6 ms·
Evidence of a 12,800-year-old shallow airburst depression in Louisiana
- newcommiedeal 1y ago[flagged]
- c0nducktr 1y agoDrunk? New user, huge burst of random comments, none of which make sense? You okay, buddy?
- polotics 1y agoI suspect someone's testing their LLM-based HN-commenting script.
- dylan604 1y agoThey need a lot more training. Those comments are something from the ol' Fark or slashdot era. Waiting for the LLMs with posts like "First!"
- andrewflnr 1y agoMaybe, but we've been getting BS like this from before LLMs. Some people really are just that crazy.
- readthenotes1 1y agoBuried the lede: "Son claims Dad was right all along"
- tigereyeTO 1y agoInteresting. There’s a hypothesis that Earth was struck by an impact 12,800 years ago in North America but the impact site wasn’t identified https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe... Could these be related?
- qualeed 1y agoI hadn't heard of this, but it says: >The hypothesis is widely rejected by relevant experts.[2][1][3][4] It is influenced by creationism [...] It is an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation that the Younger Dryas was caused by a significant reduction in, or shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America. [...] Authors have not yet responded to requests for clarification and have never made their raw data available Is there a reason why the widely accepted explanation isn't satisfactory?
- tigereyeTO 1y agoThe publication of this research. One possibility discussed in the publication is that the sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz was caused by the Perkins Louisiana impact.
- cluckindan 1y agoIt happened at the end of an ice age, when mile-thick glaciers were melting away. That’s a lot of fresh water going to the oceans.
- adastra22 1y agoThe argument is that the impact event(s) are WHY the ice age ended.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoOhhh… cool!
- cluckindan 1y ago… and widely criticized as a creationist theory.
- jonathaneunice 1y agoZero expertise in any of the related disciplines to interpret or judge any of this, but I can say with confidence that the related Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... is a wild read and outright flamethrower at everything about Younger Dryas and seemingly, everyone involved.
- farceSpherule 1y agoThe Younger Dryas debate spans climatology, archaeology, geology, and astrophysics, creating tension across multiple disciplines. There is scientific evidence that the Younger Dryas event occurred, however, no universally accepted scientific study that conclusively proves WHAT caused it.
- cluckindan 1y agoThe Younger Dryas was not an ”event”, it was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xeromal 1y agoIs the 0 point for Before Present a different year than the Jesus year? I've never heard it used before.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoIs it plausible for such a large airburst as hypothesized to leave behind such a small crater?
- btilly 1y agoYes. If it exploded in the air, then there is no crater.
- gattr 1y agoIndeed, cf. Tunguska event ([1]) from 1908. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
- MichaelZuo 1y agoHuh? There’s definitely a visible impact structure: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.9045428,101.9279614,14z/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&g_ep=Eg1tbF8yMDI1MDYzMF8wIJvbDyoASAJQAg%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@60.9045428,101.9279614,14z/data...
- ceejayoz 1y agoZoom out a bit and it looks pretty unremarkable for the area. One has to be careful interpreting craters in areas with permafrost. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-the-mystery-of-siberias-explosive-craters https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-t...
- cheaprentalyeti 1y agoI'm guessing that like everything south of a certain point in Louisiana, it'll start out as a larger landscape feature and then gets filled in by sediment.
- cheaprentalyeti 1y agoOh, and before I forget: the kudzu will probably eat what's left of the crater.
- protocolture 1y agoLook a lot of this passes the sniff test but anything Younger Dryas related I have to assume based on past performance is all buillshit designed to prop up religious fundamentalists and bodgy history.
- esseph 1y ago??? There's no link to anything religion wise with the Younger Dryas AFAIK. My only experience studying it has come from the geological / astrophysics sides though.
- adastra22 1y agoIt has apparently been taken up as a cause by creationists.
- K0balt 1y agoYeah. It’s conflation of coincidence (as in coincide) with causality, as usual. That there was a widespread major flooding event doesn’t support the existence of a God, though (unsurprisingly) most human cultures have a distant memory of such an event. It’s a similar assertion to saying that the existence of humanity is proof of a creator.
- protocolture 1y agoComet Research Group is funded by fundies. They sort of angle towards science when making claims, but those claims are sort of designed to support a scientific creationism angle if they ever get upheld.
- andrewflnr 1y agoI don't know about the sniff test. The paper here does a little bit of the amateur scientist thing where they belabor details that real experts tend to take for granted. That doesn't make it wrong, but it increases the skepticism warranted. I do agree the religious link is weird. The mere presence of a 12800 year timeline contradicts YEC. Then again, that kind of logic doesn't always stop pseudoscience people, especially the more conspiracy-flavored ones.
- blueflow 1y agoHow is this supposed to work with the sedimentation? The glass spherules under the lake are maxxing out 5-6 meters below the surface. Where does the material on top of that come from, and why didn't it fill in the lake, but leave it intact & with ridges? Second, if you think of an impact at an angle, the crater and its ridges form an ellipse. If its coming very flat, the structures might look rather parabolic, but still bent inwards. In the article, the north ridge is bent outwards. How? Questions over questions.
- slackfan 1y agoSounds like we finally have some proper dates for the Finno-Korean hyperwar.