Comments on: The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/ Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:27:14 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: Rod Chilton https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529496 Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:27:14 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529496 Hi Greg: I just noticed your interesting site and your discussion of the Younger Dryas. I think that you covered this topic very well. The Younger Dryas is something I have been researching over the past eight years. Very early on I noted many problems with the North Atlantic Ocean circulation theory. This sent me along the road to investigating alternative ideas, one of which Dr. Kennett and others have derived quite recently, and that is a comet impact. Or as they indicate more specifically, an air bursting comet, as occurring in the skies over North America. Well, all this and I believe much more is the conclusion I have reached and presented in a new book I call Sudden Cold. If you are so inclined check it out at my website bcclimate.com. Thank-you for this forum, Yours truly Rod Chilton

]]> By: Dennis Cox, Fresno, Ca. https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529495 Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:31:56 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529495 A “swarm” is a large group of annoying insects. Pretty small word for a comet cluster. a group of comets is a Catastrophe of Comets.

Ejecta

Some ejecta I found that had been tossed around
was waiting for someone to assess.
That â??twas up in the air before it got there.
What tossed it, I had not a guess.
Strange, and quite queer, no volcano was near,
or round crater to account for the mess.
How rude, and sore cruel; to break every rule,
then lie in plain sight nâ??er the less?

In northern Mexico you will find ten thousand square miles of ejecta, breccias, melt basins, and pyroclastic flows as fresh and pristine as the day they first cooled. And if you follow the flows of those materials back to their respective sources you find no impact crater, or volcanic vent. Just bare, burned, smoothly melted, stone. Or strange dragon spine shaped mountains without a trace of alluvial material. And you will find yourself knowing beyond all shadow of doubt that the source of all the heat and destruction came from above.
If you aren’t looking down there you aren’t doing impact science. And you aren’t going to unravel the mystery of the Younger Dryas cooling. Or the Megafaunal extinctions of the early Holocene. You are just chasing butterflies in the playground. C’mon you guy’s catch up.

]]> By: Blind Squirrel FCD https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529494 Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:34:38 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529494 Greg, that is the best explanation I have heard yet. I can’t wait to hear how this all comes out.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529493 Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:51:43 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529493 Is 72 kilometers per second not fast enough for you?

Also, there is an element being ignored here. These diamonds are not object entering the atmosphere. They are objects forming in the atmosphere as products of a very high energy impact and subsequent stuff that happens. It seems to me that they only have to be going at the speed of sound or maybe twice the speed of sound to get the effects seen in the bones, and I’ve read impact reconstructions in which gas clouds are moving this quickly along with shock waves. The gas cloud provides the raw material, the shock wave the extra compressive energy, and the whole thing is moving at the speed of the average rifle bullet.

]]> By: Blind Squirrel FCD https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529492 Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:16:25 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529492 another quote from Thompson

“They probably came in under very high velocities, hundreds of kilometres (sic) a second almost. It must have exploded and just embedded these things in the tusks in large quantities, as many as 100 or more in one tusk

The highest theoretical speed for an asteroid entering the atmosphere is 72.9 KPS. This would be a very rare event. I can’t help wondering what else this guy is wrong about.
BS

]]> By: Blind Squirrel FCD https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529491 Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:55:22 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529491 Nathan: Your point no. 1 makes a bit more sense. As far as no. 2 goes, yes Richard Firestone, the team leader claims that mammoths were killed by these fragments.

Firestone said he believes meteorites exploded over parts of Beringia â?? the Ice Age-era region that includes parts of modern-day Alaska, Yukon and Siberia â?? creating showers of fragments, or “micrometeorites,” that struck and killed many of the prehistoric creatures that roamed the area.

BS

]]> By: Nathan Myers https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529490 Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:53:04 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529490 Squirrel: 1. A grain of sand can travel at any speed, for any distance, if the air it is traveling in is moving at the same speed. 2. As I read it, the grains involved are not blamed for killing anything; they are found embedded in one side of exposed mammoth tusks.

]]> By: Blind Squirrel FCD https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529489 Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:31:05 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529489

Your objection is to the lethality of a grain of sand traveling at, say, 2,000 kph entering a mammoth.

No, my objection is that the grain of sand cannot travel at 2000KPH in our atmosphere for more than a few feet before it is stopped by friction or vaporizes from heat.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529488 Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:06:57 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529488 Blind: OK, I get it.

(as an aside, burning totally involved the atmosphere, certainly, but that s probably not important here)

Your objection is to the lethality of a grain of sand traveling at, say, 2,000 kph entering a mammoth.

I’m going to have to go back and read (and blog) the original paper. I’m not sure if the cause of death was always or even ever this particular effect … its just tha the effect links the death to the event closely enough. Even if these are bones laying around on the landscape, that’s pretty good considering there is a lot of other putative evidence for the event and its consequences.

]]> By: Blind Squirrel FCD https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529487 Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:52:26 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/11/the-fantastic-mystery-of-the-y/#comment-529487 I am willing to believe that meteors formed diamonds and tektites, that escape velocity can be reached and material can travel from one body to another in the solar system to another. None of this has anything to do with my original objection that it is impossible to kill so much as a squirrel with a grain of sand at any significant distance.

Larger bits are presumably moving and exploding at the same time. Also, imagine your ping pong balls moving at nine times the speed of sound. The atmosphere in front of the ping pong ball is burned off.

I am unable to find any meaning in this statement. Atmosphere does not burn. The grain of sand burns.

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