Those temperatures are sufficient to melt steel. Furthermore the same glass-rich layer at the Syrian site contains large peaks in nanodiamonds, nickel and platinum. No building fire can duplicate that range of evidence—such fires can’t produce nanodiamonds or platinum enrichments. All this evidence refutes the hypothesis of Thy et al that this glass was produced in low-temperature building fires.54
When the new paper by West and his colleagues is published later in 2015 (after this book has gone to press), I have no doubt that it will, effectively, refute the arguments of Thy et al—just as all previous attacks have been successfully refuted. But I also have no doubt that others, who for whatever reasons of their own are philosophically opposed to the notion of a cataclysm 12,800 years ago, will publish yet more so-called “requiems” for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in the years ahead, even while the constant discovery of new evidence means that it continues to thrive and grow. As we’ve seen throughout this book, catastrophist ideas, no matter how thoroughly documented and persistently argued and presented they may be, are routinely and regularly brushed under the carpet by the uniformitarian establishment. Thus while he lacked nothing in persistence, or in the thoroughness of his documentation, J Harlen Bretz faced years of discouragement before his ideas were welcomed by the mainstream.
Jim Kennett, Richard Firestone, Allen West and their colleagues have argued the catastrophist case for the Younger Dryas comet impact with equally commendable persistence and with equal mastery of documentation and they, too, have faced rejection and hostility. Two things are different in their case, however. First, this is the twenty-first century and we have the internet, which allows the very rapid sharing and proliferation of ideas. That was not the case when Bretz began his lonely struggle. Secondly, Kennett, Firestone and West seem to have a better understanding of the politics of science than Bretz did and have greatly strengthened their own hand by mobilizing support for their work from many colleagues. It is one thing to shout down and silence a lone wolf like Bretz. It is quite another to shout down and silence a large team of highly credentialed scientists from multiple disciplines and universities.
And the team is growing. As I complete this chapter in March 2015, I have before me on my desk the latest paper published by Firestone, Kennett and West. The paper, entitled “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact 12,800 Years Ago,” appears in the September 2014 issue of The Journal of Geology. The lead author is Carles R. Kinzie of the Department of Chemistry, DePaul University, Chicago. Firestone, Kennett, West and twenty-two other leading scientists from prestigious universities and research institutes around the world are co-authors.55 The gravity of the paper, of its authors and of the journal in which it appears, together with the further detailed refutations it contains of prior critiques,56 combine to make a laughing stock of Nicholas Pinter’s claim that the Younger Dryas comet hypothesis is “fringe science.”
Indeed, the contrary is true—what is clearly happening is that an extraordinary hypothesis has again and again met the demand for extraordinary evidence to support it and has begun to force its way through the staunchly-defended doors of the mainstream. It will not be an easy struggle; it never is. There will be setbacks as well as progress. But the 2013 paper on spherules and the 2014 paper on nanodiamonds contain a wealth of evidence that even the most hardened gradualists must find hard to dismiss entirely. As Wallace Broecker, a geochemist and climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, recently begrudgingly admitted: “Most people were trying to disprove this. Now they’re going to have to realize there’s some truth to it.”57
But there cannot be just “some” truth to it. The Younger Dryas comet hypothesis is either right or wrong. My own assessment, having pored through more than seven years of research papers and having read every attack and refutation since the first public airing of the hypothesis in 2007, is that the case for the impact is a very strong one that grows stronger and more convincing every day. I could give many further examples of the successful efforts by the proponents of the hypothesis to defend their ideas over the years, but rather than doing so here, I refer the interested reader to the sources given in the footnote.58
Meanwhile the September 2014 paper, summarizing the evidence presented, concludes:
A cosmic impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling episode is the only hypothesis capable of explaining the simultaneous deposition of peak abundances in nanodiamonds, magnetic and glassy spherules, melt-glass, platinum and/or other proxies across at least four continents (approaching 50 million square kilometers). The evidence strongly supports a cosmic impact 12,800 years ago.59
Of particular note, adds James Kennett, is the fact that the glassy and metallic materials in the YDB layers could only have formed at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees Celsius and therefore could not have resulted from any alternative scenario other than a massive comet impact.60
Figure 20: The Younger Dryas Boundary Strewnfield (after Wittke et al, 2013 and Kinzie, Kennett et al, 2014). The area enclosed by the dotted line defines the current known limits of the YDB field of cosmic-impact proxies spanning 50 million square kilometers.
