North American Catastrophe

About 12,900 years ago an asteroid or comet – the distinction is a bit blurry – fragmented above North America and effectively fire-bombed the entire Eastern side of the continent, wiping out the large mammals and the Clovis people with both the direct blast, the fire-storm and the Younger Dryas cold spell which refroze the Northern Hemisphere just as it was leaving the last Ice Age’s glacial advance. This is the latest claim advanced by a team of geoscientists at a recent geophysics meeting. The various news outlets have reported on the meeting, probably leaving a few of their fellow scientists a bit envious of the publicity – sufficient motivation to do some research of their own… that’s science!

Here’s the BBC story… Ice Age Blast

The BBC also has some good background pieces…

Megafuna Extinction …dozens of large mammals went extinct roughly at the same time as the blast took place. Some might’ve died soon after, some lingered through the Younger Dryas freeze.

Solutreans in America …the Solutrean people were Stone Age Europeans who lived towards the end of the last big Ice Age (glacial advance.) Their technology, and possible genetic traces, have links with the Clovis culture that was destroyed by the comet/asteroid blast.

Clovis First? … background on the debate over who settled the Americas first. The picture has been blurred by a lot of finds earlier than Clovis remains.

Science News has a more scholarly news report… Ice Age Ended Smashingly? … but they archive quickly, so the link might drop dead.

And, of course, MSNBC… Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts …which gives a nice summary.

Also the American Geophysical Union has abstracts from the meeting available online – just do a search under “Younger Dryas” and most of the abstracts will be about the putative impact event.

Andrew Collins is an independent researcher with an astounding grasp of the Late Pleistocene and Neolithic (see his “From the Ashes of Angels”), and some intriguing theories and evidence for Plato’s teasingly half-true story of “Atlantis”. Collins believes that the story derives from tales brought back by the Phoenicians, who had made contact with the natives of the present day islands of the Americas. The natives had retained memories of a terminal Ice Age catastrophe which had preceded the flooding of their primeval lands – just as the new research has revealed.

Here’s Andrew’s discussion of the new findings… Comet Firestorm

And, of course, my erstwhile friend and guru of the Interstellar, Paul Gilster, reports on the Impact at his blog, Centauri Dreams …which also has a few thoughts from yours truly.