Part 3 : Magicians of the Gods..Nanodiamonds Are Forever...Fingerprints of a Comet

 Magicians of the Gods

By Graham Hancock

5 

Nanodiamonds Are Forever 

Continuing our journey east through the northern states of the US, after leaving Washington and driving across the Idaho panhandle, Randall made a point of showing me some of the spectacular features of Camas Prairie in western Montana. There, what look to the unpracticed eye like a series of colossal dunes march in serried ranks across the flat yellow floor of an elliptical basin, twelve miles long and ten miles wide, in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. But the “dunes,” it turns out, are not dunes at all. Instead they are giant current ripples, some more than fifty feet high and three hundred feet long, formed at the end of the Ice Age when Camas Prairie was part of the bed of Glacial Lake Missoula and lay under about 1,400 feet of water. 1 Geologists are agreed that the ripples were shaped by powerful currents set in motion when the lake drained catastrophically. 2 

“And I don’t dispute it,” Randall says, as we stand on a vantage point above the prairie. A largely deserted highway runs through the floor of the ancient basin, but now as a vehicle appears, providing scale, I see that it’s dwarfed to matchbox size by the ripples. 

“So,” I ask, “you have nothing against the existence of Lake Missoula as such? Or the notion that it did drain catastrophically?” 

“No, nothing at all. I have no doubt there were dozens of jökulhlaups out of Lake Missoula. Some were even pretty big. My point, though, is that none of them were of sufficient size to cause the spectacular flood damage that we’ve seen in the Channeled Scablands. That was done by an event orders of magnitude bigger than anything Lake Missoula could provide. So yes, the lake was dammed by ice in the Clark Fork valley, just as the gradualists maintain, and yes, that ice dam did break frequently over a period of a few thousand years, say from 15,000 years ago down to about 13,000 years ago. But the amount of water released in these periodic floods was minuscule, just a drop in the bucket compared to the final event—in which Lake Missoula was also involved, of course, but definitely not as the main culprit.” 

“And that final event had to do with the impact of our comet?” (I’ve started calling it “ours,” but it’s usually referred to in the scientific literature as the “Clovis comet” or the “Younger Dryas comet.”) 

“You bet,” Randall replies. “But not just one impact. Multiple impacts. I’m guessing as many as four of the fragments—each of them maybe half a mile across, maybe bigger—hit the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice caps in a sort of scattergun effect and caused just a massive amount of instantaneous melting. The meltwater was everywhere, in enormous quantities. Naturally some of it cascaded into Lake Missoula, filling it up suddenly and causing it to burst its ice dam, thus adding its contents to the much bigger floods that were already sweeping down from the north.” 

“So Lake Missoula was more of an innocent bystander, really, than the culprit.”

Randall chuckles. “Yes, that’s right. The lake was the innocent bystander that was in the way and that later got accused of the crime. But the comet was the culprit.” 

Conspiracy corner 

I’m no conspiracy theorist but I have a sneaking feeling—nothing more—that something a bit like a conspiracy is at work in science to prevent the proper consideration and wide public uptake of catastrophist ideas. I gave the example of J Harlen Bretz in Chapter Three. The frosty and deeply unpleasant reception initially given to his findings, the years that he spent in academic limbo afterward, the repeated, persistent efforts made by a host of scholars to dismiss his evidence entirely, or, failing that, to account for it by gradualist means, and then at last, years later, when all that had failed and the notion of outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula had offered itself as a solution, the realization that he had been right all along. But not right, not right under any circumstances, not right in any imaginable universe, on the issue of the single cataclysmic “debacle” that his instincts had originally led him to! If J Harlen Bretz was to be right, then it was necessary that he should be right in a politically correct way—in other words, in a way that could be redacted by skilled uniformitarian spin-meisters to edit out any hint of lurking cosmic disaster! 

Indeed, within the fantasy of such a conspiracy (I sincerely hope it is a fantasy!) the jökulhlaups idea is an exceptionally useful one. First of all, it provides what purports to be a wholesomely rational, sober and above all “scientific” account of the tortured geological features witnessed by Bretz in the Scablands. Secondly, jökulhlaups happen every year in various parts of the world today, and thus do not violate the commandment that existing processes, acting as at present, must be held sufficient to account for all geological changes. Thirdly, present relevance can be assigned. The Ice Age floods need not be simply of scholarly interest; since jökulhlaups still occur in the twenty-first century, science can be brought to bear to anticipate and ameliorate their effects. 

All of this might start to look like a very effective diversion from the truth, if the truth is that a cataclysm, a single, prodigious cataclysm, did occur at the end of the Ice Age … 

And might furthermore recur. 

What, in other words, if the Ojibwa prophecy is true? What if the star with the long, wide tail is, indeed, “going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again?” 

Would those who know this benefit from sharing their knowledge with others? Or might they think it served their interests better to keep quiet about the whole thing? 

We’ll return to this in Chapter Nineteen. By comparison, the question we have to ask and answer first is much simpler. 

Was the Younger Dryas cold event that began so suddenly and so mysteriously 12,800 years ago brought on by the effects of a large comet hitting the earth? 

The evidence for the comet “The Younger Dryas (YD) impact hypothesis,” as its proponents restated it in a keynote paper in The Journal of Geology in September 2014, “proposes that a major cosmic impact event occurred at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) 12,800 years ago.” 3 The paper, as we will see, presented a mass of new evidence in support of the hypothesis—in particular confirming and greatly extending earlier evidence of the copious presence of nanodiamonds in samples from the Younger Dryas Boundary layer taken in many different countries. Nanodiamonds 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. 4 

By 2014 when the Journal of Geology paper was published, debate over whether or not a comet impact was involved in setting off the Younger Dryas had been raging for seven years. The first headline that caught my eye was in New Scientist magazine of May 22, 2007 and asked provocatively: 

DID A COMET WIPE OUT PREHISTORIC AMERICANS? 

At that time, 2007, I was taking a break from the lost civilization mystery that had absorbed my energies, and been the subject of so many of my books, for so long. The New Scientist article tweaked my curiosity, however, because it referred to the exact epoch that I had focused on in my books. The article didn’t speak of a lost civilization, but began with a reference to the so-called “Clovis” culture of North America which, as we saw in Chapter Three, vanished from the archaeological record during the Younger Dryas between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. “The Clovis people,” the article observed: 

flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short faced bears. It’s unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky. 

According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that’s where the Clovis people’s doom came from. Citing several lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into earth’s atmosphere around 12,900 years ago [N.B. that date would later be revised downward by a hundred years to 12,800 years ago], fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield as Europe. 5 

As I read on, I learned that the team the article was referring to was composed of highly credentialed and eminently respectable mainstream scientists: 

Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the team’s three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to the Clovis culture. “The entire continent was on fire,” he says. 

Lead team member Richard Firestone, a nuclear analytical chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, says the evidence lies in a narrow 12,900-year-old carbon rich layer of sediment found at eight well-dated Clovis-era sites and a peppering of sediment cores across North America, as well as one site in Belgium. 6 

Probed as to why no crater had yet been identified with this hypothetical impact 12,900 years ago, a third team member, Arizona-based geophysicist Allen West, suggested that smaller, low-density parts of the comet would have exploded in the atmosphere, while larger fragments might have crashed into the two-mile deep ice cap that covered North America at that time. “Such craters,” West observed, “would have been ice-walled and basically melted away at the end of the last ice age,” leaving few traces. 7 

The article went on to explain that the sediment samples the team’s evidence focused on contained several different types of debris that could only have come from an extraterrestrial source, such as a comet or an asteroid. As well as nanodiamonds, the debris included tiny carbon spherules that form when molten droplets cool rapidly in air, and carbon molecules containing the rare isotope helium-3, far more abundant in the cosmos than on earth. 8 

“You might find some other explanation for these individually,” says Firestone, “but taken together, it’s pretty clear that there was an impact.” The team says the agent of destruction was probably a comet, since the key sediment layer lacks both the high nickel and iridium levels characteristic of asteroid impacts. 9 

Last but not least, the New Scientist article confirmed, all the evidence pointed to North America as the epicenter of the disaster: 

Levels of the apparent extraterrestrial debris, for example, are highest at the Gainey archaeological site in Michigan, just beyond the southern reach of North America’s primary ice sheet 12,900 years ago. Moreover, levels decrease the further you go from Gainey, suggesting that the comet blew up largely over Canada …10 

In other words, largely over the ice cap that covered the northern half of North America during the Ice Age—the source of all the meltwater that scarred and hacked the Scablands of Washington State in “Bretz’s flood” (whether or not that meltwater came exclusively from Lake Missoula or gushed forth in far larger quantities than Lake Missoula, alone, could ever have held). Bretz himself, as we’ve seen, was forced to abandon his own strong intuition that there had been a single, massive meltwater flood in favor of multiple flushings of limited amounts of meltwater out of Lake Missoula again and again over thousands of years. 

The primary reason he embraced this theory, however, was not that he had become a convert to gradualism, but because he was never able to explain how a large enough area of the ice cap to supply all the vast amounts of water needed for his flood could simply have melted all at once. He had proposed two possibilities—dramatic overnight global warming on the one hand, or volcanic activity under the ice cap on the other—but, as the reader will recall, he very quickly conceded there was no evidence for either. What Bretz did not consider, and could not consider—because the supporting evidence only began to come in a quarter of a century after his death—was the possibility that the ice cap could have undergone cataclysmic melting as a result of a comet impact. 

If only Bretz had known … 

A few months after the article appeared in New Scientist, the “Clovis comet” team published a detailed paper on their findings. It appeared in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on October 9, 2007. Despite the sober setting, the headline was dramatic: 

EVIDENCE FOR AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL IMPACT 12,900 YEARS AGO THAT CONTRIBUTED TO THE MEGAFAUNA EXTINCTIONS AND THE YOUNGER DRYAS COOLING 

A carbon-rich layer, summarized the team: 

dating to around 12,900 years ago, has been previously identified at Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event close to 12,900 years ago, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North America are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning circa 12,900 years ago … We propose that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to megafaunal extinctions …11 

Nor were the mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, camels, giant beaver and other megafauna alone. In total, it is particularly striking that no less than thirty-five genera of mammals (with each genus consisting of several species) became extinct in North America between 12,900 and 11,600 years ago, i.e. precisely during the mysterious Younger Dryas cold event. 12 What was now emerging, therefore, was an explanation both for the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas itself and for the accompanying extinctions, and perhaps for much else besides—including the cataclysmic flooding that left its marks on the Channeled Scablands of Washington State. 

