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A space rock crashed into Earth about 12,900 years ago, wiping out some of North America's biggest beasts and ushering in a period of extreme cooling, researchers say, based on new evidence supporting this comet-crash scenario.
If such an impact took place, it did not leave behind any obvious clues like a crater. But microscopic melted rock formations called spherules and nano-size diamonds in ancient soil layers could be telltale signs of a big collision. The mix of particles could only have formed under extreme temperatures, created by a comet or asteroid impact.
Researchers first reported in 2007 that these particles were found at several archaeological sites in layers of sediment 12,900 years old. Now an independent study published in the Sept.17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) says those findings hold up.
A team led by Malcolm LeCompte, of Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, studied sediment samples from three sites in the Unites States: Blackwater Draw in New Mexico, Topper in South Carolina, and Paw Paw Cove in Maryland. The researchers said they found the same microscopic spherules in some of the same ancient layers as were found in the 2007 study.
A comet crash in the ice fields of eastern Canada could explain the region's die-off during the late Pleistocene epoch. While the cause of the catastrophic extinction event has been debated, researchers say it killed off three-fourths of North America's large ice-age animals, such as saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths, and the Clovis people, a Stone Age group that had only recently immigrated to the continent. [Album: 25 Amazing Ancient Beasts]
An impact also would explain what set off the Younger Dryas period or "Big Freeze," a 1,300-year era of glacial conditions that has been well documented in ocean cores and ancient soil samples. A comet would have produced enormous fires that melted large chunks of the North American ice sheet, sending cold water into the world's oceans and disrupting the circulation of currents responsible for global heat transport, the researchers noted.
A comet would have produced enormous fires that melted large chunks of the North American ice sheet, sending cold water into the world's oceans and disrupting the circulation of currents responsible for global heat transport, the researchers noted
Just to be clear, there is no evidence of any kind that makes scholars think that there is a companion star in our Solar System. It is a theory based solely on a need to explain the periodic mass extinctions that our planet has experienced. So, the only answer to ‘how many stars are in the Solar System’ that can be proven through observation is one…the Sun. Read more: www.universetoday.com...
The comet was later observed as a series of fragments ranging up to 2 km (1.2 mi) in diameter. These fragments collided with Jupiter's southern hemisphere between July 16 and July 22, 1994, at a speed of approximately 60 km/s (37 mi/s) or 216,000 km/h (134,000 mph). The prominent scars from the impacts were more easily visible than the Great Red Spot and persisted for many months
Most supposed impact indicators at 29 sites are too old or too young to be remnants of an ancient comet that proponents claim sparked climate change at the end of the Ice Age, killed America’s earliest people and caused a mass animal extinction
It has been suggested variously that extinction events occurred periodically, every 26 to 30 million years,[23] or that diversity fluctuates episodically every ~62 million years.
originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: Wolfenz
What 12,000 to 36,000 year extinction cycle?
The only theorized cycle I remember reading about was something like every 26 million years.
.....
Yes, here it is:
Patterns in frequency
It has been suggested variously that extinction events occurred periodically, every 26 to 30 million years,[23] or that diversity fluctuates episodically every ~62 million years.
Ok,
I'm probably the only poster here who is really into this, but here is a paper on the Brady layer, a layer of carbon rich soil found in the US Midwest that dates to the younger dyras onset.
Most of the carbon (in the Brady soil) was fire derived or black carbon," notes Marin-Spiotta, whose team employed an array of new analytical methods, including spectroscopic and isotopic analyses, to parse the soil and its chemistry. "It looks like there was an incredible amount of fire."
If you notice in the photo the black carbon layer is very pronounced.
www.sciencedaily.com...
originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan
I've often wondered why the shores of my state (SC) and NC are shaped like that. It does look suggestive.
At 80 and 90 miles wide however, it would have needed to be something in the size of miles hitting.
The other problem is the lack of things like shocked quartz and other trace to show them as impact sites.
Still, better than what I thought as a kid (which was a gigantic hurricane sat off the coast and carved them out, hehehehe).
Estimating the number of current extinctions is hard enough, since some species disappear without us ever knowing they were there in the first place. It has been said we are having trouble even “counting the books while the library burns” . However, finding out what is normal is harder still. The fossil record preserves some species much better than others, and the fact that we can't find a species after a particular point may indicate it disappeared entirely, or just became a fair bit rarer. Read more at www.iflscience.com...
