The Carolina Bays are named after the bay trees found growing in the 500,000 mysterious oval shaped depressions located in Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.

Their characteristics have been presented as evidence of impact damage from a comet or asteroid. This view is hotly disputed, as is the idea that they are of relatively recent origin at the beginning of the Holocene. Emilio Spedicato is one proponent who considers that a relatively recent impact to have been a contributory fact to the ending of the last Ice Age leading to the demise of Atlantis.

In 1976, Otto Muck was probably the first to suggest a link between the Carolina bays and Atlantis ^{[098 p154-158].}

A more mundane explanation has been recently offered by Jon Pelletier, assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has just published a paper on a series of uniformly shaped and oriented lakes on North Slope of Alaska. Pelletier has offered a credible ‘thaw slumping’ rationalisation for their annual growth. However, I have not seen his explanation for their existence in the first place. Pelletier’s explanation^(a) for the Carolinas is based on the dissolving of the underlying limestone in a manner that generated lakes with a uniform orientation. Although he admits that at present (2005) his solution is “very speculative”.

The cometary explanation was given additional support in 2007 when a team of researchers from Oregon University outlined evidence that included the Carolinas, for the disintegration of a comet over Eastern Canada around 10900 BC. They claim that apart from the initiation of the Younger Dryas period, it caused widespread destruction across North America and also led to the disappearance of the Clovis culture. Further evidence supporting this view^(b) was advanced by other academics in 2008.

The serial sceptic, Paul Heinrich, claims that there is dating evidence, which indicates varying dates for the creation of different Carolinas. The most recent popular work to discuss comprehensively, the origin as well as the conflicting dating evidence for the Carolinas, is The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith. This is an important book that is primarily concerned with a cosmic catastrophe that wiped out the North American mammoth along with other large animals at the same time that the Clovis People disappeared 13,000 years ago. This was also the time of the colder Younger Dryas period.

When the Russian investigator Leonard Kulik studied the Tunguska River area over which a meteor/asteroid exploded in 1908 he discovered a number of neat oval bog holes that might offer support for either the impact theory or more improbably the theories of Pelletier.

^(a) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8379644/

^(b) http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=8625