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.
Indeed, there is most definitely evidence of the original source. See: Palaeolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex by W.M. Napier (2010) And The Structure and evolution of the Taurid Complex. (1991) by D.I. Steel et al. Also, ‘The Cosmic Winter’ (1990), a book by Victor Clube, and Bill Napier is an excellent read.
There’s doubt about the size. With objects like this, the assumption is made that the albedo is very low (about like asphalt), and size is estimated by brightness. But some bodies, like Vesta, have high albedo. So this is either largish dark, or small bright. Nobuddy nose.
Guys, even if we had a year’s notice, we don’t have a plan, not a workable one. The money put into a planetary defense system isn’t a hill of beans. We can put something up to nuke an incomer, but we are as likely to create a shotgun effect as anything else. Which is worse, one big whack or a thousand little ones? A garrote or a bullet though the brain?
We are the first generation in history to have the ability to stop us going back to the stone age, and Dave Morrison, head of NASA, plays ostrich on our behalf. Napier and others started talking about this back in the 1980s, and we’ve done nothing but go backward on it ever since. Outside of better computers, our hardware is really about what it was at the beginning of the Space Shuttle program.
So it doesn’t matter if it is dark or bright. If it is as big as the bigger half of the SL/9 fragments our goose would be cooked.
Steve Garcia
Fear of CAGW is a whole lot more rational than fear of imminent meteoric catastrophe. It’s on a par with space invaders. Sagan and his ilk on the one hand spent tens of millions on the Arecibo Antenna hoping to pick up signs of intelligent life, and now even nuttier kooks say quit sending signals or you’ll let the evil aliens know where we are. Crackpots all. You stand a better chance of ET communication by praying.
Life on earth is clearly home grown–no evidence of ET interference. Maybe evolution has been steered now and then by catastrophes but they are very rare. Distribution of species is clearly controlled primarily by continental drift and climate change due to such slow drift. And secondarily by global climate change, where ice ages have been the exception. If any political pretender ran on a campaign of salvation from meteors I would vote for whatever crackpot was running against him.
I’ll tell you what a few of mankind’s biggest problems are.
1) Medical advances assure the survival of the least fit. It is of course our duty to be humane and help the weak but the consequences are clear: we enable the perpetuation and multiplication of “defective” genes. Treatable genetic diseases will inevitably become more prevalent unless we resort to genetic engineering or eugenic bigotry. I offer no solution.
2) Narcotic prohibition is destroying one Latin American country after another. We persecute those who escape from a drug trafficing hell of our making. The solution is obvious: repeal prohibition.
3) While Marxist ideology is suffering except in those countries that have been ruined by drug traffic, totalitarian regimes continue to hold sway in much of the world, and to prevent humane military intervention.
4) Ideological climate pseudoscience continues to subvert the scientific method on a par with Creationism.
5) Driving continues to be dangerous until airbags are designed to prevent inury due to collisions with meteors. –AGF
@agfosterjr June 15, 2012 at 10:06 pm:
All but the last paragraph of this is OT…
“Humane military intervention” – an oxymoron if ever there was one. Preventing it is a good thing. (I almost missed your snarc.)
Most (if not all) of the Latin totalitarian regimes have been put in place by the U.S. at the behest of U.S. economic interests such as the infamous U.S. Fruit Company. Our govt continues intervening ‘humanely’ to a lesser degree than in earlier times, thanks in no small part to GW Bush’s inability to handle walking and chewing gum at the same time, for which the Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Bolivians, in particular, thank him for not assassinating their populist movement leaders. Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, especially, have thrived by this later weakening of U.S. hegemony efforts – much of it done by Milton Friedman and his ‘Chicago Boys’ through the other interventionist tool, the IMF. The nations most closely aligned to the U.S. govt remain among the most totalitarian. So the solution seems to not only be to de-prohibit narcotics but to stop intervening “humanely” in the affairs of other countries in our hemisphere.
On 1.) : At least one study around 2000 suggested that Roe v Wade in 1972 cut down inner city unmarried motherhood and that it had a subsequent effect in lowering the crime rate in 1990s, just when those unborns were coming of age. That suggestion set off a furor and (as far as I’ve been able to tell) no one has had the temerity to replicate it. Whether other studies falsified it, I don’t know; I haven’t seen anything – and I am sure I’d have perked up my ears, since it seemed to make sense to me.