The world has experienced five mass extinctions over the last half a billion years. In each of these, most of the animal and plant species on the planet disappeared. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is of course the most famous. It wasn't, however, the most destructive mass extinction ever recorded. The Permian-Triassic extinction event occurred approximately 252 million years ago and wiped out an astonishing 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species. In between these major events there have been smaller spikes in the death rates, often driven by climatic changes. While we have already lost more species than in many of the more minor events, Pimm believes a combination of habitat protection, captive breeding and action on climate change can avoid a sixth mass extinction. Read more at www.iflscience.com...
Full text Full text is available as a scanned copy of the original print version. Get a printable copy (PDF file) of the complete article (4.5M), or click on a page image below to browse page by page. Links to PubMed are also available for Selected References.
originally posted by: punkinworks10
a reply to: Wolfenz
Hi wolfenz,
This is one of the most contentious subjects in North American archeology and paleontology.
Here is the absolute latest work related to the field,
Ok,
I'm probably the only poster here who is really into this, but here is a paper on the Brady layer, a layer of carbon rich soil found in the US Midwest that dates to the younger dyras onset.
Most of the carbon (in the Brady soil) was fire derived or black carbon," notes Marin-Spiotta, whose team employed an array of new analytical methods, including spectroscopic and isotopic analyses, to parse the soil and its chemistry. "It looks like there was an incredible amount of fire."
If you notice in the photo the black carbon layer is very pronounced.
www.sciencedaily.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Known as Brady Soil, Marin-Spiotta and her colleagues studied the 15,000-year-old soil located in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas. The research found that this particular soil went through dramatic changes during the time glaciers were melting in the Northern Hemisphere which sparked a shift in the climate. This change left an extreme amount of wildfire that resulted in the carbon being trapped in the soil. Read more at americanlivewire.com...
Such buried soils, according to researchers, are not unique to the Great Plains and occur worldwide. As humans increasingly disturb landscapes through a variety of activities, carbon becomes a potential contributor to climate change as it is reintroduced into the environment.
Considerable data and analysis support the detection of a supernova at a distance of about 50 pc, ~2.6 million years ago. This is possibly related to the extinction event around that time and is a member of a series of explosions which formed the Local Bubble in the interstellar medium.
We build on the assumptions made in previous work, and propagate the muon flux from supernova-initiated cosmic rays from the surface to the depths of the ocean. We find that the radiation dose from the muons will exceed the total present surface dose from all sources at depths up to a kilometer and will persist for at least the lifetime of marine megafauna. It is reasonable to hypothesize that this increase in radiation load may have contributed to a newly documented marine megafaunal extinction at that time.
The end of the Pliocene marked the beginning of a period of great climatic variability and sea-level oscillations. Here, based on a new analysis of the fossil record, we identify a previously unrecognized extinction event among marine megafauna (mammals, seabirds, turtles and sharks) during this time, with extinction rates three times higher than in the rest of the Cenozoic, and with 36% of Pliocene genera failing to survive into the Pleistocene.
The Pliocene marine megafauna extinction and its impact on functional diversity
The Pliocene marine megafauna extinction and its impact on functional diversity
The end of the Pliocene marked the beginning of a period of great climatic variability and sea-level oscillations. Here, based on a new analysis of the fossil record, we identify a previously unrecognized extinction event among marine megafauna (mammals, seabirds, turtles and sharks) during this time, with extinction rates three times higher than in the rest of the Cenozoic, and with 36% of Pliocene genera failing to survive into the Pleistocene.
The origination of new genera during the Pleistocene created new functional entities and contributed to a functional shift of 21%, but minimally compensated for the functional space lost. Reconstructions show that from the late Pliocene onwards, the global area of the neritic zone significantly diminished and exhibited amplified fluctuations. We hypothesize that the abrupt loss of productive coastal habitats, potentially acting alongside oceanographic alterations, was a key extinction driver. The importance of area loss is supported by model analyses showing that animals with high energy requirements (homeotherms) were more susceptible to extinction. The extinction event we uncover here demonstrates that marine megafauna were more vulnerable to global environmental changes in the recent geological past than previously thought.