The Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis is one of the more interesting topics I've been following recently. The summary of events is as follows:
Overview
About 12,800 years ago, a giant broken-up comet
- caused airbursts or craters across Northern Hemisphere
- deposited melted material in the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) layer
- melted parts of huge northern ice sheets covering Canada and Europe
- halted circulation of massive amounts of ocean water in North Atlantic
- triggered 1,100-year-long climatic cooling, called the Younger Dryas
- contributed to the extinction of millions of large animals (megafauna)
- caused a major decline in human population levels of approx. 50%
Evidence:
Millions of tons of material, melted at high temperatures,
- is at more than 36 known sites
- is at every site currently investigated
- is spread across 16 countries on 4 continents
- ranges from offshore California to the Middle East
- has no geographical limit to the extent of distribution
- covers 20-25% of the N. Hemisphere (map on next slide)
- dates to approximately 12,800 years ago at the start of YD cooling
Source: https://cometresearchgroup.org/
All published peer-reviewed research: https://cometresearchgroup.org/publications/
If you find this topic interesting, I recommend watching this Joe Rogan video where he interviews Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock about the evidence for the event.
I'll definitely bite on this
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Very unlikely that it just missed Africa. More likely the materials have not yet been discovered due to it being an undeveloped 3rd world continent. Interesting stuff anyways!
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Very intriguing. Nice avatar.
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The Younger Dryas impact probably never happened- most of the evidence (the nanodiamonds, etc) were never found by anyone except the original authors, and most of the tests haven't been successfully replicated. It's cool, but probably not true.
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This poster's comments are inaccurate. Anyone reading this post needs to look at this evidence demonstrating multiple peer-reviewed papers from authors both supporting and not supporting the hypothesis. Right now, there is overwhelming support of the hypothesis, with multiple peer-reviewed papers. And when someone says "it can't be replicated", they're not looking at how much evidence has been produced in disparate parts of the world at the exact same time frame. You also cannot "replicate" a hurricane, but we know they occur and inflict damage.
https://cometresearchgroup.org/publications/
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1- there's no evidence of a population decline among native American populations around that time. Since the impact was supposedly there, that's problematic. (Nor in Europe and Asia.)
2- No impact crater has been found.
3- We already have pretty good evidence for the megafauna extinctions, and we can attribute them largely to climate and human action.
4- Speaking of climate, we basically understand how that worked, too- no need for an impactor.
I can go on for a while, but essentially- there's always SOMEONE who wants to blame something in geological history on a meteor or comet. This one is one of the more aggravating to most geologists, since it's talking about events that happened basically yesterday.
Founding a not for profit dedicated specifically to trying to prove your pet hypothesis is considered kinda sketchy among scientists. Plus there are only two papers supporting it, both of which came out in 2007.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like for it to be true- but that's the problem. Nothing cooler than meteors out there, and confirmation bias is a real risk even for the best of scientists.
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1 - "problematic" is a vague and misleading word. I encourage you to try to refrain from using it. Evidence for population decline in Native Americans may not be fully attainable if they were vaporized or completely washed away on impact.
2 - the crater hasn't been found because it likely hit the North American ice sheet, cushioning the blow, and melting the ice
3 - keep digging about the climate part!
4 - would love to hear the explanation for a sudden spike in temperatures 12,800 years ago
Also, be careful with the ad hominem attacks as they are logical fallacy traps! There's nothing sketchy about needing outside funding to do research when entrenched orthodoxy is built into education systems. I don't think you'd say IBM is sort of sketchy because they solicited outside funds (equity) to help them build artificial intelligence when universities proved to not be sufficient.
I see you're a geology student. You could really do something special here by researching this stuff yourself and not just reading the mainstream texts. I know it would be scary to challenging the orthodoxy, but look where you're at, you're on Steemit! You're challenging orthodoxy as we speak. Keep pushing!
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...I feel kinda uncomfortable arguing against someone with an account as much bigger than mine than yours is, since I've definitely seen a lot of people use their larger accounts to target smaller ones like mine (a flat earther went out of their way to crush one science aficionado's account a couple months back), but from what I can tell from your history, you seem pretty cool.
Anyhow:
There's exactly zero evidence of the Younger Dryas impactor that has stood up to peer review. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
There are no ash deposits. Minor volcanoes leave ash deposits, so a meteor or comet sure as hell would. This one didn't.
If the impactor had been cushioned by the ice, it would have melted the ice. That in turn would have led to flooding comparable to or greater than the Missoula floods, and rather more recent- and trust me, we would have noticed that.
The supposed lonsdaelite (nanodiamonds formed from the impact)? Not only have they never been found by anyone else, other scientists have identified the ones by the comet proponents as actually being polycrystalline aggregates of graphene and graphane, which are definitely not related to impact.
