http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== A Catastrophe of Comets The geophysical world according to me, and a few folks I happen to agree with A Different Kind of Catastrophe By Dennis Cox Each researcher looking into the extinction level, extraterrestrial impact, events evidenced by the materials of the Younger Dryas Boundary layer has his, or her, own take on what kind of event the blast effected materials detected there describe. My own view arises out of a forensic study of the fluid motions of the Ignimbrites of central Mexico, and west Texas. Combined with the recent research on the YDB at various sites all over the continent, and drawing heavily on the work of William Napier on the Taurid meteor complex, an extraordinary story begins to emerge. There is a growing condenses across a broad range of disciplines that major catastrophic events have happened in human times. And that many of our myths, and legends describe those catastrophes in detail. There are a lot of theories out there as to the nature of the disaster that triggered the Younger Dryas Cooling. And the competing theories run the full gamut from a close encounter with another planet, to a sudden polar shift, super nova, solar flair, or impact event. Until recently there wasn’t a clear front runner. The thing that’s been missing from all of them until now was verifiable planetary scaring. And there is substantial planetary scaring to indicate, almost conclusively, that the giant comet described by Professor William M. Napier, of the /Cardiff Center for Astrobiology, Cardiff University, UK/ as the Taurid progenitor was, in/ /fact, the comet that produced the catastrophe evidenced by the materials of Younger Dryas boundary layer. Here’s an essay of his that first appeared in an anthology: “God, the universe and men – Why do we exist?” (ed. Wabbel, T.D.), Patmos, Dusseldorf, 2003 (original in German). *A Neolithic comet* by William M Napier Comets are jokers in the celestial pack. They erupt, usually without forewarning, into the orderly progression of the sky. They cross the celestial sphere in weeks or months, growing one or more tails, before fading and disappearing from sight. On rare occasions a comet may be an awesome sight, and the historical literature of the past two thousand years is sprinkled with accounts of the fear induced when a great comet, its smoky red tail bisecting the heavens, appears in the night sky. In the remote past, tales of such apparitions were often conflated with stories of disaster on Earth. A comet called Typhon in Greek mythology was connected with a mythological flood, and the legend of Phaethon, in which the sun’s chariot went off course and the Earth was first burned up and then flooded, may describe an exceptional meteorite impact. There is good evidence that the sky in Neolithic times was dominated by a recurrent, giant comet, and that the Earth annually ran through an associated meteor storm of huge intensity. The origin of religion dates to these times and may be tied up with this spectacular night sky. The prospect that cosmic myths, megaliths and art dating from this time may have been responses on the ground to threats in the sky has in recent years moved from Velikovskian fancy to a subject for serious scholarly discussion. In more scientific times, too, it was often suggested that a comet striking the Earth might create create worldwide havoc. For example past encounters of Halley’s comet were supposed to have coincided with Noah’s flood in 2342 BC. This catastrophist view of Earth history was widely held until late 1830s. From about the middle of the 19th century, however, it was supplanted by a uniformitarian one, at least in the English-speaking world. Partly this came about because geologists came to recognize that the terrestrial landscape had been formed over aeons by gradual forces, by erosion and slow mountain building. The astronomers too played their part in this changing perception. Several periodically returning comets were found to be associated with annual meteor streams. It seemed that the end state of comets was nothing more exciting than a swarm of dust. By the time of the Victorians, the universe was seen as a more or less irrelevant backdrop to the affairs of Earth. Scientists were free to explain evolution unhindered by any thoughts of celestial disturbance. The occasional revivals of the catastrophist worldview became the domain of cranks. This long slumber lasted until the late 1970s. *The destroyer of worlds* Starting in the late 1970s, however, there came a renaissance of catastrophism. A number of factors brought about this change of perception. First, wide-angle telescopic surveys of the sky were revealing the existence of a population of small, fast-moving Earth-crossing asteroids, making impacts on Earth quite common events on geological timescales. Second, large impact craters were being found on Earth in increasing numbers. Usually these were overlain with sediment or had otherwise gone unrecognized, being seen by Earth-minded geologists as no more than, say, circular lakes. An example is Lake Manicouagan in Canada, 80 km across, about the size of the Copernicus impact crater on the moon. The impact rates from both the evidence on the ground and in the sky converged to the same picture: the Earth is a heavily bombarded planet. From this