What does a geologist say about the Carolina Bays? 

I grew up in the Cape Fear River valley of North Carolina in the 1950s and played in the bay lakes as a child. Then in my teens, I obtained my first pilot's license and, as part of my training, I had to do cross-country flights across Bladen, Cumberland, Columbus, Robeson and nearby counties (many of these are North Carolina/South Carolina border counties). I was shocked and enthralled to see from the air what I had lived among. Of course, my instructor (a prototypical "old pilot" of crusty outward appearance covering a very intelligent and thoroughly experienced person inside) told me about the "impact theory" and the alignment of the ovality did seem to support that superficially but the features always appeared to me to be more superficial and less violent than an impact event would create. Decades later, following my "office job retirement", I took on a part-time job with the Forest Service as a pilot and was assigned patrol and fire-fighting assistance duties in southeastern NC and the bays were part of my everyday life. We'd use them as navigational landmarks and as descriptions of locations for communication with ground personnel. One of my favorite bay lakes is "Horseshoe Lake", it's approx 15 miles SE of Fayetteville, NC and marks approximately the northern border of Bladen county and the airspace restrictions around Fayetteville airport. I don't know exactly what it looks like from the ground but the "wet part" of the lake is the south-western edge periphery of the full bay, with a marsh extending across the nw/se axis of the bay and the typical berm edge arc across the northeastern portion of the bay. This northeastern segment cannot be seen from the ground but its extent and connection to the "wet lake" area is immediately and easily seen from the air. Another apparent feature is the variety of the features -- full oval lakes, to clear oval bays with a central "sump" of wet or moist ground, to dry fully formed bays, to vague bays with what might be described as blown-out edges, and the bays that have been obscured -- or not!! --- by agricultural land use. I found this video fascinating and full of excellently presented facts versus the usual soup of "theories" surrounding other depictions of the bays. Your scientific observations and analyses have greatly confirmed and explained features I've lived among and been very curious about for my entire life. For that, I applaud your work and personally appreciate it greatly.

Any fisherman could tell you exactly what it is, really big bream beds.

Wouldn't the energy of an impact melt chunks of ice that got blasted off the ice sheet? Especially if they became sub-orbital during their re-entry?

One of the first geologic maps I worked on after starting my current job had Carolina Bays in the coastal plain portion of the map. That was the Cherry Hill quadrangle near Emporia, VA. I had never heard of them before that map.

This a an interesting analysis, and, if you are interested Pleistocene climate, serves to suggest that the climate might have been far harsher than we normally imagine. The large, partially eroded "bay" discussed around 11:00 shows multiple concentric lines of vegetation along the lower right. Those look like shore line features and might indicate the feature, which is only partially defined, might in reality be sequential meander margins of a stream migrating up and left in the image. With LiDAR it should be poissible to detect relict thermokarst landscapes even in heavily forested environments. The eastern seaboard and plains were heavily forested prior to European colonization. The Lena River example also includes meandering streams that are not incised.

I have seen a paper that showed permafrost at least as far a Georgia. We have to remember Permafrost is ground frozen for at least 2 years. With the fluctuations during the last Glacial Maximum I don't see it as a huge leap.

I was so waiting/hoping for the Lana Delta to come into this discussion. I became aware of them while researching the voyage of the Jeanette, an early attempt to reach the north pole. George de Long and his crew landed there after the ship became trapped and crushed by sea ice.

