Nano-diamonds suggest comet collisions wrecked havoc on Earth

William Atkins
Saturday, 03 January 2009 23:37

Science - Space

The discovery of numerous tiny diamonds spread out at six sites in North America suggest to scientists that they came from comets impacting the Earth about 13,000 years ago, possibly dooming the Clovis natives and many now-extinct animals.


Douglas J. Kennett, J.P. Kennett, A. West, C. Mercer, S.S. Que Hee, L. Bement, T.E. Bunch, M. Sellers, and W.S. Wolbach reported their findings in the Science article “Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer.”

They discovered tiny diamonds, what they called “nanodiamonds,” in sediments at sites from Arizona to South Carolina, within the United States, and Alberta and Manitoba, within Canada.

The nanodiamonds were discovered at a depth that corresponded to being scattered about around 12,900 years ago (plus or minus 100 years).

The team, led by U.S. archeologist Doug Kennett of the Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, states that the discovery of these prolific number of nanodiamonds suggest that they did not originate on Earth.

They claim this because of the extraordinary conditions that would have had to be met for them to be native to our planet.

Instead, the researchers suggest that many comets could have likely impacted the Earth during the beginning of the Younger Dryas interval.

These collisions produced, as they stated in the abstract to their paper, “multiple airbursts and possible surface impacts, with severe repercussions for plants, animals, and humans in North America.”

Page two explains the Younger Dryas period, along with additonal information on the nanodiamond discovery.