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Catastrophe: Which Ancient Disaster was the One to Destroy Atlantis?

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Adam Hawthorne
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« Reply #30 on: September 16, 2009, 11:50:49 pm »

THE NORTH AMERICAN COMET THEORY ­ THE GREATER IMPLICATIONS FOR PLATO’S STORY OF ATLANTIS

In the year 2000 my book GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS was published for the first time. It proposed that Plato’s concept of Atlantis was based on stories reaching the Mediterranean in Plato’s age of an immense cataclysm that rocked the Bahamas and Caribbean at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, causing fire to rain from the sky, unimaginable tsunamis and the drowning of low lying regions. Cuba was singled out as matching very well the description of Atlantis’s central island, while the Bahamas was almost certainly the sunken lands where according to Plato no ocean going vessel could pass any more since it was now too shallow (which the Bahamas unquestionably is, following the rise of the oceans at the end of the last Ice Age).

The cataclysm I proposed that caused the destruction of Atlantis is identical to that being cited by the 25 strong scientific team at the American Geophysical Union last week. Using available evidence on the structure and dating of the Carolina Bays, a knowledge of the firestorms recorded in sentiments across the United States, as well as details of the flow of ice melt waters and the mass extinction of Pleistocene animals, I concluded that a comet had come out of the north-western skies and disintegrated into pieces, causing multiple aerial detonations across North America. This resulted in wide scale firestorms, massive explosions, tens of thousands of elliptical craters from the Yukon down to Florida, as well as the onset of the Younger Dryas, or mini ice age. This in turn led eventually to the end of the last Ice Age, with the drowning eventually of large areas of the Bahamas and Caribbean.

This much is now being proved correct, but if this is the case then scientists should also look at what I said happened as a result of this comet impact. German rocket scientist Otto Muck in his book THE SECRET OF ATLANTIS (1978, 1st UK edition) was the first to point out the existence of massive elliptical craters in the West Atlantic Basin, off the coast of Florida. He proposed that these were the result of an asteroid strike, which caused tremendous underwater earthquakes, ripping apart the tectonic plates that join to form the Great Atlantic Rift and pulling beneath the earth a whole continent that sat astride the ridge. This, of course, Muck concluded was the lost continent of Atlantis.

No evidence of this former island continent has ever come to light, even though the Mid Atlantic has been the chosen site of Atlantis ever since the theory was first proposed by granddaddy of Atlantology, Ignatius Donnelly back in 1882. Curiously, Donnelly was one of the first to take seriously the theory of a major cataclysm hitting the North American continent and causing mass devastation at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. It appeared in his book RAGNORAK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL (1883).

Using Muck’s lead, I proposed in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS that the apparent gigantic craters in the West Atlantic Basin were perhaps evidence of the largest parts of the aforementioned comet overshooting North America and crashing into the ocean. If so, then this would have produced massive underwater earthquakes and unimaginable tsunamis, which would have devastated the Bahamas and Caribbean to the south.

I found evidence also for the presence on the Caribbean islands prior to this time of Pleistocene animals such as the giant sloth, as well as the existence of species of snake on different islands that can only have thrived when the islands were linked together. In addition to this, myths and legends preserved by the former inhabitants of the Caribbean, as well as their descendents in South and Central America, spoke of a time when all the islands were joined. Then came a fire out of the sky, which was followed by massive flooding, which hit the islands twice. Afro-Caribbean islanders on Tobago even spoke of a time when the islands split after the ‘old moon broke’ and came crashing into the sea, presumably having learnt such stories from the indigenous peoples there beforehand.

All of the myths and legends, which derive from Bahamas in the north to the Lesser Antilles in the south, could be accounted for if it was shown that the larger fragments of the comet which had fragmented over North America at the end of the Pleistocene epoch ended up in the Western Atlantic Basin. If so, then there was every chance that almost all of the indigenous populations of the islands would have been wiped out, with only a few survivors left to tell the tale. Such stories were then retold across millennia, both in the islands and also by their descendents on the mainland, until finally they were conveyed to incoming Mediterranean traders either prior to or during the life of Plato, in the same way that similar stories were told to the first mariners to reach these same isles in the wake of Columbus.

