Michael Shermer, Founding Publisher of Skeptic Magazine, tweeted Graham Hancock an extraordinary note this week. Shermer announced that based on last week’s blockbuster Abu Hureyra paper he was persuaded to re-think his position on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. What a welcome development in the long effort to win the hearts and minds of persistent critics […]

“A single major asteroid impact would not have caused such widely scattered materials like those discovered at Abu Hureyra,” Kennett said. “The largest cometary debris clusters are proposed to be capable of causing thousands of airbursts within a span of minutes across one entire hemisphere of Earth. The YDB hypothesis proposed this mechanism to account for the widely dispersed coeval materials across more than 14,000 kilometers of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Our Abu Hureyra discoveries strongly support a major impact event from such a fragmented comet.”

One of the best things about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is finding catastrophic features that may date to the event, but have not yet been directly connected with it. Today I submit one of the finest examples: The Great Lake Tahoe Comet Tsunami. Its is a well-published and uncontroversial fact that in the prehistoric peopled […]

Well, maybe it’s not really a “thang,” yet. But the Tusk is having some popular fun on Twitter tweeting photographs of the iconic, but relatively unknown, Younger Dryas Black Mat. I think many people interested in our subject have some sense that a clearly visible, multi-continent-wide, destruction layer exists, but many others certainly do not […]

Point Counter Point

The science publishing and peer-review process gets a lot of grief, often for good reason. Many fruitful areas of paradigm changing research languish outside the major journals and never pass from the gatekeepers to the printing press. But thankfully the YDIH, despite the controversy and “robust” debate, appears regularly in the world’s top earth science […]

Sharma, 2013 This week is “abstract reveal” week for the enormous annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) held each December (See Tusk at 2009 AGU). So each year around this time I search the AGU website for any coming presentations concerning the Younger Dryas and cosmic impact. Fall Meeting 2019 San Fran turned […]

Tireless Aussie Marc Young has done it again. During his summer holiday Marc has managed to link every YDIH peer-reviewed journal article directly from the bibliography spreadsheet. My idea to have a slick “accordion file” of all the papers at the bottom of the page was simply ahead of its time, and this is a […]

See permanent page here Readers may recall a few months ago the Tusk and Australian university student Marc Young compiled a bibliography and archive file of all the YDIH publications since the seminal PNAS publication in 2007. I have taken the files and given them a permanent home here. The publication history of the subject […]

  New evidence that an extraterrestrial collision 12,800 years ago triggered an abrupt climate change for Earth The muck that’s been accumulating at the bottom of this lake for 20,000 years is like a climate time capsule. Christopher R. Moore, University of South Carolina What kicked off the Earth’s rapid cooling 12,800 years ago? In […]

NY Post Gizmodo Quartz Francis Thackeray   This confirmation of a South African platinum layer from the Younger Dryas Impact was particularly welcome for several reasons.  First, it is another confirmation of evidence for  the impact in the Southern Hemisphere, following the Pilauco paper from Chile in March of this year. Second, the lead author, […]

Want to know a sure-fire formula to get long time internet friends together in person — and even outdoors on a blazing August day? Dig up a perfectly featured Carolina Bay. Long time Carolina bay enthusiasts, digital buddies of the Tusk, and curious citizens, Chris Cotrell, Antonio Zamora, Michael Davias, Micah Hanks and Jason Pentrail […]

Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles with exquisite hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.

The main objective of this study was to test the YDB impact hypothesis by analyzing a wide range of data from the Pilauco site in southern Chile. The following conclusions show that our data and interpretations are consistent with the YDB impact hypothesis and we found no evidence that refutes the hypothesis. (1) At Pilauco, […]

Some wag tweeted this funny cartoon today depicting the current state of affairs in Younger Dryas Boundary Research. The storyboard calls out The Bos and Vance Holliday for their willful ignorance with regard to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. The clever and extraordinarily well informed cartoonist points out the awkward position The Bos has created for […]

Seriously, it is really cool to see Science Magazine name Hiawatha Crater as 2018 breakthrough story runner up — and with due reference to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. The crater will be an intellectual gift that keeps on giving, and its better days are ahead. So I will go ahead and nominate the article […]

This paper from five years ago seems consistent with the Hiawatha Impact Crater. Some 13,000 years ago, as the last Ice Age seemed to lose its cold grip on the Earth, the temperature suddenly plunged again. Up to now, scientists believed that the Younger Dryas cold reversal was caused by great amounts of Canadian meltwater […]

See another blockbuster confirmation of the Younger Dryas cosmic impact below. I keep a pretty close eye on our subject but had no idea such intricate, original and thorough work was underway in the Czech Republic. Gunther Kleteschka has appeared on several YDB papers, but has clearly been busy in his own laboratory collecting entirely […]