new evidence it was not a large step to infer that the great mass extinctions which populate the fossil record may have been caused by celestial forces. After all, a 10 km comet or asteroid hitting the Earth at 25 km per second would unleash 100 million megatons of energy, equivalent to a small hydrogen bomb on each square km of the Earth’s surface. It is hard to believe that such an event would leave no geological or biological trace! One killing mechanism might be the ejection of dust, cutting out sunlight, decreasing photosynthesis and so collapsing the food chain at its base. The heat generated by a large impact, spread globally by incinerating debris, is another possible killing mechanism: the world would be subjected to a rain of fire. It is not surprising that many people (Urey in 1975, Napier & Clube in 1979, Alvarez in 1980), have over the years proposed that huge impacts are connected with mass extinctions of life such as the dinosaur extinctions of 65 million years ago. Contrary to the popular literature, however, it is unlikely that the 10 km bolides which generate the biggest craters on Earth are asteroids. Asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter are confined to highly stable orbits. To be thrown out of the belt, an asteroid must be nudged by collision from its stable orbit into a nearby, unstable one. This asteroid-nudging mechanism probably works for kilometer-sized objects but a big asteroid is just too difficult to shift. The major killers, then — the global destroyers — are likely to be comets or their debris. But as soon as we look to comets as the agents of mass extinction, we enter a whole new ballpark. And overwhelmingly, the most massive objects to enter the near-Earth environment on geologically interesting timescales are rare, giant comets (say 100 — 200 km or more across). It is very unlikely that such a monster has struck the Earth any time within the past billion years, if only because it would have sterilized the planet. The fate of a short-period comet approaching the sun is to disintegrate. The dust generated by a very large comet will form a temporary disc around the sun, within which the Earth will orbit. We are immersed in such a disc, the zodiacal cloud, now. However in the wake of disintegration of a giant comet the mass of this zodiacal cloud will increase to hundreds or thousands of times its present mass. Immersed in it will be larger debris, ranging from cm sized icy pebbles to multi-km fragments of the original comet. The result is that for a period of tens of thousands of years following the arrival of a supercomet, the Earth environment becomes extremely hazardous. Small dust particles may trickle down for the active lifetime of rare, giant comets — which could be millennia. The resultant cooling may lower the ocean levels by some hundreds of meters, changing the spin rate of the Earth and inducing stresses at the core-mantle interface comparable to those involved in plate tectonic movement. Rapid climatic variations, coupled probably with worldwide tectonic disturbances, are then expected. A cosmic mass extinction is, then, a much more complicated affair than a single huge impact. Rather, it is an affair of multiple impacts coupled perhaps with extensive volcanisms, lava outpourings and rapid climatic changes. As it happens, this more complex picture gives a much better fit to the detailed record of events at the well studied extinction boundaries, in particular the stepwise extinctions and severe coolings of the Earth 36 — 39 million years ago, and the dinosaur extinctions of 65 million years ago, which were preceded by a rapid greenhouse warming over 200,000 years followed by a cooling during the last 300,000 years, accompanied by a massive outpouring of lava in India over the same period and the deposition of several layers of small glass spherules in Mexico, the Indian Ocean and other places, indicating, probably, a multiplicity of impacts. Extinctions of many life forms such as bivalves, ammonites and rudists were well under way long before the big impact which gave the 170 km Chicxulub crater of 65 million years ago. *The Galactic connection* The arrival of comets, too, gives structure to the terrestrial record of catastrophes. Many comets derive from the Oort cloud, a great swarm comprising maybe 100 billion comets or orbiting at distances out to 50,000 astronomical units, a quarter of the way to the nearest star. Comets orbiting beyond this distance would be thrown into interstellar space by the gravitational action of passing stars and nebulae. The sun has a tenuous gravitational hold on the Oort cloud comets, and it is not surprising that the Oort cloud is sensitive to the galactic environment. It is disturbed from time to time, by passing stars, by massive nebulae or when the solar system penetrates the spiral arms of the Galaxy — for our Galaxy is an open-armed spiral. Any such disturbance sends a swarm of comets plunging into the inner planetary system, and with luck we might be able to see the effects of spiral arm penetrations or passing nebulae in the geological record. In fact, when we examine the age distribution of the well-dated terrestrial impact craters, of which there are less than fifty, a remarkable pattern emerges. There’s a distinct bunching of ages, with clearly identifiable impact episodes (seven in the