From the UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS and the “humans have survived far worse climates” department.
New research suggests toward end of Ice Age, human beings witnessed fires larger than dinosaur killers
LAWRENCE — On a ho-hum day some 12,800 years ago, the Earth had emerged from another ice age. Things were warming up, and the glaciers had retreated.
Out of nowhere, the sky was lit with fireballs. This was followed by shock waves.
Fires rushed across the landscape, and dust clogged the sky, cutting off the sunlight. As the climate rapidly cooled, plants died, food sources were snuffed out, and the glaciers advanced again. Ocean currents shifted, setting the climate into a colder, almost “ice age” state that lasted an additional thousand years.
Finally, the climate began to warm again, and people again emerged into a world with fewer large animals and a human culture in North America that left behind completely different kinds of spear points.
This is the story supported by a massive study of geochemical and isotopic markers just published in the Journal of Geology.
The results are so massive that the study had to be split into two papers.
“Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago” is divided into “Part I: Ice Cores and Glaciers” and “Part 2: Lake, Marine, and Terrestrial Sediments.”
The paper’s 24 authors include KU Emeritus Professor of Physics & Astronomy Adrian Melott and Professor Brian Thomas, a 2005 doctoral graduate from KU, now at Washburn University.
“The work includes measurements made at more than 170 different sites across the world,” Melott said.
The KU researcher and his colleagues believe the data suggests the disaster was touched off when Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating comet that was roughly 62 miles in diameter — the remnants of which persist within our solar system to this day.
“The hypothesis is that a large comet fragmented and the chunks impacted the Earth, causing this disaster,” said Melott. “A number of different chemical signatures — carbon dioxide, nitrate, ammonia and others — all seem to indicate that an astonishing 10 percent of the Earth’s land surface, or about 10 million square kilometers, was consumed by fires.”
According to Melott, analysis of pollen suggests pine forests were probably burned off to be replaced by poplar, which is a species that colonizes cleared areas.
Indeed, the authors posit the cosmic impact could have touched off the Younger Dryas cool episode, biomass burning, late Pleistocene extinctions of larger species and “human cultural shifts and population declines.”
“Computations suggest that the impact would have depleted the ozone layer, causing increases in skin cancer and other negative health effects,” Melott said. “The impact hypothesis is still a hypothesis, but this study provides a massive amount of evidence, which we argue can only be all explained by a major cosmic impact.”
###
The study: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/695703
Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago. 1. Ice Cores and Glaciers
The Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) cosmic-impact hypothesis is based on considerable evidence that Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating ≥100-km-diameter comet, the remnants of which persist within the inner solar system ∼12,800 y later. Evidence suggests that the YDB cosmic impact triggered an “impact winter” and the subsequent Younger Dryas (YD) climate episode, biomass burning, late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, and human cultural shifts and population declines. The cosmic impact deposited anomalously high concentrations of platinum over much of the Northern Hemisphere, as recorded at 26 YDB sites at the YD onset, including the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core, in which platinum deposition spans ∼21 y (∼12,836–12,815 cal BP). The YD onset also exhibits increased dust concentrations, synchronous with the onset of a remarkably high peak in ammonium, a biomass-burning aerosol. In four ice-core sequences from Greenland, Antarctica, and Russia, similar anomalous peaks in other combustion aerosols occur, including nitrate, oxalate, acetate, and formate, reflecting one of the largest biomass-burning episodes in more than 120,000 y. In support of widespread wildfires, the perturbations in CO2 records from Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, suggest that biomass burning at the YD onset may have consumed ∼10 million km2, or ∼9% of Earth’s terrestrial biomass. The ice record is consistent with YDB impact theory that extensive impact-related biomass burning triggered the abrupt onset of an impact winter, which led, through climatic feedbacks, to the anomalous YD climate episode.
I see quite a mass of strong assertions that this is phooey, but little specific critique of why.
I would pay good money to see the commenters on this site engage with Randall Carlson regarding the data surrounding the theories about YDB anomalies. I’d wager the man has spent far more time reading through the scientific literature combined with a more macro based view of reality than what I’ve seen from the rigid status quo-sticians here. Further, his quality of debate and professionalism isn’t lost on folks like me appreciate healthy argumentation. Please, someone reach out to him and set up an interview and let’s beat to death all the studies, arguments, counter arguments, etc… And see where the logic takes us.
Granted, I’ve learned much because of the contributions of the commenters (and I’m grateful) however I also routinely see valid counter points never countered, which always leaves me disappointed. I’m itching to see a panel of genuine debate about many of these unknowns
I suspect in this case as in ‘climate change’ everyone is looking for the One True Cause whereas in fact it may be that frighteningly familiar thing in so many disasters, a chain of coincidences. Of which cometary impact may well be one
This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn
That woke the judge all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
More wisdom in that nursery rhyme than the whole IPCC.
honestliberty
Here is the oceanographic explanation of the series of events leading to the termination of the last glacial period, namely the Bolling-Allerod, the Younger Dryas and Holocene inception. Bolide impacts might have happened around that time but are not needed to explain these events.
The Bolling-Allerod (Northern hemisphere warming at 14,600 yrs ago) and Younger Dryas (subsequent 1000 yr cold interval) were features of the last deglaciation driven by oceanographic processes. The deglaciation starting as early as 22yrs ago led by warming in Antarctica. The general picture is one of steady changes in Antarctica contrasting with unstable fluctuations in the NH driven by the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
The root cause of this NH fluctuation is an instability in the AMOC arising from a positive feedback which it possesses. Cold water formation and downwelling in the Norwegian sea drives the gulf stream – reactive flow of Carribean warm and – critically – saline water across the Atlantic to north west Europe. This gulf stream water has high salinity, and this makes the cold water formed in the Norwegian sea even more dense than would result from its temperature alone. So this cold and saline water sinks all the way to the Atlantic floor and is one of the principal drivers of the global thermo haline circulation (THC). This “deep water formation” at the Norwegian sea in turn speeds up the gulf stream – something has to replace all that sinking cold super-salty water. Thus the positive feedback.
