Taurid Meteor Stream Strikes Again

Today I learned that the American Meteorological Society keeps a website where people can report meteors: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/

A bunch of posts popped up on reddit this morning with people capturing video of last night's firebal like this one:

The upside of developing a surveillance society is we get cool footage like this.

Right now we are in the Leonid/Taurid meteor streams, which have pretty big rocks in them. The big rocks make for very bright meteors.

If you want to go down a great internet rabbit hole, start looking into meteors, Halloween, and oral traditions.

Did you know that cultures all around the world celebrate late October or early November as the time when people on Earth can commune with the dead? There's Halloween, Samhain, Dia del los Muertos, All Saint's Day, and others all cluster around the same time frame.

One of the more interesting, and controversial, hypotheses explaining this is that it ties together the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and cultural memory.

The end of the last ice age, around 12,900 years ago, was an extremely traumatic time. Somehow, the Earth warmed extremely rapidly which melted thousands of cubic miles of ice. At the same time, half the large animals on the planet went extinct. Topping off the disaster sundae, we have burn mats at the same layer of sediment indicating a huge amount of fire across the globe. This period of time marks the end of the time period called the Younger Dryas.

What does that have to do with Halloween?

Well, one of the explanations for the ending of the Younger Dryas is the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis. This hypothesis holds that a meteor or series of meteors hit the ice sheets in North America, injecting enough energy to melt the ice and cause all the secondary evidence we see in the ground. It wasn't as big as the dinosaur killer in the Yucatan, but it was probably the biggest thing humans had ever seen. The remains of Comet Enke are often highlighted as the most likely culprit.

And so, the cultural memory of what was probably the worst event ever to hit humanity was recorded in story and legend. In just about any tradition you look at, you will find the same stories of cataclysm, fire from the sky, descending angels, angry gods hurling bolts, and other descriptions which are probably metaphors for meteors and meteorites. A really interesting guy who ties all these threads together is Randall Carlson (although I think he goes a bit off the edge at times).

And all of those legends point to the same time of year, namely right now. If you saw great lights in the sky, your whole world turned upside down, and lots of people dying you too might think that the world was ending and it was your time to commune with the dead.

The good news is we are at the point now where technology allows us to mostly see these things coming. The bad news is we aren't paying enough attention.