These ‘voyagers’, the term used by Plato in his dialogue entitled the ‘Timaeus’, and later in the ‘Critias’, were most probably either Phoenicians out of Southern Spain or Carthaginians out of North Africa. The crews of these ocean-going vessels would also have had contact with Mediterranean ports such as those on Sicily, in Carthaginian hands during Plato’s life. Having spent time there himself, he might easily have come across these rumours and stories of a once great island empire across the ‘Atlantic Sea’ devastated by earthquakes and floods, deciding to use them in his dialogues. One clue is the use of Semitic names in his Atlantis account, showing that his primary maritime sources came not from Egypt, as is always assumed due to the dialogues’ use of Solon as the collector of these tales from the old priest of Sais, but from either Phoenician or Carthaginian sources, who spoke forms of the Semitic language.

Plato’s suggestion that the cataclysm that devastated Atlantis either took place in 8500 BC (found in the ‘Timaeus’) or 9500 BC (found in the ‘Critias’), is very close to the proposed dates for the end of the Pleistocene epoch. However, I suspect that these were the only real clues he got from Egypt, for they are very close to the time-frames given in temple chronologies for the age of the gods in ancient Egyptian tradition. Thus their connection with the destruction of Atlantis is merely a happy coincidence, although one that is now proving to be bizarrely accurate.

In my opinion, there is compelling evidence that Bahamas and Caribbean once supported a high culture with maritime capabilities prior to the cataclysm which devastated their island civilization. More and more examples of vast underwater features of human construction are coming to light off key Bahaman islands such as Bimini and Andros through the scientific work of Greg and Lora Little, and if it can be established that these predate what I call the Carolina Bays event, then this formed an important missing piece of the puzzle in our understanding of this cataclysm and its effects on the development of the Atlantic myth.

I sincerely hope that people will re-examine the proposals in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, for they are now being authenticated by excisting new scientific findings.


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Adam Hawthorne
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« Reply #31 on: September 16, 2009, 11:52:25 pm »

Ice Age blast 'ravaged America'



 
A space rock may have exploded in the air over North America

A controversial new idea suggests that a large space rock exploded over North America 13,000 years ago.

The blast may have wiped out one of America's first Stone Age cultures as well as the continent's big mammals such as the mammoth and the mastodon.

The blast, from a comet or asteroid, caused a major bout of climatic cooling which may also have affected human cultures emerging in Europe and Asia.

Scientists will outline their evidence this week at a meeting in Mexico.

  "Their impact theory shouldn't be dismissed; it deserves further investigation."

- Jeff Severinghaus, Scripps Institution of Oceanography


The evidence comes from layers of sediment at more than 20 sites across North America.

These sediments contain exotic materials: tiny spheres of glass and carbon, ultra-small specks of diamond - called nanodiamond - and amounts of the rare element iridium that are too high to have come from Earth.

All, they argue, point to the explosion 12,900 years ago of an extraterrestrial object up to 5km across.

No crater remains, possibly because the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which blanketed thousands of sq km of North America during the last Ice Age, was thick enough to mask the impact.

Another possibility is that it exploded in the air.

Climate cooling

The rocks studied by the researchers have a black layer which, they argue, is the charcoal deposited by wildfires which swept the continent after the explosion.

 

The Clovis people developed an advanced stone tool technology

The blast would not only have generated enormous amounts of heat that could have given rise to wildfires, but also brought about a period of climate cooling that lasted 1,000 years - an event known as the Younger Dryas.

Professor James Kennett, from the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB), said the explosion could be to blame for the extinction of several large North American mammals at the end of the last Ice Age.

"All the elephants, including the mastodon and the mammoth, all the ground sloths, including the giant ground sloth - which, when standing on its hind legs, would have been as big as a mammoth," he told the BBC.

"All the horses went out, all the North American camels went out. There were large carnivores like the sabre-toothed cat and an enormous bear called the short-faced bear."

Professor Kennett said this could have had an enormous impact on human populations.

Population decline

According to the traditional view, humans crossed from north-east Asia to America at the end of the last Ice Age, across a land bridge which - at the time - connected Siberia to Alaska.

 

The extinction of large North American beasts is a puzzle

The Clovis culture was one of the earliest known cultures in the continent. These proficient hunter-gatherers developed a distinctive thin, fluted spear head known as the Clovis point, which is regarded as one of the most sophisticated stone tools ever developed.

