w) Tarim's impact may explain the cause of the exceptional richness of rare earth deposits in Asia, particularly in China and North Korea – it is the result of the fallout of the asteroid pulverized in the blast.
Later this layer of rare minerals was washed away and got concentrated at the alluvial regions where they are mined today.
x) There is a concentric pattern centered on Tarim's impact for the distribution of various geological occurrences, including:
· Ural Mountains
· Volcanic arc of Indonesian Islands
· Continental fracture between Africa and Arabian Peninsula
· Volcanic province between the fracture of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Middle East and Eastern Europe
· Ural Mountains
· Fracture between Europe and Asia
· Caspian Sea
· Himalayas (despite its arc is now deformed by the Indian Plate drift)
y) The south region of the American continent is said to be the place of origin of the dinosaurs.
The ecosystems recovered after a few million years and created new conditions for population renewal.
The survivors came from the regions least affected by the hyper-mega-earthquake, megatsunamis and forest fires.
South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia were a single bloc in the Gondwana super-continent, and the inhabitants of its remotest regions were lucky.
Permian pre-mammals that were predominant until then were decimated, and the small reptile archosaurs (ancestors of crocodilians, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs) got better adapted to the new conditions and repopulated that new world.
The environment full of niches to be explored, free of previous predators, allowed the rapid diversification of species and their evolution to larger sizes, originating the large dinosaurs.
z) Despite their relatively recent formation, South American salt flats could be remnants of megatsunamis generated by the Wegener’s impact event — the lakes are geologically new, but the salt could be originated from ancient marine floods.
These flats are distributed along the Andean region through Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.
The actual theory says that at least some of these salt flats are originated from volcanic eruptions, like the Salar de Antofalla, collecting mineral-enriched waters springing from the volcano of same name in Argentina.
But other volcanic regions around the world do not present salt flats — on the contrary, North American salt flats result from evaporation of great lakes, like Bonneville.
South American salt flats are spread over a large area, as well as Patagonian soil is characterized by low levels of fertility and higher than average levels of salinity.[1]
α) The map shows the high concentration of aridisols, arid lands in south of Argentina characterized by higher than average salinity contents.
An analysis of Argentinean Patagonian shows that “soils have quite different leaching characteristics, salinity levels and moisture contents over short distances, although they developed under the same atmospheric climate.”41
Megatsunamis could explain this apparent inconsistency, as well as the higher salinity levels along the south of South America.
There are other regions on the planet that present low fertility levels while surrounded by exuberant forests possibly by the same reason.
Image: Major soil types in Argentina according to soil taxonomy orders[2]
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β) Coherently, we found salinity levels higher than average in the south region of Africa, namely the countries of Botswana, Namibia[3] and South Africa — all these regions are in a straight line of view for the gigantic waves.
As well as the south region of South America, these countries would be the most severely affected by the megatsunamis irradiating from the South Pole — these countries present intrinsically primary saline soils.
The case of Australia and India would be better understood by means of computer simulations — the first countries present similar characteristics, but the path of the waves is more complex.
Western Australia is the most severely region affected by the soil salinity problem,[4] as well as India, then located nearby that Australian province.
Both countries probably have been slammed by the megatsunamis after the waves crossed the globe and were funneled by the local geography according to the paleomaps — it is a possibility, but only a simulation could prove the viability of this hypothesis.
Probably we will never have sufficient soil salinity data to allow us to reach a conclusion about the influence of the megatsunamis on East Antarctica.
North America’s western region of the United States was not positioned in direct alignment with the waves and that area was fertile at the time of the dinosaurs.
But Rohe Crater, the 600 km impact astroblema that initiated the final decadence of dinosaurs near the end of the Cretaceous occurred in a perfect alignment for the megatsunami to wash and impregnate with salt those lands, as evidenced by its hotspot today, the Hawaiian Archipelago.[5]
This crater is still partially visible and measurable up today at the north extremity of Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain, but its largest portion is already subducted below the Aleutian Trench.
γ) The Salar de Uyuni, also known as Salar de Tunupa, in Bolivia, is the largest salt flat in the planet, and its brine pools present an exceptionally high content of lithium (70 to 80% of the world reserves)[6] — lithium is a common element in chondritic meteorites.
Another large lithium reserve is found in the Salar de Atacama, in Chile, located about 300 km from the Salar de Uyuni.
An impactor of huge size such as Wegener’s one could carry along with it a large amount of other metallic and non metallic aggregated rocks, and lithium could be the extraterrestrial metal marker of the impact.
Thus, the secondary ring of the Wegener Crater would be rich in lithium and, when the region was subducted by the South American Plate, this metal (among others) surfaced in the Andean region as a result of the volcanism generated by the friction with the Nazca Plate.
Fragments related to Wegener's impactor may continue to wander in our solar system — Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, when it collided with Jupiter in 2009, emitted a detectable amount of lithium.
However, no significant amount of water vapor was detected, as would be expected from a comet — this could indicate that Shoemaker-Levy 9 was in fact an asteroid with a density greater than a cometary object.
Its breakdown can be understood based on the smooth accretion process evidenced by asteroids such as 25143 Itokawa and 162173 Ryugu, in addition to the object 486958 Arrokoth, flown over by the New Horizons spacecraft in January 2019.
