Episode Details

Chris Cottrell of Dabbler’s Den has been one of the key researchers carrying the Carolina Bays investigation forward for a decade, and his conversation with George Howard on the Cosmic Tusk podcast covers the full arc of the research: where the community started, how the tools evolved, where the three main researchers diverge, and why Chris changed his publicly held position on the age of the bays after years of telling a different story on YouTube.

The foundational tool that opened the investigation to citizen researchers is the lidar overlay built by Michael Davis, who spent close to twenty years converting USGS lidar data into a format navigable on Google Earth, fitting ellipses to nearly 80,000 individual Carolina Bays, cataloguing each one with its length, orientation, and mathematical properties. The result became an accidental industry tool: wetland mitigation companies and university ecology programmes started using Davis's lidar independently of the Carolina Bays research, having discovered it was simply the best coastal plain elevation visualisation available. Tim Harris, a former Lockheed Martin and Boeing aerospace engineer, then applied the same orbital mechanics equations used for ballistic missiles to the elliptical orientation data and traced the radial pattern of the bays back to a single point of origin in the Saginaw Bay region of Michigan.

The chemical link to the Australasian tektite field, impact glass found across South Asia and Australia from an event 786,000 years ago whose source crater has never been identified, provides the most striking convergence. The chemical signature of the Australasian tektites matches the missing sandstone geology of the Michigan basin, and when Tim Harris ran the orbital math, the tektite field falls on the antipodal side of the planet from the proposed impact site. Chris Cottrell spent years publicly supporting a Younger Dryas origin for the bays alongside Antonio Zamora, and his shift came from the sea level record: if the bays were formed 12,800 years ago, they should appear along the entire coastline down to the lower elevations that were exposed at that time, but they are absent below roughly 30 feet, a threshold that corresponds precisely to the high water mark of the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago. That absence, he says, means the bays were already there and got washed away by sea level rise after they formed, placing their formation before 125,000 years ago, and in line with the 786,000-year Australasian tektite event.

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**CHAPTERS**

00:00 Introduction: George Howard and the Carolina Bays community

02:12 Chris Cottrell's origin story: the geology field trip and Ask Jeeves

05:27 Returning to the subject: the 2015 family hike and the YouTube channel

07:17 Three researchers, three hypotheses: Davis, Zamora, and Cottrell

07:52 Michael Davis's lidar tool and how it changed everything

14:57 The Nebraska rainwater basin and how the pattern extends westward

18:41 The Australasian tektites: 786,000 years and a missing impact site

22:02 Tim Harris, ballistic missile equations, and tracing the origin to Michigan

25:53 Why Chris changed his mind: the sea level argument

32:00 The Delmarva Peninsula anomaly and subsidence

35:00 Herndon Bay, Blythe Bay, and the field research

~60:00 The Arabian Bay dig: backhoes, sediment, and what they found

~90:00 Closing thoughts and what comes next

**GUESTS**

Chris Cottrell

YT Channel - @DabblersDen (https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8v7TydVhPpXGGi0XqCBpg)

Latest Book - https://us.amazon.com/Gone-But-Not-Forgotten-Catastrophe-ebook/dp/B0H35FGLRD

**ABOUT**