I forwarded this to a friend who happens to be a Carolina Bay expert and he was not a big fan of the guy's conclusions. Cool images though.

 

Carl Steen
 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>
To: ARCH-L <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tue, Aug 28, 2012 2:22 pm
Subject: Re: article on LIDAR


Lyle,  I spoke to one of these guys at a GSA meeting in Baltimore in March, 2010, and he quickly disabused me of the notion that these are impact structures.  He said they had clear pre-Clovis occupation dates from on top of some of them.  https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2010NE/finalprogram/abstract_168767.htm  



Tangentially, our research has implications for the recently proposed comet impact origin for Carolina bays by Firestone et al. (2007), who suggest that such impacts precipitated the Younger Dryas stadial (ca. 12,800-11,450 Cal BP), megafauna extinctions, and the demise of Clovis culture at the end of the last ice-age. Our data, however, demonstrate that Carolina bays were formed by high-energy lacustrine processes over lengths of time far greater than the onset of the YD and that bay evolution is a long-term process rather than a synchronous event.


Yet I see that 6 months later,  their team reached a conclusion opposed to this:  http://cintos.org/graphics/GSA_2010/vss/index.html & https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2010AM/finalprogram/abstract_176757.htm



We propose that the Carolina bays are depositional artifacts in the surface of a ~10 meter-thick sheet of distal ejecta, spread differentially from a cosmic impact. The lack of a correlated impact structure in North America is challenging, however.




I had previously spent a lot of time in Google Maps plotting these out, but that went out the window after I spoke to him. Now I am confused. Maybe it was the thinner air in Denver which caused a change in their thinking.
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=214018657625084197659.00044c85f0abaf7fbb2f0&msa=0&ll=35.023811,-78.458176&spn=0.502134,1.056747





Doug Schwartz



On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Lyle E. Browning <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Also check this site for LIDAR use to detect Carolina Bays along the east coast. I've found it to be very useful in survey work as the USGS Quads tend to have only the larger ones as partial dotted lines whereas these things are virtually covering the landscape, and delimiting historic settlement.


cintos.org/LiDAR_images/index.html



Lyle Browning


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