a new theory says that gold, silver, diamonds etc found in Eastern
N. America may have come from a comet that shattered over Canada
during the last Ice Age…
Diamonds and precious metals found in the eastern United
States might have rained down during the last Ice Age after a
comet shattered over Canada and set North America ablaze, all
leading to a mass die-off of animals and humans.
New chemical analyses of diamond, gold and silver found in
Ohio and Indiana reveal the minerals were transported there
from Canada several thousand years ago. The question is, how?
“There are no gold mines or silver mines in Ohio that anyone
knows of, but there are plenty of them in Canada,” said
retired geophysicist Allen West, who was involved in the
study.
The discovery is consistent with a theory proposed by West and
colleagues that a 3-mile-wide comet splintered over glaciers
and ice sheets in eastern Canada about 12,900 years ago and
wiped out man and beast.
“These would have been like ten thousand Tunguskas going off
at once,” said West, referring to a mid-air explosion over
Siberia a century ago possibly caused by a fragmenting meteor.
Precious rain
The diamonds, gold and silver could have been ejected into the
air during the blasts, West said, or they could have been
carried south by rivers formed from the meltwater of liquified
glaciers.
For several months following the comet strike, the skies
rained precious stone and metals, the researchers speculate.
Diamonds drizzled down by the tons.
“Some of them you couldn’t see, and animals would’ve been
breathing them in,” West told LiveScience. “But other ones
would clearly have been visible. They might’ve even hurt if
they hit you.”
The larger diamonds were visible to the naked eye and dropped
like hail stones within seconds of the blasts, West said.
The smallest diamonds, the “size of cold viruses,” would have
lingered in the atmosphere for weeks or months, eventually
wafting down to Earth like expensive snowflakes.
Killed man and beast
Flaming fragments of the comet crashing to Earth sparked
forests fires around the globe, West contends. The intense
heat from the blasts set the very air on fire. North America’s
grassland, the furs of animals, the hair and clothing of
humans all would have been set ablaze.
West and his colleagues have proposed that the comet strike
contributed to the extinction of several species of North
American megafauna, including mammoths and mastodons, and led
to the early demise of the Clovis culture, a Stone Age people
who had only recently immigrated to the continent.
The multiple airbursts might have also caused large amounts of
fresh water to be dumped into the Atlantic Ocean, temporarily
disrupting currents and prompting a sudden global cold snap
called the Younger Dryas period.
“The kind of evidence we are finding does suggest that climate
change at the end of the last Ice Age was the result of a
catastrophic event,” said study team member Ken Tankersley, an
anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati.
While the discoveries in Ohio and Indiana are consistent with
the theory of a comet colliding with Earth during the last Ice
Age, West cautions that it is not a “smoking gun.”
“We’re a long way from saying categorically that these things
got here because of this event,” West said. “They’re
consistent, but we’ve got a lot more work to do to show
there’s a direct connection.”
The researchers are preparing to submit their research to a
scientific journal.