Nickel Films in the Bays: Smoking Gun from Russia
Every once in a while, a little gem pops up in the literature that makes you wonder how on Earth (or from space) you missed it. This one is a beauty.
In 2018, a Russian–American team quietly published a short but stunning report in Experiment in Geosciences that should be front‑page news for anyone following the Carolina Bays mystery. Working with sediments from three Bays about 10 km north of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they ran magnetically extracted grains under a Tescan Vega II SEM at the Geophysical Observatory “Borok” of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
What did they see? Pure nickel films coating ilmenite, magnetite, and quartz grains. Microparticles of native metals and alloys. Nanoparticles of pure Ni. All of it locked onto the surface of rounded sand grains as if flash‑welded there by intense heat.
Here’s the kicker: The authors argue these features are the first documented traces in Bay sediments of direct thermal interaction between terrestrial material and incoming cosmic matter—formed in situ, not introduced later. Their working model: the Bays were produced by numerous fragments of an aerodynamically shredded cosmic body (comet or asteroid) arriving on a very oblique trajectory.
This is the kind of find that gives the “wind‑and‑water” crowd heartburn. Not slow, sleepy geology—this is heat, metal, and skyfall. Another piece of physical evidence pushing the Bays away from plodding explanations and toward the high‑energy drama of cosmic catastrophe.
Note: I currently only have access to the abstract of this article, not the full text. If you have the complete publication (PDF or scan), I would deeply appreciate a copy for the Tusk archive. Please email it to [email protected]. Thank you!
Citation / Source: “Carolina Bays, Oval Craters, Impact Process…” Experiment in Geosciences, 24(S1), 52–54 (2018). Abstract via eLIBRARY.ru: https://elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=39494153