1. PERIODIC EARTH IMPACTS
2. EARTH IMPACT SIMULATIONS
3. EARTH IMPACT EVIDENCE
4. COMETARY ORIGIN OF THE BIOSPHERE
5. PREHISTORIC STRIKES
6. PLEISTOCENE STRIKES AND NEANDERTHALS

• Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
• Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many.
• Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
• Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
• Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
• But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

- Gautama Buddha

1. PERIODIC EARTH IMPACTS
   • 'BAND OF MISFITS' THEORY: METEORS ARE NOT THAT RARE
     On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep-ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction - toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 29 kilometers, or 18 miles, in diameter, lies 3,800 meters, or 12,500 feet, below the surface.
     The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 183 meters high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.
     Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the past 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to 1 million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.
   • THE YOUNGER DRYAS
     The Younger Dryas (YD) was the most significant rapid climate change event that occurred during the last deglaciation of the North Atlantic region. The transition into the Preboreal (PB), the PB/YD transition, and the YD/Holocene transition were all remarkably fast, each occurring over a period of a decade or so. (implying that they were due to a comet or meteorite impact. High resolution (mean: 3.48 years/sample), continuous measurements of GISP2 major anions (chloride, sulfate and nitrate) and cations (sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium and ammonium) were used to reconstruct the paleoenvironment during the YD because these series record the history of the major soluble constituents transported in the atmosphere and deposited over central Greenland. The climate change that accompanied the YD was not restricted to Greenland. The record of variations in the CH⁴ concentration of trapped gases in the GRIP ice core shows that tropical and subtropical climates were colder and drier during the YD and also earlier cold events. This may indicate the continued importance of ice sheets and permafrost in limiting the growth of vegetation at higher latitudes until the end of the YD. Both low-latitude source CH⁴ and ammonium rise at the end of the YD.
     Prominent periods of increased dustiness have been observed in the record, peaking approximately every 500 years at:
     • 11.4 kyr BP aka YA (early Preboreal)
     • 11.81 kyr BP aka YA (during the Younger Dryas)
     • 12.22 kyr BP aka YA (during the Younger Dryas)
     • 12.64 kyr BP aka YA (during the Younger Dryas)
     • 13.18 kyr BP aka YA (during the Bolling/Allerod)
     • 13.65 kyr BP aka YA (during the Bolling/Allerod)
     • 14.02 kyr BP aka YA (during the Bolling/Allerod)
     Note, the Holocene Preboreal, Younger Dryas and Bolling/Allerod are climate time periods. BP = Before Present = YA = Years Ago. kyr = thousand years
   • "VOLCANIC ACTIVITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE"
     or
     "VOLCANIC ACTIVITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE"
     Camp Century. Location Date BC. Cluster
     
     • Unknown ? 50?0 192 120
     • Unknown ? 210?0 72 45 A': Cl - 2
     • Unknown ? 260?0 54 35 A': Cl - 2
     • Unknown ? 6060?40 119 75 A: Cl - 1
     • Unknown ? 6230?40 102 65 A: Cl - 1
     • Unknown ? 7090?60 79 50
     • Unknown ? 7240?60 124 80
     • Unknown ? 7500?60 51 35
     • Unknown ? 7640?70 412 260 B:
     • Unknown ? 7710?70 69 45 B:
     • Unknown ? 7810?70 73 45 B:
     • Unknown ? 7910?70 95 60 B:
   • BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL CLIMATE - Lamb 1977
     • 1105 AD - Global Climatic Boundary 850 BP (900 YA)
     • 270 AD - Global Climatic Boundary 1680 BP (1730 YA)
     • 810 BC - Global Climatic Boundary 2760 BP (2810 YA)
     • 3110 BC - Global Climatic Boundary (5110 YA)
     • 6550 BC - Global Climatic Boundary 8500 BP (8550 YA)
     • 7350 BC - Global Climatic Boundary 9300 BP (9350 YA)
     • 10,300 BP - Global Climatic Boundary 10,300 BP (10350 YA)
     • 10,800 BP - Global Climatic Boundary (10850 YA)
   • THE CASE FOR SOLAR FORCING OF CLIMATE
     High-resolution analyses of an early Holocene climate event may imply decreased solar forcing as an important climate trigger.
     The authors assembled a wide range of lacustrine, tree-ring, ice-core and marine records that reveal a Northern Hemispheric - and possibly global - cooling event of less than 200 years duration with a 50-year cooling-peak centered at approximately 10,300 years BP. Just a couple more nudges and we should arrive at the seemingly inevitable conclusion that earth's climate on sub-Milankovitch timescales is tightly coupled to variable solar activity. Like the ones caused by comet impacts?
   • HIGH-FREQUENCY MELTING PULSES OF THE FENNOSCANDIAN ICE SHEET DOCUMENTED IN LATE GLACIAL/EARLY HOLOCENE SEDIMENTS OF THE BALTIC SEA
     Three major drainage events at Mt. Billingen in Sweden lowered the lake level considerably and are dated from several sites in Sweden and Finland at average ages of 11,200, 10,300 and 9,900 years B.P.
   • (8) ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE TROPICS
     Throughout the Last Glacial Stage and Holocene have been a series of abrupt changes in climate. Some of these seem to have regional or even global significance. The rate of change is significant for the understanding of future shifts in climate.
     • Zwai-Shalla (Ethiopia) 11600, 8200, ?6700, 4400 Cal BP
     • Bosumtwi (Ghana) 11600, 8300, 3800, 1000 Cal BP
     • Tigalmamine (Morocco) 11700 and 8100 also 5100, 3800, 2300? Cal BP
     • Some evidence from Mexican and Asian lakes
     • Ice core d18O and Methane records
     • 8.1 ka event half magnitude of Younger Dryas
     • North Atlantic marine cores (Bond et al, 1997) 11100 10300 9400 8100 5900 4200 2800 1400 Cal BP
   • LECTURE NOTES
     What caused abrupt events in the tropics? Solar cycles? SST - Bond cycles? Salt water oscillator - thermohaline shutdown.
     Younger Dryas - meltwater from Lake Agassiz; 8.1 ka ?deglaciation of Hudson Bay; others?
     Conclusion: glaciation in high and mid latitudes was matched by important changes in low latitudes:
     • aridity during glaciation
     • increased rainfall during Early Holocene
     • abrupt events demonstrate the interconnectivity of global environmental systems
     • spatial -temporal -processes
     • abrupt changes had a major influence on civilizations
   • READ THE SUNSPOTS
     Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.
   • THE YOUNGER DRYAS IMPACT EVENT
   • THE EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL SEQUENCE Bond Cycles (cold events) Solar Forcing or NADW "900 or 1500 - year" cycle.
     Cycle number
     • 8. 11,100 yr
     • 7. 10,300 yr
     • 6. 9500 yr
     • 5. 8200 & 7100 yr
     • 4. 5000 yr
     • 3. 4400 & 4100 yr
     • 2. 3200 & 2700 yr
     • 1. 1400 & 1100 yr
     • 0. 600, 400 & 200 yr (LIA)
   • COLLISIONS 0 - 1799 AD
     • AD440 A disaster wipes out the British population and erases what was then dense woodland - Gildas - 'the fire of righteous vengeance...blazed from sea to sea..once lit it did not die down..it burnt up almost the whole surface of the island..Horrible it was to see the foundation stones of towers and high walls thrown down bottom upwards..' Fire is sent from heaven whilst the fire of heaven burns. Days are as dark as night. The Isle of Axholme was suddenly overwhelmed.. vast numbers of trees were instantly burned through near the ground and fell aligned NW/SE [similar to Tunguska,1908].CW106ff, 284-5
     • AD534-5 ?mile dia meteorite or 1-2 mile across comet fragment [size of those hitting Jupiter July 1994] collides with earth [force released 1000000+ Hiroshimas/several 100,000 megatons]. Creates world-wide dust veil, especially in northern hemisphere. - tree-ring data from north America and Europe shows 15 year slower growth. Sun dims dark 1½years. Result - Dark Age deepens. Massive crop failure in British Isles Italy Mesopotamia China [70-80% Chinese pop die]. Liang dynasty Emperor orders out 500,000 pop of Imperial City Loyang. China descends into chaos over next 10 years. AD 540+ First Middle East and European substantial bubonic plague due to catastrophic conditions [source David Keys Independent 25 7 94].
     • AD1178 - 25 June An object around a mile across slams into the Moon releasing 100k megatons of power [10x global nuclear arsenal power or 24 tons of explosive for every human Lewis. eye-witness account - 'Its after sunset. The bright new moon has become visible. Suddenly its upper horn splits in 2. A lengthy flaming torch springs up, spewing out fire, hot coals, sparks. The moon writhes, throbbing like a wounded snake. This happens again and again, 12 times or more, turning the moon blackish along its whole length.'
     • AD1490 2 - 3 lb stones sized from water chestnuts to goose eggs fall like rain kill over 10,000 [or tens of thousands] Chinese. AD1492 Austria - 3 cwt stone falls with a thunderclap LEWIS 10
   • NEWS FROM NEARBY SPACE:
     Meanwhile the more researchers learn about asteroid and comet strikes on Earth, these events seem much more common than previously assumed -- which is definitely not good news. Last summer, TMQ laid out the disturbing evidence that space-rock strikes powerful enough to cause mass extinctions were not confined to the primordial mists: Something gigantic smashed into the Earth about 10,000 years ago, and there might have been a severe comet or meteorite strike as recently as the year 535. Recently researcher Dallas Abbott of the Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University has found indications that a huge comet or asteroid fell into the Indian Ocean about 4,800 years ago, causing global tsunamis.
     As recently as a decade ago, most scientists assumed that space-rock strikes powerful enough to cause general devastation happen only every million years or so. Now it looks like they are far more frequent. If a rock comparable to the one that struck the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago struck today in Kansas, half the population of the United States might die. And as TMQ endlessly points out, what is NASA doing about this? Absolutely nothing.
     Yet if a comet or large meteor was spotted heading toward our world, NASA could do nothing. And NASA isn't even researching possible anti-space-rock technology. No agency of your government wastes taxpayers' money more cynically or systematically than the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. If a big space object strikes the Earth, sending humanity's survivors back into the Dark Ages, our descendents will consider the present Washington government history's worst collections of fools for doing nothing while there was time.
   • RECENT COSMIC IMPACTS ON EARTH Do Global Myths Reflect an Ancient Disaster?
     Scientists who model the probabilities of comet and asteroid impacts on Earth estimate that a really devastating impact--capable of killing more than a billion people (at today's standards) and wiping out civilization as we know it--has happened only every million years or so. Archaeologist Bruce Masse thinks such impacts may have happened more frequently, or at least more recently than believed by the astrophysical community. If he's right, the danger posed by near earth objects (NEOs) is possibly greater than we've thought.
     Masse, like many of today's archaeologists, isn't based in a museum or university, but works for a government agency--in his case, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
     The same government agency that covered up the Noah's Ark Find!
   • AFRICAN ICE CORE ANALYSIS REVEALS CATASTROPHIC DROUGHTS, SHRINKING ICE FIELDS AND CIVILIZATION SHIFTS
     A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began forming about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago.
   • MINING TO START IN LAKE BOSUMTWI
   • ARCHIVED NEWS - October 2002 Science Magazine Volume 298, Number 5593, pp.589-593) | October 18, 2002
     Six ice cores from Kilimanjaro provide an ~11.7-thousand-year record of Holocene climate and environmental variability for eastern equatorial Africa, including three periods of abrupt climate change: ~8.3, ~5.2, and ~4 thousand years ago (ka). The latter is coincident with the "First Dark Age," the period of the greatest historically recorded drought in tropical Africa. Variable deposition of F- and Na+ during the African Humid Period suggests rapidly fluctuating lake levels between ~11.7 and 4 ka. Over the 20th century, the real extent of Kilimanjaro's ice fields has decreased ~80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the remaining ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020.
