[meteorite-list] some choice informed creative comments from 202 re wattsupwiththat.com blog article New evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the start of the Younger Dryas: Rich Murray 2012.03.13
From: Rich Murray <rmforall_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:53:15 -0700 Message-ID: <CAHqJ8paoqeru-3bpeaxKnL-R=9ut8ndA_c8XB0nemw0830QKbg_at_mail.gmail.com> some choice informed creative comments from 202 re wattsupwiththat.com blog article New evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the start of the Younger Dryas: Rich Murray 2012.03.13 http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2012/03/some-choice-informed-creative-comments.html http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/astrodeep/message/96 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 202 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. Dennis Cox says: March 13, 2012 at 5:32 am I?m reading a lot of skepticism expressing alternate causes for the climate changes of the PH transition that don?t involve impact. This healthy skepticism [is] all well and good. But if those same skeptics are going to speak to the data at hand -- what I haven?t seen yet is a rational explanation for the materials in the sediment core they took from Lake Cuitzeo that doesn?t involve a major impact event. Specifically, the materials in the layer dating to 12,900 Ya. I?m also reading a lot of unquestioned assumption that any major impact event must involve the formation of a crater somewhere. The Tunguska event of 1908 did not leave a crater because the fireball didn?t reach the ground. Only its blast wave did. So the largest impact event in recorded history was an aerial burst that didn?t produce a crater. There is nothing to indicate airburst events are unusual. And there is also no reason to assume Tunguska was a large example on the grand scale of such things. Here?s a few short references to think about; http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/boslough_April_16_2009.pdf The Nature of Airbursts and their Contribution to the Impact Threat, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Aerial%20Bursts%20and%20the%20impact%20threat.pdf Large Aerial Bursts and the Impact Threat, and http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/DesertGlass.pdf High performance computing provides clues to scientific mystery. When you consider that a single large ablative airburst can produce planetary scarring that does not bare any resemblance to a crater, but instead is characterized as a melting event. And realize that geologists of the past have never considered that enough heat, and pressure to do such a thing could come from above, then there is a very real possibility that the planetary scarring of the YD event has already been found, and is still in very good condition, but has been mis-defined on the geologic maps [as] volcanic. Another point to consider is that since the astronomical model this new paper is working from is Cube and Napier?s work on the Taurid complex, then folks might want to start thinking, not just in terms of a single large impact somewhere, but many. If we are working from that astronomical model, then we should be looking for the planetary scarring of something like 10,000 Tunguska class, and larger, air bursts hitting the northern hemisphere over a period of about an hour as the Earth passed through the debris of the fragmented Taurid progenitor. Instead of thinking of the YD impact event as the fist of God smashing into the ground at a specific location, it would probably be a better analogy think of it as his hot, and angry, breath burning much of the biomass of the northern hemisphere away down to the last blade of grass. 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 _at_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 buried almost 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 surface all 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 petrified - just 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 _at_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 _at_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 feet2thefire says: March 13, 2012 at 10:56 am John from CA 7:47 am: I don?t have copies, but look these up on Google Scholar: 1. D. Gath Whitley, ?The Ivory Islands in the Arctic Ocean,? Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great Britain, XII (1910) 2. J.D. Dana, Manual of Geology (4th ed.; 1894), pg 1007 3. F. Wrangel, Narrative of an Expedition to Siberia and the Polar Sea (1841) [wording may not be quite correct - see following...] (Wikipedia) An account of the physical observations during his first journey was published in German (Berlin, 1827), and also in German extracts from Wrangel?s journals, Reise laengs der Nordk?ste von Sibirien und auf dem Eismeere in den Jahren 1820-1824 (2 vols., Berlin, 1839), which was translated into English as Wrangell?s Expedition to the Polar Sea (2 vols., London, 1840). The complete report of the expedition appeared as ?Otceschewie do Sjewernym beregam Sibiri, po Ledowitomm More? (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1841), and was translated into French with notes by Prince Galitzin, under the title Voyage sur les c?tes septentrionales de la Sib?rie et de la mer glaciale (2 vols., 1841). From the French version of the complete report an English one was made under the title A Journey on the Northern Coast of Siberia and the Icy Sea (2 vols., London, 1841). This is the Wrangel for whom the island in the E Arctic Ocean is named, the one with the mini mammoths. Have fun with that one! 4. G. A. Erman, Travels in Siberia (1848) [that is all I have] Have fun finding them John! For explorations, the older the source the better. Steve Garcia Larry Ledwick (hotrod ) says: March 13, 2012 at 2:40 pm I think some are jumping to an unwarranted conclusion when they assert that the mammoths must have been flash frozen. They only needed to be quickly cooled to about 40 deg F or below (refrigerator temperature) then they could have been slowly frozen over hours or days. One core body temperatures chill to near refrigerator temperatures, decomposition slows dramatically to near zero. There is plenty of time for a sudden cold snap or strong cold winds to then freeze the animal in place. If this happens at a time of major climatic change where that location becomes a year around snow field the animal could gradually sink to the bottom of the snow, then over time sink into the underlying muck as the ground undergoes brief partial thawing during the summer melt. Possible explanations would include, an animal browsing in a wind blown clear area right next to a large snow drift and having the snow drift suddenly slump (small avalanche) instantly burying the animal in soft snow, then the rapidly chilled animal slowly freezing over the next few days as another storm moves in. Wet snow avalanches set like concrete when the snow stops moving, the animal would suffocate in a matter of minutes then freeze. Similar, to the above the animal browsing near a frozen over melt water pond and breaking through the ice into several feet of ice cold water and muck, to be slowly frozen and buried as the winter progressed. A browsing animal moving from wind blown clear areas across a deep snow drift with a strong frozen snow crust breaks through the crust and sinks into very deep snow and is instantly buried when his trashing motions cause the snow to collapse in on him. For similar examples look no further than spring cross country skiers who venture onto unstable slope after a wind storm and trigger a small avalanche to be buried and not found until the spring thaw weeks or months later. An animal does not need to be buried deeply to be killed by a snow slump. A boy I went to high school with was killed in a small avalanche my junior year, he was knocked down by a small avalanche and buried face down under only 6 inches of snow. A small child was killed in a small avalanche in his own driveway here in Colorado years ago, while playing when a large pile of snow slumped and buried him. Lets not look for circumstances that defy logic when very mundane possibilities could easily explain the situation. Larry 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 Received on Wed 14 Mar 2012 02:53:15 AM PDT |
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