I think I subbed to your channel after you posted this, so apologies that I'm 9 months late to the party, but it just popped up in my feed. Carolina Bays are one of my favorite morphological features. It's so easy to get caught up in the hype trying to tie these into "that impact theory", but I found that trying to find out their actual depositional environment was just way more fascinating. These things occurred over at least the last 125k years if we are to believe the results from various marine isotope studies. They give us a glimpse into the climate and weather patterns of that time, and that just really gets me going. Sure, comet impact ejecta and "a very bad day on Earth" is sexy and all, but the most likely explanation is way more interesting to me, and videos like this are exactly what we need to dispel the myths. (Also, it's pretty easy to find LiDAR of bays overlapping dunes overlapping bays and being cut by rivers. All of which simply could not have happened all at once.) I'm not inclined to agree with the thermokarst oriented lakes being related to the bays though. Similar in some respects, but I'm not sure I could be convinced that the periglacial environment extended as far south as Georgia. Also, to my eye, the majority of thermokarst lakes seem to exhibit a much higher degree of irregularity in their shapes than the bays. Can't disregard their shared aeolian features though. So, super similar, sure, but not exactly. Maybe the thermokarst lakes are what the bays looked like in their infancy, and then smoothed out over time? Maybe the thermokarst lakes will resemble the bays in tens of thousands of years... Another cool place to look at is coastal southern Argentina, btw. Again, I have no idea if this was periglacial, but there seem to be extant oriented lakes there as well. FWIW, Cintos used to have a lot more publicly availably LiDAR imagery for Google Earth; I have it all saved to one of my old laptops. I really need to back all that up; it's got every bay cataloged from the project. I have no idea why they don't seem to host it anymore. And as a personal aside, I fly a drone equipped with LiDAR at one of my worksites, located just north of the Delaware Bay in NJ. I know there are bays there but they have been so heavily obscured by industry and farming so it's very difficult to pick them out. I haven't detected any obvious bay features at my site, but if I ever do... well, I'll be sure to absolutely geek out over it. Anyway, sadly, you'll probably not be invited to the JRE any time soon... ;)

This is why I love RU-vid. Fascinating topics to discuss and debate about. We really don't know much about the geographic history of North America. From the Red Giants of the America's to the Younger Dryas theory.

Toward the end of the video when you show the lakes in alaska, those are thermokarst lakes and they've been proven to not have regular elliptic shape or directional orientation like the Carolina bays.

Interesting. Before you got to the end in the delta in Alaska I was thinking they reminded me of the crazy looking depressions in the delta of the Volga river at around Astrakhan. Everytime I see it on the map I always look closely at it and wonder how a receding Caspian sea can lead those crazy things.

Really neat analysis. I saw info about these bays before and was convinced it was from impacts and I just assumed different impacts caused the different orientations and ages. But I think you’re right. Sandy lakes with high winds.

Thanks for the information. I was totally unaware of these features.

I live near a set in eastern NC, White Lake. There’s about 3 in a cluster together and a larger one, Lake Waccamaw near the SC border. Cool to hear the info about them.

As I recall, all of the versions of the impact theory I've learned of involve multiple primary impacts in quick succession, some simultaneous, that each generated their own secondary "splash" events that are proposed to have created the "bays". The ideas were of one or more objects that broke up before impact, possibly colliding shortly before impact, or perhaps even a swarm of smaller objects to begin with. Some have compared the event to the various annual meteor showers we experience on Earth as our orbit takes us through debris fields.

Well, I’ve been thinking about this video for months. This is gonna sound crazy, but I guess I’m gonna break it down for y’all: what if the bays were formed originally as little ponds like in the example in this video of Alaska. These ponds would freeze over in the winter and partially melt in the summer, creating an ice disc on the surface of the ponds. Then the wind blows this ice disc to one side of the pond and scrapes the edges. As the wind changes direction, it pushes it to another side of the pond, also scraping it, acting like an erosive Spirograph. As the ice sheets retreated in the north, the weather got warmer and the ice discs stopped forming, stopping the erosive growth and locking the axis of the ellipse in the current position. Then the shallow ponds got filled in with sediment, leaving behind the only the deepest and largest of the ponds. Then the water dried up and the sand left behind is being blown by the wind and undercutting the bays next to one another.

Randall Carlson has the best explanation for Carolina Bays. A meteor crashed into a glacier during the last ice age and threw huge chunks of ice into the air that fell back to Earth and made elliptical craters. Probably more than one meteor and hence different alignments. Edit: Now that I’ve finished your video, maybe yours is the best. Who knows.

None of the thermokarst lakes has the perfection of the bays, none have the overturned rims nor the perfectly flat bottom. I think if you were to do a serious investigation we would find unlike the bays the thermokarst lake's orientation conforms to the base strata.