Where you have a positive feedback in an open dissipative far-from-equilibrium system you have the conditions for nonlinear oscillation. This is directly analogous to the ENSO in the Pacific, the positive feedback of the Bjerknes mechanism (cold upwelling strengthens trade winds strengthening cold upwelling etc.) giving rise to the ENSO nonlinear oscillator, although the AMOC operates over much longer – century and millenial – timescales than ENSO (year to decadal).
So a basic oceanographic feature comparing the NH with the SH in the palaeo record is more fluctuation and instability in the NH and more stable, gradual changes in the SH. The nonlinear instability of the AMOC is the root of this. Also, there is a clear signature of interhemispheric bipolar seesawing, whereby when the NH moves in one direction, the SH moves in another. This is not universal however – sometimes at the moments of biggest transition, NH and SH move together.
About 22 kYa (thousand years ago) Antarctica started warming. The slow oceanic warming caused by peaking obliquity was hoovered to Antarctica by deep ocean circulation. The NH at the same time slightly cooled.
However at about 14 kYa the “Bolling-Allerod” (BA) happened, i.e. the NH abruptly warmed, as evidenced by Greenland cores. This was accompanied by a reciprocal pause and slight reversal in the (already long established) gradual Antarctic warming – the bipolar seesaw again. This episode is referred to as the “Antarctic cold reversal”.
At the time of the BA there was a sharp rise in global sea level – 20 meters in 500 years. Weaver et al 2003 (link below) show that this was caused by a collapse of the gradually warming Antarctic ice sheet. The resulting pulse of fresh meltwater from Antarctica had the long range effect of speeding up the AMOC and the gulf stream in the NH, bringing rapid warming to the NH and the BA.
The bipolar seesaw continued – as the NH became sharply warmer, there followed in the SH the Antarctic cold reversal where temperatures went slightly into decline.
However down in the deep ocean, ongoing century-scale interactions between the SH and NH caused – about a thousand years later – an abrupt stoppage of the AMOC and the gulf stream. In fact the cuplrit was Antarctic Intermediate water (AAIW) – see again Weaver et al. With the interruption of the gulf stream the NH went cold again – the Younger Dryas. In response – by now you get the picture – the Antarctic returned to gradual warming.
Eventually, after about 1000 years of NH cold with no gulf stream (the YD) the after-effects of the huge Antarctic ice sheet collapse finally subsided allowing the AMOC and the gulf stream to resume. Now followed an exception to the bipolar seesaw – both NH and SH warmed together, around 12 kYa. This marked the final end of the last glacial and the Beginning of the Holocene.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/299/5613/1709
http://epic.awi.de/15280/1/Lam2004a.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/97GL02658/full
There are eternally questions in this topic, like: “So what caused the end of the NH/SH see-saw, or is it still a feature of life — such as the cooling in Antarctica which counters NH warming presently?”
“Heat piracy” is the reason for the NH-SH bipolar seesaw. There is so much heat energy in the ocean and it takes so long to change this amount (e.g. 6500 year lag between obliquity and interglacial timing) that in the “short” term of decades to centuries, ocean heat is a bit of a zero sum game. If ocean currents steal heat from one hemisphere to the other, then one gets warmer and the other colder. The best thing about this “heat piracy” is that it tends to happen around the Caribbean.
I’ll get to digest that in time. How would a massive impact on the north american icesheet impact that change?
Massive flooding would make its way to the ocean, the heat impact would burn much around that wasn’t under ice. Have I missed something?
Look, my point was I would like someone of your learned caliber to actually discuss this in a podcast or interview that lasts three hours so the combination of views gets sorted out, piece by piece, and the viewer (layperson such as myself) doesn’t have to spend months researching something I’d rather not. SO, would you be willing to do it and bring up all your points to someone like Randall Carlson to refute and respond or do you just want to come here and claim ownership of knowledge of the past as fact to someone of little knowledge such as myself? Randall, I can promise you is no mental slouch and additionally, if you proved him wrong is the type of man strong enough to admit it.
@honestliberty,
Sorry, but that isn’t how it works. This is science, not an Oxford Union debate, or the Jerry Springer show. The hypothesis, if such it is, is dismissed because the evidence isn’t what it is claimed to be, has been misinterpreted and/ or simply doesn’t exist. Their 2007 paper was drivel. No other word for it. I have posted the link before to the paper that trashes these findings. That is what you should be reading; not looking for TV or radio debates:
http://www2.nau.edu/ScottAnderson/docs/135.pdf
how interstering you are willing to dismiss something so accessible as to point people such as myself in the right direction after tuning in to something like a 3 hour debate. I don’t need you to tell me what I should do, so keep your status quo suggestions to yourself. It is an adjacent ad hominem, insinuating that I’m not intelligent enough to pierce through the BS. I haven’t seen an actual live debate between the two sides rather than post rebutes after the fact. Nor did I find the avenues of “scholarly” research to vet the questions.
MY POINT, was for people like me who have little knowledge, a nice debate that lasts a few hours would be a great primer to get me on the right track. Your dismissive attitude is exactly what is wrong with status quo religionists like Michael Shermer, who someone pointed out as some sort of legitimate “skeptic”. Right.
