Missing Craters
If we think of the Earth and Moon as a binary system, or gravity well, then it is fair to assume that if objects randomly enter that gravity well, then they should divide proportionately according to the sizes of the individual attractors in that system. Or to put it more simply: We must get hit about six times more often than the moon, and by bigger objects. All of the landforms on the moon, every mountain range, every depression, every feature you can see, are impact related. Anyone with a toy telescope can look up on a clear night and see whole mountain ranges that were raised up in seconds sometime in the past. The study of astronomy gives us a pretty good idea of the frequency of the various sizes of impacts. And anyone can look at the erosion of land forms here on Earth and see how slow that process is.
But when we consider all of those factors at the same time we come to an uncomfortable paradox. There should be a lot more impact structures; big ones, clearly visible, with little or no erosion. In fact, there must be at least one major mountain range on the Earth, however old, or deeply eroded, that owes its very existence to an extra-terrestrial impact or explosion. And yet, there is not a single accepted theory that allows for extra-terrestrial events as one of the possible driving forces in landform creation.
To be fair, in all of recorded history there hasn't been a single significant ballistic cratering event like we see in the simulations. We don't even hear about a classic, ballistic cratering, impact event like the simulations show in the archetypes of our most ancient of myths, and legends. But the firestorm of mass extinction impacts that wiped out North America a few thousand years ago did happen. We have the burned bones of the corpses for proof.
And we have other materials that tell us conclusively of the heat and pressure that must have happened at some places on the continent. Such heat and pressure is only found in an ET impact event. Those specific materials are the nano-diamonds found in the Younger Dryas Boundary layer (YDB). (Firestone et al 2007, 2009, Kennett et al 2008,2009) They are important for the fact that they weren't brought here. Rather they were formed in the atmosphere during the violent explosions of multiple comet fragments. And the heat, and pressure, required to produce them makes them a valid proxy for understanding the atmospheric conditions they formed in. They are a barometer, and pyrometer, rolled up into one.
The nano-diamonds originated in unimaginably hot, and violent, above ground explosions, right here in the skies of earth. And Nano diamonds being found all over the world just means the violent conditions of heat, and pressure, it takes to form them are not uncommon at all. It doesn't make the detection of their existence any less significant. It makes it more so. When you hear ancient legends of a fiery rain of stones, or fire coming down from the sky, you are hearing an oral history account of a nano-diamond producing, thermal impact, event. The widespread detection of them confirms those ancient stories as actual history, not mere myth.
A different kind of impact event
The likelihood the observations of an amateur will be taken seriously by the academic community is inversely proportional to the significance of those observations. So that a really big idea that changes anything has about as much chance of being heard as a mouse breaking wind in a hurricane. And, paradoxically, the importance of communicating those observations is directly proportional to their significance. So it's a kind of Cassandra's curse for the 21st century. I seek only to communicate a new observation about a different kind of impact event. Those who wish to debate will have to wait until I am through studying it.
Reference:
Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions, and the Younger Dryas cooling. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Firestone%2B25_2007.pdf
"Nature of the Event: continent-wide effects, especially biomass burning, but the size, density, and composition of the impactor are poorly understood. Even so, current data suggest that this impactor was very different from well studied iron, stony, or chondritic impactors (e.g., at the K/T boundary). The evidence is more consistent with an impactor that was carbon-rich, nickel–iron-poor, and therefore, most likely a comet. Although the current geologic and geochemical evidence is insufficient to fully understand impact dynamics, we can offer speculation for future work.
