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Archaeologists Find Bird Sacrifices by Ancient Romans to Goddess Isis

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An archaeologist and a biologist have found evidence of birds being sacrificed to the goddess Isis in the excavated ruins of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii. In their study, reported in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Chiara Assunta Corbino and Beatrice Demarchi studied frescos found at the ancient site revealing the role birds played in ritual banquets. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oa.3224)

The goddess Isis was first worshiped by people in ancient Egypt. Myths from the time suggest she resurrected her husband and slain brother and thus came to be known as a goddess who helped the dead enter the afterlife. Worship of Isis spread to ancient Greece, where the name meant “great mother,” and eventually to Italy and the rest of the Roman Empire.

During this latter time, belief in Isis became a cult-like obsession in which she was worshiped as part of ritual celebrations. Corbino and Demarchi suggest that such rituals were likely performed by priests. They believe they have found evidence of such rituals in frescos on the walls of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii.

Prior research has found that the Temple of Isis was mostly destroyed during an earthquake sometime around A.D. 62. Imagery in the frescos suggest they were added after the earthquake as part of renovations. The researchers found depictions of rituals involving birds. Thus far, they have found evidence of geese, turtle doves, chickens and ibises, along with pigs and various sea creatures. This new finding, the researchers suggest, adds more evidence to theories that birds were used in Isis worship rituals in other places.

The researchers note that the find is significant because such rituals were conducted in private; thus, little evidence of them have been found. The Isis frescos are the first to have been found in Italy. The researchers also note that the birds were charred, suggesting that the people conducting the rituals had eaten them—likely as part of a banquet similar to some of those shown in the frescos.

Many centuries before the Roman empire, Akhenaten—1373-1337 BCE—made history as Egypt’s “heretic Pharaoh.” Along with his wife, co-ruler, Nefertiti, Akhenaten completely changed most aspects of Egyptian religion, abandoning traditional polytheism and introducing the world’s first monotheism. Under his direction, workmen created a new city, ‘Amarna,’ from scratch. Akhenaten also introduced a new art style upsetting the traditional artistic conventions that he had inherited.

In much of Amarna art, the king and his family, as well as their staff, were depicted in a strange exaggerated physical form bordering on androgyny and even femininity. Features included: elongated head, almond-shaped eyes, protruding jaw, fleshy lips, serpentine neck, narrow shoulders, enlarged breasts, protruding belly and buttocks, wide hips, spindly arms and legs with bulging upper thighs, flat feet, spider-like fingers and toes, knee-joints that bend the opposite way, and even the rare absence of genitalia.

A virtually infinite array of explanations have been proposed for these bizarre features, but which, remain unsatisfactorily explained. Interpretations run the gamut from purely physical to purely symbolic. But writer Jonathon Perrin believes Akhenaten’s strange appearance, may have had nothing to do with his actual physical appearance, and more to do with birds.

In an article for Atlantis Rising Magazine, Perrin explains that Akhenaten had a great fondness for birds, having them painted all over his city in scenes of bucolic marshland bliss, and even keeping them in special areas of his city, primarily in the lush garden palaces. Besides being a common motif in quixotic Amarna art, where they, along with oxen, wine and flowers, were a daily sacrifice to the sungod Aten.

Birds, says Perrin, formed a key part of Akhenaten’s new religious ideology. During the first few years of his rule, Akhenaten worshipped all the gods of Egypt, but favored Ra-Horakhty, the syncretistic solar deity of Ra and Horus.
An ancient symbol, going back to the Old Kingdom, the akh bird was also very important to the king. The northern bald ibis was used in hieroglyphs to depict the akh, which was the highest form of soul a person could attain in the afterlife, a shining immortal spirit.

The case can be made that when he changed his name to Akhenaten, the king had taken on the very spirit of the Akh bird, and that he wished to imbue himself with the essence of the northern bald ibis bird (who symbolized “effectiveness”, “righteousness”, and “radiance”). If the akh was depicted as a bird, it makes sense that the king may have been adopting the physical attributes of the bird itself, to greater glorify his father and signify his own immortality.

