Alexander Tollmann (1928–2007) was born in Vienna. He has been a professor at the Institute of Geology at Vienna University since 1969. Tollmann was also a founder of the Austrian Green Party.
In 1992 together with his geologist wife Edith, also now deceased, he published a work describing two cometary collisions in the 11th and 8th millennia BC.
With a mass of technical data they also claim that there was an earlier impact around 11000 BC when a comet struck the northern hemisphere in fragments.
Wikipedia offers an interesting critical review(b) of the Tollmanns’ theory, while the Golden Age Project established by Christian O’Brien presents a more sympathetic assessment(c).
These Late-Glacial impacts are suggested as the cause of the ‘Debacle’ flood in Ontario and the ‘Spokane Flood’ in the Columbia Basin. The Tollmans then claim that a second cometary impact occurred in 7552 BC that broke into seven pieces, one of which fell in the Atlantic. They maintain that the consequences of this event were the Flood of Noah and the Holocene Extinctions.
The Tollmanns backed up their claim with the results from field studies around the Köfels crater in the Austrian Tyrol. In 2008 two British researchers, Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, controversially proposed[426] that the Köfels impact was caused by an asteroid that was recorded on an Assyrian cuneiform tablet, which itself is a copy of an earlier Sumerian document dated to 3123 BC. It is also suggested that the same event was responsible for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Over ten years later other scientists claimed that a field of craters around Lake Chiemsee, in southeast Bavaria, was caused by fragments from a huge comet that broke up in the atmosphere(a). It should be noted that Lake Chiemsee is only about 50km from the Köfels crater. Artefacts, including coins, seem to have been strongly heated on one side. This fact, together with Roman reports of stones falling from the skies and dendrochronology has suggested a date of around 200BC for the event.
(a) http://www.chiemgau-impact.com/
(b) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tollmann%27s_hypothetical_bolide&printable=yes
(c) http://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/19giantcomet.php
See Also: Asteroids and Comets, Emilio Spedicato