last 250 million years). Most of the larger craters belong to these impact episodes. There seems to be a background ‘drizzle’ of small impacts — probably strays from the asteroid belt — superimposed on which are powerful bombardment episodes each comprising a swarm of missiles, including major impactors yielding collisions 50 — 100 million megatons in energy. Bombardment episodes of this sort may be expected to yield mass extinctions of life and corresponding geological disturbances and indeed a correlation, albeit a very imperfect one, does exist. Remarkably, the two greatest mass extinctions coincide with passages of the solar system through the spiral arms of the Galaxy. The closest life came to extinction in post-Cambrian times seems to have been the Permo-Triassic event of 245 million years ago, when perhaps 95% of all species became extinct. At that time the solar system was passing through a spiral arm known as the Scutum arm. And about 60–70 million years ago, covering the epoch of the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, the solar system was passing through the Sagittarius arm. Without this passage, the dinosaurs might still be with us and homo sapiens would probably not exist: we are children of the Galaxy. And yet, life has survived, and seems to have existed on Earth, no doubt surviving many impacts and other cosmic disturbances, for a very long time. The evidence for Precambrian life is strong, and was reported as long ago as 1858, not long after the publication of The Origin of Species. The strongest evidence for this comes from stromatolite domes — precipitates from the metabolic activities of sea-floor microorganisms — which have been found in rocks 3,500 million years old in Western Australia. Earlier than that, we enter the era of the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment. This was a time, comprising the first 10% of Earth history, when the impact rate was perhaps a thousand times higher than it is at the present time: the heavily cratered lunar highlands belong to this era. The heat generated from large impacts, in those days, would have repeatedly raised the temperature of the crust to above 100 degrees Centigrade and so sterilized the Earth. Probably, oceans could not exist because they would simply boil off. Whatever the cause of this tremendous bombardment, it seems to have come to an abrupt end about 3.8 billion years ago. It is striking that life is found on the Earth just as soon as this bombardment subsided. Without Jupiter and Saturn, comets flooding in from the Oort cloud would subject the Earth to a sustained bombardment comparable to that of the early Earth. But these giant planets act as powerful shields, gravitationally deflecting the long-period comets away from the inner planetary system. We owe our existence to Jupiter and Saturn. This does raise an interesting constraint on the existence of carbon-based lifeforms in other star systems: a sheltered environment is essential. The argument is quite general and depends only on the kinetic energies and impact frequencies of small bodies which, presumably, are a universal accompaniment to planetary systems. We do not know enough about other planetary systems to say how common such environments are likely to be. It is one more ingredient to be thrown into the anthropic pot. The evidence of the terrestrial record, then, is that life has an ability to withstand cosmic slings and arrows throughout aeons, provided these impacts are not so energetic that they sterilize the planet. This must come down to life’s powers of replication. A single microorganism with a doubling time of one hour, surviving a great cosmic disaster, would replenish a nutrient-rich ocean within a year. *A mechanism for interstellar panspermia* This power to replicate has led to speculation that, perhaps, life is a cosmic rather than simply a terrestrial phenomenon, drifting throughout the Galaxy and taking root where it can. If this were so, it would profoundly affected our perceptions of life’s cosmic significance. But we need a mechanism for interstellar panspermia. And here, unexpectedly, giant comets seem to provide it. It has long been clear that a large impact may eject materials from a planet. The streaks from the crater Tycho, easily seen with binoculars, cover the entire lunar hemisphere and are evidence that material can be thrown thousands of kilometers from an impact site. A large, fast impact on land on the Earth will throw a mass of terrestrial rock equal to a fraction of a percent of the impactor mass into orbit around the sun. Most of this material will be quickly recaptured by the Earth, some will eventually fall into the sun, but a small proportion, subject to the bagatelle of random planetary perturbations, will eventually be ejected from the solar system altogether. It is estimated that something like 10 tones of surface material from the Earth, from past terrestrial impacts, drifts into interstellar space each year. A gram of poor, rocky soil may contain 10 million microbes, and microorganisms will occupy every micro-crack in a boulder. Shielded from ultraviolet light, it is likely that microorganisms could survive for, say, a hundred thousand years before cosmic rays eventually destroy them. This figure may be conservative: survival times of 100 million years against cosmic rays have been