Cover. A depiction of the seismic circles which emanated from the impact that formed the Adirondack Mountains in upper New York State, in the United States. The remains of this impact are seen in the coast line, the rivers, the political boundaries and numerous other geographical features shown in more detail on the Adirondack Mountains page, linked below.
Introduction
This is about the meteors, asteroids and comets that bombarded the Earth over the last billion years or so, how those impacts created our geography, and how man has used those land forms. What drove me on this research is the increasing exactness in which these discoveries were made. As a child, my family would take excursions in the car, to see the country and what was there. To keep me occupied, my Mother would give me the map, and she showed me how the different lines and symbols meant different things. From that, I learned to read and understand the maps, and this set me on a course of my life that I would read and collect all the maps that I could find of the area where I was, because they gave me a better understanding of the world around me..
In my mid 20's I was living in the State of Oregon and I came across a map of Oregon that was hand drawn, but done so to a very high degree. As I studied it, I found what looked like a large crater in the southeastern part of the State. Comparing that to other maps I had, I could only get rough 'Maybes' from them for confirmations of the idea. Then one day I ran into a much older man, a professional geologist (whose name is long ago gone), who I thought would have some insight into this, and I queried him on the idea. His response was that there were no craters on the Earth, and the reason it looked like one to me was because the map was hand drawn.
That didn't answer my curiosity in the way I wanted to hear, but at the time there were no other sources of information available. And it stayed that way until Google Earth came along. Using that I found my childhood home, where I kissed my high school sweetheart, and a number of other such things, and then I remembered that map! "Is that possible?", I said to myself. So I went to Oregon on Google Earth and looked, and there it was, plain as day. And then - there was another one.... and another and soon I had circles that described nearly every geographic feature of those high desert plains.
That started a journey of discovery. From there I started to see how the land was formed, over and over again there were circles, just like on the Moon. Yes, they were eroded, covered with vegetation or farmed over for many years, even centuries, but the main features were there. These impact circles formed the mountains, the rivers, the coastlines and more, all over the world. Then after a time, I started to see that many of these impacts left not just one circle, but a series of concentric circles around them, seismic shock wave circles. And, I was increasingly amazed at how these circles expanded over vast distances, forming the geography of places hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from the impact. Then I started to see how man has been using the land forms created by these seismic waves, and so the research continues.
While much of this work is here
simply to demonstrate why our world is as it is, it is also here to
provide overwhelming evidence of the impacts, and how the Earth was
formed to the non believers and the professionals who refuse to look
at anything unless it was in their 19th century based text books. Hopefully some of you will use these studies as a template, and begin a search for discoveries of your own as there is still much to be done. And when you see those geographical features falling exactly on that perfect circle, you will say as I did "No Way!", "Are you serious?", "That's incredible!" Then by studying more of the evidence you will see that yes, it is serious. Yes, it is incredible. Our world did came to be by Catastrophic Impact, and the remains of those impacts, those Seismic Circles, are what we know today as Geography.
Galileo Galilei demonstrating his telescope to the Catholic Church, the mountains on the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, and his theories that the Earth is not the center of the universe. These views were not in line with those of the church, subsequently he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Cnes/Spot Image - Centre National d'Études Spatiales the French government space agency
Data SIO - the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego
NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
U. S. Navy
NGA - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
GEBCO - General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans
U. S. Department of State Geographer
U. S. Geological Survey
Geo Eye
MapLink
Tele Atlas
Terrametrics
GeoBasis -DE/BKG
Europa Technologies
GIS Innovatsia
ORION-ME
DigitalGlobe
Basarsoft
European Space Imaging
Province of British Columbia
Mapabc.com
Whereis®Sensis Pty Ltd
Inav/Geosistemas SRL
ZENRIN
SK Energy
Kingway Ltd.
INEGI
Texas Orthoimagery Program
USDA Farm Services Agency
GIS Innovatsia
Mapabc.com
These people have put together the best of the imagery of our Earth so that we can see and study our world in a way that was not possible before. They have created the tools which allow us a new understanding.
It is a commonly accepted theory that all the continents of the Earth were joined at one time into a super continent named Pangaea. Then for some reason this super continent broke up into many pieces, or sub-continents. These sub-continents then floated around on the surface of the Earth, sometimes colliding with one another, one rising to form the mountain chains, and the other diving down returning the surface to magma. At these boundaries, volcanoes form which spew lava and ash which re-covers the Earth, all of this like a giant boiling pot. Then erosion from the atmosphere carves the river valleys and glaciation wipes everything clean. Now, finding any traces of anything that happened before all of this is further complicated by the plant life that covers the planet reclaiming any remains.
