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A multiple fragment, thermal impact, comet firestorm that may have contributed to the Younger Dryas cooling, and the mega-faunal extinctions 12,900 years ago. Preface: I was trained to do battle damage assessment in the military. And it has been an interest ever since. A long time ago I noticed some explosive blast effects that couldn't be explained to my satisfaction. I knew nothing of the YD. But it was a wonderful conundrum. I knew I was looking at the results of an event that flew in the face everything I had ever learned. And more violent than anything I could imagine. I knew of no natural energy release to account for them. For that matter I knew of no kind of energy at all that could do what I was seeing, not even military.  This is a big, ancient, planet. My focus is on understanding what happened during a tiny little window of time of only a few seconds, minutes at most. I have been looking at the ground effects of a specific event on a specific day. This event was so violent, the biggest mystery to me was how anything could have survived. The ground effects I had noticed all seemed to point to something that happened around the end of the last Ice age. I never set out to explain the Younger Dryas events. Rather, when I learned of work on the Younger Dryas Boundary layer I realized they confirmed some of what I had found. It confirmed, if nothing else, that an event of the level of destruction I was looking at did indeed happen. And recently enough too. I see the recent work on the YDB layer as corroborating circumstantial evidence, that's all. This kind of event has happened a lot all over the world. And once you understand which landforms are associated with them. You'll see their effects are as common as the craters on the moon.
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 in the firestorm. 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, 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 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. It's true, the atmosphere shouldn't be able to do that to a really big, fast moving, solid rock before any of it gets to the ground. 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 shown above of the fragments of Comet LINEAR we clearly see that fragmentation of an icy comet can occur spontaneously 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 phenomenon. And the Russian scientists haven't been sitting on their hands all this time. There are literally hundreds of excellent, peer reviewed, papers on the subject. The explosive cosmogony of comets has been exhaustively studied, and thoroughly described. (E.M.Drobyshevski et al) So the nature of those explosions is understood better than most realize. 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. 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 in the YDB 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? More, and more, reliable evidence is coming to light that tells us very clearly that we should be looking for signs of non-volcanogenic melting instead of craters. But the conundrum we face now is that we have always assumed that the only source of enough heat, and pressure to melt rock is below ground. Or in a large ballistic impact event. Generations of Geologists have used melted rock formations, and metamorphic rock, as conclusive evidence of volcanism, or plate tectonics. They would hold up a piece of melted rock. And, recognizing that its chemistry could only have been produced under conditions of intense heat, and pressure, and believing that those conditions could only be found deep in the Earth, have coined generic terms like "Deep Crustal", or "Upper mantel", to describe them. And the number of confusing, wrong-headed, theories for getting sedimentary rock down to great depth, cooking it enough to turn it into metamorphic rock, and then bringing it back up again without any deformation of the strata are to many to count. There is a huge debate looming on the horizon. Because, in fact, many of the melted rock formations produced in the Younger Dryas impact event are very easy to identify, almost conclusively, with satellite images alone. And without exception, every one of the positively identifiable ET blast melt formations will be found to have already been mis-identified as volcanogenic. The differences in the chemistry between thermal impact blast melt, and ordinary volcanic tuff may be so small that only detailed laboratory analysis can tell them apart. And visually, they may be virtually indistinguishable to one standing on the ground among them. But there is a better, far simpler way to tell them apart. If you want to study an explosive event after the fact, you look to the actual motions of the blast effected materials. It's as simple as asking; which way was it moving before it came to a stop? Was the flow pushed from behind by pressure? Or was it pulled from the front by gravity? Where did it flow from? This is a profoundly simple hypothesis founded on the principle that we can answer those basic, fundamental questions easily, and confidently, with hi-resolution satellite images alone. Before, there were only two recognized forms of "tuff", or ignimbrites. We had volcanic tuff and we had impact melt. But we need to break it down into a third category. The three are:
Our focus is on the last of the three. This work is simply an ongoing study of the fluid motions of those ignimbrites. The sudden, unimaginably violent events of their formation can be understood to an amazing, and extraordinary, level of detail if one simply studies how the blast effected materials moved during emplacement. So the only questions I am asking here are concerned with are simply: How did it move, and flow, during formation, and final emplacement? We need only to get enough altitude to see the actual patterns of movement, and flow, to determine the exact movements, and true points of origin, of a sheet of surface ignimbrites. So the science of Fluid Mechanics has the trump card. And it doesn't get any easier than when the materials are exposed, in pristine condition, on the surface. Ignimbrites, literally "fire cloud rock", or tuff as they're more commonly called, are the stuff you see in these images that has the look of wet, fast flowing, concrete, or lumpy mud. And they are always formed in an explosive event. So, as a blast effected material, they are a clear signature of the motions of the explosive event they formed in.