   • AFRICAN ICE CORE ANALYSIS REVEALS CATASTROPHIC DROUGHTS, SHRINKING ICE FIELDS, CIVILIZATION SHIFTS
     A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago.
   • N-BODY GRAVITATIONAL INTERACTIONS
     The giant planets' perturbation influence on the KB small bodies' orbits accumulates and results in a Brownian-like motion of their perihelion. Nemesis draws meteors, possibly composed of toxic compounds, from the halo. It is suspected that a large swarm of meteors collects in a resonant orbit with a period about 3:2 to that of Nemesis' period. They occasionally appear as comets in the central part of the solar system. Some of these meteors are grouped in two clusters, from which comets pass quasi-periodically 1676(+/- 110) yrs. near Earth's orbit. Another postulate (by Hoyle) is that at every six passes of one of the comet swarms a major meteor strikes Earth, i.e. on an average of every 10000 years. These strikes can cause a degree of global catastrophic weather changes and the major ones are responsible for starting (and stopping) an Ice Age.
     This Vulcan web site defines "Three-halves times their (the comet swarms) period (3353 +/- 31.7 years) defines the interval during which the Earth will be most at risk." This value is remarkably close to two times Hoyle's value 1676 years (or 3352 yrs.
   • GREEN COMET
     What makes a comet green? The atmosphere of the comet--called "the coma"-- contains cyanogen (CN), a poisonous gas, and diatomic carbon (C2). Both of these substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight.
   • IN SEARCH OF CRATER CHAINS
     As the fragments of shattered comet 73P/Schwassmann Wachmann 3 glide harmlessly past Earth this weekend in full view of backyard telescopes, onlookers can't help but wonder, what if a comet like that didn't miss, but actually hit our planet?
   • COLLISIONS FROM 1800
     Argentina - crater chain no more than a few thousand years old found. Cause a near horizontal impact/disintegration of 1000 megaton 150-300 metre stony asteroid
   • CHAOS FROM ABOVE: DID ASTEROIDS AND COMETS TURN THE TIDES OF CIVILIZATION?
     "We have summer without heat. The crops have been chilled by north winds, (and) the rain is denied." In China, "the stars were lost from view for three months." The sun dimmed, the rain failed, and snow fell in the summertime. Famine spread, and the emperor abandoned his capital amid political and economic disasters.
     New evidence, however, supports the tales of ancient scribes and identifies brief but brutal times of worldwide ecological catastrophe. The evidence is in tree rings, which clearly show several years of cold weather that stunted growth beginning in A.D. 536 and especially after A.D. 540-541. The rings show similar events that began in 1628 B.C. and 1159 B.C., and rare written documents of those times seem also to describe cataclysmic social collapse.
   • METEOR IMPACTS MAY BE GOOD FOR EARTH
   • WOOLLY MAMMOTHS: EVIDENCE OF CATASTROPHE?
     
   • COMET WORMWOOD?
   • COMETS/ASTEROIDS/BROWN DWARFS
   • WILL A COMET OR ASTEROID STRIKE THE EARTH?
   • OTHER UNORTHODOX CATASTROPHISM
   • CATASTROPHISM! Man, Myth and Mayhem in Ancient History and the Sciences
   • ARE ASTEROIDS HISTORY'S GREATEST KILLERS?
   • CATASTROPHISM
   • INDEX OF ARTICLE TITLES
   • SITES INTERNET
   • THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
   • COMETS, METEORS & MYTH: NEW EVIDENCE FOR TOPPLED CIVILIZATIONS AND BIBLICAL TALES
   • FOUR TYPES OF EARTH CATASTROPHE
   • TOP 5 COSMIC THREATS TO LIFE ON EARTH
   • NASA AND COMET IMPACT - PROPHETIC SUMMARY
   • THE ORIGINS OF DOOMSDAY ANXIETY
     After years of ignoring the most pervasive fear in human history, it is time to examine its roots dispassionately. For such a purpose, we need only call upon the appropriate rules for evaluating historical evidence.
   • (1) FIRE, FLOOD AND COMET
     The tree-ring record points to global environmental traumas between 2354 and 2345 BC, 1628 and 1623 BC, 1159 and 1141 BC, 208 and 204 BC and AD 536 and 545. Baillie argues that the tree rings are recording first the biblical flood, then the disasters that befell Egypt at the Exodus, famines at the end of King David's reign, a famine in China that ended the Ch'in (sic) dynasty, and finally, the death of King Arthur and Merlin and the onset of the Dark Ages across the whole of what is now Britain.
   • HAS NIBIRU/PLANET X BEEN SIGHTED?
     Immanuel Velikovsky demonstrated rather convincingly that there was massive evidence of both a literary and scientific nature that great catastrophic earth changes had occurred during the second millennium BC due to cometary showers and the close passage of Venus. He settled on a date of 1450 BC, but more recent scientific evidence points to the date actually being 1628 BC. There is also evidence for a disruption circa 5200 BC, 8,800 BC, 12,400 BC, 16,000 BC, 19,600
   • NO MORE SUNSETS OR SUNRISES?
     It would also blow the cover off of most of the so-called "secret societies", for this would likely be their greatest "secret" and thus also their greatest means of social control:
     That the Earth "rejuvinates" every 3,200 years (3315 years according to the Vulcan theory) or so by means of agalactic-scale, catastrophic event which humankind is largelyunable to do anything about.
   • ASTEROIDS AND COMETS Lots of links.
   • SIGNS SUPPLEMENT - METEORS, ASTEROIDS, COMETS, AND NEOs Part I
     A compendium of many comets, asteroids or NEO threats.
   • SIGNS SUPPLEMENT - METEORS, ASTEROIDS, COMETS, AND NEOs Part II
     A compendium of many comets, asteroids or NEO threats.
   • SIGNS SUPPLEMENT - METEORS, ASTEROIDS, COMETS, AND NEOs Part III
     A compendium of many comets, asteroids or NEO threats.
   • DID ASTEROIDS AND COMETS TURN THE TIDES OF CIVILIZATION?
     Ben Rudder, an anthropologist who reviewed in New Scientist magazine a recently published book (Exodus To Arthur) by Baillie on the subject, wrote:
     "If Baillie is right, history has overlooked probably the single most important explanation for the intermittent progress of civilization. Worse, our modern confidence in benign skies is foolhardy, and our failure to appreciate the constant danger of comet "swarms" is the result of a myopic trust in a mere 200 years of "scientific" records."
     Baillie himself notes that:
     "There is, I feel, a strong case for the contention that we do not inhabit a benign planet. This planet is bombarded relatively often. If this story is correct, we have been bombarded at least three times - and probably five times - since the birth of civilization some 5,000 years ago. And each time, the world was changed."
   • COSMIC IMPACTS AND CIVILIZATION COLLAPSE @ THE LONDON CATASTROPHES MEETING O R IBID
     At some time around 2300 BC, a large number of the major civilizations of the world collapsed, simultaneously it seems. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age civilization in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilization in India, the Hilmand civilization in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilizations in the world - all fell into ruin at more or less the same time. Why?
     A thousand years later, at around 1200 BC, many of the civilizations of the same regions again collapsed at about the same time. This time, disaster overtook the Myceneans of Greece, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late Bronze Age Israel, and the Shang Dynasty of China.
     Another huge upheaval occurred around 540 AD, when a major natural catastrophe together with a climatic downturn devastated Europe and other parts of the world, triggering the collapse of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages.
   • HOLOCENE (REGIONAL - EUROPE) ?SUMMARY or (3) HOLOCENE CLIMATE RECORDS IN EUROPE
     Covering the last 11,000 years, these data also showed several warm/cool oscillations that had a quasi-periodicity on the order of 1500 years.
     McDermott et al. (2001) derived a O¹⁸ record from a stalagmite discovered in a cave in southwestern Ireland with a time resolution that they say is "approximately an order of magnitude better than in the North Atlantic cores that record evidence for quasi-periodic (1475 ?500 year) ice rafting during the Holocene." These values are in relatively close agreement with the nominal 1633 quasi-periodic strike interval theoretically predicted from the 3/2 comet swarm orbit resonance period with Vulcan's 5000 year orbit. If the comet swarm's orbit does not quite reach Vulcan's orbit, the strike interval will diminish. Further, if Sol has recently (last 10,000 years or so) changed direction of its oscillation perpendicular to the galactic plane, as some suspect, the period of the comet swarms strike intervals can also be foreshortened.
   • NORTH ATLANTIC MILLENNIAL-SCALE OSCILLATIONS
     Several warm/cool oscillations with a quasi-periodicity of about 1,500 years were documented.
   • THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD AND LITTLE ICE AGE IN IRELAND
     The authors derived a O¹⁸ record - with a time resolution they say is "approximately an order of magnitude better than in the North Atlantic cores that record evidence for quasi-periodic (1475 ?500 year) ice rafting during the Holocene" - from a stalagmite discovered in Crag Cave in southwestern Ireland, after which they compared this record with the O¹⁸ records from the GRIP and GISP2 ice cores from Greenland.
   • (14) HEADING TOWARDS THE NEXT ICE AGE? - 16 November 2001
     The cycle of sunlight intensity roughly follows a 1,500-year pattern, based on analysis of the past 12,000 years. The 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling corresponds to data from tree ring studies, another way of measuring the sun's strength over time. He said the findings also agree with studies that measured the chilling of the Earth based on the advance and retreat of alpine glaciers in Europe. This 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling corrosponds to the 1633 quasiperiodic strikes of alternate comet swarms A and B or A' and B'.
   • Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales
     Biblical stories, apocalyptic visions, ancient art and scientific data all seem to intersect at around 2350 B.C., when one or more catastrophic events wiped out several advanced societies in Europe, Asia and Africa.
     The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the fire, brimstone and flood of possibly mythical events. Omens predicting the Akkadian collapse preserve a record that "many stars were falling from the sky." The "Curse of Akkad," dated to about 2200 B.C., speaks of "flaming potsherds raining from the sky."
     Roughly 2000 years later, the Jewish astronomer Rabbi bar Nachmani created what could be considered the first impact theory: That Noah's Flood was triggered by two "stars" that fell from the sky. "When God decided to bring about the Flood, He took two stars from Khima, threw them on Earth, and brought about the Flood."
     Another thread was woven into the tale when, in 1650, the Irish Archbishop James Ussher mapped out the chronology of the Bible -- a feat that included stringing together all the "begats" to count generations -- and put Noah's great flood at 2349 B.C.
   • (3) CIVILISATION COLLAPSE, CLIMATIC DOWNTURNS & SOLAR FLUCTUATION
     From both scientific (lake sediments, ice cores, dust layers, etc) and historical (archaeology, history) evidence, I have found that quasiperiodical changes of about 1200/1300 years,which could be considered the 7th order fundamental harmonics of sunspot cycles. I am completing a manuscript, entitled The Curse: A Theory of History, These changes of about 1200/1300 years cycle corrosponds to the 1633 quasiperiodic strikes of alternate comet swarms A and B or A' and B'.
   • (3) HOW MANY COSMIC IMPACTS HAVE PUNCTUATED EARTH DURING THE LAST 10,000 YEARS?
     Whilst a dozen Holocene impact craters have been confirmed to date, the majority of impacts that occurred during the last 10,000 years have not been detected yet.
   • B-1: SOME MAJOR IMPACTS OF ASTEROIDS AND COMETS
   • THE RISE OF ASTRONOMICAL CATASTROPHISM After being ridiculed for well over a century, astronomical catastrophism is now (1984) coming into its own.
   • NOW, IT'S COMET SHOWERS THAT DID IT The nature of astronomical catastrophism is still up in the air! But, a mere decade ago such a paper would have to look far for a journal to publish it.
