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from SOTT Website
Tunguska Blast In June 1908, an explosion rocked a remote, swampy area in central Siberia, in Russia; it came to be known as the "Tunguska event."
A later expedition to the site found
that 20 miles of trees had been knocked down and set alight by the
blast. And today, it is understood that Tunguska's devastation was
caused by a 100-foot asteroid that had entered Earth's atmosphere,
causing an airburst.
The "Younger Dryas event," as it is
known, coincided with the end of the prehistoric
Clovis culture. And
the mass extinction of almost all of the giant animals that lived on
North America at the time.
All of that astonishing
biodiversity was blown away. In that paper, a team of twenty six scientists, studying sedimentary deposits presented a whole suite of compelling evidence for a massive impact event of a comet that appears to have broken up, and scattered, fragments all across North America.
The multiple, air
bursts are thought to have triggered wide spread bio mass burning on
a continental scale. As well as causing a return to ice age
conditions, and the extinction of many species. Including the mega
fauna like mastodons, wooly mammoths, and giant sloths.
But while they had good evidence from the ground that a very large impact had occurred in the recent past, it was clear that the event was vastly different from anything that had been studied before. And without an astronomical model that could confidently describe the nature of the impactor/s, they were were at an impasse.
"Where's the crater?" became a rallying cry of opponents
to the hypothesis.
Tunguska of 1908 was the largest impact event in recorded history.
And yet, the blast affected materials at ground zero do not qualify
it as an impact structure. Indeed, if there hadn't been any eye
witnesses, our impact scientists would be in complete denial of an
ET origin for all the violence there that day. There is no reason to
think Tunguska was an isolated event. Or even a big one, on the
grand scale of such things.
The colors in the simulation we see in the below video, are graded by temperature.
Simulation of an asteroid exploding in Earth's atmosphere, taking into account the speed.
Dr Boslough tells us that, in it, we see the ablated meteoritic vapor mixes with the atmosphere to form an opaque fireball with a temperature of thousands of degrees.
As it hits the ground, the hot vapor cloud expands to a diameter of 10 km within seconds, remaining in contact with the surface, with velocities of several 100m/s. And at temperatures exceeding the melting temperature of quartz for more than 20 seconds.
Moreover, the air speed behind the blast wave exceeds several hundred meters per second during this time.
For comparison, an ordinary oxy-acetylene cutting torch in a steel shop uses a thin stream of hot gases at only about 900°C. and 40 psi to cut steel.
The speed of that stream of hot gasses is
only a little bit more than a stiff breeze. But that's all it takes
to turn solid iron into a melted, aerosol, spray. And to blow it
away in runnels of melt into heaps of slag.
We have its existence predicted in peer reviewed literature.
But so far I haven't heard anyone attempt to describe the form that such geo-ablative melt might take as it is emplaced. While in motion, any ablated materials from a large, geo-ablative, airburst like that would be in atmospheric suspension, in a density current similar to a pyroclastic flow. And when everything comes to rest, the resulting rock form might be visually indistinguishable from ordinary volcanic tuff, or ignimbrite. If so, we face a conundrum in the Earth sciences.
Because it has always been assumed without question that
only terrestrial volcanism can melt the rocks of the Earth, or
produce 'Tuff'.
But no one had
connected the dots, and put the Younger Dryas comet, and the Taurid
Progenitor together. Except in private, speculative, emails, and
letters. And to the best of my knowledge there was nothing in
refereed literature.
It was indeed an astronomical catastrophe. And the nature of the
event bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything in any NEO hazard
assessments, or anything in current impact theory.
The YD impact hypothesis as it
stands, describes tens of thousands of such airbursts in a little
over an hour. And accompanied by clouds of particles down to the
size dust grains falling into the atmosphere at something like 30
km/per second, as the Earth crossed through the orbital path of the
giant fragmented comet's debris stream.
Using a gram scale to weigh a giant comet is like giving the distance to moon in inches.
The total mass of the
fragments that hit the Earth that day works out to well over 1.1
billion tons. 109 mega tons TNT of destruction doesn't seem like
such a stretch, when you work out how big the parent comet was.
Comet Linear
Comet HOLMES (below image) is unstable, and prone to violent outbursts.
Comet LINEAR, and
Comet Schawassmann-Wachmann 3, shown here make it abundantly clear that
total, explosive, fragmentation of a comet can occur spontaneously
at any time. And it can happen before it even gets close to a
planet. It doesn't need the atmosphere to do that. If you can describe a beast, you can predict its footprints.
Since the YD impact hypothesis has become a fully fledged theory that gives a specific description of the exact nature of the impactors, then it follows that we should also be able to predict the nature, and severity, of the blast effected materials. Only the first fragments to fall would have fallen into cold atmosphere. The rest would have fallen into already superheated atmosphere, and just cranked up the heat, and pressure.
So we're not necessarily looking
for craters where solid bolides hit the ground. We are looking for
the signatures, whatever they might be, of a 'Perfect Storm' of
ablative airbursts, with winds gusting to supersonic, and downdrafts
hotter than the surface of the sun. In the impact zones, the surface
of the Earth didn't get smashed and broken by the event. It was
flash melted, and blown away.
If the Younger Dryas Impacts were, in fact, the multiple airburst impact storms of the Taurid Progenitor, then there should be hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of flash melted rock, and blast effected materials, on this continent, as pristine as the day they first cooled. And with no giant volcanic system to account for them. And in fact, such continental scale, orphaned materials do indeed exist. And they can be found in two large geologically recent, multiple airburst, impact zones.
One is
The Northeast Impact Zone, extending
from the Great Lakes to the Arctic circle. And the other major
impact zone can be found in central Mexico, and extends up into west
Texas, and New Mexico.
