In their book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan attempt to explain the relevance of past events to “who we are.” In the preface they express hope that others will attempt to “vault over or burrow under” the high walls erected between various sciences in order to properly address our collective cultural and biological history.
North American Wisconsinian Ice sheet impact event
We attended the December 2009 AGU meeting in San Francisco, and presented a poster of some of the Perigee: Zero concepts as they pertain to the Carolina bays and their role in identifying a possible North American Wisconsinian Ice sheet impact event. A comprehensive review of the conjecture and our Heuristic Argument can be seen on our Saginaw Impact Manifold web site.A PDF file of the submission in slide presentation form is available for download HERE.
In a previous AGU submission (AGU 2006 T41A-03) and its referenced web-based documentation ( here at Cintos.org ), we proposed that extraterrestrial impacts were responsible for cooling at the Younger Dryas boundary, North American megafaunal extinctions, and collapse of Native American culture. Recent work by others (Firestone, et al) has added significant support to such a hypothesis. We have since followed the cronological constraints to a proposed date of ca 40 ka.
A challenging aspect of the hypothesis involves the lack of an identifiable impact structure. The conjecture suggests that terrestrial material ejected from such an event would be distributed in a stylized manner.Our analysis correlates numerous proposed ejecta material emplacements - including the Carolina bays and the Goldsboro Ridge - to a cosmic impact event that struck the Wisconsin-era ice shield at ~43°N, ~87°W. The proposed scouring action of the event is seen producing the current-day Saginaw Bay Basin.
If you are a Google Earth user, you can access the Saginaw Impact Manifold Inferred Orientation of Distal Ejecta thread on Google Earth's Nature and Geography (Moderated) forum, or simply click the GE logo here to download a starter kmz:
The Enigmatic Sand: a Call for Collaboration
Optically Stimulated Luminescence Dating (OSL) has proven to be a reliable method of dating sedimentary deposition timetables over the span of 1 kya to 100 kya. The process, which is well understood and accepted, is one which requires a rigorously controlled sample collection, handling and processing regimen. As such, it can not be casually applied for testing across an extensive geography for research into a poorly-provenance conjecture. The conjecture under consideration - our Saginaw Impact and Distal Ejecta Manifold - has minimal support in the community at present, yet we feel justified in the expenditure of the considerable resources suggested here.We propose a scenario in which significant quantities of distal ejecta, in the form of a 1-10 meter thick sheet(blanket) of fine-grained sand, was deposited (blanketed) across a wide area for the North American continent in a singular event lasting less than an hour ~12 thousand years ago (kya), at the onset of the Holocene. During this blanketing, we propose that the constituents of the strata were heated to beyond 200 C, resetting their OSL clock. Identifying a coherent OSL dating across a wide field of samples would strengthen the case for our conjecture.
Our conjecture suggests that the resulting strata of sand - as a unit - can easily be discriminated from more generic fluvial and eolian deposit using a set of easily-applied and identified criteria:
- located immediately below current A soil horizon
- homogeneous strata unit of 1 to 10 meters in thickness
- unconsolidated
- contact with underlying strata to be conformable and sharply defined
- blanket will drape over hosting terrain up-slope/ down-slope while maintaining strata thickness
- mottled, laminated or gnarly presentation in vertical and horizontal cross section, suggesting turbid deposit environment
- no indications of stratified horizons within the unit (single deposition sequence accepted)
- exception to above when multiple units of otherwise-qualified strata exists in contact with each other, generating a horizon
- no indications of aqueous deposition, i.e. shells, therefore deductively considered eolian
- virtually no clay lenses present
- incongruous course skew seen in unit
- tightly constrained grain size across unit
- grain size (as a unit) variable from exceedingly fine sand up to small gravels
- no variation in heavy metal suite across strata
- little variation in presented color across unit
Suggested sitings for this strata include:
- sourced from within the rim of a Carolina bay structure, or within a field of these structures
- Costal margins, where a truncated bay will be interpreted as a parabolic dune
- Holocene-era deposits on elevated platforms where existance is engimatic
Ideally, samples meeting the above criterial would also have previously been tested to indicate:
• OSL dating of ca 40 kya,
Due to the proposed geographic extent of this strata, we recognize it may well be considered "common" within your experience; yet enigmatic nonetheless in context, raising questions about the true depositional method.
Please consider the profile offered above, and should you have access to experimental datum derived from previous research which identified depositional strata meeting these criteria, we implore you to consider collaboration with us. In addition, should you have knowledge of , and access to, sites which exhibit these criteria, we invite you to assist us in obtaining OSL dating across the vertical and extent of the unit.
At present, the project is unfunded. Please contact us for more information.
Michael Davias
917-751-8861
Send me an email