This is not the only suspect and additional impacts are remarked upon. I am not overly comfortable with a crushed comet stream operating in effective resonance with Earth's orbit but i also do not wish to dismiss it either.
My reason is simple enough. the critical event in 12900BP was clearly targeted. That means that unwanted impacts could be prevented. It is possible though that a first pass by the sun was used to crush the comet and that additional passes were used to clean up the mass of objects. This may have involved some impacts to test capability. I know i would want to have the data before i slammed the bulk into the Ice Cap.
Once understood in this manner, it is plausible and even likely. Recall that adjusting an orbit consists of tweaking that orbit far out on its swing toward the sun. A little tweak has a huge multiplayer effect. in quite the same way that shoving a child's swing does.
Taurid meteor stream is the debris trail of a giant comet
When Magicians of the Gods was published in the UK on 10 September, I was mocked in the national media because the book references the serious suggestions of a number of astronomers that our planet is in real and present danger of an encounter with the fragments of a giant comet. I have no wish to invoke doom and gloom but I felt it would be irresponsible of me NOT to report this, because the evidence is that the Taurid meteor stream is the debris trail of a giant comet that was thrown into the inner solar system by gravitational disturbances some 20,000 years ago and that broke into multiple fragments some of which hit the earth 12,800 years ago, with further impacts 11,600 years ago. The result was a sustained global cataclysm (known to geologists as the Younger Dryas) that was accompanied by worldwide extinctions of animal species, and I suggest, by the almost complete destruction of an advanced human civilization that had flourished during the Ice Age.
In recent days, the media (including some of the same newspapers that mocked me in September) have been reporting new science which appears to confirm that we are indeed in a cosmic danger zone, just as I warn in Magicians of the Gods. See here for example:
And here for further details of the scientific paper on which the press reports are based:
And more of the recent press reports here:
None of this, in my view, is a matter for gloom and doom. Instead I see it as a matter for action. The technology already exists to sweep our cosmic environment clean of potential threats and to ensure that we do not become the next lost civilization. The problem, however, is that the human species presently seems to lack the will for rational and responsible action, and to be far too choked up with fear, hatred and suspicion to undertake a grand project for the collective benefit of mankind, preferring instead to devote the big budgets to destructive and dangerous military spending and the insanity of mutually assured nuclear destruction.
The big media have done their best to mis-represent Magicians of the Gods, but I remain encouraged by the level of intelligent support for the book so far shown by the general public. Publication in the United States is on 10 November, just two weeks from today. Background on the book here: http://grahamhancock.com/magicians/.
Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned.
Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way. But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower.
Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system. They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years.
Earth could be at risk of meteor impacts and we might wrongly have assumed we are in a safe era, scientists warn
Humans have presumed that they are in a safe part of the ‘cosmic cycle of death and destruction’, scientists warn, but that might be wrong
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/earth-could-be-at-risk-of-meteor-impacts-and-we-might-wrongly-have-assumed-we-are-in-a-safe-era-a6702501.html
The most recent shower happened 11 million years ago. But that doesn’t mean that the Earth is safe, according to a new study.
"There is evidence that the comet activity has been high for the last one to two million years, and some comet orbits are perturbed, so we may be in a shower at the present time,” said geologist Michael Rampino.
Professor Rampino from New York University worked with the Carnegie Institute’s Ken Caldeira to carry out an estimate of when meteor impacts and extinctions happened.
That included a study of the asteroid that hit the Earth 65-million years ago and is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs. Five of the six largest impacts brought a mass extinction, the scientists report in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"The correlation between the formation of these impacts and extinction events over the past 260 million years is striking and suggests a cause-and-effect relationship," Professor Rampino said. “This cosmic cycle of death and destruction has without a doubt affected the history of life on our planet."
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