proposed. Here, however, we have a problem. In the form of a handful of boulders, such ejecta would simply lose themselves in interstellar space. It is unlikely that any life-bearing boulder from Earth has ever landed on another planet: the distances to be covered are simply too vast. But the situation changes radically if, when life-bearing boulders are thrown out of the Earth, they are then eroded into sub-microscopic particles. A particle a few microns in diameter is rapidly thrown out of the solar system by the pressure of sunlight. Fast erosion occurs when a giant comet is thrown into a short-period, Earth-crossing orbit. In that case the mass of the zodiacal cloud is enhanced by two or three powers of ten. A meter-sized boulder, struck at 15 km/sec by the cometary dust particles, may be reduced to micron-sized particles within a decade. Such comets are thrown into suitable orbits every 100,000 years or so and so the process is not uncommon. The result of this rapid erosion is, not a handful of bodies, but perhaps 1018 particles thrown each year into interstellar space. The Earth becomes surrounded by an expanding biosphere several light years across, containing a vast number of life-bearing dust particles. The solar system passes through or close to star-forming nebulae occur every 100 million years or so, and these life-bearing particles will be injected directly into protoplanetary systems. In this way, provided that systems with the capacity to support life are generated in the star-formation process, then the necessary codes for replication will already be present. Suppose that we started with a Galaxy in which planets receptive to life are common, but on which life had not taken hold. Then with an initial seeding from the Earth alone, the whole galactic disc would become life-bearing within a few billion years. Life would spread like a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. Just as the notion of comets as destroyers of worlds is very old, so also is the notion of them as creators. In 1790, Sir William Herschel was presenting a world view in which comets moved from one star-system to another, replenishing life as they went. There’s nothing new under the sun! And so it turns out that these rare, large, icy bodies — giant comets — have much more significance for life than we might have expected. One of them may have had a profound effect on the way our ancestors perceived the world around them. They may have been a major factor in the evolution of life on our planet. And they may also have played a vital role in the spread of life throughout our Galaxy. That’s pretty interesting stuff. And it was in 2003, well before the work of R.B. Firestone et al, and Kennet et al. on the Younger Dryas boundary layer turned up evidence of an extra terrestrial impact as a trigger for the Younger Dryas cooling, and the cause of the mega faunal, extinctions etc. Those blast effected materials describe multiple impacts over most of the continent. Many of the opponents of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis have seized on the idea that a really big, fast moving, bolide doesn’t have time to break up before some of it hits the ground, and makes a crater. But who says a comet has to arrive in one piece? CometLinear RAS-comet2 Professor Napier has published a new paper titled Paleolithic extinctions and the Taurid complex The paper will appear in the March issue of journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It’s pretty exiting from where I stand. Because he’s describing the exact same kind of multiple fragment impact event the YDB group has been talking about for years now. And his is an impact scenario that can be supported by actual verifiable planetary scaring. Highlights: 13,000 years ago the Earth was struck by thousands of Tunguska-sized cometary fragments over the course of an hour, leading to a dramatic cooling of the planet, according to astronomer Professor Bill Napier of the Cardiff University Astrobiology Centre. He presents his new model in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The cooling, by as much as 8 degrees C, interrupted the warming which was occurring at the end of the last ice age and caused glaciers to re-advance. Evidence has been found that this catastrophic change was associated with some extraordinary extraterrestrial event. The boundary is marked by the occurrence of a "black mat" layer a few centimeters thick found at many sites throughout the United States containing high levels of soot indicative of continental-scale wildfires, as well as microscopic hexagonal diamonds (nanodiamonds) which are produced by shocks and are only found in meteorites or impact craters. These findings led to the suggestion that the catastrophic changes of that time were caused by the impact of an asteroid or comet 4 km across on the Laurentide ice sheet, which at that time covered what would become Canada and the northern part of the United States. The cooling lasted over a thousand years, and its onset coincides with the rapid extinction of 35 genera of North American mammals, as well as the disruption of the Paleo Indian culture. The chief objection to the idea of a big impact is that the odds against the Earth being struck by an asteroid this large only 13,000 years ago are a thousand to one against. And the heat generated by the rising