10. Michail I. Petaev et al., “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Cores Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 32 (August 6, 2013), 12917–12920. See also Heather Pringle, “Did a Comet Wipe Out Prehistoric Americans?” New Scientist (May 22, 2007), http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11909-did-a-comet-wipe-out-prehistoric-americans.html#.VJqZ88AgA; and Firestone et al., “Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact 12,900 Years Ago That Contributed to the Megafaunal Extinctions and the Younger Dryas Cooling,” 16016.
11. James Kennett cited by Jim Barlow-Oregon in “Did Exploding Comet Leave Trail of Nanodiamonds?” Futurity: Research News from Top Universities, http://www.futurity.org/comet-nanodiamonds-climate-change-755662/. See also Kinzie et al., “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer Across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 cal BP,” 476.
12. Richard Firestone quoted in Pringle, “Did a Comet Wipe Out Prehistoric Americans?”
13. Kinzie et al., “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer Across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 cal BP,” 498–499.
14. Quoted in Julie Cohen, “Nanodiamonds Are Forever: A UCSB Professor’s Research Examines 13,000-Year-Old Nanodiamonds from Multiple Locations Across Three Continents,” The Current, UC Santa Barbara, August 28, 2014, http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014368/nanodiamonds-are-forever.
15. Petaev et al., “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Cores Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas,” 12918–12919.
16. Ibid., 12917.
17. W. M. Napier, “Palaeolithic Extinctions and the Taurid Complex,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 405, no. 3 (July 1, 2010), 1901–1906. See also Gerrit L. Verschuur, Impact: The Threat of Comets and Asteroids (Oxford University Press, 1996), 136.
18. Clube and Napier, The Cosmic Winter, 147.
19. W. M. Napier, “Comets, Catastrophes and Earth’s History,” Journal of Cosmology (November 6, 2009), 344–355
20. Ibid.
21. Clube and Napier, The Cosmic Winter, 153.
26: FIRE AND ICE
1. The Comet Research Group, https://cometresearchgroup.org/.
2. The Comet Research Group, “Comet Impact Scientists,” https://cometresearchgroup.org/scientists-members/.
3. Christopher Moore et al., “Widespread Platinum Anomaly Documented at the Younger Dryas Onset in North American Sedimentary Sequences,” Scientific Reports (March 9, 2017).
4. Ibid., 1.
5. Michail I. Petaev et al., “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Cores Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 32 (August 6, 2013), 12917, 12918.
6. Moore et al., “Widespread Platinum Anomaly Documented at the Younger Dryas Onset in North American Sedimentary Sequences,” 2–3.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 4–5.
10. Ibid., 7.
11. Ibid., Supplementary Information, 10–11. Platinum (Pt) is one of the platinum group of elements (PGE) that includes iridium (Ir), osmium (Os), ruthenium (Ru), and rhodium (Rh).
12. Ibid., 12–13.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Wendy S. Wolbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago,” Journal of Geology 126, no. 2 (March 2018), 165–205.
17. Ibid. The full list of coauthors: Wendy S. Wolbach, Joanne P. Ballard, Paul A. Mayewski, Victor Adedeji, Ted E. Bunch, Richard B. Firestone, Timothy A. French, George A. Howard, Isabel Israde-Alcántara, John R. Johnson, David Kimbel, Charles R. Kinzie, Andrei Kurbatov, Gunther Kletetschka, Malcolm A. LeCompte, William C. Mahaney, Adrian L. Melott, Abigail Maiorana-Boutilier, Siddhartha Mitra, Christopher R. Moore, William M. Napier, Jennifer Parlier, Kenneth B. Tankersley, Brian C. Thomas, James H. Wittke, Allen West, and James P. Kennett.
18. Ibid., 165.
19. Ibid., 165, 167.
20. Ibid., 169.
21. Ibid., 170.
22. Ibid., 170–171.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 171.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 187, 189.
27. Ibid., 192.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 192–193.
30. Ibid., 193.
31. Ibid., 194.
32. Josh Halliday and James Gant, “Andy Burnham Calls for More Support to Tackle Lancashire Wildfires” (Guardian, July 2, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/02/firefighters-need-support-to-tackle-lancashire-moorland-blaze-says-andy-burnham and Helen Pidd, “Firefighters From Seven Counties Fight Greater Manchester Moor Fires” (Guardian, July 1, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/01/firefighters-from-seven-counties-fight-greater-manchester-moor-fires.
