America Before

by Graham Hancock

  The meet-up was scheduled for Wilmington, North Carolina, on November 13 and 14, 2017. Chris Moore and Malcolm LeCompte, coauthors of both the platinum and the biomass-burning papers, would join us from the University of South Carolina, together with their colleague Mark Demitroff of Stockton University in New Jersey, coauthor of several earlier papers providing solid support for the YDIH.3

  I invited my friend and colleague Randall Carlson to drive in from Atlanta to be part of the discussions. His work connecting impacts on the North American ice cap 12,800 years ago to the immense flood damage in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington State is discussed extensively in Magicians of the Gods.4

  PHOTO: FAIRCHILD AERIAL SURVEYS, 1930.

  And I was pleased to learn that George Howard had also asked Antonio Zamora to be there. An independent researcher, a chemist, and a computer scientist,5 Zamora is not a member of CRG and has nothing whatsoever to do with the group, but I had recently read an intriguing paper he had published earlier in 2017 in the peer-reviewed journal Geomorphology tracing the origins of the Carolina Bays to the Younger Dryas impacts.6

  Around 500,000 peculiar elliptical ponds, depressions, and lakes with raised rims pock much of the US Atlantic seaboard from Delaware to Florida. Since it was in the Carolinas that scientists first noticed them in the late nineteenth century, they became known as Carolina Bays and from quite early on there were theories that they had been created by an immense swarm of meteorites striking the earth.7 Several CRG members have explored the possibility that the Younger Dryas impacts might be connected to the mystery,8 but the majority of the group have since distanced themselves from such notions. Dating studies indicate that the Bays were not all created simultaneously, as the YDIH would require, but are of widely varying ages separated by tens of thousands of years.9

  Antonio Zamora’s 2017 paper in Geomorphology put the cat among the pigeons by raising an interesting scenario whereby the bays could, after all, have resulted from YD impacts. I had naively assumed that Malcolm LeCompte and Mark Demitroff (who were then both CRG members but have since resigned) would welcome this new research.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  GLACIER ICE IMPACT HYPOTHESIS

  LET’S START BY TAKING A proper look at the controversial proposals behind the “Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis” that Antonio Zamora puts on the table in his Geomorphology paper.10

  He begins by recognizing earlier evidence that discounts the Carolina Bays as impact features but then draws our attention to an intriguing mystery—the so-called Nebraska Rainwater Basins. Other than being oriented from northeast to southwest instead of from northwest to southeast (an important piece of evidence in itself), these curious elliptical geological formations more than 2,000 kilometers west of the Carolinas greatly resemble the bays:

  The Nebraska Rainwater Basins are not as well known as the Carolina Bays but their elliptical shape is so similar that it is necessary to consider that they formed contemporaneously with the Carolina Bays by the same mechanisms. … The objective of the Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis is to examine the characteristics of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins to determine whether these geomorphological features could have been created by secondary impacts from terrestrial material, such as glacier ice, ejected by an extraterrestrial impact.11

  Zamora is the first to acknowledge that his “Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis” depends heavily on prior work done by two other investigators, Michael E. Davias12 and Thomas H. S. Harris,13 the former a specialist in “geospatial big data, data mining, computer graphics and algorithms” and the latter a dynamics and flight science expert at Lockheed Martin Corporation.

  LEFT: Nebraska Rainwater Basins. RIGHT: Carolina Bays. IMAGE: ANTONIO ZAMORA; LIDAR FROM CINTOS.ORG.

  LEFT: Nebraska Rainwater Basins. RIGHT: Carolina Bays. Note orientation from northwest to southeast in the case of the Carolina Bays and from northeast to southwest in the case of the Nebraska Rainwater Basins. IMAGE: ANTONIO ZAMORA; LIDAR FROM CINTOS.ORG.

