“Now I see you, I’m frozen in time
All your colors burst into life
I don’t dare close my eyes…”
Watching for Comets – Skillet
Well, I’ve started this essay about five different ways, but so far, I haven’t been able to make it settle out the way I want. Let’s see how I do this time…
Cascadia, like any bioregion, is primarily defined by its mountains and hills, rivers and shorelines, plains and valleys. But in our case here, we had (literally on top of everything else) eons long periods when miles thick ice sheets covered the area as they also carved deep, deep furrows in the terrain as the glaciers bulldozed through everything in their path. The grooves that were worn into the bedrock by the incalculable grinding pressure of the relentless sheets of ice can still be seen today.
(Picture of glacier striations: Coming Soon)
This Pleistocene Ice age lasted for over two million years with around 20 different periods of expansion and contraction of the ice sheets. Most of the earths water was tied up in these ice sheets sending the coastlines much farther out than what we know today. NASA estimated that 20,000 years ago, global sea levels were 120 meters lower than today.
This roughly 400’ lower sea level exposed far reaching coastlines that ran almost interrupted from Siberia across Alaska, through British Columbia, and down the Pacific states to California. During this time people and animals roamed, and they migrated out of Asia all along these coasts to spread themselves throughout all of North America.
And then, in a flash, it was all gone.
Evidence for this is, and has been, littered across the landscape for all to see. However, the recent open availability of satellite imagery has made it so much easier for people to find all the pieces of this scattered puzzle and start putting things back together. When we combine this with the information gathered from the Greenland deep glacial ice core drilling, the evidence, is as they say, highly compelling.
My interpretation here is that at least two, enormous, extra-terrestrial, cataclysmic events impacted North America between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago. The first of these series of events melted the ice age glaciers in a relative flash, and basically wiped the map clean, causing a massive floral, faunal, geographical, and cultural reset for Cascadia as it did all of north and central America. Temperatures spiked radically, leading to dramatic breaking up of the packed glacial ice, and resulting in massive meltwater runoff. The accompanying steam and smoke ejected high into the atmosphere created conditions not unlike a nuclear winter, the result if which, changed the climate rapidly once again, plunging our planet back into another ice age. One that was colder, albeit much briefer, than the previous 2.5 million Pleistocene epoch. This “brief” ice age is called the Younger Dryas, so named after the Dryas Octopetalia flowers which were common to Europe in that time period. Better and more informed people than me have done incredible work putting together the pieces of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) and since I don’t wish to insult anyone. Here I will point you their way with a few links I found helpful:
Cosmic Tusk: https://cosmictusk.com/hancock-younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-since-2007/
Crater Hunter: https://craterhunter.wordpress.com/a-different-kind-of-climate-catastrophe/
Comet Research Group: https://cometresearchgroup.org/
Only after the shock of the preliminary impacts subside, and worldwide temperatures drop like grandma tripping down a flight of stairs, do we enter the 1500 year long Younger Dryas period. Temperatures are fairly stable and cold. Colder even than much of the entire Pleistocene. But then around 11,500 years ago, we again see a dramatic and sudden spike in temperatures that brings an end to the Younger Dryas ice age, and sends global temperatures rocketing up, up, and away toward the warmth of the Holocene we presently enjoy.
(ice core temperature graph image, circle 11,000)
Presumably, these events were the result of a comet or an asteroid (or both, as I am starting to think) that broke up after it was trapped into a close solar orbit by the effects of Jupiter’s immense gravity, spinning out a periodic dance of death with the earth. What many researchers new believe is that the Taurid meteor showers, which come around twice a year, are the scattered remains of these devastating impact events. Some now believe that the Tunguska event of 1908 might also be related, as it happened at the end of June during the springtime intersection with the Taurids.
If, after reading this, you go off to look up information regarding the Taurid Meteor shower, you will see it is often linked to Comet Encke. Common thought says these showers are made of Encke’s dust as it passes by, crumbling away to nothingness. However, after tumbling down several rabbit holes related to this topic, my personal belief is a flavor of the research presented by William Napier: that Comet Encke is (only) a 3 mile wide remnant chunk of ice after a much, much larger comet (100 km) collided with an asteroid that was also locked into the orbital tracks laid by Jupiter’s gravity, and broke apart. This deadly hailstorm of cosmic ice, rock, and iron worked its way along its periodic path until it tragically intersected our own planet’s orbit. And then it rained down on the Earth. For years.
The people of this time must have just been terrified, transfixed and literally glued to the night sky as they watched this all unfold. There had to have been multiple comets overhead, probably the brightest thing in the night sky other than the moon. Speaking of the moon, it probably lit up now and then as it also got peppered by the same stream of debris that was raining down on us.
As a result of extraterrestrial bombardments, the kinetic shock and heat from all of the impacts shattered and melted the ice sheets over North America. In our case, trapped by the narrow convergent funnel of the Northern Cascades and the Canadian Rockies, billions of tons of water loaded with icebergs the size of cruise ships, raged out of the north and swept across the land, overflowing the existing channels of the Columbia river system.
All this water dramatically changed the landscape, killed almost everything along the way, raised the oceans, flooded the waterways of the Puget Sound, and made Vancouver island an actual island instead of the extended foothills of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains.