DID A COMET CAUSE A FIRESTORM THAT DEVESTATED NORTH AMERICA 12,900 YEARS AGO?

Naturally there is going to be wide scale objection to these staggering new theories, which have immense implications in other areas of science and literature, including the reality of Plato’s account of the destruction of Atlantis, which might well preserve some semblance of the comet’s impact on the Bahamas and Caribbean (see below). Many scientists, particularly those who believe that global cataclysms very rarely rock the world, are strictly against the team’s theories.

‘There is a tendency in this field to label any circular feature a crater,’ says Michael Oskin of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who surely had in mind the famous Carolina Bays when he said these words. These are literally ten of thousands of elliptical craters, orientated northwest to southeast that cover large areas of not just the Carolinas but several states from New York down to Florida. Many are in swampland and filled with water, thus are taken simply to be wind-created lakes or ponds. Ever since their discovery in the 1930s, following the advent of aerial photography, there has been mounting speculation that the Carolina Bays, and other similar elliptical craters in the Yukon permafrost, are impact craters caused by either the aerial bombardment of meteorites, or the fragments of some more substantial object such a comet or asteroid, similar to that suspected of causing the Tunguska explosion in a remote forested region of Siberia in 1908.

Carbon-dating evidence from the Carolina Bays has provided compelling evidence that they were formed around the end of the Pleistocene period, and many bear characteristic lips or banks at their southeast ends, suggesting that whatever caused them arrived from the northwest, the same direction as the bright object which passed overhead immediately before the Tunguska explosion.

Speaking of Oskin’s skepticism, Asish Basu, a geochemist at the University of Rochester, New York, believes that the findings presented by the team are sound, and their evidence for an extraterrestrial explosion is convincing. ‘I think it is a very straight forward case of an impact.’