Archaeologists have found evidence from the Topper site in South Carolina, US, that Clovis populations here went through a population collapse.

But there is no evidence of a similar decline in other parts of the continent. The Clovis culture does vanish from the archaeological record abruptly, but it is replaced by a myriad of different local hunter-gatherer cultures.


 
The Tunguska event devastated parts of Siberia in 1908

Jeff Severinghaus, a palaeoclimatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, told Nature magazine: "Their impact theory shouldn't be dismissed; it deserves further investigation."

According to the new idea, the comet would have caused widespread melting of the North American ice sheet. The waters would have poured into the Atlantic, disrupting its currents.

This, they say, could have caused the 1,000 year-long Younger Dryas cold spell, which also affected Asia and Europe.

The Younger Dryas has been linked by some researchers to changes in the living patterns of people living in the Middle East which led to the beginning of farming.

A massive explosion near the Tunguska river, Siberia, in 1908, is also thought to have been caused by a space rock exploding in the atmosphere. It felled 80 million trees over an area of 2,000 sq km.

The new theory will be presented and debated at the American Geophysical Union's Joint Meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, this week.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6676461.stm
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« Reply #32 on: September 16, 2009, 11:53:01 pm »

Diamonds tell tale of comet that killed off the cavemen


Fireballs set half the planet ablaze, wiping out the mammoth and America's Stone Age hunters

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday May 20, 2007
The Observer


Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere.
Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilisations that were emerging in Europe and Asia.

'This comet set off a shock wave that changed Earth profoundly,' said Arizona geophysicist Allen West. 'It was about 2km-3km in diameter and broke up just before impact, setting off a series of explosions, each the equivalent of an atomic bomb blast. The result would have been hell on Earth. Most of the northern hemisphere would have been left on fire.'

The theory is to be outlined at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. A group of US scientists that include West will report that they have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago, they say. The huge pressures and heat triggered by the fragments crashing to Earth turned the comet's carbon into diamond dust. 'The shock waves and the heat would have been tremendous,' said West. 'It would have set fire to animals' fur and to the clothing worn by men and women. The searing heat would have also set fire to the grasslands of the northern hemisphere. Great grazing animals like the mammoth that had survived the original blast would later have died in their thousands from starvation. Only animals, including humans, that had a wide range of food would have survived the aftermath.'

The scientists point out that archaeological evidence shows that early Stone Age cultures clearly suffered serious setbacks at this time. In particular, American Stone Age hunters, descendants of the hunter-gatherers who had migrated to the continent from Asia, vanished around this time.

These people were some of the fiercest hunters on Earth, men and women who made magnificent stone spearheads which they used to hunt animals including the mammoth. Their disappearance at this time has been a cause of intense debate, with climate change being put forward as a key explanation. Now there is a new idea: the first Americans were killed by a comet.

It was not just America that bore the brunt of the comet crash. At this time, the Earth was emerging from the last Ice Age. The climate was slowly warming, though extensive ice fields still covered higher latitudes. The disintegrating comet would have plunged into these ice sheets, causing widespread melting. These waters would have poured into the Atlantic, disrupting its currents, including the Gulf stream. The long-term effect was a 1,000-year cold spell that hit Europe and Asia.

The comet theory, backed by observational evidence collected by the team, has excited considerable attention from other researchers, following publication of an outline report of the work in Nature

'The magnitude of this discovery is so important,' team member James Kennett, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the journal. 'It explains three of the highest-debated controversies of recent decades.'

These are the sudden disappearance of the first Stone Age people of America, the disappearance of mammoths throughout much of Europe and America and the sudden cooling of the planet, an event known as the Younger-Dryas period. Various theories have been put forward to explain these occurrences, but now scientists believe they have found a common cause in a comet crash. However, the idea is still controversial and the theory is bedevilled by problems in obtaining accurate dates for the different events.

'We still have a long way to go,' admitted West. 'But we have a great deal of evidence, from many sites, so this is quite a powerful case that we are making.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2083785,00.html

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« Reply #33 on: September 16, 2009, 11:53:37 pm »

New Clovis-Age Comet Impact Theory
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Science News   Keywords
ARCHAEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY, GEOLOGY, CLOVIS, COMET, EXINCTION, PLEISTOCENE, OREGON, AGU 
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Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago. 