This idea of Pangaea comes from the early 1900's where from a map of the Earth, it appeared as if the east coast of South America, and the west coast of Africa would fit together, if you cut the continents out of the map and then thought of them as a jig-saw puzzle. Then with enough imagination, subduction, erosion, volcanoes and the all powerful 'fudge factor', you could fit all the pieces back together into the super-continent Pangaea, in one shape or another. From there, if it happened once, it probably happened several times before. And so the modern Geo-sciences were born.
However the question comes up "If the oceans were 100 feet higher, 100 feet lower, or did not exist at all, would we ever have had a theory of Pangaea?"
Secondly, in regards to the surrounding planets that we have been able to photograph and examine with some clarity, the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, why do we not see evidence of floating continental plates there, but instead see landscapes pockmarked by a billion years of meteor impacts?
The Far Side of the Moon
Until recently all of our observations of the Earth were made on the ground. Geographers measure the surface of the Earth and plot their findings on paper drawing maps of all sorts. While these maps are necessary and useful, using them as a basis for the Earth sciences is problematic. Maps are drawings of what we understand to be there, rather than the real thing, and the various projections used to draw the surface of a nearly spherical Earth on a flat sheet of paper distorts the dimensions, or cuts the geography into pieces, leading sometimes to questionable conclusions.
Then came aerial surveys, photography from five or six miles up. These are good for property analysis, roads and land use planning. From these are drawn maps of excellent quality, but even with these we cannot see enough of our planet to get a good look at it, as many of the features of our Earth are 10s or 100s or 1,000s of miles across.
Geologists use microscopes, gas chromatography, radiation, spectral analysis or other means to analyze what they found on or near the surface. Sometimes they find shatter cones, microscopic diamonds or iridium layers and this is evidence that a meteor impacted the Earth there. This evidence is then compared with other findings to confirm the impact. This seems to work for smaller impacts, but the larger ones are beyond the scale of these methods. Then to try to understand the past, theories come up about dust clouds from the impact that blocked out the sun, super tsunamis and strange gases that killed off all the dinosaurs with this impact or that one, many millions of years ago.
To understand our Earth, we need to see it as the sphere that it is, and we need to be able to see it at distances where the geographic features can be seen in their entirety, and in relation to the surrounding area. And, we need views that are as free of clouds as possible. Satellite imagery is the only way to do this.
Google Earth has made this possible. They have assembled the imagery of a myriad of organizations and companies, which have been filled with an untold number of highly skilled scientific people, all with the quest to understand our Earth better. They have provided us with a tool from which we can see our entire planet from its' entirety, down to fine geographic detail. With this comes new understandings of our Earth.
Our
Earth was built over billions of years by the bombardment of an
untold number of asteroids, meteors, comets, and extra terrestrial
objects of all kinds, shapes and sizes, just like the Moon, Mars,
Venus and Mercury. These impacts created the form of our Earth,
building it up layer by layer, one impact after another. Gravity
then pulls the Earth into a nearly perfect sphere, and the
rotation of the Earth causes a bit of a bulge around the Equator.
Then, with erosion from the atmosphere, vegetation covering things over, glaciation, volcanoes and
other natural forces, we have what we have today.
While very small impacts may have
been obliterated by time and erosion, the larger impacts left
substantial marks and many times in grandiose design. In fact,
these impacts gave us our geography. They are the valley that the
river flows in, the mountain top Skyline Drive that gives us those
exhilarating views. They are the coast lines, the national parks
and the dirt you walk over every day. The formations left from these
impacts are where towns and cities where built, and many of them
are our political boundaries. Often they define the way we plant
our crops, where we build our roads and reservoirs, and where we
find the minerals that enrich our lives. These impacts placed the
volcanoes and the fault lines where earthquakes occur, and they
shaped the continents.
This new evidence demonstrates that the
surface of the Earth has remained relatively unchanged for a long, long
time. Where it was thought that most of the formations of Earth were
formed slowly over millions of years of time, in fact most of the
formations on the Earth came to be by catastrophic impact. These
impacts then caused seismic shock waves which expanded across the Earth
in the form of concentric circles similar to a stone thrown into a
still pond of water. While our atmosphere and time have eroded these forms, the remains of these seismic waves are precise and
still clearly visible today. Where it was thought that the mountains
were raised by continents colliding, and the rivers formed by erosion,
it can be shown now that the mountains were raised and the rivers valleys were formed by
these seismic circles.
