The cause of the Ice Age has been found. Free Technical Library News

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Cause of the ice age found

11.03.2012

An international team of scientists, exploring sedimentary deposits in Lake Quiceo, located in central Mexico, discovered a thin ten-centimeter layer of dark color filled with soot and other "exotic" substances that could not have appeared on Earth just like that - nanodiamonds, "impact" spherules (compounds of carbon atoms that appear only with a strong impact), etc. Scientists argue that this layer could only have arisen as a result of a large celestial body falling to Earth - a comet or an asteroid.

The researchers estimate that the impact occurred approximately 12900 years ago. It was a fairly large celestial body several hundred meters across. Scientists believe that it entered the earth's atmosphere at a very high speed at an acute angle, so it subsequently broke up into smaller fragments, and the consequences of its fall were not as terrible as they could be.

It was 12900 years ago that the period called the Early Dryas ended on Earth, and the Younger Dryas began - a very short period characterized by a sharp cooling, oppression and collapse of ecosystems, the extinction of many large animals in both Americas and Western Europe - mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed cats. At the same time, there is a decrease in the number of human populations in the same areas. In North America, for example, during the Younger Dryas, in just a thousand years, the vast aboriginal culture of Clovis disintegrated and died out, which in all respects was very stable and claimed to have a protracted existence.

There were a lot of possible explanations for the Late Dryassian cooling, among them was the asteroid version, but at that time it was recognized as very controversial. The basis for it was the recently discovered sedimentary anomaly, which covers North America, Western Europe and Greenland. The chemical composition of this sedimentary layer, if not in scale, then in character, is very similar to the sedimentary layer left by the famous Chicksculub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. According to this hypothesis, 12900 years ago, the sky “shot” another large asteroid at the Earth, but it fell the wrong way and brought less terrible destruction.

Until now, the asteroid version has been at the very bottom of the list. Now, after the discovery in Lake Kitseo, she moved to the first place.

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