   • A CAUSE AND SOLUTION FOR FERMI'S PARADOX See section 5.Impacts And Extinctions
   • FEKRI HASSAN: Cores of mud from the ocean floor revealed regular periods of extreme cold - mini ice ages - in Europe every 1,500 years, and lasting 200 years. This web site predicts the quasi-periodic theoretical long term (two) comet swarms revisit interval to be 1500 - 1700 years.
   • RESEARCHERS MAKING WAVES AT LOS ALAMOS Latest Space Fear: Asteroid-Spawned Tsunamis - Reuters 07-JAN-98. First they killed the dinosaurs. Now This!
     If an asteroid with a diameter of 600 feet (200 meters) or more splashed down in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it would set off a tsunami, a huge sea wave. A 3 miles (4.8 km) diameter, it would flood the upper east coast of the United States and drown the coasts of France and Portugal.
     The tsunami's waves would move outward from the impact site at about the speed of jet aircraft. This has never happened in the course of recorded history, Hills said; on the other hand, the computer model indicates the likelihood of it occurring is about once every 3,000 to 5,000 years. These values are multiples of the 1,500 to 1,700 year comet swarms quasi-periodic revisit interval.
   • A REVIEW OF EXODUS TO ARTHUR; CATASTROPHIC ENCOUNTERS WITH COMETS
     The five harshest environmental events showing in the dendrochronology records are events at 2354-2345 BC, 1628-1623 BC, 1159-1141 BC, 208-204 BC, and 536-545 AD.
   • THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES.
     The so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision of the earth with one of these wandering luminaries of space, the following question can occur, Was this the first and only occasion, during all the thousands of millions of years that our planet has been revolving on its axis and circling around the sun, that such a catastrophe has occurred? The answer must be in the negative.
   • THE CASE FOR CELESTIAL CATASTROPHISM
   • IMPACT EVENT
   • IMPACT EVENT - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
   • PROJEKT ZUR KOLLISIONSGEFAHRVON "EARTH- CROSSING- ASTEROIDS" MIT UNSEREM PLANETEN. or PROJECT TO THE COLLISION DANGER OF "EARTH CROSSING ASTEROIDS" WITH OUR PLANET GENESIS OF EDEN DIVERSITY ENCYCLOPEDIA
     Encounters with comets and asteroids a kilometer or so in diameter, sufficient to destroy a country the size of India, occur about once in a million years.
2. EARTH IMPACT SIMULATIONS
   • COMET IMPACT! - Jacob Schwartz
     What would happen if people around the world realized we may all die in three months. . . Small enclaves of humans, plants and animals may survive a comet impact, but civilization won't. . . . Any dinosaur you ask will tell you Earth is a dangerous place! . . . The common expectation is that the neighborhood of time called 2000 will bring a new era of destruction, enlightenment, both or neither.
   • UNITEL- January 2004
     Thou shalt be concerned about the life in the hereafter, if you don't learn about such things as the changing earth's magnetic field, possible asteroid collisions, and solar output variability, and new medical technologies.
   • UNDETECTABLE ASTEROIDS COULD DESTROY CITIES - EXPERTS
   • ASTEROID IMPACT SIMULATION WOULD DEVASTATE WISE COUNTY
   • CATCH THE WAVE: ASTEROID-DRIVEN TSUNAMI IN U.S. EASTERN SEABOARD'S FUTURE
     Researchers in California have developed a computer simulation depicting the ocean impact of the asteroid 1950 DA, a half-mile wide (1.1-kilometer) space rock that swings uncomfortably close to Earth in 2880.
   • MASSIVE TSUNAMI SWEEPS ATLANTIC COAST IN ASTEROID IMPACT SCENARIO FOR MARCH 16, 2880
     or . MASSIVE TSUNAMI SWEEPS ATLANTIC COAST IN ASTEROID IMPACT SCENARIO FOR MARCH 16, 2880
     March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as 1950 DA, a huge rock two-thirds of a mile in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 38,000 miles per hour.
   • (5) TSUNAMI GENERATED BY ASTEROID IMPACTS or TWO- AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATIONS OF ASTEROID OCEAN IMPACTS Galen Gisler, Robert Weaver, Charles Mader Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, NM, USA Tsunamis up to a kilometer in initial height are generated by the collapse of the vertical jet. These waves are initially complex in form, and interact strongly with shocks propagating through the water and the crust. The tsunami waves are followed out to 100 km from the point of impact.
   • EFFECTS OF 'KILLER' COMETS ON UA WEB SITE
   • EARTH IMPACT EFFECTS PROGRAM
     Suggested assumptions: 3 mile - Kuiper Belt object; 45 degree angle; density of 1700 kg/m³ (ice and metal mixture); impact velocity 72 km/sec (a long period comet); target sedimentary rock; Possible impact location - 56N, 110 W (compute your desired distance from impact).
   • SOLAR SYSTEM COLLISIONS Calculate the affects of your own meteorite strike.
     For comets, suggest 72 km/sec velocity and 475 meter ice comet simulating one of Nostradamus' strikes.
   • CRATER - 2 October 1999
     This is a short routine to evaluate the scaling equations to determine the diameter of a crater given details on the nature of the projectile, conditions of impact, and state of the target.
   • COMET CRASH: TERAFLOPS COMPUTER SIMULATES COLOSSAL COMET IMPACT INTO OCEAN
     The calculation assumed a 1-kilometer-diameter comet (weighing about a billion tons) traveling 60 kilometers per second and impacting Earth's atmosphere at about a 45 degree angle. This is small as far as comets go
     Low-lying areas like Florida would indeed be washed over, but Dave says the event is very close to the size threshold at which impact experts expect that a global catastrophe could occur, by screening out much sunlight for long periods of time and disrupting agriculture, among other effects. "Simulations of this kind can help pin down that energy threshold and help answer the question: Is it a regional or global catastrophe?"
   • FAQS ABOUT NEO IMPACTS
   • FEWER EARTHBOUND ASTEROIDS WILL HIT HOME
     Asteroids and not the threat, comets are!
   • WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN A COMET OR ASTEROID STRIKES THE EARTH?
   • DATA BASE OF TERRESTRIAL IMPACT STRUCTURES - click or world map.
   • CTH 3D COMET IMPACT SIMULATIONS Simulates a strike of a 1 kilometer diameter comet (weighing about 1 billion tons) into the Atlantic Ocean and releasing 300 Gigatons TNT equivalent energy. A 300 foot tidal wave would inundate Florida and much of the eastern seaboard.
   • CATCH THE WAVE: ASTEROID-DRIVEN TSUNAMI IN U.S. EASTERN SEABOARD'S FUTURE
     Researchers in California have developed a computer simulation depicting the ocean impact of the asteroid 1950 DA, a half-mile wide (1.1-kilometer) space rock that swings uncomfortably close to Earth in 2880.
   • SEVEN FOR THE SEVEN STARS IN THE SKY
     The book of Enoch mentions the stars on two occasions. One reference says:
     • "... and there I saw seven stars of the heavens bound together in it, like great mountains and burning with fire. Then I said: For what sin are they bound, and on what account have they been cast in hither... "
     • The same chapter elsewhere also describes the effect of the collisions of heavenly bodies presumably the seven stars, with Earth:
     • "... I saw in a vision how the heaven collapsed and was borne off and fell to the earth. And when it fell to the earth I saw how the earth was swallowed up in a great abyss, and mountains were suspended on mountains, and hills sank down on hills, and high trees were rent from their stems, and hurled and sunk in the abyss ... "
     I would suggest that not only is albido change involved in the process of ending an ice age, but changes in sea and air temperature (caused by the heat of the impacts) and in the greenhouse effect (caused by increased water vapour in the atmosphere.
     Lockheed Martin, one of the USA's biggest communications and space launch vehicle corporations, used its Sandia laboratories in New Mexico to simulate what was likely to happen when comet P/Shoemake/Levy/9 crashed into Jupiter. The simulation in advance of the event proved so accurate that the same team, led by David Crawford and Arthurine Breckenridge, did a simulation of a 1.4 kilometre comet weighing approximately 1000 million tons, crashing into the Atlantic Ocean 25 miles south of New York. First Austin Atkinson describes the computing power:
   • (8) WHEN A COMET MEETS A PLANET - Celestial Mechanics & Dynamical Astronomy, 1998, Vol.71, No.3, pp..191-201
     The objective of this paper is to develop a simple model of an encounter between a comet and a planet, with a subsequent capture or an escape, and to study the potential consequences.
   • (4) FAQ ON FIREBALLS AND METEORITE FALLS - 23 June 1998
   • ASTEROID TSUNAMIS COULD BE HUGE, SLOW
     The model showed that a one kilometer iron asteroid strikes with the power of 1.5 trillion tons of TNT and produces a spout of water more than twelve miles high.
     For instance, on land, a relatively small, 30 to 50-meter-wide asteroid would create quite a crater and a blast what would cause local damage. The same event in the sea, however, would cause waves that would scour a much larger area.
   • TSUNAMI FROM ASTEROID/COMET IMPACTS
     Tsunami generally travel very fast across the ocean (typically 500km/h or more). In deep water the tsunami height might not be great but the height can increase dramatically when they reach the shoreline because the wave slows in shallow water and the energy becomes more concentrated. In addition to the inherent increase in the height of the wave from this shoaling effect, the momentum of the wave might cause it to reach a considerable height as it travels up sloping land. It is typical for multiple waves to result from one tsunami-generating event and these could be several hours apart when they reach a distant shore.
   • SIMULATION OF ASTEROID/COMET IMPACTS WITH EARTH
     The largest impact recorded over the 100,000 year run was a stony asteroid 5 kilometers in diameter traveling at 29 kilometers per second. The 23 million megaton explosion produced a crater 60 kilometers across and the resulting climate catastrophe was sufficient to wipe out the human population.
   • SIMULATION OF ASTEROID/COMET IMPACTS WITH EARTH
     Although one million years seems a very long time, bear in mind that impacts do not run like clockwork - they could occur at any time. An event that happens once-in-one-million-years of the simulation has a one-in-a-million chance of happening in the next twelve months. This should not be dismissed as unimportant, particularly if it could involve billions of deaths and the end of civilization. After all, many optimistic people around the world regularly buy lottery tickets where the chance of winning first prize is one in 30 million or worse. The chance of getting dealt a royal flush in 5 card poker is about one in half a million.
   • WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN A COMET OR ASTEROID STRIKES THE EARTH?
     A large comet or asteroid greater than 1 kilometer in diameter that impacts Earth will produce a global catastrophe.
   • IMPACT FROM OUTER SPACE
     100-m to 1-km diameter impactors
     Toward the upper end of this size range, the megaton equivalent energy would so vastly exceed what has been studied in nuclear war scenarios that it is difficult to be certain of the effects. Extrapolation from smaller yields suggests that the "local" zones of damage from the impact of a 1-km object could envelop whole states or countries, with fatalities of tens of millions in a densely populated region. There would also begin to be noticeable global consequences, including alterations in atmospheric chemistry and cooling due to atmospheric dust -- perhaps analogous to the "year without a summer" in 1817, following the explosion of the volcano Tambora.
     1 km to 5 km diameter impactors
     The threshold for an impact that causes widespread global mortality and threatens civilization almost certainly lies between about 0.5 and 5 km diameter, perhaps near 2 km. What happens when an object several kilometres in diameter strikes the Earth at a speed of tens of kilometres per second? Primarily there is a massive explosion, sufficient to fragment and partially vaporize both the projectile and the target area. Meteoric phenomena associated with high speed ejecta could subject plants and animals to scorching heat for about half an hour, and a global firestorm might them ensue. Dust thrown up from a very large crater would lead to total darkness over the whole Earth, which might persist for several months. Temperatures could drop as much as tens of degrees C. Nitric acid, produced from the burning of atmospheric nitrogen in the impact fireball, would acidify lakes, soils, streams, and perhaps the surface layer of the oceans.
