Your correspondent was doing some navel gazing last night and checked the academic “cites” for the soon to be even more famous 2007 paper, “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling.”
I’ll be darned if I did not come across a just-added citation from a group at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Sciences Lab. This is no casual reference or dismissal. It was a confirmation — of space stuff in the clovis black mat — by respected scientists I have never heard of. Big news. And also news to key researchers on the Younger Dryas Boundary Team.
Here are the CV’s for two of the authors who pop up prominently when searched: Alex Andronikov and Dante Lauretta. Very impressive.
A key aspect of the research is that they focused on the stratigraphy that Allen West has long said was most critical; not the black mat itself, but the very bottom and earliest portion of the layer, termed in the Andronikov paper: the Lower Younger Dryas Boundary (LYDB). They call the LYBD, “a thin (2-5 cm) basal pitch-black layer likely corresponding to the lower YD boundary.” The blackest of the black mat.
Though little detail is provided in this brief conference abstract, the LYDB layer exhibited chemistry similar to the now-definitive KT Boundary layer marking the extinction of the dinosaurs. It was elevated in Iridium and Osmium, Platinum Group Elements, with other worldly ratios of said elements. What’s more, Rare Earth Elements were found to be in concentrations 800x times that found in meteorites themselves!
These findings not only corroborate those of the YDB team, but also contradict those of Paquay, et. al., considered by some to be a nail in the coffin of the theory.
When you find the breath of stars at a point in history where whole genera of animals and a human culture disappear from the record, it is time to take a deep breath, keep an open mind — and continue looking.
When the first results were announced in 2007 many scientists simply spat them out, closed their minds, and decided to ignore them. Worse, others later smeared the YD researchers. Fortunately, thanks to curious and competent scientists like Andronikov and Lauretta, good science can survive bad people.
Alex Andronikov