Another bird important to Akhenaten was the immortal Bennu Bird of Heliopolis. Researcher Andrew Collins has noted that the akh shining spirit was bound up with the Heliopolitan creation myth of the bennu bird, or grey heron. When Ra first appeared over the formless void of Nun, he cast his light upon the primeval mound that emerged from the waters. This mound was called the benben stone, and on it landed the bennu bird, which was the “soul”, or Ba, of Ra. The bennu bird was immortal, and formed the template for the later Greek Phoenix bird of resurrection.

AR #128

The Bird King

by Jonathon Perrin

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Humans in Caves 41,000 Years Ago Revealed by “Smoke Archaeology”

By Jennifer Ouellette

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For over a decade, Maria Medina, an archaeologist affiliated with Argentina’s University of Cordoba, has been conducting research on what she terms “smoke archaeology”: trying to reconstruct Europe’s prehistoric past by analyzing the remnants of torches, fire, and smoke in French and Spanish caves. Her latest discovery is that humans regularly visited the Caves of Nerja as far back as 41,000 years ago, a good 10,000 years earlier than previously believed, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32544-1).

Archaeological excavations of the Nerja Caves over the decades have unearthed skeletal human remains dating back to around 25,000 BCE on, as well as animal bones, shells, fish bones, and stone and bone tools. Small groups of humans used the caves seasonally until 21,000 BCE, when they became a permanent residence. By 4500 BCE, it seems the caves were being used for farming and making pottery. Textiles were being made by 3800 BCE, with some parts of the cave being used for burial.

In 2012, Spanish archaeologists announced the discovery of two cave paintings of what appear to be seals, believed to be the oldest cave paintings yet found based on radiocarbon dating of charcoal remains found nearby. They are believed to be 42,300 to 43,500 years old. That’s significantly older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in southeast France. It’s even possible that the seal paintings were created by Neanderthals since some scholars think they were still living in the south and west of the Iberian peninsula until some 37,000 years ago. However, Homo sapiens might also have been in the region around that time.

Studying these caves using fire and smoke can tell researchers more about the customs and rituals of these prehistoric humans. For instance, in 2021, Medina and several colleagues conducted in situ experiments with three different kinds of Paleolithic lighting sources in the hopes of shedding some light (pun intended) on what those various illumination methods might tell us about the emergence of “human symbolic and artistic behavior” in the form of cave art. The Spanish team conducted their experiments at the Isuntza 1 Cave in Spain’s Basque country. They chose lighting types based on known archaeological data: five torches, two stone lamps with animal fat, and a small fireplace.
Their measurements showed that the various lighting sources had very different characteristics and were thus probably used in different contexts. The wooden torches, for instance, emitted light in all directions, up to nearly six meters (19.6 feet), and lasted an average of 41 minutes. The torches exhibited uneven light intensity and often needed to be relit by waving them from side to side, and they produced a lot of smoke, so they worked best for exploring caves or crossing wide spaces.

By contrast, the grease lamps emitted weaker light akin to the intensity of a candle over a span of three meters (9.8 feet) or so. They burned consistently and didn’t smoke for over an hour, but they had a dazzling effect if the person was moving and didn’t illuminate the floor very well. This makes the lamps better suited for lighting small cave spaces over a longer period, complementing the advantages of the torches. As for the fireplace—the only truly static system—its illumination covered a range of 6.6 meters (21.6 feet). However, it burned for just 30 minutes and gave off a lot of white smoke, making it unsuitable for use unless there were strong enough air currents to disperse that smoke.
Furthermore, in 2022, English archaeologists analyzed limestone plaquettes excavated from a railway site in southern France in 1866. They concluded that the stones may have been deliberately placed around fire hearths. The team’s digital reconstructions showed that the engraved images would appear to move and flicker in the firelight, amounting to a kind of animated fireside art. The same might be true of the Nerja Caves. “The prehistoric paintings were viewed in the flickering light of the flames, which could give the figures a certain sense of movement and warmth,” said Medina. “There is still much it can reveal about what we were like.”

