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What is the source of this chart? I'm trying to understand the reason for the inclusion of the word highlighted below...

https://cosmictusk.com/hancock-younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-since-2007/

Another possibility, not necessarily mutually contradictory with any of the above mechanisms, is that 11,600 years ago the earth interacted for a second time with the debris stream of the same fragmenting comet that had caused the beginning of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago. This is by no means implausible since the earth stillpasses through that debris stream twice a year. It is the well-known Taurid meteor stream, now 30 million kilometers wide. Travelling at around 2.5 million kilometers a day on its orbital path, our planet passes through the Taurid stream for around 12 days at the end of June and again for 12 days in late October and early November. At both transits, meteorites – “shooting stars” – in huge numbers enter and are usually small enough to burn up in our atmosphere (in October/November they are often referred to as the “Halloween Fireworks”).

That sounds harmless enough but, as long ago as 1990, before any of the physical, geological evidence for the Younger Dryas comet impacts had been discovered, astrophysicist Victor Clube and astronomer Bill Napier warned of the view:“that treats the cosmos as a harmless backdrop to human affairs, a view which Academe now often regards as its business to uphold and to which Church and State are only too glad to subscribe.”1524

Such a view, in Clube and Napier’s prescient 1990 opinion, is dangerous in that its effect is to “place the human species a little higher than the ostrich, awaiting the fate of the dinosaur.”153

As can be seen from the reactions of some members of “Academe” to the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, this view, and what Clube and Napier call the “great illusion of cosmic security”154 that it engenders, are still powerful forces in the world today. Much more than the truth about our own past is at stake, however, for there is a chilling convergence between Clube and Napier’s findings on the one hand, and the findings of Kennett, West and Firestone on the other, as to what the Younger Dryas comet really means for humanity.

To understand the implications of this convergence properly it will be necessary to review some of the discoveries made by Clube, Napier and others in the 1980’s and 1990’s – discoveries, remember, that are completely independent of the later work of the Kennett/West/Firestone team on the Younger Dryas impacts. To cut a long story short, as I’ve already indicated, the burden of these discoveries is that it is possible – indeed highly probable – that we are not yet done with the comet that changed the face of the earth 12,800 years ago. Clube and Napier’s work, with important contributions also from the late Sir Fred Hoyle, and from mathematician Emilio Spedicato and astronomer Professor Chandra Wickramsinghe, obliges us to consider the chilling possibility that the Younger Dryas comet was itself only a fragment of a much larger, giant comet – once perhaps as much as 100 kilometers in diameter – which entered the inner solar system about 30,000 years ago and was captured by the sun and flung into an earth-crossing orbit.

It remained relatively intact for the next 10,000 years. Then around 20,000 years ago it underwent a massive “fragmentation event” somewhere along its orbit that transformed it from a single deadly and potentially world-killing object into multiple objects grading down from 5 kilometers to 1 kilometer or less in diameter, each and every one of which would still, in its own right, be capable of causing a global cataclysm.155 The astronomers believe it was several fragments on this scale that hit the earth 12,800 years ago, causing the Younger Dryas,156 and that we can expect further encounters with the remaining fragments in the future.157 “This unique complex of debris,” write Clube and Napier, “is undoubtedly the greatest collision hazard facing the Earth at the present time.”158

The Taurid meteor stream, so called because its showers of “shooting stars” look to observers on the ground as though they originate in the constellation of Taurus, is the most familiar and best-known product of the ongoing fragmentation of the original giant comet.

“Shooting stars” are harmless – nothing more than tiny meteors burning up in the atmosphere – so why should we be in the least bit concerned about a meteor stream? In the case of the fifty or so distinct and separate meteor streams that have now been discovered by astronomers – the Leonids, the Perseids, the Andromedids, etc – the answer to this question is that in most cases there is probably no danger and nothing to fear. Since most of the particles that they contain are indeed tiny, they represent no threat to the Earth.

But it is quite a different matter with the Taurid meteor stream. It too contains countless trillions of tiny dust-sized particles that produce nothing more dangerous than shooting stars when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. As Clube, Napier, Hoyle and Wickramsinghe have demonstrated, however, the Taurid stream also contains other much more massive material, sometimes visible, sometimes shrouded in clouds of dust, and all of it flying through space at tremendous velocities and intersecting the Earth’s orbit twice a year, regular as clockwork, year in year out. Amongst these massive, deadly members of the Taurid family are Comet Encke, which is estimated to have a diameter of around five kilometers. But Comet Encke is not alone. According to Clube and Napier there are also: “between one and two hundred asteroids of more than a kilometer diameter orbiting within the Taurid meteor stream. It seems clear that we are looking at the debris from the breakup of an extremely large object. The disintegration, or sequence of disintegrations, must have taken place within the last twenty or thirty thousand years, as otherwise the asteroids would have spread around the inner planetary system and be no longer recognizsable as a stream.”159

In addition to Comet Encke, there are at least two other comets in the stream – Rudnicki, also thought to be about five kilometers in diameter, and a mysterious object named Oljiato, which has a diameter of about 1.5 kilometers.160 Initially believed to be an asteroid, this extremely dark, Earth-crossing projectile sometimes shows signs, visible in the telescope, of volatility and outgassing and most astronomers now regard it as an inert comet that is in the process of waking up.161 Comet Encke itself is known to have been inert for a long period, until it suddenly flared into life and was first seen by astronomers in 1876.162 It is now understood to alternate regularly, in extended cycles, between its inert and volatile states.

Clube and Napier’s research had convinced them that an as yet undetected companion to Comet Encke is orbiting amidst clouds of harmless dust at the very heart of the Taurid meteor stream.163 They believe that this object is of exceptional size, that it is a comet, and that like Encke and Oljiato it sometimes – for very long periods – shuts itself down. This happens when pitch-like tars that seethes up continuously from its interior during episodes of outgassing become so copious that they coat the entire outer surface of the nucleus in a thick, hardening shell and seal it off completely – perhaps for millennia.164On the outside all falls silent after the incandescent “coma” and tail have faded away and the seemingly inert object tears silently through space at a speed of tens of kilometers per second. But, at the center of the nucleus, activity continues, gradually building up pressure. Like an overheated boiler with no release valve, the comet eventually explodes from within, breaking up into fragments that can become individual comets every one of which threatens the Earth.

Calculations indicate that this presently invisible object at the heart of the Taurid stream might be as much as 30 kilometers in diameter.165 Moreover, it is thought likely that other large fragments accompany it. According to Professor Emilio Spedicato of the University of Bergamo: “Tentative orbital parameters which could lead to its observation are estimated. It is predicted that in the near future (around the year 2030) the Earth will cross again that part of [the Taurid meteor stream] that contains the fragments, an encounter that in the past has dramatically affected mankind.”166