The angle of the oval shape indicates that whatever made these shapes came from north-north west direction, and angled inclination impact. There are NO perfectly circular bays that would mimic a meteor impact from directly above.

These are impact craters caused by massive, speeding chunks of ice. Specifically, ejecta (large chunks of ice) from a glacial ice sheet in the northern hemisphere, that was hit with either a meteor or more likely, a comet….most likely, the Laurentide ice sheet.

The Laurentide ice sheet was massive, over a mile thick in some places. The great lakes are a remnant of these massive repositories of water and earth-scouring power. If a comet hit this massive ice sheet at a slight angle, the pressure wave would have blasted a huge amount of the sheet outward. Some would have been vaporized into steam, other parts pulverized. But yet, ice is more friable than bedrock, and it is reasonable to assume that large, and even mountain-sized chunks were ejected along with smaller sized pieces. These chunks rapidly flew across the ancient sky, toward what today is the Carolinas, and they landed in approximately and relatively the same place at the same time.

Do an experiment on a frozen pond. Fire a bullet at an angle into the ice. Watch the dispersal pattern of the ice fragments into the surrounding snow. They have similar patterns as carolina bays.

Furthermore, there may be NO evidence of the crater itself, although future space based sensors may discover it. An impact of a comet into mile-thick ice would be relatively instantly erased, both by the flooding of the impact site with new snow and water, and the fact that the majority of the impact was absorbed by the massive ice sheet, which has melted away along with the crater.

Simply, Carolina bays are the splashes of ice from a massive impact event on the glacial ice sheet.

–Bob

I guess any impacts *could* have fortuitously landed right on the course of the river bed, but it seems to be stretching things a bit.

A river constantly moves, eroding away its banks and changing its path. They short-circuit themselves often, leaving loops of relatively stagnant water. The loops usually settle over the years as the center erodes into the deeper water, forming a pond with a well defined, very uniform edge. The ponds eventually fill and grow over with new wetland life.

From that point, all I can offer is conjecture, but I’d imagine that it takes hundreds of years for larger plants and trees to grow in these voids. After so much time, the climate and the predominant species of plants has changed and, so, you get a near-perfect circle of contrasting species of plants thriving in the newest and best topsoil around.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And supporting info with pics of bays:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0706977104/DC1

But it’s already something that nobody suggested the Bays are the remains of a so-far unknown but highly developed civilisation, or prehistoric alien messages similar to crop circles…