Hacker News Reader

Comment by tigereyeTO | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. There’s a hypothesis that Earth was struck by an impact 12,800 years ago in North America but the impact site wasn’t identified

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...

Could these be related?

View on HN

The evidence for multiple strikes around 12,800BP has been piling up for quite a few years now. There are other theories of course. A few papers :

Alaska - https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/695703

South Carolina - www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51552-8 (plus Article: https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-that-an-extraterres... )

Chile - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y

South Africa - https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.06.017

Syria - https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-60867-w

California, Channel Islands - https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.09.006

If you actually click on the link, it mentions this both in the abstract, and a detailed comparison of evidence in a whole table.

I hadn't heard of this, but it says:

>The hypothesis is widely rejected by relevant experts.[2][1][3][4] It is influenced by creationism [...] It is an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation that the Younger Dryas was caused by a significant reduction in, or shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America. [...] Authors have not yet responded to requests for clarification and have never made their raw data available

Is there a reason why the widely accepted explanation isn't satisfactory?

The publication of this research.

One possibility discussed in the publication is that the sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz was caused by the Perkins Louisiana impact.

It happened at the end of an ice age, when mile-thick glaciers were melting away. That’s a lot of fresh water going to the oceans.

The argument is that the impact event(s) are WHY the ice age ended.

Ohhh… cool!

… and widely criticized as a creationist theory.

Which has nothing to do with the legitimate scientific question of whether an impact triggered the interglacial warming period we're currently in.

The point is that it is not a legitimate scientific question, as those posing it are disregarding all evidence for geological and cosmological causes for rapid deglaciation.

The YD impact hypothesis is motivated by creationist thinking (hyperbolically ”god threw a stone at us to relieve mankind of ice”) and the idea has been thoroughly refuted.

Clinging to beliefs when there is ample evidence to the contrary is the very opposite of the scientific method.

The original paper proposing a YD impact was serious science put forward by serious academics, AFAIK: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1994902/

That it was later a cause taken up by creationists is annoying, but it has no bearing on the scientific question (which is as yet unsettled).

Too bad Dr. Firestone seems to have been the lead author in many articles which have been based on data that could not be reproduced by later authors.

E.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908874106

Reply on news.ycombinator.com