Tollmann's hypothetical bolide
Encyclopedia
Alexander Tollmann's bolide, proposed by Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann in 1994, is a hypothesis presented by Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n geologist
Geologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...

 Alexander Tollmann
Alexander Tollmann
Dr. Alexander Tollmann was an Austrian professor of geology.He was born in Vienna. He has been professor at the Geologischen Institut of the University of Vienna since 1969...

, suggesting that one or several bolides (asteroid
Asteroid
Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

s or comet
Comet
A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...

s) struck the Earth
Impact event
An impact event is the collision of a large meteorite, asteroid, comet, or other celestial object with the Earth or another planet. Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant...

 at 7640 BCE (±200), with a much smaller one at 3150 BCE (±200). If true, this hypothesis explains early Holocene extinctions
Holocene extinction event
The Holocene extinction refers to the extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch . The large number of extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods; a sizeable fraction of these extinctions are occurring in the...

 and possibly legends of the Universal Deluge.

The claimed evidence for the event includes stratigraphic
Stratigraphy
Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....

 studies of tektites, dendrochronology
Dendrochronology
Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...

, and ice core
Ice core
An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet, most commonly from the polar ice caps of Antarctica, Greenland or from high mountain glaciers elsewhere. As the ice forms from the incremental build up of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper, and an ice...

s (from Camp Century, Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

) containing hydrochloric
Hydrochloric acid
Hydrochloric acid is a solution of hydrogen chloride in water, that is a highly corrosive, strong mineral acid with many industrial uses. It is found naturally in gastric acid....

 and sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid is a strong mineral acid with the molecular formula . Its historical name is oil of vitriol. Pure sulfuric acid is a highly corrosive, colorless, viscous liquid. The salts of sulfuric acid are called sulfates...

 (indicating an energetic ocean strike) as well as nitric acid
Nitric acid
Nitric acid , also known as aqua fortis and spirit of nitre, is a highly corrosive and toxic strong acid.Colorless when pure, older samples tend to acquire a yellow cast due to the accumulation of oxides of nitrogen. If the solution contains more than 86% nitric acid, it is referred to as fuming...

s (caused by extreme heating of air).

Christopher Knight
Christopher Knight (author)
Christopher Knight is an author who has written several pseudoarcaeological and pseudohistorical books dealing with theories such as 366-degree geometry and the origins of Freemasonry...

 and Robert Lomas
Robert Lomas
Roberto Lomas is a British writer and business studies academic. He writes primarily about the history of Freemasonry as well as the Neolithic period, ancient engineering and archaeoastronomy...

 in their book, Uriel's Machine
Uriel's machine
Uriel's Machine:The Ancient Origins of Science is a book published in 2000 by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. The book's name is derived from a character of the same name in the Book of Enoch...

, argue that the 7640 BCE evidence is consistent with the dates of formation of a number of salt flats and lakes still extant in dry areas of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

. They argue that these lakes are the result remains of multiple-kilometer-high waves that penetrated deeply into continents as the result of oceanic strikes that they proposed occurred.

Mainstream evaluation

Quaternary
Quaternary
The Quaternary Period is the most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the ICS. It follows the Neogene Period, spanning 2.588 ± 0.005 million years ago to the present...

 geologists, paleoclimatologists, and planetary geologist
Geologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...

s specializing in meteorite
Meteorite
A meteorite is a natural object originating in outer space that survives impact with the Earth's surface. Meteorites can be big or small. Most meteorites derive from small astronomical objects called meteoroids, but they are also sometimes produced by impacts of asteroids...

 and comet
Comet
A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...

 impacts have rejected the Tollmann bolide hypothesis. They reject his hypothesis because:
  1. The evidence used to argue it can more readily be explained by more mundane and less dramatic geologic processes
  2. Many of the events alleged to be associated with this impact occurred at the wrong time, sometime hundreds to thousands of years before or after his hypothesized impacts; and
  3. There is a lack of any credible physical evidence for the cataclysmic environmental devastation and characteristic deposits that kilometer-high tsunamis would have created had they actually occurred.


