Malachi Smith's List: EARTH SCIENCE

• Evidence Of The 'Lost World': Did Dinosaurs Survive The End Cretaceous Extinctions?
• ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2009)
• The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago.
• but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality.
• New scientific evidence suggests that dinosaur bones from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin, USA, date from after the extinction,
• 
   

  View eastward from divide between Ojo Alamo and Barrel Spring arroyos, Kirtland shale in foreground. Conical butte capped with lower part of Ojo Alamo sandstone. Butte at left consists of Kirtland shale at base, overlain by conglomeratic sandstone of Ojo Alamo, and that in turn by the middle or shale member of the same formation, with pebbles from the disintegrated upper conglomeratic member scattered over the top. San Juan County, New Mexico. Circa 1915. (Credit: Plate 71-A in U.S. Geological Survey / Bauer, C.M. 251)
• and that dinosaurs may have survived in a remote area of what is now New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years.
• This controversial new research, published today in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, is based on detailed chemical investigations of the dinosaur bones, and evidence for the age of the rocks in which they are found.
• "The great difficulty with this hypothesis -- that these are the remains of dinosaurs that survived -- is ruling out the possibility that the bones date from before the extinction," says Jim Fassett, author of the research.
• "After being killed and deposited in sands and muds, it is possible for bones to be exhumed by rivers and then incorporated into younger rocks" he explains.

  • As the Flood of Genesis may very well have done; since the Bible states the flood waters were on the earth for a year.
  Add Sticky Note
• This is not the usual way in which fossil deposits of this kind form, but it has been shown to explain some other post-extinction dinosaur bones.
• Fassett has amassed a range of evidence that indicates that these fossils from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone were not exhumed and redeposited and that these dinosaurs really did live after the end Cretaceous extinction event.
• The first step must be to demonstrate that the rocks containing the bones are younger than the extinction event.
• Fassett has analysed the magnetic polarity of the rocks, and the pollen grains they contain, different approaches to finding the age of rocks which, he concludes "independently indicate that they do indeed post-date the extinction".
• Fassett also found that "the dinosaur bones from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone have distinctly different concentrations of rare earth metal elements to the bones in the underlying Cretaceous rocks"
• and this, he argues, "makes it very unlikely that the post-extinction bones were exhumed from the underlying sediments."
• This is supported by a find of 34 hadrosaur bones together -- "these are not literally an articulated skeleton, but the bones are doubtless from a single animal" -- if the bones had been exhumed by a river, they would have been scattered.
• So does this provide conclusive proof that dinosaurs survived the Cretaceous extinctions?
• According to David Polly, one of the editors of the journal in which the research is published, "this is a controversial conclusion, and many palaeontologists will remain sceptical",
• but we already know that flying theropod dinosaurs (more generally referred to as birds) and crocodiles survived, so the possibility of pockets of survivors of other types of dinosaur is not quite as far fetched as it might sound.
• Finding conclusive evidence, however, is a difficult matter when the crime scene is 65 million years old.
• "One thing is certain," continues Polly, "if dinosaurs did survive, they were not as widespread as they were before the end of the Cretaceous and did not persist for long."
• The 'Lost World scenario' of humans and dinosaurs existing at the same time, still belongs firmly in the realms of pure fantasy.

  • According to some it does..According to others, it does not
  Add Sticky Note

21 more annotations...

• Giant Impact Near India -- Not Mexico -- May Have Doomed Dinosaurs
• ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2009)
• A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen.
• And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.
• Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin,
• a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources.
• 
   

  Three-dimensional reconstruction of the submerged Shiva crater (~500 km diameter) at the Mumbai Offshore Basin, western shelf of India from different cross-sectional and geophysical data. The overlying 4.3-mile-tick Cenozoic strata and water column were removed to show the morphology of the crater. (Credit: Image courtesy of Geological Society Of America
• Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet.
• Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
• “If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet,” Chatterjee said.
• “A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics.”
• By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.
• It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place.
• It is likely that the impact enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India.
• What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate, and sent them drifting toward Africa.
• Shiva's outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500 kilometers in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as the Bombay High, which would be 3 miles tall from the ocean floor (about the height of Mount McKinley).
• The geological evidence is dramatic.
• Most of the crater lies submerged on India's continental shelf, but where it does come ashore it is marked by tall cliffs, active faults and hot springs.
• The impact appears to have sheared or destroyed much of the 30-mile-thick granite layer in the western coast of India.
• The team hopes to go India later this year to examine rocks drill from the center of the putative crater for clues that would prove the strange basin was formed by a gigantic impact.
• “Rocks from the bottom of the crater will tell us the telltale sign of the impact event from shattered and melted target rocks.
• And we want to see if there are breccias, shocked quartz, and an iridium anomaly,” Chatterjee said.
• Asteroids are rich in iridium, and such anomalies are thought of as the fingerprint of an impact.

21 more annotations...

• Hundreds Flee Threatening Philippine Volcano     
• Authorities in the central Philippines rushed to cope with two dangers suddenly being posed by Mayon volcano, 340 miles southeast of Manila.
• Initially, the mountain caused concern when it produced a nearly 350-ton increase in the amount of sulfur dioxide it was spewing.
• Heavy rain then unleashed a huge mudslide, panicking residents as it cascaded down the volcano’s slopes.
• Military personnel and vehicles were dispatched to help hundreds of threatened residents evacuate to safety.
• The mountain has produced several violent eruptions during recorded history. It began to show signs of awakening in July.
• 

     

    The nearly perfect cone-shaped Mayon volcano towers over nearby Legazpi City, in Albay province.

5 more annotations...

• Strong earthquake rocks western Indonesia
• (AP) – 13 hours ago
• JAKARTA, Indonesia — A strong undersea earthquake caused minor damage and made buildings in Indonesia's capital sway Friday, but there were no immediate reports injuries.
• The quake came as Indonesia is still recovering from another, more powerful earthquake that killed more than 1,000 people last month, not far from Friday's temblor.
• The epicenter of the latest quake was in the Sunda Strait off the western coast of Java and had a preliminary magnitude of 6.4, Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said.
• Suhardjono, an official at the agency who like many Indonesian goes by a single name, said it was not powerful enough to cause a tsunami.
• "We ran away from the house when the tremor hit our coastal village," said Enjen, a local fisherman who lives near the epicenter. Some houses had cracked walls and roof tiles fell down, he said.
• Residents in Merak, another coastal area, briefly ran outdoors in panic but returned to their houses and offices when the shaking stopped, said witness Anugerah Wijaya.

• On Sept. 30, a 7.6 magnitude quake devastated large areas of neighboring island of Sumatra, flattening huge numbers of buildings and houses and making hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

  The epicenter of that quake was a few hundred miles (kilometers) north of Friday's quake.
• The U.S. Geological Survey put the strength of Friday's earthquake at 6.5 and said it had a depth of 35 miles (55 kilometers).
• Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

9 more annotations...

• 4 Quakes Rattle Central Arkansas
• Mag. 2.8 2009/10/16 02:19:53 35.486N 92.269W 1.7 11 km (7 mi) SSW of Higden, AR
    Mag. 2.7 2009/10/15 13:53:22 35.236N 92.398W 0.6 1 km (1 mi) WNW of Greenbrier, AR
    Mag. 2.8 2009/10/15 01:55:35 35.233N 92.420W 2.6 3 km (2 mi) W of Greenbrier, AR
    Mag. 2.8 2009/10/14 23:05:15 35.462N 92.261W 2.8 10 km (6 mi) NNW of Quitman, AR
• October 15, 2009
    Pine Bluff Commercial
• Two small earthquakes rattled central Arkansas overnight and a third shook the area Thursday afternoon, but they were so minor that local residents felt nothing.
• The first quake, which occurred at 11:05 p.m. Wednesday, hit about 6 miles north-northwest of Quitman, in southwest Cleburne County, or about 50 miles north of Little Rock, and it registered a magnitude of 2.8, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
• The second, also magnitude 2.8, struck at 1:55 a.m. Thursday and its epicenter was about 2 miles west of Greenbrier in Faulkner County, or 35 miles north of Little Rock, the USGS said. That was only 18 miles southwest of the first temblor.
• The epicenter of the third quake, which hit at 1:53 p.m. Thursday, was about a mile from the second quake, the USGS said. It registered a magnitude of 2.7, the agency said.
• Haydar Al-Shukri, director of the Arkansas Earthquake Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said it was common to see earthquakes of that magnitude in the region.
• "They were most likely due to hydrothermal activity," Al-Shukri said, referring to movement of hot fluids far beneath the Earth's surface.
• Brian Blackstock, owner of Springhill Nursery and Market at Greenbrier, said he was unaware of the quakes.
   