A very cool video. Thanks. Has anyone excavated a trench across one of the bays? I would expect at least a thin layer of finer sediment deposited under water in the middle? I guess it depends on how long they were water-filled before draining. Still a likely to trap for spores or pollen blown up from the South?

Cool stuff man. I like how people are explaining your profession to you. Seems like a very complex combination of data. No simplistic conclusion.

I have so many thoughts about your idea of it being similar to the formations in the far north. If it were ice related, the thawing ice sheet on the lake/pond/bay could very easily move the sand. Not just once but many thousands of times. I recall the wandering stones in the deserts being explained in this way. The ice freezes around the stone and then drags the stone around as the ice sheet moves with the wind. My initial thought was these rings being formed by tussocks. A floating mound of organic that is blown around slowly digging up a depression below it as the roots run aground over large time scales.

I have a feeling they were created long ago when water more covered the area.

What about the old theory of igniting underground peat? It’s a common occurrence in that area of NC. Wild thing to see the earth on fire, water boiling in ditches from the heat.

How do you get that resolution for your satellite images? Good job by the way!

Really good video, watched it to the end. I'm still a fan of the impact theroy. To me, the general uniformity of the bays doesn't compare to the naturally formed lakes. From my understanding, the impactor broke up while entering the atmosphere going SW. Multiple fragments of varying sizes struck the 1 mile thick ice sheet, each one ejecting debris differently. That is why there can be variation in the bays angles and convergence points. I can't wait for someone to put all the lidar into an AI algorithm to see what it comes up with. Not to mention thats the only way of getting a rough estimate on their number, lol. I'd love to get your thoughts on the possibility of multiple impactors! 🙏🏻🙂

The dry-sand used with impact model does not reflect the truth on the ground. The sand used should be very fine and saturated to more accurately reflect the impact response. I would recommend the well-rounded very fine sand eroded out of the Triassic and Jurassic dune sands found on the Colorado Plateau. Ballistic ice-bergs, what a concept. More evidence against than for it seems, but still highly entertaining.

I've thought for years that they are analogous to features in tundra regions which undergo daily freeze thaw structures.

Could acidity be the causee chewing rock away? Might not be the same process we think of

Take a fresh poured slab of concrete and flood the surface and you will get pic marks like the bays.. a clay mud flat with a skim of water on it will poc like thatas it dries

They look just like all of northern Alaska from just south of Point Lay to just east of Prudhoe Bay. Looks like a spray of meteor fragments that landed there too. They all lay in the same direction as well, like there was an impact north west of there? Would be interesting to see it in Lidar.

a couple things come to mind as watching this. regarding the dividing line where 2 bays overlap, I dont think a comparison to celestial impacts is not valid. I think if there are too many to be cosmic impacts, they would have to be secondary impacts of ice. ice thrown off of a glacial impact would be a fraction of the speed and likely fractured at a low angle I think the impact energy would be low. the direction is something to note, not all but most clusters are. the melting ice would cause an extremely flat floor. plus these things are just different. the other ones around the world dont fit to me, I dont think there is enough similarity to call them the same

This is such a cool video, love your content! Thanks!.

Hydrologically closed bays don’t cooperate with the dune progression. If they have been naturally drained by being pirated (like Big bay), they accept the dune moving in. Check it out … seen in numerous instances.

NO ONE has shown a better hypothesis than Mr. Zamora. Highly plausible scenario. ice sheet, impactor, rained ice debris pretty much kills all large fauna on N American continent... like it or not, it is the best explanation .

These are Gator flag ponds made many many years ago, over a long period of time.

I agree with impacts being simultaneous, but might they be over a few minutes in delay due to trajectories?