BTW, I favored Roe v Wade as a young man, because I grew up in a neighborhood where children were left to their own upbringing, and I saw many parents who never should have been parents. From what I saw many of us turned out to be real drags on society, especially including my own two brothers. This, of course, implies that I myself should have not been born to my less than functional parents. Like you, I have no solution, but I wanted to add perspective. (And, as I said, this it OT, and I have no intention of hijacking one of my favorite topics.)
While it seems contradictory on WUWT, I do think we need to raise an alarm about comets and other NEOs so that an adequate plan for planetary defense can be funded properly. In doing so I do not advocate that the effort be used to shoehorn a world government. Something on the lines of a joint scientific effort limited to this effort would suffice quite well. This limitation can be safeguarded well enough. And once a methodology is proven and in place only a small cadre would be needed to ‘man the ramparts’.
Steve Garcia
agfosterjr,
Have to agree with you on the 5 points 😉
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agfosterjr says:
June 15, 2012 at 1:59 pm
That link is some of the silliest nonsense we’ll ever hope to read. You could not support a word of it with good evidence. –AGF
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I read some more, and yeah there is alot of nonsense on that site. But the stuff about massive die-offs of mammoths & other mega-fauna ~12900 yrs ago are just recounts of observational evidence, so I don’t think the other kookiness is relevant. There are other sites w/no kookiness that recount the same observations.
The web copy of this document was an apparent OCR scan of the original, link below. I edited this extract from:
Journal of the transactions of the Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society of Great Britain
pp. 40-43
http://www.archive.org/stream/journaloftransac421910vict/journaloftransac421910vict_djvu.txt
Steve P says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:15 am
Thankyou for that fascinating link. Context works wonders, and it is clear that Rev. Whitley is a scholar to be reckoned with. More questions are raised than I have the ability to address, but one particularly intriguing observation I must repeat:
“The surface of the island consisted
of a bed of thick moss on which many beautiful flowers were
growing, but underneath were cliffs of pure ice. It was possible
to strip off the moss like a carpet from a floor, and beneath was
pure ice which never thawed.”
With this Whitley provides a solution to the problem, one touched on by
Pfizenmeyer as quoted by Sue Bishop at the link I provided above (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html).
The mammoths’ food grew on top of the ice, so that the animals were doomed to a life of dangerous grazing, and whether they died of old age or a fall through the ice, their remains were bound to preserved for millennia.
Still we cannot help but wonder if the accounts are not somewhat exaggerated. For one thing, why is it no longer possible to find such hords of tusks as are claimed to have existed if these accounts are not embellished. For another, how would such an abundance of ivory have affected the market, when we must suppose that a high price of mammoth ivory would have been due to the difficulty of transport rather than short supply. Is it possible to distinguish between elephant and mammoth ivory? Of which were Victorian keyboards and trinkets composed?
At any rate, even if there is some truth to these tales they fall short of providing evidence for either Noah’s flood or for meteoric catastrophe: the carcasses accumulated in the ice over long periods of time. The more numerous their remains the more difficult it becomes to argue that they all died at the same time–such populations could not have been supported on the surface at any given time.
–AGF
RE: Dennis Cox: (June 13, 2012 at 8:43 am)
“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.”
Is it possible that a near miss (near hit) with possible atmospheric penetration might result in a capture of the disruption fragments? Perhaps one site is an initial glancing contact point and the others are due to returning fragments.That type of event might lead to a large cloud of ballistic extra-atmospheric debris that could have taken a long time to decay.
One theory for the origin of the moon postulates it as the result of a glancing impact with a Mars-sized body.
Spector asked:
Good question. Based on what I’ve been able to learn so far, I’d say yes. But when you’re considering the potential effects of multiple clusters of fragments of varying size, from dust grains up to stuff that must have been hundreds of meters across, as the Earth passed through Taurid progenitor’s debris field, then the correct answer is probably, “all of the above”.
