Did A Comet Strike Earth 12,900 Years Ago And End The Clovis Culture?

The hypothesized impact event scenario stated that the air burst(s) or impact(s) of a swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comet fragments set areas of the North American continent on fire, causing the extinction of most of the megafauna in North America and the demise of the North American Clovis culture after the last glacial period. The Younger Dryas ice age lasted for about 1,200 years before the climate warmed again. This swarm is hypothesized to have exploded above or possibly on the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the region of the Great Lakes, though no impact crater has been yet identified. An airburst would have been similar to but orders of magnitude larger than the Tunguska event of 1908. The hypothesis proposed that animal and human life in North America not directly killed by the blast or the resulting coast-to-coast wildfires would have likely starved on the burned surface of the continent.

 

Trees downed in the Tunguska event

Credit: Wikipedia

 

Sandia National Laboratories’ Mark Boslough rebuts a speculative hypothesis about comets leading to the end of the Clovis culture in North America. 

Photo by Randy Montoya)

“It was a gamble and could have been embarrassing if we were wrong,” said Boslough. “But I had been watching while Shoemaker-Levy 9 made its way across the heavens and realized it would be close enough to the horizon of Jupiter that the plumes would show.” His reasoning was backed by simulations from the world’s first massively parallel processing supercomputer, Sandia’s Intel Paragon.

On the one hand, it was a chance to check the new Paragon’s logic against real events, a shakedown run for the defense-oriented machine. On the other, it was a hold-your-breath prediction, a kind of Babe Ruth moment when the Babe is reputed to have pointed to the spot in the center field bleachers he intended to hit the next ball. No other scientists were willing to point the same way, partly due to previous failures in predicting the behavior of comets Kohoutek and Halley, and partly because most astronomers believed the plumes would be hidden behind Jupiter’s bulk.

That the plumes indeed proved visible started Boslough on his own trajectory as a media touchstone for things asteroidal and meteoritic.

It didn’t hurt that, when he stands before television cameras to discuss celestial impacts, his earnest manner, expressive gestures and extraterrestrial subject matter make him seem a combination of Carl Sagan and Luke Skywalker, or perhaps Tom Sawyer and Indiana Jones.

Standing in jeans, work shirt and hiking boots for the Discovery Channel at the site in Siberia where a mysterious explosion occurred 105 years ago, or discussing it at Sandia with his supercomputer simulations in bold colors on a big screen behind him, the rangy, 6-foot-3 Sandia researcher vividly and accurately explained why the mysterious explosion at Tunguska that decimated hundreds of square miles of trees and whose ejected debris was seen as far away as London most probably was caused neither by flying saucers drunkenly ramming a hillside (a proposed hypothesis) nor by an asteroid striking the Earth’s surface, but rather by the fireball of an asteroid airburst — an asteroid exploding high above ground, like a nuclear bomb, compressed to implosion as it plunged deeper into Earth’s thickening, increasingly resistive atmosphere. The governing physics, he said, was precisely the same as for the airburst on Jupiter.

Among later triumphs, Boslough was the Sandia component of a National Geographic team flown to the Libyan Desert to make sense of strange yellow-green glass worn as jewelry by pharaohs in days past. Boslough’s take: It was the result of heat on desert sands from a hypervelocity impact caused by an even bigger asteroid burst.

In the present case

In the Clovis case, Boslough felt that his ideas were taken further than he could accept when other researchers claimed that the purported demise of Clovis civilization in North America was the result of climate change produced by a cluster of comet fragments striking Earth.

In a widely reported press conference announcing the Clovis comet hypothesis in 2007, proponents showed a National Geographic animation based on one of Boslough’s simulations as inspiration for their idea.

Indiana Jones-style, Boslough responded. Confronted by apparently hard asteroid evidence, as well as a Nova documentary and an article in the journal Science, all purportedly showing his error in rebutting the comet hypothesis, Boslough ordered carbon dating of the major evidence provided by the opposition: nanodiamond-bearing carbon spherules associated with the shock of an asteroid’s impact. The tests found the alleged 13,000-year-old carbon to be of very recent formation.

While this raised red flags to those already critical of the impact hypothesis, “I never said the samples were salted,” Boslough said carefully. “I said they were contaminated.”

That find, along with irregularities reported in the background of one member of the opposing team, was enough for Nova to remove the entire episode from its list of science shows available for streaming, Boslough said.

“Just because a culture changed from Clovis to Folsom spear points didn’t mean their civilization collapsed,” he said. “They probably just used another technology. It’s like saying the phonograph culture collapsed and was replaced by the iPod culture.”
 

Computer simulation of one-kilometer comet impact
The simulation starts with the comet 30 kilometers above the surface. The comet produces a strong luminescent bow shock in the atmosphere as it speeds downwards. Seven-tenths of a second later it hits the ocean with an impact energy of 300 gigatons of TNT – about 10 times the explosive power of all the nuclear weapons in existence in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War – forming a large transient cavity in the ocean and a dent in the ocean floor. The comet itself is almost instantaneously vaporized, along with 300 to 500 cubic kilometers of ocean. This high-pressure steam explosion rises into the atmosphere. Comet vapor and water vapor are ejected into ballistic trajectories that will take it around the globe, with some of it even achieving escape velocity.

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.