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.”
Well, I indicated my post was theory, albeit mine. And it still produces the best possible conclusion with the evidence to date.
My initial research is linked, and backed up by Harvard.
Did you even look?
So much for my ‘trolling’?
Well, GL, at least I now understand the basis for your claim that the destruction of Puma Punku was contemporaneous with the Younger Dryas, but wouldn’t all that upheaval have destroyed the astronomical alignment which seems to me the best evidence for an earlier origin of the monuments there?
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Bill Illis says:
August 30, 2010 at 6:01 pm
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.
Ulric Lyons says:
August 31, 2010 at 11:08 am
The YD is a cluster of cold events the similar to the LIA, also known as a Heinrich event.
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These ideas seem like a good “null hypothesis” — the YD was simply another Heinrich event. Such events occur regularly during glacial periods when climate “sensitivity” is high. When most glaciers disappear during interglacials, the sensitivity is low and the Heinrich events are greatly muted.
The YD occurred because the interglacial wasn’t well-enough established yet (and glacial sheets had not yet melted enough) to mute the event.
However, the real cause of the YD is still up in the air — it will take quite some time to gather enough evidence to say one way or another.
Interesting. If I recall correctly, from 45 years ago, Velokofsky wrote of the indigenous people of the New Mexico/Arizona area having a legend of a fireball in the NE that destroyed a lot of life. I know Velokofsky is not considered well for his analysis of myths, but myths have an origin in something. The story of humans leaving their idyllic relationship with nature, henceforth children were to be born in pain, a hint at larger cranial capacity at the time of leaving that idyllic state?
Kim, possibly yes or no, depends upon the structure and shape of the alignments. 40 years research is a lot and no doubt contains a lot of detail. remember that is just one report.
I have some technical issues. The horizon with the watermark slopes, but the temple floor seems level. Thats just one example. So you need to read a lot of studies from various sources to get a better picture, not necessarily more accurate.
Without a shadow of a doubt, this was a massive climatic and environmental event. The mystery layer adds spice to the mix. The link has links that describe in detail the extinction and sources of remains around the world. It also pictures carvings of life extent at that time but extinct in the promoted age.
All again makes a mockery of the warmists claims to unprecedented this or that.
Re temperatures, have a look at this link, figure 4.4
http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch4_climate/textr4.htm
Not only did the temperature go crazy about 10,500 BC but it makes todays variations look flat line. Now that rapid up, down and then up again co-incides with the “layer”
We must at all costs fight any dilution or censorship of this site’s authentic and autochtonous discussions of cosmic ray induced climate modulation. alternative theories of solar nucleosynthesis and coupling of the weather here and on Mars with synthetic moonbattery of any sort, lest it invite fatally flawed fetal bat tissue experiments and an abortive increase in Warmism in Alaska. What better proof could anyone want of continuing cold temperatures in New England than recent reports of the decimation of its furry flyer population by fungal white-nose disease- hardly a tropical affliction.
Actually a lot more than just the stratosphere would be filled with reflective water vapor/ice crystals. Basically the entire high altitude atmosphere from the point of the comet material(s) first encounters with friction, gradually on down. Its a fit.
Doug
There are no trolls here. Think of what a troll represents: incredibly slow and stupid, aggressive, knocking people down. What you see here is right-brain thinkers breaking out along a “fault” that is already opening up uncomfortably in the world of science – the hints of catastrophism at the YDB that not only don’t fit the current geological paradigm, they threaten not to fit the current paradigms of physics. That’s a really big threat, just like climate skepticism is to AGW’ers. So there is a low level of style, grammatical correctness, and comprehensibility. But the hints suggest that behind the poorly-expressed ideas is a reasonable degree of scientific savvy. Creative thinking is likely to be incorrect in details, even when it’s right in its central principle. If creative thinking is forbidden here because it might be incorrect , or because its upholders are poor writers, God help us.
Look at those Carolina Bays pictures. The sheer perfection of ellipticity, and the flatness, simply do not compute with conventional impact from rocks, to me. Then there is the prevalence of radioactivity; high levels of iridium etc. in the YDB. There are an awful lot of things that don’t fit, that left-brain scientists would like to quietly disappear into a “Censored” file. I’ve seen far too much Mannian censoring to trust orthodoxy. So I see a warning flag with this paper – “no nanodiamonds” – none anywhere? no, it’s graphene/graphane – but hey, these materials are only newly-discovered, and extraordinary in themselves “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” – h’mmmm, where have I heard language like this before?
There is definitely something up with this YDB. My BS detector says so. Therefore all clues might help, even misspelt clues.