33. Dale Kasler, “Northern California Wildfires Are Burning Much Earlier This Summer. Here’s Why.” (Sacramento Bee, July 2, 2018), https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article214198989.html.
34. CAL FIRE, “Incident Information,” http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_stats?year=2017.
35. Matthew Rena, “Costs to Fight 2017 California Wildfires Shatter Records” (Courthouse News Service, January 8, 2018), https://www.courthousenews.com/costs-to-fight-2017-california-wildfires-shatters-records/.
36. Walbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago,” 165.
37. Matthew R. Francis, “When Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 15, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-carl-sagan-warned-world-about-nuclear-winter-180967198/.
38. Cited in ibid.
39. R. B. Firestone et al., “Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact 12,900 Years Ago That Contributed to the Megafaunal Extinctions and the Younger Dryas Cooling,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 41 (October 9, 2007), 16020.
40. Probably just under 10,000 megatons. See Ashley Kirk, “How Many Nukes Are in the World and What Could They Destroy?” (Telegraph, October 11, 2017), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/many-nukes-world-could-destroy/. Note, however, that though this figure is based on statistics from the Arms Control Association, it is an estimate due to the secretive nature of governments’ approach to weaponry.
41. Wolbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago,” 179.
42. Ibid., 200.
43. S. J. Fiedel, “The Mysterious Onset of the Younger Dryas,” Quaternary International 242 (2011), 263.
44. David J. Leydet et al., “Opening of Glacial Lake Agassiz’s Eastern Outlets by the Start of the Younger Dryas Cold Period,” Geology (January 4, 2018).
45. Fiedel, “The Mysterious Onset of the Younger Dryas,” 264.
46. Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization (2015), chapter 6, 121–122.
47. Wolbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~ 12,800 Years Ago,” 179. Emphasis added.
48. Ibid., 179.
49. Ibid., 180.
50. Ibid., 175.
51. Ibid., 178.
52. Ibid., 179.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 201.
55. Ibid., 179.
56. Ibid., 167.
57. Ibid., 168, 173, 177, 178, 188. See also Petaev et al., “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Cores Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas,” 12917. And see W. M. Napier, “Palaeolithic Extinctions and the Taurid Complex,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 405, no. 3 (July 1, 2010), 1901–1906. The complete paper can be read online here: http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/405/3/1901.full.pdf+html?sid=19fd6cae-61a0-45bd-827b-9f4eb877fd39, and downloaded as a pdf
here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.0744.pdf; and Victor Clube and Bill Napier, The Cosmic Winter (Wiley, 1990), 150–153. See also Gerrit L. Verschuur, Impact: The Threat of Comets and Asteroids (Oxford University Press, 1996), 136.
58. Firestone et al., “Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact 12,900 Years Ago That Contributed to Megafaunal Extinctions and the Younger Dryas Cooling,” 16020.
59. Yingzhe Wu et al., “Origin and Provenance of Spherules and Magnetic Grains at the Younger Dryas Boundary,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 38 (September 5, 2013), e3564.
60. R. B. Firestone et al., “Analysis of the Younger Dryas Impact Layer,” Journal of Siberian Federal University. Engineering and Technologies 1 (February 2010), 30, 47, 56.
61. Wolbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago,” 195: “Peros et al.’s (2008) comprehensive analysis of North American pollen records indeed demonstrated that an abrupt, temporary decline in conifer forests (mostly Picea sp.) occurred widely across North America during the first 150 y of the YD climate episode. This loss was accompanied by a sudden expansion of Populus species (poplar, cottonwood, aspen) and sometimes Alnus (birch), which are opportunistic pioneers that often flourish following major forest disruptions such as wildfires. In turn, Populus species were replaced by conifers during the remainder of the YD. Thus, a large, pervasive, temporary change in continental vegetation, as reflected in the North American pollen record, is consistent with a major biotic perturbation that would have resulted from widespread biomass burning at the YDB.”