A comet or meteor would not cause a spike in temperatures. Instead, it would cause a drop in temperatures. (I'm assuming that's a typo on your part, though- happens to me all the time, especially on my phone.)
When we actually look at the graph, though, we see that around that time we were in a highly variable period in the Quaternary glaciation cycle. That brief resurgence of glaciation? It's well within our expected deviation. It simply doesn't need a comet to explain it.
You ask me to challenge the orthodoxy- except in geology, we literally just overthrew the orthodoxy a few decades ago. As a science we're just now starting to gather our feet under us after the plate tectonics revolution. It was one of the biggest upheavals in the history of any science, and literally nothing in geology survived without being put through a crucible to stress test it. Calling for me to challenge the orthodoxy in geology right now is kinda like demanding that America demand independence from England in 1790.
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I admit I'm no geology student (I studied economics), but I'm seriously confused now. We have these 4 papers alone in the last 2 years that confirm remnants of a high impact event 12,800 years ago and you're saying it's all bogus without providing any peer reviewed sources. I find it extremely odd that geologists could be finding the same remnants at the exact same time period across 4 continents and geologists claim it's "never been found by anyone else" (except for multiple independent teams).
Help me learn. Please look at these sources and let me know what is wrong about them:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Anronikov,%20A.%20V.,%20I.%20E.%20Andronikova,%20C.%20W.%20Loehn,%20B.%20Lafuente,%20J.%20A.%20M.%20Ballenger,%20G.%20T.%20Crawford,%20D.%20S.%20Lauretta,%20Implications%20from%20chemical,%20structural%20and%20mineralogical%20studies%20of%20magnetic%20microspherules%20from%20around%20the%20lower%20Younger%20Dryas%20boundary%20(New%20Mexico,%20USA).%20Geogra%EF%AC%81ska%20Annaler:%20Series%20A,%20Physical%20Geography%2098:1%E2%80%9321%20(2016).
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mahaney,%20W.C.;%20Somelar,%20Peeter;%20Dirszowsky,%20Randy%20W.;%20Kelleher,%20Brian;%20Pentlavalli,%20Prasanna;%20McLaughlin,%20Shane;%20Kulakova,%20Anna%20N.;%20Jordan,%20Sean;%20Pulleyblank,%20Coren;%20West,%20Allen;%20Allen,%20Christopher%20C.R.,%20(2016)%20A%20microbial%20link%20to%20weathering%20of%20postglacial%20rocks%20and%20sediments,%20Mt.%20Viso%20area,%20Western%20Alps,%20demonstrated%20through%20analysis%20of%20a%20soil/paleosol%20bio/chronosequence.%20J%20of%20Geology%20(in%20press).
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Holliday%20V.,%20Surovell%20T.,%20Johnson%20E.%20(2016)%20A%20Blind%20Test%20of%20the%20Younger%20Dryas%20Impact%20Hypothesis.%20PLoS%20ONE%2011(7):%20e0155470.%20doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155470
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kennett,%20James%20P.;%20Kennett,%20Douglas%20J.;%20Culleton,%20Brendan%20J.;%20Emili%20Aura%20Tortosa,%20J.;%20Bischoff,%20James%20L.;%20Bunch,%20Ted%20E.;%20Daniel,%20I.%20Randolph,%20Jr.;%20Erlandson,%20Jon%20M.;%20Ferraro,%20David;%20Firestone,%20Richard%20B.;%20Goodyear,%20Albert%20C.;%20Israde-Alc%C3%A1ntara,%20Isabel;%20Johnson,%20John%20R.;%20Jord%C3%A1%20Pardo,%20Jes%C3%BAs%20F.;%20Kimbel,%20David%20R.;%20LeCompte,%20Malcolm%20A.;%20Lopinot,%20Neal%20H.;%20Mahaney,%20William%20C.;%20Moore,%20Andrew%20M.T.;%20Moore,%20Christopher%20R.;%20Ray,%20Jack%20H.;%20Stafford,%20Thomas%20W.,%20Jr.;%20Barnett%20Tankersley,%20Kenneth;%20Wittke,%20James%20H.;%20Wolbach,%20Wendy%20S.;%20West,%20Allen.,%20(2015)%20Bayesian%20chronological%20analyses%20consistent%20with%20synchronous%20age%20of%2012,835%E2%80%9312,735%20Cal%20B.P.%20for%20Younger%20Dryas%20boundary%20on%20four%20continents.%20Proc%20Natl%20Acad%20Sci%20U%20S%20A%202015%20Aug%2027;112:32%20E4344-53.
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