25
ELOISE
IT’S EARLY OCTOBER 2017, A roasting-hot midmorning, and we’ve just left Tucson, Arizona, for the 80-mile drive to Murray Springs, a very rich and complex Clovis site about 14 miles southwest of the town of Tombstone and 20 miles north of the Mexican border. Our route takes us via I-10 and AZ-90 through increasingly sere scrub and semidesert under a merciless sky, but when we arrive at Murray Springs itself, park, say hello to the rangers at the gate, and walk the couple of miles of the trail around the archaeological site we find ourselves in a sort of oasis with abundant mesquite growing tall enough along the edges of a sinuous arroyo—a flood channel—to offer some welcome shade. Although flash floods still rip through here from time to time it’s rumored that the present lush environment owes more to treated sewage being dumped in the area.
Santha and I are accompanied by geophysicist Allen West and his wife, Nancy. Working with Jim Kennett, an earth scientist and oceanographer at the University of California, and Richard Firestone, a nuclear analytical chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, West is one of the principal investigators in a loose alliance of more than sixty scientists from many different fields who have joined forces since 2007 to try to solve a profound mystery. It concerns the Younger Dryas, the interlude of cataclysmic global climate change coinciding with the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event in which thirty-five genera of North American megafauna (with each genus consisting of several species) were wiped out around 12,800 years ago. Sharing their fate were the Clovis people and their distinctive culture with its characteristic “fluted-point” weaponry.
We climb down to the floor of the arroyo, which is about 2 meters deep and 12 meters wide at this point, and begin to walk along it. After a few moments Allen stops. “It’s around here that they excavated Eloise,” he says. He’s referring to one of the mammoths ambushed and butchered at Murray Springs by the Clovis people some 12,800 years ago. He describes how Eloise’s skeleton was found intact except for the hind legs, which had been chopped off right after she was killed. One was moved up and placed alongside her head. Archaeologists found the other a few hundred meters away, close to the residue of an ancient campfire. Part of a broken Clovis point was also found by the campfire, while the rest of it was “in Eloise.”
The archaeologist who excavated the mammoth in the 1960s, and who would bring Allen West and Richard Firestone to the site many years later, was Vance Haynes, Regents Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences. The reader will recall that his adamant defense of “Clovis First” was a significant factor in extending the life of that now thoroughly discredited theory and in inhibiting other research indicating a much earlier peopling of the Americas.
As the discoverer and principal excavator of Murray Springs, however, Haynes deserves credit for drawing attention to a very curious aspect of the site—a distinct dark layer of soil draped “like shrink-wrap,” as Allen West puts it, over the top of the Clovis remains and of the extinct megafauna— including Eloise.
Haynes has identified this “black mat” (his term) not only at Murray Springs but at dozens of other sites across North America,1 and was the first to acknowledge its clear and obvious association with the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event. He speaks of the “remarkable circumstances” surrounding the event, the abrupt die-off on a continental scale of all large mammals “immediately before deposition of the … black mat,” and the total absence thereafter of “mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, dire wolf, American lion, tapir and other [megafauna], as well as Clovis people.”2
Haynes notes also that “The basal black mat contact marks a major climate change from the warm dry climate of the terminal Allerød to the glacially cold Younger Dryas.”3
From roughly 18,000 years ago, and for several thousand years thereafter, global temperatures had been slowly but steadily rising and the ice sheets melting. Our ancestors would have had reason to hope that earth’s long winter was at last coming to an end and that a new era of congenial climate beckoned. This process of warming became particularly pronounced after about 14,500 years ago. Then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, the direction of climate change reversed and the world turned dramatically, instantly cold—as cold as it had been at the peak of the Ice Age many thousands of years earlier. This deep freeze—the mysterious epoch now known as the Younger Dryas—lasted for approximately 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, at which point the climate flipped again, global temperatures shot up rapidly, the remnant ice sheets melted and collapsed into the oceans, and the world became as warm as it is today.4
In addition to Murray Springs, Vance Haynes reports finding:
At least 40 other localities in the United States with Younger Dryas age black mat deposits. … 5 This layer or mat covers the Clovis-age landscape or surface on which the last remnants of the terminal Pleistocene megafauna are recorded. Stratigraphically and chronologically the extinction appears to have been catastrophic, seemingly too sudden and extensive for either human predation or climate change to have been the primary cause. This sudden … termination … appears to have coincided with the sudden climatic switch from Allerød warming to Younger Dryas cooling. Recent evidence for extraterrestrial impact, although not yet compelling, needs further testing because a remarkable perturbation occurred … that needs to be explained.6
Haynes published these thoughts in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May 2008. The “extraterrestrial” impact that he mentions (and finds “not yet compelling”) has nothing to do with “aliens” but refers to a serious scientific theory, the “Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,” that had received its first formal airing—also in PNAS—in October 2007.7 The paper was coauthored by Allen West, Richard Firestone, James Kennett, and more than twenty other scientists and presents evidence that multiple fragments of a giant comet—a swarm of fragments—struck the earth with disastrous consequences around 12,800 years ago. The effects were global but the epicenter of the cataclysm was over the North American ice cap, which the impacts destabilized, triggering the Younger Dryas deep freeze and the megafaunal extinctions.8
Haynes was right to say, in 2008, that this radical hypothesis needed further testing. It would receive it in the years ahead and become the focus of a furious debate that has divided scientists and continues to this day. On one side, many highly qualified and experienced specialists from many different fields are convinced that a comet swarm was indeed encountered around 12,800 years ago and that the result was a global catastrophe, with its most extreme effects felt in North America. On the other side is a smaller but more vocal and highly influential group of skeptics who reject the theory. I reported the debate between the two factions in some detail in my book Magicians of the Gods so won’t repeat myself here. As I write these words in 2018, and despite a decade of unrelenting criticism and focused attempts at refutation, the upshot is that the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis [YDIH] has stood the test of time, gained increasingly wide acceptance among scientists, and remains by far the best single, coherent explanation for the cataclysmic events and extinctions—the “remarkable perturbation”—that did indeed occur around 12,800 ago.
Allen West is at the cutting edge of the research into this colossal mystery and the coauthor of more than forty scientific papers looking into it in depth.
I’m privileged to have him join me at Murray Springs.
BLACK MAT
ALLEN LEADS US OVER TO the side wall of the arroyo, explaining, as we walk, that the area would have had a very different appearance 12,800 years ago. In particular it would have been “much wetter,” with “a string of lakes” serving as watering holes for the megafauna that the Clovis hunters came here to kill. The arroyo itself is a relatively recent feature but a useful one because it slices vertically through a couple of meters of sediment laid down before and after the onset of the Younger Dryas and thus functions something like an archaeological trench, revealing the layers—and what’s in them—stacked one on top of the other.
A distinct black stratum, running horizontally like a layer in a cake, is visible on both walls of the arroyo about a meter below present ground level. It obviously lies across the whole landscape and has been exposed here by the flash floods that cut the arroyo—as though, to extend the analogy, a “slice” of the cake has been removed, allowing us a glimpse of its interior.
The stratum is about a hand’s-breadth thick.
“That’s the black mat,” Allen confirms.
It doesn’t look like a cataclysm, but appearances can be deceptive. The first and most obvious sign of an impact by an asteroid or comet is a crater—or multiple craters in the case of a swarm. However, the earth’s surface is dynamic and craters can be obliterated by erosion or other geological processes, or covered over by later sediments or submerged by rising sea levels. In the case of impacts on the 2-kilometer-deep North American ice cap, as envisaged in the YDIH, the craters would have been excavated in ice that would have subsequently melted away, leaving little or no evidence on the ground beneath.
Scientists have therefore developed other measures, more subtle than looking for craters, to detect cosmic impacts in the geological record. Nanodiamonds, for example, are microscopic diamonds that form under rare conditions of great shock, pressure, and heat, and are recognized as being among the characteristic fingerprints—“proxies” in scientific language—of powerful impacts by comets or asteroids.9 Other proxies include melt glass (resembling trinitite), tiny carbon spherules that form when molten droplets cool rapidly in air, magnetic microspherules, charcoal, soot, platinum, carbon molecules containing the rare isotope helium-3, and magnetic grains with iridium.10
Certain of the glassy and metallic proxies require temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees C to form and there is nothing in nature other than the heat and shock of a cosmic impact that can instantly generate such temperatures.11 Alternative explanations might be offered for some of the other proxies but when they occur together, and in abundance, a cosmic impact again fits the evidence better than anything else.12
Moreover, 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.”13
These layers are found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been agreed that a gigantic cosmic impact in the Gulf of Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,800 years ago.14
I have a question for Allen. “Since the black mat was found draped directly on top of Eloise—like ‘shrink-wrap,’ you said—then presumably it must have begun to form very shortly after she was killed and butchered with most of her remains left lying on the spot?”