fireball would be limited by the curvature of the horizon and could not explain the continent-wide occurrence of wildfires. Professor Napier has now come up with an astronomical model which accounts for the major features of the catastrophe without involving such an improbable event. According to his model, the Earth ran into a dense trail of material from a large disintegrating comet. He points out that there is compelling evidence that such a comet entered the inner planetary system between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago and has been fragmenting ever since, giving rise to a number of closely related meteor streams and co-moving asteroids known as the Taurid Complex. In the course of the giant comet’s disintegration, the environment of the interplanetary system would have been hazardous and the Earth would probably have run through at least one dense swarm of cometary material. The new model indicates that such an encounter would last for about an hour during which thousands of impacts would take place over continental dimensions, each releasing the energy of a megaton-class nuclear bomb, generating the extensive wildfires which took place at that time. The nanodiamonds at the extinction boundary would then be explained as having come in with the comet swarm. One recent meteorite is known which may have come from this giant comet progenitor: the Tagish Lake meteorite, which fell over Yukon Territory in January 2000. It has the highest abundance of nanodiamonds of any meteorite so far analyzed. Professor Napier sums up his model: "A large comet has been disintegrating in the near-Earth environment for the past 20,000 to 30,000 years, and running into thousands of fragments from this comet is a much more likely event than a single large collision. It gives a convincing match to the major geophysical features at this boundary." In fact there is significant planetary scaring that can be attributed to the impact It can also be shown that the comet arrived in two clusters of fragments. One hit the Laurentide Ice sheet in the Great Lakes region. The other hit central Mexico. And out of tens of thousands of fragments there is not one single impact structure that bares any resemblance to what standard impact theory might expect. The clusters approached the Earth from the direction of the sun. And as they did so, the solar wind blew their tails out ahead of them. On their outbound trip from in close to the sun towards Earth, they would have been visible in the day time sky for months before they hit. And in their final aspect during the last days before impact they would have out-shown the sun. It must have been one hell of a show. Most of our fragmented comet consisted of material that didn’t explode like a vaporizing rock, hitting the atmosphere . It detonated in hyper-thermal explosions more like what we would expect from a very hot, and powerful, chemical bomb. This was no ordinary impact event. And the processes of detonation responsible for the intense heat the impacts produced were like nothing anyone has ever imagined, much less studied. The orbit of the comet was steeply angled; about 45 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. And the clusters hit the Earth at a very low angle coming in very fast from the southeast. Flying side by side a thousand miles , or so, apart, the Larger of the clusters hit first in central Mexico. And a few seconds later the eastern end of the Laurentide Ice sheet got hit in an area from Northern Minnesota, and the Great Lakes to the Arctic Circle. As the down-blasts of thermal impact plasma hit the ice sheet it caused titanic, hot and powerful, hydrothermal explosions (steam) that lofted huge icebergs hundreds of miles in all directions. A few short minutes later, those flying chunks of ice were the impactites that formed the depressions all over the eastern side of the continent called the “Carolina Bays”. And the signs of massive flooding that have been attributed by generations of geologists to the bursting of ice damns holding back Glacial lake Agassiz are, in fact, the flood effects of the flash melting, and total breakup, of the entire eastern end of the Laurentide ice sheet. In a matter of hours, most of the eastern end of the LIS was already in the north Atlantic, or well on its way; rafted along on a mega-floods of melted ice. And a catastrophic sudden rise in sea levels worldwide had begun. This was a truly giant comet. Had it not broken up before it got here, and hit in one piece, we wouldn’t be here.. You can get hit fifty times with fifty pounds of force and you can still survive the blows. You may be bruised, and battered, but you stand a good chance of a full recovery. But if all of that force is in one blow of 2500 pounds that’ll be the end of you. This comet didn’t hit as a single point bolide of ordinary rock, or ice. It hit as multiple, high velocity, clusters of explosive fragments. In seconds all of central Mexico was pulverized into a surreal, and blasted, landscape of ignimbrites, and melted mountains, like a Salvador Dali painting. It generated a post impact mega tsunami of thermal impact plasma taller than the atmosphere, and hundreds of miles from front to back, that rushed downrange to the northwest at supersonic speeds. And it sterilized the western half of the continent on a swath from Mexico to the