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Did ancient asteroid cause mega-tsunami?
In a temple at the Mayan site of Palenque, scribes recorded that a catastrophe befell Earth around 3300 BC. I argue in my book Mayan Calendar Prophecies: Predictions for 2012-2052 that descriptions of this event in Mayan inscriptions and historical chronicles are consistent with the breakup of a comet and the oceanic impact of its fragments which spawned mega-tsunamis that wiped out coastal civilizations of the time. Research shows that something catastrophic did befall Earth right when the Maya said it did. Researcher Dallas Abbott has found mega-tsunami deposits on the island of Madagascar that are the size of Manhattan and taller than the Chrysler building. The wave that left those deposits must have been thousands of feet high. Earthquake-induced tsunamis can only produce waves a couple hundred feet tall. Thus some other force must have produced this wave. Abbott argues that it was an asteroid or comet that slammed into the ocean and she thinks she has even found the crater. Read the research below to get the details:
Ancient Crash, Epic Wave
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: November 14, 2006At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.
The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.
Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.
Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every 1,000 years.
Read the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/science/14WAVE.html
Filed under: News · Tags: 3300 BC Event, asteroid, comet breakup, comet impact event, mega-tsunami