We have often talked about the evidence of previous catastrophes that have devastated Earth.
Changing the landscape in the blink of an eye and wiping out
huge populations of animal species in the process. Most of this evidence comes from
the entombed skeletal remains that have been uncovered all across the globe.
The most recent seems to be connected to the end of the Pleistocene. A lot of the evidence seems to
suggest flooding on an almost unimaginable scale. New research is uncovering that around 13,000
years ago a Firestorm covered 10% of the Earth's Surface. Let's dive in and find out more...
Before we examine the new evidence it is important to understand what could have caused these mass
extinctions around this timeframe. This time frame is often referred to as the Younger Dryas.
It marks the sudden and sharp decline in global temperatures.
Some believe that a giant comet struck the earth and caused the devastation we
see in much of the remains. This event is referred to as the Younger Dryas event.
The comet is thought to have caused widespread changes to the climate,
triggering an 'impact winter' and subsequent declines in animal populations.
What is the evidence that supports this idea? There are 26 known younger dryas sites which
contain anomalously high concentrations of platinum over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
There are also finds of melt glass in Pennsylvania,
South Carolina, Syria and as we reported a while ago in the Atacama Desert in Peru.
An analysis of patterns in pollen levels also revealed that pine forests
were suddenly burned off to be replaced by poplar trees.
This is a species that specialises in covering barren ground.
Many rejected this theory instead favouring the idea
the North Atlantic Conveyor shutdown causing drastic changes to the global temperature.
Then in 2018 new evidence uncovered from ice cores,
marine and lake sediments as well as terrestrial sequences suggested increased dust concentrations,
with high peaks of ammonium, which is a biomass burning aerosol. These all seemed to suggest one
of the largest biomass burning events at the onset of the Younger Dryas. When they
examined the changes in CO2 records from Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, these seemed to suggest that
this burning event may have consumed 10 million km2 or about 10% of Earth's terrestrial biomass.
These changes could not be explained by just the stopping of the North Atlantic Conveyor.
Some have suggested that the platinum discovered might have come from Volcanic eruptions.
There are major eruptions which occurred near the Younger Dryas onset but no significant Platinum
peaks are associated with any episodes of volcanism recorded in the cores. Although
their analysis of other metal ratios seemed to indicate the impactor could have been any one
of several types of meteorites it is inconsistent with a collision with a single type of meteorite.
And instead suggest it might have come from a comet. And specifically, one that
was disintegrating before impact. These would have caused both aerial detonations and ground impacts
from numerous relatively small cometary fragments widely dispersed across several continents.
The smoke released by the fires as well as the dust caused by the impact events would have caused
a reduction in overall global temperatures. The cooling of the upper atmosphere may have created
supercooled crystals in the high atmosphere. These have high reflectivity and could lead
to a self-sustaining, high albedo layer of ice crystals causing further cooling across the globe.
Let's take a little step back here. We have deposits of Platinum that are not associated
with volcanic activity. Ice core samples indicate higher concentrations of biomass burning aerosols
and there is a distinct increase in CO2 records
that is not accounted for. We also have the evidence of glass shards across the globe.
When we looked at the glass shards of the Atacama we saw that in the region where the shards were
found many of the hills surrounding the area had tell tale signs of triangular buttresses.
Andy Hall's work indicates that these triangular formation
may be caused by surface conductive faults running across vast portions of the landscape.
Under normal conditions, geomagnetic events are normally discharged through the atmosphere.
We normally see these in the form of thunderstorms, earthquakes, and volcanoes.
When the event is much much larger these circuits can overload creating short-circuits.
These massive currents then cause sheets of lightning and plasma bolides, which arc through
surface conductive paths above ground. Magnetic fields around the plasma currents induce rotation
along the horizontal axis modifying the speed of the winds. This causes the material to be
blown asymmetrically and it carves a valley longitudinally down the center of the hill.
What about the fires. Any discharge event on the scales we are talking about would indeed have been
responsible for vast walls of fire travelling across the globe. It is important to realise
that their findings are only indirect evidence of fire. They detect the by-products in the form of
nitrates, ammonia and carbon dioxide. Is this the only way these could have been produced?
Let's start with nitrates. When lightning strikes in earth's nitrogen-oxygen rich atmosphere it
produces a mixture of oxides of nitrogen, which form nitrous ions and nitrate ions.
These eventually get washed from the atmosphere by rain. Now normal lightning is not enough
to account for this uptick but we are not talking about normal lightning here. So the
uptick in nitrates could be explained due to some massive discharge event around 13,000 years ago.
Ammonia is created in the laboratory by mixing nitrogen gas with hydrogen gas
at higher temperatures and pressure in the presence of iron. If we assume the discharge
travels partly through the surface materials could this account for the required iron? As
the discharge is occurring temperatures and pressures will be much much higher.
We have plenty of nitrogen in the air but not much hydrogen is present. So where could this have come
from? When an electric current is passed through water is dissociates into hydrogen and oxygen.
The glass shards found on the Atacama are located in what was once part of the ocean
but somehow became uplifted in some event. The dating of this event is possibly millions of
years prior to the period we are considering now but then there is also the uncomfortable problem
of the agricultural beds that are located above the snow line which may suggest that
they too were uplifted along with the entire plateau. This means that either
modern man is much older than we acknowledge or the uplifting occurred much more recently.
Could there discharge events partly through either the shallow ocean bed or the later uplifted lake
bed create the required hydrogen in the presence of iron in the rocks to create the uptick in
ammonia detected in many of the core samples? From the evidence, we have previously looked at these
events were not just associated with South America but seemed to occur right across the globe,
possibly not all simultaneously but all part of an ongoing sustained event. Any rivers,
lakes, seas or groundwater could create the required hydrogen for the production of ammonia.
Further research reveals that there is a much simpler path for the production of ammonia
from the nitrates we produced from the discharge. When nitrates are dissolved in water
and are in the presence of a simple metal catalyst
which is then exposed to an electric current this can cause the nitrate to undergo a process
called electroreduction forming ammonia and nitrogen as byproducts.
During the discharge events not only does this carve the landscape with characteristic features
but it would also throw vast amounts of fine particulates
into the air which could account which would have blocked out vast
amounts of sunlight and lowered the global average temperature.
Platinum would also be explained by the fact that the discharge was transmuting elements
along the discharge path. A while ago I looked at how metal veins might have been produced
through discharge events. We saw that metals are often found along channels and that along these
paths we would find different types of metals often ending in the heavier metals like Uranium