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Younger Dryas Quotes

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Younger Dryas Quotes

“The Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere. This immense and extraordinary deluge, 'possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,' swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today--a devastated blank slate [...] littered with 10,000-ton 'glacial erratics,' immense fossilized waterfalls, and 'current ripples' hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high. If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone. If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.”

ApocalypseDemolishCataclysmDelugeYounger DryasFloodsCosmic ImpactIce Sheet
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age--perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we've seen--or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural know-how, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It's therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of 'package' is involved here.”

MysteryEvidenceLegacyAfterlifeArchaeologyHunter GatherersYounger DryasEarthworksMonumental ArchitectureMound Building
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The earth and all life upon it endured and was devastated by what can only be described as a globally distributed firestorm at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago. In this planetary debacle, 10 million square kilometers of trees and other plant matter burned. To put that in perspective, the United Kingdom was in a state of traumatic shock in late June and early July 2018 after 4,942 acres of Lancashire moorland were consumed by wildfires. That's an area of just 20 square kilometers, but firefighters and emergency services from seven counties were utterly overwhelmed by the blaze and the military had to be brought in to assist. Meanwhile, a report in the Sacramento Bee dated July 2, 2018, opined that California's wildfire season had started early, with two 'major fires' already fought at huge expense and requiring evacuation of local residents. These two fires were estimated to have consumed 85,000 acres, which sounds an awful lot but in fact converts to just 344 square kilometers. The previous years, 2017, was California's most destructive wildfire season then on record, with a total of 1.25 million acres burned. The cost of dealing with the disaster, including fire suppression, insurance, and recovery expenditures, was estimated at US$180 billion. Yet 1.38 million acres converts to just 5,585 square kilometers--an insignificant fraction (around 0.05 percent--that is, a twentieth of 1 percent) of the 10 million square kilometers destroyed in the Younger Dryas wildfires.”

DevastationWildfiresCataclysmYounger DryasComet ImpactDebacle
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“As the discoverer and principal excavator of Murray Springs, [...] Haynes deserves credit for drawing attention to a very curious aspect of the site--a distinct dark layer of soil draped 'like a shrink-wrap,' as Allen West puts it, over the top of the Clovis remains and of the extinct megafauna--including Eloise. Haynes has identified this 'black mat' (his term) not only at Murray Springs but at dozens of other sites across North America, and was the first to acknowledge its clear and obvious association with the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event. he speaks of the 'remarkable circumstances' surrounding the event, the abrupt die-off on a continental scale of all large mammals 'immediately before deposition of the ... black mat,' and the total absence thereafter of 'mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, dire wold, American lion, tapir and other [megafauna], as well as Clovis people.' Haynes notes also that 'The basal black mat contact marks a major climate change from the warm dry climate of the terminal Allerod to the glacially cold Younger Dryas.' From roughly 18,000 years ago, and for several thousand years thereafter, global temperatures had been slowly but steadily rising and the ice sheets melting. Our ancestors would have had reason to hope that earth's long winter was at last coming to an end and that a new era of congenial climate beckoned. This process of warming became particularly pronounced after about 14,500 years ago. Then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, the direction of climate change reversed and the world turned dramatically, instantly cold--as cold as it had been at the peak of the Ice Age many thousands of years earlier. This deep freeze--the mysterious epoch now known as the Younger Dryas--lasted for approximately 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, at which point the climate flipped again, global temperatures shot up rapidly, the remnant ice sheets melted and collapsed into the oceans, and the world became as warm as it is today.”

Climate ChangeExtinctionPaleontologyCataclysmYounger DryasIce SheetsPleistocene
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all-inclusive... The large animals that had given the name to the period became extinct. Their death marked the end of the era. But how did they die? What caused the extinction of forty million animals?”