“What we see is that at the bottom of that black-mat layer, literally the first thing touching those bones, are spherules, iridium, platinum, and small pieces of melt-glass from the event. So it doesn’t mean the animal was alive when the event happened, but she had to have been alive very, very shortly, at most a few weeks, before it.”
I ask Allen to explain the black mat to me. “I understand that the lowest part of it is full of impact proxies laid down at the time the mat began to form but clearly they’re not the mat itself …”
“The black mat formed on top of the layer of proxies,” Allen replies. “Down here it has a lot of charcoal in it. But it also has algal remains so it’s not just fire. The Younger Dryas changed the climate and made the area much wetter. Algae began to grow along the edges of the lakes.” He puts a hand on the black stripe along the arroyo wall: “So the remains of about 1,000 years of dead algae, charcoal, and a lot of other stuff are all embedded in here, and at the bottom of it, where the impact happened, we find iridium, platinum, and a layer of melted spherules where the temperatures must have been so high that they would have melted a modern car into a pool of metal.”
“So are you saying that there was an impact right here? At Murray Springs?”
Allen replies that it’s not as simple as that. “The bigger impacts were farther north. Down here it’s more likely to have been an airburst—a fragment of the comet that literally blew up in the sky before hitting the ground …”
“And the effect of that would have been … what?”
“If you’d been standing here it would have seemed like the whole sky caught on fire with the center of it brighter than the sun. And the thing is it would have been totally silent. They would have heard nothing at first. Because the speed of sound is a lot slower than the speed of light.”
My imagination has gone into overdrive. “Could it have happened,” I ask, “while the Clovis hunters were actually butchering Eloise?”
Allen shakes his head. “We know it didn’t happen instantaneously,” he reminds me, “because they chopped her legs off and hauled one of them away and cooked it. But it could have happened later the same day and like I say it certainly happened within a couple of weeks. That’s based on modern data from elephant kills in Africa. The scavengers come in quickly and disarticulate the skeleton, and that didn’t happen with Eloise.”
This kill site sounds like unfinished business to me.
“That other haunch left up by Eloise’s head,” I reflect, “and the rest of her intact. Doesn’t that suggest that the hunters were still in the vicinity and meant to come back to finish butchering her, but for some reason never did?”
Allen joins in with the spirit of the thought. “Okay,” he says. “It’s pure speculation, obviously, because we’ll never know for sure the exact sequence of events here 12,800 years ago, but based on the evidence it’s not unreasonable to envisage the hunters sitting around, cooking mammoth haunch over their campfire when all of a sudden the sky explodes …”
“And that’s why they never go back for the rest of Eloise? Because they’re all dead?”
“Could be,” Alan agrees. He jabs a finger into the base of the black mat and continues.
“But what we can be certain of was that this moment marked the end of their story, and the end of an epoch, really. There’s not a single Clovis point found anywhere in North America that’s above that black mat. They’re all in it or below it. And there’s not a single mammoth skeleton anywhere in North America that’s above it. A huge part of the die-off could have been as a direct result of the impacts themselves, but impacts and airbursts south of the ice cap, particularly as far south as New Mexico, would also have set off wildfires. There’s overwhelming evidence that gigantic wildfires raged at the onset of the Younger Dryas—in fact, more soot has been found at the Younger Dryas Boundary than at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. We did the calculations and it looks like as much as 25 percent of the edible biomass and around 9 percent of the total biomass of the planet was on fire and destroyed within days or weeks of the YDB. So in many areas if the animals weren’t killed outright they wouldn’t have been able to forage enough food afterwards to survive. The grass would have burned up, leaves on trees were gone. … And you know, the other thing is that when comet fragments come in they’re traveling incredibly fast and they literally punch a hole in the atmosphere. They actually push the air aside and they bring in that super cold from space, and when they explode in the air that cold plume continues to the ground and you literally have things frozen in place if they were close enough to where the plume came down. It’s possible they were fried and then frozen all within a matter of seconds.”
MULTIPLE INJECTIONS OF PLATINUM
I ASK ALLEN HOW LONG, in his opinion, the multiple impacts that kicked off the Younger Dryas were sustained for. Was it an overnight affair? Was it a matter of days? Was it weeks?
He replies that there are levels of uncertainty, variables that will probably never be properly resolved, but that within those limits what the evidence points to is not days or weeks but a 21-year period of utter devastation, horror, and cataclysm unfolding between 12,836 years ago and 12,815 years ago, with a peak around 12,822 years ago.
This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum—“a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,” as he puts it now—“so we know that was the length of the impact event because there’s very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It’s pretty well locked in place.”
The backup to what Allen’s saying is in a paper I’m already familiar with by Michail Petaev of Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and his colleagues Shichun Huang, Stein Jacobsen, and Alan Zindler. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August 2013, the self-explanatory title of the paper is “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Core Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas.”
Platinum is, of course, an element found on earth, but analysis of the platinum in the ice core by Petaev and his colleagues reveals a composition quite unlike terrestrial platinum and leads the scientists to conclude that “an extraterrestrial source,” perhaps “a metal impactor with an unusual composition,” is the most likely explanation.15 They note also that during the 21-year interval—between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago, as indicated by Allen:
The Pt concentrations gradually rise by at least 100-fold over ~14 y and drop back during the subsequent ~7 y. … The observed gradual ingrowth of the Pt concentration in ice over ~14 y may suggest multiple injections of Pt-rich dust into the stratosphere.16
Allen’s reading of what Petaev’s findings point to, shared widely by his colleagues, is that the “impactor” was in fact multiple impactors, all of them fragments of a comet that had wandered in from the outer solar system and taken up a potentially deadly earth-crossing orbit.
Though bound together by ice, comets have rocky cores that are often volatile, and it is in the nature of these cores to undergo fragmentation. Take Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, for example. It broke apart into twenty-one fragments, all of which smashed into the planet Jupiter over a period of 6 days in July 1994 with spectacular effect, creating huge, fiery explosions and dark scars, in some cases larger than the earth, that persisted on the surface of the gas giant for many months.
Something of the same sort is involved in Allen’s vision, again widely shared by his colleagues, of what happened to the earth at the Younger Dryas Boundary. Drawing also on the work of William Napier, professor of astrobiology at the University of Cardiff, what the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis proposes, in brief, is a large parent comet in the range of 100 kilometers in diameter. Plunging in from the outer solar system, it enters an earth-crossing orbit around 30,000 years ago and remains intact for the next 10,000 years. About 20,000 years ago, due to gravitational forces in the inner solar system it undergoes a massive “fragmentation event” that transforms it from a single deadly and potentially world-killing object into multiple objects varying in diameter from the extremely dangerous kilometer-plus range down to a few tens of meters, down to chunks the size of cars, down to boulder sized pieces, down to fist-sized rubble, and down beyond that to countless billions of smaller fragments and an immense penumbra of dust. As thousands of years pass, the whole turbulent mass of big and little pieces of the comet orbiting at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour begins to separate into multiple filaments each filled with debris, eventually expanding to form a giant tubular “meteor stream” some 30 million kilometers in diameter and extending more than 300 million kilometers across the entire orbit of the earth—which it cuts in two places so that we must pass through the stream twice a year. Traveling 2.5 million kilometers along its orbital path every day, the earth takes 12 days to complete each passage through the stream.17
Because the meteor stream produces showers of “shooting stars” that look to observers on the ground as though they originate in the region of the sky occupied by the constellation Taurus, it’s called the Taurid meteor stream. Our planet still passes through it twice a year, negotiating its dangerous inner filaments in late June and early July (when shooting stars are not visible because they are encountered in daylight) and again from late October into November, when a spectacular “Halloween fireworks” display is put on.18
On most of these biannual encounters with the Taurids we just get the pretty fireworks, but occasionally we get more. On June 30, 1908, for example, an object thought to have fallen out of the Taurid meteor stream,19 and estimated to be somewhere between 60 and 190 meters in diameter, penetrated earth’s atmosphere. It exploded in the air—fortunately above an uninhabited region of Siberia—flattening 80 million trees across an area of 2,000 square kilometers. To put this in context, Greater London has an area of 1,582 square kilometers and a population of more than 7 million people. “If transferred to London,” Professor Napier calculates, the Tunguska airburst:
would have been heard throughout the UK, north to Denmark and across Europe as far as Switzerland. Topsoil would have been stripped from fields in the north of England, people in Oxford would have been thrown through the air and severely burned, an incandescent column of matter would have been thrown 20 km in the air over London, and the city itself would have been destroyed about as far out as the present-day ring road. Impact energy estimates range from 3 to 12.5 Mt (megatons TNT equivalent).20
The consequences if an object of similar size were to explode over a major city today would, in other words, be utterly catastrophic, but because the Tunguska event took place in a remote region before the era of modern mass communications, very few people are aware of how deadly even relatively small chunks of space rock can be.
Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the “unique complex of debris” within the Taurid stream as “the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.”21 Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, has led both teams—the geophysicists and the astronomers—to conclude that it 390 was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.
Tunguska—an airburst at an altitude of 5–6 kilometers. The object was estimated to have had a diameter of between 60 and 190 meters. It flattened 80 million trees across an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers. This is an area larger than London. Had the event occurred over a major city, rather than over an uninhabited area, the loss of life would have been horrendous.
“It’s as though after dodging the bullet for thousands of years,” I say to Allen as we walk back along the baking floor of the arroyo, “the earth finally intersects a particularly lumpy and rocky filament of debris and we get hit really hard, over and over again, year after year, until we’ve passed through it.”
“Petaev himself says ‘multiple injections of platinum,’” Allen reminds me. “I think those were pretty much his exact words in the paper, so that’s an independent assessment of the idea. There’s something else, too, from new research we’ve been working on. In the ice core, at the exact same moment we see this big onset of platinum at the beginning of the 21 years, we also see a sudden rise in dust.”
“Which tells you what?”
“Which tells us that along with everything else that was going on at the time there were also very high winds blowing. There are certain proxies of that windiness that end up in the ice sheet. When it’s windier the winds will pick up continental dust, and, number one, it’s colder so there’s less plant cover, so when it gets windier and there are less plants to hold the sediment down, you get huge dust storms. We can see that buildup in the Greenland ice sheet. We see magnesium and calcium, a huge increase in them, and those are indicative of terrigenous dust, continental dust, and we see an increase in sodium and chlorine which are from sea salt—so the winds are so strong they pick up more sea salt and deposit it in Greenland. The levels of these windiness proxies continue to climb for nearly 100 years. At the same time we see one of the biggest peaks in the entire ice core in all the biomass burning proxies, and those occur within less than a 10-year window of the start of that 21-year interval—so you look at that and the best explanation is the impact occurred, that it triggered immense biomass burning, and that it changed the climate radically, resulting in high winds and immense dust storms.”
“So it was a combination of really horrible things?”
“A cascade of bad things. It must have felt like the end of the world for those who lived through it.”
“And particularly bad here in North America—the epicenter of the disaster?”
“Much worse here than anywhere else! A true calamity. But it wasn’t only North America. We’ve traced evidence of further impacts from the same swarm in the exact same period in Europe and as far east as Syria and even into South America. The strewn field extends across more than 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface.”
NEW EVIDENCE
I HAVE WRITTEN EXTENSIVELY ABOUT the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis in Magicians of the Gods. There I present evidence that the impacts changed the world completely and wiped from the record almost all traces not only of the Clovis people but also of an advanced civilization of the Ice Age.
The fact that North America was the epicenter of the cataclysm, though acknowledged, has profound implications for our understanding of the human past that archaeologists have never thought through—in part because the scale of the cataclysm is only now beginning to be fully mapped out.
After completing Magicians, therefore, I made sure I stayed up to date with the steady stream of new evidence released by Allen and his group in the scientific journals. There was a visible quickening in the pace of the research, and in 2017 and 2018 two major studies revealed how truly devastating the cataclysm at the onset of the Younger Dryas really was.
If there was ever a time when a significant chapter in the story of human civilization could have been lost, this, surely, was it.
26
FIRE AND ICE
ALLEN WEST AND THE TEAM of scientists working on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis established themselves as a formal research organization, the Comet Research Group, in 2015.1 The group (hereafter CRG) presently numbers sixty-three leading scientists from fifty-five universities in sixteen countries.2 Many other scientists are also directly and indirectly associated as coauthors of papers written by CRG members.
This is the case with a paper, published in Nature’s sister journal Scientific Reports on March 9, 2017, titled “Widespread Platinum Anomaly Documented at the Younger Dryas Onset in North American Sedimentary Sequences.”3
The lead author is geoarchaeologist and CRG member Dr. Christopher Moore of the University of South Carolina. His coauthors and fellow CRG members are geophysicist Allen West, whom we met in the last chapter, anthropologist Randolph Daniel of East Carolina University, archaeologist Albert Goodyear, whom we met in chapter 6, earth scientist James P. Kennett of the University of California, geologist Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati, and geologist Ted Bunch of Northern Arizona University. The non-CRG coauthors are planetary and atmospheric scientist Malcolm LeCompte of the University of South Carolina, geomorphologist Mark J. Brooks, also of the University of South Carolina, environmental scientist Terry A. Ferguson of Wofford College, South Carolina, geoscientist Andrew H. Ivester of the University of West Georgia, luminescence-dating expert James K. Feathers of the University of Washington, and physicist Victor Adedji of Elizabeth City State University.4
All in all, therefore, a very distinguished assembly of scientists—and the task that they set themselves was also in the finest tradition of good science, namely, to test an important prediction made by other scientists. From the previous chapter, the reader will recall the research by Michail Petaev and his colleagues showing elevated levels of platinum in the Greenland ice cores over a 21-year period between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago. Petaev reports what appear to have been “multiple injections” of platinum-rich dust into the stratosphere over this period and predicts that if the source of the dust was cometary, asteroidal, or meteoroidal, then the fallout should have extended far beyond Greenland and would be “expected to result in a global Pt anomaly.”5
The coauthors of the 2017 platinum paper chose North America, the suspected epicenter of the Younger Dryas cataclysm—and also their home turf—to test this prediction by establishing “whether or not a Pt anomaly exists in terrestrial sediments of YD age that is similar to that reported from the GISP2 ice core.”6
It sounds low-key, but much was at stake. If soil samples showed platinum to be at normal background levels in the YDB layer across North America, then Petaev’s prediction would be false and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis would suffer serious collateral damage. On the other hand, if elevated levels of platinum were found, it would vindicate Petaev and give further strong support to the hypothesis that cosmic impacts caused the Younger Dryas cataclysm.
Eleven archaeological sites—see map below—all with good stratification and well-established YD-age sediments were selected as the focus of the study: 1. Arlington Canyon, Santa Rosa Island, California; 2. Murray Springs, Arizona; 3. Blackwater Draw, New Mexico; 4. Sheriden Cave, Ohio; 5. Squires Ridge, North Carolina; 6. Barber Creek, North Carolina; 7. Kolb, South Carolina; 8. Flamingo Bay, South Carolina; 9. Pen Point, South Carolina; 10 Topper, South Carolina; and 11. Johns Bay, South Carolina.
The project began by testing soil samples from Arlington Canyon, Murray Springs, Blackwater Draw, and Sheriden Cave, four sites with particularly “well-defined and well-dated YDB age sediments containing peaks in YDB impact-related proxies.”7 What the tests revealed was:
a large above-background Pt anomaly at each site in the identical sample previously identified as the YD boundary layer containing abundance peaks in YDB proxies, including micro-spherules, melt glass, and nanodiamonds.8
The team then extended the Pt analysis to soil samples from the seven other sites. In summary, across all eleven sites, they conclude that their results
provide strong evidence for above-background enrichment in Pt within sediments that date to the onset of YD climate change at ~12,800 Cal B.P. Pt abundances from our study sites averaged 6.0 parts per billion (ppb) … compared to background abundances above and below the YDB layer averaging 0.3 ppb. Average background Pt concentrations are all lower than crustal abundance of 0.5 ppb, whereas average YDB concentrations are 12× higher. These concentrations are also higher than the peak Pt concentration (~80 parts per trillion [ppt] or 0.1 ppb) reported at high chronological resolution from the GISP2 ice-core in Greenland by Petaev et al. All study sites contain significant Pt peaks that are ~3 to 66× higher than in Greenland.9
The technical language and abbreviations make it difficult to stay focused on the grave implications of all this. In a layer in the earth that already contains abundant evidence of a cataclysmic cosmic impact around 12,800 years ago, a mass of new corroborative evidence has now been discovered. In parallel, the much greater strength of the Pt signal in the United States than in Greenland joins multiple other indicators pointing to North America as the most severely affected locus of the cataclysm. If this were a homicide investigation in which the prosecution were hesitating to charge the suspect, new evidence of this quality would be decisive, and a winnable case could be brought to court. Moore and his colleagues are cautious and modest, however, claiming only that:
the consistent presence of anomalous Pt concentrations within sediments from multiple archaeological sites across North America that date to the onset of the YD Chronozone is compelling. … This study finds no evidence to contradict the conclusions of Petaev et al. that the Greenland Pt enrichment most likely resulted from an extraterrestrial source. … In addition, our findings show no contradiction with the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.10
After completing their own investigation, Moore et al. combed the scientific literature for indications of how far beyond North America and Greenland the YDB platinum anomaly extends. Though not central to any investigation prior to Petaev’s, they found that platinum group elements had been discovered and mentioned in passing in other earlier studies of the Younger Dryas Boundary at locations as far afield as Belgium, the central Pacific, Venezuela, the southwest of England, and the Netherlands —“important information,” hinting at a truly global picture, that they hope “may encourage further research.”11
In the Supplementary Information to their main paper, Moore and his colleagues also provide detailed evidence ruling out either volcanic activity or processes in the mantle of the earth as the sources for the enriched platinum at the YDB.12 By contrast, after compiling geochemical data for 167 meteorites, including chondrites, achondrites, irons, and ureilites, they found very high average Pt abundances, “making all four classes of meteorites possible sources of YDB Pt enrichment.”13
They also note, “If a Pt-rich meteorite or comet impacted Earth, the target rocks would have become a melted mix of meteoritic and terrestrial material, and so should be Pt-enriched.”14
The coauthors therefore compiled geochemical data from eighty-six examples of such “impactites” from three major impact layers spread out over a period of more than two billion years. In every one of them they found elevated Pt abundances in a range including all the values in the Pt-rich YDB layers from around 12,800 years ago.15
FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF CLUES
THE CORROBORATING EVIDENCE KEEPS COMING in.
