From the University of South Carolina – PNAS: Topper site in middle of comet controversy
By Peggy Binette, USC
Did a massive comet explode over Canada 12,900 years ago, wiping out both beast and man in North America and propelling the earth back into an ice age?
That’s a question that has been hotly debated by scientists since 2007, with the University of South Carolina’s Topper archaeological site right in the middle of the comet impact controversy. However, a new study published today (Sept.17) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides further evidence that it may not be such a far-fetched notion.
Albert Goodyear, an archaeologist in USC’s College of Arts and Sciences, is a co-author on the study that upholds a 2007 PNAS study by Richard Firestone, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Firestone found concentrations of spherules (micro-sized balls) of metals and nano-sized diamonds in a layer of sediment dating 12,900 years ago at 10 of 12 archaeological sites that his team examined. The mix of particles is thought to be the result of an extraterrestrial object, such as a comet or meteorite, exploding in the earth’s atmosphere. Among the sites examined was USC’s Topper, one of the most pristine U.S. sites for research on Clovis, one of the earliest ancient peoples.
“This independent study is yet another example of how the Topper site with its various interdisciplinary studies has connected ancient human archaeology with significant studies of the Pleistocene,” said Goodyear, who began excavating Clovis artifacts in 1984 at the Topper site in Allendale, S.C. “It’s both exciting and gratifying.”
Younger-Dryas is what scientists refer to as the period of extreme cooling that began around 12,900 years ago and lasted 1,300 years. While that brief ice age has been well-documented – occurring during a period of progressive solar warming after the last ice age – the reasons for it have long remained unclear. The extreme rapid cooling that took place can be likened to the 2004 sci-fi blockbuster movie “The Day After Tomorrow.”
Firestone’s team presented a provocative theory: that a major impact event – perhaps a comet – was the catalyst. His copious sampling and detailed analysis of sediments at a layer in the earth dated to 12,900 years ago, also called the Younger-Dryas Boundary (YDB), provided evidence of micro-particles, such as iron, silica, iridium and nano-diamonds. The particles are believed to be consistent with a massive impact that could have killed off the Clovis people and the large North American animals of the day. Thirty-six species, including the mastodon, mammoth and saber-toothed tiger, went extinct.
The scientific community is rarely quick to accept new theories. Firestone’s theory and support for it dominated the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union and other gatherings of Paleoindian archaeologists in 2007 and 2008.
However, a 2009 study led by University of Wyoming researcher Todd Surovell failed to replicate Firestone’s findings at seven Clovis sites, slowing interest and research progress to a glacial pace. This new PNAS study refutes Surovell’s findings with its lack of reported evidence.
“Surovell’s work was in vain because he didn’t replicate the protocol. We missed it too at first. It seems easy, but unless you follow the protocol rigorously, you will fail to detect these spherules. There are so many factors that can disrupt the process. Where Surovell found no spherules, we found hundreds to thousands,” said Malcolm LeCompte, a research associate professor at Elizabeth City State University and lead author of the newly released PNAS article.
LeCompte began his independent study in 2008 using and further refining Firestone’s sampling and sorting methods at two sites common to the three studies: Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Topper. He also took samples at Paw Paw Cove in Maryland, a site common to Surovell’s study.
At each site he found the same microscopic spherules, which are the diameter of a human hair and distinct in appearance. He describes their look as tiny black ball bearings with a marred surface pattern that resulted from being crystalized in a molten state and then rapidly cooled. His investigation also confirmed that the spherules were not of cosmic origin but were formed from earth materials due to an extreme impact.
LeCompte said it was Topper and Goodyear’s collaboration, however, that yielded the most exciting results.
“What we had at Topper and nowhere else were pieces of manufacturing debris from stone tool making by the Clovis people. Topper was an active and ancient quarry at the time,” LeCompte said. “Al Goodyear was instrumental in our approach to getting samples at Topper.”
Goodyear showed LeCompte where the Clovis level was in order to accurately guide his sampling of sediments for the Younger Dryas Boundary layer. He advised him to sample around Clovis artifacts and then to carefully lift them to test the sediment directly underneath.
“If debris was raining down from the atmosphere, the artifacts should have acted as a shield preventing spherules from accumulating in the layer underneath. It turns out it really worked!” Goodyear said. “There were up to 30 times more spherules at and just above the Clovis surface than beneath the artifacts.”