δ) Besides lithium, other possible indicators of extraterrestrial impact at the region are the significant levels of platinum, iridium and rhodium observed in lichens at Tierra del Fuego, extreme south of Patagonia and near the impact location on West Antarctica.[7]
Another large lithium reserve is found in the Salar de Atacama, in Chile, located about 300 km from the Salar de Uyuni.
An impactor of huge size such as Wegener’s one could carry along with it a large amount of other metallic and non metallic aggregated rocks, and lithium could be the extraterrestrial metal marker of the impact.
Thus, the secondary ring of the Wegener Crater would be rich in lithium and, when the region was subducted by the South American Plate, this metal (among others) surfaced in the Andean region as a result of the volcanism generated by the friction with the Nazca Plate.
Fragments related to Wegener's impactor may continue to wander in our solar system — Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, when it collided with Jupiter in 2009, emitted a detectable amount of lithium.
However, no significant amount of water vapor was detected, as would be expected from a comet — this could indicate that Shoemaker-Levy 9 was in fact an asteroid with a density greater than a cometary object.
Its breakdown can be understood based on the smooth accretion process evidenced by asteroids such as 25143 Itokawa and 162173 Ryugu, in addition to the object 486958 Arrokoth, flown over by the New Horizons spacecraft in January 2019.
Image: 25143 ITOKAWA asteroid, in Wikipedia
δ) Besides lithium, other possible indicators of extraterrestrial impact at the region are the significant levels of platinum, iridium and rhodium observed in lichens at Tierra del Fuego, extreme south of Patagonia and near the impact location on West Antarctica.[7]
The presence of these metallic elements caused by atmospheric contamination on that remote location, as proposed by the authors of that study, seems a less plausible possibility than their absorption from the rocks and ground soil by those composite organisms.
There are two candidates for an extraterrestrial impact on that region, the largest one being the Wegener’s impact, and the other the impact that originated the deformed crater actually known as Scotia tectonic microplate and its South Sandwich Islands volcanic arc possibly 200 or 180 million years ago.[8]
ε) The Antarctic Peninsula, possibly a deformed section of Wegener Crater’s outer secondary ring, is extremely rich in copper ore, as indicated by Copper Peak — literally a mountain made of copper — and other reserves found on that region.
Other locations with large reserves of copper ore and gold around the Wegener crater and surrounding areas at the time of impact are New Zealand (copper, gold and lithium), Japan (copper, gold and lithium), Taiwan (gold), Philippines (copper and gold) and the Andean region (copper, gold and lithium) — and the proposed model of Coronary Mantle Plumes (another study by the author) can explain this spatial distribution.
The possibility that the wealth of copper, gold and lithium in the region of the outer secondary ring was originated with the impact of Wegener is one more evidence to be considered for this hypothesis.
φ) 252 million years ago, the Antarctic continent was located slightly more to the north than today — its climate was comparable to that of Canada or Siberia today.
Other locations with large reserves of copper ore and gold around the Wegener crater and surrounding areas at the time of impact are New Zealand (copper, gold and lithium), Japan (copper, gold and lithium), Taiwan (gold), Philippines (copper and gold) and the Andean region (copper, gold and lithium) — and the proposed model of Coronary Mantle Plumes (another study by the author) can explain this spatial distribution.
The possibility that the wealth of copper, gold and lithium in the region of the outer secondary ring was originated with the impact of Wegener is one more evidence to be considered for this hypothesis.
φ) 252 million years ago, the Antarctic continent was located slightly more to the north than today — its climate was comparable to that of Canada or Siberia today.
The Antarctic freezing process started about 40 million years ago when sea currents and winds began to circulate freely around it, creating a region increasingly isolated from the air and ocean masses further north.
This process was triggered in part by the drifting of Antarctica to the south, but mainly by the drift of the fraction of Zealand towards the north — when it moved towards Australia and Asia, it stopped serving as a barrier to the oceanic circulation and started the freezing that wiped out almost all life of a continent that has always maintained rich and varied ecosystems.
[1] There are no more letters on the Latin alphabet, so we proceed using Greek letters.
[2] Based on Atlas de suelos de la Republica Argentina (INTA 1990); in Country Pasture/Forage Resource Profile, Argentina, FAO, by Martín F. Garbulsky and V. Alejandro Deregibus, 2006
[3] Characteristics of soils under seasonally flooded wetlands (oshanas) in north-central Namibia, African Journal of Agricultural Research; Yoshinori Watanabe1, Fisseha Itanna2*, Yuichiro Fujioka3, Ausiku Petrus2
and Morio Iijima1,4; Vol. 11(46), pp. 4786-4795, 17 November, 2016
[4] Dryland salinity in Western Australia, https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/soil-salinity/dryland-salinity-western-australia-0
[5] Another study by the author.
[6] Keating, Joshua (2009-10-21). "Bolivia's Lithium-Powered Future: What the global battery boom means for the future of South America's poorest country". Foreign Policy.
[7] Iridium, platinum and rhodium baseline concentration in lichens from Tierra del Fuego (South Patagonia, Argentina), Pino A1, Alimonti A, Conti ME, Bocca B., J Environ Monit. 2010 Oct 6;12(10):1857-63. doi: 10.1039/c0em00097c. Epub 2010 Sep 8.
[8] Another study by the author.
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