     
     1. It would destroy most of the world's food crops for a year, and /or
     2. It would result in the deaths of more than a quarter of the world's population, and/or
     3. It would have effects on the global climate similar to those calculated for "nuclear winter", and/or
     4. It would threaten the stability and future of modern civilization.
     5. A catastrophe having one, or all, of these traits would be a horrifying thing, unprecedented in history, with potential implications for generations to come.
   • CAN WE SURVIVE THE NEXT MAJOR ASTEROID IMPACT?
3. EARTH IMPACT EVIDENCE
   • ASTRONOMER: EARTH SAFE FROM ASTEROIDS FOR NOW
     About 170 craters have been identified as having been caused by space objects, she said. Many more haven't been found yet, or won't be because they're under oceans.
   • Craters on Earth
     It was not until we began to look at Earth using satellites that we began to see lots of big impact craters on Earth--about 150 are now known. This map shows the locations of some of them.
   • (3) HOLOCENE IMPACT CRATERS 10,000 BP up-dated list of Holocene impact craters
     Tsöörikmäe (Estonia) c. 9,500 BP (date: Pirrus; Tiirmaa)
     Mache (Russia) c. 7,000 BP (date: Shoemaker/Grieve)
     Ilumetsa (Estonia) c. 6,000 BP (date:Czegka)
     Henbury (Australia) c. 5,000 BP (date: Shoemaker/Grieve)
     Boxhole (Australia) c. 5,000 BP (date: Shoemaker/Grieve)
     Morasko (Poland) c. 5,000 BP (date: Czegka)
     Campo del Cielo (Argentina) c. 4,000 BP (date: Shoemaker/Grieve)
     Rio Cuarto (Argentina) c. 4,000 BP (date: P. Schultz)
     Kaalijarvi (Estonia) c. 4,000 BP (date: Shoemaker/Grieve)
     Wabar (Saudi Arabia) c. 600 BP (date: Wynn/Shoemaker)
     Simuna (Estonia) c. 50 BP (date: Pirrus; Tiirmaa)
   • 186-MILE-WIDE CRATER TOPS GROWING LIST OF BIG HOLES
     QUESTION: What is the world's largest impact crater?
     ANSWER: The largest known impact crater probably is the Vredefort formation in South Africa. Severely eroded, it's about 2.023 billion years old and originally was probably 186 miles across, according to reconstructions.
     Manicouagan: A circular lake in Quebec outlines an eroded crater more than 60 miles across that occurred about 215 million years ago, about the time the dinosaur age began.
     Chicxulub: University of Arizona researchers helped identify this 120-mile-wide buried formation in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, partly offshore, in the 1990s and are now exploring it in detail. A massive impact formed it about 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out.
     Bedout: Recently, scientists reported strong evidence that a 125-mile-wide crater, the 250 million-year-old Bedout structure, lurks beneath the waters off northwestern Australia.
     Popigai: This Russian crater more than 60 miles across formed 35 million years ago.
     Acraman: This Australian crater is more than 50 miles wide and 590 million years old.
     Chesapeake Bay: A more than 50-mile-wide crater lies hidden beneath Virginia's Chesapeake Bay. It's about 35 million years old.
   • UNCOVERING AN ASTEROID
     Fragments of an ancient asteroid have revealed new details about asteroid impacts on Earth.
     In Morokweng, South Africa, lies a crater larger than the city of London. With a diameter of over 70 km, it is one of the ten largest craters on the planet and was created when a huge asteroid collided with the Earth about 144 million years ago. Usually, asteroids large enough to create craters more than four kilometres wide are vaporised by the high temperatures created when they hit the Earth. But recently, an international group of scientists accidentally discovered a fragment of an asteroid in the Morokweng crater that is believed to be a piece of the destructive, ancient space rock.
   • DRILLING SET AT CHESAPEAKE BAY METEOR SITE
   • NEO NEWS (02/23/05) IMPACTS AT THE AAAS
     The Chesapeake impact produced a large "strewn field" of melted ejecta called the North American Tektites. The impacting object was probably between 3 and 5 km in diameter. This impact was unusual in that it took place on the continental shelf beneath several hundred meters of water, in water-saturated rock. There is some evidence of a very large tsunami produced by this impact, which was in deeper water than the Chicxulub impact in Mexico.
     One of the mysteries of this impact is its coincidence in time with the 100-km- diameter Popigai crater in Siberia, which also has an estimated age near 35 million years. Comparative studies of the two similar-size craters will surely be interesting, one occurring on dry land and the other underwater. There are apparently two global impact layers that have been identified in Italy separated by 10-20 cm, and perhaps these can be linked to the two craters and will provide a measure of the interval of time between the impacts.
   • UK'S 'COMET' CRATER INVESTIGATED
   • GEOLOGY AND THE GREAT FLOOD Some Good Pictures
   • QUEBEC'S MANICOUAGAN RESERVOIR - 70 km diameter
   • COSMIC EARTH IMPACT LINKS
   • EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RISK - Jef's web files
   • LINKS
   • IMPACT LINKS:
   • EARTH IMPACT DATABASE
   • EARTH IMPACT DATA BASE
   • IMPACT CRATERS ON EARTH
   • WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE... Lots of links.
   • IMPACT CRATER
   • IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, AS WE KNOW IT
   • TERRESTRIAL IMPACT CRATERS, Second Edition
   • THREE CRATERS IN ISRAEL
   • CONTROVERSIAL THEORIES OF THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY, THE EARTH AND THE SOLAR SYSTEM: RE-EVALUATING ANCIENT HISTORY
   • MASSIVE METEORITES IN GEOLOGICAL HISTORY - August 1990
     The impact of asteroids or comets striking the earth may have cracked the planet's crust, causing cataclysmic lava flows, environmental upheaval, mass extinctions, and plate boundaries.
   • CATASTROPHIC THEORY OF MOUNTAIN UPLIFTS by Donald W. Patten And Samuel R. Windsor
   • PRESTO, CHANGE-O! Extraterrestrial impacts transform Earth's surface in an instant
   • THE FOLLOWING (EACH IS A SEPARATE PAGE) ARE LINKS TO DIFFERENT GREAT FLOOD MYTHS:
   • THE COSMIC CATASTROPHE SURVIVAL STRATEGY BY TALAKO
   • (1) COMETS, DRAGONS AND PROPHETS OF DOOM - May 1998
     Ancient myths, tree ring studies and archaeological evidence all confirm that a rare giant comet may have visited the Earth only a few thousand years ago, raining fireballs and meteors in its wake.
     Dr Bill Napier, astronomer at Armagh Observatory, and Dr Victor Clube of Oxford and Armagh Universities (sic), have investigated the doom-laden cosmic myths of early civilisation. From the Persian prophet Zooraster, who in 500 BC predicted the end of the world caused by 'a huge comet sent by Satan' to the description in the Book of Revelations of a 'burning mountain' falling from the sky, early history is full of myths of celestial combat, rains of fire and many-headed dragons, which support astronomers' theories of the existence of a tumultuous night sky. Recent terrestrial research has provided 'hard' evidence to support theories of close encounters with comets.
   • THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL written by I. Donnelly in 1883. He hypothesized that all those sheets of unconsolidated rocky debris strewn across the planet (called the "drift") were the consequence of comet's impacts.
   • THE LOESS AS A BIZARRE PRECIPITATE
   • ADDED THOUGHTS (ON LOESS)
   • HUGE METEORITE DISCOVERED UNDERGROUND IN KANSAS
     According to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the so-called Brenham meteorite exploded centuries ago over what is now Kansas, scattering more than three tons of fragments.
   • IMMENSE CIRCULAR TERRESTRIAL STRUCTURES OF GREAT AGE These circles measure between 7 and 700 kilometers in diameter and are nearly perfect geometrical figures. To date (1978), some 1,170 circles have been discovered, of which more than half can be visually traced for 360? Now the Kara-Bogaz-Gol of the Caspian Sea can be added. See SPIRITUAL SOURCES in the 1997 Paper.
   • A RE-EVALUATION OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL ORIGIN OF THE CAROLINA BAYS A comet strike appears to explain the recent formation of the Carolina bays in the late Wisconsinan or early Holocene time frame (about ten thousand years ago. Elliptical craters ranging in size from 200 feet to seven miles formed the half million Carolina bays
   • DID A HALF MILLION METEORS FALL ON THE CAROLINAS?
   • MOON-LIKE CRATERS IN THE NORTH SEA FLOOR Thousands of elliptical craters or pockmarks in the sediments were discovered, ranging from 30-330 feet across, 6-25 feet deep, and located in water about 500 feet deep. The long axes of the craters point roughly in the same direction; and the craters tend to be arranged in lines like those of the Carolina Bays.
   • EIGHT LITTLE CRATERS ALL IN A ROW See Figure.
   • (1) IMPACT RESEARCH CURRENT ACTIVITIES/PROGRESS - June:August, 1998
     The Woodleigh structure, Carnarvon Basin, Western Australia, is buried by flat- lying Cretaceous strata of the Gascoyne Platform, but is manifested by a multi- ring Bouguer anomaly approximately 120 km in diameter that coincides with an overall magnetic 'low'.
   • POSSIBLE CHAIN OF METEORITE SCARS IN ARGENTINA See Figure.
   • EUROPE'S BIGGEST SMACH HIT - 15 February 1999
     Geologists prospecting for oil in the Barents Sea have stumbled across the largest meteorite crater ever found in Europe. It is also one of the largest in the world. It was formed 150 million years ago when an asteroid, possibly 500m (550 yards) across and travelling at 30,000 km/h (19,000 mph), plunged into the sea off the coast of Norway. This chain of impact is thought to be one of the five most important catastrophes that have happened on Earth. They estimate the Rochechouart meteorite measured 15km and the Bizeneuille one perhaps even bigger. The suggest that the impacts were the equivalent of 40 million Hiroshimas (yes 40 million), affecting thousands of square km in the Northern hemisphere. Notice a "chain of impacts, as if from a fragmenting comet.
   • (3) LARGEST IMPACT STRUCTURE DISCOVERED IN FRANCE?
     Apparently, geologists who were re-analyzing Landsat 2 pictures of Rochechouart and Bizeneuille, two adjacent areas of south-western France, discovered that the two already known 20 km-wide craters were in fact 200 to 300 km wide! There shock waves actually touched each other, as their impats were 140 km apart, 200 million years ago.
     Further research has revealed that other 200 million year old impacts have the same latitude: Manicouagan (Québec) and Saint-Martin (Canada). Red Wing (USA) and Obolon (Ukraine) are also located on the same path that can be traced between Manicouagan and Rochechouart. Remember the multiple impacts on Jupiter? Same phenomenon here, they say.
     
   • (6) CHAIN OF CRATERS - Discover Magazine - July 1998
     Geologist John Spray of the University of New Brunswick in Canada chiseled some rock samples from the ancient Rochechouart crater in west-central France. Geologists had debated the crater's age for some time, and Spray wanted to use a new dating technique to settle the issue. His resultoan age of 214 million years reminded him that the Manicouagan crater in Quebec was about that old. Intrigued, he did some more sleuthing and found three more craters of a similar age: Saint Martin, in Manitoba; Obolon, in the Ukraine; and tiny Red Wing, in North Dakota. Could all five craters have been created simultaneously? If so, it could explain a mass extinction of that age.
   • ADDING UP THE RISKS OF COSMIC IMPACTHISTORICAL RECORD
     Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, has tried to untangle other astronomical observations from ancient tales told from the Middle East to Hawaii. He referred to an impact event in the Rio Cuarto region of northern Argentina, in which an asteroid 100 to 300 yards (or meters) in diameter apparently broke up as it zoomed through the atmosphere, leaving a trail of craters.
   • IMPACT CRATERS: THE PARTY LINE REVISED AND RE-REVISED
   • ASTEROIDS OFTEN TRAVEL, AND STRIKE, IN PAIRS
   • (2) DETECTION OF A DUST TRAIL IN THE ORBIT OF AN EARTH-THREATENING LONG-PERIOD COMET
     ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 1997, Vol.479, No.1 Pt1, pp.441-447
   • (1) LEONID IMPACTS ON MOON OBSERVED AGAIN And Explosions on the Moon
     "Like Earth, the Moon also plowed through comet Tempel-Tuttle's debris field on Nov. 18th," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. But, unlike Earth, the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere where meteoroids harmlessly disintegrate." Instead, lunar Leonids hit the ground and explode.
4. COMETARY ORIGIN OF THE BIOSPHERE
   • (4) DOES PANSPERMIA ACCOUNT FOR RED RAINFALL IN INDIA?
   • (6) THE PANSPERMIA THEORY ACCORDING TO HOYLE & WICKRAMASINGHE
     Main Points Of Theory
     • Life on Earth which first appeared about 4000 million years ago, at a time when the planet was being severely bombarded by comets and asteroids, could not have started on Earth
     • Life in the form of bacteria and viruses were brought to Earth by comets, which were the sites where they multiplied (in warm watery interiors), and which acted as vehicles of transport
     • Microorganisms continue to arrive at the Earth even today, being included in the 100 tons or so of cometary debris that enters the Earth on a daily basis
     • The continued arrival of cometary bacteria and viruses contributes to the evolution of species through geological time
     • Interactions of present day life forms on Earth (including) humans with cometary bacteria and viruses could lead to epidemic disease
     • Astronomical evidence is fully consistent with the occurrence of microorganisms on a cosmic scale......
   • SCIENTISTS FIND SECRET OF LIFE... IN THE STARS
     "So what we have here is an example of how impact events can create a habitat for life and not merely act as agents of destruction," he said.
   • (5) COMETARY ORIGIN OF THE BIOSPHERE - 1999 Icarus 146: (2) 313-325
     Most of the biosphere was brought on the primitive Earth by an intense bombardment of comets. This included the atmosphere, the seawater and those volatile carbon compounds needed for the emergence of life.
   • AN ARGUMENT FOR THE COMETARY ORIGIN OF THE BIOSPHERE
     The evidence suggests that a rain of comets brought the Earth its water, its organic molecules and its atmosphere—key ingredients for life’s beginning
   • (7) ON THE POSSIBLE EXTRATERRESTRIAL INFLUENCE ON EARTH'S CLIMATE & THE ORIGIN OF THE OCEANS
     Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, 1999, Vol.146, No.1-4, pp.33- 51
     The total extraterrestrial influx rate may be four to five orders of magnitude greater than previously thought, large enough to account for today's total near-surface inventories of water and carbon.
   • DID COMETS FLOOD EARTH'S OCEANS?
     Rosetta, Philae and Ptolemy will either solve one scientific mystery, or open another whole set of new ones.
   • (8) COMETARY ORIGIN OF SEA WATER PLANETARY AND SPACE SCIENCE, 1999, Vol.47, No.1-2, pp.125-131
     The deuterium enrichment of seawater is quantitatively consistent with its origin from a cometary bombardment of the primitive Earth.
   • (10) COMETARY TRAVEL: FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACE TO EARTH'S OCEANS Icarus, 1999, Vol.140, No.2, pp.446-450
     The HDO/H2O ratio in Earth's oceans suggests that the water was delivered by both comets and rocky material formed in Earth's region of the solar nebula.
   • (10) COMETARY TRAVEL: FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACE TO EARTH'S OCEANS Icarus, 1999, Vol.140, No.2, pp.446-450
     The HDO/H2O ratio in Earth's oceans suggests that the water was delivered by both comets and rocky material formed in Earth's region of the solar nebula.
   • IMPACT DELIVERY OF EARLY OCEANS 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago, when bombardment of the inner solar system was thought to be especially severe. Rather than the expected net loss, the earth seems to have gained more than 0.2 - 0.7 ocean masses in that period. See this site's ASTRONOMICAL INFORMATION FROM NORMAL SOURCES in the 1997 Paper
   • AN ARGUMENT FOR THE COMETARY ORIGIN OF THE BIOSPHERE The evidence suggests that a rain of comets brought the Earth its water, its organic molecules and its atmosphere-key ingredients for life’s beginnings ( as proposed in the 1997 Paper)
   • SCIENTISTS REPORT 'ALIEN' LIFE - 22 November 2000
     Researchers said that in the filter of a high-flying balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, they found a strain of bacteria unlike anything on Earth. The bacteria were found at an altitude of 10 miles and scientists from the ISRO, Cardiff University and the University of Wales College of Medicine said it may have come from a comet on a close approach to earth, according to the Daily Mail. Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe, who is based at Cardiff University, said the discovery marked "the first time we have had direct evidence for the hypothesis that comets seed life on other planets."
   • INTERNATIONAL GEOSPHERE-BIOSPHERE PROGRAMME - IGBP Science No. 3
   • ANOMALOUS HIGH ALTITUDE LUMINOSITY (AHAL)
     When meteors plunge into the earth's upper atmosphere, friction with the air causes them to incandesce and burn up. The smaller ones are completely consumed. A few bigger ones reach earth and are renamed "meteorites." So far, all of this is well-understood. But when meteors begin to burn up much above 100 kilometers, a problem arises. The air there is normally much too thin to cause incandescence and burn-up. LAYERS OF EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE
     Meteors burn up in the mesosphere.
     The Mesosphere:
     In the Earth's mesosphere, the air masses are relatively mixed together and the temperature decreases with altitude. Atmospheric temperatures reach the lowest average value of around -90°C in the mesosphere. This is also the layer in which a lot of meteors burn up while entering the Earth's atmosphere.
     The mesosphere extends from the top of the stratosphere (the stratopause, located at about 50 kilometers) to an altitude of about 90 kilometers. Upper reaches of the atmosphere, such as the mesosphere, can sometimes be detected by looking at the limb of a planet.
5. PREHISTORIC STRIKES
   • METEORITE TURNED EARTH INSIDE OUT
     A devastating meteorite collision caused part of the Earth's crust to flip inside out billions of years ago and left a dusting of a rare metal scattered on the top of the crater, says new University of Toronto research. This has been suggested for the Moon at times in the past but ours is the first observational evidence that this process has operated on Earth. Vulcan, over the years, has drawn many Kuiper belt bodies into 3:2 resonate orbits which pass through the inner solar system. One in a while, large ones are drawn in and they crumble rounding the Sun. Large fragments of one of these striking Earth initiated the Pleistocene (Ice Ages) and big pieces of it are still around to threaten Earth.
   • ANCIENT IMPACT TURNED PART OF EARTH INSIDE-OUT
     A space rock the size of a large mountain hit 1.8 billion years ago and dredged up part of Earth's lower crust, essentially turning a bit of the planet inside out, a new study concludes.
     It appears an asteroid about 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide hit the planet at more than 89,000 mph (40 kilometers per second).
   • COULD THE CZECH BASIN HAVE BEEN CREATED THROUGH METEORITIC IMPACT?
     This week the Czech newsmagazine Tyden reported on a theory that the so-called Czech basin, or massif, which makes up most of Bohemia, may have been created by a meteorite hitting the area around 2 billion years ago.
   • 1.85 BILLION YEAR OLD METEORITE DEBRIS FOUND IN MN
     In a spot he had never visited, with fire in three directions, Jirsa found evidence of a cataclysm that probably no one but a geologist would have noticed -- debris from the Sudbury impact.
     That blast created a crater more than 150 miles across, scattering rock and dust over nearly a million square miles.
     "It's fairly dark rock," Jirsa said. "They look like concrete, but in this concrete you would throw pieces of rock of all sizes and shapes and in all possible orientations."
     The rock includes balls the size and shape of a large taconite pellet which Jirsa believes formed in the impact's huge, hot cloud of dust, much as hailstones form in a storm cloud.
   • PREHISTORIC ASTEROID "KILLED EVERYTHING"
     This cataclysm some 3.5 billion years ago is the earliest known meteor strike to hit the Earth, and one of at least four that have been identified in a geologically brief 300-million-year period.
     It seems like the Vulcan induced comet swarms say around for several million years rather that the few hundred thousand year estimates. This is consistent with the Pliocene to Pleistocene transition and the reformation of Venus's surface by related impacts a few million years ago. Those swarms are likely still with us!
   • ANCIENT METEORITE LEAVES TELLTALE TRACES
     The first convincing evidence of a massive meteorite impact that occurred 2.63 billion years ago has been found in northwestern Australia's Pilbara region.
   • THAW POINT: 'SNOWBALL EARTH' WAS MORE LIKE A SLUSHBALL
     Instead of "Snowball Earth," the planet really became "Slushball Earth," its authors suggest.
     The great chill -- the longest and deepest ice age in Earth's known history -- happened during the late Neoproterozoic era, 850 to 542 million years ago.
     The evidence for the Snowball thesis comes from deep sediments in the ocean.
   • EARTH REALLY WAS ONE BIG SNOWBALL
     The "Snowball Earth" theory claims that our planet was entirely frozen over about 630 million years ago. Most geoscientists agree that the Earth cooled significantly at that time, but some favour a "Slushball Earth" scenario in which equatorial oceans did not freeze.
     researchers found a sharp spike in iridium levels in the cores that date to the end of the cooling period, favouring the snowball theory. The size of the spike suggests a global glaciation lasting between 3 and 12 million years
   • STUDY CASTS DOUBT ON 'SNOWBALL EARTH' THEORY
   • AGE OF DINOSAURS BEGAN WITH COMET IMPACT
   • CHICXULUB IMPACT CRATER AND THE K/T MASS EXTINCTION, REVISITED
     The new evidence from Yaxcopoil-1, combined with the spherule ejecta evidence from NE Mexico, indicates that the Chicxulub impact predated the KT boundary by about 300k y. Chicxulub therefore was not the cause for the KT mass extinction. The KT impact crater still remains to be found.
   • NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS A DIFFERENT METEOR KILLED DINOSAURS
     Her team concluded that there was a gap of some 300,000 years between the deposition of the spherules (from the Chicxulub crater) and the iridium (from an asteroid). Therefore, there must have been two impacts.
   • SHIVA CRATER
   • DID A COMET SWARM KILL THE DINOSAURS?
     A gravitational disturbance in the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt, the massive comet reservoirs found at the outer reaches of our solar system, could dispatch a swarm of dirty snowballs inward toward the Sun, and therefore Earth. That gravitational disturbance was caused by Vulcan.
     and
     (8) RE: MULTIPLE COMETARY IMPACTS AT K/T TIME
     See: CS - early/94: On one occasion, 14 comets struck earth and comet caused the death of the dinosaurs. The largest was 18 miles in diameter.
   • COULD MULTIPLE METEOR IMPACTS HAVE KILLED THE DINOSAURS?
     Rather than a single meteorite impact 65 million years ago, could Earth have been hit with a scattershot of several rocks from space? It may have happened before. There is evidence that about 35 million years ago, at least five comets or asteroids collided with Earth. If the effects of a single large meteorite impact seem overwhelming, imagine how life on Earth would reel from a barrage of rocks from space.
   • DOUBLE TROUBLE: WHAT REALLY KILLED THE DINOSAURS
     Instead of being driven to extinction by death from above, dinosaurs might have ultimately been doomed by death from below in the form of monumental volcanic eruptions. The suggestion is based on new research that is part of a growing body of evidence indicating a space rock alone did not wipe out the giant reptiles.
     Another leading culprit is a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that occurred between 63 million to 67 million years ago. These created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds in India, whose original extent may have covered as much as 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers), or more than twice the area of Texas.
     Now research suggests the mass extinction happened at or just after the biggest phase of the Deccan eruptions, which spewed 80 percent of the lava found at the Deccan Traps."It's the first time we can directly link the main phase of the Deccan Traps to the mass extinction," said Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller.