This seemed all the more plausible when I learned that Firestone, Kennett and West’s proposal for their comet was that it was a conglomeration of impactors including one that might have been as much as 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) in diameter. 13 Furthermore, that 4-kilometer object would itself have been just one among multiple fragments resulting from the earlier disintegration—while still in orbit—of a giant comet up to 100 kilometers or more in diameter. 14 Many of the fragments of the parent comet (including some of great size as we’ll see in Chapter Nineteen) remained in orbit. Those that hit the earth at the onset of the Younger Dryas underwent further explosive fragmentation (accompanied by powerful airbursts that would themselves have had cataclysmic effects), as they entered the atmosphere over Canada. 

Nonetheless, the authors thought it likely that a number of large impactors, up to 2 kilometers in diameter, would have remained intact to collide with the ice cap. 15 There, as West had earlier told New Scientist, any craters would have been transient, leaving few permanent traces on the ground after the ice had melted. “Lasting evidence,” the PNAS paper added, “may have been limited to enigmatic depressions or disturbances in the Canadian Shield, e.g. under the Great Lakes, or Hudson Bay.” 16 

Summarizing the damage, the authors envisaged: 

a devastating, high-temperature shock wave with extreme overpressure, followed by under pressure, resulting in intense winds traveling across North America at hundreds of kilometers an hour, accompanied by powerful, impact-generated vortices. In addition, whether single or multiple objects collided with the earth, a hot fireball would have immersed the region near the impacts … At greater distances the re-entry of high-speed, superheated ejecta would have induced extreme wildfires which would have decimated forests and grasslands, destroying the food supplies of herbivores and producing charcoal, soot, toxic fumes and ash. 17 

And how might all this have caused the dramatic cooling of the Younger Dryas? The authors offered many mechanisms operating together, among the most prominent of these being the huge plume of water vapor from the melted ice cap that would have been cast into the upper atmosphere, combined with immense quantities of dust and debris “composed of the impactor, ice-sheet detritus, and the underlying crust” as well as the smoke and soot from continent-wide wildfires. 18 Taken in sum, it’s quite easy to understand how so much lofted debris could, as the authors propose, “have led to cooling by blockage of sunlight”; meanwhile the water vapor, smoke, soot and ice would have promoted the growth of “persistent cloudiness and noctilucent clouds, leading to reduced sunlight and surface cooling … [thus reducing] the solar insolation at high latitudes, increasing snow accumulation and causing further cooling in the feedback loop.” 19 

Severe and devastating enough in themselves, these factors nonetheless pale into insignificance when compared with the consequences of the hypothesized impacts on the ice cap: 

The largest potential effect would have been impact-related partial destabilization and/or melting of the ice sheet. In the short term this would have suddenly released meltwater and rafts of ice into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, lowering ocean salinity with consequent surface cooling. The longer-term cooling effects would have resulted largely from the consequent weakening of thermohaline circulation in the northern Atlantic, sustaining YD cooling for [more than] 1,000 years until the feedback mechanisms restored ocean circulation. 20 

Impact-related partial destabilization and/or melting of the ice sheet! And on a scale capable of disrupting the circulation of the world’s oceans for more than a thousand years! This matter of thermohaline circulation is an important one that requires explanation. We will return to it. But what most struck me in the paragraph quoted above was that the authors had only considered the consequences of the huge quantities of icebergs and meltwater dumped into the oceans north and east of the epicenter of their proposed comet impacts. They did not consider the effects of that gigantic icy flood on the lands lying immediately south of the ice cap—which most certainly would not have been spared. 

Once again I found myself wondering how J Harlen Bretz might have reacted if information about a possible comet impact had been at his disposal during his lifetime. I cannot prove it, of course, but I think he would have been much less likely to be seduced by Lake Missoula gradualism and much more likely—now that a credible heat source had been provided—to stick to his catastrophist guns. A single, cataclysmic meltwater flood on a truly gigantic scale coming directly off the ice cap to scour the Scablands begins to look very feasible indeed in the light of the case made by Firestone, West, Kennett and the large team of scientists working with them. 

Meanwhile my own hypothesis of an advanced civilization of prehistoric antiquity obliterated from the face of the earth during the Younger Dryas “window” is also strengthened by their work. For if their calculations are correct the explosive power of the Younger Dryas comet would have been of the order of ten million megatons. 21 That makes it two million times greater in its effects than the former USSR’s Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested, 22 and a thousand times greater than the estimated explosive power (10,000 megatons) of all nuclear devices stockpiled in the world today. 23 A global disaster of such magnitude at exactly the time I suggested in Fingerprints of the Gods does not prove the existence of a lost civilization of the Ice Age but does at least provide us with a mechanism large enough—if such a civilization did exist—to have obliterated it almost entirely from human memory. 

The evidence continues to mount 

Because it has such important ramifications for almost everything we think we know about the safety and security of the earth’s cosmic environment, and about our own past, it is reasonable to ask how solid the Younger Dryas comet impact theory really is. Since 2007, when it was first proposed, how has it stood up to scientific scrutiny and what new evidence has been brought forward in support of it? 

The answer is that it has stood the test of time well and benefited from a steady accumulation of new evidence set out in the proper way in the scientific literature and subject to rigorous peer review. There is neither space nor need, here, to explore this extensive literature in depth, but to give the general picture I will list the dates and titles of a few of the more important papers, with brief summaries of the conclusions and full references in the footnotes: 

2008: Wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California’s Northern Channel Islands at the Allerod-Younger Dryas Boundary. Evidence for ecosystem disruption at 13,000 to 12,900 years ago on these offshore islands is consistent with the Younger Dryas Boundary cosmic impact hypothesis. 24 

2009: Shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in Younger Dryas Boundary sediments. The presence of shock-synthesized hexagonal and other nanometer-sized diamonds in YDB sediments in association with soot and other wildfire indicators is consistent with a cosmic impact at 12,900 years ago, and the hypothesis that the earth crossed paths with a swarm of comets or carbonaceous chondrites producing air shocks and/or surface impacts that contributed to abrupt ecosystem disruption and megafaunal extinctions in North America. 25 

2010: Discovery of a nanodiamond-rich layer in the Greenland ice sheet. The presence of rounded nanodiamonds and lonsdaleite in Greenland ice suggests that a large cosmic impact occurred … The existence of this layer … appears consistent with the occurrence of a major impact event that correlates with the nanodiamond-rich YDB in North America at 12,900 years ago. 26 

2010: Palaeolithic extinctions and the Taurid Complex. Intersection with the debris of a large (50–100 km) short-period comet during the Upper Palaeolithic provides a satisfactory explanation for the catastrophe of celestial origin which has been postulated to have occurred around 12,900 years ago and which presaged a return to Ice Age conditions of about 1,300 years duration. The Taurid Complex appears to be the debris of this erstwhile comet; it includes about 19 of the brightest near-earth objects. 27 [N.B. The implications of this important paper by astronomer Bill Napier of the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Cardiff, Wales, UK, will be considered in greater detail in Chapter Nineteen.] 

2010: Evidence for a Cosmogenic Origin of fired glaciofluvial beds in the Northwestern Andes: Correlation with Experimentally Heated Quartz and Feldspar. Fired sediment, considered equivalent to the “Black Mat” impact of 12,900 years ago, has been located and analyzed in the Andes of Northwestern Venezuela. The “Black Mat” refers to possible fallout from the Encke Comet airburst presumed to have occurred over the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the impact spreading ejecta over large portions of North America and Europe, making it an interhemispheric event of considerable magnitude … The presence of copious monazite in the carbonaceous coatings is considered part of the incoming ejecta, as it is not a common indicator mineral in the local lithology … The intergrowth of carbonaceous “black mat” material with thermally disrupted and fragmented quartz and feldspar, a “welded” patina of 100–400mm thickness, could only occur with temperatures in excess of 900 degrees centigrade, the event here interpreted to be of cosmogenic origin. 28 

2011: Framboidal iron oxide: Chondrite-like material from the black mat, Murray Springs, Arizona. At the end of the Pleistocene a Younger Dryas “black mat” was deposited on top of the Pleistocene sediments in many parts of North America. A study of the magnetic fraction from the basal section of the black mat at Murray Springs, AZ, revealed the presence of amorphous iron-oxide framboids in a glassy iron-silica matrix. [Our] data suggest that the observed textures are … due … to a shock event that fractured and largely amorphized the grains … Therefore, we argue that these particles are the product of a hypervelocity impact event. 29 

2012: Evidence from central Mexico supporting the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. We report the discovery in Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico of a black, carbon-rich lacustrine layer, containing nanodiamonds, microspherules, and other unusual materials that date to the early Younger Dryas … We … find the evidence cannot be explained by any known terrestrial mechanism. It is, however, consistent with the Younger Dryas boundary impact hypothesis postulating a major extraterrestrial impact involving multiple airbursts and/or ground impacts at 12,900 years ago. 30 

2012: Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago. We examined sediment sequences from 18 dated Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) sites across three continents … All sites display abundant microspherules in the YDB with none or few above and below. In addition, three sites … display vesicular, high temperature siliceous scoria-like objects, or SLOs, that match the spherules geochemically … Our observations indicate that YDB objects are similar to material produced in nuclear airbursts, impact crater plumes and cosmic airbursts, and strongly support the hypothesis of multiple cosmic airbursts/impacts at 12,900 years ago. Data presented here require that thermal radiation from air shocks was sufficient to melt surface sediments at temperatures up to or greater than the boiling point of quartz (2,200 degrees centigrade). 31 

2013: Large Pt anomaly in the Greenland ice core points to a cataclysm at the onset of Younger Dryas. One explanation of the abrupt cooling episode known as the Younger Dryas (YD) is a cosmic impact or airburst at the YD boundary that triggered cooling and resulted in other calamities. We tested the YD impact hypothesis by analyzing ice samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core across the Bolling-Allerod/YD boundary for major and trace elements. We found a large platinum (Pt) anomaly at the YDB … Circumstantial evidence hints at an extraterrestrial source … [perhaps] a metal impactor with an unusual composition …32 

2013: New Evidence from a Black Mat Site in the Northern Andes Supporting a Cosmic Impact 12,800 years ago. The spherules from Venezuela are morphologically and compositionally identical to YDB spherules documented elsewhere … on three continents, North America, Europe and Asia, confirming the YDB magnetic spherule results of previous researchers. Their microstructural texturing indicates they formed from melting and rapid quenching … Thus the most likely origin of the spherules seems to be by cosmic impact/airburst 12,800 years ago with interhemispheric consequences. The site in Venezuela, along with one in Peru, are the two southernmost sites currently known to display evidence for the YDB impact event, and these sites represent the first evidence that the effects of the impact event extended into South America, even into the Southern Hemisphere. 33 

2014: Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP. A major cosmic-impact event has been proposed at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling episode at 12,800 years (plus or minus 150 years) before the present, forming the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) Layer distributed across up to 50 million square kilometers on four continents. In 24 dated stratigraphic sections in 10 countries of the Northern Hemisphere, the YDB layer contains a clearly-defined abundance peak in nanodiamonds (NDs), a major cosmic impact proxy … The large body of evidence now obtained about YDB NDs is strongly consistent with an origin by cosmic impact around 12,800 years ago and is inconsistent with formation of YDB ND by natural terrestrial processes, including wildfires, anthropogenesis, and/or influx of cosmic dust. 34 [NB. This paper and its important implications will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.] 

