Mid Pleistocene Transition Impact
Unification of the Australasian Tektites and the Carolina bays


Cintos Research is an independent organization of individuals dedicated to interdisciplinary scientific research into the intersection of our solar system and the earth's geological history.

We wish to pursue the truth, no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism, both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. – Carl Sagan, Cosmos Introduction.

Our current goal is to spark interest in the enigmatic Mid Pleistocene Transition Impact among members of various professions. Our data is provided freely, and we are open to direct collaboration, or to support your independent research.

This site was created to share the context of our talk given at the 2019 GSA Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. As a result of that presentation, we were given the opportunity to submit our work fro peer review publication by the GSA. Two years plus on - due to delays brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic - the two papers we have generated are now published.

DOI
10.1130/2021.2553(24) entitled Postulating an unconventional location for the missing mid-Pleistocene transition impact: Repaving North America with a cavitated regolith blanket while dispatching Australasian tektites and giving Michigan a thumb

DOI
10.1130/2021.2553(23) entitled Terrestrial ejecta suborbital transport and the rotating frame transform

Our primary work product has been the
Carolina Bay Survey, in which we have measured the size and orientation of over 50,000 landforms. Considering the evidence contained in the Survey, we maintain that interdisciplinary research into a possible cosmic origin should be encouraged. Consensus opinion does hold a cosmic impact accountable for an enigmatic Pleistocene event - the Australasian tektite strewn field - despite the failure of a 60-year search to locate the causal astroblem. Ironically, a cosmic link to the Carolina bays is considered soundly falsified by the identical lack of a causal impact structure. Our conjecture suggests both these events are coeval with a cosmic impact into the Great Lakes area during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, at 786 ka ± 5 k.

What is a “Carolina Bay”, and why should one care? The following quote is from a 1998 PhD dissertation by Timothy D. Nifong:

Carolina bay depressions, once thought to number in the hundreds of thousands, are substantially rarer than previously believed. I estimate that fewer than 900 bay depressions with relatively unaltered site hydrologies remain within the study area. Those that do remain continue to disappear at an alarming rate. North and South Carolina bay depressions are important refuge for wildlife and for plant populations, including more than 65 "special status" plant species. Field observations and pertinent literature indicate that bay vegetation at relatively intact sites is highly dynamic, and that depression vegetation responds dramatically to differences in site disturbance regimes. Development of surrounding upland areas has resulted in increased isolation of Carolina bay depressions from the once pervasive role of fire as a landscape disturbance factor, and in the lowering of regional water tables. Consequently, bay vegetation has undergone an apparent "homogenization", with concomitant decreases in species richness and community diversity. If Carolina bay biodiversity is to be conserved and protected, increased and immediate attention must be given to prioritization, acquisition, and restoration of bay systems.

Our personal energies have been directed at socializing the bays - for the pressing ecological reasons, but also to encourage scientists in general to consider research into how they were created.


A challenging aspect of the hypothesis involves the lack of an identifiable impact structure. The conjecture suggests an extremely oblique - nearly tangential - impact, and that terrestrial material ejected from such an event would be distributed in a stylized manner. Our analysis correlates numerous proposed ejecta material emplacements - including the Carolina bays and the Goldsboro Ridge - to a cosmic impact event that struck the Laurentide ice shield at ~43°N, ~87°W. The proposed cratering impact, when combined with the scouring action of 7 full glacial ages, is seen producing the current-day Saginaw Bay Basin. We have followed the chronological constraints to a proposed date of ~787 ±5  thousand years ago.

Gradualistic processes are considered by modern science to be responsible for the creation and evolution of the Carolina bay phenomenon. Given our LiDAR views of 50,000+ perfectly formed and aligned landforms, that approach seems silly. For a full explanation of our speculation as to the origin of the Carolina Bays, please see our pages on Cintos.org, where we explore a cosmic impact into the Great Lakes at the time of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, ~800,000 years ago.

We presented a talk at the 2019 GSA Annual Meeting in Phoenix, entitled
An Incomprehensible Cosmic Impact At The Mid Pleistocene Transition, Searching For The Missing Crater Using Australasian Tektite Suborbital Analysis And Carolina Bays' Major Axes Triangulation. The link takes the viewer to the GSA abstract page, where additional links are available to retrieve the slide deck and a talk transcript.

Australasian (AA) tektites are distal ejecta of a cosmic impact into terrestrial sediments 788.1 ± 2.8 ka. Protracted explorations within the strewn field, as preferred by consensus opinion, have yielded neither an astrobleme nor a proximal imprint. In 3 lesser strewn fields correlated with progenitor astroblemes, tektites are strewn asymmetrically and their total masses and minimum loft distances scale with projectile kinetic energy (KE) partitioning yield. Pursuing an a priori astrobleme location within the uniquely expansive AA strewn field ignores such findings. Absent identification of proximal ejecta in the strewn field, workers are now inferring that indochinite tektites are proximal, dismissing their known devolatilization, weightless vacuum quench and their carefully derived re-entry speeds, ≥ 80% of Earth escape. A defendable guess 40 years ago, but promoting an a priori astrobleme in Indochina is now impeding progress.