     Keller stressed these findings do not deny that an impact occurred around the K- T boundary, and noted that one or possibly several impacts may have had a hand in the mass extinction. "The dinosaurs might have faced an unfortunate coincidence of a one-two punch—of Deccan volcanism and then a hit from space," she explained. "We just show the Deccan eruptions might have had a significant impact—no pun intended."
     First came the comet impact(s), and it(they) set off volcanic activiaty.
   • A VOLCANIC DINOSAUR DEBATE
     At least 50 percent of the world's species, including the dinosaurs, perished 65 million years ago. A large meteorite struck Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula around the same time, and most scientists blame this impact for the mass extinction.
   • DID MULTIPLE IMPACTS PUMMEL EARTH 35 MILLION YEARS AGO
     Rather than a single meteorite impact 65 million years ago, could Earth have been hit with a scattershot of several rocks from space? It may have happened before.
     There is evidence that about 35 million years ago, at least five comets or asteroids collided with Earth. If the effects of a single large meteorite impact seem overwhelming, imagine how life on Earth would reel from a barrage of rocks from space.
   • MYSTERY MINERALS FORMED IN DINOSAUR-DESTROYING ASTEROID FIREBALL
   • (1) NEW THEORY ON DINOSAURS: MULTIPLE IMPACT DID THEM IN or NEW THEORY ON DINOSAURS: MULTIPLE METEORITES DID THEM IN
     The discoveries are giving new support to the idea that killer objects from outer space may have sometimes arrived in pairs or even swarms, perhaps explaining why the extinctions seen in the fossil record can be messy affairs, with species reeling before a final punch finishes them off.
     In the U.K., we have a phrase, `You wait an hour for a bus, then three come along all at once,' " he remarked in an interview. "Maybe impacts are like that."
   • DID A GIANT METEOR KILL DINOSAURS?
   • THE ASTEROID WAS INNOCENT, SAYS DINO STUDY
     Chicxulub might have played a role in "softening" the dinos, he said, after which they may have never quite recovered. The second, still undiscovered, impactor might have been the terminal blow.
   • LARGEST EVER FIELD OF IMPACT CRATERS UNCOVERED
     Paillou estimates that it is roughly 50 million years old, relatively young in geological terms
   • HUGE CRATERS CONFIRM METEORITE IMPACT ON EARTH!
     The structures turned out to be part of a huge field of 100 craters spread over 5000 square kilometres near the Gilf Kebir plateau. The craters vary in diameter from 20 metres to 2 kilometres across. The previous largest known crater field covers a mere 60 square kilometres in Argentina.
     The size of the field suggests that it could be the result of two or more meteors disintegrating as they entered Earth's atmosphere, the first evidence of a multiple strike, he says.
   • DINOSAUR EXTINCTION THEORY 'A MYTH' or DINOSAUR DEATH THEORY 'JUST A MYTH'
     The team suggests a more complex series of events such as an additional asteroid impact, perhaps in the Shiva Crater in India, volcanism, and climate change.
   • DID BEES SURVIVE WHEN DINOSAURS COULDN'T?
     The reign of tropical honeybees may have outlasted the great dinosaur age, and if true, the clue may raise questions about whether a single, cataclysm really took the Earth into a prolonged winter. One paleontologist looks not to what died, but what survived the events from 65 million years ago. Maybe it was a series of comet collisions.
   • DAY FROM HELL MAY HAVE KILLED OFF DINOSAURS
     Earth's temperatures soared, the sky turned red and trees all over the planet burst into flames, said atmospheric physicist Brian Toon of the University of Colorado.
   • PREHISTORIC ASTEROID "KILLED EVERYTHING
     This cataclysm some 3.5 billion years ago is the earliest known meteor strike to hit the Earth. There was almost certainly life at this time. Primitive, bacterial life, and if the impacts were made by a meteor 20 miles in diameter, they would have killed everything on the surface of the Earth,"
   • DINOSAURS FRIED WITHIN HOURS OF COSMIC COLLISION
   • DINO IMPACT GAVE EARTH THE CHILL
     The global winter was probably caused by a pollutant cloud of sulphate particles released when the asteroid vaporized rocks at Chicxulub, Mexico.
   • SCIENTISTS SAY METEORITE HIT WISCONSIN
     They believe they have finally solved the puzzle: A 650- to 700-foot meteorite crashed into the earth at speeds up to 67,500 mph. The impact 450 million years ago dislodged rocks and created a massive hole in a 4-mile area called Rock Elm about 70 miles east of Minneapolis.
   • (2) CATACLYSMIC METEOR SWAMPED NOVA SCOTIA
     A giant meteor hurtled from the sky 50 million years ago, punching a huge crater in the ocean floor off Nova Scotia. The impact created a tidal wave five times as high as Fenwick Tower that rolled over the entire province.
     The meteor was moving at 20,000 kilometres per hour when it splashed into the sea. About two kilometres in diameter, the space rock steamed through the seawater and slammed into the Earth's crust 250 kilometres south of Shelburne, creating a hole 40 kilometres across.
   • (2) "IMPROBABILITY" OF OBLIQUE-ANGLE IMPACTS The most likely impact angle is therefore 45 degrees (forget all those pictures with asteroids descending vertically).
     
     (3) COSMIC IMPACTS IMPLICATED IN BOTH THE RISE AND FALL OF DINOSAURS "Our research adds to the speculation that there was a comet or asteroid impact about 200 million years ago, followed relatively quickly by the rising dominance of dinosaur populations of the Jurassic period," said Kent.
   • DINO HEAT WAVE RECORDED IN LEAVES
     The researchers say analysis of fossil leaves from 65 million years ago shows there was a sudden and dramatic rise in carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Only the impact of a large asteroid, vaporizing billions of tones of limestone rocks, could have released so much gas so quickly into the environment, they believe.
   • (5) ASTEROID IMPACT TIED TO RISE OF DINOSAURS Scientists have long suspected that an asteroid led to the demise of dinosaurs' 65 million years ago. Research last year suggested that an earlier impact 251 million years ago might have allowed dinosaurs to evolve in the first place.
   • LOW OXYGEN LIKELY MADE 'GREAT DYING' WORSE, GREATLY DELAYED RECOVERY
     The biggest mass extinction in Earth history some 251 million years ago was preceded by elevated extinction rates before the main event and was followed by a delayed recovery that lasted for millions of years.
   • COSMIC COLLISION MAY HAVE CREATED HAWAII
   • (4) HAWAII, TOMBSTONE OF THE DINOSAURS
   • MOTION OF THE HAWAIIAN HOTSPOT: A PALEOMANGETIC TEST
   • (11) THE BREAK-UP OF PANGEA - 01 February 2001
     Just as reported in the February 1997 Paper.
   • IMPACT CRATER BENEATH LAKE HURON blasted by a meteorite at least 500 million years ago
   • (6) TINY TEETH SHED LIGHT ON ANCIENT COMET - 23 March 1998
     Minuscule fossil animal teeth, known as conodonts, indicate that a 370-million-year-old comet that slammed into Nevada could be as much as five times larger than scientists initially suspected.
     "The crater left by the ancient Nevada comet is now interpreted to have been at least one mile deep and 45 miles wide. It is comparable in size to one that struck the Chesapeake Bay area about 35 million years ago. On the basis of this comparison, the Nevada comet could have been as large as three miles in diameter, much larger than our initial calculation of one kilometer. It may have been part of the first of a series of comet showers that led to a mass extinction of many forms of life three million years later."
   • DOUBLE WHAMMY: Asteroids Delivered One-Two Punch
     A pair of 35-million-year-old craters on Earth thought to have been carved by comets now appears to be the result of a broken asteroid that generated a slowly delivered shower of debris over millions of years. Asteroids are pretty tough and fracture with difficulty before they impact. Comets can have metal cores and this may be the source of the trace metals being found. Comets impact Earth commonly, asteroids only every hundred million years or so.
   • EVIDENCE FOR METEOR IN EARLY MASS EXTINCTION FOUND
     Ellwood and four other researchers have just published an article in the journal Science in which they tie an early mass extinction to a meteor strike. This extinction happened 380 million years ago in what is called the middle Devonian. It was a time when only small plants, wingless insects and spiders inhabited the land and everything else lived in the sea. About 40 percent of all species disappeared from the fossil record at this time.
     "We know that meteors have struck the Earth hundreds of times," Ellwood said. "If I had to guess, I would say that once every 5 million years a meteor big enough to cause a mass extinction hits the Earth.
     "We could protect ourselves if we wanted. We went to the moon, we can figure out how to destroy or deflect a meteor. All it takes is the political will -- and an awareness of the threat."
   • GIANT CRATER FOUND: TIED TO WORST MASS EXTINCTION EVER An apparent crater as big as Ohio has been found in Antarctica. Scientists think it was carved by a space rock that caused the greatest mass extinction on Earth, 250 million years ago.
   • GIANT CRATER FOUND: TIED TO WORST MASS EXTINCTION EVER
   • MARINE ECOSYSTEMS HAVE CHANGED 250M YEARS AGO AT MASS EXTINCTION
     The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago, an event that wiped out an estimated 95% of marine species and 70% of land species. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans.
   • GREATEST MASS EXTINCTION GAVE OCEANS A FACE LIFT
     Before the end-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago, the seas were home to a balance of both ecologically simple communities and complex ones. Following the extinction, complex communities displaced simple ones, coming to outnumber them three-to-one, a pattern that prevails today.
   • BOOST TO CO2 MASS EXTINCTION IDEA
     A computer simulation of the Earth's climate 250 million years ago suggests that global warming triggered the so-called "great dying".
     A dramatic rise in carbon dioxide caused temperatures to soar to 10 to 30 degrees Celsius higher than today. The research adds to the growing body of evidence that higher temperatures, rather than a giant space rock hitting the planet, led to the greatest mass extinction in history.
     Impacts of metal core comets cause dramatic increases in Earth's temperature>
   • NEW THEORY ON MASS EXTINCTION BLAMES SUDDEN DROP IN OXYGEN
     Researchers taking the pulse of Earth's worst mass extinction 250 million years ago say they have diagnosed the ailment that doomed most animals: altitude sickness.
   • GREAT EXTINCTION CAME IN PHASES
     A joint UK-Chinese team tell Nature magazine the disaster that befell the planet 250 million years ago must have happened in phases. . . Their conclusion is based on the abundance of "organic fossils" found in rocks at Meishan in southern China. . . These suggest there were at least two episodes to the mass die-off that saw up to 95% of life forms disappear.
     More evidence of quasi-periodic comet swarms.
   • SPACE ROCK CAUSED 'GREAT DYING'
     About 250 million years ago, something unknown wiped out most of the life on the planet. It was far more devastating than the impact that ended the rule of the dinosaurs 65 million years. A geochemist at the University of Rochester, New York, believes the fragments date back to the Permian-Triassic period, 251 million years ago, when about 90% of marine life and 70% of land species vanished.
   • (7) KILLER CRATER FOUND - 19 April 2000
     Australian geologists have discovered the buried remains of an 80-mile wide impact crater that could be the culprit behind the worst extinction catastrophe in Earth's history.
     Although no precise age for the crater -- the fourth largest in the world -- has been determined yet, it appears to be 250-360 million years old, making it a possible source for the massive Permian-Triassic extinction event that wiped out almost all life on the planet 250 million years ago.As often happens, the comet round's the Sun often striking in the southern hemisphere.
   • MORE EVIDENCE FOR MASS EXTINCTION
     Lava flow twice the size of Europe covered Siberia 250 million years ago.
   • BOOST TO ASTEROID WIPE-OUT THEORY
     The 250-million-year-old Permo-Triassic extinction killed off 95% of all marine life and 70% of all land species. Six cores drilled from the Bedout area returned dates much younger than the extinction event. But one core returned a date of about 250.1 million years old - on the button for the mass extinction recorded in fossil beds around the world.