Taking on the dogmatic uniformitarians 

One would have thought, with such an impressive accumulation of evidence, that the Younger Dryas impact theory would, by now, be fully accepted and that researchers would have moved on to a broader consideration of the implications of such a recent and hitherto unsuspected global cataclysm for our understanding of the history of the earth and of our own species. However, we’ve already seen from the example of J Harlen Bretz how scientists wedded to the uniformitarian and gradualist reference frame react with extreme negative force to catastrophist theories. 

Nor was Bretz an exception. Alfred Wegener, who first proposed the notion of continental drift— plate tectonics—was similarly pilloried, as, subsequently, were Luis and Walter Alvarez (the Chicxulub, “K-T” impact), Steven J. Gould (punctuated equilibrium), Victor Clube and Bill Napier (coherent catastrophism), and James Lovelock, Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina and Lynn Margulis for their contributions to geophysiology and the Gaia theory. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Richard Firestone, Allen West, James Kennett and others who have followed the evidence and stuck their necks out to suggest that a comet impact caused the Younger Dryas have also come under sustained and bitter attack. 

Indeed the triumphant crowing of critics who clearly believe they have done away, once and for all, with the heretical catastrophism of Firestone, West and Kennett, has filled the academic air several times in the past few years. On each occasion you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief as if to say “thank God; we finally got those bastards”; but then a few months later comes the devastating and absolutely convincing refutation that forces the critics back to the drawing board. This is why eight years of sustained attacks have only served to prove—again and again—that the science behind the theory of the Younger Dryas comet is good. 

It’s quite noticeable, reviewing the literature, that academics form themselves into gangs. The ringleaders in the “anti-YD-comet” camp, whose names appear frequently at the top of critical articles, include Mark Boslough, a physicist on the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories, and Nicholas Pinter, a geology professor at Southern Illinois University. In 2012 they teamed up with half a dozen other scientists to publish a paper entitled “Arguments and Evidence Against a Younger Dryas Impact Event.” 35 And a year earlier Pinter and some of the authors of the 2012 attack had joined forces to write a paper hubristically entitled “The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: A Requiem.” 36 

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the comet theory had been greatly exaggerated. For example one of the key critiques made by Boslough et al in their 2012 article was that: 

Magnetic microspherule abundance results published by the impact proponents have not been reproducible by other workers. Analyses of the same YD site stratigraphy by Surovell et al [2009] could not replicate observations for two of the impact markers published by Firestone et al [2007]. The study by Surovell et al [2009] found no peaks of abundance unique to the YD time interval. 37 

But the impact proponents were later able to show that Boslough and his co-authors “neglected to cite nine independent spherule studies on two continents that reported finding significant YDB [Younger Dryas Boundary] spherule abundances.” 38 More damning, though, was the fact that when other scientists repeated the analysis of Surovell et al, their findings did indeed support an impact. The scientists concluded that: 

the inability of Surovell et al to find YDB spherule peaks resulted from not adhering to the prescribed extraction protocol. For example, Surovell et al did not conduct any analyses using scanning electron microscopy, a necessary procedure clearly specified by Firestone et al. 39 

A separate independent study by Malcolm A. Le Compte et al noted that Surovell et al “collected and analyzed samples from seven YDB sites, purportedly using the same protocol as Firestone et al, but did not find a single spherule in YDB sediments at two previously reported sites.” 40 LeCompte et al set out to examine this discrepancy. After a thorough investigation of all the evidence their results cast the work of Surovell et al into an even deeper shadow: 

We conducted an independent blind investigation of two sites common to both studies, and a third site investigated only by Surovell et al. We found abundant YDB microspherules at all three widely separated sites consistent with the results of Firestone et al and conclude that the analytical protocol employed by Surovell et al deviated significantly from that of Firestone et al. Morphological and geochemical analysis of YDB spherules suggest they … formed from abrupt melting and quenching of terrestrial materials and … are consistent with … a previously proposed cosmic impact 12,900 years ago …41 

Unsurprisingly, after all this, Pinter’s “requiem” for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis turned out to have been premature: 

Pinter et al claimed to have sampled the YDB layer at a location “identical or nearly identical” with the location reported by Kennett et al, as part of three studies that reported finding no YDB spherules or nanodiamonds. However, the published Universal Transverse Mercator coordinates reveal that their purported continuous sequence is actually four discontinuous sections. These locations range in distance from the site investigated by Kennett et al by 7,000 m, 1,600 m, 165 m, and 30 m, clearly showing that they did not sample the YDB site of Kennett et al. Furthermore, this sampling strategy raises questions about whether Pinter et al sampled the YDB at all, and may explain why they were unable to find peaks in YDB magnetic spherules, carbon spherules, or nanodiamonds. 42 

In 2012–13, in an effort to limit the scope for poor or misleading scholarship to be cited as though it discredits their work—when in fact it does no such thing—Jim Kennett, Richard Firestone, Allen West and a formidable group of pro-impact scientists launched “one of the most comprehensive investigations of spherules ever undertaken.” 43 The investigation focused on eighteen sites across North America, Europe and the Middle East (the latter represented by Abu Hureyra in Syria), and conducted more than 700 analyses on spherules using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy for chemical analysis and scanning electron microscopy for surface microstructural characterization. 

The results, published in PNAS on June 4, 2013, took advantage of recent advances in radiocarbon technology to refine the date of the Younger Dryas impact from 12,900 to 12,800 years ago 44 and enabled a much more detailed map of the YDB field to be drawn up, covering close to 50 million square kilometers of North, Central and South America, a large segment of the Atlantic Ocean, and most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Calculations indicate that the impact deposited around ten million tons of spherules across this vast strewnfield. 45 Nor was there any doubt in the researchers’ minds that an impact had been at the heart of the matter: 

The analyses of 771 YDB objects presented in this paper strongly support a major cosmic impact at 12,800 years ago … Spherules … are (i) widespread at 18 sites on four continents; (ii) display large abundance peaks only at the YD onset at around 12,800 years ago; (iii) are rarely found above or below the YDB, indicating a rare event; and (iv) amount to an estimated 10 million tons of materials distributed across around 50 million square kilometers of several continents, thus precluding a small, local event. 46 

Despite the annoying ability of the Younger Dryas comet to keep on proving itself, and of its proponents to keep on refuting all attacks, Nicholas Pinter, lead author of the 2011 “Requiem” paper, felt moved in an interview with NBC News in September 2013 once again to attempt to cast the hypothesis into scientific limbo. “My only comment,” he said, “is that the pro-impact literature is, at this point, fringe science being promoted by a single journal.” 47 

A number of observers with no particular axe of their own to grind were puzzled by this remark. First of all, as National Geographic correspondent Robert Kunzig noted, it smacked a little of wishful thinking, even desperation, on Pinter’s part. “Some opponents of the hypothesis,” wrote Kunzig, “want so badly for it to go away that they have attempted to declare it dead.” 48 Secondly, the journal that Pinter accused of promoting fringe science was none other than the revered, utterly mainstream, and extensively peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 49 Thirdly, although a number of articles by Kennett, West, Firestone and their team have appeared in PNAS, it is simply not true to suggest that PNAS is promoting their cause. On the contrary, at the time Pinter blurted out his protest to NBC the critics of the YD comet hypothesis had published ten times in PNAS, whereas the proponents of the hypothesis had published there only eight times. Likewise Pinter’s claim that the hypothesis is only being presented in a single journal could hardly be more wrong. By September 2013, in addition to their eight papers in PNAS, proponents had published no less than fifteen papers in thirteen other journals. 50 

The scholarly fight over the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is far from over. At the time of writing, the most recent salvo fired by critics of the hypothesis was entitled “Anthropogenic origin of siliceous scoria droplets from Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites in northern Syria.” Authored by P. Thy, G. Willcox, G.H. Barfod and D.Q. Fuller, it was published online on December 16, 2014 and in print in January 2015 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. 51 The essence of the argument in this paper is that siliceous scoria droplets (composed mostly of glass matrix and bubbles together with partially melted mineral grains) from Abu Hureyra in Syria—cited by pro-impact scientists as evidence for their case—were nothing to do with the comet but were instead a product of ancient buildings destroyed by house fires: 

We therefore conclude that melting of building earth in ancient settlements can occur during fires reaching modest temperatures. There is no evidence to suggest that siliceous scoria droplets result from very high temperature melting of soil and are the result of a cosmic event. 52 

“For the Syria site the impact theory is out,” boasted lead author Peter Thy in a press interview headlined “Study Casts Doubt on Mammoth-Killing Cosmic Impact.” 53 But once again it seems the bluster was premature. Allen West is listed as the corresponding author on the majority of scholarly papers published by the team of scientists working on the Younger Dryas impact, so I emailed him on March 18, 2015 to ask if he and his colleagues had any response to the critique by Thy et al. West replied as follows: 

We agree with Thy et al that hut fires can produce glass, but it does not follow, therefore, that all glass comes from hut fires, as they conclude. We have analyzed natural glasses supplied by one of the authors of that study, and the 12,800-year-old glass from Syria is only superficially similar. Instead it matches known cosmic impact glass, as well as high-temperature atomic bomb glass. 