 
 
 
 
 

Newswise — Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago.

Driving the theory is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at some 50 Clovis-age sites in North America that date to the onset of a cooling period known as the Younger Dryas Event. The sites include several on the Channel Islands off California where UO archaeologists Douglas J. Kennett and Jon M. Erlandson have conducted research.

The theory is being discussed publicly, for the first time, Wednesday, May 23, at the 2007 Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco, Mexico. Kennett is among the attendees who will be available to discuss the theory with their peers. The British journal Nature first addressed the theory in a news-section story in its May 18 issue.

Before today, members of the team – including Kennett’s father, James P. Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Richard B. Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – had been quietly introducing the theory to their professional colleagues.

Douglas Kennett, with Erlandson watching, detailed the theory May 19 to a fully packed UO classroom, where students and faculty members from archaeology, art history, anthropology, biology, geology, geography, political science and psychology, pelted Kennett with questions.

The researchers propose that a known reversal in the world’s ocean currents and associated rapid global cooling, which some scientists blame for the extinction of multiple species of animals and the end of the Clovis Period, was itself the result of a bigger event. While generally accepted theory says glacial melting from the North American interior caused the shift in currents, the new proposal points to a large extraterrestrial object exploding above or even into the Laurentide Ice Sheet north of the Great Lakes.

“Highest concentrations of extraterrestrial impact materials occur in the Great Lakes area and spread out from there,” Kennett said. “It would have had major effects on humans. Immediate effects would have been in the North and East, producing shockwaves, heat, flooding, wildfires, and a reduction and fragmentation of the human population.”

The carbon-rich layer contains metallic microspherules, iridium, carbon spherules, fullerenes, charcoal and soot. Some of those ingredients were found worldwide in soils dating to the K-T Boundary of 65 million years ago.

The K-T layer marks the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the Tertiary Period, when numerous species were wiped out after a massive asteroid is believed to have struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico.

Missing in the new theory is a crater marking an impact, but researchers argue that a strike above or into the Laurentide ice sheet could have absorbed it since it was less intense than the K-T event.

Kennett said that 35 animal genera went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, with at least 15 clearly being wiped out close to 12,900 years ago. There would have been major ecological shifts, driving Clovis survivors into isolated groups in search of food and warmth. There is evidence, he said, that pockets of Clovis people survived in refugia, especially in the western United States.

“This was a massive continental scale, if not global, event,” Kennett said. He and Erlandson say that they are currently evaluating the existing Paleo-Indian archaeological datasets, which Kennett describes as “suggestive of significant population reduction and fragmentation, but additional work is necessary to test this hypothesis further.” Earlier research efforts need to be re-evaluated using new technologies that can narrow radiocarbon date ranges, and, as funding becomes available, new sites can be located and studied, Erlandson said.

“As we have grown more confident in the theory,” Erlandson said, “we’ve been letting some of it out in informal talks to gage the response to see where we are headed and what the initial objections are, which will help us to maintain our own objectivity.”

The interest in pursuing both old and new leads could ignite a major surge of interdisciplinary questioning and attract a new wave of interested students, Kennett and Erlandson said.


Links: Kennett faculty Web page: http://www.uoregon.edu/~dkennett/Welcome.html;
Erlandson faculty Web page: http://www.uoregon.edu/~dkennett/Welcome.html





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© 2007 Newswise.  All Rights Reserved.
 
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/530208/
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« Reply #34 on: September 16, 2009, 11:53:59 pm »

Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?
Sid Perkins


Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say.


 
IT'S IN THERE. A layer of carbon-rich sediment (arrow) found here at Murray Springs, Ariz., and elsewhere across North America, provides evidence that an extraterrestrial object blew up over Canada 12,900 years ago. The hallmarks include lumps of glasslike carbon (top), carbon spherules (middle, in cross section), and magnetic grains rich in iridium (bottom).
West; (middle inset): Cannon Microprobe
 


At sites stretching from California to the Carolinas and as far north as Alberta and Saskatchewan—many of which were home to prehistoric people of the Clovis culture—researchers have long noted an enigmatic layer of carbon-rich sediment that was laid down nearly 13 millennia ago. "Clovis artifacts are never found above this black mat," says Allen West, a geophysicist with Geoscience Consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The layer, typically a few millimeters thick, lies between older, underlying strata that are chock-full of mammoth bones and younger, fossilfree sediments immediately above, he notes.

