Welcome to another presentation about the Carolina Bays.
The Carolina Bays have a mathematically elliptical geometry, and since ellipses are conic sections,
this implies that the bays originated as inclined conical cavities.
This episode describes some of the comments that I get about my videos and how the azimuths
or headings are calculated by fitting ellipses to the Carolina Bays using the least squares
method.
The headings of the elliptical basins found on the Atlantic Coastal Plain, Nebraska and
other locations of the United States converge by the Great Lakes.
This image shows the great circle trajectories for the basins that I have personally investigated.
The basins do not have any evidence of extraterrestrial material, so they were not made by meteorite
impacts.
The best explanation for the elliptical geometry of these basins is that they formed as penetration
funnels by secondary impacts of glacier ice pieces ejected by one or more extraterrestrial
impacts on the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Ice Age.
Experiments confirm that oblique impacts by ice projectiles on a viscous target produce
inclined conical cavities that look elliptical when viewed from above and that viscous relaxation
reduces the depth of the cavities to produce shallow elliptical basins.
There are some persistent and deeply rooted myths in the geological community about the
effect of an extraterrestrial impact on an ice sheet and about how the elliptical basins
originated.
A viewer of one of my videos left a comment with two misconceptions.
He said: An impact on the ice sheet would have vaporized the ice.
It would have vaporized rock.
Carolina Bays are eroded remains of epiglacial thermokarst lakes.
The idea that an impact on an ice sheet just melts or vaporizes the ice is very common,
but it is 98% wrong.
Professor Schultz from Brown University has shown that high speed impacts on an ice sheet
break up the ice sheet and the ice pieces are ejected in ballistic trajectories from
the impact site.
Most of the kinetic energy of the projectile is transferred as kinetic energy to the ice
pieces created by the shock of the impact, and only a small portion of the energy gets
converted to heat to melt the ice and vaporize the meltwater.
The statement that the Carolina Bays are the eroded remains of epiglacial thermokarst lakes
is another misconception.
It is based on the thermokarst fallacy, which proposes that the Carolina Bays are identical
to thermokarst lakes that form in permafrost and, therefore, the presence of Carolina Bays
implies the presence of permafrost at an earlier time.
Geologist Christopher Swezey promoted the thermokarst fallacy in one of his publications,
where he stated that the presence of Carolina Bays in North and South Carolina implies that
these states had permafrost at one time, even though two different publications say that
the southern limit of continuous permafrost during the Last Glacial Maximum was located
in central or northern Virginia.
The thermokarst fallacy has made its way into Wikipedia, where the Carolina Bays are described
as relict thermokarst lakes.
Several professional geologists have rebuked Swezey's thermokarst fallacy.
A paper published in 2021 by Lundine and Trembanis describes several geological features that
distinguish Carolina Bays from thermokarst lakes.
QUOTE: Carolina Bays have also been compared to thermokarst or thaw lakes in the Arctic,
due to their similar appearance (oriented, elliptical depressions).
The maximum relief of thaw lakes (rim apex to bottom of basin) often exceeds 10 meters,
much greater than the maximum relief results reported for Carolina Bays.
Again, if the Carolina Bay basin deposits are removed, their maximum reliefs are only
increased by a few meters, still much less than that of the typical thaw lake.
The presence of permafrost, a prerequisite for thermokarst formation, as far south as
the coastal plain of Georgia seems unlikely even during prior glacial maximums.
It also is not supported by proxies nor is it supported by model predictions of past
permafrost extents.
END QUOTE.
In my presentations, I always emphasize the elliptical geometry of the Carolina Bays and
Nebraska Rainwater Basins.
I usually plot points along the perimeter of the basin and fit an ellipse by the least
squares method.
A good fit confirms the elliptical geometry of the basin and it affirms its likely origin
as an inclined conical cavity because ellipses are conic sections.
Sometimes, I am criticized for my emphasis on the elliptical geometry.
One person said: only the rainwater basins that YOU chose to show are 'mathematically'
elliptical.