First, many pieces of evidence used by the Tollmann bolide hypothesis to argue for catastrophic Holocene
Holocene
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...

 impacts can be just as well, in most cases even better, explained by more mundane geological processes. For example, the chemical composition of and the presence of volcanic ash
Volcanic ash
Volcanic ash consists of small tephra, which are bits of pulverized rock and glass created by volcanic eruptions, less than in diameter. There are three mechanisms of volcanic ash formation: gas release under decompression causing magmatic eruptions; thermal contraction from chilling on contact...

 with the specific acidity spikes in the Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

 ice cores presents clear evidence that they are volcanic, not impact, in origin. Also, the largest acidity spikes found in Antarctica ice cores are far too old, from 17,300 to 17,500 BP, to be associated with any Holocene
Holocene
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...

 impacts. The formation of modern salt lake
Salt lake
A salt lake or saline lake is a landlocked body of water which has a concentration of salts and other dissolved minerals significantly higher than most lakes . In some cases, salt lakes have a higher concentration of salt than sea water, but such lakes would also be termed hypersaline lakes...

s and salt flats is readily explained by the concentration of salts and other evaporite minerals by the evaporation
Evaporation
Evaporation is a type of vaporization of a liquid that occurs only on the surface of a liquid. The other type of vaporization is boiling, which, instead, occurs on the entire mass of the liquid....

 of water from stream-fed lakes lacking external outlets, called "endorheic lakes"
Endorheic
An endorheic basin is a closed drainage basin that retains water and allows no outflow to other bodies of water such as rivers or oceans...

, in arid climates. The composition of the salts and other evaporate minerals found in these lakes is consistent with their precipitation from dissolved material continually input into the lakes by rivers and streams and concentration by evaporation instead evaporation of sea water. Whether a lake becomes salty or not simply depends on whether the lake lacks an outlet and the relative balance between water flowing into the lake and leaving the lake via evaporation. Ocean water dumped into a lake as the result of a single catastrophic event, as suggested above, would contain an inadequate amount of dissolved minerals to produce, when evaporated, the vast quantities of salts and other evaporites found in the salt lakes, flats, and pans cited as evidence of a mega-tsunami
Tsunami
A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...

 by this hypothesis.

In case of Lake Bonneville
Lake Bonneville
Lake Bonneville was a prehistoric pluvial lake that covered much of North America's Great Basin region. Most of the territory it covered was in present-day Utah, though parts of the lake extended into present-day Idaho and Nevada. Formed about 32,000 years ago, it existed until about 14,500 years...

 (Great Salt Lake
Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake, located in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah, is the largest salt water lake in the western hemisphere, the fourth-largest terminal lake in the world. In an average year the lake covers an area of around , but the lake's size fluctuates substantially due to its...

), the above arguments for the Tollmann Bolide Hypothesis contain factual errors. First, the presence or absence of glaciers does not directly influence whether a lake becomes either a salt lake or not. When the Great Salt Lake was a freshwater lake, Lake Bonneville, a significant source of water was mountain glaciers. It was their disappearance along with reduced precipitation and increased evapotranspiration within watersheds due to higher temperatures that caused a reduction in the freshwater inflow to Lake Bonneville and it becoming a salt lake. Finally, the shift, which started before the hypothesized Tollmann bolide impacts, from a freshwater lake to a salt lake for Lake Bonneville was not instantaneous event, but occurred over a period of several hundred years as discussed in detail by various papers.

In addition, many published papers clearly demonstrate that isostatic depression
Isostatic depression
Isostatic Depression is the term used by geologists for the sinking of large parts of the Earth's crust into the asthenosphere. The sinking is caused by a heavy weight placed on the Earth's surface...

 of the Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

's crust is not only real, but quite capable of submerging substantial portions of coastal areas adjacent to continental ice sheet
Ice sheet
An ice sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km² , thus also known as continental glacier...

s and resulting in the accumulations of marine
Marine (ocean)
Marine is an umbrella term. As an adjective it is usually applicable to things relating to the sea or ocean, such as marine biology, marine ecology and marine geology...

 sediments and fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

s within them. A well-documented example of flooding caused by isostatic depression is the case of Charlotte, The Vermont Whale, a fossil whale found in the deposits of the former Champlain Sea
Champlain Sea
The Champlain Sea was a temporary inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, a paratropical subsea or epeiric sea created by the retreating glaciers during the close of the last ice age...

. Like many similar marine deposits, the sediments, which accumulated within the Champlain Sea lack the physical characteristics; i.e. sedimentary structures, interlayering, and textures, that characterize sediments deposited by a mega-tsunami
Tsunami
A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...