The exact size of that impact remains to be resolved with further research. Until then, says Kennett, “There is no known limit to the YDB strewnfield which currently covers more than 10 percent of the planet, indicating that the YDB event was a major cosmic impact … The nanodiamond datum recognized in this study gives scientists a snapshot of a moment in time called an isochron.”61
Worldwide, to this day, scientists know of only two layers of sediment “broadly distributed across several continents that exhibit coeval abundance peaks in a comprehensive assemblage of cosmic impact markers, including nanodiamonds, high-temperature quenched spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, carbon spherules, iridium and aciniform carbon.”62 These layers are found at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,800 years ago, and at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been agreed that a gigantic cosmic impact in the Gulf of Mexico (in that case the impactor is thought to have been an asteroid some ten kilometers in diameter) caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.63
“The evidence we present settles the debate about the existence of abundant YDB nanodiamonds,” Kennett says. “Our hypothesis challenges some existing paradigms within several disciplines, including impact dynamics, archaeology, paleontology and paleoceanography/paleoclimatology, all affected by this relatively recent cosmic impact.”64
The point Kennett makes here has important implications for the study and understanding of our past. Archaeologists have been in the habit of regarding cosmic impacts, supposedly only occurring at multi-million year intervals, as largely irrelevant to the 200,000-year story of anatomically modern humans. When we believed that the last big impact had been the dinosaur-killing asteroid of 65 million years ago, there was obviously little point in trying to relate cosmic accidents on such an almost unimaginable scale in any way to the much shorter time-frame of “history.” But the very real possibility confirmed by Kennett’s study that a huge, earthshaking, extinction-level event occurred just 12,800 years ago, in our historical backyard, changes everything.
Chapter 6
Fingerprints of a Comet
The evidence from deposits of nanodiamonds, microspherules, high-temperature melt-glass and other “ET-impact proxies” at the Younger Dryas Boundary points strongly toward a cataclysmic encounter between the earth and a large comet around 12,800 years ago. The point of entry would have been somewhere over Canada, by which time the comet might already have broken up into multiple fragments on its journey through space (as was the case with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 when its “freight-train” of large fragments hit Jupiter with spectacular effect in 1994). It is equally possible, however, that the break up of the Younger Dryas comet did not occur until after it had entered the earth’s atmosphere. Either way, some of the fragments v
ery soon exploded in the air; others, with diameters of up to two kilometers, smashed down at various points on the North American ice cap, yet others streaked on in a southeasterly direction across the Atlantic Ocean where further impacts followed on the European ice cap, and still others remained aloft until they reached the Middle East in the vicinity of Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, where the final rain of impacts occurred.
Because the evidence for the comet is so new, and because the impact hypothesis is still disputed, almost no consideration has yet been given to the immediate effects of the multiple major impacts that are thought to have taken place on the North American ice cap. In all cases the ice itself, still more than two kilometers thick 12,800 years ago, would have absorbed most of the shock of the impact leaving very few lasting features on the ground. Even so, researchers have begun to home in on a number of possible craters.
One candidate is the so-called Charity Shoal feature in Lake Ontario. Consisting of a raised rim around a small circular basin approximately a kilometer in diameter and 19 meters deep, it was studied by a team of scientists led by Troy Holcombe, who concluded that it was likely to be of extraterrestrial impact origin and might have been created in the late Pleistocene around the time of the onset of the Younger Dryas.1
Similarly, the half-kilometer diameter, 10-meter deep Bloody Creek Structure in southwestern Nova Scotia was identified as a possible impact crater by Ian Spooner, George Stevens and others in a 2009 paper in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. They could not be confident as to its age, but noted that “impact onto glacier ice during the waning stages of the Wisconsin Glaciation about 12,000 years ago may have resulted in dissipation of much impact energy into the ice, resulting in the present morphology of the Bloody Creek Structure.”2
Figure 21
A third candidate is the Corossol Crater in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada. Discovered by the Canadian Hydrographic Service during underwater mapping, Corossol is 4 kilometers in diameter, implying an impacting object with a diameter of up to half a kilometer. The crater presently lies in 40 to 185 meters of water and was originally thought to be very ancient, dating to some point after the middle Ordovician, about 470 million years ago.3 Recent research, however, casts doubt on this chronology. For example, M.D. Higgins and his colleagues from the University of Quebec and the Geological Survey of Canada argued in a paper presented at the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2011 that:
The paucity of sediments in the crater might be taken to indicate that it is young. The minimum age was established using data from a 7 meter core taken in the central trough. Calibrated carbon-14 ages of shells in the sediments can be extrapolated to give an estimate of the age of the base of the sedimentary sequence of around 12,900 years ago … This is taken to be the youngest possible age of the impact.4
That “youngest possible” age of 12,900 years is comfortably within the margin of error of 12,800 years plus or minus 150 years that is presently accepted for the Younger Dryas Boundary.5 In other words if the findings of Higgins and his team are confirmed, Corossol could well be one of the hitherto “missing” impact craters left by the Younger Dryas comet. Firm identification of such a crater would be jam on the cake for Firestone, Kennett, West and other pro-impact scientists, but as they have made clear many times, they do not need craters to prove their hypothesis, since prominent craters are not to be expected either from airbursts or from impacts on ice caps.