Toon et al. suggest that an impact capable of continent-wide damage requires energy of 107 megatons, equivalent to an impact by a 4-km-wide comet. Although an impactor that size typically leaves an obvious large crater, no such late Pleistocene crater has been identified. The lack of a crater may be due to prior fragmentation of a large impactor, thereby producing multiple airbursts or craters. Hypervelocity oblique impact experiments (Peter Shultz, unpublished data) indicate that a low-impedance surface layer, such as an ice sheet, can markedly reduce modification of the underlying substrate if the layer is equal to the projectile’s diameter. These results suggest that if multiple 2-km objects struck the 2-km-thick Laurentide Ice Sheet at 30°, they may have left negligible traces after deglaciation. Thus, lasting evidence may have been limited to enigmatic depressions or disturbances in the Canadian Shield (e.g., under the Great Lakes or Hudson Bay), while producing marginal or no shock effects and dispersing fine debris composed of the impactor, ice-sheet detritus, and the underlying crust. Toon et al. also noted that if airbursts explode with energy of 107 megatons at optimum height, they will cause blast damage over an area the size of North America that is equivalent to a ground impact of 109 megatons. Such airbursts effectively couple the impactor’s kinetic energy with the atmosphere or surface, producing devastating blast waves well above hurricane force. In 1908, at Tunguska, Siberia, a object 150 m in diameter, either a carbonaceous asteroid or a small, burned-out comet, produced a 15-megaton airburst with an intense fireball (107 °C) that scorched 200 km2 of trees and leveled 2,000 km2 of forest yet produced no crater or shock metamorphism. A debris shower from a heavily fragmented comet would have produced an airburst barrage that was similar to, although exponentially larger than Tunguska, while causing continent-wide biomass burning and ice-sheet disruption, but again possibly, without typical cratering.”
The fragmented impact hypothesis as a trigger for the Younger Dryas cooling, and the megafaunal extinctions at the end of the last ice age has been criticized by some because of problems with a large object being able to be broken up in the atmosphere, and dispersed over a large landmass without any of the fragments being big enough to make an impact crater. And many of the critics cite the supposed strength of an asteroid. Although I’ll agree the atmosphere shouldn't be able to do that to a really big, fast moving, solid, bolide before any of it gets to the ground. Detailed studies of the structural integrity of an asteroid have never been done.
But we aren't talking about a dense, rocky asteroid that broke up when it got here. We are talking about a fragmented comet. The Deep Impact mission to comet TEMPEL 1 showed the head of that comet to have the consistency of a dirty snow bank. It also showed that the object is a geologically active body. Comet HOLMES is unstable, and prone to violent outbursts. And if we look at the recent HST images of the fragments of Comet LINEAR we clearly see that total, explosive, fragmentation of an icy 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
It’s been more than a hundred years since the Tunguska phenomena. And the Russian scientists haven’t been sitting on their hands all this time. There are literally hundreds of excellent papers on the subject. And from the Physical-Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 194021 St-Petersburg, Russia we read:
Tunguska-1908 and similar events in light of the New Explosive Cosmogony of minor bodies, E.M.Drobyshevski, 2009 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2268163/Explosive%20Cosmogony.pdf
I hope you’ll give E. M. Drobyshevski’s work a close look. Because the nature, and origin, of the objects that caused the devastation of the younger Dryas impact events is understood far better than most realize. And this was no simple, rocky bolide. It was already highly fragmented before it arrived. And the fragments mostly consisted of electrolyzed ices that were nearly as explosive as frozen hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel.
Mark Boslough, at Sandia Labs has done a super computer simulation that depicts the atmospheric effects of an above ground blast like Tunguska but much larger. It shows the object exploding high in the atmosphere. But it retains it's momentum. And, in a moving explosion, all of the kinetic energy continues on down to the ground in the form of a supersonic downdraft shock wave hotter than the surface of the sun.
For comparison, an ordinary ox-acetylene cutting torch in a steel shop uses a thin stream of hot gases at only about 1600 degrees F. 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. The nano-diamonds found in the Younger Dryas boundary layer are significant in that they formed under hot, violent, explosive, atmospheric conditions all over the north American continent that should have been able to do that to whole mountain ranges. Those conditions of intense heat, and pressure can only happen in an impact event. And yet no one has ever found a crater. But that much heat, and pressure, only goes away peacefully in children's bedtime stories. So, since the surface scars the impact firestorm made must be here right under our feet, then maybe the pretty, perfect circle, craters we see on the Moon, and Mars, and that we’ve come to assume we should expect here on Earth as well, aren’t what we should be looking for at all. But if we’re not looking for round craters, then what kinds of planetary scaring are we looking for?
The atmosphere translates all of the kinetic energy into heat. But it doesn't dissipate it. And contrary to standard impact theory, the most common forces acting on the ground in an airburst impact event are heat, and pressure, not kinetic shock. The reason that round craters are rare isn't because we rarely get hit. They are rare because we rarely get hit by non-explosive rocky bolides, or asteroids.