    "I haven't felt anything or even heard about anything," he said. "So they must not have been much."
• Al-Shukri said his students would collect data from seven seismographs near Enola that should provide more details about the temblors.
• The seismographs were set up within two miles of an injection well being used to pump waste fluids from gas drilling back into the ground. Al-Shukri said the seismographs were set up as a condition of a permit for the well so that seismic activity arising from the drilling could be monitored.
• The well is about 25 miles south of the epicenter of the first quake, and about 12 miles southeast of the second.
• Al-Shukri said the temblors were most likely unrelated to the injection well "because they're way too far from this particular injection well."
   
    http://www.pbcommercial.com/articles/2009/10/16/ap-state-ar/ar_ark_earthquakes.txt

12 more annotations...

• World's Oldest Submerged Town Dates Back 5,000 Years
• ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2009)
• Archaeologists surveying the world’s oldest submerged town have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic.
• Their discovery suggests that Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, was occupied some 5,000 years ago — at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought.
• These remarkable findings have been made public by the Greek government after the start of a five year collaborative project involving the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and The University of Nottingham.
• 
   

  Archaeologists surveying the world's oldest submerged town have discovered that Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, was occupied some 5,000 years ago -- at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Nottingham)
• As a Mycenaean town the site offers potential new insights into the workings of Mycenaean society.
• Pavlopetri has added importance as it was a maritime settlement from which the inhabitants coordinated local and long distance trade.
• The Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project aims to establish exactly when the site was occupied, what it was used for and through a systematic study of the geomorphology of the area, how the town became submerged.
• This summer the team carried out a detailed digital underwater survey and study of the structural remains, which until this year were thought to belong to the Mycenaean period — around 1600 to 1000 BC.
• The survey surpassed all their expectations. Their investigations revealed another 150 square metres of new buildings as well as ceramics that suggest the site was occupied throughout the Bronze Age — from at least 2800 BC to 1100 BC.
• The work is being carried out by a multidisciplinary team led by Mr Elias Spondylis, Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in Greece and Dr Jon Henderson, an underwater archaeologist from the Department of Archaeology at The University of Nottingham.
• Dr Jon Henderson said: “This site is unique in that we have almost the complete town plan, the main streets and domestic buildings, courtyards, rock-cut tombs and what appear to be religious buildings, clearly visible on the seabed.
• Equally as a harbour settlement, the study of the archaeological material we have recovered will be extremely important in terms of revealing how maritime trade was conducted and managed in the Bronze Age.”
• Possibly one of the most important discoveries has been the identification of what could be a megaron — a large rectangular great hall — from the Early Bronze Age period.
• They have also found over 150 metres of new buildings including what could be the first example of a pillar crypt ever discovered on the Greek mainland. Two new stone built cist graves were also discovered alongside what appears to be a Middle Bronze Age pithos burial.
• Mr Spondylis said: “It is a rare find and it is significant because as a submerged site it was never re-occupied and therefore represents a frozen moment of the past.”
• The Archaeological Co-ordinator Dr Chrysanthi Gallou a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Nottingham is an expert in Aegean Prehistory and the archaeology of Laconia.
• Dr Gallou said: “The new ceramic finds form a complete and exceptional corpus of pottery covering all sub-phases from the Final Neolithic period (mid 4th millennium BC) to the end of the Late Bronze Age (1100 BC).
• In addition, the interest from the local community in Laconia has been fantastic. The investigation at Pavlopetri offers a great opportunity for them to be actively involved in the preservation and management of the site, and subsequently for the cultural and touristic development of the wider region.”
• The team was joined by Dr Nicholas Flemming, a marine geo-archaeologist from the Institute of Oceanography at the University of Southampton, who discovered the site in 1967 and returned the following year with a team from Cambridge University to carry out the first ever survey of the submerged town.
• Using just snorkels and tape measures they produced a detail plan of the prehistoric town which consisted of at least 15 separate buildings, courtyards, streets, two chamber tombs and at least 37 cist graves.
• Despite the potential international importance of Pavlopetri no further work was carried out at the site until this year.
• This year, through a British School of Archaeology in Athens permit, The Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project began its five year study of the site with the aim of defining the history and development of Pavlopetri.
• Four more fieldwork seasons are planned before their research is published in full in 2014.

• To see the expedition for yourself, watch the video podcast on YouTube — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kepaQu4uerg

   

  And on the University's Podcast website — http://communications.nottingham.ac.uk/podcasts.html.

24 more annotations...

• "Rosetta Stone" of Supervolcanoes Discovered in Italian Alps
• There will be another supervolcano explosion. We don't know where. —James E. Quick, geology professor; Southern Methodist University, Dallas
• October 25, 2009
• Research presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America
• Scientists have found the "Rosetta Stone" of supervolcanoes, those giant pockmarks in the Earth's surface produced by rare and massive explosive eruptions that rank among nature's most violent events.
• The eruptions produce devastation on a regional scale - and possibly trigger climatic and environmental effects at a global scale.
• Photo: A tool marks a dark gray boulder encased in light gray fossilized volcanic ash found along the
• Sesia River in the Italian Alps. The boulder is evidence of the eruption of an ancient supervolcano, scientists said in September 2009.
  
• The powerful explosion 280 million years ago created a huge caldera and may have spewed enough material into the air to trigger prolonged global cooling. (Kimberly Cobb)
• The fossil supervolcano was discovered in the Italian Alps' Sesia Valley by a team led by James E. Quick, a geology professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
• The discovery will advance scientific understanding of active
   
    supervolcanoes, like Yellowstone, which is the second-largest supervolcano in the world and which last erupted about 630,000 years ago.
• A rare uplift of the Earth's crust in the Sesia Valley reveals for the first time the actual "plumbing" of a supervolcano from the surface to the source of the magma deep within the Earth.
• The uplift reveals to an unprecedented depth of 25 kilometers the tracks and trails of the magma as it moved through the Earth's crust.
• Supervolcanoes, historically called calderas, are enormous craters tens of kilometers in diameter.
• Their eruptions are sparked by the explosive release of gas from molten rock or "magma" as it pushes its way to the Earth's surface. Calderas erupt hundreds to thousands of cubic kilometers of volcanic ash.
• Explosive events occur every few hundred thousand years. Supervolcanoes have spread lava and ash vast distances and scientists believe some eruptions may have set off catastrophic global cooling events at different periods in the Earth's past.
• It is more than 13 kilometers in diameter. "What's new is to see the magmatic plumbing system all the way through the calderas. The exposure also serves as direct confirmation of the cause-andeffect link between molten rock moving through the Earth's crust and explosive volcanism.
• Sesia Valley's caldera erupted during the "Permian" geologic time period, say the discovery scientists.
• "It might lead to a better interpretation of monitoring data and improved prediction of eruptions," says Quick.
• Calderas, which typically exhibit high levels of seismic and hydrothermal activity, often swell, suggesting movement of fluids beneath the surface.
• "We want to better understand the tell-tale signs that a caldera is advancing to eruption so that we can improve warnings and avoid false alerts," he says.
• To date, scientists have been able to study exposed caldera "plumbing" from the surface of the Earth to a depth of only 5 kilometers. Because of that, scientific understanding has been limited to geophysical data and analysis of erupted volcanic rocks. Quick likens the relevance of Sesia Valley to seeing bones and muscle inside the human body for the first time after previously envisioning human anatomy on the basis of a sonogram only.
• "We think of the Sesia Valley find as the 'Rosetta Stone' for supervolcanoes because the depth to which rocks are exposed will help us to link the geologic and geophysical data," Quick says.
• "This is a very rare spot. The base of the Earth's crust is turned up on edge. It was created when Africa and Europe began colliding about 30 million years ago and the crust of Italy was turned on end." Scientists have documented fewer than two dozen caldera eruptions in the last 1 million years.
• Besides Yellowstone, other monumental explosions have included Lake Toba on Indonesia's Sumatra island 74,000 years ago, which is believed to be the largest volcanic eruption on Earth in the past 25 million years.
• Described as a massive climate-changing event, the Lake Toba eruption is thought to have killed an estimated 60% of humans alive at the time.
• Another caldera, and one that remains active, Long Valley in California erupted about 760,000 years ago and spread volcanic ash for 600 cubic kilometers. The ash blanketed the southwestern United States, extending from California to as far west as Nebraska.
• "There will be another supervolcano explosion," Quick says. "We don't know where. Sesia Valley could help us to predict the next event."
• Quick will present the research in a topical session at the Oct. 18-21 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. Co-researchers include Silvano Sinigoi, Gabriella Peressini and Gabriella Demarchi, all from Universita di Trieste; John L. Wooden, Stanford University; and Andrea Sbisa, Universita di Trieste.

