This is the story of a comet impact on the Laurentide Ice Sheet 12,900 years ago that triggered the Younger Dryas Cooling Event. The secondary impacts of the ejected glacier ice produced the penetration funnels that formed the Carolina Bays.
Transcript:
Life was good. The glaciers had started melting. The Earth was starting to warm up. Animals grazed on the land. There were mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, wild hogs and deer. There were also predators like saber-toothed tigers, lions, dire wolves and fearsome giant animals like short-faced bears.
Humans hunted with stone tools. It was like a Garden of Eden, but there were animals far more dangerous than serpents.
In spite the harsh weather and all the dangers, humans prospered and spread throughout North America.
It was the end of the Pleistocene Epoch during which extensive ice sheets and glaciers had advanced and retreated repeatedly over the landmasses. Now the ice was retreating for the last time as the weather warmed.
The first ominous sign was an unusual star surrounded by fog that appeared in the early morning before sunrise.
It was a comet that had gone around the Sun in a highly elliptical orbit and it was now heading back toward the outer region of the solar system from where it had originated. The comet had already traveled three quarters of the distance from the Sun to the Earth by the time that it was visible with the naked eye.
It would cross Earth's orbit in 20 days at 50 kilometers per second. Every day, the comet became larger and brighter.
This was an sinister and frightening sign. The comet was now visible in the daytime.
Within a few days, it became brighter than the Moon.
And then it happened. The Earth and the comet came to the same point in space at the same time.
Let there be light! light. light. light. light.
And there was light. But the light was not good. Fragments of the comet streamed brightly and penetrated through the Earth's atmosphere in two seconds.
The collision of the heavenly bodies against the surface of the Earth created a blinding flash and initiated a great explosion at the base of the ice sheet that covered the area where the Great Lakes are today.
The high pressure of the impact melted and vaporized the ice and formed a high pressure plume of steam that propelled huge pieces of the glacier in ballistic trajectories that formed an expanding ejecta curtain.
For thirty seconds, the excavation of the comet into the ice sheet sent chunks of glacier ice at speeds of 3 to 4 kilometers per second. The ice pieces had trajectories that went as high as 150 to 340 kilometers above the surface of the Earth in suborbital space flights.
The water that was ejected above the atmosphere quickly boiled in the vacuum of space and turned into a fog of ice crystals in low Earth orbit that blocked the light of the Sun.
All living creatures within 500 kilometers of the extraterrestrial impact were instantly killed. A high pressure shock wave displaced the atmosphere away from the impact zone creating hurricane force winds. But shortly thereafter, the wind rushed back in to fill the low pressure area created at the impact site.
The ice boulders in the ejecta curtain were traveling in the vacuum of space and they would re-enter the atmosphere within 6 to 9 minutes after the extraterrestrial impact. When the thick blanket of ice boulders came crashing down, it trapped the jet stream and brought the cold, high velocity wind toward the surface.
Some areas had impacts with energy of about 8 megatons of TNT per square kilometer. The impacts produced seismic vibrations that liquefied unconsolidated ground. The Atlantic Coastal Plain and the ancient river deposits along the Platte River in Nebraska became like quicksand.
The oblique impacts of glacier ice on the liquefied ground created inclined conical cavities, which quickly became shallow elliptical basins by viscous relaxation in the trembling ground. The mud that splashed was swept eastward by the hurricane force winds.
Chunks of ice as big as a baseball stadium plunged to Earth at seven times the speed of sound. Atmospheric ablation of the ice boulders produced vapor trails that blackened the sky. The impacts were accompanied by deafening sonic booms, death and destruction.
The megafauna and the Clovis people were pounded mercilessly by the catastrophic hailstorm until their remains became indistinguishable from the soil. The ice boulders that hit hard ground did not create conical cavities; instead, they shattered into high-speed ice shards that were equally devastating to the animals and the vegetation.
There were no survivors under the ejecta curtain that covered an area with a radius of 1500 kilometers from the Great Lakes region. The air was filled with a fine dust of ice particles that drifted beyond the range of the ejecta curtain and smothered the vegetation with a heavy coating of ice crystals.
The thick icy cover created damp, humid conditions that caused the vegetation to rot and fostered the growth of algae that produced a black mat that today marks the boundary of this catastrophe.
There were survivors beyond the range of the ejecta curtain. In order to stay alive they had to seek shelter from the colder weather and they had to find food in a landscape shrouded in darkness where it was difficult to distinguish night from day.
This was the start of a 1300-year global winter. Today, we call this the Younger Dryas cooling event.
North America was devastated by the barrage of impacts, and other parts of the world suffered great climatic upheavals. The colder climate triggered a Y-chromosome bottleneck in humans where female births outnumbered male births by a seventeen to one ratio.
During this harsh weather, humans had to survive mostly by hunting and fishing because the frigid climate did not allow reliance on plant resources. As the weather warmed and became more stable, human societies recovered. Agriculture and domestication of animals became widespread.
Some scientists propose that Göbekli Tepe, which was an ancient site in Mesopotamia, recorded the date of the great cataclysm in the figures carved on the pillars of the site.
This story is true. There are multiple lines of evidence that point to a cataclysm at the Younger Dryas Boundary. A thin layer of platinum was found in the Greenland glaciers dating to 12,900 years ago.
The platinum layer is found across many sites in North America and it is proof that an extraterrestrial object impacted the Earth at that time.
A black mat coinciding with this time line separates an ancient North America where megafauna and the Clovis culture thrived, and above the black mat there is a modern America without giant beasts and no evidence of the Clovis culture.
This same pattern is found in South America. Before the Younger Dryas event, there is abundant evidence of large herbivores. Then, they suddenly disappear from the fossil record for a long, long time.
An impact on an ice sheet does not leave many traces after the ice melts and water floods the impact site. We don't have a crater to point to and say "This is the place where the comet hit the Earth".
But we have the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska Rainwater Basins, which are evidence of this cataclysm.
The elliptical geometry of the basins indicates that these geological features originated as inclined conical cavities. The basins are conic sections.
The radial orientation of the basins toward the Great Lakes is a clue about the location of one or more extraterrestrial impacts.
The Carolina Bays should not be dismissed as the result of wind and water mechanisms. If wind and water could consistently create perfect elliptical structures, such features would be found all over the world. But they are not. They only occur in the United States between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic coast.
The study of the Carolina Bays gives us the opportunity to learn about the cosmic catastrophe that caused so much devastation in the not too distant past. An impact from space is the greatest threat to humanity. It could happen again with very little warning and our civilization would be gone in an instant.
Thank you for listening to this story. My book about the Carolina Bays is available at Amazon. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified of future videos about the Carolina Bays.