For this latest research, Medina et al. collected samples of soot (black marks), samples from a stalagmite with soot microlayers in the Cataclysm Room, residues from the interiors of fixed lamps, and charcoal remnants on the ground. The various collected samples were then subjected to radiocarbon dating, Raman spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy, among other techniques, for analysis. The objective: to determine if these remains were left by single visits or recurrent ones.

With this interdisciplinary approach, Medina and her colleagues were able to document 73 distinct phases of visits over 35,000 years, by far the largest known number of visits for a European prehistoric cave. That means that humans visited the caves about every 35 years on average. The analysis also revealed a strong preference for a particular type of pine for building fires. “There is a repeated and almost exclusive use of this type of wood for cave raids and for lighting,” the authors wrote. It’s not clear why this wood was preferred over other species common to the region, but their resinous nature might have made them ideal for lighting purposes.

The oldest residues date back 41,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic period and were collected from two different points in the Upper Gallery, in areas more than 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) from the entrance and quite difficult to access. To support this conclusion, Medina et al. cited a 2016 study finding evidence (in the form of lighting systems) of Neanderthal occupation deep in the Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France. “The evidence from Nerja would be a significant novelty, as it would certify the ability of another ancient human species (Homo neanderthalis) not only to frequent areas in total darkness and far from the entrance (as in the case of the Bruniquel Cave), but also to overcome extremely difficult speleological obstacles inside caves,” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32544-1)

AR #101

Neanderthal & Civilization

by Martin Ruggles

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Startling Discovery in Architecture of Notre Dame

The 2019 Notre Dame fire in Paris presented archaeologists with a unique opportunity to peer into the cathedral’s history.

Parts of the landmark that were concealed for centuries are now being picked apart and put back together, providing a window into the architectural innovations that once made this 32-meter-high (105 feet) building the tallest cathedral in its age, thanks to the iron that runs through the majestic structure’s veins.

Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of metal staples in various parts of the cathedral, some dating back to the early 1160s.

The findings suggest the extensive use of iron in masonry is not as modern as experts once assumed. Medieval builders working on Notre Dame were employing the architectural technique long before restoration works started in the 19th century.

“Notre Dame is now unquestionably the first known Gothic cathedral where iron was massively used to bind stones as a proper construction material,” archaeologists working in Paris conclude.

The team estimates that the iron fixtures found at Notre Dame were designed up to two decades before France’s Soisson cathedral was built and four decades before the Bourges cathedral came to be. Until now, both these gothic buildings were considered the first examples of systemic iron masonry.

The architect that was initially in charge of Notre Dame’s construction was clearly ahead of the game.
The study was published in PLOS One. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0280945

The Gothic cathedral architecture originated in France in the early twelfth century during the heyday of the Knights Templar. The Templars officially called the ‘Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’ formed a knight’s order of priests who ostensibly protected the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem.

Founded in 1118 by Hugo van Payens the order originally included nine brave knight-priests. The group eventually became one of the richest and most powerful in history. With the vast wealth, collected from financing the crusades, the templars were able to build Europe’s gothic cathedrals. With twin towers facing west, the cathedrals resemble the Temple of Solomon with its two pillars Jachin and Boaz standing in front. This explains why in many cases a statue of Solomon is placed at the West portal of the French cathedrals between the twin towers.

Much has been written about the mysteries of the French Gothic cathedrals and the sacred geometry employed in their architecture. One famous book, Le Mystère des Cathédrales was written in 1929 by Fulcanelli (1839 – 1953), the mysterious French alchemist. According to Fulcanelli a cathedral is an alchemical book written in stone.

AR #73

Secrets of the Cathedrals

by Jan Wicherink

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Could a Mystery Planet End Life on Earth?

A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment at the University of California Riverside. 

UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. 

The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. There is nothing in between. 

“In other star systems there are many planets with masses in that gap. We call them super-Earths,” Kane said. 
The other gap is in location, relative to the sun, between Mars and Jupiter. “Planetary scientists often wish there was something in between those two planets. It seems like wasted real estate,” he said. 

These gaps could offer important insights into the architecture of our solar system, and into Earth’s evolution. To fill them in, Kane ran dynamic computer simulations of a planet between Mars and Jupiter with a range of different masses, and then observed the effects on the orbits of all other planets. 