He’s an apologist for the state, big pharma, and everything status quo. He is about as credible of a source as Karl Marx.
honestliberty says:
“I see quite a mass of strong assertions that this is phooey, but little specific critique of why.”
The base-critique is: the Impact Hypothesis originated as an interpretation of the Carolina Bays ‘pock-marks’, as the impact-signatures of a ‘shotgun-blast’ disintegrating comet.
But then, it turned out the Bays are not impact-features at all.
Yet, the exciting comet-idea remained popular … even without its primary evidence. So supporters went looking for other ways to argue that there really was a big astronomical impact.
It’s really quite difficult to prove that an impact occurred. Even with a gaping crater staring us in the face, that is often the only evidence we have that anything happened. If Tunguska had not had eye-witnesses, and National Geographic photographed the blast blowdown, there would be no hint that it happened.
Even the Chicxulub ‘Dinosaur Killer’, with many decades of research, remains a matter of several controversies.
It became a very steep uphill intellectual struggle to sustain the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, once the tangible evidence in the form of the Carolina Bays was invalidated.
Thank you for a succinct and polite response. Does the claim that the supposed multiple impacts hit the ice sheet a cop out or does it warrant a reasonable explanation to the evidence of massive flooding in the northwestern United States and black mat later find in the ydb impact boundary? Is it not possible that it could have happened and been a catalyst to global climate change with all that excess water immediately changing the temperature and salinity on a mass scale? If not, why is this so difficult to believe?
To clarify, I don’t know enough. I truly don’t and my hope is to get those who have the years of research condense it into something I can approach without spending years reading the literature. I have other interests. Making whiskey is something that I focus most if my free time on, just ahead of CAGW nonsense.
I perceive Randall Carlson as an intelligent scholar who has put in the time and challenges the modern interpretation of the past. I know this: his redemption of the beast article really helped build my knowledge base about the glory of CO2 and the silliness of the CAGW movement.
He is not a uniformitarianist and that makes sense to me.
He is will articulated, patient, and has tons of field experience. I consider him someone of significant credibility. I think he would agree with most of not all of the commenters on here.
However, regarding the Carolina bays, I’ve not heard that specifically. I’ve only tuned in the least few years. My reference was toward an extra terrestrial impact on the North American ice sheet and the northern Pacific ocean, approximately 4 separate impacts during the younger dryas.
Pardon the length of my response. My method of learning is one that I can listen to solid debate for hours, and then research the points to gather how often each side was accurate. I need that and this is why I made my suggestion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_bay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_bay#Impact_event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis
Carolina Bays are Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They’re the original & real reason for all this. Except, Hussein did not have WMD. And Carolina Bays are not impact-features. It’s unlikely that one could get on top of the Iraq-story, without getting on top of how WMD got it all going … and then turned out to be bogus.
These so-called Bays are a strange land-feature; lakes, ponds and depressions with a particular shape and orientation. They often have a slightly elevated bank or berm at the ‘far end’. Start with the Wikipedia links, then search & wander on the Web for racier & weirder coverage of them. It’s out there. Homework.
Understandably, people who embarrassed themselves with WMD-malarkey (or worse?) … and people who took the Bays to be evidence of a game-changing cosmic event (which turned out to be wrong) … are not keen to draw attention to their mistake.
Pres. George W. Bush, once it became undeniable that there were no WMD, ‘shifted’ the story. “Wull, wull – he’s a Bad Guy anyway! Go git him boys!” But wait a minute – the original & real reason for attacking Iraq (the proof that Hussein was a bad-guy), was the WMD … which – oops – didn’t exist.
Likewise, there were people who really & truly loved the Big Comet Strike scenario (and all the cool follow-on things that can be tied to it, like the Younger Dryas and mass-extinctions) … and when their only real & scientific support for a Big Important Impact turned out to have nothing to do with any kind of impact … they too ‘shifted’ the story.
That’s the real story here. A human story, not a science-story. An all-too-human story.
Refs for Carolina Bays as the foundational Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis evidence.
Here is the earliest publication of which I am casually aware, which accounts for the Carolina Bays as impact-features.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/624004
“The Carolina “Bays”: Are They Meteorite Scars?”
by F. A. Melton and William Schriever
The Journal of Geology 41, no. 1 (Jan. – Feb., 1933): 52-66
To extract, highlight & emphasize:
“[T]he origin of [Carolina Bays] has long been a subject of speculation [ca 1933] … a hypothesis involving impact by a cluster of meteorites is presented as the most reasonable explanation.” [emph. & annot. added]
I have not yet seen a freely-available full-text copy of this report. Just the Abstract, so far (at multiple URLs).
=====
I am also including here a non-academic (but ‘serious’) article, from 1951, partly because it makes pointed reference to the above paper and its interpretations, importantly because it confirms ‘soft’ assertions that I have made elsewhere about the social context of the Bays & impact-scenario, and because it is fully available. I believe there are several other worthwhile papers pre-dating this one, and a string of others following it … all having been published & being well-known, during a period well-preceding what is nowadays typically posed as the beginning of the (YDB et al) ‘comet-idea’ (in the ’60s and ’70s).
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1951PA…..59..199K
“The origin of the Carolina Bays and the Oriented Lakes of Alaska”
by Kelly, A. O.
Popular Astronomy, Vol. 59, p.199
The modern context of proposed impacts to explain the Younger Dryas, attendant global climate change, mass extinctions and alterations of human prehistory, all trace directly to a period of intense fascination with a putative colossal astronomical strike (or sustain bombardment), beginning in the early 20th C, and based on an erroneous interpretation of the Carolina Bays as impact-features.
