Minimalist wrote:I'm providing a link to this because the photo is too big and it would crap up the board but it is Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border. The whole area is full of these buttes which are the remains of the ancient sea bed. It's hard to see but right at the top there is a layer which is different from the majority of the column. It's hundreds of feet in the air as a result of uplifting.
A flood of the Mississippi would include all of its tributaries, as well.
Any tributaries you're aware of that come close to central Texas?
The Red River for one.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
And the Red must have tributaries of its own. All river systems seem interconnected to at some point reach the sea
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
That long narrow gravel deposit suggests deposition by a river Charley. If the Limestone sank a river's incline would steepen and start shifting existing depoits from its bed, steepening the incline would also lead to erosion of the river banks so the gravel bed could be a secondary deposit from upstream.
Any sign of and old river bed?
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Thanks Min, certainly appears to be an area that has been subjected to a tremendous water flow at sometime in the recent geological past. The list of rock strata is all soft and easily eroded. Where the hell is it all? If, as appears to be most likely, the area was scoured after a dam breach, at that distance from the ocean there should be a debris fan down stream of the flow, it can't all have just vanished.
That long narrow gravel deposit suggests deposition by a river Charley. If the Limestone sank a river's incline would steepen and start shifting existing depoits from its bed, steepening the incline would also lead to erosion of the river banks so the gravel bed could be a secondary deposit from upstream.
Any sign of and old river bed?
No doubt it's a redeposition from upstream and the bordering terraces paralleling the limestone riverbed:
Image this sequence laying on the now scoured, exposed half of bedrock bed, and you get a good idea of how things were about 25 years ago. Because of the increased development along the creek corridor in the past 15-20 years, the water runoff is strong enough to cut down into the stratum and wash it downstream. Especially during big flash floods. There is a fault line (Balcones Escarpment) ca. 3 nm upstream.
The Balcones Fault zone was most recently active about 15 million years ago during the Miocene epoch. This activity was related to subsidence of the Texas Coastal Plain, most likely from the large amount of sediment deposited on it by Texas rivers. The Balcones Fault zone is not active today, and is in one of the lowest risk zones for earthquakes in the United States.
Subsidence:
In geology, engineering, and surveying, subsidence is the motion of a surface (usually, the Earth's surface) as it shifts downward relative to a datum such as sea-level. The opposite of subsidence is uplift, which results in an increase in elevation.
Hey, what period are those south Texas monkeys from?
Haven’t found the falling star hit data yet, but this is some stuff I found in my hunt through my archives.
First the interest in the Sun got around fast. (Or stayed around a long time.)
Study sheds fresh light on Dilmun By REBECCA TORR
Published: 20 June 2005
A SAUDI archaeologist is rounding up a group of experts to witness an annual phenomenon in Saar, which he claims sheds new light on the Dilmun civilisation.
Dammam Regional Museum archaeologist Nabiel Al Shaikh has been visiting a temple at the 4,000-year-old Saar settlement for the last nine years in an attempt to prove his theory.
The ancient temple has an oddly positioned triangular corner room, which Mr Al Shaikh claims was used as an astronomical device to measure the position of the sun.
He believes that during the summer solstice, which falls on June 21, the sun would set over the corner of the temple - letting priests know that it was the beginning of the New Year.
If his theory is correct, it means that the Dilmun civilisation was one of the first to base its calendar on the movement of the sun.
It would also mean it used a different calendar to other civilisations of that time - such as Mesopotamia, Iran and Egypt, whose first day of the year fell on March 21 under the equinox calendar.
The corner room is made even more unusual because its outside wall is not connected to the wall of the main building.
Mr Al Shaikh believes this would enable people of that time to rebuild the corner room to compensate for slight discrepancies that occur in the 365-day calendar.
He says the astronomical year is closer to 365.242 days, which means there is an extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds each year.
"It's a major discovery," Mr Al Shaikh told the GDN.
"People 4,000 years ago discovered a calendar. The Dilmun civilisation introduced astronomy and a calendar - they didn't just have fishing and trade.
"With a calendar you can organise your life because it tells you when to farm or when to sail."
Mr Al Shaikh has approached several archaeology authorities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, but has received little support for his theory.
One of the problems is that the sun no longer sets over the corner of the temple, but is off by about 10 degrees.
However, Mr Al Shaikh said the discrepancy could be explained by the movement of tectonic plates, erosion and soft sand beneath the settlement.
"The Heritage and Archaeological Directorate until now has not confirmed it, but I will try to get them along this time," said Mr Al Shaikh.
"We have been debating this every year. I'm trying to create awareness and get geologists to confirm there is local movement. If they confirm this, they will confirm the theory."
Mr Al Shaikh said the Bahrain Historical and Archaeological Society would be publishing his theory in a Dilmun book later this year.
Another discovery by archaeologist Khazal Al Majdi has also lent weight to Mr Al Shaikh's theory.
Mr Al Majdi published a report in 1998, which explained the word Saar was a Sumerian name meaning 'the cycle of a year'.
Archaeologists, astronomists, geologists, scientists and others interested in visiting the site tomorrow should contact Mr Al Shaikh on 39679219.