Most importantly, those authors did not discuss or look for the evidence of abundant high temperature minerals presented in our previous papers on three sites on two continents (Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Syria) where we found suessite that melts at around 2,300 degrees centigrade and corundum at around 1,800 degrees centigrade. Now we have even stronger evidence from the Syrian site and are working on a new paper to be published this year. The 12,800-year-old Syrian glass contains a range of minerals that melted at extraordinarily high temperatures. See the table below from our new paper: 

Those temperatures are sufficient to melt steel. Furthermore the same glass-rich layer at the Syrian site contains large peaks in nanodiamonds, nickel and platinum. No building fire can duplicate that range of evidence—such fires can’t produce nanodiamonds or platinum enrichments. All this evidence refutes the hypothesis of Thy et al that this glass was produced in low-temperature building fires. 54 

When the new paper by West and his colleagues is published later in 2015 (after this book has gone to press), I have no doubt that it will, effectively, refute the arguments of Thy et al—just as all previous attacks have been successfully refuted. But I also have no doubt that others, who for whatever reasons of their own are philosophically opposed to the notion of a cataclysm 12,800 years ago, will publish yet more so-called “requiems” for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis in the years ahead, even while the constant discovery of new evidence means that it continues to thrive and grow. As we’ve seen throughout this book, catastrophist ideas, no matter how thoroughly documented and persistently argued and presented they may be, are routinely and regularly brushed under the carpet by the uniformitarian establishment. Thus while he lacked nothing in persistence, or in the thoroughness of his documentation, J Harlen Bretz faced years of discouragement before his ideas were welcomed by the mainstream. 

Jim Kennett, Richard Firestone, Allen West and their colleagues have argued the catastrophist case for the Younger Dryas comet impact with equally commendable persistence and with equal mastery of documentation and they, too, have faced rejection and hostility. Two things are different in their case, however. First, this is the twenty-first century and we have the internet, which allows the very rapid sharing and proliferation of ideas. That was not the case when Bretz began his lonely struggle. Secondly, Kennett, Firestone and West seem to have a better understanding of the politics of science than Bretz did and have greatly strengthened their own hand by mobilizing support for their work from many colleagues. It is one thing to shout down and silence a lone wolf like Bretz. It is quite another to shout down and silence a large team of highly credentialed scientists from multiple disciplines and universities. 

And the team is growing. As I complete this chapter in March 2015, I have before me on my desk the latest paper published by Firestone, Kennett and West. The paper, entitled “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact 12,800 Years Ago,” appears in the September 2014 issue of The Journal of Geology. The lead author is Carles R. Kinzie of the Department of Chemistry, DePaul University, Chicago. Firestone, Kennett, West and twenty-two other leading scientists from prestigious universities and research institutes around the world are coauthors. 55 The gravity of the paper, of its authors and of the journal in which it appears, together with the further detailed refutations it contains of prior critiques, 56 combine to make a laughing stock of Nicholas Pinter’s claim that the Younger Dryas comet hypothesis is “fringe science.” 

Indeed, the contrary is true—what is clearly happening is that an extraordinary hypothesis has again and again met the demand for extraordinary evidence to support it and has begun to force its way through the staunchly-defended doors of the mainstream. It will not be an easy struggle; it never is. There will be setbacks as well as progress. But the 2013 paper on spherules and the 2014 paper on nanodiamonds contain a wealth of evidence that even the most hardened gradualists must find hard to dismiss entirely. As Wallace Broecker, a geochemist and climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, recently begrudgingly admitted: “Most people were trying to disprove this. Now they’re going to have to realize there’s some truth to it.” 57 

But there cannot be just “some” truth to it. The Younger Dryas comet hypothesis is either right or wrong. My own assessment, having pored through more than seven years of research papers and having read every attack and refutation since the first public airing of the hypothesis in 2007, is that the case for the impact is a very strong one that grows stronger and more convincing every day. I could give many further examples of the successful efforts by the proponents of the hypothesis to defend their ideas over the years, but rather than doing so here, I refer the interested reader to the sources given in the footnote. 58 

Meanwhile the September 2014 paper, summarizing the evidence presented, concludes: 

A cosmic impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling episode is the only hypothesis capable of explaining the simultaneous deposition of peak abundances in nanodiamonds, magnetic and glassy spherules, melt-glass, platinum and/or other proxies across at least four continents (approaching 50 million square kilometers). The evidence strongly supports a cosmic impact 12,800 years ago. 59

Of particular note, adds James Kennett, is the fact that the glassy and metallic materials in the YDB layers could only have formed at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees Celsius and therefore could not have resulted from any alternative scenario other than a massive comet impact. 60 

Figure 20: The Younger Dryas Boundary Strewn field (after Wittke et al, 2013 and Kinzie, Kennett et al, 2014). The area enclosed by the dotted line defines the current known limits of the YDB field of cosmic-impact proxies spanning 50 million square kilometers. 

The exact size of that impact remains to be resolved with further research. Until then, says Kennett, “There is no known limit to the YDB strewn field which currently covers more than 10 percent of the planet, indicating that the YDB event was a major cosmic impact … The nanodiamond datum recognized in this study gives scientists a snapshot of a moment in time called an isochron.” 61 

Worldwide, to this day, scientists know of only two layers of sediment “broadly distributed across several continents that exhibit coeval abundance peaks in a comprehensive assemblage of cosmic impact markers, including nanodiamonds, high-temperature quenched spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, carbon spherules, iridium and aciniform carbon.” 62 These layers are found at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,800 years ago, and at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been agreed that a gigantic cosmic impact in the Gulf of Mexico (in that case the impactor is thought to have been an asteroid some ten kilometers in diameter) caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. 63 

“The evidence we present settles the debate about the existence of abundant YDB nanodiamonds,” Kennett says. “Our hypothesis challenges some existing paradigms within several disciplines, including impact dynamics, archaeology, paleontology and paleoceanography/paleoclimatology, all affected by this relatively recent cosmic impact.” 64 

The point Kennett makes here has important implications for the study and understanding of our past. Archaeologists have been in the habit of regarding cosmic impacts, supposedly only occurring at multi-million year intervals, as largely irrelevant to the 200,000-year story of anatomically modern humans. When we believed that the last big impact had been the dinosaur-killing asteroid of 65 million years ago, there was obviously little point in trying to relate cosmic accidents on such an almost unimaginable scale in any way to the much shorter time-frame of “history.” But the very real possibility confirmed by Kennett’s study that a huge, earthshaking, extinction-level event occurred just 12,800 years ago, in our historical backyard, changes everything. 

6 

Fingerprints of a Comet 

The evidence from deposits of nanodiamonds, microspherules, high-temperature melt-glass and other “ET-impact proxies” at the Younger Dryas Boundary points strongly toward a cataclysmic encounter between the earth and a large comet around 12,800 years ago. The point of entry would have been somewhere over Canada, by which time the comet might already have broken up into multiple fragments on its journey through space (as was the case with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 when its “freight-train” of large fragments hit Jupiter with spectacular effect in 1994). It is equally possible, however, that the break up of the Younger Dryas comet did not occur until after it had entered the earth’s atmosphere. Either way, some of the fragments very soon exploded in the air; others, with diameters of up to two kilometers, smashed down at various points on the North American ice cap, yet others streaked on in a southeasterly direction across the Atlantic Ocean where further impacts followed on the European ice cap, and still others remained aloft until they reached the Middle East in the vicinity of Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, where the final rain of impacts occurred. 

Because the evidence for the comet is so new, and because the impact hypothesis is still disputed, almost no consideration has yet been given to the immediate effects of the multiple major impacts that are thought to have taken place on the North American ice cap. In all cases the ice itself, still more than two kilometers thick 12,800 years ago, would have absorbed most of the shock of the impact leaving very few lasting features on the ground. Even so, researchers have begun to home in on a number of possible craters. 

One candidate is the so-called Charity Shoal feature in Lake Ontario. Consisting of a raised rim around a small circular basin approximately a kilometer in diameter and 19 meters deep, it was studied by a team of scientists led by Troy Holcombe, who concluded that it was likely to be of extraterrestrial impact origin and might have been created in the late Pleistocene around the time of the onset of the Younger Dryas. 1 

Similarly, the half-kilometer diameter, 10-meter deep Bloody Creek Structure in southwestern Nova Scotia was identified as a possible impact crater by Ian Spooner, George Stevens and others in a 2009 paper in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. They could not be confident as to its age, but noted that “impact onto glacier ice during the waning stages of the Wisconsin Glaciation about 12,000 years ago may have resulted in dissipation of much impact energy into the ice, resulting in the present morphology of the Bloody Creek Structure.” 2 

A third candidate is the Corossol Crater in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada. Discovered by the Canadian Hydrographic Service during underwater mapping, Corossol is 4 kilometers in diameter, implying an impacting object with a diameter of up to half a kilometer. The crater presently lies in 40 to 185 meters of water and was originally thought to be very ancient, dating to some point after the middle Ordovician, about 470 million years ago. 3 Recent research, however, casts doubt on this chronology. For example, M.D. Higgins and his colleagues from the University of Quebec and the Geological Survey of Canada argued in a paper presented at the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2011 that: 

The paucity of sediments in the crater might be taken to indicate that it is young. The minimum age was established using data from a 7 meter core taken in the central trough. Calibrated carbon-14 ages of shells in the sediments can be extrapolated to give an estimate of the age of the base of the sedimentary sequence of around 12,900 years ago … This is taken to be the youngest possible age of the impact. 4 

That “youngest possible” age of 12,900 years is comfortably within the margin of error of 12,800 years plus or minus 150 years that is presently accepted for the Younger Dryas Boundary. 5 In other words if the findings of Higgins and his team are confirmed, Corossol could well be one of the hitherto “missing” impact craters left by the Younger Dryas comet. Firm identification of such a crater would be jam on the cake for Firestone, Kennett, West and other pro-impact scientists, but as they have made clear many times, they do not need craters to prove their hypothesis, since prominent craters are not to be expected either from airbursts or from impacts on ice caps. 