Here is another recent post at Judy Curry’s site about the effects of extreme climate change on recent human evolution and migration out of Africa – the great exodus 60,000 years ago:
https://judithcurry.com/2018/01/25/impact-of-climate-change-on-human-evolution-the-odyssey-from-africa/
The age of modern humans , or at least their residence outside Africa , may have been greatly increased by new discoveries in India : from Nature , just published :
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25444
Abstract:
-“Luminescence dating at the stratified prehistoric site of Attirampakkam, India, has shown that processes signifying the end of the Acheulian culture and the emergence of a Middle Palaeolithic culture occurred at 385 ± 64 thousand years ago (ka), much earlier than conventionally presumed for South Asia1. The Middle Palaeolithic continued at Attirampakkam until 172 ± 41 ka. Chronologies of Middle Palaeolithic technologies in regions distant from Africa and Europe are crucial for testing theories about the origins and early evolution of these cultures, and for understanding their association with modern humans or archaic hominins, their links with preceding Acheulian cultures and the spread of Levallois lithic technologies”-
Obviously this will have to be verified by further studies , but it just shows how the science is never settled , (except of course for climate science).
Modern human remains predating the 60kya breakout are old news – ones in India, China and around Israel and the Levant have been in the literature for a decade. They are periodically re-reported as new findings, as now.
Indeed starting with the appearance of H sapiens about 200,000 years ago, there were periodic break-outs from Africa. The claims about the 60 kya breakout are not that this was the only breakout. This is a common misunderstanding or oversight. No – the claim – backed up by genetic evidence, is that it was this 60 kya breakout, the first to happen after humans became behaviourally modern about 70 kya, was the one to which nearly all humans outside Africa today trace their descent. This is shown for instance by the mitochondrial haplotype L3 labellling of this migrating group. Some groups exiting Africa left desendants. Others did not – or left only a small trace of their genes.
Just to be clear – the fact there were numerous “exodi” from Africa both before and after the 60 kya event, does not alter or contradict the clear evidence from genetics, from both maternal mitochondrial and male Y-chromosome analysis, that most humans today are indeed descended from that single 60 kya breakout. As Richard Dawkins showed mathematically in “The Ancestor’s Tale”, prior to 20,000 years ago, everyone alive was ancestor either to everyone living today, or to no-one.
Science writers and journalists are a lot to blame for this muddle and for inaccurate, biased and politicised reporting of scientific research in general including in climate science. When these media copy-writers try to dumb down a research publication for a press release, they use the report as a vehicle for all their own predjudices, policy agendas and pet ideas. So I have learned to ignore the pre-amble in media reports of scientific findings and just read the abstract directly, and if possible the paper also.
It has been known for years that H sapiens exited Africa as long ago as 200, 000 years, with the well known discoveries in India, China and the Levant (endlessly re-reported as new findings). We are told that this discovery at Misliya cave in Israel dated to 177,000-194,000 years ago, changes everything in human origin research. It changes nothing and is not even new. These reporters seem never to have heard of genetics.
This is all old news.
Here is a link to the 2015(?) Joe Rogan podcast with Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock in which they present very detailed and credible evidence for the meteor strike. However, since they are not “academics’, they were/are widely ridiculed.
However, now that an “academic” has come up with the very same theory, it is big news.
They had a subsequent podcast with Rogan that also featured Michael Shermer. He questioned the validity of many of their conclusions (Hancock’s in particular) and it’s fair to say that the current evidence of an advanced civilisation at that time doesn’t meet the standard one would demand for a typical scientific hypothesis to be accepted as established. However, given the events proposed, could that ever be the case?
Hancock said himself that you can’t say that with certainty, but it’s definitely plausible, and more plausible than the Egyptologists’ established theory that the Sphinx enclosure was excavated 4500 years ago in a dry climate at a time that the Sphinx wasn’t facing Leo at sunrise.
Carlson’s evidence for an impact of enormous consequence at the time in qurstion is pretty solid. Together with Hancock’s work collating evidence from others in Egypt, Gobekli Tepe, India (where other ancient monuments align perfectly with the summer solstice 12,800 years ago) and South America, it is currently at least the most plausible hypothesis that this comet caused devastation worldwide, and that some humans at the time had reached levels of civilisation (settlement, agriculture, technology and astronomy) across the world well in advance of the hunter-gatherer level you’ll see presented in museums and textbooks.
The Plato/Atlantis thing is hugely interesting even if it does turn out to be a myth, but if a tiny morsel of the money given to climate science were directed to marine archeology, we could investigate around the Azores neighbourhood and find out whether the greatest legend in our history really was based on a genuine place.
Michael Shermer is unqualified to remark on much that he does, and evidence of that is littered throughout the webosphere with people calling out his monumental ignorance. Graham was absolutely validated with his attack on Shermer for publishing such a disingenuous hit piece… and to claim he didn’t know is even more disingenuous. He is nothing short of an apologist for the state, status quo, etc… He is NOT a skeptic. I don’t throw the word schill around often, but he meets all the criteria. The guy is classless and ignorant on much of what he claims to be skeptical.
(I would suggest that) the illustration published by WUWT in 2012
identifies timing of the MWP and the LIA accurately.
Yes
All are other aspects of the Solutrean Hypothesis for the origin of pre-Clovis New World aborigines.
No one has mentioned the draining of Lake Agassiz as cause of the disruption of Arctic and north Atlantic currents in the time frame discussed.
I quote part of the Wiki article :
Lake Agassiz’s major drainage reorganization events were of such magnitudes that they had significant impact on climate, sea level and possibly early human civilization. Major freshwater release into the Arctic Ocean is considered to disrupt oceanic circulation and cause temporary cooling. The draining of 13,000 years ago may be the cause of the Younger Dryas stadial.[1][8][9] The draining at 9,900–10,000 years ago may be the cause of the 8,200 yr climate event.