I respect Scientific Method – but the real thing is, one has to practice it holistically – with one’s whole being, at all levels of outer work and inner feelings and reactions. One has to be open to the possibility of being wrong, be ok with accepting respectful criticism, be able to bat away any real rudeness, have a BS detector for when orthodoxy is likely to be circling the waggons and not doing science, and TEST that BS detector for evidence that it was right (or wrong).
So I will read PNAS (Richard Firestone 2007), The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophe (Firestone et al 2006), and Magnetic Reversals (Robert Felix 2009) to stress-test my BS detectors and generally study something really interesting, sparked by this thread.
I couldn’t agree more Lucy. Something definitely happened at the beginning of the YD that resulted in major cooling event (s?) that lasted another 1,000 years just as we were pulling out of a major ice age. Whatever caused that reversal has never been fully or adequately explained and we would be remiss not to look at all possibilities until we are able to do just that.
The history of science is full of discoveries that appeared completely loopy when first proposed, ie the nature of gravity, the heliocentric solar system, the existence of microbes that cause disease, not to mention radioactivity. I don’t know if the explanation for the YD event falls within those parameters, but it sure raises some interesting questions…
Chris, your concern for the New England Bats is heartwarming but their affliction is very minor indeed compared to the scope and range of extinctions at the YD event.
Lucy, thank you for noting my disrespect for the English Language, its true. Perhaps its a part of the testing that I am subject to. Thank you for your acceptance of my faults, it is appreciated.
I was well and truly “Manned” with my link above, I was looking for temperature, thought I had temperature but instead now discover its a proxy. But, what a proxy, would love to see the current state of that.
Grey, I hope Tony will go to bat for his site’s concerns at this week’s International Congress of Palaeooceanography in San Diego. It is a continuing scandal that the many IPCC authors attending have suppressed all mention of the peer reviewed Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophe that Linda has pointed out.
Their squalid refusal to acknowledge how the evolution of cancer tumor immunity in shark cartilage reflects their adoption to cosmic ray bursts militates for replacing the teaching of Darwinist theories with sound science in home school curricula, before other so-called ‘educational’ television stations (ever notice how few employ meteorologists !] are attacked by Malthusian warmistas or have their signal to noise ratio degraded by Telluric Current induced thermionic heating from blacktop parking lots.
All it needs is an open mind, a desire to look at all the options, a quest to find answers. If the data does not fit, burying it, is not the thing to do
From an email from Ted Bunch (one of the original authors of the Firestone paper) to Leroy Ellenberger:
Dear Leroy – not to worry, Dalton is a competent scientist and did what he could do with the materials given to him. The problem lies with Scott and Pinter.
Some brief reasons why the Dalton et al paper is inept:
1. They did not collect from the YDB layer at the Arlington site that was used in the two Kennett et al papers, but from layers that contained “carbonaceous particles”, mostly charcoal – there are no diamonds in charcoal and it is not clear that they even sampled the YDB.
2. They did not collect or at least process the YDB sediment at Murray Springs, which contains most of the nanodiamonds in the YDB as loose nanodiamonds – probably too much work because the work is labor intensive – need to separate kilos of material. The diamonds average about 50 to 100 ppb and you need a lot of diamonds, processed by the correct separation protocol.
3. Yes, we saw graphene, graphane and chaoite, but these are not diamonds.
4. They analyzed microcharcoal and glassy carbon for diamonds and found none, neither did we! These “carbon particles” were made outside the constrains for diamond production and survival.
5. Two reviewers for the Kennett papers are world class shock and diamond experts – they had no problem.
6. One independent stratigrapher who read the Daulton paper was astonished at the “complete ineptness of field protocol and sample characterization”. Of course, you and others can judge for yourselves.
7. The Greenland paper (Glaciology) will appear in September and there are sufficient diamond data in this paper (STEM, HRTEM, RAMAN, EELS, etc.) to prove once and for all that diamonds do, indeed, occur in the YDB.
More later, Ted
The new paper can be read at : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Discovery-of-nanodiamond-rich-layer-in-the-greenland-ice-sheet%20%282%29.pdf
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And then September issue of Science has this headline about the Daulton paper: Mammoth-Killer Impact Flunks Out After a new study failed to find nanodiamonds, impact experts are flatly rejecting outsiders’ claims that an impact 12,900 years ago devastated the megafauna.
“Impact experts” what experts?
Don’t be silly. It’s an infant science. There ain’t no such animal as an impact expert folks. And if there is, Daulton, Pinter, and Scott, certainly don’t qualify. And just what is the nature of the three ‘insiders’ knowledge, that was withheld in the education of the dozens of ‘outsiders’? And who decides who’s condemned to ‘outsider’ hell along with all of us poor unfortunates? The popular press?