27 more annotations...

• 3 More Earthquakes Rock York County
• Ground Shook in Dillsburg Early Sunday Morning
• POSTED: 10:41 am EDT October 25, 2009
  UPDATED: 7:54 am EDT October 26, 2009
• DILLSBURG, Pa. -- Three more earthquakes were reported in the Dillsburg, York County, area over the weekend.
• Earthquake experts said that they all happened within a six-minute period at about 7:20 a.m. Sunday.
• The first tremor was a magnitude 2.8, the second was a 1.8 and the third was a 2.6.
• Some residents said that the quakes shook pictures on their walls.
• "This time they are precipitated by a lot of rumbling and rolling we are hearing. So, we knew another was coming and in fact it did," said resident Candace LaGaza.
• There have been more than 600 earthquakes in the area in the past year.
• Earthquake experts just finished a study that showed underground rocks are clashing and creating the quakes.

8 more annotations...

• Experts Tally 600 Quakes In Dillsburg In Last Year -- What's Going On?
• Researchers Release Report On Dillsburg 'Earthquake Swarm'
• POSTED: 5:27 pm EDT October 19, 2009
  UPDATED: 1:03 pm EDT October 20, 2009
• DILLSBURG, Pa. -- Residents in Dillsburg, York County, have experienced about 600 small earthquakes over the last year, and now researchers have released a 20-page report looking into why.
• "Most earthquakes are happening where there are two very contrasting types of rocks in contact with each other," said expert Dr. Charles Schamberger.
• The rocks in the area, already weakened by mining, can slide.
• "Any time there's a sliding -- boom! People feel or hear one of these earthquakes," said Schamberger.
• Schamberger teamed up with other earthquake experts and Columbia University to study the Dillsburg quakes -- they term the 600-plus events, an earthquake swarm.
• "The big thing we don't know is why did they only start last year, why hasn't this swarm been acting out forever?" Schamberger said.
• Many residents wonder what's next, or if a big one is coming.
• Schamberger said there is no reason to panic. Experts have found in other earthquake swarms that the little quakes were not followed by big ones.
• "I would not bet on there being a big quake in Dillsburg," Schamberger said.
• The swarm included 23 larger shocks with magnitudes ranging from 0.8 to 2.9. None of the earthquakes caused significant damage, according to the report.
• The researchers also found that the Dillsburg quakes were shallow by earthquake standards. They happened about a half mile down in the earth.
• Experts said the shallow depth of the Dillsburg quakes resulted in loud booms being heard and the earth shaking -- even though the quakes themselves were of rather small magnitudes.
• Most California quakes happened about 15 miles down.

14 more annotations...

• Dinotopia
• “Few subjects have captured our imagination as entirely as the lost world of the dinosaur. But what if dinosaurs had not vanished entirely? What if today, hidden somewhere on Earth, there’s a mysterious land where dinosaurs still not only exist, but coexist with man?” - Michael Eisner, Head of Walt Disney

• Given the question that Michael Eisner asks, it is tempting to begin this essay in Rod Serling’s style:

   

   Meet Adrienne Mayor, an evolutionist whose passions include history and paleontology. These last two interests have combined to lead her on a fascinating journey. She thinks she is traveling from Greece through Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, to southwestern China; but, in point of fact, her final destination is … the Twilight Zone. 

• Adrienne Mayor’s book is no joke.

   

  According to her publisher, “Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist, investigates the historical and scientific realities embedded in Greek and Roman myths. Her articles on ancient natural history have appeared in many scholarly and popular journals.” For some reason, she became particularly interested in griffins.
• Griffins
• “This animal was no simple composite; it didn’t seem to belong with the obviously imaginary hybrids of Greek tradition like Pegasus (a horse with wings), the Sphinx (a winged lion with a woman’s head), the Minotaur (a man with a bull’s head), and the half-man, half-horse Centaurs.
• Indeed, the griffin played no role in Greek mythology. It was a creature of folklore grounded in naturalistic details.
• Unlike the other monsters who dwelled in the mythical past, the griffin was not the offspring of gods and was not associated with the adventures of Greek gods or heroes. Instead, griffins were generic animals believed to exist in the preset day; they were encountered by ordinary people who prospected for gold in distant lands.  ¹
• Griffins are typically described as a race of four-footed birds having the beaks of eagles and the claws of lions, probably not flying but leaping in the air and digging in the ground, living in the desert wilderness ferociously guarding hoards of gold.
• The legend of the griffin dates from at least 675 B.C., when the Greek adventurer and writer Aristeas met the nomadic Scythians near the foot of the Tien Shan (Heavenly) Mountains.
• For the next thousand years legends flourished of the gold of the Scythians and of the fierce warriors and creatures guarding it.  ²
• I sought out that unique bronze metope, a decorated plaque created for the Temple of Zeus in about 630 B.C. The artist had portrayed a fierce mother griffin with a baby griffin nestled under her ribs (fig 1.5).
• The griffin was much more than a static decorative motif; it was imagined and depicted as a real animal with recognizable behavioral traits. …
• Sarah Morris, now a professor of classical archaeology at UCLA, showed me another griffin family scene on a Mycenaean vase of about 1150 B.C., painted well before the first known written accounts of the griffin.
• In that vignette, a griffin pair tends two nestlings.
• What inspired such naturalistic images of griffin life? The imagery of griffins did not follow any standard mythological narratives-instead, the artists seemed to be imagining the behavior of an unusual animal they had heard described but had never seen.  ³
• The Athenian playwright Aeschylus (b. ca. 525 B.C.) … describes the lonely caravan trails leading to a desolate country where nomads prospect for gold, a desert inhabited by monstrous Gorgons who magically turn living things into stone, and by fearsome griffins.
• The griffins Aeschylus likens to “silent hounds with cruel, sharp beaks.”
• Despite the poetic license granted by tragedy and myth, Aeschylus was a careful zoologist--he takes pains to distinguish the wingless eagle-beaked griffins from actual winged eagles.  ⁴
• Herodotus scoffed at the idea of a race of one-eyed men, but he expressed no doubts about the existence of griffins.  ⁵
• A few decades after Herodotus, in about 400 B.C., another Greek from Caria, a physician named Ctesias … explained why Asian gold was so notoriously hard to obtain. It came, he said, from “high mountains in an area inhabited by griffins, a race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”  ⁶
• In A.D. 43, the geographer Pomponius Mela had reported that fierce griffins guarded gold in a sunbaked wilderness of Scythia.
• Summarizing the work of Aristeas, Herodotus, Pomponius Mela, and “many other authorities” (now lost), Pliny agreed that griffins were encountered in the vicinity of Scythian gold mines. … Pliny added an intriguing new detail: “The griffins toss up gold when they make their burrows.” This is the first mention of griffin nests!  ⁷
• Ms. Mayor cites many other historical accounts of griffins, from a variety of sources. We don’t have room to quote them all in this newsletter. Suffice it to say, that Ms. Mayor accumulated enough data to convince herself that the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that griffins really existed.

