Saturday, April 1, 2017

Carolina Bays are Shock Liquefaction Impact Features

 















As i posted back in 2007 from my manuscript Paradigms Shift, the Carolina Bays are part of the evidence suite supporting the impact of a large comet onto the norther Ice Cap around 13,900 BP.  That they were identified by others as likely caused by ballistic ice from the Ice Cap is very welcome.  This is geology at its best.  That it has been ignored is irrelevant as that demands understanding the critical importance to human history of the Pleistocene nonconformity in the first instance.


Rather obviously you cannot accept the one without the other and that means understanding human history restarted after that event wiped the slate clean.  Cultural records say as much and plenty of other evidence abounds.  Yet old fashioned denial holds sway.


My contribution to all this has been to understand that the comet blow was targeted in order to induce a critical crustal movement that continues to play out today in order to eliminate the Northern Ice Cap.  That was the central purpose.  Ultimately it also flooded huge tracts of what is now the continental shelve, then hospitable for agriculture and opened up the whole northern hemisphere to agricultural development now well begun.  This represents a vast increase in usable land toward a potential human population of around 100 billion.

 .. 

Problem solved: Carolina Bays are shock liquefaction impact features from hypersonic ice boulders launched from the glacial ice sheet by a cosmic impact at the Younger Dryas
A. Zamora



The Tusk was absolutely thrilled to see the publication last week of a paper concerning Carolina Bays in the distinguished journal, Geomorphology. Other than a brief role for the Carolina bays in the early papers of the Comet Research Group, and a much longer series of Geological Society of America posters laboriously researched and determindly published by Michael Davias et. al, Zamora’s A Model for the Geomorphology of Bays is the only peer-reviewed and published ‘ET origin’ work on bays in the last two decades — and it is a doozy.

 http://cosmictusk.com/antonio-zamora-geomorphology-carolina-bays-shock-liquefaction-features-glacial-icebergs-launched-cosmic-impact-ice-sheet/

Zamora builds on the work of Willam Prouty and Melton and Schriver in the first half of the 20th century, with an assist from Eyton and Parkhurst in the 70’s, and finally Davias and Kimbel’s efforts in recent years. Each of the researchers maintained that the bays were formed at once by a barrage of material from the midwest. But, just as the early researchers ultimately decided, those around today also dismiss bays as the direct impacts of ET fragments of a comet or asteroid, and consider them to be the remnant features of secondary impacts from the ejecta and ballistic shockwaves of a northerly catastrophe. They are wise to do so.

The correct theory must account for ALL the easily observed, unique characteristics of bays. [See list of 16 from Eyton and Parkhurst here] The “wind and wave,” gradual formation, theories that continue to hold sway in classrooms, and publications from Ivestor and Brooks, fail miserably to account for all the observed phenomena. Zamora checks each off with ease. When time permits I hope to address them one by one.

Significantly, Zamora’s work is multidisciplinary and, like Davias, assisted by geometry as well as geology. Here is a sample:
Ellipses are mathematical conic sections formed by the intersection of a plane and a cone. The elliptical geomorphology of the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska Rainwater Basins can be explained if the bays originated from slanted conical cavities that were later remodeled into shallow depressions by geological processes. A width-to-length ratio of 0.58 corresponds to a cone inclined at 35° using the relationship sin(θ) = W/L. The proposed conical cavities could have been made by impacts of material ejected at approximately 35° in ballistic trajectories from the point of convergence in the Great Lakes Region. The small variations of the width-to-length ratio correspond to slightly different angles that are consistent with possible ballistic trajectories
The bay rims to Zamora are the result of a complex mathematical equation. They are the final surface expression of thousands of conical, inclined ballistic shock cones, each traveling with a giant ice fragment blown from the ice sheet in a nine-minute supersonic arc from the frigid north to the Carolina coast. (I will work on that sentence but you get the idea). These icebergs from space slammed into the supersaturated unconsolidated clayey sands of the coastal plain and left behind the shock “ripples” and “flaps” that we recognize today as bay rims. Zamora even provides an equation relating the perfection and ellipticity of bays to the degree of unconsolidated sediments encountered by the ice bullets:
The LiDAR images also reveal that some terrains do not have elliptical bays. Davias and Harris (2015) describe six archetype bay shapes that may be determined by the geological characteristics of the terrain. The thickness of the layer of unconsolidated material required to produce an elliptical bay can be estimated by the formula tan(θ) × L/2, where L is the length of the major axis and θ is the angle of inclination. A conical cavity inclined at 35° corresponding to a bay with a major axis of 400 m would require a layer of unconsolidated material with a depth of approximately 140 m.
That makes sense to me, and accounts for the “classes” of similar bays, an aspect unexplained by wind and water enthusiasts, but first investigated and catalogued by Davias.

In addition to the present journal publication, Zamora makes his case in detail in a recently published book available from Amazon: Killer Comet: What the Carolina Bays tell us. I am reading it now and will update this post accordingly.

On the shoulders of genius, Zamora has provided defensible and superior answers to the many questions provoked by the appearance and distribution of Carolina bays. The geological community will largely ignore this paper, of course, but some will take note. And there is always reason for hope as the class of geologists who reject recent catastrophic explanations out-of-hand continue their long march from the tenured defense of the known, to retirement, and finally to death. I note that in closing Zamora gives a shout-out to his editor, Professor Andrew J. Plater of the University of Liverpool, clearly an enlightened man, who tweets here as @GeomorphologyDr if you care to thank him.


Acknowledgement
The author thanks Cintos.org for the use of LiDAR images licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
3.0 Unported License. The author would also like to thank two anonymous
referees and Prof. Andrew Plater whose comments helped to improve
this paper.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in the
online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2017.01.019. This data include
the Google maps of the most important areas described in this
article.
References
Brooks,M.J., Taylor, B.E., Ivester, A.H., 2010. Carolina bays: time capsules of culture and climate
change. Southeast. Archaeol. 29, 146–163.
Davias, M., Gilbride, J.L., 2010. Correlating an impact structure with the Carolina Bays. GSA
Denver Annual Meeting (31 October–3 November 2010), Paper No. 116-13.
Davias, M., Gilbride, J.L., 2011. LiDAR digital elevationmaps employed in Carolina Bay survey.
GSA Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota (12 October).
Davias, M., Harris, T., 2015. A tale of two craters: Coriolis-aware trajectory analysis correlates
two pleistocene impact strewn fields and gives Michigan a thumb. Geological
Society of America, North-Central Section - 49th Annual Meeting (19–20 May).
Dyke, A.S., et al., 2002. The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial
Maximum. Quat. Sci. Rev. 21 (2002), 9–31.
Eimers, J.L., Terziotti, S., Giorgino, M., 2001. Estimated depth to water. North Carolina,
Open File Report 01-487.
Eyton, J.R., Parkhurst, J.I., 1975. A Re-Evaluation of the Extraterrestrial Origin of the
Carolina Bays. Geography Graduate Student Association, University of Illinois, Urbana
Champaign.
Firestone, R.B., 2009. The case for the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact event: mammoth,
megafauna, and Clovis extinction, 12,900 years ago. J. Cosmol. 2, 256–285.
Firestone, R.B., et al., 2007. Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that
contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. 104, 16016–16021.
Firestone, R.B., et al., 2010. Analysis of the Younger Dryas impact layer. J. Siberian Fed.
Univ. Eng. Technol. 3 (1), 30–62 (Report Number: LBNL-4680E).
Israde-Alcántara, I., et al., 2012. Evidence from Central Mexico supporting the Younger
Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. PNAS 109 (13), E738–E747 (03/2012).
Johnson, D., 1942. The origin of the Carolina Bays, 1942. Columbia University Press.
Kennett, J.P., et al., 2015. Bayesian chronological analyses consistent with synchronous
age of 12,835–12,735 Cal B.P. For Younger Dryas boundary on four continents.
PNAS 112 (32):E4344–E4353. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1507146112 (published
ahead of print July 27, 2015).
LeCompte, M.A., et al., 2012. Independent evaluation of conflicting microspherule results
from different investigations of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. PNAS (2012:
1208603109v1-10).
Little, E.M., et al., 1972. Field measurement of light penetration through sea ice. Arctic 25
(1), 28–33 (Mar.).
Melosh, H.J., 1989. Impact Cratering: A Geologic Process. Oxford University Press.
Melosh, H.J., 2011. Planetary Surface Processes. Cambridge University Press.
Melton, F.A., 1956. Review of Carolina Bays and the Shapes of Eddies by C. Wythe Cooke.
J. Geol. 64 (3), 301–304 (May).
Melton, F.A., Schriever,W., 1933. The Carolina ‘Bays’ - are they meteorite scars? J. Geol. 41,
52–66.
Petaev, M.I., et al., 2013. Large Pt anomaly in the Greenland ice core points to a cataclysm
at the onset of Younger Dryas. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1303924110
(July 22, 2013).
Pinter, N., et al., 2011. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: a requiem. Earth Sci. Rev.
106 (3–4), 247–264.
Preston, C.D., Brown, C.Q., 1964. Geologic section along a Carolina Bay, Sumter County, S.
C. Southeast. Geol. 6, 21–29.
Prouty, W.F., 1952. Carolina Bays and their origin. Bull. Geol. Soc. Am. 63, 167–224.
Raisz, E., 1934. Rounded Lakes and lagoons of the Coastal Plains of Massachusetts. J. Geol.
2, 839–848.
Robbins, S.J., et al., May 2014. The variability of crater identification among expert and
community crater analysts. Icarus 234 (15):109–131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
icarus.2014.02.022.
Schulson, E.M., 1999. The structure and mechanical behavior of ice. J. Miner. Met. Mater.
Soc. 51 (2), 21–27.
Shuvalov, V., Dypvik, H., 2013. Distribution of ejecta from small impact craters. Meteorit.
Planet. Sci. 48 (6):1034–1042. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/maps.12127.
Stickle, A.M., Schultz, P.H., 2012. Subsurface damage from oblique impacts into low-impedance
layers. J. Geophys. Res. 117, E07006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/
2011JE004043.
Thom, B.G., 1970. Carolina Bays in Horry and Marion counties, South Carolina. Bull. Geol.
Soc. Am. 81, 783–814.
USGS, 2016. Luminescence dating — introduction and overview of the technique.
(https://gec.cr.usgs.gov/projects/lumlab/overview.shtml, 21 Nov.).
Youd, T., et al., 2001. Liquefaction resistance of soils: summary report from the 1996
NCEER and 1998 NCEER/NSF workshops on evaluation of liquefaction resistance of
soils. J. Geotech. Geoenviron. Eng. 10 (817):817–833. http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/
(ASCE)1090-0241(2001)127.
Zamora, A., 2015. Solving the mystery of the Carolina Bays. Kindle eBook (ISBN: 978-0-
9836523-8-0, 2015), Paperback ed. ISBN: 978 0 9836523 9 7.
Zanner, W., Kuzila, M.S., 2001. Nebraska's Carolina Bays. GSA Annual Meeting

No comments:

Post a Comment