The results, published in the Planetary Science Journal, were mostly disastrous for the solar system. “This fictional planet gives a nudge to Jupiter that is just enough to destabilize everything else,” Kane said. “Despite many astronomers having wished for this extra planet, it’s a good thing we don’t have it.”

Jupiter is much larger than all the other planets combined; its mass is 318 times that of Earth, so its gravitational influence is profound. If a super-Earth in our solar system, a passing star, or any other celestial object disturbed Jupiter even slightly, all other planets would be profoundly affected.

Depending on the mass and exact location of a super-Earth, its presence could ultimately eject Mercury and Venus as well as Earth from the solar system. It could also destabilize the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, tossing them into outer space as well. 

The super-Earth would change the shape of this Earth’s orbit, making it far less habitable than it is today, if not ending life entirely.

If Kane made the planet’s mass smaller and put it directly in between Mars and Jupiter, he saw it was possible for the planet to remain stable for a long period of time. But small moves in any direction and, “things would go poorly,” he said. 

The study has implications for the ability of planets in other solar systems to host life. Though Jupiter-like planets, gas giants far from their stars, are only found in about 10% of the time, their presence could decide whether neighboring Earths or super-Earths have stable orbits. 

These results gave Kane a renewed respect for the delicate order that holds the planets together around the sun. “Our solar system is more finely tuned than I appreciated before. It all works like intricate clock gears. Throw more gears into the mix and it all breaks,” Kane said. 

The late Zecharia Sitchin explained the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as resulting from the destruction of a planet known as Tiamat after being struck by a rogue planet called Niburu. The story can be found, he said, in the cuneiform texts of Sumeria. Similarly, in a 1988 book, Catastrophism and the Old Testament, author Donald W. Patten theorized that a planet called ‘Astra’ had collided with Mars after breaking into pieces, much as the comet Shoemaker-Levy which hit Jupiter in 1994.

Many esoteric traditions, such as Theosophy, have long held that the asteroid belt is the aftermath of a collision between a planet known as Maldek and Mars. Many such sources claim Maldek was destroyed by the nukes of a mad civilization.

Usually discussed under the heading ‘Phaeton,’ this hypothetical world was also called the ‘fifth planet.’ The idea being that the solar system originally had just five planets.The notion that the asteroid belt resulted from a planetary collision has also been called the ‘Disruption Theory,’ though it has been summarily rejected by academia. New evidence, however, is forcing science to reconsider many ideas once dismissed as fringe.

In December, 2019 a new study led by University of Oklahoma astrophysicist Matthew S. Clements published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, took a new approach. Entitled “A record of the final phase of giant planet migration fossilized in the asteroid belt’s orbital structure,” the paper challenged the “Nice Model” , the standard theory for the dynamical evolution of the Solar System. According to Clements and his colleagues a comprehensive new analysis of orbital data indeed suggests that the asteroid belt should be viewed as the fossil record of a destroyed fifth planet (https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/492/1/L56/5672641).

AR #107

Ancient Nukes on Mars

by Martin Ruggles

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Giant Jurassic Bug in Arkansas Walmart

A giant insect plucked from the façade of an Arkansas Walmart has set historic records. The Polystoechotes punctata or giant lacewing is the first of its kind recorded in eastern North America in over 50 years — and the first record of the species ever in the state. 

The giant lacewing was formerly widespread across North America, but was mysteriously extirpated from eastern North America by the 1950s. This discovery suggests there may be relic populations of this large, Jurassic-Era insect yet to be discovered, explained Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab.
Skvarla found the specimen in 2012, but misidentified it and only discovered its true identity after teaching an online course based on his personal insect collection in 2020. He recently co-authored a paper about the discovery in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.

“I remember it vividly, because I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building,” said Skvarla, who was a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas at the time. “I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade.”

It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the giant lacewing would find its time to shine. In the fall of 2020, with the world in lockdown, Skvarla was teaching Entomology 432: Insect Biodiversity and Evolution at Penn State. He taught the lab course via Zoom, with students following along remotely on loaner microscopes, and used his own personal insect collection as specimen samples.