When we met at Murray Springs in October 2017, Allen West told me about new CRG research that had identified an extended episode of extreme windiness, dustiness, and large-scale “biomass burning” at the onset of the Younger Dryas. He mentioned that “around 9 percent of the total biomass of the planet was on fire and destroyed within days or weeks of the YDB”—an astonishing statement—but I’d been so focused on other aspects of what he was saying that I hadn’t really considered the implications.
In February 2018 the Journal of Geology published the massive two-part study on which Allen’s off-the-cuff remarks were based. The title speaks for itself: “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ~12,800 Years Ago.”16 CRG member Wendy Wolbach, professor of inorganic chemistry, geochemistry, and analytical chemistry at Chicago’s DePaul University, led the study, in which she was joined by Allen West and twenty-five other top researchers.17
Confirmation of the figure of 9 percent of terrestrial biomass comes on the first page, with the calculation that this would have meant that plant matter covering an area of no less than 10 million square kilometers would have been consumed by the inferno.18
To imagine a world in which 10 million square kilometers of vegetation is in flames is to imagine a world in which an area roughly twice the size of the Amazon rainforest is burning. That would be about the same as the entire area of China or the entire area of Europe or the entire area of North America in flames.
No matter how many separate wildfires there were, or how spread around the planet, a conflagration on this scale, hand in hand with the cascade of other disasters that marked the onset of the Younger Dryas, can only be described as hell on earth.
Once again, although records from lake sediments also provide vital clues, it is the Greenland ice cores, together with ice cores from other Arctic regions, that contain decisive evidence of the large-scale wildfires that raged across the world 12,800 years ago. This is not least because the upper (i.e., most recent) levels of these extremely long cores contain the traces of biomass wildfires that occurred and were recorded in the historic period, thus allowing identification and calibration of specific combustion aerosols, notably oxalate, ammonium, nitrate, acetate, formate, and levoglucosan, that serve as distinct signals—or proxies—of biomass-burning.19 Wherever an abundance of these combustion aerosols shows up in the ice cores we can be certain that they mark the atmospheric fallout from extensive wildfires, we can date those wildfires, and it is often possible to identify where on the planet they occurred.
Here are some important pieces of the Younger Dryas puzzle winnowed from the dense pages of the 2018 paper:
-GISP2 Ice Core: Ammonium (NH4), a biomass-burning proxy, displays one of the highest peaks in the 120,000-year record in an interval dating to 12,830–12,828 years ago. This overlaps the platinum-rich interval dating to 12,836–12,815 years ago and coincides with the onset of the Younger Dryas.20
-NGRIP Ice Core: A single high NH4 peak, traced to biomass burning across North America, begins at the YD onset. It is the largest biomass-burning episode from North American sources in the entire record.21
-The GRIP concentrations of combustion aerosols began to increase sharply around 12,816 years ago, correlating with the GISP2 Pt anomaly (12,836–12,815 years ago). At the onset of the Younger Dryas, concentrations of oxalate and formate reached their highest known concentrations in the ~386,000-year core, with acetate abundances ranking among the highest in the entire core.22
-These GRIP data reveal that massive wildfires occurred at the onset of the Younger Dryas, representing the most anomalous episode of biomass burning in at least 120,000 years and possibly in the past ~386,000 years.23
-The Taylor Dome (Antarctica) ice-core record exhibits a small but distinct peak in NO3 that closely correlates with the Younger Dryas onset. The base of the Belukha, Siberia, ice core exhibits a major peak in NO3 [nitrate], indicating that a major episode of biomass burning occurred at the Younger Dryas onset.24
-Several ice-core sequences (GISP2, NGRIP, GRIP, Taylor Dome and Belukha) confirm that the onset of the Younger Dryas was intimately associated with one of the highest and most pervasive late Quaternary peaks in each of NH4, NO3, formate, oxalate, and acetate. These peaks occurred synchronously with the abrupt cooling and other climatic effects marking the onset of the Younger Dryas episode.25
-Investigation of “black mats” at nineteen sites in North America, Central America, Europe, and the Middle East: Peak abundances of black carbon (BC)/soot and other biomass-burning proxies were found in the Younger Dryas Boundary layers. … Concentrations of levoglucosan from within the black-mat layer in Ohio were around 125 times higher than those in the layer below it, signalling a significant peak in biomass burning.26
-Analysis of charcoal in lake sediments from nine countries in South and Central America: One of the highest peaks in the record occurs at the Younger Dryas onset around 12,850 years ago.27
-Analysis of charcoal in lake sediments from seven countries across Asia: There is a conspicuous peak in mean charcoal abundances at around 12,950 years ago (plus or minus 225 years) … followed by a sharp decline in biomass burning and then a peak at 12,400 years ago.28
-A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. … This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. … The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600–800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.29
-A marine core from the western Pacific, 1,500 kilometers north of Papua New Guinea, provides a biomass-burning record spanning a period of 368,000 years. This core is unusual in providing a record not only of charcoal but also of black carbon, which includes AC/soot. The core exhibits a high black-carbon peak spanning the period between 13,291 and 12,515 years ago and overlapping the Younger Dryas onset at around 12,800 years ago. In addition, the YDB peak in black carbon coincides with an above-average charcoal peak at around 12,750 years ago.30
-Evidence from widely separated ice records and sediment records demonstrates that a major, widespread peak in biomass burning occurred on at least four continents at the warm-to-cold transition marking the YD onset. This peak is synchronous with the cosmic impact layer at the Younger Dryas Boundary as recorded by multiple impact-related proxies, including peak abundances of platinum, high temperature microspherules, and melt glass.31
In summary, the earth and all life upon it endured and was devastated by what can only be described as a globally distributed firestorm at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago. In this planetary debacle, 10 million square kilometers of trees and other plant matter burned.
To put that in perspective, the United Kingdom was in a state of traumatic shock in late June and early July 2018 after 4,942 acres of Lancashire moorland were consumed by wildfires. That’s an area of just 20 square kilometers, but firefighters and emergency services from seven counties were utterly overwhelmed by the blaze and the military had to be brought in to assist.32
Meanwhile, a report in the Sacramento Bee dated July 2, 2018, opined that California’s wildfire season had started early, with two “major fires” already fought at huge expense and requiring evacuation of local residents. These two fires were estimated to have consumed 85,000 acres,33 which sounds an awful lot but in fact converts to just 344 square kilometers.
The previous year, 2017, was California’s most destructive wildfire season then on record, with a total of 1.25 million acres burned.34 The cost of dealing with the disaster, including fire suppression, insurance, and recovery expenditures, was estimated at US$180 billion.35 Yet 1.38 million acres converts to just 5,585 square kilometers—an insignificant fraction (around 0.05 percent—that is, a twentieth of 1 percent) of the 10 million square kilometers destroyed in the Younger Dryas wildfires.
It seems, therefore, that the United States and Britain, two of the world’s wealthiest, most technologically advanced, and most powerful countries, face great difficulties in confronting what are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor wildfires. Imagine, then, the consequences for all living things of the great inferno that consumed 9 percent of the earth’s biomass around 12,800 years ago and that left an indelible record of its climatic and atmospheric impact in lake sediments and Arctic ice.