. In addition, many of these deposits and the fossils, which they contain, are far too old, by hundreds to thousands of years, to have been created by impact around either 9,640 BP or 5,150 BP. In case of the Champlain Sea, its sediments started to accumulate around 13,000 BP, almost 3,400 years before the oldest of the hypothesized Holocene bolide impacts.

Second, as noted above, a significant amount of the physical evidence used by Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann to argue for this Holocene
Holocene
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...

 impact is either too old or too young to have been created by this hypothesized impact. In many cases, it is hundreds to thousands, and in one case hundreds of thousands, of years too old to be credible evidence of a Holocene impact. For example, the research that dates the tektite
Tektite
Tektites are natural glass rocks up to a few centimeters in size, which most scientists argue were formed by the impact of large meteorites on Earth's surface. Tektites are typically black or olive-green, and their shape varies from rounded to irregular.Tektites are among the "driest" rocks, with...

s, which Tollmann bolide hypothesis regards as indicating the time of the hypothesized impact, is antiquated. Later research, has shown the tektites to be far too old, about 790,000 BP in case of the Australasian tektites, to have been associated with any of his hypothesized Holocene impacts. At this time, there exist no documented examples of Holocene tektites. In addition, the formation of salt lakes and salt flats is neither synchronous nor consistent with the hypothesized impacts having occurred about either 9,640 BP or 5,150 BP. For example, in case of Lake Bonneville
Lake Bonneville
Lake Bonneville was a prehistoric pluvial lake that covered much of North America's Great Basin region. Most of the territory it covered was in present-day Utah, though parts of the lake extended into present-day Idaho and Nevada. Formed about 32,000 years ago, it existed until about 14,500 years...

, Lake Lahontan
Lake Lahontan
Lake Lahontan was a large endorheic Pleistocene lake of modern northwestern Nevada that extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon...

, Mono Lake
Mono Lake
Mono Lake is a large, shallow saline lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in a basin that has no outlet to the ocean...

, and other Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

 pluvial lake
Pluvial lake
A pluvial lake is a landlocked basin which fills with rainwater during times of glaciation, when precipitation is higher. Pluvial lakes that have since evaporated and dried out may also be referred to as paleolakes.-Geology:...

s in the western United States, the transition to salt lakes and salt flats occurred at different times between 12,000 to 16,000 BP. Thus, the change from freshwater to salty water and eventually salt flats started over 2,400 to 6,400 years before the oldest of the impacts hypothesized by the Tollmann bolide hypothesis occurred. As a result, it impossible that the formation of these salt lakes could have been associated with the impact hypothesized by Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann.

Finally, credible physical evidence of either multiple-kilometer-high tsunami
Tsunami
A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...

 waves penetrating deeply into continents and the ecological devastation they would have certainly caused have yet to be reported from any of the thousands of paleoenvironmental records constructed from the study of lakes, bogs, mires, and river valleys all over the world by palynologists
Palynology
Palynology is the science that studies contemporary and fossil palynomorphs, including pollen, spores, orbicules, dinoflagellate cysts, acritarchs, chitinozoans and scolecodonts, together with particulate organic matter and kerogen found in sedimentary rocks and sediments...

. In case of North America, various peer-reviewed publications summarize numerous published scientific papers that provide detailed records of paleoenvironmental changes that have occurred throughout the last 10,000 to 15,000 years as reconstructed from pollen
Pollen
Pollen is a fine to coarse powder containing the microgametophytes of seed plants, which produce the male gametes . Pollen grains have a hard coat that protects the sperm cells during the process of their movement from the stamens to the pistil of flowering plants or from the male cone to the...

 and other paleoenvironmental data from over a thousand sites throughout North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

. In none of these records, have palynologists recognized any indication of either the catastrophic environmental devastation or layers of tsunami deposit
Tsunami deposit
A tsunami deposit is a sedimentary unit deposited as the result of of a tsunami. Such deposits may be left onshore during the inundation phase or offshore during the 'backwash' phase. Such deposits are being used to identify past tsunami events and thereby better constrain estimates of both...

s, which the mega-tsunamis postulated by the Tollmann bolide hypothesis would have created. Paleovegetation maps illustrate a distinct lack of the dramatic changes in North American paleovegetation during the Holocene, which would be expected from the cataclysmic ecological and physical destruction that a continental-wide mega-tsunamis would have certainly have caused.