62. Ibid., 178.
63. Ibid., 198.
64. Firestone et al., “Analysis of the Younger Dryas Impact Layer,” 57–58.
65. Ibid., 58.
66. Together with nineteen genera of North American birds. See James P. Kennett et al., “Potential Consequences of the YDB Cosmic Impact at 12.8 kya: Climate, Humans and Megafauna,” in Albert C. Goodyear and Christopher R. Moore (eds.), Early Human Life on the Southeastern Coastal Plain (Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida Press, 2018), 184.
67. Wolbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago,” 195–196, 200–201.
68. Ibid., 200–201.
69. Kennett et al., “Potential Consequences of the YDB Cosmic Impact at 12.8 kya,” 184–185.
70. Ibid., 186.
71. Ibid., 181–182.
72. Ibid., 182.
73. Ibid.
74. Terry L. Jones and Douglas J. Kennett, “A Land Impacted? The Younger Dryas Boundary Event in California,” in Terry L. Jones and Jennifer E. Perry (eds.), Contemporary Issues in California Archaeology (Routledge, 2016), Kindle location 849.
75. David G. Anderson et al., “Multiple Lines of Evidence for Possible Human Population Decline/Settlement Reorganization During the Early Younger Dryas,” Quaternary International 242 (2011), 578.
27: CAPE FEAR
1. Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization (2015), 86–108.
2. Since 2015, the number of papers that have been published that augment the case for a YD ET impact event has been quite staggering. Strongly supportive papers include:
W. M. Napier, “Giant Comets and Mass Extinctions of Life,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 448, no. 1 (2015), 27–36; A. V. Andronikov et al., “Geochemical Evidence of the Presence of Volcanic and Meteoritic Materials in Late Pleistocene Lake Sediments of Lithuania,” Quaternary International 386 (2015), 18–29; R. Ellis, “The Carolina Bays, and the Destruction of North America,” Ralph Ellis Research Center (2015); B. Napier et al., “Centaurs as a Hazard to Civilization,” Astronomy and Geophysics 56, no. 6 (2015), 6–24; A. V. Andronikov et al., “Implications from Chemical, Structural and Mineralogical Studies of Magnetic Microspherules from Around the Lower Younger Dryas Boundary (New Mexico, USA),” Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography, 98, no. 1 (2016), 39–59; J. L. Prado, C. Martinez-Mara, and M. T. Alberdi, “Megafauna Extinction in South America: A New Chronology for the Argentine Pampas,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 425 (2015), 41–44; A. V. Andronikov and I. E. Andronikova, “Sediments from Around the Lower Younger Dryas Boundary (SE Arizona, USA): Implications from LA‐ICP‐MS Multielement Analysis,” Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography 98, no. 3 (2016); A. Zamora, “A Model for the Geomorphology of the Carolina Bays,” Geomorphology 282 (2017), 209–216; H. G. Burchard, “Younger Dryas Comet 12,900 BP,” Open Journal of Geology, 7, no. 2 (2017), 193; M. B. Sweatman and D. Tsikritsis, “Decoding Göbekli Tepe with Archaeoastronomy: What Does the Fox Say?” Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 17, no. 1 (2017); P. Spurný et al., “Discovery of a New Branch of the Taurid Meteoroid Stream as a Real Source of Potentially Hazardous Bodies,” Astronomy and Astrophysics 605 (2017), A68; H. Patton et al., “Deglaciation of the Eurasian Ice Sheet Complex,” Quaternary Science Reviews 169 (August 1, 2017), 148–172; J. T. Hagstrum et al., “Impact-Related Microspherules in Late Pleistocene Alaskan and Yukon ‘Muck’ Deposits Signify Recurrent Episodes of Catastrophic Emplacement,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017), 16620; P. Roperch et al., “Surface Vitrification Caused by Natural Fires in Late Pleistocene Wetlands of the Atacama Desert,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 469 (2017), 15–26; W. C. Mahaney et al., “Evidence for Cosmic Airburst in the Western Alps Archived in Late Glacial Paleosols,” Quaternary International 438 (2017), 68–80; I. Israde-Alcántara et al., “Five Younger Dryas Black Mats in Mexico and Their Stratigraphic and Paleoenvironmental Context,” Journal of Paleolimnology 59, no. 1 (2018), 59–79; W. C. Mahaney et al., “Cosmic Airburst on Developing Allerød Substrates (Soils) in the Western Alps, Mt. Viso Area,” Studia Quaternaria 35, no. 1 (2018), 3–23; W. C. Mahaney et al., “Did the Black-Mat Impact/Airburst Reach the Antarctic? Evidence from New Mountain Near the Taylor Glacier in the Dry Valley Mountains,” Journal of Geology 126, no. 3 (2018), 285–305; A. V. Andronikov et al., “Geochemical Records of Paleocontamination in Late Pleistocene Lake Sediments in West Flanders (Belgium),” Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography 100, no. 2 (2018), 204–220; H. P. Hu, J. L. Feng, and F. Chen, “Sedimentary Records of a Palaeo-Lake in the Middle Yarlung Tsangpo: Implications for Terrace Genesis and Outburst Flooding,” Quaternary Science Reviews 192 (2018), 135–148; M. B. Sweatman and A. Coombs, “Decoding European Palaeolithic Art: Extremely Ancient Knowledge of Precession of the Equinoxes,” arXiv, preprint arXiv:1806.00046 (2018).
