[meteorite-list] some choice informed creative responses from 138 re wattsupwiththat.com blog article New evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the start of the Younger Dryas: Rich Murray 2012.03.13

[Rich Murray]

some choice informed creative comments from 138 re wattsupwiththat.com
blog article  New evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the
start of the Younger Dryas: Rich Murray 2012.03.13

really nice to see so much friendly, cooperative sharing of ideas and evidence !


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/12/new-evidence-supporting-extraterrestrial-impact-in-younger-dryas/#comment-921464

New evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the start of the
Younger Dryas
Posted on March 12, 2012 by Anthony Watts
138 Responses


Lars Silen says:
March 12, 2012 at 4:57 am

The big problem so far has been where to find some reasonably big
crater(s) that are young enough.
My feeling is that easily identifiable craters are missing because the
impact area was covered by some kilometer of ice.
The result would be seemingly very old craters the result of a billion
years of weathering because the typical thick layers of ejecta are
missing.
I think two areas in SW finland should be checked. Mossala fjaerd is a
crater like formation where broken edges still are sharp, experts say
the crater is of volcanic origin and extremely old.
My view is that what we see is the very bottom of an impact in a 1…2
km thick ice layer.
No ejecta is found because it melted soon after the impact.
The size of the Mossala crater is ca 6 km diameter.
In the Aland area some 40 km towards WNW there is another slightly
smaller crater 5.5 km in diameter.
Again with broken surfaces that still seem fresh.
Some 15 km south of Mossala I have found glazed sea bottom fragments
similar to material found in the old Swedish Siljan krater (dia 50
km).
If there is interest I could create a web page with some pictures.
It is easy to see that two impacts like these would have injected tens
of km^3 of water into the stratospere probably causing an extended
“atomic war” like winter. /Lars Silen, physicist Finland.


Mike McMillan says:
March 12, 2012 at 6:54 am

Lars Silen

Interesting region. You guys took some heavy hits.
Here are a few Google Earth coords:
Mossala 60.299612°  21.382232°
Angskars 60.471579°  21.016164°
Aland 60.140649°  20.124260°
Siljan 61.046054°  14.899703°

Might have to unzoom a bit to see the crater, especially Siljan and Aland.


Lars Silen says:
March 12, 2012 at 1:10 pm

Re feet2thefire and George Tetley:

I made a new web page in English of the Mossala and Ava craters in
archipelago in SW Finland.

http://www.kolumbus.fi/larsil/Mossala_and_Ava_craters.html

Notice that I don’t know what the origin of these formations are, I
think they are fairly recent but obviously I may be wrong.
Comments and possible pointers to articles are very welcome.
The web page also gives a feeling for what Finnish (Arctic) summer looks like.
We live north of 60 deg N!.
/Lars Silen, physicist Finland.



beng says:
March 12, 2012 at 7:10 am

The only two major observed impacts in recorded history are the
Tunguska, Siberia event & the Shumacher-Levy comet impact on Jupiter.
The first was an air-burst of a supposed chondrite meteor, the second
a tidally-broken comet-train, producing a “string” of impacts. From
this it is hard to imagine that such impact characteristics are
unusual -- much more likely they are common.

Simple postulate: Approximately 12,900 yrs ago a comet-train impact
produced shallowly-angled air-burst(s) with multiple in-line impacts
-- in this case stretching from central Mexico north north-east (west
Texas has evidence too) to near, say, ~500 miles north of Lake
Superior directly above, or on the 10,000 ft thick Laurentide
ice-sheet . Terratons of ice were vaporized, or on the edges,
physically blasted onto the surrounding land and into sub-orbital
trajectories. How that would affect areas when it inevitably came back
down is hard to imagine -- but it would be awesome & incredibly
destructive.

The climate change that would occur after this event would also be
hard to imagine, but yet perhaps we have the evidence right in front
-- the YD.



Dennis Cox says:
March 12, 2012 at 9:14 am

Regarding the search for a crater:

In the original 2007 paper titled Evidence for an extraterrestrial
impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions
and the Younger Dryas cooling R.B. Firestone et al proposed that a 4
mile wide bolide had broken up in the atmosphere and that most of it
had hit the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

They cited some unpublished data from experiments by Peter Schultz
from Brown U. And where he had done hypervelocity impact experiments
at the NASA Ames Hypervelocity Vertical Gun Range simulating a low
angle hyper velocity impact into ice. Those experiment showed that a
half mile wide bolide coming in at an oblique angle can hit a half
mile thick sheet of ice and leave no crater in the surface beneath
after the ice melts away. Just randomized patterns of surface melting.
Those experiments imply that if there is relevant planetary scarring
from the event anywhere in the Canadian Shield, instead of the shock
metamorphic effects like we see in a normal cratering event. The
remaining scars will consists of hydrothermal blast effects. So those
scars should consist of rocks that were melted under conditions of
extreme heat, and pressure. And in the presence of a lot of water.

