Mass extinction at the end of Younger Dryas

[odysseus2000]

Did comet impacts leads to a mass extinction at the end of the Younger dryas?

This is an interesting Rogan discussion (strong language) with a gold miner who has apparently found > 10,000 Woolly mammoth in 5 acres of land and evidence for extreme temperatures at the bedrock:

https://youtu.be/Y790RJE9g4c

Another theory is that the extinction which was apparently very quick, a day, was caused by solar flares. There are also suggestions that there was massive water flows from the melting of glacial ice at this time, again happening very quickly.

This is all interesting as the time scale of circa 11,000 years ago is well within the range of carbon dating that can go back about 10 half lives (60,000 years) using accelerator technology, & so it should be possible to get some hard science to collaborate or otherwise these ideas.

This all fits in with the folklore of Atlantis & it’s sudden destruction.

It all kind of feels like continental drift & how this was ridiculed for a long time before clear evidence emerged.

Does anyone know of counter arguments that are testable & which can explain the mass extinctions etc?

Regards,

[Midsmartin]

There is a Wikipedia page on the topic. It seems it is a well discussed hypothesis, with data from various sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_D ... hypothesis

Yes I know it's Wikipedia, and may be inaccurate, but it is usually a good first step for a new topic.

[odysseus2000]

There is a Wikipedia page on the topic. It seems it is a well discussed hypothesis, with data from various sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_D ... hypothesis

Yes I know it's Wikipedia, and may be inaccurate, but it is usually a good first step for a new topic.

Super interesting.

I imagine that many of the measurements have large systematic errors & should be repeated by independent groups.

If the 10k+ number of woolly mammoths is correct it is difficult to explain as anything other than a very fast killing event during a migration.

There is nothing in any of this that I can see that isn’t tractable to more scientific investigation and we should get more clarity after more science.

Regards,

[9873210]

This is all interesting as the time scale of circa 11,000 years ago is well within the range of carbon dating that can go back about 10 half lives (60,000 years) using accelerator technology, & so it should be possible to get some hard science to collaborate or otherwise these ideas.

AIUI it's also in the range of dendrochronology (about 13,000 years). There are quite a few tools that work at thousands of years but not millions of years.

[odysseus2000]

Dendochronolgy, dating via tree rings, is an intimate part of the calibration of c14 dating.

There are a number of methods for much longer time scales, see:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
for a brief introduction with links.

Regards,