• This puzzled her, because, as she says,

   

   

  We now know, of course, that no aggressive, wolf-sized, four-legged flightless “birds” ever coinhabited the earth with humans. So what could account for consistent reports of such an animal?  8
• How do we know that griffins never lived at the same time as humans? Why do we feel justified in rejecting so many historical accounts that say they did? Do we have any legitimate reason to doubt so many witnesses? What kind of evidence would we need to verify that their stories are true?

• We need to return to Ms. Mayor’s journey.

   

  She tells us,

   

   

  As a child, I was powerfully drawn to stones and bones. By age eleven I told my parents I wanted to be a paleontologist. Pursuing my dream of becoming a paleontologist, I studied geology in college. Here I learned rocks, I learned minerals, I learned invertebrate fossils. My head was stuffed with facts. Later in graduate school I learned vertebrate fossils, and I learned bones, and anatomy, and evolutionary theory. I handled bones, and my wish to study fossils themselves became a reality. It has been my joy and delight to pursue my career.  9

  Adrienne Mayor wrote to us to tell us this quote is improperly credited.
• Given this background, she could not help but notice the remarkable similarity between the description of the “mythical” griffin and reconstructions of Protoceratops. In fact, she has published drawings and photographs showing how much Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus must have looked like griffins.
• Like me, and many other people of my generation who loved science even when we were children, she read all the books written by Roy Chapman Andrews. She was very familiar with his 1922 expedition.
• Following ancient caravan trails from China through the desolate landscape in southwestern Mongolia, the team discovered--on the surface or only partially embedded--a multitude of fossils. The men were incredulous at the sheer numbers: in Andrews’s words, remains appeared to be “strewn over the surface almost as thickly as stones,” and the ground seemed “paved with bones.” Many of the species were dinosaurs new to science, and Andrews’s team was the first to recognize dinosaur nests and eggs. The spectacular finds were shipped to New York with great fanfare.
• On their very first afternoon at the site called Flaming Cliffs, about 30 miles (48 km) from the Altari Mountains, Andrews and each member of the Central Asia Expedition had located a dinosaur skull. In two weeks they gathered over a ton of fossils from the red sediments; and in two summers they excavated the bones of more than one hundred Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus skeletons, related denizens of the Cretaceous period (ca. 100-65 million years ago).
• Andrews’s original photographs show dinosaurs emerging from the ground that combine features of birds and mammals in a very striking way.
• The body of the hatchet-faced Protoceratops is about 6 to 8 feet (about 2 m) long, roughly the size of a lion, and has four limbs, but the head has a nasty-looking beak, large eye sockets, and a thin, bony frill at the back of the skull (figs 1.10, 1.11).
• The smaller (4 to 6 feet long, about 1.5 m) Psittacosaurus (“parrot-beaked”) has very prominent jugals, or cheek projections.
• In these deserts, the exquisitely preserved skeletons are frequently fully articulated, with the beaked skulls still attached. “Tiny surface features--grooves and pits that mark the routes of blood vessels and nerves”--are still evident. ¹⁰
• In other words, Andrews found many skeletons of creatures that resembled griffins in exactly the location where griffins were said to have lived, guarding gold. But, it gets even better! Not only are the fossil beds very near to gold deposits, sometimes gold is even found in the dinosaur nests.
• Mayor knows that there are numerous historical accounts of creatures that look like a particular kind of dinosaur guarding gold in a particular area. She knows that skeletons of that particular kind of dinosaur have been found in association with gold in that very area.
• What is the obvious, logical conclusion to draw from all this data?
• That’s not the conclusion she drew. She concluded that the ancient Greeks and Romans were, “the first fossil hunters.” She thinks they must have been really good paleontologists because they were able to reconstruct not only the dinosaur’s shape, but also the social behavior of dinosaurs from the bones.
• Yet “paleontology” is missing in the standard lists of the great cultural inventions of the Greeks and Romans. How did modern science and history come to lose the significant palaeontological discoveries, thoughts, and activities of classical antiquity?  ¹¹
• Could it be that the Greeks and Romans weren’t terrific paleontologists? Could it be that they were just good historians who accurately recorded the appearance and behavior of animals they actually saw?
• She can’t understand how the Greeks and Romans could have been such great paleontologists, and science and history lost sight of that.

• She marvels that,

   

   

  … the reconstruction of the griffin by the Saka nomads and their literate Greco-Roman reporters came very close to our most up-to-date knowledge about protoceratopsids.  12
• Ancient artists portrayed griffins defending their young, a scenario that was described by Aelian.  ¹³
• Modern paleontologists found fossils of adult dinosaurs near eggs, and these “scenes were misinterpreted as egg stealing rather than nesting until Mark Norell and Michael Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History discovered an assemblage of a dinosaur protecting its own eggs in 1993.”  ¹⁴
• In other words, the ancient Greeks and Romans knew things about dinosaurs that we didn’t figure out until 1993.
• She thinks they inferred it from bones, rather than actual observation. Therefore, they had to be better paleontologists than modern ones.
• Our understanding of how dinosaurs must have moved has been greatly increased in recent years by computer modeling and simulation (funded in large part by producers of programs like Dinotopia, Jurassic Park, Disney’s Dinosaur, etc.) But those great paleontologists of the Greco-Roman era were supposedly able to figure out dinosaur behavior without the aid of computers. And, somehow, according to Mayor, history and science overlooked their exceptional ability to determine the living characteristics of creatures known only from fossils.
• Gold in the Altai comes from igneous rocks millions of years older than the Cretaceous sediments that hold dinosaur bones
• But how could gold turn up in a dinosaur’s nest?
• But gold sand is continually washed down from mountains by rain and streams. Gravity on slopes and strong winds then scatter gold-bearing sand over the geologically younger sediments.  ¹⁵
• Yes, that’s what happens today. It no doubt also happened in Greek and Roman times, too. That’s why the gold prospectors were there in the first place. The gold nuggets would have been washed down onto the ground the griffins walked on.
• Since those “Cretaceous” sediments contain bones of creatures that were reported to be alive by many credible witnesses, it is reasonable to think that they are actually modern sediments, just a few thousand years old.
• What makes evolutionists so sure they are “Cretaceous”? It is simply because they contain fossils of dinosaurs that (they think) only lived in the Cretaceous period.
• Neades
• Griffins aren’t the only “prehistoric” beasts that were observed in Greco-Roman times.
• Plutarch clearly states that some of the immense bones of Samos were displayed as the remains of Dionysus’s war elephants. This is an astonishing moment in the history of paleontology, because the remains of mastodons (prehistoric elephants) do exist in the bone beds of Samos. Plutarch’s statement means that, some 1,700 years before Cuvier, fossil mastodons were correctly recognized as a species of elephant!  ¹⁶
• Either, that, or it means that mastodons were recognized as elephants because they were actually seen and used in war more than 1,700 years before Cuvier.
• Long before the Greeks knew about elephants, however, a different interpretation of the huge bones of Samos had prevailed.
• “Some also said that at Phloion the very earth had cracked open and collapsed upon certain huge beasts as they uttered great and piercing cries.”
• Here Plutarch refers to a much older legend about monsters unique to Samos called the Neades.
• Our earliest source for that legend is Euagon, a historian of Samos who lived in the fifth century B.C., some five hundred years before Plutarch. According to surviving fragments of Euagon’s lost work, the Neades’ shrieking raised such a din that the ground was torn open and swallowed them. …
• The Neades supposedly inhabited Samos in primordial times, before human beings arrived.
• The Neades were proverbial throughout the Greek world because of a humorous saying, “So-and-so shouts louder than the Neades!”  ¹⁷
• “Euphorion says that in primeval times, Samos was uninhabited except for dangerous wild animals of gigantic size, called Neades. The mere roar of these awesome beasts could split the ground.” Aelian continues, “Euphorion says that their huge bones are displayed in Samos.”  ¹⁸
• Like griffins, the Neades were thought of as real animals of a specific landscape where people saw curious prehistoric remains.  ¹⁹
• We don’t doubt her data, but we question her conclusion. First of all, instead of asking, “If a tree falls in a forest, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” we might ask, “If the Neades lived before there were any humans to hear them, how would people know that they made loud noises?”
• Since there aren’t any bones to fossilize in the trunk of an elephant, and since elephants weren’t known in Samos 500 years before Plutarch, how would the people have guessed that Neades could make the loud trumpeting sounds that we know elephants can make using their trunks?
• According to Mayor, earthquakes are known to happen in that region. We now know that elephants “hear” through their feet. Actually, they can sense ground vibration.
• The idea that Neades could trumpet so loudly as to cause an earthquake is clearly an exaggeration, but it might be based on observation.
• At the beginning of an earthquake, a Neade might feel the ground start to shake before a person would. Frightened by the ground shaking, the Neade might trumpet very loudly. A person standing nearby would hear the sound just before feeling the earthquake, and could reasonably conclude that sound caused the earthquake.
• But, to someone prejudiced by years of evolutionary indoctrination, it is impossible to believe that people knew what mammoths looked like and sounded like because they actually saw them and heard them.
• The only explanation must be that ancient people found the bones and perfectly reconstructed the creatures that once contained those bones. Those ancient people must have been such good paleontologists that they not only correctly inferred shape, but also sound and social behavior as well.
• Dragons
• In an attempt to support this argument, she spends 10 pages ²⁰ talking about how much the legendary dragons of China look like the dinosaurs that once lived there. She even says that the Chinese people refer to dinosaur bones as “dragon bones.” Clearly, the ancient Chinese must have been great paleontologists, too. The only other explanation is that they actually saw living, breathing dragons.
• Giants
• Ironically, when it comes to giants, she is amazingly inconsistent.
• She devotes 58 pages ²¹ to the discoveries of enormous human-like bones buried in caskets with bronze-tipped spears.
• Many of the skeletons were 15 feet tall, or taller.
• Both the Bible and Greek mythology contain stories about giants that lived a thousand or more years before Christ, so one might expect her to come to the conclusion that mythological stories were based upon accurate reconstructions of large human skeletons.
• But, no. Her conclusion is that these excellent paleontologists, who recognized the bird-like characteristics of dinosaurs 2,000 years before modern paleontologists did, who correctly inferred shape, sound, and social behavior of dinosaurs from bones alone, could not tell a human skeleton from a mammoth.
• She has never seen any one of the dozens of giant skeletons that were mentioned in historical documents, but she is absolutely convinced that none of them were human. Every single one was a misidentified mammoth.

