[meteorite-list] Part2: Professor Rejects Meteor Theory of Carolina Bays' Origin

[Paul]

Susan Web wrote:

“Their key mysterious features are their 
number (half a million of them), their 
regularity of form, their common 
orientation, their extreme shallowness, 
their low rim heights.”

Their “common orientation” is not as consistent as the 
proponents of an impact origin falsely claim them to be.
In the southern and northern ends of their distribution,
the long axis of Carolina Bays actually show a wide 
range of orientations, which fails to support either an
air-burst or impact origin. Within the middle range of
their distribution, the orientation of the Carolina Bays
are consistent with Pleistocene paleowind directions as
determined from ancient dune fields, loess distribution
patterns, and paleoclimate models. I would find it quite 
remarkable that either a meteorite or comet would take 
the time and trouble to plan its impact as to perfectly 
coincide with the prevailing winds at the time it hit like 
an airplane landing at an airport. The wide spread of 
orientations at the northern and southern ends of their 
distributions is also consistent with what is known about 
the variability of Pleistocene paleowind patterns over 
time.

Another and major problem, which the proponents of either
an impact or air-burst origin is that the shape, orientation, 
and depth of the Carolina Bays have been altered by over 
a 100,000 years of modification by eolian and lacustrine 
processes. For example, Ivester et al. (2003) found that 
the multiple sand rims found within Big  Bay in South 
Carolina become progressively younger towards the center 
of this Carolina  Bay. In this case, Optically Stimulated 
Luminescence (OSL) dates from sand rims starting from 
the outer rim to the inner rim produced a perfectly 
chronologically consistent set dates of 35,660±2600; 
25,210±1900; 11,160±900; and 2,150±300 years BP. In 
this case, the Big Bay has shrunk by 1.6 km over the last 
36,000 years, with rims being produced about 36,000 BP, 
25,000 BP, 11,000 BP, and 2,000 BP as it shrunk. If a 
person wants to argue that these sand rims are of impact or 
air-burst origin, they need to explain how either impacts or 
air-bursts managed to precisely excavate tens of thousand 
of years apart sucessive craters in precise center of Big Bay 
and similar Carolina Bays and with ever decreasing energy 
as to produce sand rims of smaller and smaller diameter, 
which are nicely nested within each other.

Their nothing mysterious about these rims as (Ivester et al. 
2004a) studied the sedimentology and stratigraphy of these 
rims and found them to be “composed of both shoreface 
and eolian deposits". Eolian and lacustrine processes are 
perfectly capable of producing the low rims processes by 
Carolina Bays. The low rims can be easily explained by a
combination of eolian and lacustrine processes.

As a result of the OSL dating of the rims of numerous Carolina 
Bays, Ivester et al (2004b) concluded:

"The optical dating results indicate that 
present-day bay morphology is not the 
result of a single event, catastrophic 
formation, but rather they have evolved 
through multiple phases of activity and 
inactivity over tens of thousands of years. 
This is evidenced both by multiple rims 
of differing ages along the same bay, and 
by multiple ages within single rims."

Because the Carolina Bays have been modified for over a
100,000 years by both eolian and lacustine processes, their 
form, orientation, shallowness, and sand rims are useless as
evidence of how they were originally created.

References Cited:

Ivester, A.H., Godfrey-Smith, D. I., Brooks, M. J., and 
Taylor, B. E., 2003, Concentric sand rims document the 
evolution of a Carolina bay in the Middle Coastal Plain 
of South Carolina. Geological Society of America 
Abstracts with Programs. vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 169.

Ivester, A. H., Godfrey-Smith, D. I., Brooks, M. J., and 
Taylor B. E., 2004a, The timing of Carolina Bay and 
inland activity on the Atlantic coastal plain of Georgia 
and South Carolina. Geological Society of America 
Abstracts with Programs. vol. 36, no. 5, p. 69

Ivester, A. H., Godfrey-Smith, D. I., Brooks, M. J., and 
Taylor B. E., 2004b, Chronology of Carolina bay sand 
rims and inland dunes on the Atlantic Coastal Plain, USA. 
The 3rd New World Luminescence Dating Workshop. July 
4 - 7, 2004, Department of Earth Science, Dalhousie 
University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Mrs. Webb also wrote:

“It is also worth noting that all the 
geological theories of their origins 
are based on the erroneous notion 
that the Carolina Bays are all to be 
found in only one type of geological 
terrain, the coastal plains. But they 
have since been found in other terrain 
types, which effectively rules out 
most of the prior geological theories 
(except for those fish fins, of course).”

Unfortunately, the only “erroneous notion” here is the 
pervasive Internet folklore about Carolina Bays having 
been found on a variety of geologic terrains. The fact 
of the matter is that Carolina Bays are **not** found in 
a diverse assortment geologic terrains. The Internet 
fiction about Carolina Bays being found in a wide range 
of geologic terrains was soundly refuted by the detailed 
analysis, which May and Warme (1999) did of Carolina 
Bays, including those found within the coastal plains of 
Mississippi and Alabama. They found that these bays 
are restricted to deeply weathered, very low relief, and 
very poorly drained, geomorphic surfaces. 

Reference Cited:

May, James H., and Warne, Andrews G., 1999, Hydrogeologic 
and Chemical Factors Required for the Development of 
Carolina Bays Along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico Coastal 
Plain, USA. Environmental Engineering and Geoscience. 
vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 261-270.

The abstract for May and Warme (1999) can be found at:

http://eeg.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/261

Best,

Paul


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