Alleged Recent Impact Events: From the Ice-Ages to the Biblical Flood, Satan and Nostradamus

Session: Myths and Misrepresentations surrounding Cosmic Impact claims in Paleoclimatology, Paleontology, Paleoecology, Geoarchaeology, and Quaternary Research

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Evaluating and confirming if a terrestrial geological structure has a meteorite impact origin is a challenging task that requires the detection and documentation of unambiguous impact-diagnostic evidence, as described in the geological literature for decades and summarized in a recent consensus report [1]. This has, however, not prevented publication of some more outlandish (and not scientifically confirmed) ideas about some past (relatively recent) alleged impact events. A recent peculiar example is the reinterpretation of Dante’s Inferno in which Satan rashes into Earth and forms “a massive, circular, terraced crater that reaches to the center of the earth” [2]; no geological evidence (or logic) is involved. For some time there have been claims that 12.9 thousand years ago an impact, or a series of impacts, caused cataclysm and climate change at the Younger Dryas. As discussed in several critical assessments, there is no clear evidence for any of this, and “criteria” are used by proponents in an ad-hoc way. As an aside, there have been publications that there is a huge crater structure called Hiawatha underneath the Greenland ice sheet, supposedly of Younger Dryas age; this was not confirmed. Maybe less well known is that some decades ago, it was proposed [3] that Noah's flood was caused by series of comet impacts about 10,000 years ago in the process also destroying a hypothetical Atlantis civilization. (The main proponent, a professor of geology at the university in Vienna, was also active as a regional politician of the Green Party, and later embraced esoteric topics, predicting a global catastrophe for the year 2000, based on Nostradamus prophecies, and when the world did not end at the time and he was asked if he made a mistake, he responded that not he, but Nostradamus was wrong!). Needless to say, there is no evidence at all for such “flood impacts” and that hypothesis was immediately and thoroughly rejected by the geological community [4]. This shows there is not, and has not been, a shortage of strange unverified “impact ideas”.

[1] Cavosie A.J. et al. (2026) Meteoritics & Planetary Science 61, 1538–1565.

[2] Burbery, T. (2026) https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-14300.

[3] Kristan-Tollmann E. and Tollmann A. (1994) Terra Nova. 6, 209–217.

[4] Deutsch A. et al. (1994) Terra Nova. 6, 644–650.

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