Arctic, along a storm front extending from California to the great plains. The Mexican cluster of fragments was approximately 500 miles wide. As the first of the fragments hit they detonated high in the atmosphere. But the explosions retained their momentum. And they hit the ground as devastating supersonic down blasts hotter than the surface of the sun. Only the very first fell into cold atmosphere. The rest of the fragments just piled on in, and added to the heat. The overpressures from the blast waves were so powerful they blasted whole mountain ranges aside like clumps of flour on a bakers table. And still, they continued to pile in. And the heat, and overpressures, continued to build. R.B Firestone et al (2007) cited Toon et al when they proposed that, in some places the temperature may have went as high as 10^7 degrees C. It was so hot the heat had stripped most the electrons, and protons from the nuclei. It was in a very highly ionized plasma state. All the free electrons made it a superconductor. And the heat began to flow electrically. What has been called a ‘firestorm’ was more accurately described as a magneto-hydro-dynamic, thermal plasma storm. In a private conversation, Professor Napier explained to me that, at 30km/sec it is difficult to get that much heat from the translation of a bolide’s kinetic energy to heat. That, at the speed the comet would have been moving 10^5 deg C would be more plausible. But he also pointed out that that’s ok. Because even if we use the more realistic, and conservative, figure of 100,000 degrees C, the atmosphere of the impact zones was no longer just hot gasses anymore. We still get a ‘substantial plasma’ Where the electricity goes, so goes the heat. In the first few seconds the resulting ultra high energy electrical current had already began to generate intense magnetic fields, and electric plasma discharges millions of times more destructive than any lightening bolt. And because it is electrically conductive, the plasma responds to magnetic fields, even those generated by its own electrical current. So the post impact firestorm would have almost behaved like a living thing as the plasma organized into twisted filaments, beams, and double layers, like the magneto-hydro-dynamic storms we see on the sun And in that heavily ionized, thermal plasma, state there is no known substance on the surface of the Earth strong enough to resist the onslaught of such heat and pressure. The blast wind incinerated everything it passed over. In the middle of the impact zone vast quantities of stone were vaporized, and whipped up into the storm, where the atmosphere worked like a refining tower. And in a fiery rain the materials precipitated out of the plasma storm down wind according to their condensation temperature, and specific gravity. This was like nothing ever imagined in our most frightening nightmares of disaster, or catastrophe. For a few seconds, perhaps minutes, after the impacts, most of North America from Mexico to the Arctic, and from California, to the plains of the Midwest, was engulfed in a full blown magneto-hydro-dynamic plasma storm. And there is not one square inch of the surface terrain of western North America in its path that doesn’t bare the scars of that blast of heat. All of the high ridges of the mountain ranges of California, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana that had glaciers at the time bare clear and obvious signs of the heat. And a profound feature that is easy to spot is melted glacial ridges, blown over to the north and northwest like runnels of melted wax on the side of a candle. And we very typically see high glacial valleys below those melted ridges that have all of the material that was once suspended in the Glacier lying exactly below where it was in the glacier. Indicating that the ice evaporated so fast there was no flow of water down slope to move any of the glacial till. So we see that the glacial till dropped out so fast it’s as if the ice just vanished in a quick puff of steam. And when the blast wave got to Montana, and Idaho, it broke up the ice damn blocking the Clark Fork river in northern Idaho releasing the flood waters of Glacial Lake Missoula down the Grande Coulee. Almost at the same time as Mexico was getting hit, the eastern end of the ice sheet was getting pounded just as hard. But the ice added another factor to consider in understanding the blast effects. Under the thermal airburst down-blasts, the ice reacted explosively like reactive armor on a battle tank. The impacts into the ice sheet triggered titanic hydrothermal explosions that lofted huge berg sized chunks of ice for hundreds of miles forming the ’Carolina Bays’. Sea levels rose hundreds of feet in a matter of days as the blasted, and melted ice sheet flowed in mega floods to the sea. And just as today, most of the larger populations would have been in low lying areas. The seas rose too fast or anyone, and anything, living in coastal areas anywhere in the world, to escape. Every coastline all over the world was effected. And everywhere it would have been much like a giant tsunami. But this time the flood waters rose and never receded. The ice sheet impacts evaporated millions of acre feet of water directly into the atmosphere. With all that extra water in the atmosphere it began to rain. And it rained, and rained, and rained. There