Study Supports Theory of Extraterrestrial Impact

This pretty well seals the deal.  Recall that I began looking for a major impact event merely knowing that there had to be one to provide the energy necessary to shift the crust thirty degrees south.  This led to the discovery of scant evidence that effectively meant that any such impact was a planned event that struck a bull’s eye at the North Pole.  This led to a complete reconsideration of the last 70,000 years of human history.

Now we have a stack of evidence including this decisive lake bottom that confirms the necessary trajectory although the shoe has not dropped yet with other researchers in the understanding that this struck the North Polar Region then located thirty degrees north from its present location in Hudson Bay.

As surmised, it was also a comet and importantly, it was unique since the impact that took out the dinosaurs.  This means that a putative earlier shift was a natural result of Ice imbalance and merely proved the crustal mobility, setting the stage for a direct intervention that would end the Ice Age.

The bulk of the impact mass would have struck the ice over a broad area and induced a kinetic impulse into the crust in the correct direction to send the pole South to its natural limit caused by the elimination of the free space for the movement in the critical viscosity free carbon zone.

Other fragments outside the impact halo entered the atmosphere and explode over Mexico in particular where ample evidence is now been recognized.   This lake bottom confirms dates and that it is an impact event as large as we expected.

Study supports theory of extraterrestrial impact

by Staff Writers

Santa Barbara CA (SPX) Mar 06, 2012

This is James Kennett. Credit: University of California - Santa Barbara. 

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Study_supports_theory_of_extraterrestrial_impact_999.html

A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico.

The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.

These new data are the latest to strongly support of a controversial hypothesis proposing that a major cosmic impact with Earth occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the YoungerDryas. The researchers' findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Conducting a wide range of exhaustive tests, the researchers conclusively identified a family of nanodiamonds, including the impact form of nanodiamonds called lonsdaleite, which is unique to cosmic impact.

The researchers also found spherules that had collided at high velocities with other spherules during the chaos of impact. Such features, Kennett noted, could not have formed through anthropogenic, volcanic, or other natural terrestrial processes. "These materials form only through cosmic impact," he said.

The data suggest that a comet or asteroid - likely a large, previously fragmented body, greater than several hundred meters in diameter - entered the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle.

The heat at impact burned biomass, melted surface rocks, and caused major environmental disruption. "These results are consistent with earlier reported discoveries throughout North America of abrupt ecosystem change, megafaunal extinction, and human cultural change and population reduction," Kennett explained.

The sediment layer identified by the researchers is of the same age as that previously reported at numerous locations throughout North America, Greenland, and Western Europe. The current discovery extends the known range of the nanodiamond-rich layer into Mexico and the tropics. In addition, it is the first reported for true lake deposits.

In the entire geologic record, there are only two known continent-wide layers with abundance peaks in nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and aciniform soot. These are in the 65-million-year-old Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer that coincided with major extinctions, including the dinosaurs and ammonites; and the Younger Dryas boundary event at 12,900 years ago, closely associated with the extinctions of many large North American animals, including mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth cats, and dire wolves.

"The timing of the impact event coincided with the most extraordinary biotic and environmental changes over Mexico and Central America during the last approximately 20,000 years, as recorded by others in several regional lake deposits," said Kennett. "These changes were large, abrupt, and unprecedented, and had been recorded and identified by earlier investigators as a 'time of crisis.' "

Other scientists contributing to the research include Isabel Israde-Alcantara and Gabriela Dominguez-Vasquez of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo; James L. Bischoff of the U.S. Geological Survey; Hong-Chun Li of National Taiwan University; Paul S. DeCarli of SRI International; Ted E. Bunch and James H. Wittke of Northern Arizona University; James C. Weaver of Harvard University; Richard B. Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Allen West of GeoScience Consulting; Chris Mercer of the National Institute for Materials Science; Sujing Zie and Eric K. Richman of the University of Oregon, Eugene; and Charles R. Kinzie and Wendy S. Wolbach of DePaul University.