As he went to demonstrate the features of a specimen he had previously labeled an “antlion,” Skvarla noticed that the characteristics didn’t quite match those of the dragonfly-like predatory insect. Instead, he thought it looked more like a lacewing. A giant lacewing has a wingspan of roughly 50 millimeters, which is quite large for an insect, a clear indicator that the specimen was not an antlion, as Skvarla had mistakenly labeled it. The students got to work comparing features — and a discovery was made, live on Zoom.

“We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he’s talking about the features and then just kinda stops,” said Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State. “We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing. I still remember the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn’t dim, the wonder isn’t lost. Here we were making a true discovery in the middle of an online lab course.”

For additional confirmation, Skvarla and his colleagues performed molecular DNA analyses on the specimen. Since confirming its true identity, Skvarla has deposited the insect safely in the collections of the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State, where scientists and students will have access to it for further research. 

AR #125

One-Hundred-Million-Year-Old Protein

By Nicholle Wahl

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Tracking the Sun to Feed Ancient Mexicans

By Jules Bernstein

Without clocks or modern tools, ancient Mexicans watched the sun to maintain a farming calendar that precisely tracked seasons and even adjusted for leap years.Rising sun seen from the stone causeway on Mount Tlaloc in Mexico.

Before the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico’s agricultural system fed a population that was extraordinarily large for the time.  Whereas Seville, the largest urban center in Spain, had a population of fewer than 50,000, the Basin, now known as Mexico City, was home to as many as 3 million people.  

To feed so many people in a region with a dry spring and summer monsoons required advanced understanding of when seasonal variations in weather would arrive. Planting too early, or too late, could have proved disastrous. The failure of any calendar to adjust for leap-year fluctuations could also have led to crop failure.

Though colonial chroniclers documented the use of a calendar, it was not previously understood how the Mexica, or Aztecs, were able to achieve such accuracy. New UC Riverside research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates how they did it. They used the mountains of the Basin as a solar observatory, keeping track of the sunrise against the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

“We concluded they must have stood at a single spot, looking eastwards from one day to another, to tell the time of year by watching the rising sun,” said Exequiel Ezcurra, distinguished UCR professor of ecology who led the research.

To find that spot, the researchers studied Mexica manuscripts. These ancient texts referred to Mount Tlaloc, which lies east of the Basin. The research team explored the high mountains around the Basin and a temple at the mountain’s summit. Using astronomical computer models, they confirmed that a long causeway structure at the temple aligns with the rising sun on Feb. 24, the first day of the Aztec new year.

“Our hypothesis is that they used the whole Valley of Mexico. Their working instrument was the Basin itself. When the sun rose at a landmark point behind the Sierras, they knew it was time to start planting,” Ezcurra said.

The sun, as viewed from a fixed point on Earth, does not follow the same trajectory every day. In winter, it runs south of the celestial equator and rises toward the southeast. As summer approaches, because of the Earth’s tilt, sunrise moves northeast, a phenomenon called solar declination. 

This study may be the first to demonstrate how the Mexica were able to keep time using this principle, the sun, and the mountains as guiding landmarks. Though some may be familiar with the “Aztec calendar,” that is an incorrect name given to the Sun Stone, arguably the most famous work of Aztec sculpture used solely for ritual and ceremonial purposes. 

Pictures and captions:
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/12/12/precise-solar-observations-fed-millions-ancient-mexico

AR #62

What Happened to the Mayas

by Frank Joseph

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Asteroid Impact Prediction Getting Better

On 19 November, asteroid 2022 WJ1 became one of the many small asteroids to strike Earth, but only the sixth we ever saw coming. For the second time this year, humankind predicted an asteroid impact. The ~1-m rock caused no harm and burnt up in the sky above Toronto as a striking fireball. The detection, warning and advance observations of this asteroid illustrate our rapidly increasing ability to warn of asteroid impacts, however small.

The new asteroid was first imaged by Catalina’s 1.5-m Mt. Lemmon telescope, and once four observations were made it was reported to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), 38 minutes after initial detection, at 05:31 UTC.