3. Notably M. A. LeCompte et al., “An Independent Evaluation of Conflicting Microspherules Results from Different Investigations of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44 (2018), e2960–e2969, doi:10.1073/pnas.1208603109; and Y. Wu et al., “Origin and Provenance of Spherules and Magnetic Grains at the Younger Dryas Boundary,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 38 (2013), e3557–e3566, doi:10.1073/pnas.1304059110.
4. See G. Hancock, Magicians of the Gods, chapters 4 and 5, 69–85.
5. Antonio Zamora has a multidisciplinary background in chemistry, computer science, and computational linguistics. Mr. Zamora was born in Mexico and came to the United States at an early age. He studied chemistry at the University of Texas (BS 1962), and computer and information science at Ohio State University (MS 1969). During his service in the U.S. Army from 1962 to 1965, Mr. Zamora studied medical technology at the Medical Field Service School (MFSS) in Fort Sam Houston and worked in hematology at Brooke Army Medical Center. Mr. Zamora worked for many years as an editor and researcher at Chemical Abstracts Service developing chemical information applications. He also worked as a senior programmer at IBM on spelling checkers and novel multilingual information retrieval tools. He holds thirteen patents. After his retirement from IBM, Mr. Zamora established Zamora Consulting, LLC, and worked as a consultant
for the American Chemical Society, the National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Energy to support semantic enhancements for search engines. Mr. Zamora has been interested in astronomy since childhood when his father helped him build a refracting telescope. Since his retirement in 2011, Mr. Zamora completed massive open online courses in astronomy, geology, and paleobiology. He regularly attends the seminars of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
6. Zamora, “A Model for the Geomorphology of the Carolina Bays,” 209–216.
7. The Carolina Bays were first postulated to be of cosmic origin in 1933 when the Roosevelt administration took the first aerial photographs of the seemingly crater-dotted landscape to assist farmers during the Great Depression. For an example, consult G. Howard, “The Carolina Bays” (1997) on George Howard.net, http://www.georgehoward.net/cbays.htm, accessed August 21, 2018. See also William S. Powell, “The Carolina Bays” (Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 2006). Available here: https://www.ncpedia.org/carolina-bays.
8. For example, Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes (Bear, 2006).
9. See, for example, M. J. Brooks, B. E. Taylor, and A. H. Ivester, “Carolina Bays: Time Capsules of Culture and Climate Change,” Southeastern Archaeology 29, no. 1 (2010), 146–163, esp. 148: “Based on 45 OSL dates, active shorelines and associated eolian deposition occurred during marine isotope stage (MIS) 2 to late MIS 3 (~12 to 50 ka), MIS 4 to very late MIS 5 (60–80 ka), and late MIS 6 (120–140 ka). … In addition to these age ranges, some OSL dates indicate that bays also were active during the Holocene and Sangamon Interglacials.”
10. Zamora, “A Model for the Geomorphology of the Carolina Bays,” 211ff.
11. Ibid., 209, 212.
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