I just watched your 'oil seeps on the Caribbean island' video and really enjoyed it. I must commend you for entertaining Antonio Zamora's Glacier Ice Impact Hypothesis for the formation of the Carolina Bays. I know you must have, at least, read his paper, if not his later third book. Perhaps watching a few of his videos would make accepting the hypothesis easier? Mr. Zamora exhaustively examines all of the competing hypotheses over the course of his many videos. Every objection you mention to the idea of glacier ice ejecta from one or more impacts upon the Laurentide Ice Sheet causing the formation of the Carolina Bays, he has elegantly addressed. You neglected to include mention of the identical Nebraska Rainwater Basins. As an intelligent layman who reads papers on a wide variety of subjects, I came to this enigmatic geological puzzle without preconceptions. I am not surprised that academia has ' formed a consensus ' and has moved on concerning this subject. Evidently, elliptical Bays were formed from inclined penetration funnels punched into unconsolidated soils close to the water table, that were then subjected to liquefaction and viscous relaxation during the ~10 minutes it took for their emplacement. All deviations of form from elliptical can be attributed to variations in grade or content of the underlying strata. I found the GIIH to be so compelling that I bought all three of Mr. Zamora's books; hard-cover of his latest. His YT videos can be sarcastic at times, in humorous ways, but I wouldn't miss a one. I'll now watch your channel for new content at the same time. It takes me a few extra clicks to run the other browser that I stay signed into, but I do put forth the extra effort so I can 'like' and comment to certain content. Otherwise, I usually watch anonymously and leave bugger-all feedback, in order to use my favorite, brave, 'skip all the time-wasting gack' browser. Thank you for taking the time to make this video, and especially for mentioning Mr. Zamora's work. After watching this video, I have certainly LIKED & SUBSCRIBED to your channel, which the YT algorithm so kindly served up to me.

I encourage you all to look at the way the "Carolina Bays" have multiple examples of places where some smaller bays sit on the rims of larger bays. Please find statistically similar examples in the "thermokarst lakes/prevailing winds models/examples." I don't see how young thermokarst lakes could form on the rims of older thermokarst lakes in this manner. This formation supports the hypothesis that the "bays" were formed almost (but not quite) at the same time by impacts. The impacts were from ice chunks from the Laurentide ice sheet and contained very little terrestrial rock or extra-terrestrial rock as the initial impact(s) were made by a comet and not a meteor.

See Antonio Zamora's work on the Carolina Bays. He is very thorough. Also, see his videos on the Younger Dryas Genetic Bottleneck.

This is very interesting and it's boggling my mind. I've heard about these Bays before but never really looked into them. Now I'm probably going to go down a rabbit hole of investigation to try to figure it out with the data that exists on them.. Form my own hypothesis. I love geology too. Thanks for the video.

Wonderful thought.

Are all of these really geological vs much more recent practice target fields for either artillery or air bombing? Especially considering the army and marine bases of eastern nc/sc. Id be shocked if at least a few of the areas were target areas.

I'm with Zamora. The examples in Alaska and Siberia don't look anything like the Carolina Bays. Only a few of those are elliptical and they're not oriented nearly as uniformly. For one thing, he's not taking into account all the liquification caused by the massive earthquakes that were happening due to the primary and all the secondary impacts that were going on at the time.

My first guess would be they formed during the last intercontinental glaciation period 12,000 years ago, when North Carolina would have had permafrost. They’re called kettle lakes.

Hmmmm i have alot of respect for the Zamora & the Cosmic Tusk analysis, but the southwest to north east sand "blown" / " splashes" & that of Alaska & Lena river delta very interesting. Comparing side by side lidars would be very useful & dating of permafrost melts with sand splashes vs Carolina bay bottom dates. The those perma frost melt lakes dont to my mind have the crisp geometry of the Carolinas nor obvious uniform orientation either. A possible explanation consistent with impact hypothesis, is multiple comet fragments impacting ice sheet {like shoemaker levie 9's 21 fragments hitting Jupiter, but tighter grouping} first impact has different point of origin to subsequent ones. So for example Delaware's POI alignment could indeed be different to Carolina's. But having said that not sure about splashes & bay overlaps if all caused in same impact time frame. Would a liquefaction shake up of perma frost lakes {by even an impact caused} mega quake & after shocks somehow make lakes more geometric? probably not but different sand box sand formulas & bed testing impacts with ice etc & shaking might provide evidence either way.

I am a complete layman and working with minimal information, but as I recall from school, all of the low country, up to Columbia was an ancient sea. Could it be as the water receded it formed pools in the sand, and the orientation was caused by tidal forces?