My thinking is that if it is possible to get a valid age since melt
from any suspect melt formations, and since the youngest volcanogenic
rocks in the Canadian shield are some dyke formations that are
something like a million years old. Then it should eventually be
possible to confirm planetary scarring somewhere in the area that was
once covered by the Laurentide ice sheet. And whatever that place
looks like now, it won’t be a crater.

The trouble though, is that the nanodiamond bearing impact layer is
found all over North America, and even the rest of the northern
hemisphere.

But that 4 mile wide bolide idea is what got them in trouble. Enter
Mark Boslough, a physicist from Sandia Labs who objected to the
hypothesis as written saying that it would be physically impossible
for a four mile wide bolide to have enough time in the atmosphere to
break up completely, and scatter fragments over a continent sized area
without leaving a good sized crater somewhere. And that’s why “where’s
the crater became the rallying cry for opponents to the hypothesis.

But this new paper answers Mark’s very valid skepticism by citing the
work of  astronomer W.M. Napier and his paper titled Palaeolithic
extinctions and the Taurid Complex Bill Napier’s work show that the
thing was probably the fragments and debris from a large comet that
hit soon after its complete breakup. The new evidence from Mexico
implies that the southwest was a impact zone too. And that almost all
of it produced large aerial bursts. Hence, there is no reason to think
we’ll find a crater anywhere in the southwest either.

Perhaps something different.

The materials in the impact layer describe temps, and pressures, at
the surface that should have been capable of significant melting and
efficient ablation of surface materials. But that brings us to a
paradox in the search for relevant planetary scarring for the event.

Ever since Sir Charles Lyell published ‘The Principles of Geology’
back in the 1830s it has been assumed without question under the
standard uniformitarian/gradualist paradigm that the only conceivable
source of enough heat to melt the surface of the Earth is terrestrial
volcanism. And with the exception of a cratering impact event, no one
has ever imagined that such energies could come from the sky. So that
if there are formations of geo-ablative melt in the southwest impact
zones of the YD event, we can assume that they have already been
located. But they are listed on the geologic maps as volcanogenic.

Folks might note that north of lake Cuitzeo, and extending all the way
up into southwest Texas there are a few hundred thousand cubic miles
of materials lying undisturbed, and in pristine condition in the
Chihuahuan desert that were all emplaced as a fluidized flow like a
pyroclastic flow. And less than 15% has ever been positively
associated with a volcano.

And in high resolution satellite images those orphan pyroclastic
materials present wind-driven patterns of movement, and flow. Like the
debris laden froth, and foam on a storm tossed beach.



Larry Ledwick (hotrod) says:
March 12, 2012 at 9:57 am

Pamela Gray says:
March 12, 2012 at 6:36 am

Certainly the dust alone cannot account for the length of the cold
spell. However, the kicked up dust could account for the first couple
years. Still, dust rains out pretty easily, which could happen as a
result of the dust getting kicked up there in the first place. We call
it cloudless rain here in NE Oregon.

It is possible that the event could have overlapped with another
oscillation that was unrelated. We have so many oscillations on
different beats, it seems plausable that they will overlap. Looking
for one cause over such a long period seems a bit short sighted.


Pamela, your observation has an unspoken assumption that the ejecta
dust (or most of it) stayed in the atmosphere or went outside the
atmosphere and then promptly re-entered.

What of the possibility that a significant fraction of the ejecta went
outside the atmosphere and then entered low earth orbit, forming a
dust shell around the planet, that might persist for several hundred
years?

Due to mutual collisions the ejecta material constantly renewing
itself with ever finer and longer lasting small dust, which perhaps
had higher optical thickness than the original.

That would create a situation where the initial impact and atmospheric
dust load caused a prompt cooling, followed by a long period of
diminished top of the atmospheric solar intensity lasting hundreds of
years, which would help maintain the long term cooling for on the
order of 1000 years.

The very fine dust that would remain in orbit would, as I understand
it, gradually change from a uniform shell to a disk and unless some
mechanism existed to constantly renew its mass would eventually go
away as solar wind and the tenuous layers of the upper atmosphere
gradually cleaned out the lowest dust.

Once the orbital dust pall converted to a disk it would not have much
effect on solar intensity at the top of the atmosphere. (at some
angles to the sun it could even act as a reflector increasing solar
intensity on the top of the atmosphere).