LeCompte said the finding is “critical and what makes the paper and study so exciting. The other sites didn’t have artifacts because they weren’t tool-making quarries like Topper.”
While the comet hypothesis and its possible impact on Clovis people isn’t resolved, Goodyear said this independent study clarifies why the Surovell team couldn’t replicate the Firestone findings and lends greater credibility to the claim that a major impact event happened at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,900 years ago.
“The so-called extra-terrestrial impact hypothesis adds to the mystery of what happened at the YDB with its sudden and unexplained reversion to an ice age climate, the rapid and seemingly simultaneous loss of many Pleistocene animals, such as mammoths and mastodons, as well as the demise of what archaeologists call the Clovis culture,” Goodyear said. “There’s always more to learn about the past, and Topper continues to function as a portal to these fascinating mysteries.”
Goodyear joined USC’s College of Arts and Sciences and its South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology in 1974 to pursue prehistoric archaeology.
The Topper story
Albert Goodyear, who conducts research through the University of South Carolina’s S.C. Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology, began excavating Clovis artifacts along the Savannah River in Allendale County in 1984. It quickly became one of the most documented and well-known Clovis sites in the United States. In 1998, with the hope of finding evidence of a pre-Clovis culture earlier than the accepted 13,100 years, Goodyear began focused excavations on a site called Topper, located on the property of the Clariant Corp.
His efforts paid off. Goodyear unearthed small tools such as scrapers and blades made of the local chert that he believed to be tools of an ice age culture back some 16,000 years or more. His findings, as well as similar ones yielded at other pre-Clovis sites in North America, sparked great change and debate in the scientific community.
Goodyear reasoned that if Clovis and later peoples used the chert quarry along the Savannah River, the quarry could have been used by even earlier cultures.
Acting on a hunch in 2004, Goodyear dug even deeper into the Pleistocene terrace and found more artifacts of a pre-Clovis type buried in a layer of sediment stained with charcoal deposits. Radiocarbon dates of the burnt plant remains yielded ages of 50,000 years, which suggested man was in South Carolina long before the last ice age.
Goodyear’s findings not only captured international media attention, but it has put the archaeology field in flux, opening scientific minds to the possibility of an even earlier pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas.
Since 2004, Goodyear has continued his Clovis and pre-Clovis excavations at Topper. With support of Clariant Corp. and SCANA, plus numerous individual donors, an expansive shelter and viewing deck now sit above the dig site to allow Goodyear and his team of graduate students and public volunteers to dig free from the heat and rain and to protect what may be the most significant early-man dig in America.
The Topper timeline
1998 Goodyear and his team dig to a meter below the Clovis level and encounter unusual stone tools up to 2 meters below the surface.
1999 Team of outside geologists visit Topper site and propose a thorough geological study of the location.
2000 Geological study done is by consultants; ice age sediment is confirmed for pre-Clovis artifacts.
2001 Geologists revisit Topper and obtain ancient plant remains deep in the Pleistocene terrace. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates sediment above ice-age strata show pre-Clovis is at least older than 14,000 years.
2002 Geologists find new profile showing ancient sediment lying between Clovis and pre-Clovis, confirming the age of ice age sediment layer between 16,000 – 20,000 years.
2003 Archaeologists continue to excavate pre-Clovis artifacts above the Pleistocene terrace. New and significant Clovis artifacts are found.
2004 Goodyear discovers major Clovis occupation on the hillside. Additionally, radiocarbon dates for sediment associated with pre-Clovis artifacts come back at 50,000 years.
2005 “Clovis in the Southeast” conference held in Columbia, S.C., with tours of Topper and Big Pine Tree sites.
2006 The 3,500-square-foot roofed structure is built over pre-Clovis excavations.
2007 Firestone study about a possible Clovis comet is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, including evidence from Clovis age sediments from Topper.
2008 PBS “Time Team America” spends a week at Topper filming for an hour-long television special devoted to Topper.
2008 SCETV broadcast of “Finding Clovis,” a public television presentation of Topper Clovis. 2009 PBS “Time Team America” program airs.
2011 Topper and Big Pine Tree included in a study of post-Clovis Paleoindian decline/reorganization that is published in the journal “Quaternary International.”
2011 The first permanent exhibit of Topper artifacts installed at the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie.
2012 Independent study of micro-spherules related to an extra-terrestrial impact hypothesis is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using Clovis-age sediments from Topper that confirm the original 2007 Firestone study.