Aeolian scientist here: I'd suggest that the parabolic dunes you show at 10:00 (and again a few times) likely predate the bays. Why I think this: - The dunes are roughly the same size as those nearby (across the river, for example) that aren't connected to bays. Dunes of similar size like this tend to have formed in the same time frame, from the same wind patterns, with the same influx of sand. Of course dunes can be reactivated so this can get tricky. - The deep bay in the upper center seems to have degraded dune deposits to its west, which would be upwind rather than downwind. Although you could argue that those are derived from the next bay to the west (the one with a stream channel). - The deposits (lunettes maybe?) downwind of the bays tend to be on their SE side, suggesting a ~NW wind formed them. However the parabolic dunes were formed by a SW wind. To me this suggests that the bays and parabolic dunes were formed at different times when the strongest winds blew from different directions. (It could also be a seasonal thing: if the bays are related to ice like those in Alaska/Russia then they'd be shaped by winter winds, whereas the parabolic dunes could be shaped by summer winds when the landscape dries out enough to mobilize sand.) Either way, these things are very cool and a wonderful mystery. I just think that this particular location shows bays crosscutting dunes. The example you show at 11:30 clearly shows dunes crawling on top of a bay, so I agree that their history is intertwined. Thanks for the close look at these things!

Nah. It was aliens. Or, the earth is just a giant ball of swiss cheese... OR! Maybe ALIENS turned our earth INTO a giant ball of swiss cheese, but upper management was all like, "Change it back!" So they did, but they just forgot to fill in all the holes...

Impact hypothesis seems a non-starter as ice cannot physically withstand the accelerations/forces needed to send them a thousand miles, by orders of magnitude. Ice cannon balls and bullets simply don't work. They go poof! Sounds like someone's trying to sell books or something...

What of the structures that appear to the west? I believe there are some present in missouri, kansas and nebraska, a couple may have been found in TX panhandle. Their orientation doesnt jive with the ones found on the east coast.

The bays don't look like thermokarsts to me. They're too clean, too perfect. I like Zamora's theory, but the old saying is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? I wish some geology dept somewhere that specializes in core sampling would run a few 'practice tests' on some Carolina bays and put the idea to rest one way or another. I can still picture myself twelve thousand years ago sitting outside my cave eating a double wooly mammoth burger beside my sixteen females as a two km sized chunk of Taurid comet goes whooshing by and crashes hundreds of miles away somewhere up by the great lakes. It's interesting to think about all of the various implications one way or another if something similar were to happen today.

There is a possibility that at least some of the impacts were from liquid instead of solid ice because the speed of the event might have melted the ice. Geology like archaeology changes slowly, and new theories are hard sells. The continental drift theory was widely rejected until the 1960s.

5 minutes into this, I started thinking about that's going on with the thawing permafrost today. Aren't those caused by escaping methane that had been trapped fairly shallow? Did the Carolinas get that cold during the ice ages?

As soon as you get to the bays up by delaware the bay size drops it seems, almost like there was a second smaller event.

I'm no geologist but I got the impression it was something striking an ice sheet before you mentioned it and what made me consider it is the elliptical impressions like a lower velocity object tumbling (chunks of ice) striking and then melting into shallow ponds causing the sand and soil to settle evenly ( a large meteor exploding before impacting the ice sheet would explain all the diffrent impact trajectories (it is just my opinion )

Aren't lithics found on the edges of the Bays?

Hey that was really informative and I appreciete you take the time to do this. I am no geologist although I think the bays look actually quite different than thermokarsts and more like oblique impacts on viscous material being liquefied by strong earthquakes caused by massive impact(s) hundreds of miles away, minutes before an iceberg rain. The fact so many are near perfect ellipses is a very strong indicator for impacts. The overlays of the bays are something we dont see in thermokarsts and I find the elongated bays you showed further south interesting as they dont resemble ellipses anymore. So there are still many questions although these could be highly eroded or stretched by deformations. I also found the sandy rims and dune evidence interesting although I dont think that is a smoking gun. Dating studies done by Moore and others still seems anecdotal and it may be necessary to do hundreds of sections along different bays to get a more statistical trend to determine mecanisms of formation. I recall some results showed folded stratigraphy on bay rims. So to conclude: I quite enjoyed this video and encourage many more. I am still not convinced a few sandy dunes can overturn the amazing consistency in ellipticity that so many bays´ geometry have. This is a huge piece of evidence I fail to see how so many geologists brush off as insignificant. Maybe there were pultiple impacts, or airbusts, we simply dont know. But if we cannot piece it together like detectives... If we keep downplaying geologic drama shown by geometric precision... If doing so may mean professional suicide... We will never focus our research on finding the real truth. thnks and good luck, M

Are any Bays found above the Fall Line and if not why?

