OF COMETS AND THE GREAT FLOODS

In central Washington State, within the geologically tortured Channeled Scablands, stand the remains of an ancient waterfall that six of New York State's Niagara Falls would not equal in size. The formation is known as Dry Falls, for it receives no water at all. But its remains are stark evidence of a flood event 12,800 years ago so unspeakably violent and global in extent that it is virtually impossible today to grasp the magnitude of the cataclysm.

But humans everywhere around the globe were once witness to catastrophic flooding, and more than 100 different cultures across the world recorded the mammoth deluge. In the West, citizens may know the event as Noah’s flood of the Bible. In the Middle East, the Book of Gilgamesh of great antiquity devotes copious verbiage to it. Native cultural myths everywhere tell of desperate days of continuous torrential rain and drowned homelands, of headlong flight for high ground, and of the land laid waste after flood waters finally receded.

What peoples in the waning days of the Ice Age experienced was real. Their myths and tales were based in fact. Our ancestors experienced hell on Earth brought by comet debris strikes and airbursts by the dozens over land, on the vast Ice Age ice sheets, and in the oceans. The extremely close comet flyby was codified in myth by the dozens as a glowing serpent or a celestial fish with radiant fins and flowing tail. As the comet swept ever so close by the Earth, the planet’s northern hemisphere was pummeled by large debris, much of it falling on what is now Canada and northern Europe. Then the great Laurentide ice cap, in some places two miles thick, held the northern latitudes of the continent in an icy grip. The chucks of cosmic rubble moving at more than 50,000 miles per hour exploded above ground or directly impacted the ice sheet, generating temperatures hotter than the sun. Those that fell or airburst over the north Atlantic vaporized thosuands of square miles of surface salt water and physically lofted titanic quantities of seawater into the stratosphere.

On the great ice caps, a mega-tsunami of water was liberated from the deep freeze by the super hot impacts. Overhead, the high speed winds of the jet stream began moving a super dense cloud of water vapor around the planet. Soon the entire earth was shrouded in gloom. And it began to rain and rain and rain.

At the edge of the ice sheets, torrents of flood water began roaring from the glaciers’ interiors. It is impossible to imagine what a wall of water hundreds of feet high cascading over land might appear like or what it would do to the landscape. But the Channeled Scablands of Washington are raw testament to the power of a sustained super flood of weeks in duration. For almost nothing grows on the scoured earth there to this day. And remember the falls, Dry Falls many times the size of famous Niagara? It was carved in perhaps three weeks.

Down river valleys around the world the ice water raged, followed by weeks of rains of such magnitude that no human alive since 12,800 years in the past has experienced anything like those torrents from the sky. Any low lying populated areas had to be abandoned immediately, if the settlements hadn’t been first wiped out by continental fires ignited by the heat of the comet fragment strikes. Those who could make their way to high ground may have survived the initial surges of flood water. But now they were fully exposed to fierce elements of driving rain and wind, not for a day or two but for nearly a month. Exposure snuffed out untold numbers. Cut off from their animals and local food resources, starvation set in and began to fell millions around the world.

As the weeks of ecological horror dragged on, the global cloud shroud began to cool the earth. Sunlight could not penetrate the cloud layers, so the planet began to grow cold. Over the course of the next year or two, the mean temperature of the globe would free fall no less than 15 degrees Celsius. The waning Ice Age was reversed in a geologic instant and the Earth would experience an extreme cold period for 1,200 years, a time know to science as the Younger Dryas climate episode.

A growing body of scientific evidence is revealing for the first time the monstrous tribulations that befell our ancestors. Archaeologists are unearthing the remains of lost advanced societies that disappeared all at once at the dawn of the Younger Dryas period, nearly 8,000 years before the pyramids of Egypt rose from the Giza plateau above the Nile River.

Megalithic sites replete with grand architecture and extensive religious compounds a magnitude larger than Stonehenge, such as Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and Gunung Padang pyramid in Indonesia, have been dated to or well prior to 12,800 years before the present day, even so far removed from today as 20,000 years ago.

And there are likely many more such sites, but they remain undiscovered because they are lost beneath the ocean waves. Many coastal and island communities were likely initially obliterated by comet borne super tsunami waves. Now, with water levels hundreds of feet higher than at the outset of the Younger Dryas, there is scant chance of discovering the extent of great sophisticated cultures that likely once flourished in favorable locations, such as river deltas and beside fine harbors.

We may count ourselves fortunate not to have been alive at the time of the comet debris strikes on the planet at the end of the last Ice Age. But perhaps we should not be too smug. Some of the mythic stories speak of the return of the hellish celestial visitor in the future and a cycle of global torment for humankind.

And we thought the unending drizzle of May and June was apocalyptic.