Soot as Evidence for Widespread Fires at the Younger Dryas Onset (YDB, 12.9 ka)

Evidence from the northwestern Venezuelan Andes for extraterrestrial impact: The black mat enigma

“…Several occurrences of the 'black mat' and relation to the Younger Dryas climatic event are reported on in North America (including Greenland) and Belgium (Quade et al, 1998;Firestone et al, 2007a;Haynes, 2008;Stich et al, 2008;Kennett et al, 2009). Here we unfold the first identification of a candidate 'black mat' deposit in South America with implications on origin.…”

“…A bollide with a velocity of +15 km/s could produce a force of several tens of gigatons of energy (Hills and Goda, 1999;Hansen and Holsapple, 2003) Using the Chicxulub Impact (Hildebrand, 1993) as a measure of the impact energy, a 1 km-diameter Ni-Fe asteroid, termed a hemispheric impactor, could release 100 Gt of energy, whereas a great impactor (extinctor), the 10 km-diameter Yucatan asteroid for instance, would release 100 million megatons of energy, thereby subjecting the earth to a 'nuclear winter', i.e. soot blanket blotting out sunlight (Stich et al, 2008). If the 'black mat' of North America and the newly identified candidate are correlative in time and origin, this would imply that the proposed Laurentide impact lies somewhere in between a hemispheric and great impactor, perhaps an event akin to, but larger than, the Tunguska Event of 1908 (Phipps and Andronicos, 2008).…”

Evidence for a cosmogenic origin of fired glaciofluvial beds in the northwestern Andes: Correlation with experimentally heated quartz and feldspar

“…Grain surfaces upon which the carbon is fixed are topographically irregular with brecciated microfeatures of some depth radiating out into zones of high frequency microfractures produced either by mass impact, soot release from wildfires (Stich et al, 2008) or heat release. As observed with the experimental grains where heat-induced microfractures are random in quartz and widely spaced, in the black mat samples microfractures are closely packed into high density areas which appear to be vibration-generated microfeatures.…”

Clast rind analysis using multi‐high resolution instrumentation

“…B: SE enlarged image of the embayment showing, from left to right, dark minerals, all carbon coated presumably with volatilized vegetation existing at the time of impact and fragmented material (deflected grains‐DF) sourced from intact primary grains. C: Further SE enlargement showing welded spherules of indeterminate chemistry with sizes ranging from <2 to ∼7 μm many resembling soot (Stich et al ., ) and “stacks of cards.”…”