While it is
certain that the crust of the Earth is shifting in places,
which is the cause of earthquakes, this is something quite different
than the idea of Pangaea and continental plates floating on the surface
of
the Earth which collide to form mountains. These geographic circles
provide evidence that contradicts those ideas. Many of these seismic
circles are hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles in radius. Some
of them span continents, a few circle the globe and sometimes the
concentric circles from individual impacts are visible on six
continents, Antarctica being too ice covered for analysis. Had the
continents been drifting, then parts of the circles would be moved. Yet
the circles are intact.
Most of the impacts that are discussed
here are huge, but the principles that are shown apply to impacts
of all sizes. By understanding them, the reason why the local
river flows where it does will become evident. Why towns and
cities were built where they were, and where minerals are found
will become more clear. The soil sciences, land use planning,
geology and Earth Sciences generally will have new insights to
advance their knowledge base.
This treatise is not intended to be all inclusive of all impacts. That would not be possible. It is intended to demonstrate the major impacts of a variety of types and how they formed the Earth. Nor is this intended to be the last say in the formation of the Earth. To the contrary, it is intended to act as a guide to further research, to help us form a new understanding of our home planet, how it came to be, and why it is as it is. What you see here is just a beginning. The more we look, the more we see. With these new tools, a whole new world awaits.
The Beginning
 The idea of an impact is typically a crater like we see on the Moon. This image of Tycho Crater on the Moon is generally of how we think of them, as a depressed area with a circle of steep walls surrounding it, and a central peak. This is only the case sometimes. Whether or not an impact raised a rim when it was formed is dependent on a number of factors, such as the size of the impactor, the difference in density between the earth and the impactor, relative speeds, and the terrain where the impact occurs (mountainous, plains, water). Also the stronger gravity is, the less steep the resulting walls can be, and the less high. A peak in the center is also a rarity. As the gravity of the Earth is six times that of the Moon, the impactors come in faster, and hit harder. What is left is usually smashed to bits and scattered in all directions, or buried deeply in the Earth.
These seismic waves travel out from the center for long distances, rearranging the land as they go into geographical alignments in the form of concentric circle waves. We know these alignments as mountains, hills, valleys, coast lines and other phenomena. Larger impacts will show concentric circles out to great distances, each circle with the same center point. As more impacts occur, the land then looks more like the water ripples in the rain, pictured below. 
The
shock waves may form a circular rim of hills, or they
form valleys lower than the surrounding areas. Rivers
then form there. This is why many of the rivers flow
where they do, and why many lakes, mountains and
coastlines are where they are, and shaped as they are.
This is the case for the Tamiahua impact site on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, pictured right, where the Rio Panuco defines the northwest edge, and the Rio Tuxpan defines the southern edge. An examination of the image at right will show other smaller impacts, some of them are marked, most of them are not. As each impact is marked, the formation of the land becomes more and more organized, so that the majority of land forms can be ascribed to one or more impacts. By defining the land this way, then the effects of the various other geological forces can be more easily recognized and understood. Since most impacts do not leave craters, it is more accurate to call these Impact Sites.
Another reason the concentric circles will not show in their entirety, is that as the shock wave travels through the Earth, some of the surface is more easily moved around by the wave than other parts. In the image below the lower Red River joins the Mississippi River Delta and aligns perfectly with the shock wave from the Adirondack Impact, at 1315 miles distance(2,110 kilometers). Then at the top left of the image the alignment disappears. This shows the difference between softer soils, and harder packed earth to the north. Thus what we see are bits and pieces of the circle and we must connect the dots.
It is generally not sufficient to note a shock wave by only one alignment. As the Earth was impacted many, many times, any one geographical feature could have been formed by any of number of impacts. The proof lies in being able to show sufficient alignments to demonstrate each circle specifically. A larger or smaller circle will not fit, and moving the circle a little to one side or the other doesn't work either. There will be a specific center of impact, which may be far smaller than the impactor. The impactor could have been an asteroid of 50 miles diameter. But the center of impact will still be a point, and all shock waves will radiate from that point, rather than an area 50 miles in diameter. The shock waves from the impact create a pattern of concentric circles, all emanating from one specific point, the center of impact. While the shock wave circles will be near perfect, the alignments to it may show some variation. The variations are primarily because rocks rarely break on the smooth line where you would like them to break. Instead it breaks along the natural structure lines of the rock. These variations are rarely more than 1% of the radius. The more alignments that follow the circle, and the more concentric circles found, the more evidence of the impact. It may be possible to find one or two circular alignments from any point you want due to chance. However to find specific circles, and then again to find concentric circles, brings the probability of chance closer to zero with each alignment found. Finding the alignments that follow these guide lines demonstrates the proof of impact with increasing certainty.
