At http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/infernignite/ … Dennis Cox suggests naming post impact plasma vortice of large airburst impact events which are commonly mistaken as ignimbrite, or volcanic tuff, as infernignite. This, he says, is impact melt formed when a terrain is flash melted, ablated, and forged by intense heat and the pressure of the vortice. Infernignites, he goes on, are formed and emplaced in an atmospheric pressure driven scenario and resemble a pyraclastic flow. It can be recognised visually as it is wind driven and displays that pattern of flow – frozen into stone. Infernignite is similar in appearance to volcanogenic rocks.
At http://sites.google.com/site/cosmopier/impact-craters/holocene-palaeolagoons/ is a claim that around 1200BC a crater in Brazil was formed – and the rock art in the region mirrors the event. Rock art can of course refer to remoter events and therefore some scepticism is in order here but apparently it can be found in the roof of a rock shelter, astronomical images claimed to be contemporary with charcoal from a fire C14 dated to 1234 +/- 200 years. It associates elliptical lagoons in the region to an impact by a shower of meteorites (or cometary fragments). At the same Cosmopier web site there are other articles – one on the end of Pleistocene Palaeo Lagoons of Brazil, Argentian, Bolivia, North America, South Africa and Austtralia which they say could have been caused by a shower of meteoric material. It comes up with some interesting titbits, such as in 1910 the earth passed through the tail of Comet Halley and was it was found to contain hydrogen cyanide, a volatile chemical. On the same site there is a piece on Palaeo Meteor Streams and chemical composition of meteoric material and comets, such as carbon monoxide, dioxide, methane and ammonia, plus organic compounds and complex molecules (some of which are listed). This appears to be derived from NASAs Stardust mission. There is another piece on Palaeo lagoon geometry which is said to indicate meteor showers.
Another website worth visiting is www.centauri-dreams.org where there is a piece on an item I posted a week ago – the creation of a rift between Australia and Antarctica (then joined together) with the title, ‘A Continental Shift and its Implications’ reflecting a drift of the poles (or somewhat of a wrench). The same web site has a piece, ‘Impact, Diamonds and the Younger Dryas’ a nice addition to the debate that notes Douglas Kennet of the University of Oregon said billions of nano size diamonds have been found in sediments at six locations (January 2009) and published in Science 323 No 5910. The arguments, as always – where is the crater? A commenter at the end of the piece says a programme on the Clovis culture he watched on the History Channel said there were some 400 Clovis sites in eastern US but only some 12 in western states.
At www.chiemgau-impact.com/historie.html we have a web site devoted to meteors and Tunguska like events. The Chiemgau is a ‘strewnfield’ – lots of small depressions in one region of Germany. Simialr strewn fields have been noted in other parts of Germany, in Belgium, and France, and once again these are attributed to comet fragments. The geologus is discussed in a reasonable manner and WWII artillery shelling, which is something new, as well as industrial smelting processes, both of which are eliminated as the cause.
The Chiemgau strewnfield has not be securely dated which lays other explanations open to revision – and this is what happens. It is found near the Chiemgau glacier and as that was much bigger during the Pleistocene it is said the depressions must have formed within the Holocene. However, Roman material has been found inside the depressions so it looks as if they were there when the Roman Empire was abroad. There are a lot of pages on the web site and these deal with a wide range of issues from geophysics to historical aspects, astronomical aspects, and the history of the discovery of the ‘strewnfield’ in SE Bavaria. The journal Astronomy published an online article in October 2004 with the title, ‘Did the Celts see a comet impact in 200BC’ and this web site developed as a result of subsequent research into that possibility. Further articles have appeared in Antiquity 84 (2010) and in the Journal of the Siberian Federal University (Engineering and Technology) again in 2010. There is a bit of geology in some of the information.