Loading...Surprised I missed this when it was publicized in 2005. Deep in South Carolina bay country a sand quarry is giving up entire trees — 40,000 year old trees. Many of the logs have their root balls attached. And all are covered by ten meters of brilliant white sand.
Dear Tusk:
One of the more interesting remarks in this paper is the following:
“The recovery of well preserved baldcypress logs from two separate deposits of late Pleistocene age in South Carolina raises many interesting research questions. The most immediate question concerns the genesis of the buried white sand layer and the many large subfossil cypress logs it contains. Does the white sand unit represent a single depositional event or a slow process of accumulation over centuries to millennia of time?” – p25
- michael
Cintos -
My 0.324 cents worth:
As I understand it, sand is usually formed on beaches and riverine formations, one little accumulation at a time. That is the uniformitarian POV.
IMHO, one thing must be true: All of that 40+ feet of sand was not formed at that location. If this understanding of mine is true, then somehow the sand got transported and deposited from some previous deposit(s). That suggests something toward the non-uniformitarian school of thought – i.e., a tsunami or something relatively equivalent.
It might be informative to see what the recent tsunamis have done in terms of moving sand deposits around and depositing them. I know that a large area of downtown Banda Aceh in 2004 was scoured almost clean, with sand left where buildings and trees used to be. This was VERY impressive for me. Certainly, any sand present on beaches will be “slurried” into the water flow and won’t settle out until the turbulence dies down.
Intuitively, I would tend to think that deep sand deposits and loess have similar genesises. Also that the built up (down?) deposits are similar to glacial till and the deep gravel deposits in the northern U.S. Midwest. Similar does not mean identical, though.
What Ice Agers see as moraines from mountainous ice caps over Canada and the north central U.S. I see as mega-tsunami deposits. After all, there are no such gravel deposits/moraines in northern Siberia, which supposedly was victim of the same Ice Age.
The bottom line is this:
You asked a very good question, one the uniformitarians have a pat answer for – and an answer I don’t agree with.
At 40,000 years of age, its old enough not to alarm anyone, unlike a more recent event say 13,000 years ago.
Also – it is pretty certain that tree ring studies on the paleo-climate are not bring done, including gaining data on long term regular patterns of solar variability.
And it occured to me looking at the latest from the Hudson River Valley – you have to consider that a landslide in the Canaries may be responsible for these deposits.
Thus triangulation needs to be done to determine their cause.
In the extreme north west corner of Washington County Alabama a friend of mine told me that they found a pine stump about 30 feet underground while excavating to build a pond dam on his property. The land is very sandy all through western Washington County. I don’t know the exact location , but is is near the Aquilla community.. On my family’s property farther south and west of Vinegar Bend , My brother was drilling a well for his camp and discovered wood charcoal 18 ft underground. About 600 ft south of there I uncovered a flint indian arrow head about four ft underground while digging a hole in an old field. I found no other artifacts there. No pieces of flint , pottery , charcoal,bones or any other signs of early life. There were no rocks or clay only very sandy soil and one arrowhead. The lay of the land is a gentle slope, Not enough for weather to erode the field. It may drop 10 feet over a distance of 600 feet. I tell you this because it raises a question in my mind of when the sand was deposited and could human life existed when it happened ?
The “sand” would be the same as that underlying Carolina Bays? Is there a good map of the total area where the sand is found? If it’s in Alabama then this not a coastal or Piedmont matter. Perhaps the volume is greater than estimated by Michael Davias, according to whom Saginaw Bay volume is adequate for the total. Also, has a geochemical analysis been done to locate the source? Not sure this works for pure quartz sand. Does this large volume of quartz point to the Canadian shield as its region of origin (ignoramus asking many questions).
About that downed forest….
Whenever the CBays were deposited (probably 100+ka before YDB if Michael Davias’ latest CBay age bracketing evidence is correct), it has already been acknowledged to lay over several different Geologic formations and was likely from a single emplacement event (Douglas Johnson?, 1942, http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ocb/ or http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cbaymenu.html). The monolithic blanket of sand in which the CBays exist shows several distinctive features that clearly indicate possible descent from exoatmospheric sub-orbital trajectory as distal ejecta from a large cosmic impact.
