THE NIGHT THE STARS FELL
Wooly mammoth sleep standing up. Small calves sleep in a heap between the legs of the adults for protection against the huge American lions and sabertooth cats of the late Pleistocene. Nearby, thousands upon thousands of massive bison also huddle close together in sleep – a defensive strategy, too.
As the animals slumber in the great grasslands at mid-continent, dozens of unfamiliar specks of what look like bright starlight appear in a broad cluster low on the horizon to the north.
Squatting outside of a sapling and animal hide shelter to urinate, an elder woman in a Clovis tribal clan observes the glow of white dots over the northern horizon. She has never seen such a formation in the night sky that she has watched every day of every year since childhood. She does not know what to make of it. She calls into the hut to rouse others to come and take a look at the strange new lights in the heavens.
As a hut mate exits the shelter, the sky brightens suddenly with streaks of light. Within seconds it appears as if the heavens are raining curtains of fire. Far over the horizon, the lower atmosphere east to west erupts in a silent blinding flash. The illumination is so intense the woman claps her hands to her eyes in pain. It is the last sensation of any kind she will ever experience.
Below our feet, almost everywhere across present-day America, is a quarter-inch layer of black soot-like sediment. That thin layer, known as the black mat, is a few dozen feet below the surface in a sediment band laid down 11,900 years ago. That black-as-night layer of matter is evidence of one god-awful day in America.
The black mat layer is, indeed, soot laced with exotic microscopic carbon compounds that, except for the untold billions of super small nano-diamonds in the mix, are not of this earth, or, rather, are created on the planet only when an object from space traveling at hypersonic speed slams into earth’s crust. The unimaginable pressures attained by such strikes create different states of matter that simply are not present in the surface rocks of the planet.
That black carbon layer is prima fascia evidence of fire. But this was no ordinary range fire on the Great Plains. This fire engulfed the entire continent from southernmost Canada all the way to northern Mexico, 11,900 years ago. The entire landmass was set ablaze by nuclear-like heat generated by dozens of comet debris strikes on the continent and explosions in the atmosphere.
The woman outside her hut, the sleeping mammoth, and the bison herd were all struck by thousands of superheated particles of shattered comet and pulverized earth rock traveling at 40,000 miles an hour or more, most of it racing down range to the south. The intense heat of the cometary shrapnel ignited anything organic everywhere. A colossal firestorm ensued coast to coast, a conflagration that is impossible to fathom.
The Clovis people and their advanced stone tool culture vanished utterly from the continent. It is thought that perhaps as many as a million Clovis perished, along with all horses and camelids, all the giant cats, the short-faced bear, huge dire wolves, the gigantic armadillo-like glyptodont, in short, all the Pleistocene megafauna. It would take nearly a millennium for a new tribe of humans – the Native Americans – to repopulate the great land coast to coast and for the populations of familiar animals such as bison, deer, moose, and brown bear to recover and radiate northward from the Mexican frontier into the vast continent’s re-greening interior.
Across the globe, the smoke from the burning of North America darkened the daytime sky for months, causing the climate to cool dramatically. At the time, the last Ice Age was fast waning, and the mile-high hemisphere-straddling Laurentide ice sheet was in rapid retreat from what is now the United States. For 4,000 years prior to the comet debris strikes, temperatures had been rising to such an extent that climate over the continent was already similar to that which we experience today. But the environmental upheaval that followed the debris fall reversed the march to a warmer climate regimen, and the world was plunged into a thousand year period of intense cold much like that when the glacier ice was master of the realm. Climate scientists know the ‘big chill’ by the moniker Younger Dryas, named for an arctic plant in Scandinavia.
Researchers are beginning to piece together a view of our earthly heavens that runs counter to everything we assume about our solar system neighbors. It’s not particularly reassuring. There is a growing body of evidence that space rubble strikes on our planet are far more common than had been imagined. Yes, there are always tiny bits of matter entering the upper atmosphere and burning up in a streak of light the public calls shooting stars. Stand outside any clear night for five or ten minutes and you are like to see one. Five or six times a year Earth routinely passes through comet debris streams. We see the results of the passage as meteor showers: the Leonids, the Perseids, the Geminids, and so forth. The number of shooting stars visible within an hour jumps five and ten fold and more. We look forward to such nights of meteor showers. But there is no telling if there are large objects in the heavenly debris streams. Apparently, the presence of large objects is not as rare as we had imagined.
Most everyone knows that 66 million years ago an object from space the size of Mount Everest slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula and the environmental devastation the strike caused worldwide snuffed out the great beasts we call dinosaurs. But who knows about the Tunguska Event in western Siberia in 1908? There an object the size of a bus exploded eight miles up over the taiga forests in that region and the ungodly pressure wave knocked down thousands of square miles of trees, in fact, virtually every tree in the territory. Had the object arrived four hours later, it would have come down over London.
In 536 A.D., chroniclers of the age all over the world left written records about a period of seven or eight years of horrific weather, gloomy skies, repeated crop failures, and catastrophic famine. We know the period as the onset of the Dark Ages. The name is apt, for “the sun seems in perpetual eclipse” wrote a Byzantine scribe, and “bread (grain) failed in every quarter.” At the time, Chinese observers wrote that an angry comet could be seen in the sky, and in its wake there was snow in all seasons and famine year after year after year.
There is increasing evidence that the stories of the Great Flood in the Bible and in the Book of Gilgamesh were triggered by tsunami, possibly from an ocean strike 5,000 years ago that left behind what appears to be a large depression in the Indian Ocean seafloor known as Berkkle Crater. Coastal and river delta communities from Africa to Australia were wiped away by gigantic waves that left telltale chevron-shaped sediment formations on a number of coastlines.
The strikes that precipitated the Younger Dryas 1,000-year return of Ice Age cold brought down the first wave of human occupation on the continent and cleared out the environment for the unopposed arrival of Native Americans. It also drove an entire community of extremely large animals extinct but opened the door for the migration of other smaller-in-stature species that we are all familiar with today.
I do like to stand outside on a fine cold night and watch a meteor shower. It’s a treat I have enjoyed yearly for decades. But I also watch with a jaundiced eye, for I know that once in a very great while, large objects with what seem like sinister intent are embedded in the comet debris streams. They are harmless, of course, unless Earth happens to cross directly in front of them in its customary orbit about the sun. Then, sometimes, human history suffers a staggering roundhouse punch.
Here’s hoping that a celestial blindside fist doesn’t land anytime soon.