Is this theory now discounted ? If so , on what evidence, because it does seem plausible.
I thought lake Agassiz drained into the Pacific?
Don’t think so . I live at the bottom of Lake Agassiz. East of the Rockies. Are you thinking of the Utah scablands floods? I’m guessing that event may have drained to the Pacific.
Lake Agassiz drained south into the Mississippi until long after the Younger Dryas.
Look up Traverse Gap in Minnesota which is the continental divide point of the drainage system. It is well below the lake level that Lake Agassiz was until about 9,000 years ago after which the Hudson Bay ice-sheet broke down and allowed the drainage to go into the Atlantic. Note this is much later than the Younger Dryas cooling (noting there was Older Druas and an Oldest Dryas cooling events before the Younger).
Just think how crazy wide the Mississppi was during the ice ages especially the summers. There is no way animals would have been able to cross it and humans would have needed the very earliest human-made boats to make it (unless it froze in the winter).
Mike
Yes big freshwater releases in the ocean at high latitudes can interrupt cold downwelling and deep water formation, which are dependent on high salinity.
This excellent paper strongly supports the Firestone et al book of 2006 The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. Bear & Company. p. 392. ISBN 1591430615.
and paper of 2007 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994902
This event was the root source of all the flood myths- trillions of tons of ice from the remnant North American ice sheets were vaporized and then later rained out causing enormous floods. In Siberia mammoth herds were swept away and their remains piled up in debris piles with the whole thing then flash frozen as the temperature dropped dramatically. For good descriptions of what happened with some photos of the debris piles with mammoth remains See “Cataclysm ” Allan and Delair Bear and Co 1997
The Carolina Bays were carved out probably by enormous chunks of ice blown off the ice cap over the Great Lakes .All the megafauna vanished and the Clovis culture ended. An exciting event for Geologists to reconstruct in the comfort of the 21st century. However had the 1908 Tunguska event occurred about 10 minute earlier London might have disappeared!! We feel safe only in our ignorance – best not to think about it
and believe we can control CO2 to save us from an imaginary global warming catastrophe.
Norman
The global rise of sea level by 100m over a few centuries at Holocene inception would surely provide ample basis for flood myths in human memory. During this Holocene flood there came a moment when the Bosphorus straits leading to (what is now) the Black Sea was overtopped by rising sea level. A catastrophic flooding followed which innundated human settlements in a matter of days.
I see no need or basis for attribution of all flood myths to a hypothetical bolide event which is entirely unnecessary to explain anything.
As to the Black sea flood see https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/02/090206-smaller-noah-flood.html
This was much later than the early Holocene – about 8-9000 and not catastrophically sudden like the Dryas event
It was probably related to the well documented 8200 year event which drowned the North Sea and Doggerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2_kiloyear_event.
In my first comment it should be 10 minutes later.
Sorry Norman, but that is complete nonsense. Pretty much the whole of the relevant scientific community reject this impact scenario as being completely baseless. For good reasons. There is NO EVIDENCE. I have linked this paper before, but I would very much suggest reading it, and some of the references therein:
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: A requiem
Pinter, N. et al.
http://www2.nau.edu/ScottAnderson/docs/135.pdf
It is extremely damning. As damning as it is possible to be in the scientific literature. They found zero in favour of this hypothesis. They also found a lot of sloppy work by Firestone et al. Unacceptably sloppy. I would recommend reading that paper to anyone who has been, or is likely to be, taken in by this fantasy.
Ian Look at the affiliations of the group of world wide based 21 authors of the Walbach et al paper. It is your statement that “Pretty much the whole of the relevant scientific community reject this impact scenario as being completely baseless” which is nonsense. Your link was published in 2011. For an excellent updated review of the controversy readers should consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis.
Obviously opinions differ. In my opinion the weight of evidence – including the new Walbach et al papers is conclusively in its favour. You are free to hold a different opinion of course and believe the science was “settled ” in 2011.
Actually there are many root sources of flood myths: filling of the Black Sea, release of lava dams across the Grand Canyon, the latter ice age events you describe. Another would be the impact caused deluge associated with the formation of Burkle Crater in the Indian Ocean ~ 5,000 years ago. Besides creating a 30-km diameter crater, associated tsunamis, the impact would have lofted a LOT of water into the atmosphere and higher (water depth at the location is 13,000′). Takes a while to rain that much water out of the atmosphere. 40 days and nights? Who knows? But the timing is intriguing. Cheers –
[snip – over the top -mod]
My “OTT” comment was not a reply to Norman page – but something entirely unrelated (top level post). Still – my bad. Naive, I guess?
It is doubtful that our human ancestors who lived through the YD impact-caused mini ice age had sufficiently long life expectancies to suffer from skin cancers, regardless of the effect wood burning aerosols and combustion would have on the atmospheric ozone levels. One could easily imagine that the hardy bunch of Homo sapiens sapiens who survived the YD did so by hunkering down in nice warm caves, perfecting their cave wall art work and animal skin clothing lines to enhance retaining body heat, trying to avoid smoke inhalation and not getting much UV radiation skin damage from spending a lot of time in the sun, not that there was much of that either, if the scientific hypothesis of the study is correct.
Practically everywhere that archeologists have discovered ancient settlements, they have found some sort of depiction of a certain type of creature. There is also a verbal tradition across the world, apparently independently (and if not independently then that is of great consequence itself), of this same creature playing a huge role in the lives of their ancestors.
The dragon.
Fire coming from the sky to devestate man, flora and fauna. It’s too widespread and common a tale to have absolutely no basis in fact. It wasn’t a creature, but was it a comet?