• Here is how she dismissed the report of Pausanias.

   

   

  This report is interesting for several reasons. First, Pausanias uses a technical anatomical term for kneecap. If Pausanias was a doctor, as some believe, his vocation would explain his use of medical terms, his fascination with the anatomy of extraordinary skeletons, and his interest in visiting sanctuaries of Asklepios, the god of medical arts, where gigantic remains were commonly exhibited.
• In the sanctuary of Asklepios at Asopos (southern Peloponnese), for example, Pausanias examined bones that were “enormous but apparently human.”
• At a sanctuary of Asklepios at Megalopolis, another collection of immense bones seemed “much too vast for a human being,” but the curators told Pausanias that they belonged to one of the giants of early myth. (If the giant remains in these temples were mammoth bones, the skulls must have been missing, since Pausanias tells us he examined an elephant skull and tusks in a temple in Italy.)  ²²
• Pausanias doesn’t say the skulls were missing. He doesn’t say that he examined headless skeletons. Don’t you think he would have mentioned it if they were decapitated?
• She just assumes they were missing because someone with his medical credentials would have instantly recognized that the bones were mammoth bones if he had seen the skull. He didn’t recognize them as mammoth bones, therefore (she concludes) the skull must have been missing.
• But, there isn’t any reason to believe the skulls of all the skeletons he saw were missing. Maybe he thought the skeletons were “apparently human” because they were complete, including the skulls, which were just like ours, only larger.
• According to forensic anthropologist Douglas Ubelaker, nonhuman bones, especially femurs, can fool even the most experienced medical experts. In his study of modern FBI files, he found that about 15 percent of “human” bones thought to be those of murder victims turn out to be animal bones. Ubelaker points out that the similarities of mammal anatomy, the finder’s expectations, and the context of the discovery encourage the misidentification as human. Those same factors figured in antiquity. ²³ [emphasis supplied]
• We certainly agree with that statement, especially the part about “the finder’s expectations.”
• That’s why animal bones are consistently misidentified as “hominid ancestors.”

  • Exactly!
  Add Sticky Note
• If experts can’t always identify bones of creatures that are well known, how can they positively identify the bones of the entirely imaginary Eosimias, or other unknown human ancestors? But that’s an entirely different subject.
• Out-Of-Place-Artifacts
• It is little known to the general public that “out-of-place-artifacts” are frequently found. These are fossils that don’t belong to the supposed time period of the rock layer as defined by the evolutionary time scale of the geologic column.

• For example,

   

   

  In the Congo in the 1980s, paleontologist William Sanders found a large Stegodon tooth from the Pliocene in a human habitation site of the Pleistocene epoch. The out-of-place tooth of a mastodon that went extinct millions of years before humans appeared on the scene “could only have gotten there if some African hunter had brought it home as a curio 21,000 years ago,” observes Sanders.
• But the topic is considered marginal. Fossils discovered in ancient sites “are rarely saved or studied,” laments David Reese, one of the few zooarchaeologists to specialize in identifying prehistoric remains from Mediterranean sites. ²⁴
• The occasional prehistoric fossil or tooth that turns up in an ancient site is an anomaly.
• Many anomalies are simply ignored because they don’t fit the search image for edible or sacrificial animals.
• Even when archaeologists do take note of fossils, such finds are often misidentified and misplaced. A fossilized bone or tooth might be recorded in the back pages of field notes, and if published in excavation reports at all, it appears as miscellany in a footnote or appendix.
• According to David Reese, it’s not uncommon for fossils excavated by classical archaeologists to be mistaken for modern species. Paleontologists rarely have a chance to examine vertebrate fossils unearthed by their archaeological colleagues from ancient sites. ²⁵
• Mayor believes that ancient people collected fossils. How else could a mastodon’s tooth have found itself into an ancient human site? It never occurs to an evolutionist that it could have gotten there the same way a gazelle’s tooth could--somebody killed it (or found it dead) and took the tooth to make into a necklace, or tool, or who-knows-what.
• The only thing that makes them out of place is that they aren’t where the theory of evolution says they should be.
• Our point is that out-of-place artifacts might not really be out of place
• Whenever they find the fossil of a “prehistoric” beast in a historic archeological site, they don’t report it because they think it doesn't belong there. That’s why there aren’t any reports of prehistoric fossils found with historic artifacts.
• Remember, we didn’t claim, “Many anomalies are simply ignored simply because they don’t fit …”. We are just telling you what the evolutionists themselves say.
• All the data appears to support evolution because only data consistent with evolution is reported.
• The Twilight Zone
• We aren’t trying to attack or ridicule Adrienne Mayor. In fact, we have the highest regard for her scholarship. We wish everyone would read her book, The First Fossil Hunters because it contains so much excellent information.
• We quoted 25 passages from it, and didn’t quote another 25 or more simply because we didn’t have room in the newsletter for them. She had a lot of good stuff to say about dragons and giants that we did not quote.
• The point we are trying to make is that Adrienne Mayor is typical of so many people who, when faced with undeniable evidence that dinosaurs were reported alive from 1200 B.C. to 600 A.D. by respected historians, they reject the evidence because of evolutionary prejudice.
• Dinosaurs did coexist with humans. There is excellent historical data with palaeontological support to show that they did.
• But because that would show that the dates assigned to the geological column are wrong, evolutionists reject the evidence.
• What more evidence could one ask to prove that dinosaurs lived 2,000 years ago? Why is it that people who will accept part of a jaw as evidence of a “missing link” between apes and humans, won’t accept tons of bones matching the description of animals described in ancient literature as evidence that those animals actually were alive at the time?
• The answer, of course, is that evidence is irrelevant when prejudice reigns supreme. The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly against evolution, but evolution is still held by many simply because of prejudice.