2013 The pre-Clovis occupation of Topper will be presented in October at the international conference on the peopling of the Americas, titled “Paleoamerican Odyssey,” in Santa Fe, N.M. http://www.paleoamericanodyssey.com/
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h/t to Dennis Wingo
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Albert Goodyear, an archaeologist in USC’s College of Arts and Sciences, is a co-author on the study that upholds a 2007 PNAS study by Richard Firestone, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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This issue’s finally getting some rubber on the road…..
Dr Pirelli from Milan, Italy, fully concurs with the conclusions of Drs Goodyear & Firestone, as does Dr Avon from the UK! Sorry couldn’t resist it, it is Friday after all!
A most fascinating exchange of ideas & thoughts on the impact of a comet/meteor issue, it is something about which I have wondered often. I think I also made a comment some months back on another post here as to whether several miles/kilometres height of compacted ice, could have altered the Earths sping characteristics over a 100,000 year period. I appreciate that we orbit the really big shiney thing that doesn’t affect the Earth’s Climate in any way whatsoever, in what is to all intents is a vacuum, but the thoughts were of the similarities of a Cricket ball being roughed up by a spin bowler to allow it to spin unpredictably by altering the balls “wobble” through the air. Is it possible for this to happen on a large scale, could it help explain some of the periodocity issues with the Milankovitch Cycles? Perhaps not, but it would be interesting if anyone has any (polite) comments, I am only a humble engineer, not a Climate Scientists!
MarkW says:
September 20, 2012 at 7:07 pm
“Chuck,
By what mechanism would an air burst rip off a huge chunk of the atmosphere. And no, the shock wave would not be big enough to do it.
Secondly, if such a big chunk of the atmosphere did get ripped off, how did the Earth manage to get that atmosphere back over the last 20K years?”
What gives you the idea that the atmosphere before such an event would have the same density or composition as after?
vukcevic says:
September 20, 2012 at 10:50 am
>> Goodyear & Firestone , hmm .
“Yes, you have to wonder is someone is having a laugh sometimes. Why is no one mentioning Dr Dunlop’s noteworthy research on this period ;)”
Or Cooper or Michelin?
Thanks for the post, Anthony, this subject can’t receive enough attention — and to date it has received very little. Addtional background on the recent publication from LeCompte can be found at my blog: http://www.cosmictusk.com
Dr. Goodyear & Dr. Firestone are tired, the joke is over inflated.
To Duster and many others, please note:
Earthquakes have an epicenter, directly above them.
Aerial explosions such as meteorites or nukes have a hypocenter, directly below them.
Threats from comets and asteroids are very real .NASA just released a news clip asking people to name a massive asteroid[1999RQ36] that could hit us by 2182. This is half a kilometer in size. The passover mentioned in the bible during Exodus could have been a comet “passing over” and the plagues were the after effects of the comets tail on the landscspe and the atmosphere. [See the Kolbrin Bible also]We have been lucky recently as comet NEAT which was twice the size of Jupiter spun around the sun in 2003 and Earth just happened to be in safe position. There are many craters in Canada of past direct hits by asteroids and comets , one large crater in Quebec that can be seen on most maps . So this story may be real although the impact could have been in the Atlantic as well. The real problem is with the asteroids and comets that we do not know about yet or which we are not being told about.
@Nerd September 20, 2012 at 10:36 am:
I read that book on Kindle, and I can recommend it highly. But the ‘firestorm’ never really happened, because the participants conspired to keep it under wraps. It was only seriously controversial to those who knew about it, and they made certain that circle of people was small..
The book is a revelation for two reasons. One, that the author is an insider. Two, that the real science of geology proved out to be correct over the more-or-less historical story/timeline that the archeologists had constructed. The two sides wer so far apart that there was no common ground possible. Over time the archeologists’ position had every leg knocked out from under it – by real science.
This same story seems to be happening with the YDB impact story. There are entrenched forces that don’t want it to be true (careers on the line and all that being a part of it), and those have done distorted studies with bad sampling and gotten tons of main stream media science editors to hype the supposed rebuttals. Cosmictusk.com has this on every page:
There is irony in Anthony having articles on the YDB impact, because this issue is potentially a really real – and huge – threat (if real), as opposed to AGW, which is a manufactured and tiny threat and over which so many millions of words have been written. Very few words have been written about the potential of an impact in our future. At http://cosmictusk.com/again-again-again-again-and-again-jupiter-impacts-continue-to-defy-nasa-estimates/ is a report that Jupiter has again been hit by an object, this one big enough to cause a flare the size of a continent on Earth. This is the third incident since Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 – which itself wasn’t supposed to happen in any of our lifetimes.
