Mahabharata Quiz - 96

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Question – 96

Vyasa said that loud bursts were heard in Kailash and Himavat regions. Are there any evidence of asteroid / cometary fragments falling on these regions which seem to be in Nepal?

Answer:

Landslides in Langtang in Nepal situated 500 km to the east of Kailash are detected to have been caused by a cosmic impact. The paper by Masch et al comes up with imprints of a meteor crash in Langtang.  It establishes,

Ø  Impact from Southwest and debris flow also in Southwest which match well with the meteor direction given in the Mahabharata. 

Ø  Formation of SiO2-glass filled crevasses in autochthonous gneiss to a depth of 5 m are detected which is possible only in meteor crashes. The rocks (gneiss) contain 20 - 40% quartz, thus SiO2, which liquefied and flowed along the rock surfaces. A similar formation was found in the meteor crash in Atacama Desert. 

Ø  Minimum temperature on the autochthone gneiss surface of more than 1,520 C (based on Glass melt) is possible in an impact and not in regular landslides.

Ø  Similarly, the host rocks deformed in a brittle mode point to heat associated with meteor impact.

The rock melting heat does not stem from sliding, but from the immediate impact of the meteor onto the rock mountain range. The meteor scraped at a 45-degree angle along the rock face at a 5,000 m mountain altitude. It scraped 4 km along the rock, therefore the rockfall is unusually 4 km wide. As the meteor scuffled through, loosening the debris on the way, it was heard as thousands of explosions of summits tumbling down – “sahasraśo mahāśabdaṃ śikharāṇi patanti ca” – to quote Vyasa.

The period of this impact is not yet established scientifically but what makes this an event of 3136 BCE is the latitudinal match of this site with Mohenjo-Daro, where the Lower Town suffered a calamity, explainable by a meteor crash.  These two sites lie almost on the same latitude and an extended line connecting them, crosses the Persian Gulf - another probable location of the crash that could have possibly caused the Biblical flood explained in the previous question.

Three crash sites in same latitude

A group of fragments falling and landing at the same latitude is highly probable. Langtang (28.15 N) and Mohenjo-Daro (27.32 N) are latitudinally one degree away from each other. Hastinapura (29.16 N) comes within the same range. The marked location at the Persian Gulf is almost at the same latitude. Since the other three regions (Langtang, Hastinapura and Mohenjo-Daro) received the impact from South- Southwest, the effect at the Persian Gulf would have pushed the waters towards North-North East, up to Mount Ararat. This could have been more devastating to the Mesopotamian regions than the tsunami effect from the Burckle impact near Madagascar, in 2920 BCE.

The crash-range shown covers the rivers that suffered reversed flow of water on account of the gush of wind accompanying the falling fragments which was explained in Question 58