There are many others that aren't, but are more circular.
Natural lakes in unconsolidated sediment tend to round out due to bank erosion.
Add to that the dominant wind direction was from the NNW during the late Pleistocene,
and you can get a more ellipsoid shape.
The most consistent rims found on the SE side because they are playa lakes that had sand
blown out of them.
Anybody who has studied the LiDAR images can easily see that the Alaskan thermokarst lakes
have very rough irregular borders compared to the smooth elliptical features of the Carolina
Bays.
They just don't look the same.
You don't need to be a geologist to understand that the Carolina Bays were not created by
the same physical mechanisms as the lakes in Alaska.
In 1977, Raymond Kaczorowski conducted an experiment where he carved a circular indentation
on a sand tray that he filled with water to represent a model lake and then he set a fan
to blow over the water.
He was probably not getting the results that he wanted, so he changed the fan to blow in
opposite directions, as indicated by the arrows, every fifteen minutes for four hours.
This periodic reversal of wind direction by 180 degrees does not happen in nature, and
certainly not in the Atlantic Coastal Plain where the Carolina Bays are found.
Kaczorowski's described his experiment as changing the model lake from circular to elliptical,
but what he obtained looked more like a bloated American football than an ellipse.
Kaczorowski concluded that wind and water mechanisms could have formed the Carolina
Bays, and many scientists support his hypothesis in spite of the unrealistic experimental wind
conditions and the difference in the resulting shape.
Thus far, there is no experimental evidence that wind and water mechanisms can consistently
produce mathematically elliptical features like the Carolina Bays.
The comments in my YouTube videos sometimes contain questions like this one.
Antonio, I'm looking at the screen at 2:21 where you show the direction it came from.
I'm not sure how you calculate that angle, but it is clearly inaccurate.
Just looking at the bay visually it is clear that the angle should point more to the west,
possibly toward the other impact site, not the Saginaw Bay site.
Please either recalculate that or show us how you got that result because visual inspection
does not agree with your video image.
The subscriber was referring to this image about a Carolina Bay in East Texas that had
an azimuth of 220.8 degrees.
I replied: The calculation of the azimuth (220.7) comes directly from the Python program
that fits the ellipse to the points.
You can verify it on your computer monitor or by printing the image on the screen as
follows:
An azimuth of 180 would be straight down.
We need to add 40 degrees to get 220, so we hold a protractor with the straight edge oriented
vertically, and use a ruler to go through the 40 degree mark and the center of the protractor.
The edge of the ruler marks the 220 degree azimuth.
When the image is oriented with the north at the top, we can easily check the azimuth
by using a protractor and a ruler.
The subscriber replied: Thanks for explaining how that azimuth is calculated.
I still disagree with the azimuth that would come out of that image.
Perhaps it is due to the points chosen for the ellipse, but you can clearly see that
the SW part of the ellipse is not the farthest from the center.
The farthest point from the center on the SW side is more SE from the point.
The same goes for the NE point.
The line should be more to the NW.
I suggest choosing a slightly different set of points and see if a different azimuth comes
out.
Like I said, if you visually look at the azimuth of that bay, it is clear that the azimuth
is counter-clockwise from the one your program calculates.
It looks like the points you choose to represent the edge are higher on the rim on the east
side than on the west side.
Also the single point on the northernmost side is off due to the eroded nature there.
I appreciate comments that make me think.
The suggestion of using a different set of points seemed reasonable as a way of calibrating
the accuracy of the azimuth calculation.
I decided to test the idea of using several sets of points for a well-preserved Carolina
Bay near Bowmore, North Carolina.
The bay has a road along the northeast rim and a drainage ditch at the south.
The center of the bay is completely covered with rows of trees.
The rectangular feature in the LiDAR image is a set of eight large barns.
I first tried fitting an ellipse through only five points, which is the minimum number of
points that defines an ellipse.
The Python program calculated a major axis of 912.3 meters and an azimuth of 135.6 degrees.
