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> Those are both from 2009, ten years before the smoking gun cited.

Just so you're aware, you haven't actually cited the study yet in this thread.

(Kjær, Kurt H., et al. "A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland." Science advances 4.11 (2018) is the citation, for future reference)

(FWIW, Kenny, Gavin G., et al. "A Late Paleocene age for Greenland’s Hiawatha impact structure." Science advances 8.10 (2022) disputes the age given for that impact crater.)




As already noted, any connection to Hiawatha crater was only ever conjecture. Evidence that Hiawatha was not coincident with the YDB obviously tells us nothing at all about YDB events.

A recent survey article is Sweatman,

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

The remaining controversy is how much the strike contributed to the Younger Dryas development and other coincident events, particularly extinctions. To me, it is ludicrous to blame those on Clovis people, or on a climate hiccup smaller than they had weathered easily many times before. Now that we know people had already been there for 10+ millennia, the sudden wipeout idea gets much sillier.

The idea that the strike triggered the YD is appealing, but the record shows several other such cooling periods with very similar profile and duration in the past 100ky. It seems unlikely they were all triggered by comet strikes. But they could have been: we now know our records of comet strikes are woefully incomplete, having detected a very recent one only by enormous effort.

See also Wendy S. Wolbach et al.

Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/695703


Adding: it is disgraceful how sloppy and unscrupulous most opponents of the cosmic impact model have been. They should be ashamed. There is nothing wrong with demanding a high standard of evidence. Failing to maintain even the most basic standards for your own work is, especially in context, inexcusable.


They are righteous defenders of what amounts to the current creation myth of scientism. Nothing to see here when The Science is understood to be a religion.




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