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 Carolina bays among members of various professions. Our data is provided freely, and are open to direct collaboration, or to support your independent research.We presented a poster at the 2011 GSA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. The poster content, seen below, is also available as a PDF for download. I presented a TALK on the Survey and its use of LiDAR & Google Earth. A PDF of the deck is available HERE.
We presented a poster at the 2011 Southeastern Section GSA Meeting in Wilmington. The poster content, seen below, is also available as a PDF for download.
We presented a poster at the 2010 GSA Meeting in Denver. The poster content, seen below, is also available in a booklet PDF file.
We also had the opportunity to give an oral presentation on our use of LiDAR in this research at the 2010 GSA Meeting in Denver. A PDF of the presentation is available for download from HERE, or can be viewed as web pages HERE.
We attended the December 2009 AGU meeting in San Francisco, and presented a poster of our hypothesis as to the genesis of the Carolina bays and their role in identifying a possible North American Wisconsinian Ice sheet impact event.
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 Wisconsin-era ice shield at ~43°N, ~87°W. The proposed scouring action of the event is seen producing the current-day Saginaw Bay Basin. We have followed the chronological constraints to a proposed date of ca 40 ka.
If you are a Google Earth user, you can reference the Inferred Orientation of Distal Ejecta thread on Google Earth's Nature and Geography (Moderated) forum, or simply click the GE logo here to download a starter kmz. The window below displays a subset of the data developed to support the Saginaw Impact Manifold hypothesis.
The Enigmatic Sand: a Call for Collaboration
Optically Stimulated Luminescence Dating (OSL) has proven to be a reliable method of dating sedimentary deposition timetables over the span of 1 kya to 100 kya. The process, which is well understood and accepted, is one which requires a rigorously controlled sample collection, handling and processing regimen. As such, it cannot be casually applied for testing across an extensive geography for research into a poorly-provenanced conjecture. The conjecture under consideration - our Saginaw Impact and Distal Ejecta Manifold - has minimal support in the community at present, yet we feel justified in the expenditure of the considerable resources suggested here.We propose a scenario in which significant quantities of distal ejecta, in the form of a 1-10 meter thick sheet(blanket) of fine-grained sand, was deposited (blanketed) across a wide area for the North American continent in a singular event lasting less than an hour ~41 thousand years ago (ka).. During this blanketing, we propose that the constituents of the strata were heated to beyond 200 C, resetting their OSL clock. Identifying a coherent OSL dating across a wide field of samples would strengthen the case for our conjecture.
Our conjecture suggests that the resulting strata of sand - as a unit - can easily be discriminated from more generic fluvial and eolian deposit using a set of easily applied and identified criteria:
- located immediately below current A soil horizon
- homogeneous strata unit of 1 to 10 meters in thickness
- unconsolidated
- contact with underlying strata to be conformable and sharply defined
- blanket will drape over hosting terrain up-slope/ down-slope while maintaining strata thickness
- mottled, laminated or gnarly presentation in vertical and horizontal cross section, suggesting turbid deposit environment
- no indications of stratified horizons within the unit (single deposition sequence accepted)
- exception to above when multiple units of otherwise-qualified strata exists in contact with each other, generating a horizon
- no indications of aqueous deposition, i.e. shells, therefore deductively considered eolian
- virtually no clay lenses present
- incongruous course skew seen in unit
- tightly constrained grain size across unit
- grain size (as a unit) variable from exceedingly fine sand up to small gravels
- no variation in heavy metal suite across strata
- little variation in presented color across unit
Suggested sitings for this strata include:
- sourced from within the rim of a Carolina bay structure, or within a field of these structures
- Costal margins, where a truncated bay will be interpreted as a parabolic dune
- Late Pleistocene (MIS-3) -era deposits on elevated platforms where existence is enigmatic
- Surficial deposits may represent re-worked surfaces. We encourage sampling of rims at depths of a meter or more.
Ideally, samples meeting the above criterial would also have previously been tested to indicate:
• OSL dating of ca 41 kya,
Due to the proposed geographic extent of this strata, we recognize it may well be considered "common" within your experience; yet enigmatic nonetheless in context, raising questions about the true depositional method.
Please consider the profile offered above, and should you have access to experimental datum derived from previous research which identified depositional strata meeting these criteria, we implore you to consider collaboration with us. In addition, should you have knowledge of , and access to, sites which exhibit these criteria, we invite you to assist us in obtaining OSL dating across the vertical and extent of the unit. Samples from depths of at least one meter are desired, so as to avoid reworked soils and encounter the original structural rim formation.
At present, the project is unfunded. Please contact us for more information.
Michael Davias
917-751-8861
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