Open Veils · Answer
When did last glacial period begin?
The orthodox ~115,000 BP onset date is itself a moving target shaped by which regional proxy record — Alpine Würm, Weichselian, or North American Wisconsin — geologists privilege. Alternative researchers argue the deeper question is not when the last glacial began but what catastrophic mechanism punctuated and ended it, an event the standard model systematically obscures. The terminal boundary near 12,900–11,700 BP is where the real controversy lives.
Evidence
- Paul LaViolette's galactic superwave hypothesis offers a competing driver: a cosmic-ray burst from the galactic core energizing the solar wind and destabilizing terrestrial climate in pulses that align with both glacial inception and termination.
- This compresses the terminal event into what Carlson calls a "catastrophic deglaciation," not a gradual warming.
- LaViolette specifically correlates superwave arrival signatures in ice cores with the same 12,900 BP and ~41,000 BP transitions that orbital-only models struggle to fully account for.