The plain truth is that objects keep hitting planets much more often than was thought at the time of SL-9, and much more often than our astronomers are willing to tell us even now.
This sounds like alarmism. I apologize for that. But if humanity has a real threat it is not global warming. It is this: We have the potential for the first time in human history to intercept an incoming object that might send us back to the stone age, and we need to decide if we are going to do anything to protect the planet or just play Russian roulette. The cost will be much, much less than the trillions that Kyoto would cost. The first step is to determine for sure if such a risk is real. If it is not, then fine. If it is, then what do we do?
Firestone et al’s work brought this all to our attention as a possibility of having happened in the past. Certainly few would think it could happen in the future if it hadn’t happened in the past. So this YDB vetting work is important. Even if it is eventually found to be wrong, we will have taken the proper steps to prove it or falsify it.
Steve Garcia
Does the Younger Dryas really exist? There is this idea (or non-idea, product of not thinking clearly) that the default global climate and temperature is total stasis. Stupid, yes, but true. So every wiggle up or down must come from some external gate-crashing forcing event or catastrophe, disturbing the “dignity and repose” of the climate tea-party.
This leads to the comical game of musical catastrophes being endlessly played. Did he temperature rise in the past? Oh noes! – either some civilization must have developed suvs, only then to disappear without trace, or maybe a bunch of cows or mammoths all farted in unison. Did the climate cool? Then it must be a comet or volcano or lightning evolution of a culture making soot-polluting factories – only again to disappear without race.
However the climate system characterised by multiple feedbacks is in reality a nonlinear oscillator system. For instance the flips between glacial and interglacial are the tell-tale flips between two stable attractors. Thus the “Younger Dryas” might be nothing more than an interval between an abortive jump to interglacial and a subsequent successful jump. Glacial periods are in fact punctuated by repeated such abortive jumps, kind of mini-interglacials which last only a matter of decades.
Of course the comet impact evidence might well represent a real event. But if we fall into the way of thinking of needing a discreet forcing event foe every climate wiggle, ignoring the fact of climate nonlinear oscillation, the we are fighting on the AGW camp’s chosen territory and by their rules. Not smart.
The null hypothesis is oscillation.
Steve Garcia
Interesting on the bolide cover up. Doesn’t Jupiter (+ Saturn) act as a solar-system vaccuum cleaner, or maybe flypaper / goalkeeper, gravitationally sucking in bolides that might otherwise hit us?
Of course some do hit us, which is clear enough.
Adam Gallon, clearly you have been absent the last ten years and not seen the closeup pictures and the particle collection results. Comets and asteroids/meteors same thing just different charge.
phlogiston –
Yes, the understanding is that Jupiter acts as a vacuum cleaner for the Solar System.(and, Saturn, too, though it is not often mentioned because it is far out from the asteroid belt and I assume that minimizes its effect).
I put two caveats on that.
One is that Jupiter’s gravity evidently doesn’t just suck things in. On a close enough pass it alters the object’s orbit, which then brings it into a closer pass the next orbit. That is what happened to SL-9 and why it made a bee-line for Jupiter then next time around. In altering the orbit, Jupiter actually has the possibility of throwing an object toward us, for at least its last orbit before diving into Jupiter.
Also,, Jupiter can only be on one side of ts orbit at a time, so incoming objects that are not on the same side of the orbit cannot be affected by any vacuum effect. Science fiction books and movies that talk about slingshot effects of Jupiter and Saturn are at least misleading, because such slingshot effects as NASA uses have to be very precisely timed to take advantage of when those two are in good position for fly-bys. That isn’t often, in human years. Movies that show starships passing Saturn’s rings – well, that is Hollywood.
