Comet Research Group Claims New Evidence of Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

​A new scientific paper from the Comet Research Group claims to have found evidence that a comet hit the Earth around 12,800 years ago, causing the Younger Dryas Ice Age. The peer-reviewed study, published August 6 in the journal PLOS One, claims that iron and silica microspherules were found in ocean floor sediment cores in Baffin Bay, along with an unusually high amount of platinum, all of which the researchers determined were likely induced by a comet strike. They used what they described as “a novel application of single-particle inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometry” to reach their conclusions, and the article devotes much of its space to explaining and arguing for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis rather than reporting on the findings.

​The Comet Research Group has consistently argued that iron- and silica-rich microspherules are the diagnostic proof of a comet impact since proposing the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis in 2007. However, many of their claims about these tiny spheres have either been debunked or have shifted over time. Originally, the group claimed such microspherules derived from cosmic dust. However, repeated testing that showed them to be almost entirely earthly has led to the current claim, first offered by the Comet Research Group’s late Ted Bunch in 2012 (yes, the guy who claimed proof that a comet destroyed Sodom), which is that the airbursts caused by Earth passing through a comet’s debris trail result in the formation of such spheres on earth.
 
Just hours after NPR called out Graham Hancock, Jimmy Corsetti, and Joe Rogan for their Göbekli Tepe conspiracies, Hancock posted triumphantly on social media a line from a Daily Mail piece about the comet study, which credited him with advocating for the comet hypothesis: “Some researchers, including well-known author Graham Hancock, have long proposed that around 12,800 years ago, a giant comet passed through Earth’s atmosphere, triggering devastation that wiped out advanced civilizations worldwide.”
 
This is, of course, not exactly true. Hancock has not “long proposed” a comet impact. His original (and memory-holed) claim, from 1995’s Fingerprints of the Gods, was that a “pole shift” caused the Earth’s crust to slip, thus pushing his lost civilization’s homeland on Antarctica to the polar regions, freezing it. Hancock borrowed this idea from Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings (1966), and Hapgood, in turn, had stolen it from Brasseur de Bourbourg, who attributed the destruction of Atlantis to a “pole shift” recorded in ancient texts back in 1873.
 
Hancock did not adopt the comet explanation for his lost civilization’s disappearance until the Earth’s crust failed to move during the alleged 2012 “Maya apocalypse.” The claim first appears in Hancock’s 2015 book Magicians of the Gods—a scant ten years ago, and more than two decades into Hancock’s “lost civilization” career—where it is clearly identified as his appropriation of the Comet Research Group’s 2007 hypothesis.
 
The claim that a comet struck the Earth in the Ice Age, inspiring legend of the Great Flood is remarkably common. Immanuel Velikovsky was perhaps the most famous proponent, though he substituted Venus (!) for a more normal comet. Ignatius Donnelly made the same argument in Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), and the idea can be traced back all the way to 1694, when Edmond Halley, followed by William Whiston in 1696, first proposed that a crashing comet caused Noah’s Flood, the same flood Hancock et al. identify with both the end of Atlantis and the end of the Ice Age.
 
The trouble, of course, is that the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which Hancock and many members of the Comet Research Group have tried to align with myths and legends like Noah’s Flood and Atlantis, does not correlate very well with these stories. The hypothesis is that a comet strike burned 10% of Earth’s landmass, mostly in the north, and caused rapid cooling and glaciation. The Flood story, of course, is about massive rains and flooding, which better align with the end of the Ice Age, not the start of one. Hancock proposed a second comet strike in 9600 BCE that undid the results of the first, but there is no support for this, even among YDIH researchers.
 
When you add to this the deep problem that there is very little evidence that any myth or legend of its kind could have survived 12,000 years—there are no stories, for instance, of quite major geological events we know from solid evidence actually happened—the grounds for connecting an alleged Younger Dryas impact with stories recorded in historical times are wholly lacking.
 
As I said back in 2015, the YDIH might turn out to be true, but that is not proof of Atlantis:

Logically speaking, there is no reason to conclude from a comet strike that a lost civilization existed. Accepting Hancock’s claims at face value that a comet did hit the earth, that it caused apocalyptic devastation, and that the people alive in those days encoded a memory of that event into their oral histories, this does not require us to assume the existence of a high-tech lost civilization. Indeed, the evidence Hancock presented from Göbekli Tepe—that Stone Age people could plan and execute sacred structures without the usual trappings of civilization, such as farms—actively argues against the necessity of a lost civilization to explain it.

​No microspherules change this.