New analyses of samples taken from 26 of those sites reveal several hallmarks of an extraterrestrial object's impact, West and his colleagues reported at the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco, Mexico.

Samples from the base of the black mat yield most of the clues to its extraterrestrial origin, says Richard B. Firestone, West's coworker and a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley (Calif.) National Laboratory. Some of the particles there are small, magnetic grains of material with higher proportions of iridium than are found in Earth's crust, he notes.

Also in the mat's base are tiny lumps of glasslike carbon that probably formed from molten droplets of the element. These lumps, as well as little spheres of carbon with a different microstructure, contain nanoscale diamonds formed under intense pressure.

A host of unusual geological features, collectively known as Carolina Bays, hints at the cataclysm's location, says team member George A. Howard, a wetland manager at Restoration Systems, an environmental-restoration firm in Raleigh, N.C. Around 1 million of these elliptical, sand-rimmed depressions, measuring between 50 meters and 11 kilometers across, scar the landscape from New Jersey to Florida. In samples taken from 15 of the features, Howard and his colleagues found iridium-rich magnetic grains and carbon spherules with tiny diamond fragments similar to those found at Clovis archaeological sites.

The long axes of the great majority of the Carolina Bays point toward locations near the Great Lakes and in Canada—a hint that the extraterrestrial object disintegrated over those locales, says Howard.

Because scientists "haven't discovered a large, smoking hole" left by the event, the object that blew up in the atmosphere probably was a comet, says West.

Heat from the event would have set off wildfires across the continent, the scientists suggest. The heat and shock from the explosion probably broke up portions of the ice sheet smothering eastern Canada at the time, they add. The flood of fresh water into the North Atlantic that resulted would have interrupted ocean currents that bring warmth to the region, and thick clouds of smoke and soot in the air would have intensified cooling across the Northern Hemisphere.

The inferred date of the event matches the beginning of a 1,200-year-long cold spell that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which in its first few decades saw temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere drop as much as 10°C.



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« Reply #35 on: September 16, 2009, 11:55:43 pm »

Scientists Study Earth's Missing Crust
By Juan Manuel Pardellas
March 7, 2007 7:41AM




"It is like a window into the interior of the Earth," Bramley Murton, a geophysicist who is taking part in the six-week mission, said Tuesday from the research ship RRS James Cook as it headed to the site, still five days away. 
 
 
British scientists have embarked on a mission to study a huge area on the Atlantic seabed where the Earth's crust is mysteriously missing and instead is covered with dark green rock from deep inside the planet.

The 12-member expedition to take an unprecedented peek at Earth's mantle left the Canary Islands on Monday with a new high-tech vessel and a robotic device named Toby that will dig up rock samples at the site and film what it sees.

The main site -- there is at least one other in roughly the same area and a third is suspected -- is about three miles below the surface of the Atlantic and located about 2,000 nautical miles southwest of the Canaries.

It is part of a globe-spanning ridge of undersea volcanos, the kind of structure that forms when Atlantic tectonic plates separate and lava surges upward to fill the gap in the Earth's crust.

But that apparently did not happen this time. Where there should be a four-mile-thick layer of crust, there is instead that much mantle -- the very dense, dark green rock that makes up the deep inner layer of the Earth.

Scientists have seen chunks of mantle that have been spewed up with lava, but never such a large, exposed stretch.

"It is like a window into the interior of the Earth," Bramley Murton, a geophysicist who is taking part in the six-week mission, said Tuesday from the research ship RRS James Cook as it headed to the site, still five days away.

This exposed layer is irregularly shaped, about 30 miles long and perhaps that distance or more at its widest. It was detected about five years ago with sonar from a surface vessel.

There are two main theories as to what happened, Murton said: A fault ripped away huge chunks of crust, or in an area of crust-forming volcanoes, this area was mysteriously devoid of that outer material, Murton said.


Roger Searle of Durham University, one of the lead researchers, said the study aims to provide insight on everything from the chemistry of oceans to the mechanisms of how the Earth behaves under so much water.