Steve Garcia
Steve Garcia
Yes the “slingshot” effect could be a double edged sword (mixing metaphors horribly), throwing objects toward us as well as away from us, a.k.a. the alien bugs in Starship Troopers. Anyone modelled this? (gravity – unlike climate – is something that you can accurately simulate mathematically).
phlogiston –
Yes, they know well how to model orbital stuff, if they know precisely enough their givens. My own take on it is that the slingshot is affected by how the object comes in – high or low – and it can put the object into a high or low new orbit. either of those actually I see as good, because if its orbital plane is skewed, its chances of hitting us are diminished probably by a magnitude or three. But I don’t know if they can get precise enough data on objects to be able to determine any of that well. A matter of 200 meters in or out, up or down, might mean we re threatened or that we are completely safe. And I’d think 99.9999% of the time we are safe. But we should still have some funding (microscopic vs what AGW gets) to have some office handle such things, just to make sure that number is correct and keeps on being correct. And I think it should be under an international sanction, not solely USA. China is probably going to be the ones who will, going forward, have the best space program. And the ESA should have some participation. But it doesn’t have to be big, except when they get a solid plan to intercept – just in case. (I don’t think any of the plans so far are worth a hill of beans.)
I myself am not capable of doing any of the modeling, and I am not interested in getting into it. Modeling is for younger people than me, IMO. Unless they have point-and -click programs!
Steve Garcia
dammit. I am in the process of changing my ID here, and the ID defaulted to my old one before I caught it.
@Crispin in Waterloo:
not all grazing animals face towards a problem.
old montana wild west tails are that bison will face into a storm and slowly walk into it. whereas cattle will face away and slowly walk away from it.
an item of proof is that there are many stories about the folks that have bison on their ranches finding herds of buffalo at the upwind fence of a pasture alive after a heavy winter storm and herds of cattle on the other side of the wire (on their downwind side) and frozen solid.
so the herds of mastodons may have been facing the danger of storm or facing away from said danger. also they may have been facing towards danger (aliigators or tigers) or away from it.
its a coin toss.
C
There were massive changes found in the North Atlantic Ocean during this period with a gyre of Arctic polar water moving as far south as Spain. This indicated that the Gulf Stream and NAD were moving towards Spain instead of Norway and the Arctic. This massive energy loss towards to the Arctic Ocean easily caused this event, but what caused this has been suggested to be melting ice sheets from North America into the Atlantic Ocean. This likely rules out a comet because how could one change ocean circulation especially over 1000 years with just one impact. Dust would be just around for a few years, so the atmosphere would warm back up again soon after.
Matt –
You make several assumptions that may or may not be true. Some have been demonstrated to be incorrect.
The gyre you talk of is suggested by one or more proxies, about which the linearity is assumed. That is the nature of proxies – that such and such indirect evidence tells us something about some changes we cannot directly measure.
Climatologist Rodney Chilton in “Sudden Cold’ has collected the evidence against the meltwater/Lake Agassiz outflow being a cause for the cooling of the N Atlantic. Mostly, the St Lawrence has been ruled out, and the timing has been rebutted, meaning that the reasonable assumption about this event turns out to not be true. It was a good try, but no cigar.
You also make statements about comets without taking into account that different sizes may have vastly different effects. The SL-9 impactors on Jupiter in 1994 ranged from slightly larger than Tunguska (about 25 meters) to about 1.29 km across. The larger two or three made blasts as large as our entire planet. How large would those blasts have been here on Earth? Twice as big is pretty close. A blast which extended out 4,000 miles on either side of Earth would do a lot more than your assumption about putting some dust into the stratosphere. One or two magnitudes more than a volcanic eruption would be my own assumption.
You assume “a few years” of dust in the atmosphere. It would only take a few years to screw up all wind currents. But what is “a few years,” anyway? 3? 10? 25? It is clear that the YD changed in less than 100 years, some have suggested that the evidence indicates less than 10 years. What mechanism would make them go back to normal, once they were screwed up? (And that IS an important question – because the recovery after 1300 years was pretty much every bit as sudden as the beginning of the YD). Right now our weather/climate all starts with the Intertropical Convergence Zone. That is driven by convection, due to the Sun heating the ocean along the Equator. Nothing is ‘normal’ if that isn’t happening. After a body about 60-120 times wider than Tunguska hits, we can make no assumptions. We are off the high end of the charts; we will have pegged the Richter Scale and/or any tsunami scale. An ocean impact would make a tsunami close to or exceeding 100 times as high as Sumatra or Japan.
It is my own assumption that we can make no assumptions and expect them to really be right. Your limiting of a comet impact to what you can envision – that is one guess. You are welcome to it. But it will certainly be much worse that some dust for a few years.
Also, right now we only have SL-9 fragments and Tunguska to gauge off. We have little idea what size of objects are in the Taurid stream, which appears to be the remnants of the progenitor of Comet Encke. Little is known about the many, many thousands of Taurid objects, but it is a good bet that Tunguska was one of them. And we run through them twice a year, being a duck in a shooting gallery.