Nonetheless Charity Shoal, Bloody Creek and Corossol do not stand alone. A fourth possible impact site has been identified somewhat to the west of Corossol in an area known to geologists as the Quebecia Terrain. High concentrations of YDB microspherules found near the towns of Melrose in Pennsylvania and Newtonville in New Jersey were analyzed by Wu, Sharma, LeCompte, Demitroff and Landis in a paper published in September 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their conclusion was that an impact on the Laurentide ice sheet penetrated to the bedrock of the Quebecia Terrain throwing ejecta high into the atmosphere. The ejecta included spherules in the range of 2 to 5 millimeters in diameter that were spread by the winds and rained down hundreds of miles away in the Melrose–Newtonville area. Significantly the spherules turned out on analysis to contain: 

minerals such as suessite that form at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade. Gross texture, mineralogy, and age of the spherules appear consistent with their formation as ejecta from an impact 12,900 years ago … The rare earth element patterns and Sr and Nd isotopes of the spherules indicate that their source lies in the Quebecia Terrain. 6 

“We have provided evidence for an impact on top of the ice sheet,” concluded study co-author Mukul Sharma. “We have for the first time narrowed down the region where a Younger Dryas impact did take place, even though we have not yet found its crater.” 7 

Judging from the apparent northwest to southeast trajectory of the Younger Dryas comet, 8 the Charity Shoal feature in Lake Ontario, ejecta from Quebecia Terrain, the Corossol crater in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the Bloody Creek structure in Nova Scotia might mark the impacts of the last large fragments to hit North America. But the even larger fragments—in the range of two kilometers in diameter that Firestone, Kennett and West envisage—would inevitably have hit the ice cap earlier in the trajectory and thus at points lying further to the north and west. It is to these hypothetical impacts on the western fringes of the Laurentide Ice Cap, and on the Cordilleran Ice Cap, that we should look for the possible source of the meltwater for Bretz’s flood. 

Radical thinking 

Although the notion of outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula has long been accepted by mainstream science as the source of the spectacular flood damage documented by Bretz, it is important to recognize that a number of senior, highly credentialed scientists continue to dissent from this view. Prominent among the dissenters is John Shaw, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. Shaw argues that the volume of water in Lake Missoula, estimated at around 2,000 cubic kilometers at its peak, is not sufficient to account for the field evidence. His own theory is that huge quantities of meltwater—of the order of 100,000 cubic kilometers—were impounded in a subglacial reservoir deep beneath the North American ice cap and he proposes that the flood damage was caused by a single, massive release from this reservoir. 9  88s

Japanese researchers Goro Komatsu, Hideyaki Miyamoto, Kazumasa Itoh and Hiroyuki Tosaka have carried out extensive computer simulations of large-scale cataclysmic floods across the Scablands and agree with Shaw that Glacial Lake Missoula was not, on its own, anywhere near large enough to account for the flood damage: 

Even the whole draining of Lake Missoula cannot explain the field evidence of high water marks … The subglacial flooding from the north proposed by Shaw may provide an explanation for the increased volume of water required to explain the high water-mark evidence in the Channeled Scabland. 10 

Likewise Victor Baker, Professor of Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Arizona, and Jim O’Connor of the US Geological Survey’s Water Science Center have expressed concern about the “case for periodic colossal jökulhlaups” out of Glacial Lake Missoula: 

In our view, anomalies still exist between some aspects of the field evidence and the conceptual models that have been advocated. The position that the “scores-of-floods hypothesis completes Bretz’s imaginative theory” (Waitt, 1985, p. 1286) may prematurely divert attention from some of the outstanding problems that remain in interpreting the spectacular features of the Channeled Scabland. 11 

In 1977 geologist C. Warren Hunt set out to conduct a detailed investigation into Bretz’s flood. He did so because, like the scholars cited above, he was unconvinced by the theory—which had already assumed the status of unassailable fact by the mid-1970s—that all the water damage visible in the Scablands had been caused by outburst floods from Lake Missoula. Hunt’s dissatisfaction stemmed from his own extensive knowledge of dams and how to design them to take best advantage of local geology. The bottom line, according to his calculations, was that the proposed ice dam on the Clark Fork River, behind which Lake Missoula is supposed to have backed up, would have been, quite literally, impossible. 

Let us first of all consider the statistics. According to the US Geological Survey, Glacial Lake Missoula at its highest level—the level it is presumed to have reached before the Clark Fork ice dam broke—covered an area of about 3,000 square miles and contained an estimated 500 cubic miles (2,084 cubic kilometers) of water. Its surface would have been at 4,150 feet above sea level, but the bottom terrain varied in altitude from point to point so the USGS calculates that the lake would have been about 950 feet deep at present day Missoula, 260 feet deep at Darby and around 1,100 feet deep near Polson. At the ice dam itself, however, a gradient in the underlying terrain meant the glacial lake would have been more than 2,000 feet deep (its deepest point—more than twice the depth of modern Lake Superior). 12 

While broadly concurring with the US Geological Survey’s figures, C. Warren Hunt emphatically rejected “the suggestion that ice might have dammed Clark Fork so as to impound water to a depth of 2,100 ft (640 meters) … When one considers,” he wrote: 

that modern engineering employs bedrock grouting for securing the footings of 500-ft (150-m) dams, it must surely strike any reader as virtually frivolous to suggest that chance emplacement of glacial ice might have dammed Clark Fork across a 7-mile (11-km) span lacking in intermediate abutments, and then retained water at four times the pressure of modern engineered concrete dams! 13 

Hunt’s incredulity at the notion of an ice dam more than 2,000 feet high and 7 miles long receives support from studies which argue that “at a lake depth of approximately 200 meters (656 feet), the hydrostatic pressure exerted on the damming ice is sufficient to begin to force a hole through the ice. Once formed this hole will enlarge by frictional melt-widening, enabling the drainage of ice-dammed lake water to occur.” 14 

At more than thrice 200 meters in height, therefore, the hypothetical Clark Fork ice dam does, indeed, begin to look “impossible.” 

Yet, as noted, Hunt accepted the USGS statistics. The surface of Lake Missoula certainly did at one point stand 4,150 feet above sea level and the lake therefore must indeed have reached around 2,100 feet deep in the Clark Fork Valley between the Bitteroot and Cabinet mountain ranges. That it did so is confirmed by an ancient strandline at that altitude, and other strandlines have been found at lower altitudes which clearly show many subsequent lower water levels after the high one. 15 Hunt’s solution, however, since he continued to regard the Clark Fork dam as a geological impossibility, was to propose that a gigantic flood, thousands of feet deep, must have washed over the entire region at the end of the Ice Age, in the process filling the various basins of Glacial Lake Missoula up to the 4,150 foot level where the highest strandline is found and leaving the lower strandlines as it receded. 16 

As the source of his proposed region-wide flood, Hunt suggested that: 

tidal inundation brought on by some form of gravitational attraction from a celestial source, the nature of which is beyond the competence of the writer, must have resulted in a … tide … rising to 5,000 feet (1,600 meters) above present sea level … The waters were held there several weeks … during which there was much surging, partial floating of glaciers, and development of the highest beaches in “Lake Missoula.” The tidal ebb and flood with successive lower beaches developing allowed sweeping of the canyons, removal of previous glacial deposits, fans and talus, scouring of the “Scablands,” ice-rafting, polishing of standing rock obstructions to tidal surge, aggradation of valley and “by-pass” floors, and discharge of boulders into submarine deltas and fans. Lastly, a layer of silt was left in the wake of the tide, especially in the quieter waters of cul-de-sac estuaries. 17 

In other words, Hunt had very much gone “back to Bretz” in proposing a single gigantic flood as the source of all the damage on the Columbia Plateau. His 1977 notion that it was a tidal inundation of sea-water rushing up estuaries (and brought on by the gravitational attraction of some hypothetical celestial body) 18 is, however, untenable, and Hunt himself recognized this when he revisited the subject some years later in his 1990 book Environment of Violence. Conceding that “the tidewater solution is weakened by the great distance to tidewater and the absence of a trail of evidence along the possible routes,” 19 he sought out other possible sources of water in sufficiently vast quantities to inflict the damage to the landscape that he had observed in the field. In the process, he briefly considered John Shaw’s theory of a subglacial reservoir of 100,000 cubic kilometers of meltwater, but asked some pertinent questions: 

How could such melting take place without a heat source such as the volcanic heat which precipitates Icelandic jökulhlaups? What climatic regimen would allow such melting in the first place? Why would the water not have lifted the periphery of the ice sheet and emerged without accumulating soon after it was produced by melting? What containment mechanism would allow accumulation of a great under-ice lake … beneath 3,000 meters of ice? And would not water beneath the maximum ice thickness tend to escape toward the lesser confining pressures under peripheral areas of the ice sheet? Is there any possible way such a huge underice chamber of water could accumulate? 20 

To cut a long story short, Hunt reasoned that there was not. Besides the 100,000 cubic kilometers that Shaw’s theory offered was, in his opinion, insufficient. Almost ten times as much water would be needed to account for all the field evidence. With a tidal source, Glacial Lake Missoula and Shaw’s under-ice reservoir all dismissed, therefore, Hunt found himself left with only one possible—though startlingly catastrophist—solution. Somehow, in some way, very rapid, cataclysmic melting of an immense area of the North American ice cap must have taken place. After doing the necessary calculations Hunt concluded that 840,000 cubic kilometers of ice, i.e. about ten percent of the entire glaciated area, “would have had to melt.” 21 

The reader will recall that Bretz originally envisaged something similar but was defeated by the inability of either radical global warming or sub-glacial volcanism (quite simply, neither happened) to account for the vast quantities of meltwater “his” flood called for. In the end, as we saw, he settled for outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula as the answer. In 1990, Hunt faced the same dilemma —with the exception that he had already ruled out Lake Missoula—but showed himself to be an extraordinarily competent and prescient innovator when, without any preamble, he wrote: 

Earth heat cannot have melted continental ice to produce floodwaters in the volumes required … A cometary heat source could have served the purpose. 22 (Emphasis added.) 

To melt ten percent of the North American ice cap, Hunt calculated that the kinetic energy of a half kilometer diameter comet would be sufficient: 

A comet of the type that exploded above the Tunguska site in 1908 could have provided this heat. The great lake it might have created in the middle of the ice sheet would rapidly have tunneled under the remaining glacier and emerged as catastrophic floods in many directions. Cometary melting of the ice seems necessary to yield so much water in such a short time. 23 (Emphasis added.)

Anticipating the objection that no crater had been found, Hunt pointed out that the Tunguska event—an airburst—likewise left no crater or ejecta blanket. Furthermore, in the case of a hypothetical comet impact on the North American ice cap: 

all ejecta and cometary matter would likely have been swept away in the ensuing flood, coming to rest widely dispersed in the drift blanket far from its source. Thus diluted and mixed with other debris, direct evidence for either the exploded projectile or ejecta from the site could be difficult to recognize, if not lost to science permanently. 24 

Last but not least—and again the prescience is almost eerie!—Hunt noted that “glass spherules if found in glacial debris could support the theory.” 25 

He could not have known then, writing a quarter of a century ago, that from 2007 onward a team of leading scientists would champion the cause of comet impacts on the North American ice cap and, in the absence of obvious craters, would derive much of their evidence from microspherules, fused glass and nanodiamonds. 

