Allen West will be at the University Oct. 10 to discuss his theory that a massive comet wiped out the giant beasts that lived 12,900 years ago and perhaps Clovis man who inhabited South Carolina.

West's talk, "Diamonds and Mammoths: Evidence for an ET Impact 12,900 years ago," will be at 3 p.m. in Callcott, which is located behind the Russell House on South Bull Street, in Room 011. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will include dozens of slides, including images of how the massive comet might have looked.

West, a geophysicist from Arizona, has worked closely with University archaeologist Al Goodyear in conducting his research on the comet impact that is called the Younger-Dryas Event. Goodyear, a faculty member in the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) has well-known excavations in Allendale County that document Clovis and pre-Clovis man. The two scientists began collaborating in 2005 when West found sizable concentrations of iridium and nano-diamonds present in the layer of Clovis-era sediment at the University's Topper site. The element iridium and nano-diamonds are extra-terrestrial in nature and are associated with comets.

West and Goodyear's research on Younger-Dryas, first presented at the annual meetings of the American Geophysical Union in May, was published Sept. 27 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.pnas.org).

West said the Topper site was crucial in showing the extent of the comet's impact.

"At Topper, we found literally trillions of nano-diamonds. These rare, tiny diamonds, the size of a dot at the end of a sentence, are evidence of an extra-terrestrial impact," West said, "We had found nano-diamonds at Clovis sites on the West coast, and Topper confirmed that it was a continent-wide event that extended to the Atlantic."

West said the highly fragmented comet slammed into the Northern Hemisphere and produced massive, multiple explosions that had more force than all the world's nuclear weapons combined. He said that after the dust and smoked cleared, much of North America and Western Europe was dusted with microscopic diamonds, magnetic particles, iridium, and black carbon and that millions of animals and people had died.

"Large animal species were blasted into extinction--mammoths, mastodons, American camels, American horses, and saber-toothed tigers," West said. "After having been around for millions of years, they were gone in a geological heartbeat, killed by an icy dust ball from space."

On Oct. 7, National Geographic will broadcast a television special titled Mammoth Mystery, detailing West's findings. The History Channel will travel to Topper Oct. 8-9 to film for the documentary America 10,000 BC, which will feature Goodyear's Clovis and pre-Clovis work, as well as West's findings at the site.

In addition to West's findings at Topper, Goodyear had some of his own that contributed to the comet theory and ultimately the article for PNAS. Goodyear had conducted a study of ancient stone-tool artifacts made by Clovis people, who lived 13,100 to 12,900, and the Redstone people, who emerged afterwards, that he and his team had excavated at Topper, as well as sites in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. For every Redstone point, Goodyear said, he found four or five Clovis points.

"When you see such a tremendous drop-off or pattern like that, you really have to wonder whether there is a population decline to go with it," Goodyear said. "If the Redstone culture simply came right after the Clovis culture, you'd expect at least as many Redstone points and Clovis ones. That isn't what we found, and the question is why and what happened to the people who made these tools?"

The notion that a comet collided with Earth and caused massive extinctions of beast and man and ushered in an ice age was farfetched until now.

West is a retired geophysical consultant to oil-and-gas and mining companies in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Middle East, and South America. His projects in search for natural gas, oil, silver, and gold led, in part, to his discovery of new evidence for a comet impact 12,900 years ago. He recruited and helped organize the international research team on Younger-Dryas and provided some of the funding of the research.

West's lecture is sponsored by SCIAA and the University's anthropology department, geography department, physics and astronomy department, and the Nanocenter.

For more information, call Goodyear at 7-8170 or go to the SCIAA Web site at www.cas.sc.edu/sciaa.

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