13,000 years ago, a fire covered 10% of the Earth’s surface, triggering an ice age
As dust clouds enveloped the planet, they started a mini ice age, keeping the planet cool for another thousand years, just as it emerged from the 100,000 years covered by glaciers. Once the fire is out, life can start all over again.
“The hypothesis is that a large comet broke up and hit Earth, causing the catastrophe,” said Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas, who co-authored a 2018 study detailing This catastrophic event is presented.
“Many different chemical signatures — carbon dioxide, nitrates, ammonia and others — seem to indicate that 10 percent of Earth’s land surface, or about 10 million square kilometers (3.86 million square miles), was consumed by fires.”
To review the burning flames and shockwaves of this major event, a team of 24 scientists measured numerous geochemical and isotopic signatures from more than 170 locations around the world.
One analysis was conducted on patterns of pollen levels, which showed that pine forests were suddenly burned and replaced by poplars – a species that specializes in covering barren land, like your planet being hit by a series of giant fireballs.
In fact, parts of comets that disintegrate in space may still be floating around our solar system 13,000 years from now.
The samples the researchers analyzed also found high concentrations of platinum (often found in asteroids and comets) and dust, as well as increased concentrations of combustion aerosols, and if a lot of biomass is burning, you’ll find: ammonium, Nitrates, and others.
Plants died, food sources became scarce, and the previously retreating glaciers began to advance again, the team noted. Human cultures would have to adapt to harsher conditions, and as a result population declines.
“Calculations suggest that this effect depletes the ozone layer, leading to an increase in skin cancer and other negative health effects,” Melott said.
The team hypothesized that such a widespread impact of cometary debris, and the storms that followed, was responsible for the extra cooling known as the Young Andromeda period. This relatively brief change in Earth’s temperature is sometimes attributed to changes in ocean currents.
However, comet impacts are not an entirely new idea, although this recent study went a long way in trying to find evidence for it. Scientists have debated for years whether the comet impact sparked the Younger Dryas event.
Not everyone agrees that the data points to a cometary impact, but this comprehensive work lends more support to the hypothesis, like ancient carvings discovered in Turkey in 2017 that depict devastating impacts from interstellar objects .
“The impact hypothesis is still a hypothesis, but this study provides a wealth of evidence that we think can only be explained by significant cosmic impacts,” Melott said.
The research has been published here and here in the Journal of Geology.
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