I just discovered this channel on YouTube.

Bloke has a hypothesis that a comet impacted the Indian Ocean around 5000 BCE and caused a huge tsunami (around 180m high) that caused widespread damage all around.

He starts off with damage around Perth and the WA coast.. Episode 2 he looks at Tas, Vic and the Bass Strait islands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_H6W2R88Z0&t=805s
Handy Link

I am not sure what to make of it. I don’t have enough knowledge in this area. Is he onto something or is it most likely just bollocks. I have not heard of this impact event previously.

Any ideas or comments?

I’m going bollocks.

I’d expect that the Indigenous folks from back then would have passed down the story – without knowing it was a meteorite – of the immense rains, waves, etc. So I’d be asking them if they remember such stories being passed through the generations.

Can I have the doi for the journal article, just to check the refs?

Spiny Norman said:

I’d expect that the Indigenous folks from back then would have passed down the story – without knowing it was a meteorite – of the immense rains, waves, etc. So I’d be asking them if they remember such stories being passed through the generations.

Just about every culture has a flood myth, especially those that live on floodplains adjoining major rivers. I don’t think you’d get any conclusive answer on a specific event by going down this path.

party_pants said:

Spiny Norman said:

I’d expect that the Indigenous folks from back then would have passed down the story – without knowing it was a meteorite – of the immense rains, waves, etc. So I’d be asking them if they remember such stories being passed through the generations.

Just about every culture has a flood myth, especially those that live on floodplains adjoining major rivers. I don’t think you’d get any conclusive answer on a specific event by going down this path.

Going to a dance bring three and four pence.

dv said:

Can I have the doi for the journal article, just to check the refs?

I can go one better than this and post a wikipedia link :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

Seems like this is a minority view that is very much NOT the accepted scientific view.
It has been around for a decade or so, but this is the first time I have heard of it. I guess I have a lot of reading up to do.

party_pants said:

dv said:

Can I have the doi for the journal article, just to check the refs?

I can go one better than this and post a wikipedia link :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

Seems like this is a minority view that is very much NOT the accepted scientific view.
It has been around for a decade or so, but this is the first time I have heard of it. I guess I have a lot of reading up to do.

YDIH dates to around 10000 BC, long before the time this dude is talking about.

dv said:

party_pants said:

dv said:

Can I have the doi for the journal article, just to check the refs?

I can go one better than this and post a wikipedia link :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

Seems like this is a minority view that is very much NOT the accepted scientific view.
It has been around for a decade or so, but this is the first time I have heard of it. I guess I have a lot of reading up to do.

YDIH dates to around 10000 BC, long before the time this dude is talking about.

Good point. It may be that he is rehashing and already discredited theory and applying it somewhere else. Or maybe he is putting the event in its own context, out of the YD period and into a standalone event.

Anyway, I shall follow his channel for further updates to see if he can explain things in a bit more detail.

party_pants said:

dv said:

party_pants said:

I can go one better than this and post a wikipedia link :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

Seems like this is a minority view that is very much NOT the accepted scientific view.
It has been around for a decade or so, but this is the first time I have heard of it. I guess I have a lot of reading up to do.

YDIH dates to around 10000 BC, long before the time this dude is talking about.

Good point. It may be that he is rehashing and already discredited theory and applying it somewhere else. Or maybe he is putting the event in its own context, out of the YD period and into a standalone event.

Anyway, I shall follow his channel for further updates to see if he can explain things in a bit more detail.

BTW, I notice that Tony Robinson is back on Time Team.

Except they’re calling him “Sir Tony Robinson” which is a bit eye-roll-inducing.

I had a look at that last week and decided that it was someones imagination running wild.

He’s decided that sand dune blowouts are “tsunami chevrons”, and couldn’t figure out that google maps images are stitched together from different pics at different times of year. It’s rubbish.

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D89P31F3

There’s a link to a downloadable PDF file of the entire paper on the above page. It seems to be a conference paper. “This is our own color, camera ready version of a paper that was published in the conference proceedings of the Conference Atlantis 2005. The paper in the conference proceedings is in black and white.”

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010avh..confE..13A/abstract

Also a conference paper: “6th Alexander von Humboldt International Conference on Climate Change, Natural Hazards, and Societies, held March 15-19 in Merida, Mexico. http://meetings.copernicus.org/avh6, id.AvH6-13”

“Here we have what appears to be a slide of fine sediment which was thrown across the land rather spectacularly.”

FFS, it’s a perfect rectangle on google maps which he conveniently outlines. He is so confidently incorrect.

The end game in a lot of these things is to make money from youtube clicks.