was probably much more of the ice sheet that went up as steam, only to rain down in the days, and weeks, that followed than was melted to flow into the sea. As North America burned, the storms around the world raged. It rained everywhere for weeks. A mass of ice bigger than the Continental United States was destroyed. The whole world was shaken to the core. And, like taking weight from a floating barge, the sudden shift of the weight of so much ice caused a massive uplift of the middle of the continent. Coupled with the powerful detonations of so many exploding comet fragments , it caused earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions all over the world. And global seismic activity was the worst in many millions of years. While the mega floods from the blasted ice sheet were still flowing into the sea. Most of the biomass of western North America was burned away and much of the resultant smoke, and soot was blown high above the atmosphere where it blocked sunlight for years. And there was an immediate sharp drop in temperatures world wide. It was the worst kind of ’Perfect Storm’. Made all the worse because at the same time the destruction of the LIS caused a sudden rise in sea levels world wide. It also caused a shutdown of the thermal haline cycle which brings tropical warmth to the North Atlantic. Northern Europe quickly cooled to arctic temperatures. And the cold remained for centuries. The Clovis people, and whole species, and ecosystems, were annihilated in seconds. Most of the western half of the continent was sterilized. The other half was devastated. The food chain of the entire northern hemisphere was severely compromised. And except. for rare, and random, patches here, and there, that remained somehow unscathed like the one surviving undamaged house in a neighborhood hit by a tornado. The lush savannah the giant animals of North America depended on for food was gone down to the last blade of grass. Those giant animals that survived in the southeast corner of the continent faced a drastically altered, and reduced food supply. And they simply starved. The specialist predators that depended on those animals for food perished as well. The species that survived extinction were the most adaptable, the smaller ones that didn’t eat much, and those that were just plain lucky. If there were any human survivors of that day, anywhere in the western hemisphere, they were hiding in a deep cave somewhere well south of the impact zone. And they were cringing in terror as their world was erased and made new again. Any who peeked out of the cave without getting themselves killed, may have told stories of fire breathing dragons remaking the world with breath so hot it could melt mountains. Some of the exact details of the story you have just read are conjecture. But it is based on actual fact. And its complete truth is clearly, and legibly, written in the rocks of the Earth. To learn to read that story for yourself you are going to need the best satellite imagery you can get. And some kind of cipher key, or a ’Rosetta Stone’ of sorts. We find just such a key in a forensic study of the material movements during the emplacement of the Chihuahuan ignimbrites of central Mexico, and Western Texas. Published on March 15, 2010 at 10:10 am Comments (3) The URI to TrackBack this entry is: /http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/a-different-kind-of-catastrophe-2/trackback// RSS feed for comments on this post. 3 Comments Leave a comment. <#postcomment> 1. On March 15, 2010 at 10:43 pm Rich Murray Said: Three other competent amateurs supply abundant evidence and photos that show widespread impact and air bursts: http://cosmictusk.com/ excellent blog by George Howard http://cosmictusk.com/page/3 Google Earth video of Carolina Bays 4:35 minutes February 24, 2010 A couple of months ago I was having some fun with Google Earth Pro and put together this little video demonstrating the ubiquity of Carolina Bays in Eastern North Carolina. This is one of those projects where you swear you will return and do a “second draft” in the near future — and never do. So it is still kinda rough. But people unfamiliar with the Carolina Bays should find it interesting. I’d enjoy hearing what you think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vNS27eXD60 438 views A Brief Tour of the Carolina Bays on Google Earth (expand to full screen) See also: http://georgehoward.net/cbays.htm http://astrofotos.info/main.php?g2_itemId=5301 28 small images The Tupana (Panela crater) Event Hypothesis [ NE Brazil ] Pierson Barretto cosmopier@gmail.com http://astrofotos.info/main.php?g2_itemId=5301 28 small images The Tupana (Panela crater) Event Hypothesis – NE Brazil Imagens relacionadas às crateras meteoríticas, na Lua, na Terra. Um ensaio sobre o Evento Tupana; a hipótese. CLIQUE NA IMAGEM PARA LER MAIS. Images related to meteoritic craters, in the Moon, the Earth. An assay on the Tupana Event; the hypothesis. Click in the images to read more. http://www.astrosafor.net/Huygens/2009/77/h-77-tupana.pdf 11p [ in Spanish, with resume and photo ] Pierson Barretto, PhD cosmopier@gmail.com ; http://astrofotos.info/main.php?g2_itemId=41466&g2_imageViewsIndex=2 #1/35 CapivaraPalaeoLagoons 4 craters 9 km SE of Sao Raimundo Nonato on BR 324, 858 km W of Recife on coast Date: 12/03/2009 Owner: Pierson Barretto Size: Full Size 1004×923 #1 -9.0805 -42.6270 .396 km .394 low .2x.15 km ~2 m resolution #2 -9.0764 -42.6592 .401 .397 .6x.3 #3 -9.0743 -42.6378 .406 .400 .4x.2 #4 -9.0626 -42.6435 .399 .396 .2x.2 http://astrofotos.info/main.php?g2_itemId=41432&g2_imageViewsIndex=2 PalaeoLagoonZambia Date: 12/01/2009 Owner: Pierson Barretto Size: Full size: 1004×923 -14.7400 23.9712 1.129 km al eye al 53.74 km 2005.05.16 http://sites.google.com/site/dragonstormproject/ Dennis Cox, Fresno, California http://cometstorm.spaces.live.com/ http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/the-planetary-scaring-of-the-younger-dryas-impact-event/the-benivides-impact-structure/ Many Many Craters 20 starting 2009.11.22 http://cid-5d6b9f6c30c6fe9f.