Mississippi Tsunami and Caribbean Megafloods

Mississippi Tsunami and Caribbean Megafloods

While doing research on Ice Age art in North America I came upon something quite different that was worth going into here. Quoting from a site which displays some highly controversial works that the authors are supporting as Ice-age art (Which we need not go into at present):

A more recent theory propose prehistoric Solutreans of Ice Age France also sailed west to America across the Atlantic Ocean along the south ridge of the polar ice cap more than 18,000 years ago. It is thought they brought Clovis point technology (earlier, similar points were found in France) and genetic diversity (such as red hair and large noses) to Native Americans.[2]
....
What Happened to the Mega Fauna and the Paleo-Indian? Then suddenly everything changed. A geological black-layer deposit of carbon containing nano-diamonds at over 50 locations in North America tells the tale: About 12,900 years ago a huge Ice Age comet hit the atmosphere just above Canada. The discoverer, Geologist James Kennett, also found an abnormally high percentage of these nano-diamonds in a Greenland Glacier at the 12,900-year layer. What happens next is like something out of a Doomsday sci-fi movie: The exploding comet creates a giant white-hot tornado and sets forests ablaze killing off just about everything and everybody in North America. The remaining vegetation would have been charred, forcing starvation upon surviving mega fauna. The comet probably did-in Paleo Indian as well.[8] This comet melted a good portion the Laurentide Ice Sheet and the resultant flood waters changed the Atlantic currents. This combined with ash and soot in the atmosphere, plunged the Northern Hemisphere into a Mini-Ice Age for another 1,200 years.[9]
[2] America’s Stone Age Explorers, 2004 WGBH Education Foundation
[8] http://www.livescience.com/animals/070521_comet_climate.html
[9] http://www.nola.com/national/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1193981665115410.xml&coll=1At the time of the supposed burst, a relatively mild interglacial stage was going on with continental glaciers then retreated North of the Great Lakes and settled down into Eastern Canada. The time of the burst has a good series of radiocarbon dates in the realm of 10500 to 10900 years ago: 12000 years ago or even 12000 BC is an unwarranted recalibration sought for this theory by its originators. And insisting on that point just might have been what cost them official sanction of the theory.
To quote a different site:

A team of researchers have uncovered evidence that a Mega-Flood, or series of megafloods, from beneath the Ice Age Laurentide Ice Sheet shaped the Bahama Islands. These Mega-Floods traveled down the Mississippi River Valley and into the gulf of Mexico.
These Megafloods entered the Gulf, rapidly raising the water level and forcing the overflow out through the much smaller Florida/Cuba Straits. This Glacial overflow then spread across the lower lying area known as the Bahama Mega-Bank. 12,000yrs. ago, (with sea levels at least 300 ft. lower than today) the Bahama Mega-Bank was an exposed land mass larger than present day Florida.
The megafloods originated from Glacial Lake Agassiz. Lake Agassiz was an Ice Age Lake formed by receding Glaciers.and covered an area of roughly 365,000 square miles. It was the largest lake in the world. The megafloods from Lake Agassiz traveled down the 120 mile wide, 600 mile long Mississippi River Valley. The Mississippi Valley covers an area of 35,000 sq. miles and was itself cut out by this same Ice Age flooding. The Ice Age melt water through this valley fed into the Gulf of Mexico...


...These outbursts would flood the Mississippi River Valley, destroying everything in their path as they surged through the 600 mile long, 120 mile wide valley and poured into the Gulf of Mexico. So much water would flood through the Mississippi Valley that offshoot valleys would be flooded in an attempt to contain the flood waters. These outburst are what overfilled the Gulf of Mexico and caused a Mega-Flood (or series of Mega-Floods) through the Bahamas and the Caribbean.
These continual floodings (or Burps) of glacial melt water into the Gulf of Mexico increased the water level of the Gulf. This overflow of water would surge through the narrower Florida/Cuba opening and is responsible for enlarging the Florida/Cuba Straits. This same overflow then washed down the lower laying Bahama Mega-Bank into the Islands left there today. The washed down areas were then covered by sea level rise at the close of the Ice Age.
These Mega-Floods also carved away at least 50 miles of the narrow western tip of Cuba. This area was once a partial land bridge of islands spanning towards the Yucatan peninsula. The north eastern portion of Yucatan was also washed down and submerged at this time due to rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age. These actions are what created the much broader Yucatan Channel of today.
Sediment cores retrived from these regions indicate that these southern floods came to an end around 9,000 BC. The final drainage of Lake Agassiz was northeast into the Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. This final drainage is thought by some to have been so powerful, that it shut down the Gulf Stream and brought about the Younger Dryas period (a very wet cooling period that affected the entire planet). This in turn caused the mass extinction, or near extinction, of plants, animals and people worldwide.http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216660-Ice-Age-Megaflood-Shaped-Bahamas
Unfortunately for the theory, the Lake Agassiz did not exist at the specified time or location as shown on the map. And the actual date of the outpouring of the glacial Lake Agassiz is usually dated to HALF the age presented in this scenario. However, the area indicated as Lake Agassiz on the map might well indicate the approximate location of the explosion of the celestial body in question. Its fragments would in turn rain down over the Eastern United States and into the North Atlantic.
Another similar view ofthe megafloods washing out the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, presented as an Atlantis theory is posted at:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_10_atlantis_asmith.htm

I will probably want to go into that more at a different tine but the site the link goes to is not the originating site and I would like to contact the original owner first.


The various articles like to speak of these floods as Tidal Waves or Tsunamis. That might seem to be the wrong term to use,but in fact the first wave of destruction was saltwater. We can tell this because it left saline soils in its wake, not only in the Great Lakes Area and in parts of Northern Europe, but also in Central America and the Northern parts of South America, Spain and in North Africa. All were affected by the same enormous Tsunami that originated in the Noth Atlantic and overflowed in all directions, flowing along the channels as indicated in the Outburst Flood Scenario. AND THEN the Freshwater floods followed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood

Glacial lake outburst floods in North America (13,000 to 8,000 years ago)
.....
The last of the North American proglacial lakes, north of the present Great Lakes, has been designated Glacial Lake Ojibway by geologists. It reached its largest volume around 8,500 years ago, when joined with Lake Agassiz. But its outlet was blocked by the great wall of the glaciers and it drained by tributaries, into the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers far to the south. About 8,300 to 7,700 years ago, the melting ice dam over Hudson Bay's southernmost extension narrowed to the point where pressure and its buoyancy lifted it free, and the ice-dam failed catastrophically. Lake Ojibway's beach terraces show that it was 250 metres (820 ft) above sea level. The volume of Lake Ojibway is commonly estimated to have been about 163,000 cubic kilometres, more than enough water to cover a flattened-out Antarctica with a sheet of water 10 metres (33 ft) deep. That volume was added to the world's oceans in a matter of months.
The detailed timing and rates of change after the onset of melting of the great ice-sheets are subjects of continuing study.
There is also a strong possibility that a global climatic change in recent geological time brought about some large deluge. Evidence is mounting from ice-cores in Greenland that the switch from a glacial to an inter-glacial period can occur over just a few months, rather than over the centuries that earlier research suggested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoldia_sea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champlain_Sea

Actually at the time in question there was an inrush of seawater known to have taken place simultaneously along the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Baltic Sea, around the fronts of the glaciers in both continents, and among their remains can be seen signs of a catastrophic tsunami headed inland, such as whale skeletons left stranded in the mountains. On the European side there was an influx of Saltwater which created the Yoldia Sea and in North America the Champlain Sea was formed. Both areas were marked by deposits of what are called quick clays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_clay

Which in Russia also go to show that the ocean waters rolled much further inland than just the shores of the Baltic and indeed also indicated megafloods on their side draining into the Black and Caspian Seas, if not also rushing deeper into Siberia where the Ob basin was innundated at times during the Ice Ages.

At the same time as these catastrophic floods were going on. a lot of atmospheric dust was filtering down with the help of rainwater and being deposited as loess. There is rather a lot of loess around but some dispute over what it represents and how long it took to be deposited. In part that goes along with the other problems of getting good radiocarbon dates in this period. However, I can tell by looking at the maps that some of the indicated watercourses are loess beds of today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_event


Younger Dryas impact hypothesis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Younger Dryas event)

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis or Clovis comet hypothesis was the hypothesized large air burst or earth impact of an object or objects from outer space that initiated the Younger Dryas cold period about 12,900 BP calibrated (10,900 BP uncalibrated).

One scenario proposes that an air burst and/or earth impact with a rare swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comets set vast areas of the North American continent on fire, causing the extinction of most of the large animals in North America and the demise of the North American Clovis culture at the end of the last glacial period.[1] This swarm would have exploded above or even into the Laurentide Ice Sheet north of the Great Lakes. An airburst would have been similar to but many orders of magnitude larger than the Tunguska event of 1908. Animal and human life not directly killed by the blast or the resulting coast to coast wildfires would have starved on the burned surface of the continent.

The scenario has been the subject of criticism and doubts. Impact specialists have studied the claim and concluded in 2010 that there never was such an impact, in particular because various physical signs of such an impact cannot be found.[2] The evidence for the event has been thoroughly dismissed, and the hypothesis is no longer considered viable in the scientific community.[3]

--This from Wikipedia. The hypothesis was clearly worded wrongly from the onset. One of the major problems is the radiocarbon-recalibration of dates, which in this case was obviously subject to a disequilibrium owing to the catastrophe described itself. The Carbon-14 balance was altered by the event. Because of this, dates before the event were off in one direction, coincidentally about right for a brief period, and then wrong in the other direction. So in this case the date of 10900 years ago (plus or minus 500 years) should have been left alone.
Here in Indiana a lot of the experts were impressed by the microdiamonds (and even larger diamonds) resulting from the event, and the Wikipedia entry quotes an article about the evidence in the Ohio and Indiana area "The only plausible scenario available now for explaining their presence this far south is the kind of cataclysmic explosive event described by West’s theory. "We believe this is the strongest evidence yet indicating a comet impact in that time period," says Tankersley." [Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened by New Evidence Located in Ohio, Indiana, http://www.uc.edu/News/NR.aspx?ID=8625 ]
Furthermore saying there "Is no evidence" of an exploding body over Southern Canada when there are hundreds of splintered meteorite impacts along the East Coast as a result-the Carolina Bays-and several large chinks of the meteorites on display at the American Museum of Natural History-The Cape York Meteorites- is just WRONG. And I don't care who "the scientific community" might be on this occasion, when they have dismissed the theory on the grounds "there is no evidence" when the evidence is staring them right in the face, "the scientific community" has not got the right to venture any such an opinion nor yet to dismiss any possibility of an impact at the time.