Pleistocene Event Horizon

I have had a better chance to review the data provided by the paper I posted last Thursday on the evidence for a meteor blast approximately 12,900 years ago. It is extraordinarily compelling. As my readers know from my previous postings, the presence of charcoal is not a natural event, even though common sense suggests that it should be. The temperatures required to reduce carbon based material to elemental carbon is very high and typically well in excess of the natural ignition temperature of carbon in the presence of oxygen. That is why forest fires fail to cover the ground with a thick layer of carbon rather than ash.

So when the geological record shows a layer of carbon over an entire continent, that means that an extreme heat event took place in such a way as to also minimize the effect of available oxygen. This really means no more than that the volatiles produced burned away from the carbon which is what one could expect from an external continental heat event.

Not surprisingly the extinction of the mega fauna and Clovis culture clearly coincides with this particular event horizon. We can expect to find that this also coincides with the abrupt extinction event that also overwhelmed Siberia wiping out the mammoths apparently there in a single day. The carbon dating ranges between 12.7 through 13.5 which is well within the expected scatter for a geographically distributed event taking place over twelve and a half thousand years ago. We are actually almost at a time range in which any resolution is breaking down and we must be extremely wary of any single data point.

What has been shown is that just like the dinosaur event horizon, the post event strata have no mega fauna or Clovis artifacts. The distribution of the charcoal horizon is so far all of North America east of the mountains and south of the ice sheet. It also includes a locale in Belgium were the surrounding area was still I think largely locked in ice also.

Imagining a thermonuclear blast centered on the western Arctic and traveling in the southeast direction is an excellent analogy. The battering of the Carolinas with ice chunks creating the impact bays rounds out the story. The heat blast would have swept the continent and likely dissipated only on traveling over open water. If the impact was in the mile thick ice then the crater may have lacked a scaring event on the underlying rock. I rather imagine that there is a lot more evidence to be found in the form of ice generated impact events.

What we have just described is a sharp tangential blow to the polar icecap and crustal area. This was enough to get the crust moving and a lot less than otherwise required which has been recognized by other commentators to be problematic as to survivability. Once the crust was moving, the polar center of mass shifted to the current configuration thirty degrees off the original axis, which is just about were you would expect it to end up.

This placed the northern ice cap firmly into the northern temperate wind belt commencing the melting process and the immediate temperature drop for the global climate since called the Younger Dryas. This melting took place over the next twelve hundred years. During this time the Gulf Stream was established and the Scandinavian ice sheet destroyed. A monster onshore sea was created against the melting ice waiting to break out into the Atlantic. Its collapse sped the final collapse of the remainder of the polar icecap.

It is possible that the sure knowledge of the pending collapse of great onshore sea was culturally remembered giving rise to the legend of the flood. Through all this the sea level rose three hundred feet, flooding the continental shelf for the first time. But once complete, the Younger Dryas abruptly ended and the world has settled down into the most stable climate seen the emergence of the Panama Isthmus. This is natural since the Gulf Stream now dumps enough heat directly into the polar region to make sure of it.

It was a great global catastrophe but also the harbinger and creator of the Northern Temperate Zone that we have relied on for the past ten thousand years. We now have the critical evidence to support my original hypothesis of a Pleistocene event. That the event was clearly an amazingly well directed meteor strike was more than I for one was prepared to anticipate. That it hit as it did saved most of humanity and life on earth in general while releasing the crust to settle in a very advantageous location.

And that children, is a problem. We have several incredibly unlikely coincidences. That alone opens the door to whether our ancestors or someone else planned this event as a direct act of terraforming. I could only speculate on what was possible, but never a precisely targeted silver bullet that got the job done with no waste. It is a bit too good to be true.

The apparent recent emergence of the planet Venus is also another act of very convenient world building or at least the preparation for such. This is controversial of course, but the evidence to date supports just that proposition and certainly does not rule it out. Read Pleistocene Nonconformity.

If we had proper space propulsion tomorrow, we could immediately start to terraform Venus with little difficulty. We just need to move comet junk out of the Kuiper Belt and bombard Venus.

Major Meteor Blast 12900 BCE

Those of you who have read my article on the Pleistocene nonconformity will understand my interest in the attached article. My article was posted last July and since published in Viewzone.

In Pleistocene Nonconformity we argue that the Ice age was ended by a crustal movement of thirty degrees south along longitudes passing through Hudson Bay. See my article for all your immediate objections. This put the polar icecap into latitudes wherein it would obviously chill the atmosphere. This chilling lasted for two thousand years until the ice was removed and is known as the Younger Dryas. All this coincides with the worldwide climate, sea level and geological record although the exact timing of each may not yet be precisely synchronized.

The point I am making is that the earth's crust moved. Once this is accepted, all the unexplainable features in the record of conflicting geology disappear. Remember that an icecap at the latitude of New York or at least close by, means a huge global climate impact into the tropics, which is contradicted by the record. Again, read my article to work through the details.

My own suggestion for the motive impulse was the advent of a fast moving very dense meteorite close enough to the pole to impart sufficient power to get the crust moving. The other option was that an excess of ice was inherently unstable, except the icecap had been stable for a million years. A good blow would change that. It just seemed far less probable. Perhaps it was an accident that waited a million years to happen.

Now we have extremely tangible evidence of a major meteorite event that appears to have been explosive, causing a major burn off at the correct time slot. The extensive presence of soot and charcoal strongly suggests that the explosion itself released huge amounts of direct heat to produce the elemental carbon form.

I suggested in the article that Iceland sure looks like a good prospect for a meteor event if it were not ruled out for other good reasons. And I really prefer not to penetrate the earth’s crust just to see if it can be done.

The idea of a comet smashing into the icecap and jarring the crust loose is much more acceptable and even survivable in highland earth. The craters in the Carolinas may even be caused by massive chunks of ice been blasted out and crashing back to earth. Having fun yet?

Anyway, the Carolinas would only have been thirty degrees from the poles, so a shock there or further north would have plenty of vector. Once the crust started moving, it seems likely that the icecap mass determined the final thirty degrees off center resting position.

The extent of the event horizon is obviously huge covering the area of Clovis culture. The abrupt extinction of fauna is also strongly indicated. This at least fills in an important blank for the theory presented in my article. There is no reason to look for a bear when a lion is eating the meal. And as usual, it looks more interesting than anything I imagined.

By the way, that event ushered in the incredibly stable Holocene in which we now reside. We are good to go for millions of years without a polar icecap.

Published online before print September 27, 2007
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0706977104
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE

Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling

R. B. Firestone a,b, A. West c, J. P. Kennett d, L. Becker e, T. E. Bunch f, Z. S. Revay g, P. H. Schultz h, T. Belgya g, D. J. Kennett i, J. M. Erlandson i, O. J. Dickenson j, A. C. Goodyear k, R. S. Harris h, G. A. Howard l, J. B. Kloosterman m, P. Lechler n, P. A. Mayewski o, J. Montgomery j, R. Poreda p, T. Darrah p, S. S. Que Hee q, A. R. Smith a, A. Stich r, W. Topping s, J. H. Wittke f, and W. S. Wolbach r
aLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720; cGeoScience Consulting, Dewey, AZ 86327; dDepartment of Earth Sciences and eInstitute of Crustal Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; fNorthern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011; gInstitute for Isotope and Surface Chemistry, H-1525, Budapest, Hungary; hDepartment of Geological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912; iDepartment of Anthropology and Museum of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403; jEastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM 88130; kSouth Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; lRestoration Systems, LLC, Raleigh, NC 27604; mRozenstraat 85, 1018 NN, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; nBureau of Mines and Geology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557; oClimate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469; pUniversity of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627; qDepartment of Environmental Health Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; sP.O. Box 141, Irons, MI 49644; and rDepartment of Chemistry, DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60614

Communicated by Steven M. Stanley, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, July 26, 2007 (received for review March 13, 2007)

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 ka, has been previously identified at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at 12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North American are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning at 12.9 ka. This layer also extends throughout at least 15 Carolina Bays, which are unique, elliptical depressions, oriented to the northwest across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. We propose that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event-related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in