It’s not the peer review system this time. The pro-impact “outsiders” studying the YD impact layer are out publishing the “insiders” ten to one. It’s not research funding either. The outsiders aren’t exactly rolling in the money, but they aren’t being denied funding either. They are all receiving the full support of their respective institutions. For once it is the data that’s driving the research, regardless the negative propaganda of the popular press.
Read the names, and participating institutions, in the author lists of the papers reporting NDs in the YDB. Those aren’t struggling grad students with just another crackpot idea folks. Most on the list of so called “outsiders” are tenured, long term, professors of prominent universities. And many of the leading scientists on those papers are department heads at their respective institutions. The funding for their research into the events of 12,900 years ago hasn’t been a problem at all
Three obscure scientists on the inside. (of what?) using blatantly flawed protocols, couldn’t collect, and prepare, stratigraphic specimens with sufficient skill to detect nano-diamonds in a thin layer of strata, that dozens of scientists before them on the outside haven’t had a problem with.
So what?
Those ‘insiders’ did not look in the same places in the strata as the original researchers. (The NDs are in a well described, but thin layer underneath the ‘Black Mat’, at the top of the extinction layer) They didn’t test the same materials. Nor did they duplicate the sample collection, and preparation, protocols of the works they were supposed to be challenging. Rule #1 Thou shalt duplicate the experiment. Since they haven’t, their shamefully incompetent work didn’t debunk, or disprove anything.
The article in Science was a day late. (literally) The new paper in the September issue of Journal of Glaciology, (from those darned outsiders again.) reporting a discreet layer of NDs in a layer of ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet corresponding to the YDB blindsided them. This time the outsiders anticipated another cheap shot from those pesky insiders though. So they provided enough data to settle the question of NDs in the Younger Dryas boundary layer once and for all.
But the nanodiamonds aren’t the only data that needs to be tested.
Suppose everything R.B. Firestone et al proposed in their 2007 paper Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling regarding the impact of a giant fragmented comet is true.
And suppose that Bill Napier’s proposal in his paper titled Paleolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex, that the giant comet involved was non other than the Taurid progenitor is also correct.
Firestone, and friends cited Toon et al when they estimated that the devastation may have been equivalent to as much as 10^9 megatons TNT. And temps could have gone as high as 10^7 degrees C. Ten million degrees does seem a bit extreme, doesn’t it? I asked Bill Napier about that temperature. He pointed out that even if the object hit the upper atmosphere at 30 km/sec, and 100% of it’s difficult to get much more than 10^5 degrees C.
But that’s still hot enough to melt stone, and make it flow like water for a moment. Considering the distribution of the nanodiamonds found in the YD boundary layer, that hyper thermal impact storm must have blanketed half the continent.
The Taurid progenitor has been estimated by Bill Napier at something like 10^15 gm. And 50 to 100 km in diameter. That’s 1.1 billion tons. And as you are probably aware, a significant amount of that original mass is missing from the Taurid Complex. When we bring the recent work on the Younger Dryas boundary layer together with the astronomical model provided by Dr Napier, the YD impact hypothesis becomes a fully fledged theory. If you can describe a beast, you can predict it’s foot prints.
Professor Napier’s model describes something that was completely fragmented, and tidal forces had probably stretched the debris into a very long stream of fragments and particles. The event would have lasted a little more than an hour as the Earth’s orbit took it through that debris field.
Extraordinary theories require extraordinary proofs. In such an event, only the first fragments to fall would have fallen into cold atmosphere. The rest would have fallen into already superheated impact plasma, and just cranked up the heat, and pressure. The resulting thermal blast winds should have been able to toss whole mountain ranges aside like clumps of flour on a bakers table. And melt them like butter under a high pressure blowtorch.
The NDs weren’t the only blast effected materials of that event. Only the hardest to detect. The ground didn’t get smashed, and broken by solid bolides. It was flash melted and blown away by supersonic gusts of thermal impact plasma. Where the extraordinary proof comes into it, is that we need to be able to identify hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of flash melted stone, and other blast effected materials.
The impact storms of the Taurid progenitor were hotter, and more geologically violent, than anyone has ever imagined in their most frightening nightmares of devastation. The planetary scarring of the event bares no resemblance to anything in current impact theory. Or NASA’s current NEO threat assessments. And our extraordinary proof is the in fact that all of hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of blast effected materials of the primary impact zone are in context, in pristine condition. They are all present, and accounted for. And they aren’t ballistic impact craters.
If you have the time, how about taking a look at: http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/
Deepest regards to all,
Dennis Cox
P.S.
Here’s links to those two papers.
Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling, by R.B. Firestone et al
is at:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Firestone%2B25_2007.pdf
and Paleolithic extinctions, and the Taurid Complex, by W.M. Napier is at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Paleolithic%20extinctions.pdf
Dennis Cox says:
September 6, 2010 at 8:33 am
“…”
There are some major problems with the numbers you give.
A 100km diameter object has a mass ~1e15 tonnes, not 1e15 grammes.
At an impact velocity of 30km/s the explosive energy is 100tonneTNT/tonne.
So a 100km impactor would produce a 1e11 MT explosion (not 1e9 MT), more than enough to superheat the entire atmosphere and wipe out all life on the planetary surface (some ocean and subterranean life would survive). No way this has happened in the recent past. If it had, we wouldn’t have noticed it. (That’s not a typo; think about it!)
On the other hand, 1e15 grammes (equivalent to a 1km impactor) would produce only a 1e5 MT blast, which would devastate only a small fraction of the continent. This is too small to cause sufficient ecological damage, unless subdivided into many well-distributed objects. Even then, it would be a lot tamer than your apocalyptic description would suggest.
Sorry, the typo that caused the misunderstanding is my mistake, it’s a cut and paste error. And it is in this paragraph:
“Firestone, and friends cited Toon et al when they estimated that the devastation may have been equivalent to as much as 10^9 megatons TNT. And temps could have gone as high as 10^7 degrees C. Ten million degrees does seem a bit extreme, doesn’t it? I asked Bill Napier about that temperature. He pointed out that even if the object hit the upper atmosphere at 30 km/sec, and 100% of it’s difficult to get much more than 10^5 degrees C.”
That last sentence should read: “He pointed out that even if the object hit the upper atmosphere at 30 km/sec, and 100% of it’s kinetic energy is converted to heat in the atmosphere, it is difficult to get much more than 10^5 degrees C.”
But where is the refereed literature published where the specific density, or weight of any asteroid, or comet, has ever been measured?
The specific weight given by professor Napier is 10^15 grams. which works out to well over 1.1 billion tons. No one has ever said the Taurid Progenitor hit all at once. The 1.1 billion tons is the estimated size of the object when it was first injected into the inner solar system into a short period elliptical orbit. It began to breakup immediately. The Taurid Complex is the remaining debris. And the Diameter given for the original size of the TP was an estimate, not a firm figure. It is described as between 50 km, and 100 km, before it began to breakup in the inner solar system. It had been breaking up for millennia before the timing of the crossing orbits brought the highest concentration of fragments, and the Earth, together at one of the two the crossing points. That first, and worst, impact shower from the Taurids would have lasted a little over an hour. In an almost continuous rain of airburst impacts equivalent to well over 10,000 Tunguska’s; not a single bolide impact.
The scary part, is that when you study the Taurid Complex, you realize two significant points.
1.) There is an awful lot of mass missing from the system.
and even scarier:
2.) There is also an awful lot of mass remaining in the Taurid Complex. And all of it is in an Earth crossing orbit.
The Taurids aren’t through with us.
Dennis Cox says:
September 6, 2010 at 1:32 pm
“Sorry, the typo that caused the misunderstanding is my mistake, it’s a cut and paste error. And it is in this paragraph:”
No, that typo did not cause me any misunderstanding. That is not where the problems lie. You have a contradiction between the supposed diameter of the original object and its mass – out by a factor of a million! A 100km object has a mass ~1e15 tonnes NOT grammes. Do the sums. 4pi.r^3.ro/3. Say ~500,000 cubic km x 2 tonnes/m^3. There is also an inconsistency in the supposed explosive energy of the impact event and its effects.
First of all I keep writing 10 e15 gm and you keep reading 1 e15.
From Paleolithic extinction and the Taurid Complex. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Paleolithic%20extinctions.pdf
Dennis Cox says:
September 7, 2010 at 6:09 am
“First of all I keep writing 10 e15 gm and you keep reading 1 e15.”
No, you wrote 10^15, which is 1e15. In your cut and paste you have now changed what Napier wrote from ~10^15gm to 10e15gm, not only making a further error of a factor of ten, but also losing the important order of magnitude sign. It is easy to make such slips, but defending them smacks of innumeracy. I don’t believe you understand Napier’s paper. The ~1e15gm mentioned was not the mass of the cometary progenitor, but a hypothetical amount of material that, impacting as a stream of suitably sized pieces, could cause the amount of damage the scenario required. That progenitor, if of 100km diameter, would have a mass ranging from ~1e20gm (for a very low density fluffy ammonia and water snowball) to ~1e21gm (for a rock and ice aggregate), which is 1e5 to 1e6 times more massive.