  Michael Davias accompanied Zamora to Wilmington and shared with us there the evidence that he and Harris had first presented in May 2015 at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America.14

  Published as a conference paper, their proposal is that a cosmic impact during the Ice Age in Michigan’s Saginaw Bay (which was then solid land covered by deep glacial ice) would have produced ejecta and secondary impacts in a “butterfly-wing” pattern precisely over the Nebraska Rainwater Basins, where they would be oriented northeast to southwest, and the Carolina Bays, where they would be oriented northwest to southeast.15

  IMAGE: MICHAEL DAVIAS, CINTOS.ORG.

  While he has no quarrel with Allen West, Richard Firestone, and other CRG scientists who suspect that there may have been a total of eight impacts on the North American ice cap,16 Zamora focuses his investigation on the Michigan event proposed by Davias and Harris to have been specifically responsible for the simultaneous creation both of the Carolina Bays and of the Nebraska Rainwater Basins.

  Saginaw Bay, the suggested impact site, is “commonly attributed to erosion by the Saginaw glacial lobe penetrating through the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Cuestas,” Davias and Harris concede, but propose instead that it is “the footprint of an oblique impact arriving at an azimuth of 222o. … Given 1 kilometer of ice over this footprint, 45,000 cubic kilometres of water would have been instantly ionized or vaporized.”17

  Meanwhile, the shock effects of the impact, although somewhat mitigated by the ice cover, would have bulldozed into the ancient promontory of bedrock then beneath the ice at the center of the Michigan Basin, plowed out the gap in the “mitten” that we now call Saginaw Bay, and sent up a mass of ejecta consisting of pulverized Michigan sandstone (from the bedrock) and water (from the vaporized ice).18 Blasted into suborbital space, this ejecta would then have reentered the atmosphere and fallen back to earth—with the end result being a sort of slurry that splattered down across much of the continental United States south of the ice sheet but that only left impressions, such as the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska Rainwater Basins, on suitably soft and “unconsolidated” ground.19

  LEFT: Saginaw Bay is an enigmatic, now water-filled, depression in Michigan’s distinctive “Mitten,” separating the “hand” of the mitten, to the left, from its “thumb,” to the right. RIGHT: Instead of erosion by glacial ice, Davias and Harris propose that Saginaw Bay is the footprint of a massive impact of a cosmic object that struck ancient Michigan at an oblique angle. IMAGE: MICHAEL DAVIAS, CINTOS.ORG.

  When Davias and Harris gave their paper at the Geological Society of America in 2015 they tentatively suggested an age of 786,000 years for the formation of Saginaw Bay.20 While drawing on their excellent ballistics and triangulation work, Zamora’s presentation of his own Glacial Ice Impact Hypothesis in his 2017 paper in Geomorphology rejects so great an age and offers a compelling case that Saginaw Bay was scooped out just 12,800 years ago by one of the fragments of the Younger Dryas comet.21 On technical grounds to do with “the thermodynamics of water in a liquid state” he also rejects Davias and Harris’s notion that the ejecta would have consisted of a “foam of sand and water.”22 According to Zamora’s calculations, massive quantities of solid glacial ice would instead have been blasted aloft:

  Experiments of high-speed impacts on ice sheets using NASA’s Ames Vertical Gun demonstrate that ice shatters when a projectile hits it. Pieces of ice are ejected, radiating from the impact site in ballistic trajectories.23

  “The Laurentide Ice Sheet,” writes Zamora,

  covered the convergence point determined by Davias and Harris in Saginaw Bay with a thickness of approximately 1500 to 2000 m of ice during the Pleistocene. … Ballistic equations, scaling laws relating crater size to impact energy, geometrical analysis and statistical analysis provide a mathematical foundation for explaining the shape of the bays and their origin from secondary impacts of glacier ice ejected from the Laurentide I
ce Sheet that covered Michigan.24

  It’s important to be clear on this.

  Just as Zamora does not support Davias and Harris’s idea that the ejecta consisted of pulverized sandstone and water, so, too, he adamantly does NOT suggest that hundreds of thousands of fragments of the original Younger Dryas comet bombarded North America’s Atlantic seaboard, creating the phenomenon of the Carolina Bays. Neither is he suggesting that the Nebraska Rainwater Basins were the result of direct hits by comet fragments. Instead he accepts the CRG’s long-established position that the epicenter of the impacts was the North American ice cap.