Where are the studies that show the bay structure is only shallow?

Can you say “hydraulically closed”. Such a landform will always contain damper conditions.

How do you know the peninsula hasn't shifted between the impacts and now?

How can we view this sort of data?

These bays look like terminal velocity impacts unlike celestial impacts that are at velocities hundred to thousands of times higher. I work in land moving. I see a lot boulders impacting various ground types. Sure, the impacts I see are at a human scale (1 to 5 Ton impactors) and are only at 40 to 50 percent of terminal velocity (dropped about 10 to 15m above the ground) but close enough to get a good feel for it. Better than you will get from a lab using a 1kg impactor. Ground also just doesn't react the same to such small impactors. The smoothness of these features indicate to me that the impacts were likely occurring under some layer of ice but not too thick 10m to 50m which has also since melted away.

You make a lot of assumptions to dismiss possibilities. Example: Certainly if these were caused by impact hitting the ground, you'd expect them to go in deeper. While technically correct, why would they need to have been caused by a solid object impacting the ground? Why couldn't they be a comet that broke apart and sent a bunch of chunks of ice into that area. Like buckshot, but ice. They could have vaporized once hitting the ground and never penetrated, or they could have exploded above the ground, so only a shockwave hit the ground. Like the Tunguska event, only a few hundred small explosions because the comet broke up into a thousand pieces. The object could have contained more ice and zero rock, could have been more loosely held together, been different materials, impacted at a steeper angle. Many possibilities. But you just say "Certainly if these were caused by impact hitting the ground, you'd expect them to go in deeper." and dismiss the possibility of it having been caused by impact. The fact is, we know the Earth has been impacted millions of times. Many tens of thousands of times in relatively more recent history. We know the only reason the Earth isn't covered with craters like our Moon is because Earth has an atmosphere, wind, and rain erosion washing away the craters. Another Possibility: I'm not sure if you examined this possibility seriously, or just dismissed it without much thought, but if it was one asteroid made of loose rocks, maybe even ice containing many rocks, a gravel like material, or even one rock that broke into many rocks. Again it could have impacted the area like buckshot. Traveling at very high speeds most would have burned up in the atmosphere, and only small rocks impacting the ground, but at high speeds (E=MC) would have caused a large explosion, but not have penetrated as deep. In this scenario the craters would have been somewhat shallow and erosion would have filled them in over time regardless. Another possibility is, like the ice scenario, they could have been rocks, but not iron like most meteors. Maybe they were a softer material like graphite, so exploded on impact, but did not penetrate deep. You would need to model every possible impact scenario. Every possible material, combination of materials, density of materials, every angle, every speed... Literally every possibility, combined with every post impact erosion scenario. Maybe the area was covered in 5 or 10 feet of water when the pieces impacted. So the object hit the shallow water turning it to steam vaporizing it. Maybe the area was covered in 50 feet of snow, or 20 foot thick glaciers when the objects hit. There are thousands of possibilities and tens of thousands of combination of possibilities. You can't just assume iron meteor impacting ground making a deep crater like in Arizona is the only possibility. No matter how rare the other possibilities are, if they are possible, they are possible. If we are going by likelihood, then we don't exist. The Earth certainly has no moon. There are so many things about the formation of the Earth that are so remotely unlikely. Some rare combination of materials, coming from an unlikely area, an unlikely direction, hitting at an unlikely time, at an unlikely speed and unlikely angle. It would be normal and consistent with all the other unlikelihoods Earth has encountered.