IMPACT WINTER
NEWS FOOTAGE OF THE US AND UK summer wildfires shows smoke everywhere. Close up it seems foggy or misty. In the longer view there’s an obvious gloom, a darkening of the skies, where the pall obscures incoming sunlight. It’s a local effect, of course. Fifty miles away the air is clear and the skies are blue.
The 2018 Journal of Geology study reports that matters would have been very different at the onset of the Younger Dryas, when the smoke from 10 million square kilometers of burning biomass would have enshrouded the entire earth, creating what Wendy Wolbach and her coauthors describe as an “impact winter.”36
This is a concept derived directly from research in the early 1980s revealing previously unexpected consequences of a nuclear war in the form of a “nuclear winter.” The findings of that research were first put before the public in October 1983 in an article by esteemed astrophysicist Carl Sagan under the headline “In a Nuclear Exchange, More Than a Billion People Would Instantly Be Killed, But the Long-Term Consequences Could Be Much Worse.”
Appearing in a mass-circulation magazine, Sagan’s article showed that the immense quantities of dust and smoke arising from multiple nuclear explosions, and from the wildfires they sparked off, would significantly reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the earth, causing a steep and sustained fall in global temperatures, widespread failure of crops, and devastating famines. Nor would a full-scale war between superpowers be required to bring on the terrible, and potentially terminal, consequences of a nuclear winter. Even a regional nuclear conflict could do it.37 “We have placed our civilization and our species in jeopardy,” Sagan concluded.38
In the case of the Younger Dryas, the jeopardy that humanity faced was not from nuclear missiles but from the incoming fragments of a disintegrating giant comet, traveling at tens of kilometers per second, with the larger fragments as deadly as hundreds of nuclear warheads. Indeed, it is estimated that the total explosive power of the comet fragments that struck the earth in repeated episodes over a period of 21 years some 12,800 years ago would have been of the order of 10 million megatons 39—1,000 times greater than all the nuclear devices stockpiled in the world today.40
The Younger Dryas is already recognized as an epoch of extreme, anomalous cold that lasted for approximately 1,200 years, setting in fast and suddenly around 12,800 years ago and ending, equally suddenly, around 11,600 years ago. The Journal of Geology study greatly enriches this picture with compelling new evidence that the onset of this 1,200-year “deep-freeze” was marked by a brief period of extremely intense and large-scale wildfires triggered by “the radiant and thermal energy from multiple explosions” as fragments from the comet swarm pelted the earth:
This widespread biomass-burning generated large amounts of long-lived, persistent AC/soot that blocked nearly all sunlight, rapidly triggering an impact winter that transitioned into the YD cool episode.41
… The negative effects of AC/soot might have persisted for 6 wk or more at the YD onset, blocking all sunlight and causing rapid cooling. Reduced insolation is also expected from the injection of comet dust to the upper atmosphere. If so, the lack of sunlight would have had widespread and catastrophic biotic effects, including insufficient light for plant photosynthesis and growth. At the same time, North Atlantic deep-water formation ceased, thus throttling the so-called ocean conveyor and triggering a sustained decrease in near-global temperatures.42
THE MAMMOTH IN THE ROOM
IT HAS LONG BEEN UNDERSTOOD that an interruption of the warm Atlantic current known as the Gulf Stream correlates with YD cooling, and it is generally agreed that
a great gush of cold freshwater derived from the melting Laurentide ice sheet … swept across the surface of the North Atlantic. It prevented warm, salty water from the southern ocean flowing deep below the surface (the Gulf Stream) from rising to the surface. The normal overturning of the ocean water stopped. As a consequence the atmosphere over the ocean, which would normally have been warmed, remained cold and so, in consequence, did the air over Europe and North America.43
It’s revealing, looking back through the scientific literature, to see how long explanations of this sort were simply taken for granted. That there had been a cold-water flood was not in doubt, so the detective work that at first interested scientists most was WHERE all the water had come from.
The reader will recall that the North American ice cap had two distinct segments consisting of two separate ice sheets, the Cordilleran in the west and the Laurentide in the east, which were often joined, but which in the later stages of the Ice Age were separated by the famous “ice-free corridor” that for a long while was erroneously believed to have been the sole route for human migration into the Americas. Along the southern margins of these ice sheets, enormous glacial lakes formed and were prone to flooding—most famously glacial lake Missoula in the west and glacial lake Agassiz in the east. Floodwaters out of Lake Missoula would have had no access to the Atlantic Ocean (they would have been routed into the Pacific). Lake Agassiz was therefore thought to be the most likely source, and a study published in Geology in January 2018 confirms that its floodwaters “could have been routed eastward to the North Atlantic at the Younger Dryas onset and caused the canonical abrupt climate shift.”44
So we know that a cold-water flood poured into the Atlantic ocean around 12,800 years ago on a scale sufficient to stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks; we know that glacial lake Agassiz has been implicated in it; and we know that this “great gush of cold freshwater” has been connected to the plunge in global temperature—the “deep freeze”—that defines the Younger Dryas cold event.
The issue that most of the scientists are skirting, however—the mammoth in the room—is why such a flood would have occurred at the onset of the Younger Dryas “deep freeze” around 12,800 years ago rather than, say, 800 or 1,000 years earlier at the height of the warm phase—known as the Bølling —Allerød interstadial—that immediately preceded the Younger Dryas.45 Intuitively one feels the meltwater floods should have been at their peak during the warming phase. Why, therefore, in this case only, do we see them at the onset of an extremely cold phase? I raised this problem in Magicians of the Gods in 2015,46 and it is raised again by Wolbach et al. in their 2018 paper, where they present evidence that deepens the mystery. “Unlike for typical warm-to-cold climate transitions,” they report, “global sea levels rose up to 2–4 m within a few decades or less at the YD onset, as recorded in coral reefs in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”47
The point is understated, but this is a very big deal. Two to 4 meters of global sea-level rise within “a few decades or less” of the onset of the Younger Dryas is an IMMENSE amount of water, a cataclysmic world flood by any standard.
What makes it all the more remarkable, however—and all the more puzzling—is the evidence from Wolbach’s study that in the exact same period the planet suffered a spectacular episode of biomass burning and an associated “impact winter” that “caused warm interglacial temperatures to abruptly fall to cold, near-glacial levels within less than a year, possibly in as little as 3 months.”48
Meanwhile, in the process of absorbing that sudden massive flood of icy water into the North Atlantic, the world ocean had reacted by shutting off the Gulf Stream, thus sustaining freezing temperatures in Europe and North America and setting in process the entire Younger Dryas cold episode.
What we are looking for, therefore, is an agent capable—simultaneously and almost instantaneously—of bringing about all of the following:
-a global flood
-wildfires across an area of 10 million km2
-6 months of icy darkness followed by more than 1,000 years of glacially cold weather
-a stratum of soil across more than 50 million km2 dated to the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) and infused with a cocktail of nanodiamonds, high-temperature iron-rich spherules, glassy silicarich spherules, meltglass, platinum, iridium, osmium, and other exotic materials
-a mass extinction of megafauna
Wolbach and her coauthors are forthright in their conclusion:
Multiple lines of ice-core evidence appear synchronous, and this synchroneity of multiple events makes the YD interval one of the most unusual climate episodes in the entire Quaternary record. … A cosmic impact is the only known event capable of simultaneously producing the collective evidence.49
A VIOLENT HURRICANE OF BOLIDES
WHAT KIND OF COSMIC IMPACT?
From quite early in the research, since the first strong impact-proxy evidence was analyzed, it’s been the consensus view of CRG members that the agent responsible for the Younger Dryas cataclysm was a comet. Wolbach’s study strengthens that position, noting:
Comets are a compositionally variable mix of volatile ices, meteoritic material, and presolar dust. … Wide ranges of elemental ratios confirm that cometary material is heterogeneous, similar to the YDB samples. Although the type of YDB impactor remains unclear, the current evidence does not support any specific meteoritic type as source. Instead, the broad extent of biomass burning at the YD onset is more consistent with Earth’s collision with a fragmented comet50 … [resulting in a] violent hurricane of bolides 51 … [that] detonated above and/or collided with land, ice sheets, and oceans across at least four continents in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.52
This scenario, the study argues, explains all the anomalous and synchronous evidence:
Vaporization of cometary materials, and platinum-group-element–rich target rocks, injected Pt, Ir, Os, and other heavy metals into the stratosphere, accompanied by impact-related nanodiamonds, melt glass, and microspherules.53
Airburst fireballs and the ejection of molten rocks … triggered many individual wildfires over wide areas, producing one of the largest concentrations of combustion aerosols deposited in the Greenland ice sheet during the past 120,000– 368,000 years. In the higher midlatitudes, atmospheric and oceanic temperatures abruptly decreased from warm interglacial to near-glacial conditions within a few months to a year. Atmospheric and cometary dust, along with AC/soot, triggered the rapid onset of an impact winter. This blocking of sunlight led to a die-off of vegetation. Damage to the ozone layer likely led to an increase in ultraviolet-B radiation reaching Earth’s surface, damaging flora and fauna. Increases in nitrogen compounds, sulfates, dust, soot, and other toxic chemicals from the impact and widespread wildfires likely led to an increase in acid rain. Increased production of organic matter and burn products from environmental degradation and biomass burning contributed to algal blooms and the subsequent formation of widespread black mats.54
In my view, however, by far the most significant finding of the study, fitting perfectly with the scenario of a disintegrating comet, is:
The impact event destabilized the ice-sheet margins, causing extensive iceberg calving into the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans. The airburst/impacts collapsed multiple ice dams of proglacial lakes along the ice-sheet margins, producing extensive meltwater flooding into the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans. Destabilization of the ice sheet also may have triggered extensive subglacial ice sheet flooding, leaving widespread, flood-related landforms across large parts of Canada. The massive outflow of proglacial lake waters, ice-sheet meltwater, and icebergs into the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans caused rerouting of oceanic thermohaline circulation. Through climatic feedbacks, this, in turn, led to the YD cool episode.55
In other words, the long-established and widely accepted evidence linking the onset of the Younger Dryas cold interval to a freshwater flood off the North American ice cap and consequent changes in oceanic circulation is fully accepted by Wolbach. What she and her coauthors add, however, is:
an additional key element … suggesting that these climate-changing mechanisms did not occur randomly but rather were triggered by the YDB impact event. After shutdown of the ocean conveyor, the YD episode persisted … not because of continued airburst/impacts but because, once circulation stopped, feedback loops and inertia within the ocean system maintained the changed state of circulation until it reverted to its previous state.56
Indeed so. No one is suggesting that impacts and airbursts continued throughout the entire 1,200 years of the Younger Dryas cold interval. Wolbach and her colleagues leave us in no doubt that their study is focused on the beginning of that interval and specifically on the sudden and mysterious climatic reversal from warm to cold around 12,800 years ago that they attribute to an “impact event.” They remind us at several points in their Journal of Geology paper, however, that when they speak of an “event” they do not mean to imply a one-off “hurricane of bolides” striking the earth over a single day or two in a single year. What the evidence points to, instead, is a series of such brief but deadly encounters recurring biannually over the full period of 21 years of platinum enrichment identified in the Greenland ice cores.57
Many of the individual impactors would have been Tunguska-meteor-size or smaller, but they would have come in vast swarms capable of doing enormous damage, and there is evidence that at least once during these 21 years the biannual “hurricane of bolides” may have contained comet fragments with diameters of a kilometer or more.
This is what was specifically proposed in the very first scientific paper to outline the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. Coauthored by Wendy Wolbach, Richard Firestone, Allen West, and more than twenty others, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2007, it raised the possibility that “multiple 2km objects struck the 2km thick Laurentide Ice Sheet.”58
Subsequently, in September 2013, Yingzhe Wu, Mukul Sharma et al. drew attention to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, where a submerged impact crater with a diameter of 4 kilometers—the Corossol Crater—has been dated to the Younger Dryas Boundary. Looking at a range of other evidence they concluded there had been multiple impacts in this region “that were closely associated in time.”59
Separately, Richard Firestone and Allen West reported evidence of an airburst at the Younger Dryas Boundary “near the Great Lakes of an object unusually enriched in titanium and other incompatible elements. Terrestrial like ejecta fell close to an impact site near Gainey while projectile-rich ejecta fell farther away. High water content in the ejecta favors an airburst over the Laurentide Ice Sheet north of Gainey.”60
Now perhaps we are getting closer to an explanation of how a single cause could account both for plunging the earth into a 1,000-year “deep freeze” and for melting sufficient quantities of glacial ice to raise global sea level by up to 4 meters. The immense meltwater pulse that entered the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans was of course not the result of anomalous global warming in an epoch of global cooling but a direct consequence of the “destabilization” of the ice sheet by impacts and airbursts of multiple comet fragments— indeed of a swarm of comets. The thermal energy and blast wave radiated out southward beyond the ice margin all across North America, accompanied by additional local airbursts and impacts that set immense areas of the continent’s primeval conifer forests ablaze,61 followed by “aerial detonations or ground impacts by numerous relatively small cometary fragments, widely dispersed across several continents.”62
Wolbach et al. looked into a series of seven episodes of meltwater release that occurred during the Ice Age, of which the Younger Dryas was the last. Named “Heinrich Events” (after Hartmut Heinrich, the marine geologist who first identified them), such episodes are distinguished by massive armadas of icebergs calving off the continental glaciers. These icebergs carry rocks, rubble, and other debris that as the bergs melt are deposited on the ocean floor where geologists can identify them, measure them, and derive estimates of scale and chronology.
It’s therefore notable that,
even though the YD is considered a Heinrich event (designated H0), the anomalously high peak in wildfire activity at the YD onset is completely opposite to that of six previous Heinrich events, which showed low levels of biomass burning. … This is a crucial observation: the presence of high peaks in biomass burning at the YD onset is completely contrary to very low levels of biomass burning observed at previous similar climatic transitions, making the YD climate episode highly anomalous and unexplainable by the natural processes that created previous warm-to-cold transitions.63
Again, the hypothesis of repeated encounters with the fragments of a disintegrating comet over the 21 years from 12,836 to 12,815 years ago provides a straightforward explanation for this apparently anomalous state of affairs. The Younger Dryas Heinrich Event was not triggered by normal climatic changes but by the impacts of comet fragments on the North American ice cap.
We cannot say exactly when within that 21-year period the impact-related destabilization of the ice cap occurred. It might have been right at the beginning, or right at the end, or somewhere in the middle, and it might have happened more than once. What the data from the Greenland ice cores definitely do indicate, however, as we saw in the previous chapter, is that the ferocity and intensity of the bombardment, with its accompanying rain of platinum, increased year-on-year for the first 14 years, reached a peak around 12,822 years ago, and then declined over the next 7 years until ceasing as abruptly as it had begun.
It’s a good guess, therefore—nothing more scientific than that—that the peak of the comet’s interaction with the North American ice cap, and most likely the time when the really big fragments came in, would be around 12,822 years ago. Allen West and fellow CRG scientist Richard Firestone think as many as eight such kilometer-scale fragments 64 may have struck the ice cap, excavating their craters in the 2-kilometer-deep ice that subsequently melted away, leaving little or no permanent trace on the ground beneath, or leaving craters that are hard to find, for example, four suspiciously deep holes in lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Ontario.65
Encounters with any fragments of this size, let alone multiple fragments, would already constitute a planetary disaster on an almost unimaginable scale, wherever they occurred. What we must keep in mind, however, although North America was the epicenter, is that the terrible impacts experienced there were only part of a much wider event that left a trail of devastation across at least three other continents.
WHAT WAS LOST
EXTINCTIONS OF ANIMAL SPECIES TOOK place all around the world at the onset of the Younger Dryas but were particularly fast, savage, and severe in North America, where thirty-five genera of large mammals were wiped out.66
Offering evidence from seventy-three sites across twenty-three US states, Wolbach et al. document the synchroneity of these megafaunal extinctions with the Younger Dryas impact.67 Three examples—one of which, Murray Springs, was the subject of the last chapter—can stand for the rest:
BLACKWATER DRAW, NEW MEXICO: At this site, a distinctive black-mat layer, dating to the onset of YD climate change, is in direct contact with peaks in magnetic spherules, Pt, Ir, and biomass-burning proxies, including charcoal, glass-like carbon, fullerenes, and PAHs [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons]. These proxies are draped conformably over the last known bones of mammoths killed by Clovis hunters, who then abandoned the site for hundreds of years. The evidence from Blackwater Draw suggests that the YDB impact event is coeval with the megafaunal extinctions and a human population decline, along with a peak in biomass burning and with YD climate change.
MURRAY SPRINGS, ARIZONA: Peaks in magnetic spherules, melt glass, nanodiamonds, Pt, and Ir [are located] immediately beneath a distinctive black mat that dates to the YD onset. Peaks in YDB biomass-burning proxies include charcoal, carbon spherules, glasslike carbon, AC/soot, fullerenes, and PAHs. At this site, several mammoths were killed by Clovis hunters, after which the black mat formed atop the bones and humans abandoned the site for ~1000 y. Thus, the evidence supports the synchroneity of the YDB impact event, increased biomass burning, YD climate change, megafaunal extinctions, and a major human population decline.
SHERIDEN CAVE, OHIO: There are YDB peaks in magnetic spherules, melt glass, nanodiamonds, Pt, and Ir. A charcoal-rich black mat dates to the YD onset and contains peak abundances of charcoal, AC/soot, carbon spherules, and nanodiamonds that are closely associated with the last known Clovis artifacts in the cave. The black-mat layer is in direct contact with the wildfire-charred bones of two mega-mammals, the flat-headed peccary (Platygonus compressus) and the giant beaver (Castoroidies ohioensis), that are the last known examples anywhere in the world of those extinct species.68
Horses, camels, mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, saber-tooth tigers, short-faced bears, and dire wolves are among the other iconic creatures of the Ice Age that disappear from the record at this time. “This represents a major extinction,” James Kennett and Allen West remind us in a paper published in 2018 by the Florida Museum of Natural History:
Not only because so many large and well-known animals were lost, but also because many of the extinct taxa had resided for millions of years in North America. Horse evolution had continued without a break in North America since the Eocene (~55 million years ago) with the only known absence beginning at around ~12,800 years ago until their return from Europe ~500 years ago. Clearly such extinctions are highly anomalous.69
All in all, Kennett and West conclude:
Sufficient geologic and chronologic data now exists to support the hypothesis that megafaunal extinctions were caused by continental-scale ecosystem disruption, resulting from the cosmic impact at the onset of the YD. … The megafaunal extinction would not have occurred at or close to the YD onset without the YDB cosmic impact at ~12,800 years ago. Instead many of the now extinct animals would have survived much longer, even to modern times.70
The archaeological evidence is scarce, perhaps precisely because so much was swept away and covered over by the Younger Dryas earth changes. Nonetheless, it’s clear that along with the disruption of animal life in North America, the cataclysm also had severe consequences for human beings.
Top of the list, of course, is the abrupt, mysterious disappearance of the entire successful, technically accomplished, and geographically widespread Clovis culture right around 12,800 years ago.71 Then, in the centuries following, if we take the case of the southeast as an example, we see a sudden anomalous 50 percent drop in the numbers of projectile points being made.72 A similar trend is seen in many other parts of North America at the same time,73 and in California there is evidence of a cessation of human activity between roughly 12,800 years ago and 12,200 years ago.74
A study of almost 700 cultural carbon-14 dates from across North America by David Anderson, Albert Goodyear, and others shows “a rapid decline” in human activities “at the beginning of the YD that reached its lowest level early in the YD … a 200-year-long 80 percent decline in the number of cultural carbon-14 dates, implying a major decrease in population … followed by a gradual rebound for ~900 years.”75
We do not possess a time machine. We cannot place ourselves physically in North America 12,800 years ago. But all the evidence suggests the continent passed through a tremendous, earthshaking cataclysm, and we know that at least one ancestral North American culture—Clovis—became every bit as extinct 12,800 years ago as the mammoths and the dire wolves.
What else went the way of Clovis in that time of burning darkness and icy floods?
27
CAPE FEAR
IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE GOOD, honest, hardworking, inquisitive scientists live in fear of ruining their careers, perhaps even of losing their jobs and incomes, if they investigate certain subjects that have been judged by a dominant elite to be “taboo.”
Is such a climate of fear-based conformity likely to result in good science that breaks new ground? Or is it likely to keep science stuck in a rut, endlessly refining and reconfirming established models while rejecting any evidence that suggests those models might be wrong or in need of fundamental revision?
These are not rhetorical questions, because it turns out that this “imaginary” world is the very world we live in today. Science in the twenty first century does NOT encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of “the facts”—particularly when those facts call into question long-established notions about the human past.
The controversy surrounding the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is an example. Since it was first proposed formally in 2007 the scientists behind it have endured an unrelenting barrage of deeply unpleasant and self-serving attacks from a small but influential group of other scientists whose work and opinions are challenged by the notion of a comet-induced global cataclysm 12,800 years ago.
In my 2015 book, Magicians of the Gods, I give a detailed account of the major studies supporting the YDIH coupled with an equally detailed 415 evaluation of the attacks made on the hypothesis up to that point.1 I will not repeat the same information here since it is on record and can easily be consulted. My conclusion at the time was that the attacks were generally unjustified, misleading, and propagandistic, and that the YDIH constitutes the best possible explanation for the earthshaking events of 12,800 years ago. Now, as I write these words in 2018, my desk is covered with papers published during the past 3 years presenting a great mass of new evidence that very strongly reinforces, extends, and develops the original Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. The biomass-burning and platinum studies mentioned in chapter 26 are the jewels in the crown, which is why I focused on them in the limited space available here. The other studies are referenced in the notes.2
I’m more confident than ever that the Comet Research Group scientists are on the right track, and I hold them in the highest regard for speaking truth to power and being willing to stick their necks out. I was therefore excited when George Howard, not a scientist but an environmental restoration specialist and a supporter of CRG who edits the online magazine Cosmic Tusk, contacted me to suggest a meet-up with some of the leading members of the group during my fall 2017 research trip across the United States. On the same trip I met Al Goodyear and Allen West, and now here was an opportunity to exchange views with some of their other colleagues.
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
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. Davias 12 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.
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
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
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 Ice 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.
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:
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 424 typical of extraterrestrial impacts at the Younger Dryas Boundary supports this scenario.27
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 projectiles were gone forever.28 423s
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.
At one level this was all good. For science to progress it is important that all ideas be tested in the fire of peer review. And while Zamora’s hypothesis had already been through that fire once in order to have appeared in Geomorphology at all, here were other scientists who disagreed.
Excellent! Bring it on, guys!
I was at Wilmington to learn, and such constructive disagreements would surely only help me gain a better understanding of what no scientist today can yet claim to understand fully—namely, the cause and true extent of the cataclysmic events that shook the earth at the onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago.
Because I’d gone into the meeting with the mind-set that we were all colleagues here trying to figure out a solution to one of the greatest mysteries of the past, I didn’t initially expect the level of antagonism, hostility, scorn, and downright unpleasantness with which Zamora’s impact hypothesis was received by LeCompte and Demitroff—who are themselves proponents of an impact hypothesis at the receiving end of a great deal of antagonism, hostility, scorn, and unpleasantness.
But that was naivete on my part. Over the following months I was to get a much clearer understanding of what was really going on.
“EXTREMELY REGRETTABLE …”
AFTER THE WILMINGTON MEETING, SANTHA and I flew to Little Rock, Arkansas, where I had a presentation to give at a conference before we returned to the United Kingdom. During my talk, which was filmed, I showed a photograph of myself with Chris Moore on a field trip to a Carolina Bay—Johns Bay— where platinum had been found. I outlined the platinum research and other YDIH research in my presentation and then moved on to a discussion of Antonio Zamora’s Glacier Ice Hypothesis. I did not connect his work to the work of the Comet Research Group and I did not suggest he was a member of the Comet Research Group or had anything to do with it.
The video was released on YouTube on January 26, 2018.30 A little over a month later I found myself embroiled in heated email correspondence with Malcolm LeCompte and Mark Demitroff.
The first salvo was fired on March 9, 2018, with an email from LeCompte to Zamora, cc’d to me, titled “Paper by Antonio Zamora: Geomorphology 282 (2017) 209–216.”
That email accused me of providing “extraordinary coverage” of Zamora’s “speculative theory” in my Little Rock presentation and of giving it exposure “in juxtaposition” with my “discussion of the YDB Impact Hypothesis.” Describing my alleged “association” of Zamora’s work with the work of the Comet Research Group as “extremely regrettable,” LeCompte added a postscript specifically addressed to me:
Graham, I find Antonio’s work to be unsupportable, not because impact proxies aren’t found in the bay rims, as you apparently have been told and are now saying, but for the variety of reasons listed in the attached letter, first and foremost of which: because there was no ice in Saginaw Bay or anywhere within 200 km of where Antonio believes his impact occurred.
My bad about the impact proxies!
I had indeed incorrectly stated in that hastily-put-together segment of my presentation that none were found in the Carolina Bay rims and that this was part of the long-established dismissal of any impact connection to the bays. I got that wrong. Platinum is an impact proxy, as I knew very well, and Chris Moore had found it in the Carolina Bays. Multiple other proxies, including “magnetic grains and microspherules, carbon spherules and glass-like carbon,” have also been found, as a 2010 study reports, “throughout the rims of 16 Carolina Bays.”31
What I don’t see, however, is how this helps LeCompte’s claim that impacts did not make the bays. On the contrary, it seems to me that the presence of the proxies there only strengthens the case that the bays are impact-related. I shall certainly speak of this in future presentations.