And when we use modern high resolution satellite imagery to view the typical Airburst Impact structure at 29.702168, -105.686617 we can see why. That structure, and the geo-ablative curtain of airburst melt surrounding it, is typical of more than 50,000 square miles.
And terrestrial volcanism had nothing to do with it.
Comet Scwassmann-Wachmann 3. The high resolution satellite imagery that's become available in the past decade has revealed a new perspective that hasn't been available to geologists of the past.
Answering the question of where
those pyroclastic materials came from is easy when you can read the
patterns of movement, and flow, that were frozen in time from the
moment of their emplacement. And as easily as following splashes of
spilled paint back to a can.
And when you realize that gravity pulling them down a slope, and away from a vent, was not the motive force while they were in motion. And that you are looking at wind-driven patterns of movement, and flow, during the emplacement event, like the froth, and foam on a storm tossed beach.
And when you begin to see that those pyroclastic flows describe a completely different kind of non-volcanic catastrophe from anything ever imagined before.
Imagine along with me for a moment.
What say we take a great big comet, say 50 to 100 km wide, out of the Oort Cloud, or the Kuiper belt, and inject it into the inner solar system. And we park it an elliptical, Earth crossing orbit, and break it up into not so little pieces. Let's give it enough time for tidal forces to break it up completely, and stretch it out into a very long debris stream of particles, and fragments.
Our average fragment size was about the
size of
the Tunguska object. But they ranged from more than a half
mile wide, all the way down to clouds of dust.
The rest fall into already
superheated impact plasma, and just crank up the heat, and pressure.
In this way, almost 100% of the kinetic energy of the fragments gets
translated to heat, and pressure in the atmosphere. And that heat,
and pressure, hits the ground as an almost continuous, supersonic,
stream of airbursts, hotter than the surface sun.
All that astonishing
biodiversity was burned, and blown away in seconds.
The 2007 Firestone paper cited Toon et al when they proposed temps as high as 107degrees C. There's that exponential thing again. That's 10 million degrees Celsius. But Professor Napier pointed out for me that even if a bolide hits the atmosphere at 30 kilometers per second, and all of its kinetic energy is translated to heat in the atmosphere, it is difficult to get more than 100,000° C.
But that's ok. Because either way, even
with the more conservative figure, we are still describing
temperatures that are more than enough to vaporize any known
substance on the surface of the Earth. And to blow it away like wax
under a high pressure blowtorch.
In a matter of minutes, much of the eastern end of the LIS
was obliterated. Much of which probably went into the atmosphere as
steam. The immense hydrothermal explosions also lofted the iceberg
sized chunks of ice that produced the
Carolina Bays when they fell
back to Earth.
The Earth was probably in the path of
the devastating streams of high velocity, air bursting comet
fragments for about an hour. And out of tens of thousands of large,
air-bursting, fragments there is not one single impact structure
that bears any resemblance to what standard impact theory might
expect. Or a "full suite of impact hallmarks" all of the planetary
scarring of the event has been mis-defined as volcanogenic. And most
of the ages of those blast effected materials have been over
estimated by orders of magnitude.
It
generated a post impact mega tsunami of thermal impact plasma taller
than the atmosphere, hundreds of miles wide, and hundreds of miles
from front to back, that rushed downrange to the northwest at
supersonic speeds. And it sterilized the western half of the
continent on a swath from Mexico to the Arctic, along a storm front
extending from California to the great plains.
The rest of the fragments just piled on in, and
added to the heat, and pressure. The overpressures from the blast
waves were so powerful they blasted whole mountain ranges aside like
clumps of flour on a bakers table. And still, they continued to pile
in. And the heat, and overpressures, continued to build.
This was like nothing ever imagined in our most frightening nightmares of disaster, or catastrophe. During the impacts, and for a few minutes after, most of North America from Mexico to the Arctic, and from California, to the plains of the Midwest, was engulfed in what might best be described as a full blown magneto-hydro-dynamic plasma storm.
Like something we should only expect to find on the surface
of the sun. And there is not one square inch of the surface terrains
of western North America in its path that doesn't bear the scars of
that blast of heat.
And we typically see high glacial valleys below those melted ridges that have all of the material that was once suspended in the Glacier lying exactly below where it was in the glacier. Indicating that the ice evaporated so fast there was no flow of water down slope to move any of the glacial till.
So we see that the glacial till dropped out
so fast it's as if the ice just vanished in a quick puff of steam.
Most of the biomass of western North America was burned away and much of the resultant smoke, and soot was blown high above the atmosphere where it blocked sunlight for years. There was an immediate sharp drop in temperatures world wide. It was the worst kind of 'Perfect Storm'.
Made all the worse because at the same time the destruction of the LIS caused a sudden rise in sea levels world wide. It it may have caused a shutdown of the thermal halide cycle which brings tropical warmth to the North Atlantic.
Be that as it
may, Northern Europe quickly cooled to arctic temperatures. And the
cold remained for centuries.
The lush savannah the giant animals of North America depended on for food was gone down to the last blade of grass.
Those giant animals that
survived in the southeast corner of the continent faced a
drastically altered, and reduced food supply. And they simply
starved. The specialist predators that depended on those animals for
food perished as well. The species that survived extinction were the
most adaptable, the smaller ones that didn't eat much, and those
that were just plain lucky.
So that, in a daytime event, the fragments are outbound
from perihelion. The airburst storms would begin in the west, and
progress to the east. As the Earth Crosses the debris stream. In a
night time event, the debris stream would be inbound towards their
perihelion, and the opposite would be true.
It is almost a certainty that the next major impact event
will be an airburst. And it is a certainty that we haven't seen the
last catastrophic impact of the Taurid Complex.
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