Interdisciplinary Endeavor
We represent this treatise as an "Interdisciplinary" scientific endeavor. The reader is implored to consider the hypothetical solutions presented here within the context of the specific scientific field that relate to the evidence.
We are quite aware that the response from an archaeologist to any hypothesis that their specific dig site may have been overburdened with 10 meters of ejecta as: "Astronomers would need to agree there were impacts before I would entertain this".
Similarly, the geologist would insist that the learned archaeologist has deemed the Cahokia mounds to be man-made, regardless of the physical evidence, so that there is no need to look further. As for the Astronomers, they are virtually powerless to interpret the physical history of the Earth. They would tend to pass the task onto the geologist, who has already indicated ....
An obvious question is "Why has no one noticed all this overlain ejecta, and the 'power washed' landscape?" In the August 2003 issue of Physics Today, Spencer Weart discussed the topic of The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change. He makes a case for why the sudden shifts in climate - now documented - were overlooked for so long. Researchers had no expectation, so they did not look at the data in a granularity that would show the behavior. Instead, a gradual evolution is seen, where researchers expected significant change required eons but found millennia change, and when they looked for the millennia details they found changes within centuries. Only after looking for century-resolution data did they note the near-instantaneous changes.
Our goal is to spark interest in this theory among members of various professions. All we ask is that our conjecture is given a passing thought when an enigmatic or anomalous situation is encountered. We presented a poster, below, at the 2006 AGU meeting in Baltimore.
In the past year, two groups of scientists have attempted to resolve some aspects of the historical and geological record by leveraging cometary impacts.
The Holocene Impact Working Group has been researching on-shore geological structures which may have been created by large cometary impact-driven tsunamis. An interesting article describing their work is available at the New York Times.
At the Spring 2007 American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, a group of 25 researchers produced evidence of abrupt climate change at the end of the last Ice Age. The onset of a period of cooling in Northern Europe and elswhere known as the Younger Dryas Event interrupted the gradual warming and coincided with the loss of much of the megafauna and human activity in North America. A YouTube video of the AGU press conference is available. This group is referred to as the Younger Dryas Impact Group
The four scientists answer questions and discuss their analysis of a buried layer at sites from California to Belgium which reveals materials including metallic microspherules, carbon spherules, nanodiamonds, fullerenes, charcoal, and soot. The layer's composition may indicate that a massive body, possibly a comet, exploded in the atmosphere over the Laurentide Ice Sheet 12,900 years ago.
There are two additional groups of individuals who are attempting to understand the foggy relationship between our cultural heritage and the physical manifestations of the earth's evolution using Science rather than Mythology. A primary goals of this treatise is to introduce the hypothesis to these groups, as they have demonstrated a tolerance for radical and unusually bizarre theories.
The Society of Interdisciplinary Studies
The Cambridge Conference newsletter, hosted by Dr. Benny Peiser.