It turns out that the Tunguska object was only rare in that it arrived alone. And it was such a puny little thing. A large, highly fragmented comet consisting mostly of ices that are almost as violently explosive as hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel is a much more frightening kind of monster; and much more common. The form the planetary scaring takes is characterized as a non-volcanic melting event hot enough to make stone flow like water for a moment. And ballistic/kinetic shock has almost nothing to do with it.
An inescapable fact that can not be ignored is that the most violent natural disaster, and extinction level impact event, in 65 million years was only a few thousand years ago.
But standard uniformitarian, gradualist, landform theory is in complete denial of the geomorphology of the event. The high priests of the Gradualist Confabulation would have us accept on faith alone that it is possible for an extinction level event to sterilize half a continent, severely compromise the food chain in the other half. And the rest of the northern hemisphere as well. And then leave no visible geological trace.
The megafaunal extinctions, and the questions of why the event caused the extinction of the giant animals while the smaller ones survived is explained simply by noting that the species that survived were the ones that didn’t need so much to eat.
Impact science is very poorly understood. A fact readily acknowledged by most competent impact scientists, and grad students. But hotly denied by the freshman class. And by folks who get their science from the discovery channel. This was a very different kind of impact event . It was caused by the impacts, and detonations, of objects different from anything ever studied before. And they produced planetary scaring different from anything ever imagined before. The claim that looking for the markers of a normal impact didn't turn up evidence of this one. is like saying they tuned their search to detect the tiniest trace of oranges, and they didn't find any evidence of apples.
You could think of this approach as a kind forensic geology/blast analysis. We study the motions, and emplacement, of blast effected materials. Specifically sheet ignimbrites, and impact ejecta, to determine a true picture of the nature of the explosive events they formed in.
Impact melt is often mistaken as volcanic tuff. And, when viewed form the surface, the two can be so visually similar that only detailed chemical analysis can tell them apart. But no matter where you find them, and no matter the source of heat, and pressure, that melted, and moved them, ignimbrites (literally, ‘fire cloud rock’ ) are always formed in a violent explosive event. And as a blast effected material they are always a direct signature of the explosive, fluid, motions of their formation, and emplacement; no proxy required.
I would have thought that the geology of the north American continent was all very well studied. But when you start looking for any detailed research on emplacement of the pristine sheet ignimbrites in north, central Mexico, and west Texas, and the exact nature of the explosive events they were formed in. You quickly find that, while there are quite a few untested theories, detailed studies of it's origins, and fluid motions during emplacement, haven't been done.
The sudden, unimaginably violent events of their formation can be understood to an amazing, and extraordinary, level of detail if one simply studies how they moved as blast effected materials during emplacement. So the only questions I am asking here are concerned with are simply: How did it move, and flow? We need only to get enough altitude to see the actual patterns of movement, and flow, to determine the true points of origin, of a sheet of surface ignimbrites. So the science of Fluid Mechanics has the trump card.
It doesn't get any easier than when the materials are , in pristine condition, and exposed, on the surface. And, in a hi-resolution satellite image, the motions of the ignimbrites in central Mexico, and those in west Texas, are as easy to read as the patterns of movement, and flow, in splashes of mud, or spilled paint. You can look at a flow, and easily see which direction it was moving at any particular point. And by studying the motions, and fluid dynamics of the ignimbrites, and other blast effected materials we can come to a true understanding of the nature of the explosive events they were formed in.
Those thousands of cubic miles of pristine ignimbrites are very clearly the blast effected materials of an explosive natural disaster far more violent than anything in many millions of years. And arguably one the most violent events in the history of this continent. You could completely empty the Yellowstone super caldera in Wyoming, and you would have only a very small fraction of the volume of Chihuahuan ignimbrites. And yet, except for a few prospectors looking for money rocks they are almost completely unstudied. There is much untested speculation as to their origin. But they are almost completely unmapped. And, to the best of my knowledge, no formal study of their emplacement has ever been done. How can such a monumental, and catastrophic, disaster remain out of the literature?
There has been some mapping of ignimbrites in the Chihuahua City area, and on northward for about 100 km, or so, in spots along the Chihuahua - El Paso highway. It's taken years to get just that little bit done. But there is a more than 40,000 square kilometer mega-flood of random-colliding rivers of fast flowing ignimbrites in central Mexico, and up into west Texas that are as pristine as if they just cooled last year.
Waiting a lifetime for those Geologists on the ground was not an option. And, in frustration because I couldn't get my hands on any decent research papers on the subject, I set out to work out the patterns of movement, and flow, for myself to get a better understanding of the explosive events they formed in.