Much more significant is the second statement in the postscript, to the effect that 12,800 years ago there was no ice in Saginaw Bay or anywhere within 200 kilometers of the proposed impact site. LeCompte elaborates on this point in the longer letter attached to his mail, formally addressed to the Editor of Geomorphology, where he refers to “a large body of literature” providing evidence that Zamora’s proposed point of impact had been deglaciated for more than 1,000 years before the onset of the Younger Dryas and that not only Saginaw Bay but all of Lake Huron had been ice-free when the Younger Dryas began.
This seemed to be a fatal criticism of the Glacier Ice Impact Theory—but Zamora gave an immediate response to LeCompte:
In your note to the editor of Geomorphology you say “Dyke (2004), and Larson and Schaetzl (2001), provide graphical depictions of the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet with sufficiently high spatial and temporal resolution to make clear that not only Saginaw Bay, but all of Lake Huron was ice-free at the time of the Younger Dryas onset.”
Let us say that no evidence can be found for glaciers at the point where the axial projections of the bays converge. Geologists usually determine the extent of glacier coverage by examining glacial striations on the terrain and by identifying deposits of erratic boulders. Would you expect the site of an extraterrestrial impact to retain these markers? Wouldn’t the impact of a 3 km asteroid obliterate striations and erratic boulders? The subsequent melting of the glaciers would then flood the impact point and wash away the last traces of the crater. The Carolina Bays do exist, and because they are conic sections, it is very likely that they originated as conical impact cavities. … The Nebraska Rainwater Basins are now intimately related to the Carolina Bays through their geometry. Any modern publication about the Carolina Bays that ignores the Nebraska basins is incomplete and inadequate. … In my paper, I mentioned that an ET impact on hard ground would have sent rocky ejecta only one third as far as an impact on ice. Moreover, an impact on land, rather than on ice, would have left a typical ET crater. My bet is that there was an ice sheet wherever the meteorite hit, otherwise someone would already have found the crater.
Frankly, I thought that Zamora had returned Malcolm’s hardball quite well, and soon afterward he followed through by sending me a paper I hadn’t come across before, published in Quaternary Science Reviews in 1986, titled “Correlation of Glacial Deposits of the Huron, Lake Michigan and Green Bay Lobes in Michigan and Wisconsin.”32 The paper, by Donald Eschman and David Mickelson, concludes that following an earlier retreat there was a readvance of the ice sheet during the so-called Port Huron stade around 13,000 years ago and that at this time both Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron were indeed covered with ice.33
Once again, therefore, as so often in science, statements touted as facts turn out to be opinions contradicted by other opinions that are also touted as facts. The truth of the matter is that there remains great uncertainty and confusion around exactly what happened in North America—and across the whole world—at the onset of the Younger Dryas. While that uncertainty persists, alleged “certainties” of almost any kind are inappropriate and it is wise to keep an open mind to all possibilities.
Beyond the issue of the absence (or presence?) of an ice sheet at the proposed point of impact, LeCompte’s dismissal of the Glacier Ice Impact Theory is of course supported by other evidence and reasoning, but my purpose here is not to get into these minutiae. I concede the possibility that LeCompte may be right while remaining open to the possibility that he may be wrong. Either way, the real importance of Zamora’s contribution has been to raise new questions around the matter of the Younger Dryas impacts. Only time and further research will tell whether his theory really solves the mystery of the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska Rainwater Basins, but he has undoubtedly done scholarship a service by exploring the ballistics and dynamics of explosive cosmic impacts on the North American ice cap, and by looking into the potentially disastrous consequences in terms of the subsequent storm of icy ejecta.
“YOU WERE REPEATEDLY WARNED …”
THE STORM OF EJECTA FROM the Wilmington meeting was far from over. My exchange of emails with Malcolm LeCompte continued, Mark Demitroff joined the conversation as well, and both of them were clearly very annoyed with me! Chris Moore was cc’d but did not comment. What became clear from all this was that LeCompte’s objection to the video was not that I had misrepresented the Comet Research Group in any way, or that I had misrepresented Chris Moore’s recent research, but simply that right after what I had to say about the Comet Research Group, ending up with the visit I’d just made with Chris Moore to Johns Bay, I had gone on to talk about Zamora’s Glacier Ice Impact Theory.
On March 21, 2018, therefore, because I sensed there was something going on here that was worthy of reporting, and wanted no one involved to be in any doubt that I intended to report it, I began a new thread of emails under the subject line FOR THE RECORD:
I speak about the work of many scientists [in the video]. The fact that what I have to say about the work of one scientist follows what I have to say about the work of another scientist does not mean I am connecting the two—unless I specifically do so, which I don’t do here. I am therefore really perplexed as to why this video has caused offence.
I have no hesitation in sharing the bulk of LeCompte’s reply because of the light it sheds on a growing problem within science in general—the problem of enforced conformity.
The passages that I have placed in bold type were not in bold in the original but I choose to emphasize them in the extracts below because of the insights they provide into the ways this problem can manifest and the states of mind it engenders.
MALCOLM LECOMPTE TO GRAHAM HANCOCK, MARCH 23, 2018:
You were … repeatedly warned that any association of Carolina Bay genesis linked to a discussion of the YDB impact event would likely be harmful to the progress of the YDIH research and to the reputations of its investigators. You may not be aware of the time and energy spent to largely neutralize the distracting effects and hostility created by the early Carolina Bay related assertions made in the non-peer reviewed book: Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes. [This is a book coauthored by Richard Firestone and Allen West, the original formulators of the YDIH, and published in 2006, a year before the first formal paper appeared in PNAS.] The association of bay impact genesis with the YDIH created an early perception in some scientific communities that the YDB impact research was both unprofessional and bordering on pseudoscientific. Those original, naive Bay genesis claims still haunt the research and contribute to hobbling its acceptance as a legitimate research activity for a new generation of scientists. We have few, relatively younger and seasoned tigers like Chris Moore willing to disregard the real and perceived risks to their careers and reputations, and even fewer younger, newly-trained scientists following in his footsteps to adopt what is still considered a somewhat controversial line of research. His participation in this research is noticed and monitored by his many colleagues.
Nevertheless, only a week after our meeting, where Mark [Demitroff], with Chris’ endorsement, had presented an evidence-based alternative to Zamora’s proposed Bay impact genesis, you gave a video presentation that juxtaposed YDIH research with Zamora’s very controversial claim of Bay impact genesis. …
Less than a month [later] … Chris Moore, probably the most important current and hopefully future investigator of the YDB event, received a call from a colleague who had seen your You Tube video and posted it on his anti-pseudoscience website that is apparently visited by some of Chris’ peers. Your presentation juxtaposing YDIH research with Zamora’s claims certainly endowed them with some unwarranted credibility but also contaminated the YDIH by the association. Chris achieved some unwanted negative-celebrity among his colleagues. He was challenged about the wisdom of hosting you and suffered the indignity of wondering about the effect the … video might have on his career and reputation.
It is obvious to me that distribution of your video presentation has put Chris’s reputation, career and participation in the YDIH research in potential jeopardy … the resulting harm … has yet to be completely comprehended. Fortunately Chris made the brave decision to continue the YDIH research, despite that video’s presence on you tube for the foreseeable future.[what a clown,get a life DC]
Wow! All this stress, drama, and defensiveness over a video of a presentation I gave at a conference! I have to confess, I was taken aback by the vehemence of LeCompte’s reply and the suggestion that I might have harmed the career of that very likable and diligent scientist Chris Moore.
But at a deeper level what this whole exchange revealed to me was something disturbing about the way science works. I hadn’t quite grasped the role of fear before. But I could see it in action everywhere here: fear of being “noticed and monitored by colleagues,” fear of unwanted negative celebrity, fear of indignity, fear of loss of reputation, fear of loss of career—and not for committing some terrible crime but simply for exploring unorthodox possibilities and undertaking “somewhat controversial research” into what everyone agrees were extraordinary events 12,800 years ago.
Worse still, this pervasive state of fear has somehow ingrained itself so deeply into the fabric of science that those who have embraced unorthodox possibilities themselves are often among the least willing to consider unorthodox possibilities embraced by others—lest by doing so they “contaminate” their own preferred unorthodoxy.
How will it ever be possible to discover the truth about the past when so much fear gets in the way?
NEXT
HUNTER-GATHERERS AND THE LOST CIVILIZATION
SOURCE and footnotes
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/america-before-key-earth-lost-civilization.pdf
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