DeathNatureAnimalsCatastropheExtinctionYounger DryasPleistoceneGeological Period
Book:The Lost Americans, The Story of the Man They Said Never Was: Old Stone-Age American
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“Around 12,800 years ago, it was as though an enchantment of ice had gripped the earth. In many areas that had been approaching terminal meltdown full glacial conditions were restored with breathtaking rapidity and all the gains that had been made since the LGM were simply stripped away: 'Temperatures ... fell back on the order of 8-15 degrees centigrade ... with half this brutal decline possibly occurring within decades. The Polar Front in the North Atlantic redescended to the level of Cabo Finisterre in northwest Spain and glaciers readvanced in the high mountain chains. With respect to temperature the setback to full glacial conditions was nearly complete ...' For human populations at the time, in many except the most accidentally favoured parts of the world, the sudden and inexplicable plunge into severe cold and aridity must have been devastating. And in the Karakoram-Himalayan region, as in other glaciated areas, it is very likely that it was accompanied by a significant readvance of the ice-cap that previously had been in recession for some 7000 years.”

Ice AgeDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasIce Sheets
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“[The cosmic impact that started the Younger Dryas] marked the end of their story, and the end of an epoch, really. There's not a single Clovis point found anywhere in North America that's above that black mat. They're all in it or below it. And there's not a single mammoth skeleton anywhere in North America that's above it. A huge part of the die-off could have been as a direct result of the impacts themselves, but impacts and airbursts south of the ice cap, particularly as far south as New Mexico, would also have set off wildfires. There's overwhelming evidence that gigantic wildfires raged at the onset of the Younger Dryas--in fact, more soot has been found at the Younger Dryas Boundary than at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. We did the calculations and it looks like as much as 25 percent of the edible biomass and around 9 percent of the total biomass of the planet was on fire and destroyed within days or weeks of the YDB. So in many areas if the animals weren't killed outright they wouldn't have been able to forage enough food afterwards to survive. The grass would have burned up, leaves on trees were gone. ... And you know, the other thing is that when comet fragments come in they're traveling incredibly fast and they literally punch a hole in the atmosphere. They actually push the air aside and they bring in that super cold from space, and when they explode in the air that cold plume continues to the ground and you literally have things frozen in place if they were close enough to where the plume came down. It's possible they were fried and then frozen all within a matter of seconds.”

EvidenceEpochWildfiresPaleontologyCataclysmYounger DryasCosmic Impact
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.”

CollapseExtinctionArchaeologyWildfiresDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“SHERIDEN CAVE, OHIO: There are [Younger Dryas Boundary] peaks in magnetic spherules, meltglass, nanodiamonds, Pt, and Ir. A charcoal-rich black mat dates to the [Younger Dryas] onset and contains peak abundances of charcoal, AC/soot, carbon spherules, and nanodiamonds that are closely associated with the last known Clovis artifacts in the cave. The black-mat layer is in direct contact with the wildfire-charred bones of two mega-mammals, the flat-headed peccary (Platygonus compressus) and the giant beaver (Castoroidies ohioensis), that are the last known examples anywhere in the world of those extinct species.”

ExtinctionWildfiresPaleontologyDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“About thirty-five genera of mammals disappear from America, about half of them in a brief window of 500 years, 13,200 to 12,700 years ago, with Clovis hunters occupying the core of that time period. A sudden cooling, the Younger Dryas, descends on the Earth by 12,880 years ago, marking the terminal appearance of many of these animals. Suspected causes of the YD are still contentious. But it signals the end of Clovis and much of the megafauna.”

Younger DryasMammothPleistocene EpochContinental GlaciationMega Fauna
Book:In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: Global Warming, the Origins of the First Americans, and the Terribl
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“Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.”