For example, E. C. Grimm G. L. Jacobson and others documented a 50,000-year long record of environmental change by the analysis of pollen from an 18.5-meter (60.7 ft) core from Lake Tulane in Highland county
Highlands County, Florida
Highlands County is a county located in the U.S. state of Florida. The U.S. Census Bureau 2006 estimate for the population was 97,346. Its county seat is Sebring, Florida. The county comprises the Sebring, Florida, Micropolitan Statistical Area.- History :...

, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

. Because of the low-lying nature of the peninsula, which this part of Florida lies, this lake and the area around it certainly would have been flooded and obliterated along with many of the other lakes and bogs described in their and other publications. The forests and associated ecosystems of these areas would have been flooded and completely obliterated by the mega-tsunamis proposed by Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann. Despite its location, both the core and the pollen record recovered from Lake Tulane completely lacks any indication of any abrupt, catastrophic environmental disruptions, which the mega-tsunamis proposed by the Tollmann bolide hypothesis would have caused. This and other cores from Florida and elsewhere also lack sedimentary layers that have the characteristics of sediments deposited by either tsunamis or mega-tsunamis.

The cataclysmic scale of physical and ecological destruction that a megatsunamis, like the one proposed by Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann, would have caused to the Holocene landscape and ecosystems certainly would have left a painfully obvious and readily recognizable signature within the majority of long-term environment records. Such a signature has not been reported from the more than thousand cores from North America for which Holocene paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental records have been reconstructed. There is a similar lack of evidence for mega-tsunami related, Holocene, catastrophic environmental disruptions and deposits reported from environmental records reconstructed from thousands of locations from all over the world. This lack of a physical record for the occurrence of Holocene mega-tsunamis is quite revealing given that geologists and palynologists have been quite successful in some coastal regions finding in cores and exposures the characteristic sediments deposited by tsunamis locally generated by either earthquake
Earthquake
An earthquake is the result of a sudden release of energy in the Earth's crust that creates seismic waves. The seismicity, seismism or seismic activity of an area refers to the frequency, type and size of earthquakes experienced over a period of time...

s, volcanic eruptions, or submarine slides and recovering abundant well-defined records of their environmental affects by studying the pollen from cores and exposures.

A paper, which provides a more detailed analysis of the Tollmann bolide hypothesis, was coauthored by A. Deutsch, C. Koeberl, B.M. French, B.P. Glass, R. Grieve, W.U. Reimold, and other experts in the dynamics of extraterrestrial impacts and published in the same journal, “Terra Nova”, as Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann's paper.

Members of the Holocene Impact Working Group
Holocene Impact Working Group
The Holocene Impact Working Group is a group of scientists from Australia, France, Ireland, Russia and the USA who hypothesize that meteorite impacts on Earth are more common than previously supposed....

 have published papers advocating the occurrence of mega-tsunamis created by extraterrestrial impacts at various times during the Holocene and Late Pleistocene. However, none of these proposed impacts match either the cataclysmic scale or timing proposed by Kristan-Tollmann and Tollmann for Alexander Tollmann's bolide.

See also

  • Worlds in Collision
    Worlds in Collision
    Worlds in Collision is a book written by Immanuel Velikovsky and first published on April 3, 1950. The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object, and passed near Earth...

    by Immanuel Velikovsky
    Immanuel Velikovsky
    Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born American independent scholar of Jewish origins, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller Worlds in Collision, published in 1950...

  • Holocene extinction event
    Holocene extinction event
    The Holocene extinction refers to the extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch . The large number of extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods; a sizeable fraction of these extinctions are occurring in the...

  • Extinction event
    Extinction event
    An extinction event is a sharp decrease in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. They occur when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation...

  • Impact event
    Impact event
    An impact event is the collision of a large meteorite, asteroid, comet, or other celestial object with the Earth or another planet. Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant...

  • Timeline of environmental events
    Timeline of environmental events
    The timeline lists geological, astronomical, and climatological events in relation to events in human history which they influenced. For the history of humanity's perspective on these events, see timeline of the history of environmentalism...

  • Uriel's machine
    Uriel's machine
    Uriel's Machine:The Ancient Origins of Science is a book published in 2000 by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. The book's name is derived from a character of the same name in the Book of Enoch...


External links

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