Do we have any evidence of a vestigial ring system of dust around the earth?

Is it likely that enough dust ejecta would go into low earth orbit
with orbital decay times in the multi-century time range?

Larry



feet2thefire says:
March 12, 2012 at 10:14 am

@beng 7:10 am:

The only two major observed impacts in recorded history are the
Tunguska, Siberia event & the Shumacher-Levy comet impact on Jupiter.
The first was an air-burst of a supposed chondrite meteor, the second
a tidally-broken comet-train, producing a “string” of impacts.
>From this it is hard to imagine that such impact characteristics are
unusual -- much more likely they are common.


Google “Rio Carto” and pick out the hits having to do with impacts.
These are impact craters that are accepted as real (they are on the
international database as meteor impacts, though a vocal skeptical
group argues they are aeloian – wind – formed).
They are from multiple very-low-trajectory (under 15°) impactors, many
are miles long, and all are VERY long ellipses.
Most sources will refer to about ten craters, but there is a large
field to the SSW of hundreds upon hundreds of them, all with the
approximate long-axis azimuth of about 210°.

And the accepted date?

The Imperial College London at http://tiny.cc/sth2aw puts them at less
than 5,000 years ago.
With that one and Tunguska, astronomers who tell us big impacts only
happen every 100kya are stroking us.
Indigenous accounts suggest even more often than that. 536AD is a
possible impact year.

Steve Garcia



Hoser says:
March 12, 2012 at 10:32 am

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis
David Bressan on Monday, April 25, 2011

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis.html

A Catastrophe of Comets

http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/tag/younger-dryas-impact/
http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/the-planetary-scaring-of-the-younger-dryas-impact-event/california-melt/

It seems hard to argue with this info.



Myrrh says:
March 12, 2012 at 4:39 pm

Re floods and dust:
http://www.grahamkendall.net/Unsorted_files-2/A312-Frozen_Mammoths.txt

There’s a lot of muck in this. If what’s being said here about
quick-frozen not cold-adapted mamoths and tropical forests is
indicative of the conditions which prevailed at the onset of the
Younger Dryas then the event was cataclysmic on a world greatly hotter
than we are in now, that perhaps would still be this if the Younger
Dryas hadn’t happened:

“Second, the well-preserved mammoths and rhinoceroses must have
been completely frozen soon after death or their soft, internal
parts would have quickly decomposed. Guthrie has observed that “an
unopened animal continues to decompose after a fresh kill, even at
very cold temperatures, because the thermal inertia of its body is
sufficient to sustain microbial and enzyme activity as long as the
carcass is completely covered with an insulating pelt and the
torso remains intact.”44 Since mammoths had such large reservoirs
of heat, the freezing temperatures must have been extremely low.

Finally, their bodies were buried and protected from predators,
including birds and insects. But burial could not have occurred if
the ground were frozen as it is today. Again, this implies a major
climate change, but now we can see that it must have changed
suddenly. How were these huge animals quickly frozen and
buriedãalmost exclusively in muck, a dark soil containing
decomposed animal and vegetable matter?

Muck. Muck is a major geological mystery. It covers one-seventh of
the earth’s land surfaceãall surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Muck
occupies treeless, generally flat terrain, with no surrounding
mountains from which the muck could have eroded. Russian
geologists have in some places drilled through 4,000 feet of muck
without hitting solid rock. Where did so much eroded material come
from?

Oil prospectors, drilling through Alaskan muck, have “brought up
an 18-inch long chunk of tree trunk from almost 1,000 feet below
the surface. It wasn’t petrifiedãjust frozen.”45 The nearest
forests are hundreds of miles away. Elsewhere, Williams describes
similar discoveries in Alaska:

Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface
at Prudhoe Bay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this
area they discovered an ancient tropical forest. It was in frozen
state, not in petrified state. It is between 1,100 and 1,700 feet
down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in
great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each
other, just as though they had fallen in that position.46

How were trees buried under a thousand feet of hard, frozen
ground? We are faced with the same series of questions that we
first saw with the frozen mammoths. Again, we are driven to the
conclusion that there was a sudden and dramatic change in climate
accompanied by rapid burial in muck, now frozen solid.”



feet2thefire says:
March 12, 2012 at 8:04 pm

@John 6:39 pm:

“Why big game? Because mammoth tusks were found at the various Alaska
sites and were mined in vast quantity in the late 1800s from a small
island in the East Siberian Sea. Unless herds of Siberian Mammoth
decided it was the place to die, someone either herded them there or
dragged the tusks to that location.”

I trust that last was tongue-in-cheek, but even if not, it is a new
perspective for me. Those two possibilities never occurred to me, but
they are as good as mine. Which doesn’t say much!