112 more annotations...

• Comments and interpretations
• Panaima in Greek means ‘all bloody place’ or ‘bloodbath’.
• This is clearly due to the colour of the ground after a battle. There are other grounds where the red colour has been used in folklore to mean blood and some type of sacrifice.
• Most of the bones at Samos are beige, and the sediments beige-white. There is however a notable exception.
• There is a small area, which contains many beige-coloured bones, where the sediment is notably reddish.
• Figure 1 shows the red sediment near a fossil locality (Limitzis District).
• The red sediment sharply contrasts with the surrounding prevalent beige-white sediments.
• We suggest that Panaima was a true geographic landmark there in ancient times (Solounias and Mayor 2004).
• A 17th century map of Samos (copper engraving), popularly sold on Samos to tourists, also shows the word “Guerrari” at the place of the bone beds. In Latin this means ‘the place where the battles have taken place’.
• Various crusaders and Venetians were stopping in most of the Greek islands. It may be possible that Panaima was transformed to Guerrari (perhaps a renaming in Latin of Panaima); a renaming emphasizing the battle aspect which would result in a bloodbath.
• The answer is the Amazons, fleeing from Dionysus, fell [or were trapped] on Samos [fleeing] from the land of the people of Ephesos.
• Dionysus constructed ships that passed [from the Turkish mainland to Samos] and fought the Amazons, killing most of them, in various locations [on Samos].
• That the text says in various locations is interpreted to mean various locations of bones. There are at least 15 bone beds on Samos and this early citation is in agreement with this fact.
• Such a vast amount of blood spilled that people who noticed the red-stained earth called the place by the name Panaima. Some say that they fractured Phloios because of their bellowing. The bellowing of the Amazons or the elephants fractured the thick crust.
• Amazons: Ancient commentators interpreted that the fossils at Panaima or Phloios as those of fallen [warrior] Amazons.
• Interestingly, Amazons were mythical horse-riding warriors.
• It is possible that the ancients recognized the fossil Hippotherium-Hipparion skulls (most abundant fossil on Samos) as a horse and related this observation to the Amazons who were horse-riding warriors.
• In antiquity, as in modern Greece, people would have been familiar with the appearance of the basic skeletons of dead, domesticated animals. Horses have characteristic teeth and ancients would most certainly recognize such teeth from observation.
• We suggest that the identification of Amazons could be related to the recognition of fossil hipparions as horses ridden by the Amazons in battle (Solounias and Mayor 2004).
• Phloios, presented hints as to its geographic location: some of the elephants died near a place called Phloios – near indicates that the bones were not on or at Phloios, but close to that place.
• We identify Phloios as the big block of faulted limestone next to Brown’s quarry Q1 (Figs. 2 and 4).
• The limestone is a local landmark and is the only prominent feature near a fossil bone deposit at Q1. The limestone block forms a prominent high cliff and its face is the fault surface (Fig. 5).
• Phloios is about 30 m high, measuring from the Adrianos ravine and the bone bed to the topographic top. The width of that rock face is about 80 m.
• The current local name of the Phloios region is Tsarouhis.
• This is a modern Greek word meaning ‘thick sole’. Tsarcuchia are characteristic Greek farmer shoes in the 18th and 19th century, with very thick leather soles studded with horseshoe nails.
• It is possible that the massive limestone block Phloios was renamed Tsarouhis in more recent times. There is a chain of additional limestone blocks in the area and two of the prominent ones have names. The prominent limestones of the region are part of the Kokkarion Formation and make up the footwalls of several faults.
• The next visible rock south of Phloios is Megalos Vrahos (‘Big Rock’ in Greek).
• Brown’s quarry Q3 was located below Megalos Vrahos.
• One block of limestone further southeast is called Stefana (‘wreath’ in Greek). The limestone cap of the hill resembles a wreath.
• Forsyth Major excavated below Stefana Hill and the fossils are stored in the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since Tsarouhis, Megalos Vrahos, and Stefana are named today, it makes sense that the ancients named prominent rock outcrops.
• Earthquakes: Some say that they fractured Phloios because of their prodigious bellowing. Here again we have the recognition that a fracture formed in Phloios during an earthquake and the noise associated with earthquakes is interpreted as bellowing.
• It is possible that such a major earthquake took place on that fault forming the high limestone block and ancient locals witnessed it and related it to the fossil bones nearby. We see the fracture as an earthquake caused by the Amazons or elephants. There is a major normal fault next to Phloios and to quarry Q1.
• Adrianos is one of the few named gullies and ravines in Greece. It is especially rare that a specific proper foreign name was used and for a very small stream (1 km long and 1 m wide having water only part of the year).
• Adrianos: A geographic name with significance in Roman history.
• Consequently, the use of such a foreign name becomes even more interesting.
• Adrianos is a rather specific proper Latin name; so it is interesting that the ravine with the fossils has this name in a remote and poorly inhabited region.
• The name of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (Hadrianus in Latin) is Adrianos in Greek instead of Hadrianos.
• Hadrian was in Athens and visited several places in Greece. The well known Arc of Hadrian located in Athens is known as Pili of Adrianos (same spelling as the Samos ravine).
• Hadrian was interested in natural history and he visited Athens and Troy among other places. Hadrian (76-138 AD) sailed across the Aegean to reach Troy, which is 200 kilometers north of Samos on the Turkish mainland.
• The trip probably utilized the frequently fished and sailed eastern Aegean corridor of the coastline (Lydia and Ionia) and the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Ikaria and Kos.
• In Troy, he visited a fossil bed with huge bones, which he interpreted as bones of the Greek warrior Ajax from the Trojan War.
• He established a shrine for these bones.
• There is also literary evidence that Hadrian went to Egypt to see fossils, probably at Wadi Natrum S of Alexandria, and that he kept natural curios in his archives.
• Although there is no direct proof that Hadrian visited Samos, it is very likely that he would have paid a visit to the island, a well-known stop for Roman travelers on their way to Asia Minor – where big cities such as Miletos and Ephesos were located a few kilometers from Samos City.
• He may have collected bones near Phloios. As Emperor, he may have named the area after himself, a typical indication of power and Roman renaming.
• In support of the proposed visit, we know that other emperors visited Samos. For example, Marc Anthony (83-30 BC) and Tiberius (42 BC-37 AD) visited Samos probably because of the large and celebrated Temple of Hera near Ireon.
• In it fossil bones were probably displayed, such as the femur of a giraffid (Samotherium), which was discovered near the ceremonial altar of the Temple of Heraion.
• Augustus (63 BC-14 AD), Tiberius, and Hadrian all had a strong interest in unusual natural objects and phenomena; Augustus displayed so-called giants’ bones in Capri and Rome, and Tiberius received a giant tooth from the Black Sea area after an earthquake. It is possible that these emperors went to Samos to collect fossil bones (Solounias and Mayor 2004).
• In summary: The ancient Greeks interpreted these fossils as the remains of Neades, strange exotic beasts, or of the Amazons who perished in battle.
• Some of the fossils have been found in the ruins of the Temple of Heraion where they had been gathered for display.
• The red soil in which the fossils were found was explained as from blood spilled during a bloodbath.
• Furthermore, the Greeks had correlated geologic faults to earthquakes.
• The myths clearly state that they also had a sense of deep time (the great antiquity of the fossils).
• They named two bone beds because of the fossils: Panaima and Phloios.
• These are proper names given in upper case letters in the myths. In Greek, Panaima means bloodbath and Phloios means thick and hard crust.
• Phloios is located in a ravine named Adrianos, which is a non-Greek name. Small ravines rarely have names in Greece and we explain the name as the renaming of Phloios by the Roman emperor Hadrian. Hadrian is known to have collected fossils near Troy and may have visited Samos.

54 more annotations...

• World's Largest Pyramid Discovered, Lost Mayan City Of Mirador Guatemala (Video)
• 2009 10 26
    <!-- ARTICLE BY OR FROM--> 

  From: youtube.com
• World's Largest Pyramid Discovered, Lost Mayan City Of Mirador Guatemala.

