“Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very  high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact. To  help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an  automobile in less than a minute,” said James Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara  emeritus professor of geology, who with his colleagues first reported  evidence of an event in 2012 of the direct effects of a fragmented comet  on a human settlement. Such intensity, he added, could only have  resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy, high-velocity  phenomenon, something on the order of a cosmic impact.