AstronomyEpochAstrophysicsYounger DryasBombardmentsGeophysicsCollision HazardTaurid Stream
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Let’s examine the history of Genesis I, II, and III. There are many schools of thought on this subject, but the most predominant one is that Moses was the originator. This seems not too far-fetched, since Moses was reared in the Egyptian tradition, in a royal household, and probably had access to many religious writings and teachings now lost with the passing of the archives of Egypt, in Alexandria, Heliopolis, and Sais. Certainly the Ten Commandments were a condensation of the forty-two questions of Osiris for entering heaven. If Moses did write part of the Old Testament, he then must have had Naga tablet writings, or Egyptian interpretations of them, handed down to the Egyptians for thousands of years; and the Egyptian priesthood had knowledge of a cataclysm 11,500 years ago. Priests of Egypt are supposed to have told Solon during his ten years in Egypt (about 600 B.C.) that 9,000 years before that time there was a cataclysm which buried Atlantis beneath the ocean. Note that 9,000 + 600 B.C. + 1950 A.D. equals 11,550 years ago [, when the Younger Dryas ended].”

LostTraditionCatastropheTeachingsArchivesCataclysmYounger Dryas
Book:The Adam & Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms
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“This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum--'a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,' as he puts it now--'so we know that was the length of the impact event because there's very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It's pretty well locked in place.”

ScienceClimate ChangePreservationYounger DryasCosmic ImpactImpact Event
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The evidence claimed for an impact event includes a charred carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found at some 50 Clovis dated sites across the continent. The layer contains unusual materials (Nano diamonds, metallic micro spherules, carbon spherules, magnetic spherules, iridium, charcoal, soot, and fullerenes enriched in helium-3) interpreted as evidence of an impact event, at the very bottom of the black mat of organic material that marks the beginning of the Younger Dryas. The idea that Earth-based volcanism, or other natural processes, or human activity being responsible has been ruled out.”

EvidenceCatastropheGeologyCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“To this day, scientists know of only two layers of sediment 'broadly distributed across several continents that exhibit coeval abundance peaks in a comprehensive assemblage of cosmic impact markers, including nanodiamonds, high-temperature quenched spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, carbon spherules, iridium and aciniform carbon.' These layers are found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been agreed that a gigantic cosmic impact in the Gulf of Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,800 years ago.”

ScienceCataclysmYounger DryasCosmic Impact
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The black mat formed on top of the layer of proxies,' Allen replies. 'Down here it has a lot of charcoal in it. But it also has algal remains so it's not just fire. The Younger Dryas changed the climate and made the area much wetter. Algae began to grow along the edges of the lakes.' He puts a hand on the black stripe along the arroyo wall: 'So the remains of about 1,000 years of dead algae, charcoal, and a lot of other stuff are all embedded in here, and at the bottom of it, where the impact happened, we find iridium, platinum, and a layer of melted spherules where the temperatures must have been so high that they would have melted a modern car into a pool of metal.”

ClimateYounger DryasBlack Mat
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“In the case of the Younger Dryas, the jeopardy that humanity faced was not from nuclear missiles but from the incoming fragments of a disintegrating giant comet, traveling at tens of kilometers per second, with the larger fragments as deadly as hundreds of nuclear warheads. Indeed, it is estimated that the total explosive power of the comet fragments that struck the earth in repeated episodes over a period of 21 years some 12,800 years ago would have been of the order of 10 million megatons--1,000 times greater than all the nuclear devices stockpiled in the world today.”

ApocalypseJeopardyDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“What we are looking for [...] is an agent capable--simultaneously and almost instantaneously--of bringing about all of the following: -a global flood -wildfires across an area of 10 million km2 -6 months of icy darkness followed by more than 1,000 years of glacially cold weather -a stratum of soil across more than 50 million km2 dated to the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) and infused with a cocktail of nanodiamonds, high-temperature iron-rich spherules, glassy silica-rich spherules, meltglass, platinum, iridium, osmium, and other exotic materials -a mass extinction of megafauna Wolfbach and her coauthors are forthright in their conclusion: 'Multiple lines of ice-core evidence appear synchronous, and this synchroneity of multiple events makes the YD interval one of the most unusual climate episodes in the entire Quaternary record. ... A cosmic impact is the only known event capable of simultaneously producing the collective evidence.”

FloodApocalypseDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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