2 more annotations...

• Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean
• 
  LiveScience.com livescience Staff
  
  livescience.com    –  Mon Nov 2
• A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.
• The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.
• A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.
• The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.
• Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days.
• Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.
• "We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.
• The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held.
• And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.
• "The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger.
• "We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous."
• The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process - at a speed of less than 1 inch per year - for the past 30 million years.
• This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so.
• The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.
• Atalay Ayele, professor at the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, led the investigation, gathering seismic data with help from neighboring Eritrea and Ghebrebrhan Ogubazghi, professor at the Eritrea Institute of Technology, and from Yemen with the help of Jamal Sholan of the National Yemen Seismological Observatory Center.
• Original Story: Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean

16 more annotations...

• Earthquakes shake Dillsburg second time

• Michael D. O’Connell

   

  Staff Writer

   

  Thursday November 05 2009
• The weekend of Oct. 25, residents of Dillsburg, Pa. experienced three different earthquakes all within a time span of six minutes.
• The first earthquake hit the small town in York County at approximately 7:20 a.m. Sunday.
• Seismologists who studied these tremors report that the first quake reached a magnitude of 2.8, the second 1.8 and the third 2.6 on the Richter scale.
• Residents of Dillsburg are almost used to the earthquakes in their area — in fact, they have experienced about 600 small earthquakes over the last year, and researchers recently released a 20-page report examining why earthquakes are so common in that particular area.
• The 2008-2009 Earthquake Swarm Near Dillsburg, Pennsylvania report, compiled by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and the Bureau of Topographic and Geological Survey takes an in-depth look at the history of earthquake occurrences in Dillsburg in the hopes that some logic might be drawn from the information collected.
• The report gathered information from Oct. 2008 through April 2009 during which a micro swarm of over 600 earthquakes occurred in the Dillsburg area.
• The swarm itself included 23 larger shocks with magnitudes ranging from 0.8 to 2.9 that were detected by seismograph stations in the mid-Atlantic region.
• Oct. 24, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University installed a network of portable seismographs around the area of Old York Road and Mandy Lane, which, according to reports from residents, seemed to be the center of the earthquake activity.
• The portable seismographs operated until Dec. 11 and recorded 49 other small earthquakes in the area.
• However, only one of the 49 earthquakes detected was large enough to be graphed by the regional network of permanent stations. The 49 micro earthquakes were distributed along an approximately 1.5 km (or 0.93 miles) line trending northwest-southeast along Old York Road.
• The hypocenters for these shocks measured less than 1 km (0.62 miles), with an average depth of about 0.5 km (0.3 miles), causing a booming sound and noticeable shaking despite their small magnitudes.
• Even with their frequent occurrences, no significant damage from these earthquakes has been reported; the quakes themselves seem to be coming from a small amount of rock as opposed to a well-defined fault plane.
• According to the report, their depth corresponds roughly to the base of a thick sheet of igneous rock that underlies the area and is thought to be the source of the iron ore deposits that were formerly mined there.
• The focal depths of the earthquakes are smaller than what the researchers would have expected if the old mines had a direct role in the origin of the earthquakes, but at this point researchers cannot rule out a possible correlation.
• The contrast in strength between the diabase and underlying sedimentary rocks, according to the report, may have resulted in a concentration of stress along the contact between the two rock types.
• The seismic activity also may be localized along this contact due to the presence of pre-existing zones of weakness, or fractures, in the rock.
   
   However, researchers are unclear as to the exact cause of the earthquake swarm or the reason why it began when it did.
• Often, Mother Nature acts in rather mysterious ways, and in this case Dillsburg is witnessing real evidence of that enigma.

17 more annotations...

• Quake Swarm Strikes Sun Valley, Utah
     

   

   
• Quake Swarm Strikes Sun Valley, Utah
• November 29, 2009
    By Steve Timko
    Reno Gazette Journal
• Sixteen small earthquakes hit in the area of Sun Valley and Wildcreek Golf Course on Thanksgiving and on Friday, but no damage was reported and residents had a hard time even feeling them.
• The Nevada Seismological Laboratory noted the unusual earthquake sequence in a statement on Friday.
• The two largest were magnitudes 2.3 and 2.2.
• Darrell Little felt one small one in Spanish Springs one valley over on Friday.
• “It was quite a small one and the dog sleeping next to me even didn’t wake up,” Little said. “It definitely was an earthquake. It felt like the house got shoved a little bit. I could hear the creaking of the walls as the house moved just ever so slightly.”
• He felt a couple of the large ones from the swarm that hit the Mogul area in 2008, but this was not like that.
• “If I wasn’t lying flat on the bed I probably would have never felt it,” Little said.
• Estephanie Tittle lives in the south end Sun Valley but felt nothing.
• “I’m from the San Francisco Bay area, so I’m kind of insensitive to them,” Tittle said. “Unless it’s over a certain magnitude, you think it’s part of the home. . . . We’re used to it.”
• She thinks people who live in homes with solid foundations might notice smaller quakes better than people who live in homes on pylons or pillars.
   
    “Small vibrations you don’t really notice,” Tittle said.
• There was another sequence of earthquakes earlier this year just west of Sun Valley, said Ken Smith, the seismic network manager with the Nevada Seismology Laboratory. These, Smith said, just happen to be hitting in an urban area.
• “It’s just another swarm of earthquakes that we happen to have around here,” Smith said.
• There’s smaller earthquakes on Saturday but below the threshold of what the laboratory reports.
   
    “It’s definitely quieter than on Friday,” he said.
• The laboratory will continue to monitor the quakes.
• http://www.rgj.com/article/20091129/NEWS/911290341/1321/16-small-quakes-hit-Sun-Valley-Sparks

16 more annotations...

• Earthquakes Up in Central Oklahoma
• related: Oklahoma City Records 3rd Quake in 9 Days
    2nd Earthquake Central Oklahoma in 48 Hours
    9 Earthquakes Hit Oklahoma in 24 Hours
• November 27, 2009
    By Michael Kimball
    The Oklahoman
• Oklahoma County was all shook up in 2009.
• While the number of quakes recorded by a seismograph has been below average this year in Oklahoma, the number strong enough to be felt is above average, the Oklahoma Geological Survey said.
• Of those, more than twice as many earthquakes were felt in Oklahoma County this year than normally are felt in all of Oklahoma.
• "We call those swarms,” said OGS director Randy Keller. "It’s not a big swarm, but it’s interesting. ... They’re very small earthquakes.”
• The biggest quake in Oklahoma this year was 3.7 on the Richter scale and struck Aug. 28 in eastern Oklahoma County, near where three temblors have been recorded this month.
• That quake is far in intensity from the last deadly earthquake in the United States which killed two people in December 2003.
• It measured 6.6 and was centered near Paso Robles, Calif., according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
• Scientists aren’t sure what’s causing the increase in Oklahoma, but Keller said there’s no need for alarm.
• "What people maybe don’t appreciate is just how complex the subsurface structure in Oklahoma is,” he said. "There are lots of faults, some quite large.”
• Earthquakes that wouldn’t be felt in places like California, where subsurface conditions are different, can be felt here, Keller said. The hard rock beneath the Sooner State is better at conducting the seismic waves.
• "It’s kind of like you’re hammering onto the end of a nice piece of metal,” Keller said.
• Recent Events
   
    Mag. 3.0 2009/11/28 19:36:58 35.566N 97.274W 5.0 8 km ( 5 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.1 2009/11/25 10:51:39 35.529N 97.273W 5.0 14 km ( 9 mi) NE of Midwest City, OK
    Mag. 2.6 2009/11/22 23:47:12 35.493N 97.230W 5.0 16 km (10 mi) ENE of Midwest City, OK
    Mag. 2.5 2009/11/16 05:12:37 35.493N 97.230W 5.0 16 km (10 mi) ENE of Midwest City, OK
    Mag. 3.0 2009/11/14 05:13:01 35.524N 97.219W 5.0 18 km (11 mi) ENE of Midwest City, OK
    Mag. 2.7 2009/11/02 12:27:05 35.432N 96.550W 5.0 17 km (11 mi) WNW of Bearden, OK
    Mag. 3.0 2009/10/22 22:56:29 35.794N 97.017W 5.0 10 km ( 6 mi) ESE of Fallis, OK
    Mag. 2.3 2009/09/08 09:03:12 35.633N 97.205W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) ESE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.3 2009/08/27 23:15:50 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.4 2009/08/27 22:30:55 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 3.5 2009/08/27 21:09:06 35.565N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.7 2009/08/27 13:32:06 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.6 2009/08/27 12:13:52 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.5 2009/08/27 10:31:24 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.7 2009/08/27 10:17:52 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.5 2009/08/27 07:58:25 35.566N 97.290W 5.0 12 km ( 7 mi) SSE of Arcadia, OK
    Mag. 2.3 2009/08/14 15:08:58 35.467N 97.412W 5.0 2 km ( 1 mi) NW of Midwest City, OK
• http://www.newsok.com/central-oklahoma-sees-more-quakes-this-year/article/3420715

14 more annotations...