How to change global climate in an instant 

Hunt’s suggestion was that a single relatively small half-kilometer diameter object would have packed sufficient kinetic energy to set off the melting of approximately one tenth of the North American ice cap, producing a cataclysmic flood. Twenty-five years on, the proponents of the Younger Dryas comet hypothesis, as we have seen, are proposing that “multiple two-kilometer” objects may have impacted the ice cap. 26 If they are correct, the scale of the ensuing floods must have been almost unimaginably large. Nor would they have been confined only to the Channeled Scablands of the Columbia plateau. The comet hypothesis envisages a rain of impacts right across the ice sheet from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts of North America, so we should find evidence of flooding everywhere. 

We do. The Columbia plateau displays flood-ravaged scablands but so too does the state of New Jersey much farther to the east. The Columbia plateau is notable for its fields and hillsides strewn with huge ice-rafted erratics but so, too, is the state of New York. Indeed, perched on the bare rock surfaces of Manhattan’s Central Park are many imposing erratic boulders, including diabase from the Palisades Sill along the Hudson River and shist from even farther afield. Interestingly, too, just as the Columbia plateau has its coulees, so New York State has its Finger Lakes. These latter were long thought to have been carved by glaciers but their geomorphology closely parallels that of the coulees and some researchers now believe they were cut by glacial meltwater at extreme pressures—a process linked by sediment evidence to “the collapse of continental ice sheets.” 27 

Likewise in Minnesota, on the Saint Croix River where Randall Carlson and I finished our long road trip across North America, there is a spectacular array of more than eighty giant glacial potholes. One is 10 feet wide and 60 feet deep, making it the deepest explored pothole in the world. Others, as yet unexcavated, are even wider, suggesting the probability that they may be deeper as well. And all of them, without exception, were carved out by turbulent floods at the end of the Ice Age—floods emanating, Randall believes, from the superior lobe of the Laurentide ice cap. 

“You could spend a lifetime,” he tells me, “traveling this land and still not see it all. The effects of mega-scale flood flows have been extensively documented in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains in both Canada and the US, across the prairie states, in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, in Pennsylvania and western New York, and in New England. All the Canadian provinces preserve large-scale evidence of gigantic water flows. All regions within or proximal to the area of the last great glaciation show the effects of intense, mega-scale floods.” 

But the question that remains concerns the source of these floods. 

Having been dragged kicking and screaming into conceding that flooding occurred at all, gradualist science, as we have seen, subsequently engaged in a love affair with Glacial Lake Missoula, elevating it and its epic jökulhlaups to serve as the sole explanation for all the astonishing diluvial features of the Channeled Scablands of the Columbia plateau. It is not surprising, therefore, that other Ice Age floods, wherever they are admitted to have occurred, are also attributed to jökulhlaups from glacial lakes. 

More than that, it is the floodwaters from these glacial lakes—rather than anything so vulgarly catastrophist as a comet—that are presently regarded by mainstream science as the most likely cause of the Younger Dryas cold event. The giant Glacial Lake Agassiz, which lay across most of Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota and Saskatchewan, is particularly implicated. Around 13,000 years ago—i.e. immediately before the onset of the Younger Dryas—Lake Agassiz is thought to have covered an area as great as 440,000 square kilometers (170,000 square miles) when an ice dam broke and allowed a substantial fraction of its contents, perhaps as much as 9,500 cubic kilometers, to spill out along a flood path running through the Mackenzie River system in the Canadian Arctic coastal plain, and thence into the Arctic Ocean. 28 There the anticyclonic circulation of a current known as the Beaufort Gyre would have gradually moved it onward into the subpolar North Atlantic in the Transpolar Drift: 

The slow release of meltwater south through Fram Strait provides a mechanism unique to the Arctic that is capable of turning a short-duration, high-magnitude meltwater discharge into a significantly longer, more moderated and sustained meltwater rerouting event to the North Atlantic. 29 

What made matters worse, however, was that at the same time huge quantities of icy meltwater were also being dumped into the North Atlantic from the other glacial lakes and directly off the Laurentide ice sheet itself. 30 The combined effect, so the theory goes, disrupted ocean circulation to such an extent that it radically affected global climate: 

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 beneath 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. 31 

These are highly technical matters, with which we do not need to concern ourselves at too great length here. In brief, though, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, also known as the thermohaline circulation, is the great ocean conveyor belt 32 that not only carries warm salty equatorial water to the surface and thence northward where it eventually cools and sinks off the coasts of Greenland and Norway, but also carries the resultant cold North Atlantic deep water south, returning it slowly to the equator where it mixes with warmer water, rises again to the surface and thus continues the cycle: 

It transports large amounts of water, heat, salt, carbon, nutrients and other substances around the globe and connects the surface ocean and atmosphere with the huge reservoir of the deep sea. As such it is of critical importance to the global climate system. 33 

It was the shutting down of this delicately balanced, intricately interconnected, hugely complex, critical cycle, scientists agree, that caused the dramatic global cooling of the Younger Dryas. That the shutdown was the result of colossal meltwater floods out of glacial lakes, and directly off the Laurentide ice cap, is also agreed. A major puzzle, however, as S.J. Fiedel points out in a keynote paper in the journal Quaternary International, is why this should have happened 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. 34 Intuitively one feels the meltwater floods should have been at their peak during the warming phase. In reality however it was only at the Bølling–Allerød/Younger Dryas Boundary that the meltwater releases occurred. 

The solution to the mystery seems transparently obvious to Richard Firestone, Allen West, Jim Kennett and other proponents of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Quite simply, there is no mystery! In their reckoning, the huge meltwater floods that so radically affected global climate were caused by multiple large fragments of a comet ripping through the earth’s atmosphere and smashing down into the ice cap—not just one fragment of half a kilometer or so as envisaged by C. Warren Hunt, but as many as eight fragments, and possibly more, including some that might have been as much as two kilometers in diameter. 35 

The colossal heat generated by such impacts, with a combined explosive power estimated as we have seen at ten million megatons, provides all the energy needed to set off a truly cataclysmic meltdown of huge sectors of the North American ice cap. The gigantic flood that would have followed, after scouring the land in its path, would indeed have entered the oceans as “a great gush of freshwater” and provided the shock to the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation that kept global climate savagely cold for the next 1,200 years. The situation would have been worsened by the injection of dust and immense quantities of smoke into the upper atmosphere “blocking sunlight for an extended period of time,” which would, of course, have had the effect of lowering temperatures even further. Moreover: 

The impact event, followed by extensive fires and sudden climate change, likely contributed together to the rapid extinction of the megafauna and many other animals. 36 

The reader will recall that no less than thirty-five genera of North American mammals became extinct during the Younger Dryas. 37 We are therefore, by definition, looking for “an extinction mechanism that is capable of wiping out up to thirty-five genera across a continent in a geologic instant.” 38 Nor is it just North America that we must consider—for most of the diverse megafauna of South America that had flourished before the Younger Dryas also suffered extinction by 12,000 years ago, i.e, before the Younger Dryas came to an end. 39 

Could it have been “overkill” by human hunters? The question touches upon a contentious issue— namely when, in fact, and from where, did human beings first arrive in the Americas? Whatever the answer, it seems implausible that bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers would have been either motivated, or ruthlessly efficient enough, to wipe out so many animals, including giants like the Columbian mammoth, in so short a time across two continents. Moreover there is much to suggest that human beings in the Americas themselves entered a period of deep distress during the Younger Dryas that would have further reduced their motivation and efficiency. Archaeological evidence from South America is limited, but in North America, this was the time when the Clovis culture, with its sophisticated stone weapons technology, abruptly vanished from the record. Indeed, all available indicators point to “a significant decline and/or reorganization in human population during the early centuries of the Younger Dryas.” 40 

Once again, therefore, the only explanation that makes complete sense of the evidence is the comet-impact hypothesis of Firestone, Kennett, West and their large group of colleagues and coauthors. In the light of their findings, which we have reviewed extensively in the preceding chapters, I propose the following: 

1 There was indeed cataclysmic flooding in North America at the end of the Ice Age. 

2 It was not primarily caused by outburst floods from glacial lakes but rather by the rapid, almost instantaneous, meltdown of a large area of the ice cap. 

3 The heat source needed to initiate this meltdown came from the kinetic energy of a series of impacts from fragments of a giant comet that entered the earth’s atmosphere over North America 12,800 years ago and bombarded the North American ice cap. 

4 North America, while being the epicenter of the disaster, was by no means the only region hit. Other fragments of the disintegrating comet, including some particularly large objects, appear to have smashed into the European ice cap. In this connection it may be of relevance that recent high-resolution sonar scans of the English Channel, the floor of which was above water during the Ice Age, have revealed evidence of cataclysmic flooding there in the form of a 400-kilometer-long network of submerged and partially infilled valleys carved into the bedrock. “The data show a collection of landforms that, taken together, indicate a catastrophic flood origin,” state the authors of a study published in Nature. The study specifically likens these now submerged landforms to “the Cheney–Palouse terrain of the Channeled Scabland of Washington, USA.” The authors state that they “cannot resolve the absolute timing of the flooding events.” They do conclude, however, that their study “provides the first direct evidence that a megaflood event was responsible for carving the English Channel valley network. Our observations are consistent with erosion by high magnitude flows, as in the Channeled Scabland.” 41 

5 Altogether more than 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface were affected by impacts and airbursts of fragments of the Younger Dryas comet, some large, some smaller, but all devastating in their effects, extending from North America, right across the Atlantic Ocean and across Europe, with the final rain of fragments falling as far afield as the Middle East. 

6 The combined effect of these multiple impacts, particularly the immense freshwater floods into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans that followed, set off the Younger Dryas cooling event, itself a cataclysm on a truly global scale that resulted in the extinction of huge numbers of animal species and pressed humanity very hard. 

7 The human costs of the disaster might not have been confined to the complete destruction of hunter-gatherer cultures, such as the “Clovis” people of North America. The possibility must be considered that an advanced civilization, now lost to history, might also have been obliterated. 

