IMPULSE-TRIGGERED LITHOSPHERIC DISPLACEMENT (THE POPOV CASCADE) VIA GRAVITATIONAL DECOUPLING AT THE YOUNGER DRYAS BOUNDARY

Guests who came without warning — may come again. 12,900 years ago, something suddenly and abruptly changed our planet in hours, not millennia. The climate shifted from warm to glacial. Megafauna vanished on two continents. A platinum spike appeared in the Greenland ice. Black mats covered the Clovis sites. What caused this boundary? We propose: an icy body, captured by Earth's gravity, disintegrated in orbit and fell into the ocean as a swarm of fragments. The impact did not push the crust — it launched a cascade. We present a quantitative cascade model of rapid lithospheric displacement at the Younger Dryas boundary (12,900 years ago). A captured icy body (D = 150 km, density 1000 kg/m³, orbital velocity 11 km/s) disintegrates within the Roche limit, delivering 1.06 × 10¹⁸ kg to the ocean as a swarm. The impact generates seismic energy of 6.4 × 10²¹ J (M_w 11.3), sufficient to fluidize the asthenosphere, reducing friction between crust and mantle by three orders of magnitude (μ: 0.6 → 6 × 10⁻⁴). Within a 3–8 hour window, gravitational torque from water redistribution (2.33 × 10²⁷ N·m) displaces the crust by 12° in 3.7 hours at a speed of 720 km/h (0.0024g). The impact serves as a trigger, not a driving force: the kinetic energy of sliding (3.07 × 10²⁶ J) exceeds the impact energy (6.4 × 10²⁵ J) by a factor of 4.8, the source being gravitational potential energy. Wave interference from the multi-frequency swarm creates a destruction band 3000 km long, not a global flood. Our model predicts banded turbidites, hemispheric platinum asymmetry, paleomagnetic inclination shifts, and selective megafauna extinction — all verifiable against geological data. [email protected]