ABSTRACT Australasian tektites represent the largest group of tektites on Earth, and their strewn field covers up to one sixth of Earth’s surface. After several decades of fruitless quest for a parent crater for Australasian tektites, mostly in the main part of the strewn field in Indochina, the crater remains undiscovered. We elaborate upon a recently suggested original hypothesis for the impact in the Alashan Desert in Northwest China. Evidence from geochemical and isotopic compositions of potential source materials, gravity data, and geographic, paleoenvironmental, and ballistic considerations support a possible impact site in the Badain Jaran part of the Alashan Desert. In further support of an impact location in China, glassy microspherules recovered from Chinese loess may be the right age to relate to the Australasian tektite event, perhaps as part of the impacting body. The most serious shortcomings of the commonly accepted Indochina impact location include signs of little chemical weathering of source materials of Australasian tektites, unlike highly weathered sedimentary targets in Indochina, and questionable assumptions about transport of distal ejecta.

ABSTRACT This thesis embraces and expands upon a century of research into disparate geological enigmas, offering a unifying catastrophic explanation for events occurring during the enigmatic mid-Pleistocene transition. Billions of tons of “Australasian tektites” were dispatched as distal ejecta from a target mass of continental sediments during a cosmic impact occurring ca. 788 ka. The accepted signatures of a hypervelocity impact encompass an excavated astrobleme and attendant proximal, medial, and distal ejecta distributions. Enigmatically, the distal tektites remain the only accepted evidence of this impact’s reality. A protracted 50 yr search fixated on impact sites in Southeast Asia—the location of the tektites—has failed to identify the requisite additional impact signatures. We postulate the missing astrobleme and proximal/medial ejecta signatures are instead located antipodal to Southeast Asia. A review of the gradualistic theories for the genesis and age of the “Carolina bay” landforms of North America finds those models incapable of addressing all the facts we observe. Research into 57,000 of those oriented basins informs our speculation that they represent cavitation-derived ovoid basins within energetically delivered geophysical mass surge flows emanating from a cosmic impact. Those flows are seen as repaving regions of North America under blankets of hydrated impact regolith. Our precisely measured Carolina bay orientations indicate an impact site within the Laurentide ice sheet. There, we invoke a grazing regime impact into hydrated early Mesozoic to late Paleozoic continental sediments, similar in composition to the expected Australasian tektites’ parent target. We observe that continental ice shielded the target at ca. 788 ka, a scenario understood to produce anomalous astroblemes. The ensuing excavation allowed the Saginaw glacial lobe’s distinctive and unique passage through the Marshall Sandstone cuesta, which encircles and elsewhere protects the central region of the intracratonic Michigan Basin. Subsequent erosion by multiple ice-age transgressions has obfuscated impact evidence, forming Michigan’s “Thumb” as an enduring event signature. Comprehensive suborbital modeling supports the distribution of distal ejecta to the Australasian tektite strewn field from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The mid-Pleistocene transition impact hypothesis unifies the Carolina bays with those tektites as products of an impact into the Saginaw Bay area of Lake Huron, USA. The hypothesis will be falsified if cosmogenic nuclide burial dating of Carolina bay subjacent stratigraphic contacts disallows a coeval regolith emplacement ca. 788 ka across North America. We offer observations, interdisciplinary insights, and informed speculations fitting for an embryonic concept involving a planetary-scale extraterrestrial impact.

Abstract Combined geological, geochronological and geophysical data demonstrate that the evolution of the Wudalianchi volcanic field is closely linked to the most recent tectonic movements affecting the Songliao Basin, driven by dynamics associated with the subducting slab of the Pacific Plate. Intense volcanic activity has occurred in the Wudalianchi since the middle Pleistocene, including historical eruptions in 1720, 1721 and 1776. Together with radiometric age data, variations in the geomorphology of the volcanic cones reflect the effects of multiple eruptions at the same locations but during different periods. Geophysical data – including seismic images, tomography and magneto-telluric profiles – suggest the existence of subsurface low-resistivity bodies beneath some of the volcanoes, posing the potential that these could reactivate and erupt again in the future. To better characterize and elucidate the magmatic and volcanic processes operative in the Wudalianchi volcanic field over geological time, it is essential to conduct systematic geochemical and isotopic studies of many more samples of eruptive product, especially those from the older, single volcanoes.