability but no longer-term trend.
A slow-down – dramatised in the movie The Day After Tomorrow – is projected by some models of climate change.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8589512.stm
Yet in 2005….
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Changes to ocean currents in the Atlantic may cool European weather within a few decades, scientists say.
Researchers from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre say currents derived from the Gulf Stream are weakening, bringing less heat north.
Their conclusions, reported in the scientific journal Nature, are based on 50 years of Atlantic observations.
They say that European political leaders need to plan for a future which may be cooler rather than warmer.
The findings come from a British research project called Rapid, which aims to gather evidence relating to potentially fast climatic change in Europe.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4485840.stm
Hmmmmm!
Interesting PPT that discounts the comet impact theory (forming the YD boundary layer)
http://est.sandia.gov/earth/docs/boslough-agu-younger-dryas.pdf
I hope we are not going to be having another one of these “Younger Dryas” anytime soon.
Sounds like an eraser event to me.
If it was a large meteorite, then there have been 12 of them in the last 100,000 years (and lots of smaller ones) except for the last 12,000 years when there hasn’t been any.
Greenland ice core temperature history.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/100KYearsGreenlandTemp.jpg
“We should always have a skeptical attitude to new theories and test them thoroughly,” Scott says, “and if the evidence goes against them they should be abandoned.”
Do I hear a real scientist somewhere nearby? In this light the AGW hypothesis beast is so full of holes would someone please just kick it over! It seems to have died while still on all fours.
There was an interesting program on the Discovery Channel last night about the extinction of the dinosaurs due to a meteorite impact 65 million years ago. Several points were made later in the presentation – that it’s not a question of if, but when this happens again. Even though there is a group of scientists watching for incoming meteors, when interviewed they freely admit that many objects could escape detection until it’s too late.
Apophis is coming in 2029. Calculations indicate it will pass between Earth and its communications satellites. This is one of many concerns that have been all but abandoned during the era of global warming hysteria.
Apophis has been downgraded from “We’re all going to die!” to “I coulda been killed!” on the Universal Hysteria scale. Scientists are confident that in 2013 it will be downgraded again to “Whew! That was close.”
I visit Murray Springs from time to time, when I go to see my mom in Sierra Vista. It’s not 40 cm. I think we lost a decimal point somewhere.
Still have not look at the position of our planet to the sun NOT being at the equator, but moved to the northern hemisphere of the sun so we can see the suns north pole.
Sorry, you will not like this but my belief is that an electric discharge or giant thunderbolt did this. Thus no diamonds.
The clues are several. 1. Niagara falls formed at the same time. 2. There is no sedimentary deposits from the Grand Canyon. 3. The rivers and lakes in the Sahara disappeared. 4. The layers covering the USA. 5. The end of the Clovis age and 6. the start of the Younger Dryas.
As with the Scablands, the Grand Canyon was formed very quickly but by electricity rather than water. The event is recorded in Human Mythology.
There is also evidence of other massive earth changes at the same time as well.
When you look at the alternative and all the evidence it certainly is more than possible.
“As with the Scablands, the Grand Canyon was formed very quickly but by electricity rather than water. The event is recorded in Human Mythology.”
Grey Lensman, do you have a source for that?
Grey Lensman,
About 15 year ago the resident science expert for the industrial magazine “R &D” speculated that the reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles triggered a flash freeze event. It supposedly accounted for the fact that mammoth carcases have been found standing upright, with undigested vegetative matter in their stomachs.
But I, among others, think the Younger Dryas was triggered by the sudden emptying of Lake Missoula and it’s St Lawrence Seaway cousin into the deep water formation areas.
“Sorry, you will not like this but my belief is that an electric discharge or giant thunderbolt did this. Thus no diamonds.
The clues are several. 1. Niagara falls formed at the same time. 2. There is no sedimentary deposits from the Grand Canyon. 3. The rivers and lakes in the Sahara disappeared. 4. The layers covering the USA. 5. The end of the Clovis age and 6. the start of the Younger Dryas.”
@ur momisugly Grey Lensman
Not that I don’t like what you said so much as I do not understand the statements. Could you elaborate on how all these “clues” point to a massive “electric discharge” or a “giant thunderbolt? Naming landmarks and pointing out known extinctions of megafauna or the Clovis Age do not do anything in the way of connecting them to your “theory”.
Unless this was a joke?
But what caused Lake Missoula to empty. This is also tied to the draining and formation of the Great Salt lake. I think but have not checked that the last great Scabland flood occurred at that time.
Note also that the Sahara went from tropical rain forest at that time as well. Plus the east Coast USA has very deep depository layer with Clovis remains under it.
National Geographic or Discovery had a program called the Black mummy of Libya in which they documented the above and included rock art of hippos and crocs dated to before that event. Look at the recent discoveries in the Sahara, a fossilized lake with Human remains, two metres tall with superb rock carvings, just like modern art, of Giraffes
It is possible that the event was co-incident with a pole shift, the Pole shifting from SW Alaska to its present position. This moved the Ice instantly to Siberia freezing the last mammoths.
Yes, its only a theory but it fits all the evidence.
….and the graphene comes from…. where? How does graphene and graphane oxide form from graphite or carbon.
Why would there be graphene in the layer and what is the source?
So, is there graphene above and below the layer in question?…. or is the graphene only in the 40cm layer?
Is the layer caused by flooding, volcanism or neither of these two processes? What is the reason for there being a layer anyway and what time span was the layer built up in ?
Seems they haven’t done much except rule out nano diamonds…. Which is good, but surely they could exhibit a bit more curiosity and actually answer a few questions….?