Spring is coming 

What is particularly striking is that the very radical climate changes at both the onset and the termination of the Younger Dryas were global and were accomplished within the span of a human generation. 42 Again the comet-impact hypothesis makes the best sense of this. The estimated combined explosive force of the impacts at ten million megatons would have lofted sufficient ejecta into the atmosphere 12,800 years ago to plunge the earth into a long, sustained twilight, akin to a nuclear winter—the “time of darkness” that so many ancient myths speak of—capable of reducing solar radiation for more than 1,000 years. The dramatic warming that began 11,600 years ago would then be explained by the final dissipation of the ejecta cloud coupled with an end to the system-wide inertia that had beset thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic. 43 

Another possibility, not necessarily mutually contradictory with any of the above mechanisms, is that 11,600 years ago the earth interacted again with the debris stream of the same fragmenting comet that had caused the Younger Dryas to start 12,800 years ago. On the second occasion, however, analysis suggests that the primary impacts were not on land or onto ice but into the world’s oceans, throwing up vast plumes of water vapor and creating a “greenhouse effect” that caused global warming rather than global cooling. 44 

According to renowned British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle: 

The difference between a warm ocean and a cold one amounts to a 10-year supply of sunlight. Thus the warm conditions produced by a strong water vapor greenhouse must be maintained for at least a decade in order to produce the required transformation of the ocean, and this is just about the time for which water, suddenly thrown into the stratosphere, might be expected to persist there. The needed amount of water is so vast, 100 million million tons, that only one kind of causative event seems possible, the infall of a comet-sized object into a major ocean. 45 

More research certainly needs to be done to establish the exact mechanisms, in all their complexity, that brought about the sudden end of the Younger Dryas, but the effects on global climate are already well understood. The Greenland ice cores, those invaluable windows into the past, tell us that: 

temperatures rose in less than a decade at the climate transition marking the end of the Younger Dryas cold interval and the beginning of the warmer Holocene epoch at 11,600 years before the present. 46 In less than 20 years, the climate in the North Atlantic region turned into a milder and less stormy regime, as a consequence of a rapid retreat of sea-ice cover. A warming of 7 degrees centigrade was completed in about 50 years. 47 

In exactly the same interval, in the subalpine belt of Western Europe, tree species that had never been present before, including Laris, Pinus cembra and Betula, suddenly began to proliferate. 48 

In Northwestern Montana, in the USA, glacial ice in Marias Pass had receded upvalley from the canyon mouth and the Sun River Glacier had completely vanished by 11,200 years ago. 49 

A thousand other examples could be cited, but the message is the same everywhere—from Tasmania to the Andes, from Turkey to Japan, from North America to Australia, from Peru to Egypt, winter had ended and a great global spring had begun. “Such is the rebirth of the Cosmos,” as the Hermetic Texts proclaim. “It is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-inspiring restoration of all nature…” 50 

A rebirth? 

A making again? 

A restoration? 

But of what? Who went before? What exactly was to be reborn? 

We will consider these questions in the following chapters.

next

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/part-4-magicians-of-godsthe-fire-next.html

The Fire Next Time 100s

notes

Chapter 5 

1. Keenan Lee, “Catastrophic Flood Features at Camas Prairie, Montana,” Department of Geology and Geological Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, 2009, pp. 4 and 5. 

2. Ibid., p. 5. 

3. Charles R. Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP,” The Journal of Geology, Vol. 122, No. 5 (September 2014), pp. 475–505. 

4. See for example, http://phys.org/news/2014-08-year-old-nanodiamonds-multiple-continents.html, and “Wittke et al, Nanodiamonds and Carbon Spherules from Tunguska, the K/T Boundary, and the Younger Dryas Boundary Layer,” paper presented at the American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting, 2009 (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AGUFMPP31D1392W). 

5. Heather Pringle, New Scientist, 22 May 2007: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11909-did-a-comet-wipe-out-prehistoricamericans.html#.VJqZ88AgA. 

6. Ibid. 

7. Ibid. 

8. Ibid. 

9. Ibid. 

10. Ibid. 

11. R.B. Firestone, A. West, J.P. Kennett et al, “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling,” PNAS, Vol. 104, No. 41, 9 October 2007, p. 16016. 

12. Ibid., p. 16016. 

13. Ibid., p. 16020. 

14. The parallel is Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which broke up into multiple fragments that hit the planet Jupiter with spectacular effect in 1994. 

15. R.B. Firestone, A. West, J.P. Kennett, et al, “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling,” op. cit, p. 16020. 

16. Ibid., p. 16020. 

17. Ibid. 

18. Ibid. 

19. Ibid., p. 16020–1. 

20. Ibid., p. 16021. 

21. Ibid., p. 16020. 

22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba. 

23. http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm. 

24. D.J. Kennett, J.P. Kennett, G.J. West, J.M. Erlandson et al, in Quaternary Science Reviews, Vol. 27, Issues 27–28, December 2008, pp. 2530–45. 

25. Douglas J. Kennett, James P. Kennett, Allen West, James H. Wittke, Wendy S. Wolback et al, in PNAS, 4 August 2009, Vol. 106, No. 31, pp. 12623–8. 

26. Andrei Kurbatov, Paul A. Mayewski, Jorgen P. Steffenson et al, in Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 56, No. 199, 2010, pp. 749–59. 

27. W.M. Napier in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 405, Issue 3, 1 July 2010, pp. 1901–6. The complete paper can be read online here: http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/405/3/1901.full.pdf+html?sid=19fd6cae-61a0-45bd-827b9f4eb877fd39, and downloaded as a pdf here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003:0744.pdf. 

28. William C. Mahaney, David Krinsley, Volli Kalm in Sedimentary Geology 231 (2010), pp. 31–40. 

29. Mostafa Fayek, Lawrence M. Anovitz et al, in Earth and Planetary Science Letters 319–20, accepted 22 November 2011, available online 21 January 2012, pp. 251–8. 

30. Isabel Israde-Alcantara, James L. Bischoff, Gabriela Dominguez-Vasquez et al, in PNAS, 27 March 2012, Vol. 109, No. 13, pp. E738–47. 

31. Ted E. Bunch, Robert E. Hermes, Andrew T. Moore et al, in PNAS, June 2012, Vol. 109, No. 28, pp. E1903–12. 

32. Michail I. Petaev, Shichun Huang, Stein B. Jacobsen and Alan Zindler, in PNAS, 6 Aug 2013, Vol. 110, No. 32, pp. 12917–20. 

33. William C. Mahaney, Leslie Keiser, David Krinsley et al, in The Journal of Geology, Vol. 121, No. 4 (July 2013), pp. 309–25. 

34. Charles R. Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP,” op. cit., p. 475. 

35. Boslough, Daulton, Pinter et al, “Arguments and Evidence against a Younger Dryas Impact Event,” Climates, Landscapes and Civilizations, Geophysical Monograph Series 198, American Geophysical Union, 2012, p. 21. 

36. Nicholas Pinter, Andrew Scott, Tyrone Daulton et al, “The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: A Requiem,” Earth-Science Reviews, Vol. 106, Issues 3–4, June 2011, pp. 247–64. 

37. Boslough, Daulton, Pinter et al, “Arguments and Evidence against a Younger Dryas Impact Event,” p. 21. 

38. James H. Wittke, James P. Kennett, Allen West, Richard Firestone et al, “Evidence for Deposition of 10 million tons of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 years ago,” PNAS, 4 June 2013, p. 2089. 

39. Ibid., p. 2089. 

40. Malcolm A. Le Compte, Albert C. Goodyear et al, “Independent Evaluation of Conflicting Microspherule Results from Different Investigations of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis,” PNAS, 30 October 2012, Vol. 109, No. 44, pp. E2960–9. 

41. Ibid., pp. E2960 and E2969. 

42. James H. Wittke, James P. Kennett, Allen West, Richard Firestone et al, “Evidence for Deposition of 10 million tons of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 years ago,” op. cit., p. 2089. 

43. Ibid., p. 2089. 

44. Ibid., p. 2088–9. 

45. Ibid., p. 2096. 

46. Ibid. 

47. Cited in Robert Kunzig, “Did a Comet Really Kill the Mammoths 12,900 years ago?” National Geographic, 10 September 2013 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130910-comet-impact-mammoths-climate-younger-dryas-quebec-science/). 

48. Ibid. 

49. Ibid. 

50. Cosmic Tusk, “In desperate hole, Pinter grabs a shovel”: http://cosmictusk.com/nicholas-pinter-southern-illinois/comment-page-2/. 

51. P. Thy, G. Willcox, G.H. Barfod, D.Q. Fuller, “Anthropogenic origin of siliceous scoria droplets from Pleistocene and Holocene archaeologicalsites in northern Syria,” Journal of Archaeological Science, 54 (2015), pp. 193–209. 

52. Ibid., p. 193. 

53. “Study casts doubt on Mammoth-Killing Cosmic Impact,” UC Davis News and Information, 6 January 2015: http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=11117. 

54. Personal correspondence between Graham Hancock and Allen West. Email West to Hancock dated 18 March 2015. 

55. Charles R. Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP,” op. cit. 

56. Ibid. See in particular pp. 477–8. 

57. Cited in Robert Kunzig, “Did a Comet Really Kill the Mammoths 12,900 years ago?,” National Geographic, 10 September 2013, op. cit. 

58. E.g. see Mark Boslough et al, “Faulty Protocols Yield Contaminated Samples, Unconfirmed Results,” PNAS, Vol. 110, No. 18, 30 April 2013, and response in the same issue by Malcolm A. LeCompte et al, “Reply to Boslough: Prior studies validating research are ignored.” See also Annelies van Hoesel et al, “Cosmic Impact or natural fires at the Allerod–Younger Dryas Bounday: A Matter of Dating and Calibration,” PNAS, Vol. 110, No. 41, 8 October 2013, and response in the same issue by James H. Wittke et al, “Reply to van Hoesel et al: Impact related Younger Dryas Boundary Nanodiamonds from The Netherlands.” See also David L. Meltzer et al, “Chronological evidence fails to support claim on an isochronous widespread layer of cosmic impact indicators dated to 12,800 years ago,” in PNAS, 12 May 2014. I am informed by Allen West (email from Allen West to Graham Hancock, dated 18 March 2015) that a response paper to Meltzer et al is under preparation by 27 co-authors, is provisionally entitled “Bayesian chronological analyses consistent with synchronous age of 12,820–12,740 cal BP for Younger Dryas Boundary on Four Continents” and will be submitted shortly. In the same email West notes that there is one point to add about the dating that is already in print (at 18 March 2015): “In the YDB layer, we have found high-temperature proxies, including nanodiamonds, one of a group of proxies that are found in all impact events. The evidence is widespread—our YDB sites extend across more than a dozen countries on four continents (N. America, S. America, Europe, and Asia). In two papers, Wittke et al and Kinzie et al reported about a dozen high-resolution radiocarbon dates, averaging 12,800 ± 100 calendar years ago for the YDB layer. This means that, statistically, the YDB layer at all those sites could have been deposited on the same day—it doesn’t prove it did, but shows it is possible. Yet, even though those dates were directly on the YDB layer and are statistically identical, Meltzer et al rejected them as not being the same. Such a rejection is simply indefensible.” 