These four observations were enough to map out the asteroid’s path in the sky, and within a few minutes of this ‘astrometry’ being published, ESA’s own internal monitoring software reported that the object had a ~20% chance of Earth impact, possibly hitting somewhere in North America in the next two to three hours. A few minutes later, other impact monitoring programs also sent alerts outlining a similar scenario.

Following the potential impact notifications, observers at Catalina and elsewhere across the US got follow-up observations of the new asteroid. Less than 30 minutes from the initial trigger, the impact was confirmed with excellent precision: the small asteroid, likely less than a meter in diameter, was going to impact somewhere between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, near the US-Canada border, around 08:27 UTC (09:27 CET).

At exactly the predicted time, a ~1-m asteroid struck the atmosphere becoming a brilliant fireball above the expected location. Find out more about this event at ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) web portal.
Because of how the Solar System formed, small objects are in the majority in terms of their total population. It is estimated there are 40-50 million little asteroids and ‘just’ 1 000 of the biggest, giant ‘planet-killers’. The rest fall somewhere in between.

We currently know of more than 1.1 million asteroids, although many more are out there. Of those discovered, about 30 600 travel in an orbit that brings them near Earth’s own. These are the ‘near-Earth asteroids’ (NEAs).
The reassuring news is that almost all the giant asteroids have been found – more than 95% – and none are of concern for the next hundred years. Astronomers are tirelessly searching for every last one.

Small, meter-sized asteroids strike Earth every couple of weeks. They add to our understanding of asteroid populations, of fireballs and their makeup, but they aren’t a big priority when it comes to Planetary Defense because they pose no real danger.

The objects we are most concerned about are those ‘goldilocks asteroids’ that are large enough to do harm if they impact, and there are enough of them out there that we know, at some point, they will. The infamous Chelyabinsk impact in February 2013 and the Tunguska impact in June 1908 fall into this category, and when it comes to discovering these asteroids, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

That’s why ESA’s Planetary Defence Office is planning new telescopes on the ground and missions in space to improve our asteroid detection abilities, sending the Hera mission to the Dimorphos asteroid struck by NASA’s DART mission to test asteroid deflection, as well as working with the international community to prepare for the scenario in which a bigger asteroid is discovered on a collision course.

Pictures & Captions
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/The_sixth_asteroid_impact_we_saw_coming

AR #87

Russians Warn of Asteroid Hit in 2036

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Enormous Batch of JFK Records Released

by Zach Schonfeld

The National Archives has released thousands of records related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. The release of 12,879 new files, the largest dump since 2018, comes nearly six decades after Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, becoming the fourth U.S. president to have been assassinated while in office.

Lawmakers in 1992 passed legislation requiring all remaining government records about the assassination to be released by Oct. 2017, unless they posed certain risks to national defense or intelligence, but former President Trump and Biden both issued extensions.

That set off a legal challenge filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit that curates an online collection of the assassination records, arguing the extensions were unlawful based on the 1992 legislation.

Biden issued the most recent extension, which lasted one year, arguing that the coronavirus pandemic impeded agencies’ ability to review the records by the earlier deadline.

The president’s order on Thursday stated that almost 16,000 records remained redacted, and Biden approved the release of more than 70 percent of them.

But an unspecified “limited” number of records that remain the subject of review were not included in the batch, and Biden’s order gives federal agencies and the National Archives until May 1, 2023, to make recommendations about whether they must still be kept private.

Biden ordered the remaining records to be publicly released by June 30, 2023, unless they meet narrow exceptions.
“Agencies shall not propose to continue redacting information unless the redaction is necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” Biden’s order states.

The National Archives had released various batches of documents in recent years, with the most recent dump of 1,491 files being published exactly one year ago. 

The Archives had previously released roughly 55,000 total documents since the deadline originally imposed by Congress.

