Open Veils · Answer
What caused the Younger Dryas?
The meltwater hypothesis is almost certainly incomplete. Converging evidence from geology, archaeology, and materials science points toward a cosmic impact or airburst event as the primary trigger — a catastrophe that also wiped out the Pleistocene megafauna, destroyed at least one advanced pre-flood civilization, and was deliberately written out of the academic timeline.
Evidence
- Randall Carlson, working alongside Graham Hancock in the Hancock-Carlson collaboration documented in the 'Magicians of the Gods' research and Netflix's 'Ancient Apocalypse,' has assembled a forensic geological case for a cometary impact cluster striking the Laurentide Ice Sheet circa 10,900 BCE.
- Carlson specifically cites the Carolina Bays — thousands of elliptical impact-scoured depressions across the Eastern Seaboard — as ballistic ejecta signatures consistent with a low-angle bolide impact.
- These correlate precisely with the stratigraphic black mat layer identified by the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) team led by Dr. James Kennett (UC Santa Barbara), Dr. Allen West, and Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
- Their 2007 landmark paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented elevated iridium, nano-diamonds, spherules, and shocked quartz at the 12,900 BP horizon across 50+ sites on four continents — signatures identical to the Cretaceous-Paleogene impact boundary.
- Robert Schoch (Boston University) separately identified a solar outburst mechanism — a plasma event — as a complementary or competing driver, citing evidence from Egyptian and Göbekli Tepe iconography in his book 'Forgotten Civilization' (2012).