• 3.1 earthquake hits Loma Linda area, is felt across the region
• November 29, 2009 
• A 3.1 earthquake hit the Loma Linda area Saturday night, but there were no reports of damage or injuries.
• The quake occurred around 11 p.m. Saturday, about 55 miles east of downtown Los Angeles and about two miles from Loma Linda in San Bernardino County.
• It was felt over a large swath of the region, including Perris. Riverside, San Bernardino, Colton and Moreno Valley.
• According to the U.S. Geological Survey's "Did You Feel It?" survey, residents as far away as Los Angeles, San Diego and Laguna Beach reported feeling the temblor.
• -- Shelby Grad

5 more annotations...

• Egypt’s Cave Underworld Under Investigation – Egyptian archaeological team move in to find answers
• Wednesday, 02 December 2009
• Cairo, December 2nd, 2009 – Egypt’s leading Egyptologist, Dr Zahi Hawass, has revealed that an excavation team under his charge are investigating an ancient tomb at the centre of claims regarding the alleged discovery of a cave underworld beneath the Pyramids of Giza.
• In August British writer and explorer Andrew Collins announced that he had rediscovered the entrance to a previously unexplored cave system, entered via a mysterious tomb several hundred meters west of the Great Pyramid.
• The cave entrance was found following clues left in the 200-year-old memoirs of British diplomat and explorer Henry Salt, who recorded how in 1817 he and Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia had investigated cave “catacombs” at Giza for a distance of “several hundred yards” before coming across a “spacious” chamber.
• This chamber linked to three others of equal size, from which went various labyrinthine passages, one of which the Italian later explored for a distance of “300 feet further”.
• Dr Hawass, Secretary General for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has now confirmed that he has ordered an all-Egyptian team to explore the tomb at the centre of the controversy.
• “We are clearing this system now, and it is a Late Period catacomb, like many others around Egypt,” he stated this week.
• “There is no mystery about it, and there is no connection with esoteric topics. We will publish our results as part of our normal process.”
• “We knew in August that he had started clearing the tomb,” he said.
• While applauding Dr Hawass’s new interest in the site, Collins remains sceptical of his motives.
• “The excavations began almost immediately after knowledge of the cave discovery hit the internet.”
• “Does his use of the term ‘system’ now suggest that he has found and entered the caves, which he previously denied even existed? he asks.
• Collins is also unconvinced by Hawass’s explanation of what he calls the “catacomb”.
• “My colleagues and I have examined photographic evidence of dynastic catacombs throughout Egypt, and these all appear to be carved by human hands.
• “Those at Giza are natural, and penetrate the bedrock for many hundreds of metres, perhaps following the course of local geological faulting.”
• Although Dr Hawass suggests there is no mystery surrounding the “catacomb”, Collins suspects that the caves extend beneath the Second Pyramid, where ancient tradition puts the legendary tomb of Tomb of Hermes, Egypt’s legendary founder.
• “This has never been found,” he added, “So perhaps it is still there, awaiting discovery, somewhere close to where Salt and Caviglia reached nearly 200 years ago.”
• Collins book Beneath the Pyramids, published last month, tells the story of his discovery of the natural cave system. He has also released a YouTube video showing his exploration of the caves in 2008.
• For more on the discovery of Giza’s cave underworld, go to www.andrewcollins.com, or read the full story in Andrew Collins book Beneath the Pyramids (4th Dimension Press, 2009).
• Andrew Collins can be contacted via Jennie Taylor Martin of 4th Dimension Press at jennie.taylor.martin@edgarcayce.org, or via his website www.andrewcollins.com .

19 more annotations...

• BRITISH WRITER DISCOVERS THE PHARAOHS’ LOST UNDERWORLD
• Wednesday, 05 August 2009
• A British writer has staked claim to finally finding the lost underworld of the pharaohs
• which has been rumoured to exist since the construction of the Great Pyramid nearly 5,000 years ago,
• creating a stir that is set to rock the Egyptological world.
• Armed only with the forgotten memoirs of a nineteenth century British explorer, history and science writer Andrew Collins, working alongside Egyptological researcher Nigel Skinner Simpson, tracked down the entrance to this forgotten cave system and were the first to explore it in modern times.
• The story begins in 1817 when Henry Salt, a former British Consul General to Egypt, and Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia entered a series of what they described as “Catacombs” beneath Giza’s famous pyramid field and travelled for a distance of “several hundred yards”, before coming upon four large chambers from which went further cave passageways.
• Salt’s memoirs were never published, and no one seems to have recorded the caves existence since that time.
• “The importance of the memoirs had previously been overlooked,’ Collins said. “They’d been catalogued but never studied in depth. They were published, finally, in 2007.
• “We found in them reference to Salt and Caviglia’s exploration of the Catacombs and after reconstructing the two men’s explorations on the plateau we eventually located the cave entrance.”
• It turned out to be a previously unrecorded tomb west of the 5,000-year-old Great Pyramid, which Collins and his team explored in March 2008.
• Here they came upon an opening that led into a vast cave chamber filled with fallen rock debris, animal bones, colonies of bats and venomous spiders.
• Following in the footsteps of Salt and Caviglia, Collins and his team explored the caves for some distance, finding incised walls and mummy fragments, before the air became too thin to carry on.
• Subsequent visits to the caves revealed more about their extent and construction.
• Is it possible that Collins has beaten the Egyptologists at their own game by finding the entrance to Giza’s lost underworld?
• Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has been quick to dismiss the discovery:

  • What a chump..Hawass has a well deserved reputation for being a jerk and a boor.
  Add Sticky Note
• “There are no new discoveries to be made at Giza”, he stated. “We know everything about the plateau - amateurs cannot find anything new.”
• Yet Collins is confident that his discovery is genuine:
• “We have searched academic libraries in London and Cairo and have found no mention of the caves or the tomb in modern times."
• “I have asked Dr Hawass to supply me with any report or paper relating to either the tomb or the caves. He said he would send them. I am still waiting.”
• Collins says that since the caves are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years old, they may have influenced the development not only of the famous pyramid field but also ancient Egyptian beliefs in an underworld where the soul achieves resurrection before ascending to the stars.
• “Ancient funerary texts clearly allude to the existence of a subterranean world in the vicinity of the Giza pyramids, calling it variously the Underworld of the Soul and the Shetayet, quite literally the Tomb of God.”
• He said. “Hopefully, the existence of the caves will help us understand the earliest human activity on the plateau.”
• The full story of the discovery of Egypt’s lost underworld is revealed in Collins’s new book Beneath the Pyramids (Fourth Dimension Press, 2009).
• To contact Andrew Collins and learn more about the discovery of Giza’s lost underworld go to http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/news/EQ12%20_2_beneath.htm
• To email Andrew Collins, go to http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/news/email.htm
• For more on the release of "Beneath the Pyramids" by Andrew Collins, contact Jennie Taylor Martin of Fourth Dimension Press at jennie.taylor.martin@edgarcayce.org
  

25 more annotations...