Comet Strike-North America (II)

Comet Storm in North America 13,000 years ago.

11,000BC according to research published in Science magazine...

At about that time, say scientists, a massive comet struck the atmosphere somewhere above North America, broke into pieces and rained down fire and death wiping out the early Palaeo-Americans, also known as Clovis people, and making creatures such as the woolly mammoth, mastodon, short-faced bear, sabre-toothed cat, ground sloth and giant armadillo extinct. Not to forget the American camel and the American lion.

Although this theory first emerged a year ago and has been hotly debated ever since, the authors of the Science article present compelling evidence to support it in the form of nanodiamonds.

These, which are so small they are barely visible even under the most advanced microscopes, have been found embedded in 13,000-year-old sediment in North America and Europe. The only plausible explanation for this, say the authors, is a planetary catastrophe of the sort that bade farewell to the dinosaurs about 65 million years earlier.


Blasts from past

— The meteorite that may have killed the dinosaurs was said to have hit the Earth 65 million years ago. Other theories include the possibility that they were extinguished by a plague of insects

— The largest meteorite strike in Britain is thought to have taken place 1.2 billion years ago in what is now the Scottish town of Ullapool. It scattered material over 31 miles

— Experts believe that the Tunguska event, a blast in the Siberian wilderness in 1908 that was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, was caused by a comet or asteroid

— A meteorite big enough to have wiped London off the map hit Siberia in 2003. Its destruction extended for more than 40 miles