At the end of the Ice Age some 13,000 long time ago , the northern cerebral hemisphere seemed to be hotting up as glacier were recede and grasslands spreading . But then something happened : there was a sharp dip in temperatures and a comeback to gelid conditions for another thousand years .
This sudden cool event is known as the Younger Dryas , and the causes behind are n’t to the full understood . Now a new subject field is claiming tohave found further evidencefor the argument that the onset of this cold period occurred after Earth was bombarded with comet that place off vast wildfires .
“ The hypothesis is that a large comet fragmented and the chunks impact the Earth , causing this disaster,”saidProfessor Adrian Melott , who co - author the study published inThe Journal of Geology . “ A number of different chemical substance touch – carbon copy dioxide , nitrate , ammonia water and others – all seem to point that an astonishing 10 percent of the Earth ’s land surface , or about 10 million square kilometers , was ingest by flack . ”
As these firing whoosh across the landscape painting , the smoke and ash they created were swept up into the atmosphere , blocking out the Sun , spay ocean currents , killing wildlife and plants , and cool down the planet once more .
There has long been afair amount of skepticismabout the Younger Dryas impingement hypothesis , to put it thinly . The supposition first come out in 2007 , and maintains that around 12,800 days ago there was some sort of comet impact on Earth that triggered the Younger Dryas .
There have been various find that have been suggested as proof of the validity of the theory . One includestiny , glassy “ spherule ” that were disclose in Pennsylvania a few year back , which it is argued were formed by the impact . Another evoke that thetraces of platinumfound on the Greenland icecap is a result of the impact outcome .
Only last yr , ancient carvings unveil on a endocarp tabernacle in Turkey that dates to 13,000 years honest-to-goodness were render as play what may have been the impact . Discovered at Gobeekli Tepe in the south of the country , the researchers arguethat the image show the fragment comet and that the column they were etch on may “ have served as a memorial to this devastating issue ” .
This latest written report used information collected from 170 different sites around the man to see if they could find grounds of the massive fires that they say would have raged . They are claiming that the grounds does indeed show that there were vast wildfire , magnanimous in fact than the ones after the Cretaceous shock event that did away with the dinosaur .
They argue that this would help explain the shifts and extinctions seen in animal at the end of the Pleistocene , as well as human cultural changes seen at the time .
