Ancient Stone Carvings Show a Comet Swarm Hitting Earth Around 10,950 BCE

[ashling]

http://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-stone-carvings-show-a-comet-hitting-earth-in-10-950-bc-and-changing-civilisation-forever


https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44031]

Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas onset in North American sedimentary sequences

the second link gets very sciency (yes, that is a word ... maybe ) but it led me to thinking how much of our history, or paleo-history, we are losing due to ice melt in Greenland and elsewhere ... which could potentially tell us so much more about the effects of ice melt in Greenland and elsewhere

[duncang]

1. Gbekli Tepe is a amazing place

Neolithic pre-pottery and metals use. Amazing how the large stones were fitted in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

[csziggy]

2. This confirms earlier speculations about mammoth and megafauna extinctions

Did a Comet Hit Earth 12,000 Years Ago?
Nanodiamonds found across North America suggest that major climate change could have been cosmically instigated

By David Biello on January 2, 2009

Roughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America. But now nanodiamonds found in the sediments from this time period point to an alternative: a massive explosion or explosions by a fragmentary comet, similar to but even larger than the Tunguska event of 1908 in Siberia.

Sediments from six sites across North America—Murray Springs, Ariz.; Bull Creek, Okla.; Gainey, Mich.; Topper, S.C.; Lake Hind, Manitoba; and Chobot, Alberta—yielded such teensy diamonds, which only occur in sediment exposed to extreme temperatures and pressures, such as those from an explosion or impact, according to new research published today in Science.

The discovery lends support to a theory first advanced last year in that some type of cosmic impact or impacts—a fragmented comet bursting in the atmosphere or raining down on the oceans—set off the more than 1,300-year cooling period in the Northern Hemisphere known as the Younger Dryas for the abundance of an alpine flower's pollen found during the interval.

The cooling period interrupted an extended warming out of an ice age predicted by slight changes in Earth's orbit (known as Milankovitch cycles) that continues today. And it remains an unexplained anomaly in the climate record.

More: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-a-comet-hit-earth-12900-years-ago/

[Kimchijeon]

3. We are pretty lucky

that we haven't been smacked out of existence by asteroidal impact or vaporized by a gamma burst etc in our tiny little lifespans.

The more I learn about the cosmos, the more appreciative and grateful I feel to be alive. Graham Hancock & Randall Carlson have been on JRE before, they do well with explaining the awesomeness of these events to just your average layperson.

It is sobering to realize that there isn't any protection really in place to stop something like this from happening again. It's just a matter of when, not "if."

[red dog 1]

4. K&R

Not about comets, but related to them, is the spooky fact that many dark-colored asteroids often fly by the Earth, and are not "seen" by astronomers until they have passed by, sometimes coming very close, sometimes being very large.
(It's difficult to see black objects headed toward earth, since they don't reflect sunlight)