Steve Garcia
A comet from the Ort Cloud arrives at just under solar escape velocity, so that a near encounter with Jupiter would throw a fresh arrival back out to the Ort Cloud and beyond. In discounting the importance of gravity we are left with the next most important effect: the target’s surface area. Jupiter’s is two orders of magnitude greater than earth’s, and the sun’s is two orders of magnitude greater than Jupiter’s.
But the fact remains, some comets or comet fragments (meteors) do hit the earth after a few thousand alterations of orbit. But have the indicated spheroids ever been found near an impact crater? Have they been found in any layer other than the YD/Clovis? Do we have any evidence whatever that ET impacts have or can cause them? Or is it only the imagined comet X which wiped all the megafauna (no microfauna) and their hunters which leaves this unique trace? Not a continental extinction even, mind you, but two continents, North and South America, which are further apart than North America and Asia or Europe, but which just happen to be connected.
Thanks, Prof. Brown. Crispin’s claim, “They were disturbed 3200 years ago and probably again in about 1650 BC,” is as reliable as his chronology. There is not a shred of evidence for this B.S., and Brown’s back-of-an-envelope calculating is hardly rebutted by Crispin’s argument that less than 100% of the earth’s mass is located in the mantle. Most of it is, and more of its angular inertia is.
And no, there is neither evidence for mass simultaneous mammoth deaths or for any quick freezing–this is all silly myth that makes the worst GW alarmism look sophisticated by comparison. Some people are afraid of illegal immigrants, some of genetic engineering, some of radical Islam, some of climate change, some of comet collisions, some of epidemics, some of nuclear war, and so on. So build your bomb shelter, buy a gas mask, load up with weapons and food, or move north, but most of us will die of old age. We’re making Wikipedia look reliable.
–AGF
Big rock hit the ice shield over Canada. There are various scour and scorch artifacts on the rocks there. As it wasn’t an air burst, lots of the stuff made it to the ground. There’s a large chunk of “platinum group metals”, in particularly platinum, nicely deposited at the impact site:
http://www.platinum.matthey.com/production/north-america/
Nickel and PGM kind of shout meteor impact…
More stuff here: http://cosmictusk.com/
There’s also good evidence for secondary impact ejecta landing in the US and making the Carolina Bays. If you take the long axis of their ellipse, it points back at the proposed impact site in Canada.
Clovis folks AND the megafauna of N. America were wiped out by a rock fall from space. We didn’t hunt the critters to extinction.
Oh, and the reason we have mammoths with mouths full of food flash frozen is that the impact sent a tsunami of tundra / ice / sludge over the top into Siberia and engulfed them in it. That’s also why the stratigraphy is screwed up and why some mammoth are found under dozens of meters of ‘fill’.
“Big Bada Boom!”
And it will happen again…
@agfosterjr:
Look at the surface of the moon. Look at the video of impacts on Jupiter. Look at Arizona and Meteor Crater (not that old). Look at the count of OTHER craters found all over the planet (one, in Germany, so large that whole cities are inside the rim). Then look at the known NEOs and Earth Crossers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Earth-crossing_minor_planets
The amount of “stuff” in the neighborhood is very large.
It is not irrational fear to recognize what the math says. A small “nuke like” event about every year (mostly high altitude and over water / empty. Noticed by ‘nuke detecting’ satellites so they had to go to a ‘double flash’ filter to screen out the false positives).
Right now we’re nearer the edge of the Taurid path than the center, but that changes on a long duration cycle. We’ll get back to the massive rock falls of earlier times soon enough. (It is probable that heavy Taurid infall has shifted history several times and possibly climate as well).
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/lunar-resonance-and-taurid-storms/
BTW, I have no ‘fear’ of it. Frankly, I like watching meteors and wish we had more big shows. In some ways I feel ‘cheated’ that we’re out of the thick of it for a few hundred years. I do have a gas mask, weapons, and food; but mostly due to it being a fun hobby and a little bit due to having come through a 7.1 quake (the gas mask came after looking at the map of phosgene and arsine tanks in the area and the damaged ones after the quake… silicon valley and all…)
Basically, prudent preparation after reasonable and rational evaluation of the risks has no emotional content. There have been and will be again large crop failures. (We almost had one from corn rust some years back as it ripped through the monoculture, we DID have one from GMO rice polluting the ‘founders stock’ seeds resulting in global rice riots a couple of years ago). We will have various floods, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, wars and riots. (Check any news source for the ones happening now…) What is lacking in reason, is to believe, naively, that no bad thing of that sort will ever happen in your neighborhood…
I have 150 gallons or so of water in barrels in the back yard. Why? Because after the quake, which we have had, and will have again, it is the thing that you are most likely to need here. Not from fear. From understanding.
