THE MORNING THE ICEBERGS FLEW
(Third in a series)
Peppered throughout the low piedmont regions of North Carolina and South Caroline, as well as along the easterly and southerly margins of states from New Jersey to Mississippi, there are distinctly oval shaped farm fields, wetlands, ponds and lakes by the thousands. They are known by the name Carolina Bays. Across much of central Nebraska there are similar shallow depressions in the earth. Finland in Europe exhibits a fair share of these creations, as well.
The many Carolina Bays are a customary part of the landscape in the Carolinas. They are scarcely given much thought, other than some are fine fishing holes and boating waters. Who among us could imagine that these bodies of water, bogs, and marshes, languishing in the warm southern sun, are the children of ice, or rather icebergs. In fact, the Carolina Bays were formed in an hour or two 13,000 years ago, the day that icebergs literally flew through the heavens.
On a fine cold morning in March 130 centuries ago, much of North America was laboring under a blanket of glacier ice two miles thick. The leading edge of the vast Laurentide ice sheet, an ice cap larger than that atop Antarctica today, was showing signs of melting. The world’s mean temperature was rising steadily at the time, signaling that the most recent Ice Age would soon draw to a close. In the bright heavens of dawn, dozens of lights shimmered just above the horizon. They had been visible at night for a week, but now they were visible this particular morning, as the debris of a disintegrating dust and water ice comet bore down on Earth from the north. All across North America, Clovis culture tribal peoples by the thousands watched in awe as the strange lights brightened. They had never witnessed such things in the sky, and, worse, their shaman elders had warned that these brilliant points of light were a sign that the creator was displeased with humans.
All across central Canada, hundreds of objects the density of light snow but traveling at 70,000 miles per hour entered Earth’s atmosphere. Many of the smaller objects exploded above the ice sheet with the intensity of the detonations of large nuclear weapons. Larger objects slammed down onto the ice sheet. The largest fragment descended over what is now Hudson Bay and blew a massive hole in the ice, creating a vast but shallow crater in the Canadian Shield landscape. Several huge cometary pieces punched into the ice over what is now Lake Michigan and liberated the region of its ice covering.
The colossal release of energy over the ice sheet collapsed vast portions of the formation and sent hundreds of thousands of huge blocks of ice flying at supersonic speeds down range toward the southeast and south. Several other impactors ejected ice to the southwest. For perhaps little more than an hour or two, millions of tons of ice that had exploded out and away from the ice cap flew in great shallow arcs over the continent. For a time, the heavens rained icebergs ranging from the size of buses, to Olympic swimming pools, to city blocks, to a third of Manhattan Island. Many flew a thousand miles, some nearly twice as far.
When the icebergs landed, they hollowed out shallow depressions over tens of thousands of square miles. And then the perpetrators vanished as their icy cores eventually melted away and left shallow sheets of water behind with low sandy sediment rims that have, by and large, eroded almost to nothingness over 13,000 years.
Satellite images of the Carolina Bays from space show what we now know is a monstrous debris field up and down the east coast, rendered palatable and picturesque by the calm watery surfaces of the Bays wetlands, ponds and lakes. There is nothing in the photos that betrays the unimaginable violence that overwhelmed the continent on that March day and rendered the giant Pleistocene mammals on the continent extinct and also snuffed out all but a handful of the indigenous people from coast to coast.
But the images do show that all these depressions in the landscape have a characteristic oval profile and that the long dimension of the water bodies are all oriented toward the north northwest, toward the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay in Canada. By drawing a line through the center of each depression, researchers have discovered that all the lines converge in only a few locations where the largest cometary objects must have crashed down onto the planet. Huge Hudson Bay sits at one of the major convergence points, and some now think that the massive feature is the largest impact crater on the planet.
The bombardment of the northern hemisphere of Earth was duplicated throughout the solar system. The sun, moon, Mars and all the other planets and their satellites were raked with comet debris fragments. The moon and Mars show clear evidence of geologically recent strikes across their northern polar regions. Ice core samples from the Greenland ice cap reveal an elevated radioactivity spike 13,000 years ago, the result of massive solar prominence flares sweeping across Earth’s orbit caused by the sun’s surface being disturbed by many great bolide impacts.
The savage iceberg rain was short lived, but the catastrophic energy release from the bombardment set the continent ablaze and the forests and grasslands burned for weeks. Walls of super-heated air spawned by the debris strikes swept southward from impact zones in the north and ignited almost everything that would burn from coast to coast and down into Mexico. The fires raged until catastrophic ice cap melt-water floods and month-long rains of biblical proportions drenched the continent.
The human survivors of the cataclysm left behind mythic oral accounts by the hundreds, tales that have come down to us over millennia, many of which have been written down now and can be studied. There are stories of storms of chunk ice, of the sky collapsing, of fires so hot the only means of survival was to escape underground, of floods that drowned the lowlands to the foot of high hills and mountains, and of ocean waters sweeping inland for many miles. There are accounts of explosions on the moon, tales of intense light so bright it made the bones beneath the flesh visible, and recollections of whole villages and herds of giant animals drowning in the deluge or being swallowed by super tsunami waves.
What is becoming increasingly evident now is the fact that the last Ice Age did not waste away as had always been the assumption. No, the last Ice Age was utterly dismembered in a geological instant during an horrific celestial fusillade. Catastrophe befell the planet 13,000 years ago, and there were human witnesses who saw the horrors of the event and who lived to tell of the day that icebergs flew among the clouds.
(Photo: NASA image of the Carolina Bays in North Carolina. There are perhaps 50 visible in the picture.)