This account was produced by OzGeographics who has posted other highly debatable occurrences as fact, plus collects various unrelated evidence to link it in order to make an interesting story. However, I dismiss him as some sort of crank that thinks what he is doing is insightful or is doing it for nefarious reasons.

PermeateFree said:

This account was produced by OzGeographics who has posted other highly debatable occurrences as fact, plus collects various unrelated evidence to link it in order to make an interesting story. However, I dismiss him as some sort of crank that thinks what he is doing is insightful or is doing it for nefarious reasons.

OzGeographics
>>I make videos on subjects I personally find interesting, which is usually science related in some shape or form.
You can expect to see many Earth science related videos, with the occasional video branching out beyond this if I find it particularly interesting.
I’m just trying to spread my passion and love to anyone else that it resonates with. <<

This production is no more than someone’s blog of which you should check its validity.

PermeateFree said:

PermeateFree said:

This account was produced by OzGeographics who has posted other highly debatable occurrences as fact, plus collects various unrelated evidence to link it in order to make an interesting story. However, I dismiss him as some sort of crank that thinks what he is doing is insightful or is doing it for nefarious reasons.

OzGeographics
>>I make videos on subjects I personally find interesting, which is usually science related in some shape or form.
You can expect to see many Earth science related videos, with the occasional video branching out beyond this if I find it particularly interesting.
I’m just trying to spread my passion and love to anyone else that it resonates with. <<

This production is no more than someone’s blog of which you should check its validity.

Yeah, I am starting to think the same way.

He seems to place a lot of emphasis on these so called chevron shaped hills. I’d be interested to know the conventional explanation for how these are formed – wind erosion and deposition?? He seems to think these are definitive proof of flood deposition, but if the usual explanation is they are formed by wind than that would be a perfectly acceptable thing, the coastal regions of WA do get quite windy.

party_pants said:

PermeateFree said:

PermeateFree said:

This account was produced by OzGeographics who has posted other highly debatable occurrences as fact, plus collects various unrelated evidence to link it in order to make an interesting story. However, I dismiss him as some sort of crank that thinks what he is doing is insightful or is doing it for nefarious reasons.

OzGeographics
>>I make videos on subjects I personally find interesting, which is usually science related in some shape or form.
You can expect to see many Earth science related videos, with the occasional video branching out beyond this if I find it particularly interesting.
I’m just trying to spread my passion and love to anyone else that it resonates with. <<

This production is no more than someone’s blog of which you should check its validity.

Yeah, I am starting to think the same way.

He seems to place a lot of emphasis on these so called chevron shaped hills. I’d be interested to know the conventional explanation for how these are formed – wind erosion and deposition?? He seems to think these are definitive proof of flood deposition, but if the usual explanation is they are formed by wind than that would be a perfectly acceptable thing, the coastal regions of WA do get quite windy.

The chevron hills inland are part of his imagination, check out google maps for yourself.

The ones on the coast are just old primary sand dune blowouts that travel inland with the wind until enough ground cover grows over them to stop the sand from blowing.

He seems to have started with a conclusion and is trying to find “evidence” to prove it.

party_pants said:

Spiny Norman said:

I’d expect that the Indigenous folks from back then would have passed down the story – without knowing it was a meteorite – of the immense rains, waves, etc. So I’d be asking them if they remember such stories being passed through the generations.

Just about every culture has a flood myth, especially those that live on floodplains adjoining major rivers. I don’t think you’d get any conclusive answer on a specific event by going down this path.

I dunno. There was apparently Aboriginal legends of a tsunami in the Wollongong area 6000 BC IIRC. Can’t find any for that date but this article mentions the early Holocene:

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1098&context=scipapers

And this discusses Aboriginal/Maori legends:

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

I think the legends also distinguish between slow sea-level rise and tsunami events for example the slow inundation of Bass Strait.

“The Jurien Bay dune chronosequence, like most of the Swan Coastal Plain, comprises three dune system. The youngest Quindalup system is up to 7,000 years old – the age of “the ancient Yorkshire Downs”. These young dunes are alkaline and relatively rich in phosphorus and calcium. The next system is the Spearwood dunes, from ca. 120,000 to 500,000 years old; the soil is slightly acidic and nutrient impoverished, particularly low in phosphorus. The oldest dunes are the Bassendean dunes, which are up to 2 million years old; they are severely nutrient-impoverished. The plant diversity increases sharply as the soil phosphorus levels decline to the very lowest on Earth.”

Ta,

A whole new area of learning for me that I don’t know much about. If anything, the YouTuber has encouraged me to learn new things, even if it means disagreeing with his ideas.