   • MORE EVIDENCE POINTS TO METEOR IN MASS EXTINCTION
   • SHADOW OF EXTINCTION Only six degrees centigrade separate our world from the cataclysmic end of an ancient era
     The events that brought the Permian period (between 286m and 251m years ago) to an end could not be clearly determined until the mapping of the key geological sequences had been completed. Altogether, some 90% of the earth's species appear to have been wiped out: this represents by far the gravest of the mass extinctions. We now know that the principal explosions took place 251 million years ago, precisely at the point at which life was almost extinguished. So how much warming took place? A sharp change in the ratio of the isotopes of oxygen permits us to reply with some precision: 6C.
   • PERMIAN CATASTROPHE COMET?
     Could such an event have led to the even greater extinctions that occurred during the Permian era 250 million years ago? New forensic evidence seems to point in that direction.
   • VOLCANOES BLAMED FOR WORST MASS EXTINCTION
   • LIFE SMOTHERED IN EARTH'S WORST EXTINCTION
   • VOLCANOES 'WIPED OUT LIFE ON EARTH, NOT GIANT ASTEROID'
     Meteorite impacts and volcanic eruptions often go hand in hand.
   • NEW CRATER FOUND DOWN UNDER - 21 April 2000
     A new crater, the world’s fourth-largest at 75 miles (120 kilometers) across, has been found in western Australia. Scientists believe the impact crater was caused by a 3-mile (5-kilometer) wide asteroid slamming into the area, causing a wave of extinction 200 million to 360 million years ago.
   • ABERDEEN TEAM UNEARTH ASTEROID CRASH
     His tests put its age at 214 million years and links the asteroid to a giant impact crater found in Manicouagan, north-east Canada. At the time Manicouagan would have been much closer to Britain than it is today. It is thought the object which caused the Manicouagan crater was a chunk of rock more than three miles wide.
   • IMPACT 'SHOWERED DEBRIS OVER BRITAIN'
     The space rock hit what is now Manicouagan, Quebec, opening up a 100-kilometre- wide (62-mile-wide) crater that can be seen by astronauts from space. The space body, about five km (three miles) wide, generated a shockwave 40 million times larger than the Hiroshima blast. The landscape 214 million years ago was very different to the rolling green fields of today.
   • PART OF THE DINOSAUR KILLER ASTEROID that struck earth 65 million years ago has been discovered. It has been confirmed to be part of an asteroid, not a comet, supporting the conclusions of Sir Fred Hoyle and the Bible Code. Also see this site's THE 2006 AND 2012 STRIKE DATES section of the 1999 Paper.
   • STRANGE CRATER FOUND UNDER THE SEA
     Rings created by ancient meteorite impact 65 million years ago, experts say
   • GIANT IMPACT-WAVE DEPOSIT ALONG U.S. EAST COAST 35.5 million years ago.
   • WELL-PRESERVED LAYER OF MATERIAL EJECTED FROM CHESAPEAKE BAY METEOR-STRIKE DISCOVERED
     The impact in the Chesapeake Bay clearly caused a huge amount of material, both from the Earth and the asteroid, to become airborne, and the layer -- discovered at a depth of 25 feet in the kaolin mine - was probably laid down by the event. It was an active time: In the period between 34 million and 37 million years ago, at least five comets and/or asteroids collided with the Earth.
   • ASTEROIDS CAUSED THE EARLY INNER SOLAR SYSTEM CATACLYSM
     Ancient main belt asteroids identical in size to present-day asteroids in the Mars-Jupiter belt -- not comets -- hammered the inner rocky planets in a unique catastrophe that lasted for a blink of geologic time, anywhere from 20 million to 150 million years, they report in the Sept. 16 issue of Science.
     Ancient main belt asteroids identical in size to present-day asteroids in the Mars-Jupiter belt -- not comets -- hammered the inner rocky planets in a unique catastrophe that lasted for a blink of geologic time, anywhere from 20 million to 150 million years, they report in the Sept. 16 issue of Science.
     It was comets then, as now.
   • IMPACT OF GIANT METEOR FELT IN GEORGIA
     A layer of quartz grains found in an east Georgia kaolin mine have been traced to the impact of a giant asteroid that crashed near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay 35.5 million years ago. The 54-mile-wide crater left by the meteor, the sixth-largest in the world, has previously been identified as the source of a rare mineral called Georgiaite.
   • SCIENTISTS PINPOINT POLAR CATACLYSM DATE
     A 30-mile maze canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming between 12 million and 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences.
     Syracuse University and Boston University say they found geological evidence to bracket the timing of the last major flooding and link it to a global warming trend at the time.
     The scientists pinpointed the timing of the last subglacial flood by dating volcanic ash preserved on bedrock surfaces, said Laura Webb, a professor of earth sciences at Syracuse who took part in the study.
     The ash could also have come from a comet impact, or one setting off a volcano.
   • STUDY ASSOCIATES ASTEROID OR COMET IMPACT WITH EXTINCTIONS IN ARGENTINA - 10 December 1998
     A new study shows that a previously unknown impact from an asteroid or comet coincides with the disappearance of 35 different types of ancient mammals and a flightless bird 3.3 million years ago. The impact may have directly caused the regional extinctions or triggered a climate change that led to the disappearance of the animals in what is now southeastern Argentina.
   • GRASS, PINE NEEDLES 10,400' UNDER GREENLAND ICE
     Ice core samples retrieve grass/pine needles which proves Greenland glacier formed 'very fast'. If confirmed, this will be the first organic material ever recovered from a deep ice-core drilling project. There is a big possibility that this material is several million years old -- from a time when trees covered Greenland,"
   • DID AN ASTEROID IMPACT TRIGGER THE ICE AGES? High concentrations of iridium in Upper Pliocene sediments about 2.3 million years old. Estimated size of the impacting object more than 0.5 km.
   • DEATH RAY EXTINCTION THEORY
     A death ray from space may have caused one of the Earth's worst mass extinctions 443 million years ago, it has been claimed. Scientists believe the pattern of trilobite extinctions matched the effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst.
   • OLDER THAN THE SUN, THE METEORITE SCIENTISTS CALL 'THE REAL TIME MACHINE'
     - Rock which hit lake is oldest object ever found
     -Tests reveal fragment created before solar system
     As lumps of rock go it looks much like any other, unexceptional despite the deep red of its cool, smooth surface. The pieces range in size from pea- sized lumps to larger fist-sized chunks. But today, scientists will announce this is no ordinary stone. Prised from a frozen lake in northern Canada, it has become a prime candidate for the oldest known object on Earth.
     The Tagish Lake meteorite was already regarded as exceptional because its mineral composition linked it to the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, more than 4.5bn years ago. The fragments of meteorite that still exist are among the most pristine in the world, as they were protected from contamination when they became wedged in blocks of lake ice.
     A red Kuiper Belt object?
6. PLEISTOCENE STRIKES AND NEANDERTHALS
   • (13) ANOTHER HUGE IMPACT DISASTER ~20,000 YEARS BP?
     The Arizona Crater (also known as the Iturralde Structure) is a suspected crater from an impactor which struck northern Bolivia approximately 20,000 years ago. The feature is believed to have been caused by a short period comet striking at 70 kilometres per second and splattering into the muddy alluvial flood plain in the Lower Amazon jungle. The impact created a circular depression which is now roughly 8 kilometres across and 3 metres deep.
   • ABOUT PELE
     Because Hawaii sits on the mountaintops of Lemuria, the Lemurian Goddess energy still remains here as a strong vibration. That is why people who come to Hawaii say that it feels so good here, like they have come ¡§home.¡¨ It is the memory of Lemuria within their cellular consciousness that dance with this feeling and vibration of love, which is our true essence.
   • EARTHQUEST NEWS - Vol. 9 No.1 (Summer 2006)
     None of these musings undermine the work of New Age cosmologists such as John Major Jenkins. What they do highlight is an apparent blind spot when it comes to considering the significance played by Cygnus in Olmec and Mayan cosmology, something that was first realized by archaeologist Marion Popenoe Hatch in a series of articles featured in THE CYGNUS MYSTERY. She seems philosophical that very few scholars exploring the cosmological world of these two important civilizations have ever really acknowledged her dedicated work in this field of study. I am convinced that Cygnus acted not just as an astronomical timekeeper for both the Olmec and Maya, but also as the herald and progenitor of the sun-egg, the (as yet unrecognized) role it plays in the cosmic events of 2012.
   • LEMURIA
     Lemuria is the name of a small continent located in the Pacific Ocean, which sank beneath the sea approximately twenty thousand years ago. Off the Lemurian coast lay the Lemurian Isles, which were controlled by human beings as late as the time of King Kull of Valusia, about 20,500 years ago.
   • THE LOST LANDS OF MU AND LEMURIA Lost Lands of Mu and Lemuria
     Lemuria and Mu are interchangeable names given to a lost land believed to have been located somewhere in either the southern Pacific or Indian Oceans. This ancient continent was apparently the home of an advanced and highly spiritual culture, perhaps the mother race of all mankind, but it sank beneath the waves many thousands of years ago as the result of a geological cataclysm of some kind.
     Blavatsky also describes survivors of the catastrophic destruction of Lemuria escaping to become the ancestors of some of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. She maintained that she took all of her information regarding Lemuria from ¡¥The Book of Dzyan¡¦, supposed to have been written in Atlantis and shown to her by the Indian adepts known as ¡¥Mahatmas¡¦.
     Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings. It has to be said that The Secret Doctrine is an extremely difficult book, a complex mixture of Eastern and Western cosmologies, mystical ramblings and esoteric wisdom, much of it not meant to be taken literally.
     Aboriginal art, artefacts and mythology have also been used to identify the Aborigines as prehistoric remnants of the Lemurians (following Blavatsky again), who somehow escaped the devastation of 20,000 or so years ago. Indeed, in some Theosophical publications of the first quarter of the 20th century Aborigines were described as the last of the Lemurians. However, the Aborigines of Australia had already been established on the continent for at least 30,000 years at the time of the supposed destruction of Lemuria, in fact they have perhaps the longest continuous cultural history of any people on Earth, so the theory of them having a Lemurian origin does not hold water.
   • WHAT IS AN INTERESTING LOSGT CIVILIZATION? Lemuria, aka Mu, has been suggested as the original Garden of Eden, it was /is the Motherland of humanity...
     There are many theories as to when Lemuria existed and they range from 10,000 plus to 1 million, to even 1.5 million years ago...
     Please note that Atlantis is also said to have existed around 10,000 years ago and Lemuria was far older than Atlantis..
     It is said to have been a vast realm of islands and archipelagoes that once sprawled across the Pacific Ocean..
     It was said to have been devastated by a "Warrior Wave", this is from the oral tradition of the Polynesian people...
     A major impact!
   • THE MYSTERY OF MAMMOTH TUSKS WITH IRON FILLINGS
     A giant meteor may have exploded over Alaska thousands of years ago, shooting out metal fragments like buckshot, some of which embedded in the tusks of woolly mammoths and the horns of bison. Simultaneously, a large chunk of the meteor hit Alaska south of Allakaket, sending up a dust cloud that blacked out the sun over the entire state and surrounding areas, killing most of the life in the area.
     Firestone also thinks he may have found the divot left by the ancient meteorite, an impact crater that is now occupied by a round body of water named Sithylemenkat Lake in the upper Kanuti River drainage. 13,000 years ago?
   • CREATIONISM SPECIAL: A BATTLE FOR SCIENCE'S SOUL
   • GREAT BEASTS PEPPERED FROM SPACE
     Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.
     Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments.
     The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks
     The team believes there must still be peppered tusks out there that can be dated to 13,000 years ago, and the hope is that the AGU presentation will prompt museums and collectors to look through their archives.
     "There should also be a layer of this same meteoritic material in the sedimentary record. It's probably very thin. If we can locate the right place and it hasn't been turbated, we should be able to find this layer; and it shouldn't be too different from the impact layer we found for the 13,000-year event," said Dr Firestone.