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Many%20Many%20Craters?ct=photos http://www.impactstructure.net/working-hypothesis.html Thornton H. “Tim” McElvain, Santa Fe, New Mexico [careful, expert evidence and photos of many impact sites in the Western USA that may date to 20-30 MYa BP ] http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/index.html phttp://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/Morphology/ejecta/argentina_splatter/index.html [ Argentina slideshow: Google Earth images with coordinates ] http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/YDB/index.html [ We presented a poster presentation the December 2009 AGU meeting in San Francisco of some of the Perigee: Zero concepts as they pertain to the Carolina bays and their role in identifying a possible YDB impact crater. A comprehensive review of the conjecture and our Heuristic Argument is discussed in this section. A PDF file of the submission in slide presentation form is available for download HERE. Please note that since the meeting, we have demoted Lake Michigan in favor of an impact at the Saginaw Bay and Michigan proper, although neither hypothesis has proven an adequate solution at the present time. ] http://cintos.org/cintosOrg/agu2009/PP31D-1387_Poster.pdf 18p http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/YDB/ObliqueImpacts/index.html http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/YDB/Distal%20Ejecta/index.html http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/YDB/Distal%20Ejecta/CarolinaBays/index.html http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/discussion/index.html http://www.perigeezero.org/treatise/timeline/index.html http://perigeezero.org/graphics/poster_agu_2006c_page.png [ in Vista, use Control + to enlarge image ] Michael E Davias michael@perigeezero.org ; michael@cintos.org ; Jeannette L Gilbride awesome evidence (Google Earth images, stereo pairs, some videos) from Mexico to Canada for 500 km comet rubble pile air impacts 12950 BP – Dennis Cox: Rich Murray 2010.01.13 http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.htm Wednesday, January 13, 2010 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/astrodeep/message/35 Reply 2. On March 16, 2010 at 7:35 am craterhunter Said: Wow! Good stuff! The google tour of the Carolina bays is excellent. I’m convinced they are secondary impact structures. A result of explosiveve impacts in the Laurentide Ice Sheet. like other impact events, the giant, explosive impacts into the LIS produced a lot of ejecta, and impactites flying in all directions. But since they were made of ice, the impactites only left their footprints before melting, and dissapearing without a trace. As for cratering at the impact points they flew from: Peter Schultz’s hypervelocity, low angle, into ice, impact experiments at NASA’s Vertical Gun Range make it clear that we shouldn’t spend too much time looking for a primary impact crater. There probably isn’t one. The ice would have reacted like the reactive armor on a battle tank. And damage may be limited to enigmatic burns, and depressions, in the Canadian shield. But we can use the predicted locations in the Archaean bedrock of the CS to our advantage. Nearly 100% of the original impactors kinetic energy was converted into heat in the atmosphere. The thermal impact downblasts caused tremendous hot, and powerful, hydrothermal explosions in the ice that kicked out the impactites which formed the bays. There may be no shock effects. But we can find plenty of thermal effects. Those hot explosions did leave a recognizable mark in the form of melted rock that was melted, and moved, by the heat, and pressure of the blasts. And all of the nearly pristine surface melt from the event is mis-defined on the maps as ‘volcanogenic’, and ‘volcaniclastic’. But the truth should be profoundly obvious. The Archaean bedrock of the Canadian Shield is some of the most geologically stable continental crust on Earth. There hasn’t been any volcanic activity in the CS in 2.5 billion years. Or more than half the age of the Earth. There are no volcanic vents at all in the Great lakes region. So the heat, and pressure, for any geologically recent surface melting event could not have come from below. The only other direction to look for the source of the melting is up. Reply 3. On April 10, 2010 at 7:26 pm Crater Hunter blog turns it up a notch « The Cosmic Tusk Said: [...] Hunter blog turns it up a notch The Tusk recommends the blog Crater Hunter: A Catastrophe of Comets as another stop to study strange claims and the science that supports them. I think it is [...] Reply