Quite possible. And the idea has been put forward for a while. As mentioned above the Burckle Crater on the floor of the Indian Ocean fits the bill quite nicely. What many forget is that the tail of a comet always points away from the Sun so a comet on an impact trajectory after perihelion has the head following the tail.
A vast glowing, writhing thing, glowing brighter and brighter, cutting the sky in 2 and then the disaster of impact. I’d be scared of glowing snakes in the sky too.
All cultures have stories of fiery snakes that fly and all cultures have flood myths. Only the Biblical story, the very youngest version worries about rain, all the others speak of the seas rising to cover the land. The Epic of Gilgamesh” specifically says the wind and water came from the south, a flood on the Euphrates would come from the North;
I watched the appearance of the weather–
the weather was frightful to behold!
I went into the boat and sealed the entry.
For the caulking of the boat, to Puzuramurri, the boatman,
I gave the palace together with its contents.
Just as dawn began to glow
there arose from the horizon a black cloud.
Adad rumbled inside of it,
before him went Shullat and Hanish,
heralds going over mountain and land.
Erragal pulled out the mooring poles,
forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow.
The Anunnaki lifted up the torches,
setting the land ablaze with their flare.
Stunned shock over Adad’s deeds overtook the heavens,
and turned to blackness all that had been light.
The… land shattered like a… pot.
All day long the South Wind blew …,
blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,
overwhelming the people like an attack.
No one could see his fellow,
they could not recognize each other in the torrent.
The gods were frightened by the Flood,
and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.
The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.
Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth,”
I think a lot of the reason that people try to tie the flood to the Black Sea and others is because they do not want to face the idea that impacts are more common than we like to think. We comfort ourselves to think Tunguska was a “one off” by ignoring the explosions in South America in the 1930s and the bolide over America in 1972.
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_tunguska23.htm
In reality, a large meteor came out of the northeast and struck the Laurentide ice sheet over the Great Lakes. This caused a great splatter of slush-balls – low energy soft projectiles that rained down over America forming the CaroIina Bays, a million shallow impact craters that litter the east of America.
We know this because no matter where they reside, all of these Bays are orientated to one position in the Great Lakes. Only a central radiant could do this – a radiant caused by an impact. Is was these slush balls that caused the megafauna extinction, the Clovis man extinction, the Younger Dryas cool period, and the million Carolina Bay impact craters.
See paper ‘The CaroIina Bays and the Destruction of North America’.
https://www.academia.edu/20051868/The_Carolina_Bays_and_the_destruction_of_North_America
Some Carolina Bays…
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/etc/carolina-bays/lidar-image.jpg
R
Interesting that the impact proxis are centered on the Great Lakes……
R
Great Picture- Thanks
The early aviation era highlighted the legitimately-amazing pattern of “Carolina Bays”; oriented & shaped shallow surface-depressions arrayed NW to SE across a large segment of the eastern United States (100s of thousands of ‘weird’ lakes & ponds). Still less than thoroughly resolved.
The Tunguska Event was earlier, but took many years to investigate & affect the popular imagination, making it & the heyday of Bays roughly contemporary. Key imaginative depictions of how a disintegrating snowball comet could have created the Bays generated intense interest in the early 20th Century. For a brief period, a cadre of solid & leading scientists ‘formed a consensus’ that indeed the Bays were astronomical. Validating all the attendant phantasmagoria, both real & factitious.
But even at the time, some saw the fatal holes in the scientific logic, and their arguments & data soon undercut the new & very popular scientific portrayal of ‘Fire From The Sky’. By WWII, it was retired baloney.
Some did not get the retraction-memo. Some were kids and had soaked it up in what was lurid SciFi-like coverage. From then on, there has always been a cadre of people who carry the torch for an astronomical explanation of the Bays … and a ready cover-story for the disturbingly resolution-resistant Younger Dryas, and for an arbitrary assemblage of Continental and Global effects that can be conveniently invoked once a (grazing, fragmenting) comet-strike is accepted.
It’s actually another aberration not unlike the widespread current Belief System that ascribes control of the climate to CO2. Or, the only reason we don’t to this day have a pesky cadre of Eugenics-scientists, is that late adopters in Central Europe defamed it beyond the pale.
[Trying to ‘tag’ the diameter of the putative original incident astronomical object, is a new angle. I suspect this relates to difficulties with the trace elements in the winnowed microspherules that are now the preferred evidence … replacing the previously-preferred char-layers found at Clovis sites. Both these forms of evidence are interesting in their own right … and both are flawed tools (like the original case for an impact-origin of the Carolina Bays) in the assigned role.]
Ted
Thanks – here we are again battling the zombie-like YD impact hypothesis. Your historical perspective is useful. The wiki page on the Carolina Bays (bays refers to trees, not coastal inlets) also gives a history of the academic community’s rejection of the bolide explanation of both the Carolina Bays and the YD.
One problem for the bolide – or any other – explanation of the YD, is the failure of the YD to actually exist. The “YD” refers to a non -entity. What does exist is the Bolling-Allerod – the abrupt warm peak just before the “YD”. From Bill Illis’ explanations above it is clear that the BA was simply number 20 of the 20 Dansgaard-Oeschger events (micro-interglacials) that punctuated the last glacial interval. What has been called the YD is just the interval between DA event 20 and the Holocene inception. Anyway I’ve said enough on this thread – I’ll shut up 🤐 .
Yes, it’s like the Price of Freedom, Ptolemy. But! At least it’s a guaranteed job! 😉
Let’s review the key basics.
1.) The fascinating Carolina Bays depressions & water-bodies, are not impact-features. They’re very shallow, and the floor & basement materials have not been disturbed. They weren’t made by something hitting the ground.