   • 40,000-YEAR-OLD FOOTPRINT OF FIRST AMERICANS
     But the discovery of footprints in the Valsequillo Basin by a British-led team provides new evidence that humans settled in the Americas as early as 40,000 years ago, suggesting that there were several migration waves at different times by different groups.
   • THE BARRINGER METEORITE CRATER
     The impact occurred about 50,000 years ago, when northern Arizona (and the rest of the world) was in the midst of an ice age. While northern Arizona is now an arid place, it was cooler and wetter at the time of the impact. Rather than desert scrub or grasslands, the terrain was covered with a forest.
     The meteorite which made it was composed almost entirely of nickel-iron, suggesting that it may have originated in the interior of a small planet. It was 150 feet across, weighed roughly 300,000 tons, and was traveling at a speed of 40,000 miles per hour. The force generated by its impact was equal to the explosion of 20 million tons of TNT.
   • METEOR CRATER FORMATION REVISITED
     The iron mass that created Meteor Crater 49,000 years ago was just the crumbled remains of a far larger rock body, scientists say.
   • CLIMATE HISTORY: EXPLORING CLIMATE EVENTS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
     The Past 100,000 Years - Did Climate Challenge the Creativity of Early Homo Sapiens?
     For example, were early Homo sapiens challenged by abrupt climate change in the form of volcanic winter that lasted for many years? That is what Stanley H. Ambrose and some of his colleagues suspect may have happened during a critical time in human development. What is known is that some 71,000 years ago, an eruption of Mount Toba on the present day Indonesian island of Sumatra, spewed some 2,800 km3 of material into the atmosphere. This compares with less than 1 km3 from Mount St. Helens.
     Ambrose suggests that this event could have thrown the planet into a six year volcanic winter and 1000 year instant ice age which could have reduced human populations, causing population bottlenecks that accelerated the differentiation of isolated human populations and encouraged increased cooperation within tribal groups for survival
   • SUMMARY OF 100,000 YEARS - 60000 Years Ago
     Homo sapiens enter Australia and begin to use fire. Note: almost all animals are afraid of fire. Humans using fire signifies sentience.
   • EVIDENCE FOR A GIANT NEANDERTHALS SEA WAVE A great meteor impact, a submarine volcanic explosion or a giant submarine landslide are good possibilities. Highsea stands are rejected by the authors in favor of a single episode of catastrophic waves about 100,000 years ago.
   • CLIMATE HISTORY: EXPLORING CLIMATE EVENTS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
     The Past 10,000 years: Glacial Retreat, Agriculture and Civilization
     "Now you're able to put human evolution in a climatic framework. You can ask, Why didn't human beings make civilization fifty thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, "Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial-- ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started then. But they had no chance."
   • NEANDERTHALS 'MATED WITH MODERN HUMANS'- 21 April 1999
     A hybrid skeleton showing features of both Neanderthal and early modern humans has been discovered, challenging the theory that our ancestors drove Neanderthals to extinction.
     And Dr Robert Foley of Cambridge University told the BBC: "The fossil evidence as we currently understand it doesn't show the signs of hybrids between neanderthals and modern humans, so it would be a novel and unusual find." The Iberian peninsula is an area where there was a significant overlap in time and space between Neanderthal and modern man. They could have coexisted for as long as 10,000 years," he said.
   • OFFICIAL: NEANDERTHAL MAN WAS NOT A HAIRY OAF BUT A SENSITIVE KINDA GUY
   • WHAT DID WE DO TO WIPE OUT NEANDERTHALS?
   • (7) NEANDERTHALS & MODERN HUMAN COEXISTED & HAD GOOD FUN
     It appears that Neanderthals coexisted with early modern humans in central Europe for thousands of years -- and very likely mated with them -- according to new radiocarbon dating by an international team of scientists.
     Using direct accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating, team member Paul Pettitt and colleagues at Oxford University in England determined that two pieces of Neanderthal skulls from the Vindija cave site are between 28,000 and 29,000 years old. These new Croatian dates refute previous evidence indicating central European Neanderthals had disappeared as early as 34,000 years ago.
   • STUDY: HUMANS, NEANDERTHALS DID NOT MATE
   • NEANDERTHAL LOVE: SCIENTISTS SPLIT OVER HOW MUCH MATING OCCURRED
   • DID HUMANS EVOLVE IN FITS AND STARTS?
   • (11) DID ICE AGE CULTURES LOSE TECHNOLOGICAL SKILLS ? - 7 February 2000
     CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Archaeologists have discovered what the well-dressed Ice Age woman wore on ritual occasions. Her outfit, however, including accessories, doesn't resemble anything Wilma Flintstone ever wore, or, for that matter, any of our carved-in-stone conceptions of "paleofashion."
     Soffer, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois and a pioneer in the study of Upper Paleolithic life ways, compared the impressions to the representation of clothing on the so-called "Venus" figurines, which also date to the Gravettian period, roughly 25,000 years ago.
   • DISCOVERY CASTS DOUBT ON BERING LAND BRIDGE THEORY
     Using radiocarbon dating, scientists found that the Ushki site, the remains of a community of hunters clustered around Ushki Lake in northeastern Russia, appears to be only about 13,000 years old, 4,000 years younger than originally thought. The new date places the Ushki settlement in the same time period as the Clovis site, an ancient community found in New Mexico, making it highly unlikely that people could have traversed the thousands of miles from Siberia in such a short period.
   • TROUBLED TIMES The Giza Plateau
     A documentary shown on public TV in the early 90's called The Mystery of The Sphinx with Charlton Heston, demonstrated that long-term water erosion evidence on the Sphinx pushed the date of its construction to beyond 11,000BC; when the Egyptian climate permitted long periods of rain. That date matches up closely to the time of the Great Flood. Sitchin points out in his book, The Wars of Gods and Men, that numerous Egyptian texts discuss a period after the Great Flood when "gods" helped the Egyptians construct canals, drainage systems, dikes, etc. to reclaim the flooded Egyptian plain. The gods were the Anunnaki.
   • TROUBLED TIMES **Asian Hall of Records
     In Rampa's first book, The Third Eye (1956), he lends corroboration to physical evidence of the Anunnaki themselves. . . Rampa was first shown 3 uncovered black stone coffins. . . was startled to see the bodies of 2 men and one women; nude, and completely covered in gold leaf . The woman was 10 feet tall and the larger of the 2 men was 15 feet. The elderly monk said: "My son, look upon these. They were gods in our land in the days before the mountains came. They walked our country when seas washed our shores., and when different stars were in the sky."
     Tibetan monk, physician, and writer T. Lobsang Rampa, reports on pages 88-97 in his 1963 book The Cave of The Ancients that while still a young boy and trainee, he was taken by a group of monks to a highly concealed crevice entrance far up in the Tibetan mountains. The entrance led to a huge, cavernous interior. The interior was illuminated with artificial lighting in which the "bulbs" were ice cold to the touch. Spread throughout the smooth-walled rooms were many strange machines that seemed to be in working condition, but the monks could not understand their function or purpose. One oval shaped device allowed the viewer to place his head within its shell, whereby he could both hear and see different animals, music, etc.; a sort of visual encyclopedia of Earthly life (some alien contactees have reported being taken into such cavernous locations deep within the Earth and shown similar Halls of Remembrances). Later, they entered another room with a machine that allowed them to view a holographic "movie" with sound and narration explaining that the machines were working models left as part of a time capsule/hall of records explaining the history of these pre-diluvian advanced civilization which spiritually declined, misused their technology and brought about their demise. The holograph revealed cities and forests disappearing in a twinkling of an eye due to massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, atmospheric fire storms, tidal waves, etc.
   • RESEARCHERS: GREENLAND REALLY WAS GREEN!
     The DNA, dated to between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, may be the oldest yet recovered, according to the team. DNA found previously in the Siberian permafrost has been dated to 300,000 to 400,000 years ago.
     However, because of uncertainties in interpreting the age estimates, they could not rule out the possibility that the newly found DNA dates to the last interglacial, 130,000 to 116,000 years ago.
   • DNA REVEALS GREENLAND'S LUSH PAST
     Armies of insects once crawled through lush forests in a region of Greenland now covered by more than 2,000m of ice. DNA extracted from ice cores shows that moths and butterflies were living in forests of spruce and pine in the area between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago.
   • HUGE IMPACT CRATER FOUND IN EGYPT
     A giant crater made by a meteorite impact millions of years ago has been discovered in Egypt's western desert.
   • (5) EXPLODING STAR STRAFED EARTH - 13 February 2002
     Two million years ago, many marine creatures, such as bivalve molluscs, died out suddenly all over the planet. As mass extinctions go, this was a mild one. But no one knows what caused it.
     Benítez and his colleagues think that a nearby supernova at this time could have showered the Earth with cosmic rays. These charged subatomic particles collide with atoms in the air, initiating chemical reactions. Copious cosmic rays are thought to produce nitrogen monoxide, which can destroy ozone molecules.
     The researchers calculate that a supernova 130 light years away could have thinned the ozone layer by up to 60 per cent, exposing marine organisms to ultraviolet rays from the Sun. This could have killed off plankton, and thence the molluscs that live off them.
     Large meteorites passing through the atomosphere produce large quanties of nitrous oxide, an obvious source of this chemical.
   • QUEBEC CRATER IS OUT OF THIS WORLD Scientists hope to unlock 120,000 years of secrets about climate change from site revered by Inuit for clear waters
     The four-country expedition has just returned with sediments from the crater, formed 1.3 million years ago when a meteorite crashed to Earth with 8,500 times the force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
     The crater was later renamed New Quebec Crater and, finally, Pingualuit Crater.
     Diameter: 3.44 km
     Depth (total): 400 m
     Depth (lake): 267 m
     The crater is considered a scientific treasure trove because it's one of the deepest lakes in North America, fed almost exclusively by the skies above.
   • THE PLEISTOCENE EPOCH (~1.8 million-11,000 years ago)
     But fossils of Ice Age animals lie strewn about on or near the surface of the earth around the world. Mummified camels and ground sloths have been found in the American Southwest and South America. Remains of mammoths still bearing hair and flesh have been retrieved from Alaska and Siberia. Just about every county in every state in the United States probably has petrified wood representing trees that grew during the Pleistocene.
     Comet strikes quickly bring on deep freezes.
   • HUGE ANTARCTIC CRATERS REVEAL ASTEROID STRIKE or ANTARCTIC CRATERS REVEAL ASTEROID STRIKE
     Professor Frans van der Hoeven, from Delft University in the Netherlands, told the conference that the evidence showed that an asteroid measuring between three and seven miles across had broken up in the atmosphere and five large pieces had hit the Earth, creating multiple craters over an area measuring 1,300 by 2,400 miles. But the climatic conditions were different at the time of the strike - about 780,000 years ago - from when the asteroid that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs struck Yucatan in Mexico. The Antarctica strike occurred during an ice age, so even tidal waves would have been weakened to mere ripples by the calming effect of icebergs on the ocean. One thing that did happen at exactly the same time was the reversing of the Earth's magnetic field. Amen! It is more common for comets to fragment as they are loosely bound together. The early Pleistocene extends to the Brunhes-Matuyama paleomagnetic boundary (780,000 years ago).
   • (6) DID DISASTER KILL OFF ALASKAN HORSE? HUMANS EXONERATED FOR LATE PLEISTOCENE EXTINCTION & CLIMATE 'KILLED' ALASKAN HORSE
     Researchers found the horses shrank in size before their extinction 12,500 years ago, which fits with the theory that they did not have enough to eat.
     Humans were unlikely to have had a hand in the horses' demise, they claim, because fossil records show man had hardly arrived on the scene by then.
     This extinction event seems to have occurred near the time of impacts from the A': Cl-1 cluster's passage.