Spratlies Archipelago as the Australasian Tektite Impact Crater, Details of Formation & Richard Muller’s Dust Cloud Explanation for the Mid-Pleistocene Ice Age Cycle Transition
- 1 Department of Mathematics, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA
Abstract
Several significant events of a geological nature occurred approximately 800 ka before the present: (1) Australasian tektite fall (AA), (2) Brunhes-Matuyama geomagnetic reversal (BMR), (3) mid-Pleistocene changes in ice age cycles. Add to these the undated fault system (4) in the South-West (SW) of the South China Sea (SCS). Here we offer a unified cause for all four of these in (5), an impact in the SCS of a large, massive cosmic object, likely a comet, obliquely coming from the SW at an extremely shallow angle, striking the Sunda shelf yet unexploded with the shock of its compressed air bow wave, and causing the continual shelf and slope to collapse, resulting in the fault system (4), then traveling almost tangentially to the surface, exploding at impact with the sea surface, ejecting the tektites (1), creating the formation underlying the later atolls of Spratlies Archipelago (6), Nansha Islands in Chinese, & causing the BMR (2). An explanation of event (3) was Richard Muller’s hypothesis of planet Earth passing through an interplanetary dust cloud periodically due to ecliptic precession. Here we hypothesize this cloud actually is a belt of Australasian tektites ejected into space at super-orbital velocities that Earth encounters about every 100 ka.
- Muller, R.A. and MacDonald, G.J. (1995) Glacial Cycles and Orbital Inclination. Nature, 377, 107-108. https://doi.org/10.1038/377107b0
- Muller, R.A. and MacDonald, G.J. (1997) Glacial Cycles and Astronomical Forcing. Science, 277, 215-218. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5323.215
- Muller, R.A. (2002) Avalanches at the Core-Mantle Boundary. Geophysical Research Letters, 29, 41-1 to 41-4. https://doi.org/10.1029/2002GL015938
- Yamei, H., Potts, R., Baoyin, H., Zhengtang, G., Dieno, A., Wei, W., Clark, J., Guangmao, X. and Weiwen, H. (2000), Mid-Pleistocene Acheulean-Like Stone Technology of the Bose Basin, South China. Science, 287, 1622-1626. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.287.5458.1622
- Zhou, L.P. and Shackleton, N.J. (1999) Misleading Positions of Geomagnetic Reversal Boundaries in Eurasian Loess and Implications for Correlation between Continental and Marine Sedimentary Sequences. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 168, 117-130. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0012-821X(99)00052-7
- Larson, G. and Schaetzl, R. (2001) Origin and Evolution of the Great Lakes. Journal of Great Lakes Research, 27, 518-546. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0380-1330(01)70665-X
- Pillans, B. (2003) Subdividing the Pleistocene Using the Matuyama-Brunhes Boundary (MBB): An Australasian Perspective. Quaternary Science Reviews, 22, 1569-1577. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-3791(03)00078-7
- Chalk, T.B., et al. (2017) Causes of Ice Age Intensification across the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 114, Early Edition. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702143114
- Burchard, H.G.W. (2017) Younger Dryas Comet 12,900 BP. Open Journal of Geology, 7, 193-199. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojg.2017.72013
- Burchard, H.G.W. (2016) Meteorite Impact Origin of the Yellowstone Hotspot. Open Journal of Philosophy, 6, 412-419. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2016.64038
- Lee, M.Y. and Wei, K.Y. (2000) Australasian Microtektites in the South China Sea and the West Philippine Sea: Implications for Age, Size, and Location of the Impact Crater. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 35, 1151-1155. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1945-5100.2000.tb01504.x
- Glass, B.P. and Koeberl, C. (2006) Australasian Microtektites and Associated Impact Ejecta in the South China Sea and the Middle Pleistocene Supereruption of Toba. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 41, 305-326. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1945-5100.2006.tb00211.x