Ironically, a cosmic link to the Carolina bays' genesis is considered soundly falsified by the same absence of a correlated astrobleme. We have measured ~50,000 of these shallow, oriented, ovoid basins, located around an annulus focused on Saginaw Bay, Michigan. We posit the ovoid planforms to be surficial manifestations of cavitation voids within an incomprehensible geophysical mass flow of volatiles and entrained target clastics.
Unifying both missing astroblemes, we propose an incomprehensible cosmic event on a hemisphere diametrically opposed to the AA distal tektite strewn field. We invoke a highly oblique, perhaps tangential, hypervelocity projectile ricocheting off the Earth’s limb along an extended footprint. Sub-horizontal shock to thick MIS 20 ice sheet overburden triggered endogenic comminution, as stored pressure potential within the substrate was released by phase change of pore water to steam, provisioning fluidized medial ejecta outflow for Carolina bay emplacement. Shocked ice plume expansion augmented tektite velocities, and dissipated significant partitioned KE, preventing another Chicxulub-style global conflagration. The KE partitioning process conspired with intervening ice age transgressions to dislocate proximal ejecta and obfuscate the cosmic signature.
AA tektite Suborbital Analysis with appropriate dynamical accounting supports a putative antipodal Saginaw impact site, as does a recent EIGEN 6C4 gravity field assessment. The hypothesis would be falsified if 26Al/10Be burial dating of terraces under Carolina bays disallows bay deposition circa 788 ka.

A talk entitled A Tale Of Two Craters: Coriolis-Aware Trajectory Analysis Correlates Two Pleistocene Impact Strewn Fields And Gives Michigan A Thumb was presented at the GSA’s North-Central Section 2015 Meeting in Madison, WI. The abstract is linked above, and a PDF version of the talk is available from the GSA via the link HERE.

I the fall of 2017,the AGU invited me to present our latest research on the Carolina bays, Australasian Tektite Strewn Field, and the enigmatic Mid Pleistocene Transition Impact. The abstract is available on the AGU website HERE, and that page has a LINK to the ePoster pdf file. The MPT Section of this site presents that poster on a series of web pages.

Considering the evidence contained in the Survey, we maintain that interdisciplinary research into a possible cosmic origin should be encouraged. Consensus opinion does hold a cosmic impact accountable for an enigmatic Pleistocene event - the Australasian tektite strewn field - despite the failure of a 60-year search to locate the causal astroblem. Ironically, a cosmic link to the Carolina bays is considered soundly falsified by the identical lack of a causal impact structure. Our conjecture suggests both these events are coeval with a cosmic impact into the Great Lakes area during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, at 786 ka ± 5 k.


Evidence continues to mount that a cosmic impact is directly implicated in the global cooling event known as the Younger Dryas (YD), yielding the acronym Younger Dryas Boundary Impact (YDB Impact), with the latest being findings of significant biomass burning at the onset 12,800 years ago. The creation of the Carolina bays has been linked by numerous researchers to the YDB (this group included, back in 2009), yet our work shows there is no correlation to the genesis of the Carolina bays at the time of the YDB Impact - they are far to ancient to have been created so recently. We instead posit that the Mid Pleistocene Transition Impact (MPT Impact) was responsible, and the YDB event may be linked only through association with the same progenitor cosmic object during a follow-on encounter with Earth. The MPT Impact is modeled as a tangential impact, in which a substantial portion of the now-fragmented cosmic impactor object continued on its solar orbit, only to revisit the Earth on numerous occasions during the last 800,000 years. One such intersection between the Earth’s orbit and the orbit of the impactor’s fragments may be the source of the YDB Impact event. Furthermore, we posit that during the impactor’s orbit around the sun since the MPT, it has been slowly dispersing into a ring of debris, setting it up as a possible “dust cloud” trigger for the transition from 42,000 year to 100,000 year glacial cycles which began during the Mid Pleistocene Transition.

Some insight that drives the Mid Pleistocene Transition Impact hypothesis:
  • "The Carolina Bays of the Coastal Plain of North Carolina are surface features formed during deposition of the surficial sediments." Gamble, Daniels & Wheeler, 1977
  • Catastrophically-formed Carolina bay rims are composed of tightly compacted angular siliciclastics, making them more resistant to erosion than uniformly-deposited sediments
  • Shallow angle cosmic impacts can create “Lost Impacts” due to non-conventional astroblemes
  • Large scale cosmic impacts create atmospheric blow-out situations, where ejecta is drawn upwards in a column which can reach earth escape velocity
  • Heavily eroded Carolina bays reveal evidence of great age
  • Carolina bays can be blanketed with significant surficial deposits through eolian, fluvial and marine deposits
  • Buried Carolina bays can re-emerge when blanketing deposits are un-roofed by more recent erosion
  • The precise geomorphology of the Carolina bay planforms is not determined or posited at this time - but we do insist they are catastrophically-generated landforms that occasionally display gradualistic surficial re-workings
  • The Australasian Tektite strewn filed contains only distal ejecta representing the unique tektite qualities that differentiate them from typical terrestrial impact glass
  • The Muong Nong type layered tektites are true devolatilized tektites which are co-located with splash forms, and should not be interpreted as proximal ejecta
  • The devolatilization and glass-forming processes of multi-kg tektites required their presence in the vacuum of space during suborbital trajectories lasting hours, not minutes.
  • Current scientific dogma that the Australasian tektite impact structure must be found within the bounds of the strewn field needs to be questioned by those who understand basic sub-orbital mechanics




At present, the survey project is unfunded. Please contact us if should you chose to assist.

Michael Davias
203-705-9272
Send me an email

ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0002-8960-4075



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