  Ballistic trajectories of glacier ice ejecta after a cosmic impact on the North American ice cap. IMAGE: ANTONIO ZAMORA.

  In his view all the damage in the Carolinas and Nebraska was done by the stupendous mass of icy ejecta, varying in size from basketballs to “ice boulders” tens or even hundreds of meters across, that fell back to earth following the Saginaw Bay impact.

  AN APOCALYPTIC VISION

  I REFER THE READER TO Zamora’s paper itself for the detailed evidence behind his findings. In summary, however, having first reviewed and rejected all other explanations for the formation of the bays and basins, and having given special consideration to the longer-term evolution of impact craters on viscous surfaces, Zamora concludes as follows:

  The radial orientation of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins toward a convergence point in Michigan, and the elliptical shapes of the bays with specific width-to-length ratios can be better explained by impact mechanisms than by terrestrial wind and water processes.

  The Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis … has been supplemented with an experimental model demonstrating that oblique impacts on viscous surfaces can reproducibly create inclined conical cavities that are remodeled into shallow elliptical depressions by viscous relaxation. This makes it possible to model the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins as conic sections whose width-to-length ratio can be explained by the angle of impact.25

  Zamora addresses the issue of the great diversity of dates for the Carolina Bays obtained by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), noting that this has hitherto been the most significant barrier to acceptance of any form of impact hypothesis with reference to the bays. As he rightly points out, however, the fundamental assumption behind the use of OSL has been that the subsurface of the Carolina Bays was exposed to light at the time of bay formation. His experimental model refutes this by demonstrating that impacts on viscous surfaces are plastic deformations that do not expose the subsurface to light:

  The width-to-length ratios of the Carolina Bays (right) average 0.58 and are very consistent for bays of different sizes. The bays in Nebraska (left) are indistinguishable from the bays on the East Coast based on their width-to-length ratios. IMAGE: ANTONIO ZAMORA; LIDAR FROM CINTOS.ORG.

  Therefore, OSL can only determine the date of the terrain, but not the date of formation of the bays. If all the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins formed contemporaneously, it will be necessary to find a different way of dating them.

  The Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis explains all the features of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins, including their elliptical shape, radial orientation, raised rims, undisturbed stratigraphy, absence of shock metamorphism, overlapping bays, and the occurrence of bays only in unconsolidated ground.26

  Finally, and chillingly, Zamora’s paper in Geomorphology notes:

  The great surface density of the bays indicates that they were created by a catastrophic saturation bombing with impacts of 13 KT to 3 MT that would have caused a mass extinction in an area with a radius of 1500 km from the extraterrestrial impact in Michigan. This paper has considered mainly the ice boulders ejected by an extraterrestrial impact on the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Pleistocene, but the impact would also have ejected water and produced steam. Taking into consideration the thermodynamic properties of water, any liquid water ejected above the atmosphere would have transformed into a fog of ice crystals that would have blocked the light of the sun. Thus, the time of formation of the Carolina Bays and Nebraska Rainwater Basins must coincide with an extinction event in the eastern half of the United States and the onset of a period of global cooling. This combination of conditions is best met by the disappearance of the North American megafauna, the end of the Clovis culture and the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling event at 12,800 cal. BP. The report of a platinum anomaly typical of extraterrestrial impacts at the Younger Dryas Boundary supports this scenario.27

  IMAGE: ANTONIO ZAMORA.

  In his book Killer Comet, Zamora elaborates on the extent and true horror of the Younger Dryas cataclysm. He considers how the effects of the primary impact over Michigan would have been massively compounded across North America by the secondary impacts of glacier ice boulders. It’s instructive to spend a few moments with the disturbing picture he paints:

  All living things within 100 kilometers of the [Michigan] impact died instantly. They were either burned by the heat blast or killed by the shock wave. On the East Coast, 1000 kilometers from the impact zone, the blinding flash on the horizon was followed by a sky that darkened ominously as it filled with the giant ice boulders ejected by the impact. Three minutes after the flash, the dark sky advanced relentlessly, and the ground shook as the first seismic waves from the extraterrestrial impact site arrived traveling at 5 km/sec.

  By this time, all animals and humans were aware that something terrible was happening. The sky continued to darken, and then filled with bright streaks as the ice boulders in suborbital flights re-entered the atmosphere at speeds of 3 to 4 km/sec. … [As] the giant ice boulders started falling … the thumping of the impacts sent shock waves through the ground that traveled at 5 to 8 km/sec. … The shaking ground started to liquefy, trapping everyone. The ground had turned to quicksand, making it impossible to walk or run …

  At the peak of intensity, a hail of glacier ice chunks, many as big as a baseball stadium, left steam trails in the sky as they re-entered the atmosphere at supersonic speeds and crashed into the liquefied ground accompanied by the thunder of sonic booms.

  The impacts created oblique, muddy, conical craters … with diameters of one to two kilometres … that swallowed whole villages and buried all the vegetation. The vibration of the ground quickly reduced the depth of the conical craters and turned them into [the] shallow depressions [that we know today as the Carolina Bays]. … The comet itself had not killed the megafauna. The saturation bombardment by the ice boulders that were ejected when the comet struck the Laurentide ice sheet caused the extinction event. … The landscape of the Eastern Seaboard had been transformed into a barren wasteland full of huge, shallow mud holes. …

  The Carolina Bays have remained as evidence of the glacier ice impacts on the soft, sandy soil of the East Coast.

  No such evidence remains of the ice chunks that must have fallen on harder ground, but the ice impacts in the central and Midwestern states were equally merciless. When the colossal chunks of glacier ice hit the hard terrain, they shattered and sent out ice fragments at high speed. Any creature or vegetation in the path of the fast-moving ice shards was destroyed.

  When the ice finally came to rest, the ejecta blanket had covered one-half of the contiguous United States with a thick layer of crushed ice … that increased the albedo of the Earth and reflected a significant portion of the dimmer light from the Sun back into space. The combined effect of the increased ice cover and the orbiting ice crystals would make the land cold and inhospitable for many years. …

  The buried vegetation would freeze or remain dormant under the ice. Grazing animals that had survived the glacier ice bombardment had no access to their normal food sources and would soon starve. Predators that were still alive would also soon die without their herbivorous prey. …

  Eventually, North America would be repopulated by new land animals and new humans, but the megafauna, and the ingenious Clovis people that had crafted such fine stone proj
ectiles were gone forever.28

  It’s an apocalyptic vision to be sure, and we must remind ourselves that it deals with the widespread consequences of just one of the major impacts on the North American ice cap.

  ATTACK AND DESTROY

  AS WE’VE SEEN, ALLEN WEST and Richard Firestone propose that there may have been as many as eight significant impacts on the North American ice cap during the 21 years of the peak Younger Dryas bombardments.29 Together with the other scientists from the Comet Research Group, they have focused, with great success, on gathering the evidence for these bombardments in the form of impact proxies scattered across 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface.

  What none of the group has yet done, however, is investigate the full implications for North America itself of the hypothesized impacts on the ice cap.

  Why Antonio Zamora matters, and why his work deserves serious evaluation, is that he is the first to undertake such an exercise—albeit focused on only one out of the possible eight impacts. In addition, he offers testable hypotheses and opens up new vistas for inquiry and discussion. I was therefore expecting to spend 2 constructive and thought-provoking days at Wilmington, sharing ideas with big thinkers and giving proper consideration for the first time to the implications of the icy fallout across North America that Zamora rightly calculates would have been the outcome of impacts on the ice cap.

  The opposite happened. It was clear from the outset that the only reason Malcolm LeCompte and Mark Demitroff were with us at Wilmington at all was to attack and destroy the Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis at birth. There was no interest whatsoever in a discussion of the wider implications of Zamora’s thinking. Their entire focus was to demonstrate that he was completely wrong to link the Carolina Bays to any kind of cosmic impacts, and to the Younger Dryas impacts in particular.