Is it possible it could be something like a plasma? Not like birkeland currents bc those are more like electrical discharge arcs but with a plasma that is just really condensed basically like a liquid of pissed off highly energetic protons and the electrons. I was reading about ball lightning recently and one theory that’s had some success in the labs is the creation of pockets of intense radiation surrounded by a plasma layer that tends to work like a cavitron with the ionized plasma sustained and replenished by the outward “pressure” of the radiation very much how the radiative pressure of sustained fusion on the sun that counteracts the gravity and other inward forces. Possibly the sun can temporarily “nova” its outer layers from time to time due to some sort of magnetic flux anomaly or something akin to it, in which case earths protective fields could be temporarily stripped away leaving it open to sprays liquid sunshine that were blown off or escaped from the sun.. there is some science to this hypothesis

I grew up in this area, and the legend has always been at Lake Waccamaw was formed by a meteorite. I will bet this is exactly one of those Carolina Bays.

Lacking a crater maybe it was not a solid impactor but instead was something in liquid/steam? Imagine a comet breaking apart and the large chunks of ice explode just before impact and create airbursts Like a gigantic pressure washer where the droplets are tens or hundreds of kilograms in mass.

You have to assume that some ejecta would have interacted with itself which would explain some of the off axis bays. There are some in Nebraska as well. You do not need to exit the atmosphere to travel from Michigan to South Carolina.

More likely those features are from glaciation at a time when sea level was lower. LIDAR might show more of them off shore on the shelf, now filled with sediment.

Excellent discussion and an open mind as to the formation of these "bays". They are certainly in the forefront of scientific study in 2024 with the "Younger Dryas" debate on a potential impact hypotheses for controlling the climate at the time. More work needs to be done on the actual age of the "bays". Did they occur right before the Younger Dryas or during the Younger Dryas? There's definitely much more work that can be done to help narrow down the origin of these features.

If there was a valid argument against ice ejecta from one or more impacts, I didn't hear it from this video. Why didn't you show us the LiDAR for the Karst Lakes so we can compare further?

Dismissing their orientation without assessing it statistically suggests his bias instead of open interest. His other examples of aolian formed depressions, he states they show similar alignment where clearly they do not. Where I agree with him is if the central area is undisturbed strata, that would convincingly disprove impact formation....evidence?

U referenced south ga. I recognized Ricketson Bay immediately. We have many many of these bays. Most are quit small but several are huge such as ricketson bay, round a bout swamp, arabi bay, and guest mill pond. We all suspect they are the result of impacts.

I've got many bays on my land and the over reaching thing about them is the sand layer is on top of alluvial clay, the sand isn't very deep anywhere from 4=15 feet. Cold deserts don't produce very many sand dunes as heat creates more sand movement. So yeah formed by low temperature desert winds imo. On a side note I do find what look like impact glass spherules when i did deep in the gray clay of the bottom of the bays. Maybee from the Mexican Chicxulub impact?!?!. Who knows ,but definitely high temperature created spherules.

Impact on top of the ice sheet above Saginaw bay

I like the theory of glacial ice from a meteor empact falling back to earth. This would leave no trace of the impact debris.

I don’t see that at all. I see old sand dune sheets, where a later impact has landed upon it and destroyed the dunes. R

Moon impact craters are not Most impact craters on the moon are hypersonic impacts, when that happens, the crater is almost perfectly round no matter the angle it hit at.

I believe i have an idea how they got there... i should make a private video for you to explain what I saw, and how i get there, then, that this video shows me the directional spread of the debris

Did anyone do a grown lidar around Mt Vesuvios. Maybe a volcano that shot up rock into low orbit and the rocks fell back down. And how much of America was covered in ice during in the ice age. And what would happen someplace like Yellowstone caldera was covered in ice with noway to relieve pressure and it shot up with extreme pressure. Could that happen.

I have a great lidar pic that shows thousands of them maybe more in a 25km area. Crazy to think some geologist think it was wind that caused them.

Carolina Bays are formed when aquifers burst through the surface of the land at extremely high pressures. These aquifers generally ran from the mountains to the sea. This is why the long axis of the Bays roughly align in that direction. The pressures and volumns of water required do not exist today. We still have artesian wells on the coastal plains though, which is essentially the same process, but on a much smaller scale.