With ten points, the major axis was 4 meters longer and the azimuth was one degree smaller.
Sixteen points increased the length of the ellipse by eleven meters, but the azimuth
remained about the same.
In order to mark 24 points, I had to avoid the drainage ditch and the place where the
road crossed the rim of the bay.
With 24 points, the length of the ellipse increased by 6 meters, but the azimuth reverted
to the value using 5 points.
I then tried to estimate the azimuth of the Carolina Bay manually, but it was not easy.
You cannot really tell where the center of the bay is, and it is difficult to know whether
you are bisecting the elliptical feature properly.
Using the Google Earth ruler tool, I measured a major axis of 929.6 meters and an azimuth
of 137.4 degrees.
The value of the azimuth was consistent when fitting an ellipse by the least squares method.
This means that the orientation of the ellipse remained fairly constant regardless of the
number of points.
The azimuth of 137.4 degrees estimated manually has an error of 1.8 percent.
The length of the major axis became more accurate as the number of points increased.
The average of the major axis calculated with 16 and 24 points is close to what was measured
by the manual method.
I wanted to know what effect the 1.8% error in the angle would have on the calculation
of the convergence point of the bays.
This image shows the projections of an azimuth of 135.0 degrees calculated by the program
and 137.4 degrees estimated manually.
The distance between the end points is 58 kilometers at a distance of about 1,280 kilometers.
Taking the rotation of the Earth into consideration, these trajectories lead to Lake Michigan,
which is the convergence point of many Carolina Bays.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, published in 2007 by Richard Firestone and 25 co-authors,
proposed that one or more extraterrestrial impacts or airbursts by the Great Lakes caused
a megafaunal extinction and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling event.
Several papers deny that an extraterrestrial impact happened 12,900 years ago, and the
critics keep emphasizing that no impact crater and no shocked minerals have ever been found
for the purported event.
These papers call the Carolina Bays kettle ponds and dismiss them as structures formed
by wind and water without even mentioning their elliptical morphology.
The Nebraska Rainwater Basins are not mentioned at all.
The 2011 paper by Pinter and six co-authors says the following when discussing the Carolina
Bays.
QUOTE: Furthermore, the axes of the elliptical bays do not truly converge near the Great
Lakes, but rather vary in orientation both locally and regionally.
END QUOTE.
Two references are cited.
The 1942 book by Johnson and the 1970 paper by Thom were published more than 50 years
ago at a time when LiDAR imaging was not available and the Nebraska Rainwater basins had not
been discovered yet.
The paper published in 2023 by Holliday and eleven co-authors just repeats what the 2011
paper by Pinter said.
The major axes of the elliptical bays do not truly point to the Great Lakes and they vary
in orientation both locally and regionally.
The same two outdated references are used.
The book by Johnson was published 81 years ago, where he mentions that he had to work
with aerial photographs stored in survey offices.
It is regrettable that this paper published by Holliday in 2023 relies on sources that
were published before LiDAR imaging was widely used.
LiDAR has made it possible to debunk the statements that the orientations of the Carolina Bays
do not truly point toward the Great Lakes.
Just look at this image and the intersection of the lines.
If the Carolina Bays and the Nebraska basins are not pointing toward the Great Lakes, where
are they pointing?
It seems that there is a widespread conspiracy by many geologists to reject the impact hypothesis
without examining the evidence using modern tools like Google Earth and LiDAR images.
I have a great hope that when open-minded geologists start examining the LiDAR images
and testing the ellipticity of the Carolina Bays by the least squares method they will
be convinced that the Carolina Bays originated as inclined conical cavities because ellipses
are conic sections.
This will be the first step in getting rid of the myths that have held back the study
of the bays for more than 80 years.
Thank you for joining me in the investigation of the Carolina Bays and the Younger Dryas
cataclysm.
There is a link to the LiDAR visualization tool in the description of the video.
My book about the Carolina Bays is available at Amazon.
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified of future videos about the Carolina
Bays and other scientific topics.