THE CAROLINA BAYS

In addition to the radial orientation, Table 6 also indicates that certain counties, notably those furthest south and north, have much larger standard deviations than the counties in southern North Carolina and northern South Carolina. Some of this variation represents county sample sizes, because the counties with the smallest standard deviations are also the counties with the largest number of samples. Certainly, some portion of the markedly increased variation actually represents an increasingly divergent localized bay alignment.

If a comet nucleus on a low angle northwest trajectory was either fragmented or continuously fragmented as it approached the Earth, some fragments would be deflected further from the actual incoming trajectory. Continued ablation and further fragmentation of each segment of the nucleus, plus the effects of not quite simultaneous air blasts may account for the divergent azimuths in the sampled counties. Thus, bays furthest from the main trajectory could be expected to have much larger azimuthal standard deviations. Following the same logic, Bladen County, North Carolina, with the smallest standard deviation appears to be directly on the collision trajectory.

The increased variation away from the main trajectory may also account for the manner in which bays overlap. Bays in Cumberland County, adjacent to the inferred impact trajectory, tend to overlap either lengthwise along major axes or in complex clusters of as many as fourteen bays superposed in one area. Since Cumberland County is so near to the proposed collision trajectory, the complex bays and chains of bays may represent a rapid series of explosions and shock waves generated from further fragmentation of the remaining nucleus.

Lengthwise overlap along the main trajectory is to be expected because of the smaller variation in the dispersion of fragments. Where fragment dispersion is the greatest, less overlap should occur and bays should either be single or overlap along minor axes.