Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Thirteen Thousand Years ago Fragments of a Comet could have collided with Earth


Woolly Mammoth
By Tracy O


It is been postulated that the earth was barraged by a cloud of debris from a disintegrating comet 13,000 years ago. The degree of fragments raining down on the earth could have resulted in a series of mega ton explosions similar to the Tunguska event of 1908 in Siberia. Instead of this 4 km in diameter comet instead of striking a single blow in the ice sheet covering North America could have broken up into smaller fragments that had the effect of a shotgun blast on the surface of the earth.

By that time the earth was pretty well populated with humans and an event of this sort would have been handed down word-of-mouth for thousands of years later. This may be another explanation for some of the events that occurred in the Bible. One of the effects would be mega-tsunamis that could very well explain the legends of floods that are found all over the world.

The breaking up of this comet would've resulted in a series of fiery blasts that would have been as deadly as one big impact. It may be one explanation for the demise of the North American mega-fauna. The impacts could have also caused the deaths of many other animals including humans. There have been frozen mammoths found in Siberia that still have fresh butter cups in their mouth. Their deaths have been a mystery ever since discovering the first frozen woolly mammoth as to why they had fresh vegetation in their mouths. It appeared that they had all been killed instantly.

A possible explanation could be that the impact of a giant meteorite could cause shockwaves that are manifested by high velocity winds striking all at once that would have been able to kill everything they struck.

The proposal for this happening comes from Bill Napier, an astronomer who works at Cardiff University in England. In 1982 Napier along with Victor Clube co-authored a book that is titled The Cosmic Serpent. In this book they suggest that the outer planets sometimes divert giant comets from their orbits allowing them to penetrate the inner solar system. They propose that one of these giant comets had entered the solar system 20,000 to 30,000 years ago that over thousands of years the giant comet broke up into a series of fragments.

They developed a new theory based on this theoretical comet known as the theory of constant catastrophism where they claim we are living in a time of increased meteor impacts. The theoretical comet left behind it the Taurid meteor shower along with the comet Encke and a whole collection of other debris's.

In a new paper on display at www.arix.org that is to appear shortly in the monthly notices of the Royal astronomical Society in London. In this paper Napier explains that the real catastrophe was the Earth hitting a clump of debris that came from a comet that was 50 to 100 km in diameter.

It has been theorized that running into thousands of fragments from this comet would've been just like running into the blast from a shotgun. It is felt by Napier that this is more likely to have happened than a single large collision.

Even if this didn't happen 13,000 years ago there was a different kind of catastrophe that did occur than with the sudden drainage of a huge lake in Canada holding meltwater at the edge of the North American ice sheet. This lake at a cumulated as the glacier melted because it didn't have any place else to go. Whatever held this lake in place eventually broke down or melted causing a tremendous flood.

For years geologists have looked in vain for evidence that this flood went down the St. Lawrence River Valley. A recent paper however shows that some 9500 km³ of water drained out through the Mackenzie River instead. Wallace Broeckner of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades New York suggests that an Arctic release of this nature might have been an even better trigger for initiating the cold spell that happened over 13,000 years ago.

References:

Did an Exploding Comet cause Extinctions 13,000 Years Ago, Fraser Cain, Universe Today

Did a Comet Swarm Strike America 13,000 Years Ago, Jeff Hecht,
New Scientist,

Mega-flood Triggered Cooling 13,000 Years Ago, Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62U44D20100331

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