The mountain is clearly, and obviously, the source location for the radial out wards splash curtain of ignimbrites. But The mountain is not a volcano. It consists of uplifted meta-sedimentary rock. And there is no vent there. So it is not the source of heat, and pressure that melted, and moved them. There are only two possible directions look to for enough heat, and pressure to melt a few cubic miles of the Earth's surface and to blow it away from its source. Since we can clearly see the ignimbrites didn't come out of the mountain. But were blown off of it, and away from it. We can rule out down. Click here for an 8.5 meg high resolution image with the mountain in context with its.surroundings.
I have been told that "most Geologists agree" that these ignimbrites were deposited in the so called Mid-Tertiary Ignimbrite flair up between 25 and 40 million years ago. such an ancient date for the formation of these ignimbrites can't be supported.
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 untested, assumptive reasoning, there is nothing left. So the mid tertiary ignimbrite "flair up" is a confabulated, mythical event that did not happen. The first problem is the assumed age. The 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 any 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". If we want to pretend, and maintain, that there was a vent there that the ignimbrites erupted from 25 million years ago, and that they, and the mountain they came from, have undergone so many millions of years of exposure to the elements, then the ignimbrites need to show a considerable amount of hydrologic decomposition. There should be nothing left of them but soils. And they need to be under 25 million years worth of alluvium from the erosion of the mountain. Instead, they are on top of everything else. And we see virtually no alluvium from the mountain at all. Only the mountain, and its ignimbrites, slightly dusted with wind born sediments. The simple, observable, fact is that the Chihuahuan Desert Ignimbrites are in perfectly pristine condition at the pinnacle of the geologic column. And with the exception of that tiny amount of wind blown silt, and the occasional sage brush, the ignimbrites covering this terrain did not look much different when they were still hot, and smoking, the day after the event they formed in.
The form of the mountain is not the result of millions of years of erosion. The product of which would be alluvium. The mountain's form is the result of instantaneous ablation from above. The product of which is the radial out-splash curtains of pressure driven ignimbrites.
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 collection is. And without free access to the whole dataset, warts, and all, I remain to be convinced of the validity of any of it.
Impact melt, and ejecta, is often mis-identified as volcanic tuff. But wherever you find such material, volcanogenic, or not, and no matter what the source of heat, and pressure that melted, and moved it, you can know that it did not form where you find it. It formed in a violent explosive event and was moving very quickly before coming to rest, and solidifying. When you look at a piece of ignimbrite you are looking at a blast effected material. And a direct signature of the fluid motions of the explosive event it formed in; no proxy required. And unless the material has completely decomposed into soils, and become covered in vegetation, you can look at a flow of it, and easily see which direction it was moving at any particular point. 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 spilled paint.
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.
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 melt.
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 learned what the flow patterns of a pressure driven fluid look like. And I've learned 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.
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. And 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.  Click on the image for an enlarged view. Or if you'd like to see a wider perspective with this place in context with its surroundings click Here for a 4.5 meg PDF copy of the image.
