Carolina bays, Vernal Pools and Ephemeral Pools
This is one of the early aerial photographs that started the controversy over the origin of the Carolina bays. Certainly, early settlers were somewhat aware of the curious nature of these areas, but until aerial photographs were published, both their consistent oval shape and their vast distribution were unrecognized.
The Perigee-Zero conjecture suggests that rather than being structures created by impacting extraterrestrial objects, the bays are instead the manifestation of terrestrial ejecta lofted from a distant impact site.
We suggest to the reader that in this black & white photograph, the nature of the bays as "splash" structures is apparent. Also apparent is the shape; it is not oval, but more of a tear-drop, with one end being narrower than the other.
Please note that some of the structures display an interesting emplacement artifact.
The ejecta droplet involved arrived from the upper left (N-NW) in this image. The ejection site is therefore to the north of the emplacement site. The droplet's velocity has a west-to-east vector component that represents the ground rotation velocity at the ejection site, but the ground here is moving west-to-east at a higher velocity. As a result, the entire emplacement is effectively compressed on the western (left) side. This creates a structure that is not symmetrical across the major axis. This artifact allows for another correlation between an emplaced object and the physics of transporting it to the emplacement site.
Carolina bays are elliptical depressions concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard within coastal Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and northcentral Florida (Prouty 1952, Kaczorowski 1977). In Maryland, they are called Maryland basins (Rasmussen and Slaughter 1955). Other landform depressions, not widely accepted as Carolina bays, are found within the northern Gulf of Mexico coastal plain within southeast Mississippi and Alabama where they are known as either Grady ponds or Citronelle ponds/
For more discussion on the association we make between the classic "Carolina bay" and the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) Impact Event, please refference the Event manifold segment.