This is hard to interpret for anyone accustomed to terrestrial scale Geologic process. Its hard for most folks period. It involves thousands of cubic kilometers (km^3 * 1000+) of superheated ejecta from a cratering process being launched out of a deep crater (most of which was Ice Sheet and some of which was sand stone under that ice sheet) into an astronomically large hydrothermal explosion, being accelerated both vertically and horizontally to several km/sec as well as thermally energized by those two effects, drifting suborbitally as a giant cloud-sheet until reentry half a continent away, reentering the atmosphere in a frictional heating deceleration which transfers that thermal and kinetic energy into the atmosphere over the duration of the ejecta sheet reentering process, and during the upper atmospheric descent, changing the atmospheric conditions as a result on a subcontinental scale while the ejecta’s kinetic and heat is dumped into that airmass, the falling ejecta then freezing very cold during stratospheric descent before running into thicker air of the lower atmosphere and slowing down while more sand piles up on its back in the air column superhighway, encountering moisture in the troposphere and collecting that moisture through surface condensation while further slowing from the essentially static momentum of that accumulated moisture (which then further compounds the vertical chain reaction pile up effect), becoming cohesive as an overall blanket during terminal descent due to that accumulated (continental airmass) moisture, trapping voids or bubbles (entrainment) due to energization of the cohesive blanket in its epic battle against the trapped subcontinental air mass beneath it during that cohesive terminal descent, and finally reaching the surface where it changes from descent at an angle to horizontal, stretching all of the bubble voids by essentially the same trig function before they burst upon the cohesive blanket’s landing, forming bay rims in the bursting process.
Physical mechanics. Multi disciplinary. Breath slow and deep….
Clearly, the variation of CBay size may be a direct result of void coalescence during the tropospheric (lower) descent phase of the moistened and cohesive falling sand and is precisely log normal in distribution, as are many observable, naturally occurring distributions, including bubble coalescence phenomenon. Coincidence? Not likely. Here is the main reason: The CBay, over ten thousand of them, have major axes which all point toward the same central location (suggested primary impact site), but ONLY when those axial vectors are adjusted for the spin of the Earth during the ejecta flight time. The odds of that happening by chance for over ten thousand (10,000) individual, independently formed CBays are vanishingly small, EVEN if they were all formed by a similar wind pattern over much of the latitude of our present nation, which by itself is a pretty unlikely idea if you study wind and weather.
Coincidently, if you burst a bubble on a flat surface, the material in the bubble wall is deposited into the same distribution as the rim structures of the CBays.
Coincidently, if a bubble blanket is laid down at some angle to the horizontal, all of the voids will have the same elongated aspect ratio as a function of the lay-down angle,
and
Coincidently, all of the voids will all also tend to share the same heavier rim structures in the more distal direction from the original impact, because the more distal ejecta comes down first since laying down the blanket at some angle to the horizontal, from distal toward proximal w.r.t. that original impact site, causes material in the blanket to slosh in that downward sloping direction when the cohesive blanket is decelerated vertically from terminal descent at a some angle off horizontal upon reaching the surface.
Continuing….
There is a large trench missing out of Michigan, where coincidently the Glaciologists can’t find Glacier retreat evidence for the Saginaw lobe of the ice sheet, and further coincidently there is Helium 3 isotope at unusually high levels in that saginaw trench, along with megafractured subsurface layers and other features common to impact sites.
