Nanodiamonds / Neanderthals / Seas Still Rising
Nanodiamonds Discovered in Greenland Ice Sheet – adding weight to the theory of a cometary or asteroid impact event roughly 13,000 years ago.
Did volcanoes wipe out the Neanderthals? If so it would be a neat solution, but not one that explains how our forefathers survived (given that we were not as robust nor smart…)
Not well known is that our seas have been rising ever since the end of the last Ice Age. All the time we are hearing that “global warming” is causing the seas to rise, but few ask whether the rise would be happening regardless of human activity… Fortunately someone has looked into the numbers and discovered some disinformation:
By looking closely at the records, it turns out that the much advertised rising sea levels in the South Pacific depend on anomalous depressions of the ocean during 1997 and 1998 thanks to an El Nino and two tropical cyclones.
The Science and Public Policy Institute has released a report by Vincent Gray which compares 12 Pacific Island records and shows that in many cases it’s these anomalies that set the trends… and if the anomaly is removed, sea levels appear to be more or less constant since the Seaframe measurements began around 1993.
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Your comment on the nanodiamonds: “adding weight to the theory of a cometary or asteroid impact event ” actually is not necessarily so. It would be difficult to imagine any large body shattering so finely and uniformly that the only remains would require a microscope. Nor do I think this relates to the Carolina bays incident.
More likely what we are looking at is a large incursion of cosmic dust, drawn into and expelled from the Sun and then, in turn, hauled violently to the surface level of the Earth.
I respectfully disagree … there has been quiet a lot of research into this theory, and quite a lot has been proven. Large Asteroids have airburst over our planet many times in its long history. Case in point … there was an Asteroid(Later theorized to be 1 of several that hit Earth at the same time) that exploded high in the Atmosephere 40 million years ago over the sands of what later became Southern Egypt … the Sea of Glass. But there is one massive difference here … this Asteroid that exploded high above what became North America/Canada, was truely massive … its explosion not only wipped out Clovis-Man, but also killed off a great many of the lage animals living at the same time … but it also changed the weather of this planet! Up until 12,900 or earlier, our climate yo-yo’d back and forth between really warm tempretures to freezing tempretures … sometimes in as little as only 10 years! After this happened, our climate settled out to a nice slow but steady up tick to where it is today. This stable climate allowed Humans to become what we are now.
Amy,
Thanks for your comments but they don’t essentially address my point. Obviously many comets and asteroids of differing sizes have impacted the Earth or shattered at high atmosphere over eons of time (in fact, many ice-body ones do daily). There is no denying that many cataclysmic events have been triggered as a result.
However, it’s highly unlikely that the source of the nanodiamonds found in a uniform layer in Greenland ice cores would have such an impact. While being of a cosmic (i.e., extra-solar system) origin, they are more likely to have been formed by some substance already equally widely dispersed and uniform in size.
The primary candidate for this would not be a comet or an asteroid (of whatever size) but rather cosmic dust – think those huge clouds in Hubble telescope photos! – that rode in on a Galactic superwave volley sufficient to overcome the constant solar wind that usually keeps the solar system and Earth’s atmosphere free of such material.
Paul LaViolette has stated a very convincing case that this was the cause of the severe global climatic fluctuations of which you speak. (“Earth Under Fire: Humanity’s Survival of the Apocalypse”, Starlane, 1997)
Sorry. Clarifying:
“…equally evenly and widely dispersed, and uniform in size”.
If we were only looking at the ice core deposits, I might also agree with your statement, but these tiny objects have also been found at a number of digs around the US that also date from that same time period. It is rather hard to ignore all of the evidence from the digs, and the ice core readings together.