The robotic device will land on the exposed mantle, deploy a drill, and dig into the rock to bring back samples.

The project is being financed by Britain's National Environment Research Council and the Department of trade and Industry's Large Scientific Facilities Fund.
 



© 2007 Associated Press/AP Online. All rights reserved.
© 2007 Sci-Tech Today. All rights reserved.
 

http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=0110013AXUK9

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« Reply #36 on: September 16, 2009, 11:57:10 pm »

Ancient crash, epic wave - Health & Science - International Herald Tribune
By Sandra Blakeslee
Published: Saturday, October 14, 2006


At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction - toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described "band of misfits" that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world's shorelines and in the deep ocean.

Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.

The researchers, who formed the working group after finding one another through an international conference, are based in the United States, Australia, Russia, France and Ireland. They are established experts in geology, geophysics, geomorphology, tsunamis, tree rings, soil science and archaeology, including the structural analysis of myth. Their efforts are just getting under way, but they will present some of their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco.

This year the group started using Google Earth, a free source of satellite images, to search around the globe for chevrons, which they interpret as evidence of past giant tsunamis. Scores of such sites have turned up in Australia, Africa, Europe and the United States, including the Hudson River Valley and Long Island.

When the chevrons all point in the same direction to open water, Dallas Abbott, an adjunct research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., uses a different satellite technology to look for oceanic craters. With increasing frequency, she finds them, including an especially large one dating back 4,800 years.

So far, astronomers are skeptical but are willing to look at the evidence, said David Morrison, a leading authority on asteroids and comets at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. Surveys show that as many as 185 large asteroids or comets hit the Earth in the far distant past, although most of the craters are on land. No one has spent much time looking for craters in the deep ocean, Morrison said, assuming young ones don't exist and that old ones would be filled with sediment.

Astronomers monitor every small space object with an orbit close to the Earth. "We know what's out there, when they return, how close they come," Morrison said. Given their observations, "there is no reason to think we have had major hits in the last 10,000 years," he continued, adding, "But if Dallas is right and they find 10 such events, we'll have a real contradiction on our hands."

Peter Bobrowski, a senior research scientist in natural hazards at the Geological Survey of Canada, said "chevrons are fantastic features" but do not prove that megatsunamis are real. There are other interpretations for how chevrons are formed, including erosion and glaciation. Bobrowski said. It is up to the working group to prove its claims, he said.

William Ryan, a marine geologist at the Lamont Observatory, compared Abbott's work to that of other pioneering scientists who had to change the way their colleagues thought about a subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/health/14iht-web.1114meteor.3522140.html?_r=1
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« Reply #37 on: September 16, 2009, 11:57:58 pm »

(Page 2 of 2)

"Many of us think Dallas is really onto something," Ryan said. "She is building a story just like Walter Alvarez did." Alvarez, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, spent a decade convincing skeptics that a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Ted Bryant, a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, was the first person to recognize the palm prints of mega-tsunamis. Large tsunamis of 30 feet or more are caused by volcanoes, earthquakes and submarine landslides, he said, and their deposits have different features.

Deposits from mega-tsunamis contain unusual rocks with marine oyster shells, which cannot be explained by wind erosion, storm waves, volcanoes or other natural processes, Bryant said.

"We're not talking about any tsunami you're ever seen," Bryant said. "Aceh was a dimple. No tsunami in the modern world could have made these features. End-of-the-world movies do not capture the size of these waves. Submarine landslides can cause major tsunamis, but they are localized. These are deposited along whole coastlines."

For example, Bryant identified two chevrons found over four miles inland near Carpentaria in north central Australia. Both point north. When Abbott visited a year ago, he asked her to find the craters.

To locate craters, Abbott uses sea surface altimetry data. Satellites scan the ocean surface and log the exact height of it. Underwater mountain ranges, trenches and holes in the ground disturb the Earth's gravitational field, causing sea surface heights to vary by fractions of an inch. Within 24 hours of searching the shallow water north of the two chevrons, Abbott found two craters.

Not all depressions in the ocean are impact craters, Abbott said. They can be sink holes, faults or remnant volcanoes. A check is needed. So she obtained samples from deep sea sediment cores taken in the area by the Australian Geological Survey.

