Heap o' Links Fri Dec 5, 2025

Comet May Have Exploded Over North America 13,000 Years Ago
[Old news, from 2007, but I just learned about it. -mw]
New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago… the comet before fragmentation must have been about four kilometers across, and either exploded in the atmosphere or had fragments hit the Laurentide ice sheet in northeastern North America.

Wildfires across the continent would have resulted from the fiery impact, killing off vegetation that was the food supply of many of larger mammals like the woolly mammoths, causing them to go extinct.

Since the Clovis people of North America hunted the mammoths as a major source of their food, they too would have been affected by the impact. Their culture eventually died out.