Nonetheless Charity Shoal, Bloody Creek and Corossol do not stand alone. A fourth possible impact site has been identified somewhat to the west of Corossol in an area known to geologists as the Quebecia Terrain. High concentrations of YDB microspherules found near the towns of Melrose in Pennsylvania and Newtonville in New Jersey were analyzed by Wu, Sharma, LeCompte, Demitroff and Landis in a paper published in September 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their conclusion was that an impact on the Laurentide ice sheet penetrated to the bedrock of the Quebecia Terrain throwing ejecta high into the atmosphere. The ejecta included spherules in the range of 2 to 5 millimeters in diameter that were spread by the winds and rained down hundreds of miles away in the Melrose–Newtonville area. Significantly the spherules turned out on analysis to contain:
minerals such as suessite that form at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade. Gross texture, mineralogy, and age of the spherules appear consistent with their formation as ejecta from an impact 12,900 years ago … The rare earth element patterns and Sr and Nd isotopes of the spherules indicate that their source lies in the Quebecia Terrain.6
“We have provided evidence for an impact on top of the ice sheet,” concluded study co-author Mukul Sharma. “We have for the first time narrowed down the region where a Younger Dryas impact did take place, even though we have not yet found its crater.”7
Judging from the apparent northwest to southeast trajectory of the Younger Dryas comet,8 the Charity Shoal feature in Lake Ontario, ejecta from Quebecia Terrain, the Corossol crater in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the Bloody Creek structure in Nova Scotia might mark the impacts of the last large fragments to hit North America. But the even larger fragments—in the range of two kilometers in diameter that Firestone, Kennett and West envisage—would inevitably have hit the ice cap earlier in the trajectory and thus at points lying further to the north and west. It is to these hypothetical impacts on the western fringes of the Laurentide Ice Cap, and on the Cordilleran Ice Cap, that we should look for the possible source of the meltwater for Bretz’s flood.
Radical thinking
Although the notion of outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula has long been accepted by mainstream science as the source of the spectacular flood damage documented by Bretz, it is important to recognize that a number of senior, highly credentialed scientists continue to dissent from this view. Prominent among the dissenters is John Shaw, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. Shaw argues that the volume of water in Lake Missoula, estimated at around 2,000 cubic kilometers at its peak, is not sufficient to account for the field evidence. His own theory is that huge quantities of meltwater—of the order of 100,000 cubic kilometers—were impounded in a subglacial reservoir deep beneath the North American ice cap and he proposes that the flood damage was caused by a single, massive release from this reservoir.9
Japanese researchers Goro Komatsu, Hideyaki Miyamoto, Kazumasa Itoh and Hiroyuki Tosaka have carried out extensive computer simulations of large-scale cataclysmic floods across the Scablands and agree with Shaw that Glacial Lake Missoula was not, on its own, anywhere near large enough to account for the flood damage:
Even the whole draining of Lake Missoula cannot explain the field evidence of high water marks … The subglacial flooding from the north proposed by Shaw may provide an explanation for the increased volume of water required to explain the high water-mark evidence in the Channeled Scabland.10
Likewise Victor Baker, Professor of Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Arizona, and Jim O’Connor of the US Geological Survey’s Water Science Center have expressed concern about the “case for periodic colossal jökulhlaups” out of Glacial Lake Missoula:
In our view, anomalies still exist between some aspects of the field evidence and the conceptual models that have been advocated. The position that the “scores-of-floods hypothesis completes Bretz’s imaginative theory” (Waitt, 1985, p. 1286) may prematurely divert attention from some of the outstanding problems that remain in interpreting the spectacular features of the Channeled Scabland.11
In 1977 geologist C. Warren Hunt set out to conduct a detailed investigation into Bretz’s flood. He did so because, like the scholars cited above, he was unconvinced by the theory—which had already assumed the status of unassailable fact by the mid-1970s—that all the water damage visible in the Scablands had been caused by outburst floods from Lake Missoula. Hunt’s dissatisfaction stemmed from his own extensive knowledge of dams and how to design them to
take best advantage of local geology. The bottom line, according to his calculations, was that the proposed ice dam on the Clark Fork River, behind which Lake Missoula is supposed to have backed up, would have been, quite literally, impossible.
Let us first of all consider the statistics. According to the US Geological Survey, Glacial Lake Missoula at its highest level—the level it is presumed to have reached before the Clark Fork ice dam broke—covered an area of about 3,000 square miles and contained an estimated 500 cubic miles (2,084 cubic kilometers) of water. Its surface would have been at 4,150 feet above sea level, but the bottom terrain varied in altitude from point to point so the USGS calculates that the lake would have been about 950 feet deep at present day Missoula, 260 feet deep at Darby and around 1,100 feet deep near Polson. At the ice dam itself, however, a gradient in the underlying terrain meant the glacial lake would have been more than 2,000 feet deep (its deepest point—more than twice the depth of modern Lake Superior).12
While broadly concurring with the US Geological Survey’s figures, C. Warren Hunt emphatically rejected “the suggestion that ice might have dammed Clark Fork so as to impound water to a depth of 2,100 ft (640 meters) … When one considers,” he wrote:
that modern engineering employs bedrock grouting for securing the footings of 500-ft (150-m) dams, it must surely strike any reader as virtually frivolous to suggest that chance emplacement of glacial ice might have dammed Clark Fork across a 7-mile (11-km) span lacking in intermediate abutments, and then retained water at four times the pressure of modern engineered concrete dams!13
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