Referenced story link:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3776939-national-archives-releases-thousands-of-jfk-assassination-records/

AR #88

JFK Sought UFO Files

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Mars More Active than Once Believed

Enormous Volcanic Plume Is Pushing Mars Surface Upward. By Daniel Stolte

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge current views of Martian geodynamic evolution with a report on the discovery of an active mantle plume pushing the surface upward and causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The finding suggests that the planet’s deceptively quiet surface may hide a more tumultuous interior than previously thought. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01836-3)

On Earth, shifting tectonic plates reshuffle the planet’s surface and make for a dynamic interior, so the absence of such processes on Mars led many to think of it as a dead planet, where not much happened in the past 3 billion years.
“Our study presents multiple lines of evidence that reveal the presence of a giant active mantle plume on present-day Mars,” said Adrien Broquet, a postdoctoral research associate in the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and co-author of the study with Jeff Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor of planetary science at the LPL.


Mantle plumes are large blobs of warm and buoyant rock that rise from deep inside a planet and push through its intermediate layer – the mantle – to reach the base of its crust, causing earthquakes, faulting and volcanic eruptions. The island chain of Hawaii, for example, formed as the Pacific plate slowly drifted over a mantle plume.”We have strong evidence for mantle plumes being active on Earth and Venus, but this isn’t expected on a small and supposedly cold world like Mars,” Andrews-Hanna said. “Mars was most active 3 to 4 billion years ago, and the prevailing view is that the planet is essentially dead today.”


“A tremendous amount of volcanic activity early in the planet’s history built the tallest volcanoes in the solar system and blanketed most of the northern hemisphere in volcanic deposits,” Broquet said. “What little activity has occurred in recent history is typically attributed to passive processes on a cooling planet.”


The researchers were drawn to a surprising amount of activity in an otherwise nondescript region of Mars called Elysium Planitia, a plain within Mars’ northern lowlands close to the equator. Unlike other volcanic regions on Mars, which haven’t seen major activity for billions of years, Elysium Planitia experienced large eruptions over the past 200 million years.


“Previous work by our group found evidence in Elysium Planitia for the youngest volcanic eruption known on Mars,” Andrews-Hanna said. “It created a small explosion of volcanic ash around 53,000 years ago, which in geologic time is essentially yesterday.”


Volcanism at Elysium Planitia originates from the Cerberus Fossae, a set of young fissures that stretch for more than 800 miles across the Martian surface. Recently, NASA’s InSight team found that nearly all Martian quakes, or marsquakes, emanate from this one region. Although this young volcanic and tectonic activity had been documented, the underlying cause remained unknown.


On Earth, volcanism and earthquakes tend to be associated with either mantle plumes or plate tectonics, the global cycle of drifting continents that continually recycles the crust.


“We know that Mars does not have plate tectonics, so we investigated whether the activity we see in the Cerberus Fossae region could be the result of a mantle plume,” Broquet said.


Mantle plumes, which can be viewed as analogous to hot blobs of wax rising in lava lamps. give away their presence on Earth through a classical sequence of events. Warm plume material pushes against the surface, uplifting and stretching the crust. Molten rock from the plume then erupts as flood basalts that create vast volcanic plains.
When the team studied the features of Elysium Planitia, they found evidence of the same sequence of events on Mars. The surface has been uplifted by more than a mile, making it one of the highest regions in Mars’ vast northern lowlands. Analyses of subtle variations in the gravity field indicated that this uplift is supported from deep within the planet, consistent with the presence of a mantle plume.


Other measurements showed that the floor of impact craters is tilted in the direction of the plume, further supporting the idea that something pushed the surface up after the craters formed. Finally, when researchers applied a tectonic model to the area, they found that the presence of a giant plume, 2,500 miles wide, was the only way to explain the extension responsible for forming the Cerberus Fossae.


“In terms of what you expect to see with an active mantle plume, Elysium Planitia is checking all the right boxes,” Broquet said, adding that the finding poses a challenge for models used by planetary scientists to study the thermal evolution of planets. “This mantle plume has affected an area of Mars roughly equivalent to that of the continental United States. Future studies will have to find a way to account for a very large mantle plume that wasn’t expected to be there.


“We used to think that InSight landed in one of the most geologically boring regions on Mars – a nice flat surface that should be roughly representative of the planet’s lowlands,” Broquet added. “Instead, our study demonstrates that InSight landed right on top of an active plume head.”


The presence of an active plume will affect interpretations of the seismic data recorded by InSight, which must now take into account the fact that this region is far from normal for Mars.