2.) It’s hard to get a high-quality date-handle on the Bays, but plainly they date somewhere back into the pre-Holocene Ice Age … several times the age of the onset of the Younger Dryas. Part of the reason why it’s hard to get “a” date for them, is that they are not of “a” date. They are of different ages … they were made at different times. Some return different dates for different parts of the same feature, indicating that they ‘grew’, gradually.
3.) Craters are usually circular, despite that they are created by objects coming from different directions. The great majority of impact-objects, indeed, come in at an angle. And leave nice, circular craters. That Carolina Bays have a specific non-circular shape & orientation, is an argument against an impact-cause, not for it.
===
But let me repeat, that some of the evidence & information that has been uncovered or is being developed, in pursuit of an astronomical impact cause of the Carolina Bays, and the Younger Dryas, is really quite interesting & promising. Seemingly-strange layers of charred organic material in association with known Clovis sites. The screening & washing of microspherules from sediments. These are intriguing, and potentially valuable in & of themselves.
And of course, impacts do happen; they are always spectacular, and sometimes they are game-changers. But … the old expression still applies, that just because you have a shiny new hammer, does not mean that every problem out there is now a nail.
===
Amateur gold miners, especially those washing fine stream or beach deposits, often recover spherules and other odd & mysterious small objects. You see them with a magnifying glass, inspecting the concentrate in your pan or riffles. Popular gold-recovery methods are ‘fairly’ good at getting these oddities, but there two well-known specialties that use adaptations of the usual methods, to better-recover grains that are not as heavy as gold.
A sometimes-popular specialty is the washing of gravel & sediments for various gem stones. Invariably, this activity is after larger specimens, but if you are in a gem-bearing stream, there will also be small sand, made from the target gem-minerals. So ‘prospectors’ will routinely ‘check’ for fine residues from their target-mineral.
Geologist, mineralogists and geochemists are interested in determining all the constituents of deposits or formations. They use washing-tables that are specialized to effect a graded-separation of everything in the sample, rather than preferentially separate & concentrate only the heaviest (gold & platinum family).
If all you have is your own backyard, or an unguarded nearby vacant lot (street or roof-gutters), dig/scrape up some material & wash it. You certainly will not be the first to find surprises.
Ptolomy2,
Yes indeed, it’s a guaranteed job!
Summarizing the basics of mainstream knowledge of Carolina Bays:
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_bay:
1.) These simply are not impact-features. Even early, ordinary geology figured this out; confirmed from many angles by fancier, recent methods. Especially, large Bays (miles) are often much too shallow; there is a general lack of any ‘disturbance’ to the floor or basement of these features … much less signs of anything high-energy or high-velocity.
2.) Bays pre-date the current Holocene Interglacial. Hard to get a clean date-handle on them … but they clearly existed back into the last Ice Age. Roughly 2 to 4 times the age of the Holocene – and of the artist formerly known as the Younger Dryas. Some appear to be quite a bit older-yet, suggesting a prolonged & ongoing period of formation. Not all of the same age … didn’t all happen at the same time … ‘grew’.
3.) Craters on the Moon and Mars are round. The impactors came from all angles, often glancing, but left circular craters. It is usually difficult even with close study of an impact-feature to determining much if anything about the incident angle.
===
There are various efforts to pose a constellation of ‘soft’, ‘low-velocity’ impact-objects, which might better-conform to the fact that nothing fast or hard made the Bays-depressions. The archetypal scenario for this idea is an impact into the Laurentide ice sheet, near or NW of the Great Lakes.
The quick & dirty way to get properly oriented on this scenario, is to place a 10 or 100 megaton nuclear device on or in the Ice Sheet, and detonate it. Does it fling or splash chunks or slush-gobs … across the continent? No, certainly not. Firstly, no weapon has anything like the power to project energetic effects at those distances. But even with the insufficient power of these devices, there will be no tossing of intact chunks, because the energy at ‘ground-zero’ is still far too high to allow chunks or blobs to remain intact. ‘Everything’ near the explosion is reduced to a fine state … all the ice & slush is superheated steam.
The asteroid or comet that could excavate the ice sheet and project ‘designer’ soft masses across North America (and well out into the Atlantic ocean) actually propels the material as a beyond-incandescent gaseous wavefront or ‘rolling torus’.
The crater from this impactor, even after the Laurentide healed-over and flowed across it, would be extremely young, and it would be BIG. It would be as familiar to children as Dinosaurs. Globally famous.
===
What the Carolina Bays appear to really be, is a version of the ‘patterned ground’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_ground such as seen on the Alaska North Slope … and in many locales today, along the southern terminus of the former continental ice sheets, across the northern United States. Consistent wind coming off the ice was the main agent of the startling orientation seen in Carolina Bays.
if, for the sake of argument, we presume the YD was caused by the release of massive amounts of fresh water into the St. Lawrence and down to the North Atlantic, then we have cold weather. Cold weather does not evaporate as much water as does warm weather. Which explains evidence of massive dust storms along the mid-South Atlantic coast.
If things are that dry, what might be a normal forest fire could become a continental catastrophe. That would explain the biological changes observed.
The winds coming off the northern continental ice sheets must have been amazing, and they would have been arid, having been chilled by the ice and lost their moisture. As I understand it, the main sources of dust & silt, carried south long distances by the winds, were near the southern terminus of the ice. However, it would not be hard for me to see an ongoing ‘push’ and ‘crawl’ of loose dust & fine sand, like a perennial blizzard of dirt, instead of pulses of long-distance transport.
