Brrrrrr

The old year is gone away.  The new one has actually brought something interesting about a subject that has had me wondering for a long time: the most recent ice age.

We all know that it was not a major ice event.  think those are reserved for ones lasting a million years or something. Still,  it must have seemed like a curse from the gods to our ancestors- glaciers, low average temps,  and the misery that accompanies that. Then it went away.

Now let me hand you a theorem based on new info coming in.  That new info is evidence of a major ELE comet strike.  It happened...  taDA!  circa 11,000bce. The evidence is strikingly similar to The Dinosaur Killer. There's the same layer of e.t. materials visible in the rocks,  but there are some BIG surprises.

For one thing,  this material layer exists ONLY on the north American continent.  They estimate the comet at 3 miles diameter, yet there is no impact crater.  None. Remember,  this was a mere 13,000 years ago.  Surely there would have been one helluva big hole and we'd all know about it. Trust me. The other thing about the deposition layer provides the answer,  and it's one we had best pay attention to- the layer (inches - thick) is dosed liberally with soot. Soot is super-fine particles of carbon produced by combustion. An inch or so of soot. Quite a few teensy particles means LOTS of combustion.  Of what? Pretty much everything burnable over an entire continent.  So we now get to the final key. They say the strike was an airburst!

We know what a small airburst did in Russia. Something tells me that a 3 mile hot fudge sundae would cause a real problem.

Now we're headed for the tall weeds. I'll list things that ocurred to me and you can see if they create the same picture to you that they do for me.

The Biblical flood
The Grand Canyon
(and several other canyons,  including Death Valley)
Yosemite valley -  before and after
The extinction of all North American megafauna
Same for the Clovis culture
Huge ice dam rupture at the end of the last ice age.

Still checking for other goodies to add...  the loss of megalithic monument builders of the past ("the Elder Gods").

Let us begin painting the picture.

Yosemite Valley
Created in the last ice age and may not last until the next.  The rock type that makes up the valley walls crumbles quickly under the climate there. So?  It's not an ancient feature. My timeline? Created 13,000 years ago.

The Biblical flood
While we don't actually know how far back the story originated,  we know that it's at least 4,500 years old.  At least that's the first written record.  We won't ever know exactly how old it really is. There is that site in southeast Turkey that's about 10,000 years old (or is 13,000 a better guess?).  We know that such a site would be buried in sand by a flood.  We've seen a mere hurricane Sandy bury things in sand... Finally,  every surviving record,  verbal and written from every civilization and culture, includes a flood story.

The Grand Canyon
Everyone knows that it exposes millions of years of geologic rock.  Then everyone's head goes off the rails and leaves them with the lasting impression that the canyon took millions of years to form. I don't think so.

Megafauna extinction
Well,  given enough heat,  anything burns...

Clovis people
Burn at least as quickly as your average giant ground sloth.

Here is how my picture looks now:

Scenario- typical ice age -  glaciers,  ice,  snow,  cold

BOOM

3 mile comet comes calling

EVERYTHING burns...  roast camel and North American elephant/mastodon and Clovis people.  Guess we know why so much evidence of paleo-humans appears in caves.

HUGE heat pulse transfers to ice, with predictable results- ice melts over a period of days or weeks

Any ice dams in existence at that point are likely to break as they are overwhelmed by trillions of gallons of hot water. This carves lots of canyons downstream in a short time, I would think.

The resulting mass of water would have no problem creating a worldwide flood, wiping out many people worldwide,  and leaving us their view of the cause of the event.  The only people who could give us the real story were dead. The soot layer is only in North America,  which localizes the direct effects of the disaster, but the flood and the megatsunami know no boundaries.

As I said,  a Really Bad day for planet Earth.

This, of course, is just a theorem.  It requires chucking out any number of currently popular ideas,  but that's science for you. The thing that suffers most is peoples' timeline.  My theorem requires things that we assume took years or centuries to have actually happened  overnight. It does I'd be happy to hear discussion on this.

The next issue of Galactic Surplus covers interesting news from the other side of our galactic backyard.