The thing is, in spite of numerous examples of fragmented comets in short period orbits that cross the orbits of all the planets of the inner solar system like comets Scwassmann Wachmann –3, or Linear-1, none of the impact simulations to date have ever considered the impact effects of a cluster of fragments of an icy body soon after it’s complete breakup. NASA planetary sciences are still stuck on the gradualist model of one lone bolide at a time ballistic/kinetic impacts.
With the exception of some work on the Libyan Desert Glass, and the Tunguska event of 1908, by Mark Boslough at Sandia Labs. (see Large Aerial Bursts and the Impact Threat) all the simulations we see are based on the 60+ year old point-source approximations that came out of the nuclear test detonations of the cold war years. None of them accounts for preservation of the downward momentum of a hypervelocity object that detonates in an airburst like Tunguska did, or the event that produced the Libyan Desert Glass without leaving any shock-metamorphic effects such as a crater. In other words, those old point source detonations without preservation of momentum are not valid for estimating the destructive force of a hypervelocity airburst. Much less the destructive potential for a large cluster of them. Or what the resulting planetary scarring of something like 10,000 Tunguska class airbursts over a period of just a few minutes might look like.
They’re pretty heavily invested in that single bolide model. And they’ve been working from the assumption of a steady, and consistent impact flux for decades. They work from that unproven assumption when they use the number of craters in a given surface on the Moon or Mars, to estimate the age of that surface. But all it would take is the impact of one large cluster of small fragments such as we see in the two images above sometime in the past to cause them to over estimate the age of the resulting planetary surface by billions of years.
And to even acknowledge the possibility of a cluster impact event means throwing decades of work counting craters to estimate the ages of planetary surfaces in the inner solar system right out the window.
For those who’re interested the full paper titled:
Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago by T.E Bunch et al
can now be read without restriction on the PNAS website.
From the paper:
This is revealing. The clay under the rim of this CB is evidently right at the YD boundary (the onset of the YD). This is both completely in disagreement with the 50-100kya datings of the CBs we’ve seen AND in completely in agreement with the CB equals YDB idea. I don’t want to take this and run with it, but just note it for future reference.
One thing about this is that the previous datings of the CBs, as I understand them – have been taken on the rims, too. How does one have some of them dated to 12.9kya and some at 50-100kya? Multiple events seems to be the only explanation, but then the alignments are miraculous.
Evidently there is more to come on this…
I’ve been skeptical about the previous datings taken from the CB rims, which run in the 50,000 to 100,000 range usually (but not always). Not because I want the CBs to happen at the YDB, but because I don’t think the rims are the proper points of measurement for this. It does make sense to do it there if the only possibility for their formation is sedimentary or aeolian (wind-blown), which I vociferously disagree with. But it assumes something is true, even though 70 years of trying have failed to convince the rest of science. If the CBs were easily pawned off as formed by the wind, then they would not be the mysterious enigmas they are today. They are mysterious because scientists for the last 70 years have seen through that hypothesis; it just doesn’t work.
If ET impact is considered a possibility, then the rim is conceivably a tortured, discombobulated mixing zone, making it the LEAST likely place to give a proper dating. It’s like taking DNA samples from the surface of a body – there might be all sorts of other DNA in there. For the Cbs there may be a mixture of millions of years old materials with materials that DO date to an impact. Ergo, some other location for dating needs to be determined, one that is fair to both hypotheses.
@Steve P June 16, 2012 at 7:15 am
Thank you much for the article in the Journal of the transactions of the Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society of Great Britain. I had no idea that was available online. I’ve had my eye out for it for years.
Steve Garcia
Fred Hoyle – always ready to risk his neck outside his specialism (and annoy the hell out of those whose toes he trod on) was very much anti-Croll/Milankovich on the grounds of C/M’s feeble forcing. The current commitment to C/M depends massively on positive feedbacks, i.e. high climate sensitivity. (Could this be WHY it’s so popular…) Hoyle thought that glaciations required cosmic causes for both initiation and termination, and reckoned some kind of impact. Of course he spelled out a very specific complete theory (“Ice” – 1981) which was much criticised (for reasons which were no doubt valid, at least in part). Nevertheless, the main general point he made was that we should be preparing for the next glaciation. Adapt or die. (I think he suggested a geo-engineering approach, the deliberate storing of heat in the deep ocean by major pumping work – possibly loony, possibly dangerous, I wouldn’t know.)