Open Veils · Answer
What caused the end of last ice age?
The orbital-forcing model is a framework, not a full explanation — it cannot account for the speed, violence, or selectivity of the termination. Randall Carlson, Robert Schoch, Graham Hancock, and the Comet Research Group argue a catastrophic extraterrestrial impact at ~12,900 BP delivered the decisive blow, flash-melting the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering the Younger Dryas cold reversal. Paul LaViolette adds a solar outburst mechanism operating in parallel. The conventional picture now absorbs fragments of this — salty deep-water upwelling at 18,000 BP (per Nature Geoscience, Feb 2026), Eurasian Ice Sheet collapse cascading into AMOC failure (Nature Communications, May 2026) — but frames catastrophism as 'feedback' rather than primary cause.
Evidence
- Randall Carlson has spent decades mapping flood geology across North America — the Channeled Scablands, giant ripple fields in Montana, erratic boulders — as evidence of catastrophic meltwater deluges far too sudden for orbital forcing alone.
- Robert Schoch, drawing on his geological redating of the Sphinx enclosure, argues that a solar plasma event — a coronal mass ejection of extraordinary magnitude — scorched the Northern Hemisphere surface at the Younger Dryas boundary, vitrifying rocks and incinerating forests.
- Charles Hapgood's earlier crustal displacement model — endorsed in correspondence by Albert Einstein — proposed that accumulated polar ice mass periodically destabilizes the lithosphere, shifting the crust as a unit and relocating the poles.
- Recent mainstream findings are quietly convergent: the Nature Geoscience salty-blob study (Feb 2026) confirms CO2 was sequestered deep in the ocean and released abruptly at 18,000 BP — a release mechanism consistent with a sudden physical perturbation rather than gradual orbital drift.
- His work dovetails with the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, championed by researchers including Richard Firestone, Allen West, and James Kennett, who identified a platinum-enriched, nanodiamonds-bearing black mat layer at ~12,900 BP across dozens of sites on multiple continents.