Comet Hit Atlantis?
Mauri,
You wrote Someone might know if an impact by a comet or large meteorite might’ve caused the abrupt transition around 10,000 BC.
This is the reasonable next question. I had to develop the flow of thought to catch up to your question.
Comets first. There are an estimated 100,000 comets moving with the Sun as focus. Some have Jupiter as focus. Most have very long time periods for their orbits (over 100 years).
The size of the comet head can be very large – 20,000 to 200,000 miles. That maximum size makes the comet larger than the Sun. However, the mass of the comet lies in its nucleus. The nucleus varies in size from 1 to 20 miles. Now the big “however”, the nucleus is almost all dust. So, it has no potential to do this kind of damage.
Meteors next. There are billions of loose meteors flying around the universe. The largest has been up to a mile in diameter.
Interestingly,
“The advent of satellite space photography has revealed numerous previously unsuspected land-forms suggestive of impact by very large meteors on various occasions throughout Earth history. These features which have constituted the central theme of at least two full-length books, clearly show that on impacting these meteors perpetrated widespread damage, and that while some are geologically ancient others are surprisingly recent.” Cataclysm p 201.
One of those was “The Bombarded Earth” (London) by R. Gallant, pub in 1964. The other was The Mysterious Carolina Bays by H. Savage, published in 1982 in by University Carolina Press. These sound like interesting books. I will say more on the Carolina Bays below.
Asteroids next. Asteroids are in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. There may be up to 80,000 of them. The biggest is 625 miles in diameter. At least eight of them cross earth’s orbit. The biggest such is Eros with a diameter of a mere 6 miles. It has come within 14,000,000 miles. That is “close” in astronomical terms.
But even asteroids will not tilt the axis. It is as though a particle of dust fell on your table. It would not knock your table over.
Those Carolina Bays referenced above are interesting. To start with these are not bays and they are not only in the Carolinas.
There are some 500,000 of them on the Atlantic seaboard of the US centered in South Carolina but extending from New Jersey to Florida.
They are oval indentations in the ground. They range in size up to 4 miles in length. 140,000 of them are 500 ft or longer. The interesting item is that all those in a given geographical area are aligned in the same direction. That direction shifts slightly in a systematic way as one moves from one area to another.
Interestingly these “bays” tend to be not noticeable from the ground. It was not until the 1930’s with the advent of aerial photography that they came to be recognized. (Although they had been mentioned first in 1847.)
Henry Savage Jr has suggested these features were formed at the “end of the mammoth” age i.e. “end of the Pleistocene”. It seems highly unlikely that this is a coincidence with window of time we are examining. They are related to our “event”.
It appears likely that there are also impacts on the underwater continental shelf where other indentations have formed.
Such bays are found elsewhere – all with the strangely parallel orientations. There are 25,000 in Alaska near Point Barrow up to 9 miles long, more in Harrison Bay area in Alaska, and oddly enough, some in Bolivia up to 12.5 miles long, and some in Netherlands though these are less obvious due to farming over them.
The existence of these remains in the Atlantic off the US has encouraged the Atlantologist Otto Muck (pronounced “mook”) to raise a hypothesis. He suggests the similar objects that fell into the Atlantic created a tsunami that engulfed Atlantis. I have his book on order and not received it yet so I cannot comment in any more detail.
His hypothesis is a good one. The tsunamis would be adequate to inundate the Atlantean civilization. But it appears to be insufficient. First the tidal wave itself would leave Atlantis remaining above water – not submerging in a “day and a night”. So, I presume he hypothesizes that the impact on the ocean floor caused disturbances that also caused the land of Atlantis to sink. Again, I don’t have his book yet.
But there remains a larger problem with Muck’s hypothesis – it is wholly inadequate to explain the world-wide disaster that must be accounted for. So his explanation must be only a part of the larger solution to the facts on the ground.
-Reed Carson, Co-founder of Theosophy Foundation, Inc., and this website: blavatsky.net.
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