59. Charles R. Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents,” op. cit., p. 501. 

60. Cited by Jim Barlow-Oregon, in “Did Exploding Comet Leave Trail of Nanodiamonds?” Futurity: Research News from Top Universities: http://www.futurity.org/comet-nanodiamonds-climate-change-755662/. See also Charles R. Kinzie et al, “NanodiamondRich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP,” op. cit., p. 476. 

61. Quoted in Julie Cohen, “Nanodiamonds Are Forever: A UCSB professor’s research examines 13,000-year-old nanodiamonds from multiple locations across three continents,” The Current, UC Santa Barbara, 28 August 2014 (http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014368/nanodiamonds-are-forever). 

62. Charles R. Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP,” op. cit., pp. 498–9. 

63. Quoted in Julie Cohen, “Nanodiamonds Are Forever: A UCSB professor’s research examines 13,000-year-old nanodiamonds from multiple locations across three continents,” op. cit. 

64. Ibid. 

Chapter 6 

1. Troy Holcombe, John Warren et al, “Small Rimmed Depression in Lake Ontario: An Impact Crater?,” Journal of the Great Lakes Research, 27 (4), 2001, pp. 510–17. 

2. Ian Spooner, George Stevens et al, “Identification of the Bloody Creek Structure, a possible impact crater in southwestern Nova Scotia, Canada,” Meteoritics and Planetary Science 44, No. 8 (2009), pp. 1193–1202. 

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corossol_crater. 

4. Higgins M.D., Lajeunesse P. et al, “Bathymetric and Petrological Evidence for a Young (Pleistocene?) 4-km Diameter Impact Crater in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada,” 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held 7–11 March 2011 at The Woodlands, Texas. LPI Contribution No. 1608, p. 1504. 

5. Charles R. Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP,” The Journal of Geology, Vol. 122, No. 5 (September 2014), op. cit., p. 475. 

6. Yingzhe Wu, Mukul Sharma et al, “Origin and provenance of spherules and magnetic grains at the Younger Dryas boundary,” PNAS, 17 September 2013, p. E3557. Available to read online here: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/38/E3557.full.pdf+html. 

7. Mukul Sharma cited in Becky Oskin, “Did ancient Earth-chilling meteor crash near Canada?,” http://www.livescience.com/39362- younger-dryas-meteor-quebec.html. 

8. See for example W.C. Mahaney, V. Kalm et al, “Evidence from the Northwestern Venezuelan Andes for extraterrestrial impact: The Black Mat Enigma, Geomorphology 116 (2010), p. 54. 

9. John Shaw, Mandy Munro-Stasiuk et al, “The Channeled Scabland: Back to Bretz,” Geology, July 1999, Vol. 27, No. 7, pp. 605–8. E.g. p. 605: “We present evidence that suggests that only one major late Wisconsin flood is recorded in the sedimentary record, and that sedimentation within the Glacial Lake Missoula basin was independent of sedimentation in the channeled scabland.” For further discussion and elaboration of the implications of Professor Shaw’s work, and of the key evidence he presents, see Graham Hancock, Underworld, op. cit., Chapter Three. 

10. G. Komatsu, H. Miyamoto et al, “The Channeled Scabland: Back to Bretz?”: Comment and Reply, Geology, June 2000, Vol. 28, pp. 573–4. 

11. Jim E. O’Connor and Victor R. Baker, “Magnitudes and implications of peak discharges from Glacial Lake Missoula,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 1992, 104, No. 3, p. 278. 

12. US Geological Survey, “The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington,” section on Lake Missoula: http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/geology/publications/inf/72-2/sec3.htm. 

13. C. Warren Hunt, “Inundation Topography of the Columbia River System,” Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 472. 

14. See Fiona Tweed, Andrew Russell, “Controls on the formation and sudden drainage of glacier-impounded lakes: implications for jökulhlaup characteristics,” Progress in Physical Geography, March 1999, Vol. 23, No. 1, p. 91. Reservations about the integrity of an ice dam more than 2,000 miles long and seven miles high are also expressed by Consulting Engineering Geologist Peter James in “The Massive Missoula Floods: An Alternative Rationale,” New Concepts in Global Tectonics Newsletter, No. 48, September 2008, pp. 5–23. 

15. C. Warren Hunt, “Inundation Topography of the Columbia River System,” Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, op. cit., p. 468 and p. 472. 

16. Ibid., p. 473. 

17. Ibid. 

18. Ibid., and see also C. Warren Hunt, “Catastrophic Termination of the Last Wisconsin Ice Advance: Observations in Alberta and Idaho, Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 456–67. Peter James, in “The Massive Missoula Floods,” op. cit, also invokes massive incursions of seawater, in his case linked to putative polar wandering. See, for example, p. 17. 

19. C. Warren Hunt, Environment of Violence: Readings of Cataclysm Cast in Stone, Polar Publishing, Alberta, 1990, p. 137. 

20. Ibid., pp. 118–19. 

21. Ibid., p. 119. 

22. Ibid. 

23. Ibid. 

24. Ibid., pp. 119–20. 

25. Ibid., p. 120. 

26. Firestone, West, Kennett et al, “Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas Cooling,” op. cit., p. 16020. 

27. Henry T. Mullins and Edward T. Hinchley, “Erosion and Infill of New York Finger Lakes: Implications for Laurentide Ice Sheet Deglaciation,” Geology, Vol. 17, Issue 7, July 1989, pp. 622–5. 

28. Julian B. Murton, Mark D. Bateman et al, “Identification of Younger Dryas outburst flood path from Lake Agassiz to the Arctic Ocean,” Nature 464 (7289), April 2010, p. 740. 

29. Alan Condron and Peter Winsor, “Meltwater Routing and the Younger Dryas,” PNAS, 4 December 2012, Vol. 109, No. 49, p. 19930. 

30. James T. Teller, “Importance of Freshwater Injections into the Arctic Ocean in triggering the Younger Dryas Cooling,” PNAS, Vol. 109, No. 49, 4 December 2012, p. 19880. See also Claude Hillaire-Marcel, Jenny Maccali et al, “Geochemical and isotopic tracers of Arctic sea ice sources and export with special attention to the Younger Dryas interval,” Quaternary Science Reviews (2013), p. 6. 

31. S.J. Fiedel, “The mysterious onset of the Younger Dryas,” Quaternary International 242 (2011), p. 263. 

32. Andreas Schmittner, John C.H. Chiang and Sydney R. Hemming, “Introduction: The Ocean’s Meridional Overturning Circulation,” in Andreas Schmittner et al, Ocean Circulation: Mechanisms and Impacts—Past and Future Changes of Meridional Overturning, Geophysical Monograph Series 173, 2007, p. 1 (published online 19 March 2013). 

33. Ibid. 

34. S.J. Fiedel, “The mysterious onset of the Younger Dryas,” op. cit., p. 264. 

35. R.B. Firestone, A. West, Z. Revay et al, “Analysis of the Younger Dryas Impact Layer,” Journal of Siberian Federal University, Engineering and Technologies, Vol. 3 (1), 2010, pp. 30–62 (page 23 of pdf: http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/1023385/). 

36. Ibid. 

37. J. Tyler Faith and Todd A. Surovell, “Synchronous extinction of North America’s Pleistocene mammals,” PNAS, Vol. 106, No. 49, 8 December 2009, p. 20641. The last appearance dates of 16n of the 35 genera fallsecurely between 13,800 and 11,400 years ago— i.e. clustered very closely around the Younger Dryas. “Analysis of the chronology of extinctions suggests that sampling error can explain the absence of terminal Pleistocene last appearance dates for the remaining nineteen genera.” In other words the extinction of North American Pleistocene mammals is “a synchronous event.” 

38. Ibid., p. 20641. 

39. S.J. Fiedel, “The mysterious onset of the Younger Dryas,” op. cit., p. 264. 

40. D.G. Anderson, A.C. Goodyear, J. Kennett, A. West, “Multiple Lines of Evidence for a possible Human Population Decline during the Early Younger Dryas,” Quaternary International, Vol. 242, Issue 2, 15 October 2011, pp. 570–83. 

41. Sanjeev Gupta, Jenny S. Collier, Andy Palmer-Felgate, Graham Potter, “Catastrophic Flooding Origin of the Shelf Valley Systems in the English Channel.” Nature, Vol. 448, 19 July 2007, pp. 342–5. 

42. Don J. Easterbrook, John Gosse et al, “Evidence for Synchronous Global Climatic Events: Cosmogenic Exposure Ages of Glaciations,” in Don Easterbrook, Evidence-Based Climatic Science, Elsevier, August 2011, Chapter 2, p. 54. 

43. For further discussion of these possibilities, see W.C. Mahaney, V. Kalm et al, “Evidence from the Northwestern Venezuelan Andes for extraterrestrial impact,” op. cit, p. 54, and William C. Mahaney, Leslie Keiser et al, “New Evidence from a Black Mat site in the Northern Andes Supporting a Cosmic Impact 12,800 Years Ago,” The Journal of Geology, Vol. 121, No. 4 (July 2013) p. 317. 

44. See in particular, Sir Fred Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion, Moyer Bell, Wakefield Rhode Island and London, 1993, pp. 28–9. See also Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe, Life on Mars? The Case for a Cosmic Heritage?, Clinical Press Ltd., Bristol, 1997, pp. 176–7. 

45. Sir Fred Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion, op. cit., p. 29. 

46. Jeffrey P. Severinghaus et al, “Timing of abrupt climate change at the end of the Younger Dryas interval from thermally fractionated gases in polar ice,” Nature, Vol. 391, 8 January 1998, p. 141. 

47. W. Dansgaard et al, “The Abrupt Termination of the Younger Dryas Event,” Nature, Vol. 339, 15 June 1989, p. 532. 

48. Oliver Blarquez et al, “Trees in the subalpine belt since 11,700 cal BP, origin, expansion and alteration of the modern forest,” The Holocene (2009), p. 143. 

49. Paul E. Carrara et al, “Deglaciation of the Mountainous Region of Northwestern Montana, USA, as Indicated by Late Pleistocene Ashes,” Arctic and Alpine Research, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1986, p. 317. 

50. Sir Walter Scott (Ed. and Trans.), Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin writings which contain Religious of Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, Shambhala, Boston 1993, Asclepius III, pp. 345–7.

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