Solving the Mystery of the Carolina Bays - Paperback

by Antonio Zamora (Author)

The origin of the Carolina Bays presents a formidable puzzle for geologists and astronomers. The elliptical bays with sandy rims look like they were made by huge impacts, but they do not have the characteristic markers associated with extraterrestrial impacts. The dates of the terrain on which the bays are found span millennia, forcing scientists to conclude that the bays must have been made by the action of wind and water over the last 140,000 years. A new geometrical survey has found that the Carolina Bays are perfect ellipses with similar width-to-length ratios as the Nebraska rainwater basins. This book starts from the premise that if the Carolina Bays are conic sections, they must have originated from oblique conical cavities that were transformed by geological processes to their current form. Mathematical analysis following this line of reasoning provides clues supporting the idea that the Earth was hit during the ice age by an extraterrestrial object. The impact may have triggered the Younger Dryas cold event and caused the extinction of the North American megafauna and the Clovis culture. The Carolina Bays are the remodeled remains of oblique conical craters formed on ground liquefied by secondary impacts of glacier ice boulders ejected from the primary impact site.

Author Biography

Antonio Zamora has a multidisciplinary background in chemistry, computer science and computational linguistics. He studied chemistry at the University of Texas, and Computer and Information Science at Ohio State University. Mr. Zamora worked for many years as an editor and researcher at Chemical Abstracts Service developing chemical information applications. He also worked as a senior programmer at IBM on spelling checkers and novel multilingual information retrieval tools. He was the author of 13 patents. After his retirement from IBM, Mr. Zamora worked as a consultant for the American Chemical Society, the National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Energy to support semantic enhancements for search engines. Mr. Zamora has been interested in astronomy since childhood when his father helped him build a refracting telescope. During retirement, Mr. Zamora has completed massive open online courses in astronomy, geology and paleobiology. He regularly attends the seminars of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.