The Sandia Lab's simulation didn't hazard a guess as to the resulting ground effects. But it is a fair assumption that instead of being smashed and recycled into a nice round ballistic impact structure, when the hyper thermal, supersonic, downdraft hits, the terrain below it quickly and violently just melts, and goes away like wax under a blow-torch. (Or like oatmeal away from a straw) We can logically predict that such an event should create a bare, ablated looking area or mountain surrounded by ignimbrites, and melted stone, flowing away from the blast epicenter. The patterns of movement of the pressure driven, blast effected, materials are a proxy map for the atmospheric conditions above them. The blast melted rock settled into the low pressure areas after being flash melted, and blown off its points of origin. It can't get any simpler. Look closely. The lighter, smoothly melted stone marks the locations of the individual blast points and areas of highest heat, and pressure that the ignimbrites were driven off of.
 Standing on the ground among those rocks, they are indistinguishable from ordinary volcanic tuff. Their true nature is only obvious from high altitude. It is only then that the words "volcaniclastic", or "volcanogenic" are revealed to be inappropriate. Volcanism had nothing to do with this. The parent material of the ignimbrites, or "tuff" as it is more commonly known is the original terrain. The heat, and pressure to melt, and move it came from above.This melt was flash melted almost instantly. And blown down and away by a downwards blast of thermal impact plasma. Or simply, a down-blast. It's motion was almost instantaneous. Click on the picture to zoom in closer. Pay particular attention to the patterns of movement, and flow, of the blast effected materials in the image.
Note that the ignimbrites are splayed out around the central peak in chevron shaped splashes like ejecta curtains.
The central uplift is all uplifted meta sedimentary rock. Look closely, there is virtually no alluvium, or other products of exfoliation, or deterioration, of rock that we should expect if this terrain were millions of years old. Therefore the formation, and emplacement of the ignimbrites, is the most recent significant event in the geologic column.
Click on the image for an enlarged view. The top of the image is facing east We see two impact structures with radial fracture patterns like rock dings in a window pane. And we can tell by the patterns of movement in the blast effected materials that the objects impacted into motionless, but still melted, not yet hardened, ignimbrites.
This 8 meg Down Blast image will help put it into context.
This is an intensive visual study in the fluid motions of those rivers of melt. You are going to need the best satellite imagery you can get. But ordinary Google Earth does a very good job.
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 more than 40,000 square kilometers of pristine, random-colliding rivers of fast flowing ignimbrites in central Mexico, and up into west Texas that look like they only just cooled yesterday. 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 in the flows of tuff in north central Mexico for myself to get a better picture of the explosive events they formed in.
 Click on the image for an enlarged view. Note that the ignimbrites are blown out wards from a central uplift of meta-sedimentary rock. Not a vent, or rift, structure.
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 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.
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 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. Here are the possibilities: 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 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. But no matter what the source of the heat, and pressure; the more than 40,000 sq km of pristine, simultaneous, random-colliding-inter flowing, rivers of blast-generated ignimbrites, at the 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. Our impactors appear to have been a large, highly fragmented, and loosely grouped, something, about 500 km wide, like a giant, flying gravel pile. Except that much of the material was highly explosive in its own right. (E.M.Drobyshevski) The thing would have looked like a sister to the images of the fragmented comet Linear you've seen at the beginning. It came in at very high velocity, and low angle of approach from the southeast. And almost all of the fragments exploded above ground like Tunguska. Except that, in Mexico, only the very first of the fragments on the leading edge fell into cold atmosphere. The rest fell into already super heated impact plasma, and just added to the heat. 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.
All of the available literature assumes the ignimbrites in the Chihuahuan desert to be the result of ancient volcanism millions of years ago. But there is no such thing as immortality. Even the rocks of the Earth crumble to dust after a few million years of exposure to the elements. And those tens of thousands of square kilometers of perfectly pristine, simultaneously, random-colliding, and inter-flowing, rivers of blast melted stone are most certainly not thousands of times older than the monuments of the Nile.
If an extraordinary hypothesis requires extraordinary proof all I can say is 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.
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