So there is some sort of impactor factor here coupled with extreme winds...

Didn't all the areas with bays used to be under the ocean?

Referencing back to the image you showed from Barrow, I wonder if ice circling around the lakes may be what forms them. It seems like that would be a reasonable explanation for why all sides of the lakes have raised rims rather than just the leeward side. If that were the dominant driver, then I can see how it could happen without permafrost being present (and being the coastal plane was only 6-12C cooler, it seems very unlikely permafrost could form).

Many Carolina Bays are near-perfect ellipses. Thermokarst lakes simply cannot be explained by this observation. That's why Anthony Zamora's hypothesis of ice chunks ejected from the Laurentide Ice sheet better fits the facts. The intersection of a conical ejecta curtain with the plain of the Earth is an ellipse.

Maybe it was the super volcano under the North Pole. It would have thrown pieces of the ice cap in all directions

Why don't geologists know the Bays emit anomalous hydrogen (see Zonnik and others)? This suggests a totally different cause related to the oceanic-continental margins (mafic crust proximal to felsic crust, with hydrogen coming from the oxidation ferrous iron to ferric iron in mafic materials). "Fairy circles" in Brazil, Namibia, and southeast Australia, are known to emit hydrogen as well. They are due to Proterozoic or Archean mafic or ultramafic bodies in shield areas. Geo-types need to get their heads out of the sand as the recent knowledge suggests natural hydrogen is potentially our best non-carbon fuel source for the future.

You can tell you're obviously biased towards the permafrost theory & you're probably right... But you didn't exactly steel-man the ice sheet impact theory, seems like you omitted about 12,000 yrs of sedimentation & erosion

If you look in florida around Lakeland and then down the "ridge" toward sebring, you will see lakes that are circular, almost perfect circles. They remind me of fish nests but they are definately sinkholes. The aquifers underground "dry-up" and then gravity takes over. The tell tale signs are Cypress trees. Im sure you have seen the seafloor south of louisiana, they probably were from the Chixclub impact....i would like to know unequivocally but the moon thing is simply just less erosion to smooth out some of the edges

At 9:15 you point to man-made features, mining of sand and gravel, road making and other land moving where man is creating boundaries for farming and etc, from hundreds of years, and you are trying to propose that these are aeolian features and I’m not buying it. Southwesterly winds? How predominant is that shown in any other features? Rare to non-existent. I call BS.

They are large fish spawning beds from when the ocean was higher and fish were a bit larger than now !!

Obviously this is an electrical phenomenon. Dendritic shaped canyon River valleys are the arc conducting areas that were excavated by intense subterranean pressure from the intense heat, while anode matter deposition areas are minimum perimeter shaped (circular excluding magnetic fields at the time and local charge interactions) deposition regions composed of thermally processed rock (sand). The universe is electric.

I wonder if the craters could've initially been sand boils

is there water in these bays, I guess I don't know wtf your talking about, I live in sc,, guess I should go try to find one of these bays

If anyone has a good version of Google Earth check out the bay in the middle of the city of Aiken SC. It's quite round and deep enough to be full of water all the time so you don't need Lidar to find it.

If you understand exactly what Antonio Zamora his shown in all of his publications and YT podcasts, there is no longer a real mystery for the Carolina Bays as well as all of them up the Eastern Seaboard and out west in Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska. His very detailed scientific analysis and mathematical calculations have essentially proved that these were impact structures. Mainstream science has to acknowledge this publicly and give this man credit where due. If not, Science in the U.S. gets a black eye and loses credibility for not keeping up with important discoveries in this country, period.

Wow!

That the longest I don't know ever

Ta the engrossing video and links. The first time I've seen some of the relationships between aeolian dune sheets and Carolina Bays. The complexity of bay transgression on the dune sheets and dune progradation over bays suggests they, for a period, at least locally, developed together. If, as you suggest, the regolith beneath the bays is undisturbed, the aerial dimensions of the bays are inconsistent with the depths of what must have been transient craters, had they been indeed formed through ice impact. Are there examples of bays developed over crystalline basement lithologies? What of the inverted stratigraphy apparently observed along the bay rims? All the best from a Namibian earth scientist.