Comments on: Scientist Smackdown: Did a Comet Explode Over Prehistoric North America?

By: E.P. Grondine

E.P. Grondine — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:35:52 +0000

Several of the first peoples remembered these impacts and passed on accounts of them.
There is no reason for them to have made these accounts up unless these impacts did occur.

In my opinion, the only reason there is controversy is the human trait of denial combined with a well funded campaign of denial. The new NASA Inspector General will be in office soon, and hopefully we will then learn about former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s failure to respond to the instructions of the Congress in the George Brown Jr. amendment.

The whole affair should make good copy (news stories), just as Keller’s yearly claims that impact did not kill the dinosaurs does. I look for more stories on this “smackdown” over the coming months.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:28:52 +0000

@TheTraveler: Anything that falls to earth releases energy equivalent to the energy required to put back to wherever it came from. It releases this energy as heat. So, if a comet falls onto earth from interstellar space, then the heat it releases, all in a millisecond, is equivalent to gently putting that thing on the earth and throwing it into interstellar space, all in a millisecond. That’s a lot of heat.

Also, thing moving in interstellar space do so at speed. What I described above was if something fell onto earth from height. If something is travelling at interstellar speeds and smacks into the earth, then much more energy ( heat ) is released.

The fires are started by the heat released.

Picture

By: I made a boom boom

I made a boom boom — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:13:08 +0000

A cataclysmic explosion makes the oxygen in our atmosphere into fuel, creating a raging wall of fire that feeds on itself.

Dresden and tokyo in WWII both burned to the ground because of fire storms created by our bombing. Incendiary bombs started fires, but the atmosphere itself fed and fanned the flames. Firestorms killed more Japenese than Fat Man or Little Boy individually. Now picture a rock the size of Gibralter careening into our atmosphere, creating enormous heat as it ploughs through until BOOM, it explodes with the power and heat to mow down all of our hemisphere.

I still think Clovis man killed off the mega fauna his own greedy self though. He was only human..

By: The Traveler

The Traveler — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:41:54 +0000

I’m still trying to figure out how a comet, made of ice, explodes and starts fires.

Melting; yes.
Exploding; possible.
Flammable; I’m not seeing it.

By: Thomas Lee Elifritz

Thomas Lee Elifritz — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:57:03 +0000

The comet impact may have been far more localized than they imagine :

http://webpages.charter.net/tsiolkovsky/Clovis_Comet_Crater.pdf

http://webpages.charter.net/tsiolkovsky/Darwin’s_Valentine.pdf

I arrived at this looking for a terminus for glacial and subglacial lake flooding, the Younger Dryas and Marquette advance, and then the final Laurentide Ice Sheet disintegration. A localized multi-crater impact on the ice sheet at this location at 12,900 BP would have suffered several great flooding events and a glacial readvance, which would have obliterated the evidence and pushed most of the material right down and possibly into Lake Superior.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:05:45 +0000

Mega fauna filled a precariously balanced niche in their envirenment. A comet could have destabilized/ crashed their population much easier than it could mans. Why hasn’t mitochondrial DNA research proved our past here one way or another?

By: Jim Kling

Jim Kling — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:47:37 +0000

I would just point out that the research never suggested that an impact ‘killed off the Clovis people.’

The Clovis people didn’t die — their culture morphed into other cultures, probably as a result of the loss of megafauna that they preyed upon.

If there was an impact, it may have killed off the Clovis culture, but not the people.