Geologist Claims Meteorite Caused a Tsunami off the Coast of New York Region 2,300 Years Ago

KENNETH CHANG reports in the New York Times that: "... several geologists have collected evidence indicating that something very big and unusual occurred in waters near the New York area around 300 B.C., give or take a century. And Dallas Abbott, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is asserting that a meteorite, landing somewhere in the Atlantic, generated the tsunami." Scientists further speculate that a "furious onrush of water left sediment a foot and a half deep on the Jersey Shore, and debris cascaded far up the Hudson River... Although American Indians had long been living in and around the area that became New York, Dr. Abbott said there was no archeological evidence of a tsunami or known legends of, say, a terrible flood." Dr Abbott has built her theory on evidence of "minute carbon spheres and smaller-than-dust diamonds in sediment layers, which she said were the distinctive calling cards of a meteorite’s impact... “I think it’s pretty convincing,” Dr. Abbott said. “We always find the impact ejecta in the tsunami layer, never outside.” What tends to make a number of geologists skeptical of Dr Abbott's claims is the failure to find a crater in the ocean floor that had been left by the meteorite. "The carbon atoms inside some of the diamonds (Dr Abbot found) are lined up in a hexagonal crystal structure instead of the usual cubic crystals. The hexagonal diamonds have been found only within meteorites and at impact craters, said Allen West, a geologist who performed the diamond analysis for Dr. Abbott’s New York sediments.