…Yeah, those mammoth skeletons – much more than just tusks, as you
certainly know – were not just on one island, but on the whole of the
Liakhov and the New Siberian Islands, plus/including Wrangel where the
mini mammoths survived a bit longer, those islands – just how or why
did those mammoths end up there? Especially the Berskova one with the
buttercups in its stomach. Buttercups don’t grow there, and there
isn’t enough vegetable matter to pee on, so what did they eat – herded
or not? If you figure it out, then tell me. My old Plan B backup
explanation was a polar shift, which is about the only explanation
that doesn’t dispute the facts of the mammoths and their tummies – but
it disputes everything else we know , or think we know.

Berskova wasn’t on those islands, but the principle remains your
question: WTF were they bloody doing up there? When mammoth’s hair is
NOT designed for cold, when mammoth remains are ALSO found in Mexico,
when mammoths in ASIA died off at the same time as the ones in N.A. –
what can possibly have been going on back then? Did their being there
have any connection to the extinction event itself – no matter whether
climate or Clovis overkill or comet? Occam’s razor fails us. No simple
explanation exists. Even Holmes’ deduction fails us. I think we don’t
have enough facts to ask the right question. But yours are as good as
mine or anybody else’s.

But are you ready for this?… Mammoths weren’t the only big skeletons
found on the New Siberian and Liakhov Islands.

On Kotelnoi Island (one of the New Siberian Islands) “neither trees,
nor shrubs, nor bushes, exist. . . and yet the bones of elephants,
rhinoceroses, buffaloes, and horses are found in this icy wilderness
in numbers which defy all calculations.” [Whitley, Journal of the
Philosophical Society of Great Britain, XII (1910), pg 56.

One must first credit Whitley with knowing the difference between
horse bones and ‘elephants’ – which latter I assume are mammoths.
Rhinos and buffaloes, too – if for no other reason than scale. The
real weird one is rhinos! The nearest rhinos now are south of the
Himalayas. NO ONE would suggest those rhinos were herded up to those
islands, nor that they happened to wander there while foraging – not
then the nearest forage for them is about 1,000 to the south.

Whatever we try to assign the exitnction to, climate or Clovis man or
impactor, it still doesn’t explain what the heck they were doing there
in the first place. And if Clovis man killed ‘em all in N.A., who
killed them all in Siberia????? Every answer is insufficient.



Steve Garcia
feet2thefire says:
March 12, 2012 at 8:22 pm
@John -
Accounts from early expeditions exist, if not exactly journals. In
1829 German scientist G.A. Erman went there to measure the magnetic
field. Here is some of what he said:

In New Siberia on the declivities facing the south, lie hills 250 or
300 feet high, formed of driftwood, the ancient origin of which, as
well as the fossil wood of the tundras, anterior to the history of the
Earth in its present state, strikes at once even the most uneducated
of hunters. . . . Other hills on the same island, and on Kotelnoi,
which lies further to the west, are heaped to an equal height with
skeletons of pachyderms [elephants, rhinoceroses], bisons [sic], etc’,
which are cemented together by frozen sand as well as by strata and
veins of ice. . . . On the summit of the hills they [the trunks of
trees] lie flung upon one another in the wildest disorder, forced
upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops broken off or
crushed, as if they had been thrown there with great violence from the
south on a bank, and there heaped up.”

And Edward von Toll visited from 1885 to 1902, and

found them [wood hills] to cinsist of carbonized trunks of trees, with
impressions of leaves and fruits.”

On another island Toll found mammoth bones and other bones, plus
fossilized trees with leaves and cones, making him to write,

This striking discovery proves that in the days when the mammoths and
rhinoceroses lived in northern Siberia,, these desolate islands were
covered with great forests, and bore luxuriant vegetation.”

Scary, isn’t it??? Whatever killed the mammoths seems to have also
killed the trees – and not only killed them but swept the islands
clean (as it is today) and piled the trees and bones high into hills,
literally. It certainly wasn’t climate change. And Clovis man was a
LONG way off in the USA and Mexico. Clovis spears were pretty high
tech for their day, but. . .

Steve Garcia


10 m broken rock hill with black glazes, W of Rancho Alegre Road, S of
Coyote Trail, W of Hwy 14, S of Santa Fe, New Mexico, tour of 50
photos 1 MB size each via DropBox: Rich Murray 2011.07.28 2011.08.03
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2011/08/10-m-broken-rock-hill-with-black-glazes.html
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2011/08/35479730-106085926-1865-km-el-top-10-m.html
photos 3-5 of 50
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/astrodeep/message/92