For anyone else interested in living through the (mathematically) inevitable Bad Things in life, I’ve made some lists of helpful stuff:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/crisis-kits-and-preparedness-packs/
though in reality, everything is a resource and what you really need is the mind set to know how to use it. But while I can make a fire from sticks and make dinner from a squirrel, I’d rather just turn on the Coleman Stove, and have Turkish Coffee while cooking some nice Ravioli and pouring a Chianti to go with them…
In short: I fully expect to die of old age. I also know I’m going to be more comfortable on my way to reaching it “during the bad thing”. (Having lived through a couple already I have no doubt that they happen…)
I would like to expand on my comments about the last glacial age being warmer than today. The more I think of it, the more it makes sense that the polar shift is key to the why we don’t see glacial fields like before. When the comet storm hit, it immediately increased the sea level and its tsunami punched a path through of the Bering land bridge. Before the comet storm, the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska remained a barrier to the cold Pacific waters. The warm Atlantic waters penetrated much further north past the pole in northern Greenland before chilling. The polar winds would have taken that warm moist air and fed the mountainous glaciers surrounding then polar region. Excuse me for a side bar, but one of my minors was ocean engineering in which half the curriculum was on weather and ocean currents. At that time, we were taught the glaciers actually formed in warm moist periods which seemed counter intuitive. The glaciers flow downhill and grow. When they grow enough in height, they become self sustaining as Greenland is. The world may have been considerably warmer than today but the glacial extent was in lands much farther north before the hit so it fools us into thinking it was actually colder than it was with those same lands now laying further south today. Our reference frame is skewed. With Alaska further south before the hit, it is conceivable that palms would have co-existed with pines until they were all jumbled together by the giant tsunami and the land turns frozen by the polar shift. As the world cools, the warm moist air that feeds the glaciers cease to be and the glaciers shrink and the sea level continues to rise thus enlarging whatever breach the giant tsunami had made in the land bridge. The cold pacific waters disrupts the warm Atlantic flow northward. We are in that temperature range now where we are cold enough to starve the high altitude glaciers but warm enough to melt the lower ends. If we turn colder, we would feed the lower glacial fields while the top ends remain stagnant. If we turn warmer, then the lower ends melt faster but glaciers also grow faster at the higher altitudes (i.e. middle of Greenland versus the edges}.
Chuck Forward
agfosterjr says:
September 23, 2012 at 3:18 pm
“And no, there is neither evidence for mass simultaneous mammoth deaths or for any quick freezing–this is all silly myth that makes the worst GW alarmism look sophisticated by comparison.”
You could do yourself a favor by an inquiry into the scientific research related to the death and preservation of the mammoths, rhinoceros, and assorted fauna found frozen in the “Muck “ beds that cover approximately 3000 square miles of the Russian Arctic. The only thing silly concerning your statement of quick freezing is a lack of knowledge.
E M Smith: As a former boy scout I still believe in being prepared, and I congratulate you. As for the moon, one side is older than the other: the one with more craters. It’s been getting progressively safer as the solar system has cleaned up the inner debris. What history tells us more than math is that plagues, quakes, volcanoes and tsunamis are more dangerous than meteors–so far. Nobody has ever been killed by a meteor or comet, as far as we know–in recorded history, for the last 5,000 years. You are more likely to run over your offspring in the driveway than get wiped out by a comet–I think. Pompei had Vesuvius, Lisbon had the sea. Every decade hundreds of thousands die by some castastrophe, but so far no city has been wiped out by a bolide–as far as we know. (And Sodom and Gomorah sure don’t count.)
You say, “Clovis folks AND the megafauna of N. America were wiped out by a rock fall from space. We didn’t hunt the critters to extinction.” And you talk about math. What are the chances that only big beasts are affected and little critters aren’t? Do you have a mechanism for this? These fragments just pick on big game and nary a bird. Doesn’t sound at all scientific to me.
Chuck Forward: what do you mean by “polar shift”? –AGF