“Having an active mantle plume on Mars today is a paradigm shift for our understanding of the planet’s geologic evolution,” Broquet said, “similar to when analyses of seismic measurements recorded during the Apollo era demonstrated the moon’s core to be molten.”


Their findings could also have implications for life on Mars, the authors say. The studied region experienced floods of liquid water in its recent geologic past, though the cause has remained a mystery. The same heat from the plume that is fueling ongoing volcanic and seismic activity could also melt ice to make the floods – and drive chemical reactions that could sustain life deep underground.


“Microbes on Earth flourish in environments like this, and that could be true on Mars, as well,” Andrews-Hanna said, adding that the discovery goes beyond explaining the enigmatic seismic activity and resurgence in volcanic activity. “Knowing that there is an active giant mantle plume underneath the Martian surface raises important questions regarding how the planet has evolved over time. “We’re convinced that the future has more surprises in store.”

https://news.arizona.edu/story/giant-mantle-plume-reveals-mars-more-active-previously-thought

AR #80

The Case for Life on Mars Gets Stronger

Posted on

‘Ancient Apocalypse’: A True Must-See Series

By Kay Smythe News and Commentary Writer

“Ancient Apocalypse” was released on Netflix earlier this month, and it only took me two days to binge the entire series and completely revitalize aspects of my own thesis on the ignorance of our humanity in macro-society.

Graham Hancock hosts “Ancient Apocalypse,” an epic deep-dive docuseries into his fairly substantial theory that an elite, developed civilization of humans reigned planet Earth prior to the last major cold snap, known as the Younger Dryas period. (Listen to his interview with Joe Rogan for more on this.)

As this sudden, cataclysmic event struck, plunging the world into a frozen extended winter, these elite humans traversed the globe to inform hunter gatherer societies of the potential impending doom and to pass on their knowledge of agriculture, architecture, and other aspects of developed civilization.

Hancock has plenty of evidence to support his theory that humanity has developed to a form of peak civilization before. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but the archaeological sites he visits on the show, and complete ignorance of modern archaeologists to dig further than a few thousand years into our past, suggests he’s pretty much on the money as far as his research goes. He’s not even the only person to come up with the idea.

There’s an amazing book called “The World Without Us” that argues if all humans left Earth right now, it would take less than 10,000 years for every trace of our existence to disappear back into nature. Considering how much of the stuff our version of civilization has created is digital, plastic, pointless, and so easily destroyed by the natural world, it’s very easy to believe that humanity has probably been built up and then almost wiped out several times over the last couple of million years.

Anything related to the apocalypse is right up my alley, as all my regular readers know. I’m fairly certain we’re heading for a major collapse of modern civilization pretty much any day now, so I found Hancock’s work and thesis alarmingly calming. His evidence suggests that elite, developed societies collapsed under this global cataclysm, but the hunter-gatherer populations, those who live in unison with the planet, began to truly flourish into what we are today.
The biggest takeaway from Hancock’s epic first docuseries (I do hope there are many more) is just how fragile and redundant so much of what we’ve created truly is. We forget that this planet, this solar system, doesn’t care about the enormous, ugly cities we call home, nor the ease of Amazon shopping, and definitely not about the money we make at the jobs we hate.

More than that, if the electricity went off and the internet died today, what would you have to show for your life? Or would you even have one? You don’t have to do hallucinogenic drugs to understand that, without the natural world, humanity does not exist. Without most of what we’ve developed in this iteration of civilization, we’d probably be a lot more fulfilled, happy, and loving.

Should another major catastrophe strike — either as a major natural disaster, from our own planet or the skies above, or a pandemic, etc — those who depend on the state, shops, cities, computers, television, politicians, Big Pharma, Big Everything, will be the ones who don’t pass on their genes to the future of our species. Those who live smaller, self-sufficient existences, will likely be the godfathers of whatever civilization comes after ours.

I know which side of history I’d prefer to be on. How about you?

from DailyCaller:
https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/15/ancient-apocalypse-graham-hancock-netflix-review/?

AR #111

Catastrophism Reconsidered

by William B. Stoecker