That’s a lot of coincidences: Log normal size distribution of a large population of similar features in the imprint, all axes pointed to one focus region but ONLY when accounting for Earths rotation during time of flight of distal ejecta, CBay rim structures matching flat surface scaled up bubble burst results both in aspect ratio and in rim thickening on the down-slope side of the descending blanket, multiple different impact-type phenomenon under Saginaw, and all of these things before even considering the monotonous uniformity and (extremely) remarkable lack of any or all terrigenous detritus deep within the bulk of the sand itself, which not only is in total contradiction to any wind/water-based model of formation for the CBays (No leaves. No dirt. No branches. No fossils. So seashells. No fish. No spent water bottles. Just pure quartz sand.) but is all completely and very neatly explained by the aerial delivery model for that sand. Coincidence?
Saginaw has an exposed layer of sandstone around the edges of that valley, and if the formation epoch is as now identified by Mr. Davias and his tireless effort on this task, some two miles of ice sheet depth may have been present in that area at during that epoch. That’s a two mile thick sheet of reactive armor available to transform or absorb much of the cratering energy of a rather large cosmic impact, to possibly leave relatively little impact scarring compared to the possible size/speed/energy of the impactor. This is of course if you consider the Saginaw valley, about 150 km by 350 km, as a relatively small crater. Interestingly, the impact may have been at a shallow angle. The truth is probably more like “we are completely unsure” due to the unknowns of that much ice being in the picture.
Clearly, some closer looks are necessary, on all of these fronts of research.
Missing Crater?
That much ice could amplify the impact shock effects upon solid surface beneath it for a steep angle impact. It could also greatly reduce the impact shock effects upon solid surface beneath it for a shallow angle impact. The most amazing thing about this part of the story is that no one is sure, because ice impacts are just coming into the arena of scientific estimation for normal (steep) angles, and the shallow angle impact case has been largely neglected in the development of modern cosmic impact cratering science! That I find particularly surprising, and is likely due to the fact that the NASA hypervelocity gun facility used to experiment in this realm doesn’t do shallow angle, so no one bothers to do numeric or analytical modeling where there is no experimental results available for comparison or contrast. But recent hydrocode modeling suggests that a shallow angle shot could definitely hold the key to minimal impact scarring, since its the vertical component of the projectile’s kinetic energy that is absorbed in the shallow angle hit, not total kinetic from 1/2*m*v^2 that we are taught in traditional high school physics.
This is a classic multi-variant, multi-disciplinary type of problem that is conceptually very tough to get one’s mind entirely around. Typically not solvable using the sole resources of any single scientific discipline, so no wonder it hasn’t been solved yet. The markings are clearly emplaced in the imprint, however, so it will all come to light eventually when the proper breed of multi-disciplinary scientist takes a detailed, open minded look at the entire picture. The GeoSpace scientist.
A key area of evidence will be the nature of the horizon below the sand. If it was emplaced in a single event or process, there should be evidence beneath the sand about what happened to put the sand there. About the emplacement process. If there were forests and other surface features that were suddenly and mercilessly blanketed by billions or trillions of tons of high density, very pure quartz sand, thats going to leave signatures about the delivery process. A felled forest of preserved trees is exactly the kind of signature we would expect. Clearly. Imagine the worst blizzard and the worst ice storm you can. Now combine those two types of storms, and things start getting ugly. Then multiply by 50 or 500 or 5000 for a feeling of the weight of 2 to 5 meters of high density pure quartz sand (yep, very ugly indeed). Then compress the duration of the ‘storm’ to a matter of mere minutes. Ouch.
Too ugly to imagine? Maybe.
Evidence? Yes, there should be plenty of evidence. That buried surface is going to show evidence of being blasted by gail force winds, crushed by a giant’s foot (the size of 5% of the surface of the continental U.S. and weighs as much as Rhode Island) and then sprayed up through the voids as they burst open and spread the sand out to form void rims. The highly compressed air underneath may have become heated from rapid pressure rise due to the astronomical weight of material in the air column reaching the surface, but not for long, as it would be quickly jetted out through every opening upon contact of that heavy blanket with the surface. Try to imagine it. Then imagine the evidence. From that open-minded conceptual exercise, imagery of flattened forests begin to materialize as a very basic, simple and highly anticipated result. Ugly monster storm. Astronomical energies. Use your imagination.
TH