"The dating of the shocked quartz coincided with the rapid disappearance of the Clovis people, a technologically advanced hunter-gatherer culture that had dominated much of North America for centuries. Archaeological evidence has shown that their distinctive stone tools vanish abruptly from the record shortly after this period. This timing also marked the beginning of the Younger Dryas, a sudden and dramatic cooling event that lasted about 1,200 years."
"Some researchers, including well-known author Graham Hancock, have long proposed that a giant 'Doomsday comet' passed through Earth's atmosphere, which blocked sunlight, disrupted ocean currents and abruptly plunged the Northern Hemisphere into a sudden, century-long cooling. Shocked quartz forms when the crystal lattice of minerals is irreversibly deformed under extreme pressures, often millions of times greater than normal atmospheric pressure. In the new study, the grains were carefully extracted from sediment layers precisely dated to the onset of the Younger Dryas."
Sediment samples in California, Arizona and New Mexico yielded shocked quartz grains dated to around 10,800 BC. Shocked quartz forms when mineral crystal lattices are irreversibly deformed by sudden, extreme pressures such as meteorite impacts or large atmospheric explosions. The presence of shocked quartz indicates an airburst or impact that likely ignited continent-spanning wildfires, destabilized climate, and caused rapid loss of many Ice Age megafauna. The timing aligns with the abrupt disappearance of Clovis stone-tool technology and marks the onset of the Younger Dryas, a sudden cooling event lasting about 1,200 years. Some researchers propose a comet-induced sunlight blockade and ocean-current disruption as the mechanism.
Read at Mail Online
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