Younger Dryas also known as Dryas III was a mini Ice Age that lasted from around 10700 BC until around 9600 BC. It is named after a flower that flourished during this relatively short period. For about thirteen hundred years the glaciers had been slowly retreating until within a short time-span temperatures dropped and they began to advance again. The cause of this cooling is not absolutely clear. One view is that a sudden release into the North Atlantic of vast quantities of fresh water that had been contained by huge ice dams is assumed to have closed down the Gulf Stream, resulting in a twelve hundred year lowering of global temperatures. There is evidence that the change only took one or two decades. The same threat is said to exist today with the possibility of the melting of the Greenland ice cap.
The most recent theory, by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith[110], links the onset of the Younger Dryas with the explosion of a comet over North America that led to the extinction of many species and the collapse of the Clovis culture(a).
Coincidentally, Professor Emilio Spedicato independently arrived at the conclusion that it was a cometary impact in the North Atlantic that was responsible for the Younger Dryas. Subsequently, when temperatures rose again it resulted in the flooding of vast areas of low-lying landmasses that in Spedicato’s opinion, included Atlantis, which he locates in Hispaniola.
Ice cores from Greenland indicate a further cooling period circa 6200 BC that may be related to the abandonment of many Neolithic settlements during this period. Other periods of abrupt climate change have been identified from 3800 BC to 3500 BC and 2800 BC to 2000 BC.
The fact that Plato’s apparent date for the demise of Atlantis, circa 9600 BC, corresponds with the current, best estimate for the date of the Younger Dryas is interesting but unfortunately not conclusive proof of any direct connection. In the absence of any supportive archaeological evidence, a linkage between Atlantis and the Younger Dryas will have to remain a matter of faith rather than fact. Interesting but inconclusive.
(a) http://www.mysterious-america.net/nacomet.html