In a very widespread arid regime such as would favor a generalized conflagration, I would expect lack of sufficient water to prevent the strong development of forests. There is evidence (pollen) to inform us of the botany in different regions … but wherever forests would constitute a large fire fuel-load, it would be properly expected that sufficient moisture was available to support such biomes, ecosystems – and species.
Historically, what we pointed to as evidence of such a widespread ignition-mechanism, was the striking Carolina Bays artifacts. At first, we thought these were impact-caused, but with study it soon became clear that they were not the result of impacts.
So … more recently we have seen first the postulation of widespread fire-evidence. Some char-layers have been uncovered, but these were first identified in close association with known human-Clovis sites … and are not found away from such sites, in a distribution that strongly supports any generalized single-event conflagration. [see also, the black-earth deposits of the Amazon … in association with human habitation & primitive agriculture]
Because the ‘big-fire’ postulate is not well-supported away from Clovis sites (but really – what ARE those deposits, at Clovis sites!?), there was a shift to the extraction & trace-element analysis of microspherules … in hopes to support an aerial-burst astronomical object.
The plan with microspherules is to show that something BIG, and extraterrestrial, took place in the sky. But, microspherules rain-down in serious tonnages, all the time, from incoming meteors and from several other kinds of sources. They can be found most-everywhere, anywhere. This evidence obliges us to confess only that – yep – meteorites burn up in the atmosphere, contain characteristic extraterrestrial trace-elements, are subject to astronomical stresses, and the debris falls to earth. Check.
It’s an interesting avenue of investigation, and I especially like that it can be pursued most-anywhere, and by most-anyone. No, you & I can’t do mass-spectrometry … but that isn’t really needed, to interrogate microspherules extensively.
The key to washing-out your own microspherules, is that they are highly motile – they roll & move easily, because they are round. You will spot the occasional such object, while ‘skimming-off’ black-sands concentrates, to spot your few specks of gold. And what you first notice, is that they “move”, while the other little black specks around them, don’t move.
+10
The Andaman Islanders, 75,000 years old, survived both the eruption of Toba and the younger dryas.
Is it a coincidence that last time this subject came up three other defenders of the faith turned up to ridicule the idea of an impact event. The names were different but is there a possibility they are the same three persons. The YD impact is a theory. Let us not forget the idea of a lake of fresh water pouring into the N Atlantic and switching the ocean conveyor belt is also a theory. My understanding is that the chap who actually invented the theory is not such a big fan nowadays and yet uniformitarians such as MrClayton and Mr Whittaker seem to be quite happy accepting one theory and not the other. It is also clear, both this time and the last time this subject was aired, none of these people have actually bothered to read what is being said. Clube and Napier’s two books have been out there since the early 1990s. They were profession astronomers working at an observatory. One of them is the co-author of this new paper. I find it strange that commenters on WattsUp are all ready to ridicule global warming and climate scientists but when it comes to other sciences they out in force supporting mainstream views with no hint of scepticism at all. To be a true sceptic one has to look with a jaundiced eye at all the sciences – and not just pick on one of them. Are these three people regular commenters as the earlier ones never showed up after they had ruined the debate. Will that happen again. They are clearly incensed that the YD impact theory has not gone away – and trying their hardest to nip it in the bud. The Clube and Napier theory perfectly explains not just the YD event but also the Oldest and Older Dryas event, another event around 40,000 years ago (where most of the large mammals disappeared – not so many during the Younger Dryas), and more recent events such as the one at 8000 years ago, another at 5000 years ago, and another at the end of the EB age. Don’t take my word for it – read up on the subject. Too many people can’t be bothered to read up on CAGW and that is why we are in the trouble we are. Until more people get themselves clued up on climate the shambles will keep going on – and the same goes for the people above. They are shouting down something they don’t like. Just like Micky Mann does.
Impact-events do happen, they aren’t just an ‘intellectual exercise’. But then too there’s an old saying, that when we get a new hammer everything starts to look like a nail. After becoming better-aware that Earth is – and has been – pummeled by asteroids, an intellectual period ensued in which, eg, extinction and climate are seen as… nails.
But the biggest problem, at the sweeping-view level, is that we now increasingly see Dryas Events as both recurring, and as components of larger climatic processes (“patterns”). Even simply a “Younger”, plainly alludes to an “Older” Dryas. Signs are begining to emerge, that a Dryas-type episode is a normal occurance at the beginning of an Interglacial, or following soon at the end of a stadial.
The cause(s) of these multiple Dryas events are not known; but the key thing to notice is that matching impactors to them will get very tricky.
Another mounting liablity of the Dryas as an impact-effect, is its termination. An impact does a great job of making something happen ‘all of a sudden’. But it does nothing to explain why the termination is also ‘all of a sudden’. That’s weird. The rest of the overall form of the Dryas period is similarly problematic, from the impact-explanation viewpoint; then at the end, it’s totally-weird.
In order to make an impact work in the Dryas-context, we have to ‘shift our story’, to calling it a Trigger. Triggers happen; they too are part of the Story … but neither impact-objects nor trigger/flip-flop phenomena are Magic Hammers.
===
First the “black mat” deposits, and now the special microspherules are both intriguing avenues of investigation. Both have been developed by YD-Impact enthusiasts, to compensate for the loss of the key evidence for any impactor, which is an identifiable impact-feature excavated in the landscape. Originally we thought the so-called Carolina Bays were the calling-card of an astounding & unique impact-event, and built the Hypothesis around them. Then, the Bays turned out to be something altogether different, not impact-related.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis survived (barely) the loss of its key & primary Evidence, when what we thought was a half-million craters turned out to be a geological curiosity.
What the idea probably cannot survive, is the reinterpretation of the Dryas-phenomenon as a stock actor in the Ice Age drama.