The movements of an unconstrained fluid are defined by the forces moving it. And for our purposes we'll need to refine that profoundly simple observation a little more and say that there are two fundamental forces to consider; gravity, and pressure.
Examples:
Take a droplet of paint, and put it on a level surface. Then blow it around with a straw. That's a pressure driven fluid. It's characteristic patterns of movement, and flow, are the result of the motive force being behind the flow, and pushing it. It piles up at the low pressure areas on the periphery where the pressure is no longer strong enough to move it.
Next, tip the surface a bit and let the paint flow downhill. That'll be a gravity attracted fluid. Its patterns of movement, and flow, are consistent with the motive force being in front of the flow, and pulling it down hill. It doesn't work on level ground.
The lines of flow in an unconstrained, and driven fluid will always be away from the driving force. Even if that fluid is melted stone being driven up hill. And when those lines of flow are frozen into a river of melted stone they become a permanent, reliable record of the nature of the forces that melted, and moved it.
An experiment:
Cover a surface with about an inch of wet, slightly sticky, grainy, mud the consistency of thin, wet, concrete. Hit it with short bursts of compressed air coming down from above to simulate the patterns of movement, and flow, in a pressure driven flow of blast melted ignimbrites.
A fun variation if you want you involve the children is to use runny oatmeal spread out on a cookie sheet. If you have the kids surround the Cookie sheet, and blow the oatmeal around with short, random, puffs of air thru a straw. You get the same flow patterns. But the kids taught me one should be vigilant, and use caution with this version of the experiment due to the danger of the experiment escalating into a food fight. If you look away at the wrong time you could become the first casualty.
It was a good learning experience for all though. The kids easily learned what the flow patterns of a pressure driven fluid look like. And I've had a lot of fun learning that this is simple enough to teach to children. They also pointed out for me that it's difficult to do good, objective, scientific, observation with oatmeal in your ear.
You can mock up a classic science fair scale model of a volcano if you want to simulate the flows of a gravity attracted density current down slope.
If it takes months, or years, to map a few miles along a highway from the ground it's time to bring the work into the twenty first century and use the satellites our tax money paid for, and do it from space, or it'll never be finished. Thanks to NASA, LandSat, and Google, I can produce my own image map of any given area on the continent in full spectrum color with resolution down to about 1 meter per pixel. And computer memory is the only constraint to size. I have a couple I've had printed professionally that cover a whole wall. If you look at a specific location anywhere in those flows, it is very easy to see which way it was flowing at any given point. And backtrack it to its source location. A sheet of clear plastic, and a handful of markers, and you have a large area, hi-resolution flow map. Complete with little directional arrows.
There are gaping holes, and glaring discrepancies, in the data when it comes to the actual movements from it's supposed source vents, and final emplacement. There simply aren't enough volcanic vents to account for more than 40,000 square miles of pristine sheet ignimbrites. You can't say it came from one direction if it was flowing from the other. And the proposed trap door rift vents that simultaneously open for hundreds of miles, spew a few thousand cubic miles of ignimbrites, and then close without a trace involves some crazy mantle physics that would only make sense in a comic book. And that just aren’t possible in the real world. As a matter of fact, if you take a typical paper on the "Mid Tertiary Ignimbrite Flare Up" and you line out all of the untestable, assumptive reasoning, there is nothing left. It can be shown that the mid tertiary ignimbrite "flair up" is a confabulated event that did simply did not happen.
Those actual material movements tell an extraordinary story, one that is far different, and violent, than anything we could have ever imagined. And active volcanism was only a minor side effect.
In an explosive volcanic eruption we see both gravity, and pressure at work as the material is ejected from the vent forcefully, only to be attracted by gravity down, and away from the vent. And it rarely flows very far. But we see something different going on in central Mexico, and west Texas. There are tens of thousands of square kilometers of pristine ignimbrites, with no visible signs of decomposition, at the very top of the geologic column. And the patterns of movement, and flow are not consistent with a volcanic eruption at all. All of the material movement is pressure driven. There aren't enough volcanic vents to account for even a fraction of all of the melted material. And, because of the scale of it all, you don't see it until about twenty thousand feet. But when you spend some time studying the movements of the blast effected materials in the satellite images, you'll notice something that generations of Geologists on the ground missed. The simple, observable, fact is that, contrary to the old literature, the melt didn't come out of the ground at all. It was the original surface terrain, blasted, and flash melted, by multiple sources of heat, and pressure coming down from above. The material was blown off its source locations by those same above ground sources of heat, and pressure.
