Earth's Disaster Cycle

Every 12,068 years, the earth experiences a catastrophic event which changes the survivability on earth. Roughly 70,000 years ago the Toba Catastrophe is thought to have caused a population "bottleneck" of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs of humans. The Younger Dryas event (around 12,900 to 11,700 years ago) may have been triggered by impact events in Greenland and Canada. A conjecture is that Noah's flood (or any of the myriad flood stories from around the world) and Atlantis might have been a non-mythical recounting of a worldwide catastrophe caused by the sudden melting of the ice packs.

The suggestion that there is a 12,068-year cycle suggests that there might be a repetitive event causing these catastrophes. Just as we can predict the sun will rise every 24 hours, the moon will pass through its cycles every 29.5 days and the Earth will circle the earth every year, there is a suggestion that another pattern repeats every 12,000 years. One such pattern is the obit that our solar system goes through the galactic plane.

Illustration of a galactic plane (NGC 4452)
Source: By ESA/Hubble & NASA

As our solar system orbits through the galactic "accretion disk", our sun travels and accumulated dust and ions from the galactic center. Imagine the consequence of plugging the valve on a pressure cooker. The shell of the sun explodes outward - a micronova. Under normal circumstances, coronal mass ejections have a small likelihood of hitting Earth. A micronova is a different event. The entire solar system would be peppered by the ejection of particles. If we are lucky, our planet would be missed by larger projectiles but it is possible that the events which killed the dinosaurs and caused the Younger Dryas period was caused by solar ejecta. Even the disruption of the magnetic flux could cause the turbulence of the Toba event.