The cores contain melted rocks and magnetic spheres with fractures and textures characteristic of a cosmic impact. "The rock was pulverized, like it was hit with a hammer," Abbott said. "We found diatoms fused to tektites," a glassy substance formed by meteors. The molten glass and shattered rocks could not be produced by anything other than an impact, she said.

"We think these two craters are 1,200 years old," Abbott said. The chevrons are well preserved and date to about the same time.

Abbott and her colleagues have located chevrons in the Caribbean, Scotland, Vietnam and North Korea, and several in the North Sea.

Heather Hill State Park on Long Island has a chevron whose front edge points to a crater in Long Island Sound, Abbott said. There is another, very faint chevron in Connecticut, and it points in a different direction.

Marie-Agnès Courty, a soil scientist at the European Center for Prehistoric Research in Tautavel, France, is studying the worldwide distribution of cosmogenic particles from what she suspects was a major impact 4,800 years ago.

But Madagascar provides the smoking gun for geologically recent impacts. In August, Abbott, Bryant and Slava Gusiakov, from the Novosibirsk Tsunami Laboratory in Russia, visited the four huge chevrons to scoop up samples.

Last month, Dee Breger, director of microscopy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, looked at the samples under a scanning electron microscope and found benthic foraminifera, tiny fossils from the ocean floor, sprinkled throughout. Her close-ups revealed splashes of iron, nickel and chrome fused to the fossils.

When a chondritic meteor, the most common kind, vaporizes upon impact in the ocean, those three metals are formed in the same relative proportions as seen in the microfossils, Abbott said.

Breger said the microfossils appear to have melded with the condensing metals as both were lofted up out of the sea and carried long distances.

About 900 miles southeast from the Madagascar chevrons, in deep ocean, is Burckle crater, which Abbott discovered last year. Although its sediments have not been directly sampled, cores from the area contain high levels of nickel and magnetic components associated with impact ejecta.

Burckle crater has not been dated, but Abbott estimates that it is 4,500 to 5,000 years old.

It would be a great help to the cause if the National Science Foundation sent a ship equipped with modern acoustic equipment to take a closer look at Burckle, Ryan said. "If it had clear impact features, the nonbelievers would believe," he said.

But they might have more trouble believing one of the scientists, Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C.

Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Masse said, "and we're not there yet."
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BlueHue2
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Blue-Hue? is he Just Blind, or a One-eyed 'king' ?


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« Reply #38 on: May 02, 2014, 10:33:27 am »

'ATLANTIS'(= originally ATHE.)

See my Sub-Script,

experienced THREE Tsunamies dd.

1055 bc, 855 bc, 705 bc.

Obviously Plato cannot refer to all Three Cataclysms
So I propose that he merged the 3 into 1

Sincerely, ' Blue-Hue '
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Atlantis in,"historical-Perspective"
=Known-World,Oikumene=Now,Yemen>Surat-89

This Egyptian,INDIAN-Ocean trade-Empire was
ruled by-CEO-Queen Tiy

PLATO wrote (GREEK!)" ATHE " Now,Aden= Solomon's/OFIR, in Herodotus-Araby-Map

ATLANTIS-Dialogue=Satire,on Athens-Trade boycott(of Darius2,413bc)
knakker
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« Reply #39 on: March 06, 2019, 03:33:02 am »

Not ancient but future earthquake in Revelation 16:18, a GLOBAL earthquake. The three Floods belong to the story line of Athens.

https://roodgoudvanparvaim.wordpress.com/
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cladking
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« Reply #40 on: March 18, 2019, 04:26:03 pm »

I  don't think Atlantis was destroyed at all. 

I think the memory of Atlantis was destroyed by the failure of Ancient Language that we call "The Tower of Babel". 
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atalante
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« Reply #41 on: December 22, 2019, 01:39:49 pm »

knacker is correct about floods.   The "3 floods" referred to a destruction of Critias's Attica/Athens. 

That destruction of Attica occurred during the "flood of Ogyges".  Classical era Greeks said the Silver Age was ended by the "flood of Ogyges".  This info about ending the Silver Age is consistent with Critias, because the Greeks had "forgotten" the events that occurred in Attica before the mythical "flood of Ogyges". 

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