Any given fragment of ignimbrite, no matter the scale of the event it formed in, was only in fluid state on the surface for a few violent seconds at most. Even in a super eruption that goes on for days. So if two flows of melted stone are representative of two separate events, even a separation of only a few seconds, then one of them will be seen to be over-topping the other, already solidified one. But if they were both melted, and flowing at the same time, the interaction between the two will be a fluid convergence. i.e. They will inter-finger. Or they will come together like two rivers flowing into one.
Everywhere, in all of the tens of thousands of square kilometers of random, colliding, flows of pristine surface ignimbrites you'll note that, without exception, the patterns of movement in all of the material is consistent with very fast, and sudden, motion like ejecta. And every collision between flows is a fluid convergence. There is not one, single, over-topping flow. The inescapable conclusion is that contrary to the old literature, all of the pressure driven ignimbrites in the Chihuahuan Desert were in rapid, fluid, motion at the very same time. All of that tuff describes an intricate, almost infinite, dance of violent fluid motions. And all of those turbulent, inter-flowing, motions describe the very same moment.
Either that material is the geologically recent result of the largest super eruption since primates first came down out of the trees. And most of central Mexico is one giant, explosive, caldera that no one ever noticed as such. And all of the missing vents will be found... someday. (And never mind that all of the motions of the simultaneous, inter-flowing, rivers of melted stone describe a sudden, virtually instantaneous, event.) Or all of the melt is the result of the most violent ET encounter in 65 million years. And it, and its ground effects, are different from anything ever studied before.
Both are pretty extraordinary possibilities. The visual evidence is more supportive of the latter though. Because, when viewed from high altitude, it is profoundly obvious the heat and pressure to melt, and move, all that material came from above. But, no matter what the source of the heat, and pressure, the more than 40,000 sq km simultaneously, random-colliding, and interflowing, mega-flood of blast-generated ignimbrites, at the very pinnacle of the stratigraphic column describes a geologically recent explosive event that was arguably the single most violent natural disaster in all of human existence. Yet, with the exception of a few prospectors looking for money rocks, it's almost completely unstudied.
The primary impact zone is a 500 by 1300 km oval that covers most of north central Mexico. And extends well up into west Texas, and New Mexico. The other impact zone is a little smaller in the great lakes region. And it extends from northern Minnesota, well up into Canada.
The geochronology of the north American continent is still very poorly defined. And if we accept that the state of the science is expressed by the USGS's own Geochronological data-base, it just may be that we don't have the technology yet to accurately date this event. When I downloaded the database what I got was a huge spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel format with most of the cells left empty. They explain the empty cells with the disclaimer that they haven't included any of the anomalous data. And there aren't any entries for anywhere on the continent in the "age since melt" column...
They give no explanation of what they consider to be "anomalous data". And without such an explanation I have to consider that either most of their assumptions are wrong, or most of their data is questionable. And without free access to the whole dataset, warts, and all, I remain to be convinced of the validity of any of it.
The sheet ignimbrites of the Chihuahuan desert, extending all the way up into west Texas, and New Mexico are on top of every thing else in perfect condition. They are the pristine capstone of the geologic column. And with the exception of the occasional sage brush here and there they did not look much different when they were still hot, and smoking. If you tell me they are thousands of times older than the stones in the monuments of the Nile. I'll quote the great Bill Gates and tell you "that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
Even the rocks of the Earth crumble to dust after a few million years of exposure to the elements. And the tens of thousands of square kilometers of perfectly pristine, simultaneously, random-colliding, and inter-flowing, mega-flood of blast melted stone at the very pinnacle of the geologic column are most certainly not 25 million years old.
If an extraordinary hypothesis requires extraordinary proof, all I can say is get the best satellite image data you can find, look closely, and see for yourself. There is no visible trace of exfoliation, or decomposition, in the flows at all. And except for some sparse cacti, and sagebrush, growing on them, those flows of ignimbrites are all in the very same condition as the day they first cooled. And their motions are very easy to read.
I’ve posted hundreds of images, and a more detailed explanation of the hypothesis here: The DragonStorm Project
~Dennis Cox