Hill and mountain chains too big for the shock wave to re-align, break in line with the wave, providing valleys where the rivers and streams flow. Where it seems that the cracks, or valleys in the mountains have little order other than that of erosion, the vast majority can be ascribed to one or more impacts, where the seismic wave broke the mountains and left the valleys where the rivers flow.
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actual impact site, the center, may be round or deformed
depending on many variables. What was the shape of the
object? Was it round, or perhaps some other
shape. How did it hit? Straight down or at an angle? Was
it a hard rock asteroid, or a dust ball comet? There are
many variables, but more often than not, the center is
flat, perhaps a little higher or lower than the
surrounding area, but generally flat. On some occasions
the impact may raise a center peak, or make a deep
impression, but most often the center is not much
different than the surrounding area, as the impact
blasts everything flat. It is common to see a lake in the center, as the center is sometimes depressed. On smaller impacts, the farm house and other buildings may be in the center, probably because the ground there is somewhat higher, so that is where they built the buildings. On larger sites, the center area may have been blasted nearly level by the impact. These level areas are then excellent areas for towns and cities to be built, such as Mexico City, Tokyo or Moscow.  In
the image at right, the
Ébano Impact, is on the northwestern
border of the State of Veracruz with San Luis
Potosi State, Mexico. This impact is on the
eastern coastal plane of Mexico. The soil there
being relatively soft and wet was easy to
penetrate deeply with a high speed, hard asteroid.
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Often times the object may simply go splat, blowing the
material of its making out across the Earth in all
directions, and leaving little evidence of its existence
other than a few inches of soil.The image at left is of an area south of Norfolk, Nebraska. A first look seems to show nothing but almost flat farm lands. However if you study the image, the shapes of numerous impacts will start to form. Click on the image for more on this. Often the impact site is best described by a change in vegetation patterns, this due to different soil types from one impact to the next. These patterns can often be seen only from high above. Those that study the various soil types could benefit from a knowledge of the limits of each type, as an aid to agriculture, land use planning and other sciences that base decisions on soil types and their properties. |
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They could come from a planetary sized
object that was somehow torn apart to form asteroids such as
in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In this case
they could have densities similar to that of the Earth. Sometimes they may explode when they hit, where pieces fly off in all directions, like throwing a piece of dried dirt against a concrete wall. This is the case of the Tycho Crater on the Moon, shown in the image at left, bottom center of the Moon.
On the other extreme a comet could have been roaming the galaxy for billions of years collecting particles bit by bit and slowly growing to something perhaps a hundred miles across or more. However, if gravity is proportional to mass, then even if the comet was 100 miles in diameter, the gravity of it would be infinitesimal compared to the gravity of Earth. Considering this, the comet would then be so loosely packed that only the light of the sun would be enough to blow material from the surface, and that would form the tail of the comets we see in the sky. Many of the impactors that hit the Earth were these giant dust balls. This is not to discount their significance because some of them still contained enough material to shape the continents and form the mountains. When they hit a large percentage of the material of their making is blasted out in all directions to form a new layer on the Earth. The hit still produces the circular shock waves which reform our Earth. In the center, the comet collapses and depending on several variables, the center may end up higher or lower than the surrounding terrain. Oddly enough, when these impact sites are seen from above, they may look like the classic idea of a crater with the center looking like a raised area, a hill or mountain. But on examination, by moving closer and tilting the view, the areas generally look nearly flat. This illusion is caused by the differences in the soil types from one area to another within the impact site. The Navajo Impact site is one of these. While the center is raised, the amount of rise, compared to the length and width shows how loosely packed is was.
Then comes the problem of size. How big are these things? Considering the Earth to be 8,000 miles in diameter, and that the formula for the volume of a sphere is: Then 4 /3 x 3.14159 x 4000 x
4000 x 4000 = the volume of the Earth = 268,082,346,667
cubic miles.
