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UCSB Study Supports Theory of Extraterrestrial
updated: Mar 05, 2012, 12:56 PM

Source: UCSB

A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.

These new data are the latest to strongly support of a controversial hypothesis proposing that a major cosmic impact with Earth occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas. The researchers' findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Conducting a wide range of exhaustive tests, the researchers conclusively identified a family of nanodiamonds, including the impact form of nanodiamonds called lonsdaleite, which is unique to cosmic impact. The researchers also found spherules that had collided at high velocities with other spherules during the chaos of impact. Such features, Kennett noted, could not have formed through anthropogenic, volcanic, or other natural terrestrial processes. "These materials form only through cosmic impact," he said.

The data suggest that a comet or asteroid - likely a large, previously fragmented body, greater than several hundred meters in diameter - entered the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle. The heat at impact burned biomass, melted surface rocks, and caused major environmental disruption. "These results are consistent with earlier reported discoveries throughout North America of abrupt ecosystem change, megafaunal extinction, and human cultural change and population reduction," Kennett explained.

The sediment layer identified by the researchers is of the same age as that previously reported at numerous locations throughout North America, Greenland, and Western Europe. The current discovery extends the known range of the nanodiamond-rich layer into Mexico and the tropics. In addition, it is the first reported for true lake deposits.

In the entire geologic record, there are only two known continent-wide layers with abundance peaks in nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and aciniform soot. These are in the 65-million-year-old Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer that coincided with major extinctions, including the dinosaurs and ammonites; and the Younger Dryas boundary event at 12,900 years ago, closely associated with the extinctions of many large North American animals, including mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth cats, and dire wolves.

"The timing of the impact event coincided with the most extraordinary biotic and environmental changes over Mexico and Central America during the last approximately 20,000 years, as recorded by others in several regional lake deposits," said Kennett. "These changes were large, abrupt, and unprecedented, and had been recorded and identified by earlier investigators as a ‘time of crisis.' "

Other scientists contributing to the research include Isabel Israde-Alcántara and Gabriela Dominguez-Vásquez of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicólas de Hidalgo; James L. Bischoff of the U.S. Geological Survey; Hong-Chun Li of National Taiwan University; Paul S. DeCarli of SRI International; Ted E. Bunch and James H. Wittke of Northern Arizona University; James C. Weaver of Harvard University; Richard B. Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Allen West of GeoScience Consulting; Chris Mercer of the National Institute for Materials Science; Sujing Zie and Eric K. Richman of the University of Oregon, Eugene; and Charles R. Kinzie and Wendy S. Wolbach of DePaul University.

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Comments in order of when they were received | (reverse order)

COMMENT 261840	2012-03-05 01:17 PM
Is there a separate division of professors at UCSB that just travels around and does studies with other scientists? I always ask myself, why would you invent something, or make some breakthrough when your making a professors salary. Seems odd...can someone explain how this works....and also who's teaching the customers?
COMMENT 261848	2012-03-05 01:46 PM
What? What you're asking doesn't make sense. Dr. Kennett has been at UCSB for years and does great research plus he is a very good teacher. You're asking why would a professor want to conduct research while earning a professor's salary? Well, first it's their job. What would happen to you sat at work day after day without doing your job? Second, they're scientists of the highest degree. You don't get there without passion, back breaking work and the love of pushing science forward. For a global scale project like this one, having a large network of scientists collaborating on common goals is essential. Among all the work here, there are likely several avenues of study being perused at the same time by the different researchers. All the data collected was no done just by UCSB, but it was and is a worldwide effort, as you can easily determine by the last paragraph of the summary.
COMMENT 261853	2012-03-05 01:59 PM
I disagree... There were a very intelligent peoples living here when these events happened...they DID happen,no arguement there,but the dates are off by more than a thousand years according to Chumash history & wisdom keepers. And one can read the pictographes[with the proper training] in the numerous painted caves in the front & back-country that "speak" of these happenings. Whooly mams were here until only 5-6000 yrs. ago so please don`t be fooled into this "new" timeline of events which I`m sure, will become the new teaching of America`s convoluted history.
COMMENT 261868	2012-03-05 03:03 PM
"Whooly mams"---I love that! Great name for a rock band!!
COMMENT 261869	2012-03-05 03:09 PM
I am usually the 1st to complain about ucsb, but this time I am not sure what the problem with Dr Kennett's and the other scientists work? that they worked together? that they study ancient environments? that he gets paid? that he is not inventing something? just not sure about the beef?
COMMENT 262039	2012-03-06 07:52 AM
@261848 You don't seem to be aware that the main activity of professors at universities is doing research. @261853 The last woolly mammoths lived as recently as 1700 bc, but most died during the Younger Dryas, as this article says. Extinction doesn't necessarily mean the complete and utter end; a few individuals may live on. As for the dates, I'll take the word of scientists, scientific instrumentation, scientific evidence, over the claims by some random internet poster of what the telephone game of folk wisdom keepers says, which is inaccurate by its nature.

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