That means that if the average
size of an object that hit the Earth was one cubic mile,
then the Earth must have been hit more than 268 Billion times. Or from another angle, if the earth received 1,000,000 hits, the average size of the object must have been 268,082 cubic miles in volume, or 80 miles in diameter. While that may seem like a lot, if the Earth's diameter is 8,000 miles, it would take 100 of those side by side, just to make one diameter! An object depositing 268,000 cubic miles of material on the Earth would act significantly to define the continents. That would add one mile of thickness to an area more than 580 miles in diameter. An impact that big would leave some pretty serious marks. Many of these objects then would have been many times that in diameter, and by impacting such volumes of material on the Earth, we can start to understand how the shape of the Earth was determined. But now... The probability is that the largest impacts came first, as larger objects have more gravitational attraction, and that was a very long time ago. What is left for us to see on the surface are with a few exceptions, the remains of much smaller impacts. These impacts generally smash themselves to bits as they hit, throwing the material of their making out over the surface in every direction and adding a new layer to the Earth. Or they bury themselves in the Earth. However the shock waves they produce, in those expanding circles, deformed the land to make the mountains, hills, river valleys, coastlines and more for hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles in radius. When we look at the Earth for evidence of impacts, we need to be thinking on this large scale. We should not be aghast should someone suggest an impact site of 1,000 or 2,000 miles diameter. In fact, we should expect them. |
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The jog in Kinbasket Lake, British Columbia,
Canada and the alignment of the adjacent
mountains were the result of an impact 95
miles (155 km) to the northwest.
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Dinamita Impact Crater, Gomez Palacio, Mexico
Should we be worried about large impacts today? Our Earth came together violently. Considering that these impacts create shock waves that form mountains and river valleys as they expand, and that the difference in elevations between them is often hundreds, if not thousands of feet, a hit by one of these would be like a circular tidal wave of solid earth, hundreds or thousands of feet high, expanding and reverberating at tremendous speeds. The shock waves may expand for thousands of miles. Entire cities would be reduced to unrecognizable rubble. Plant life could re-root, but anything else that walks, crawls or swims would be devastated. As far as mass extinctions are concerned, noxious gas plumes or dust clouds that blocked out the sun may have happened, but after a land wave 500 feet high passed over the continent, gas and dust clouds would not have much significance. And it looks like there were many, many of these impacts. It must be understood that our Earth, as big as it is to us, is no more than a tiny speck in the universe, and there are many things out there far bigger than us. Just to orbit the Earth requires a velocity of about 15,000 miles per hour. These space rocks may be traveling at 25,000 to 50,000 miles per hour and more. The energy of a medium sized asteroid hitting the Earth would be far greater than anything man has seen before. The impact pictured above of the Dinamita Crater near Durango, Mexico shows circular seismic wave alignments that deformed the ground at 950 miles (1,525 km) distance and beyond. It is likely that if this asteroid hit today, every building within 950 miles of it and possibly farther would fall. These things make earthquakes at 9 and above on the Richter scale look like kindergarten play time. Such was the formation of our Earth! |
 Interesting studies could be made using the logs of well drillers to map out the 3 dimensional underground extents of the various soil types encountered down into the earth. According to this theory, the extents of the impact circles could be determined by the extents of the various soil types described on the well drillers logs. Maps could be made to demonstrate the various accumulations at their depths. And perhaps, if there was an asteroid made of gold that impacted the earth, the extents of that impact could be mapped. Knowledgeable well drillers of all types should keep samples of the layers they drill through for a chemical analysis. At some point they will drill through a valuable layer. Once they find a valuable layer, the rest of the impact can be mapped, and the concentrated deposits then found. We see in many places here on the Earth, how minerals have come together so that we can mine them in great quantities. Gold, for instance, will erode down from the mountains and collect in the sand bars of the rivers and streams to form placer deposits where miners pan for gold. This happens because of the specific characteristics of gold. Other minerals accumulate in different ways because of their specific characteristics and circumstances. If this happens here on Earth, is logical that it happens also out in the vast reaches of space, so that over billions of years like elements come together. Thus, while most of the impactors would be composed of plain old dirt like you walk over every day, some of them could be highly concentrated with specific minerals. Is it possible then, that some of them are made up of gold, copper, aluminum or titanium? Could this be one reason why minerals here on Earth are concentrated as they are? Is this why in some places we have mines that are miles across and go deep into the Earth? Is there a connection between the mines we have found and impacts? If so, then where do the minerals end up after impact? |