He will give a short tour of the Saar settlement at 4.45pm and then explain the phenomenon as the sun sets at 6.36pm.
"People don't have to believe I'm wrong or right, but I invite them to come and see," he said.
Second: There may have been some climate changes going on.
News Notes
Geoarcheology
Mesopotamian climate change
Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater to supply their crops. So archaeologists have long wondered why the ancient people moved from an area where they could easily farm to begin a much harder life in the south.
One reason could be climate, said Harvey Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University, at the meeting in December. The climate record in ancient Mesopotamia and around the world shows an abrupt climate change event in 6400 B.C., about 8,200 radiocarbon years before present. A period of immense cooling and drought persisted for the next 200 to 300 years.
When the severe drought and cooling hit the region, there was no longer enough rainwater to sustain the agriculture in the north, Weiss says. And irrigation was not possible due to the topography, so these populations were left with two subsistence alternatives: pastoral nomadism or migration.
Archaeologists first start seeing evidence of settlements in southern Mesopotamia shortly after 6400 B.C. In the south, an area too arid to have sustained rain-fed agriculture, irrigation from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would have been possible where the rivers flow at plain level, Weiss says. Irrigation farming took three to four times the labor effort of rain-fed farming, but irrigation agriculture would have made surplus production easier because the yield was double that of rain-fed agriculture. Surplus production meant that people could begin specializing in full-time crafts rather than relying exclusively on farming, Weiss says, thus giving rise to the first class-based society and the first cities.
"It's perhaps too extreme to say that climate change caused all of the advanced society collapses," says Peter deMenocal, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "But it's also too extreme to say that climate change has had no effect. The challenge to us as paleoclimatologists is to develop much more detailed and well-dated records," he says.
The most fundamental question in Mesopotamian archaeology, Weiss concludes, "is, 'why is there a Mesopotamian archaeology?'" Having already tied the Early Bronze Age collapses from the Aegean to the Indus to the abrupt climate change event 4,200 years before present, Weiss believes he can now tie the changes of lifestyle and migration that were essential for early class formation and urban life in Mesopotamia to an abrupt, multi-century shift toward drier conditions which occurred near 8,200 years before present.
Second: There may have been some climate changes going on.
Tablets that may reveal El Niño secrets are feared lost in Iraq
By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
09 June 2003
The secrets of El Niño, one of the most mysterious and destructive weather systems, could be unlocked by hundreds of thousands of ancient clay tablets now feared lost or damaged in the chaos of Iraq.
Researchers believe the tablets, written using a cuneiform text, one of the earliest types of writing, form the world's oldest records of climate change and could give vital clues to understanding El Niño and global warming.
Academics are demanding that ministers act to protect the unique cultural records, which have chronicled agriculture and other areas of everyday life in the Near East for nearly 5,000 years.
The fear is that the tablets and other priceless records are being plundered from sites across the country in the aftermath of war. The tablets record the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian empires, which once dominated the land now divided between Iraq, Iran and Syria. They outline the catastrophic collapse of the city of Ur more than 4,000 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have died in a disastrous series of flash floods and severe droughts that may have lasted up to 30 years.
Dr Richard Grove, research director at the Centre for World Environmental History at the University of Sussex, believes a series of dramatic changes in ocean currents and global winds was responsible for the collapse of the civilisation. His controversial theory suggests that the El Niño he believes contributed to the fall of the Sumerian and Akkadian empires was one of the most severe of the past 5,000 years, and may have vital lessons for climatologists today.
Dr Grove said: "What happened was like a nuclear explosion. The cuneiform tablets of Iraq record in detail the almost complete collapse of pre-industrial agrarian societies due to extreme climate events lasting up to 10 to 20 years and possibly longer."
The tablets, known as the Lamentations of Ur, tell of the city's decline in about 2200BC. Thousands of other clay tablets, many the size of cigarette packets, form an everyday record of tithes paid to temples in the form of grain and livestock. About 80,000 tablets are thought to have survived looting at Baghdad's antiquities museum. But scholars fear thousands more are being plundered around the country.
Some 130,000 tablets are also housed at the British Museum in London. Dr Irving Finkel, of the department of the Near East, said: "We have had alarming reports of tablets being taken out of the ground. The record is very much under threat.
"Nothing is being taken from the Iraqi museum now, but sites around the country are incredibly vulnerable. There is a very urgent need for an authority to crack down on that."
The veteran Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell has raised the fate of the Sumerian archives in the Commons and urged ministers to intervene to protect the tablets from harm.
• The antiquities museum, ransacked by looters as Saddam Hussein's regime crumbled, will reopen next month after many of the treasures feared lost were found stashed in secret vaults around the city.
Donny George, the museum's research director, said yesterday that among the items on show would be the Treasure of Nimrud, a priceless set of golden Assyrian jewellery studded with gems that has been displayed only once, briefly, in the past 3,000 years.
The treasure was recovered last week from flooded vaults below the gutted shell of the city's looted central bank.
Besides the Nimrud artefacts, American investigators also recovered thousands of items from the museum's main exhibition collection last week when employees led them to a secret vault in Baghdad. The items had been taken there for safekeeping before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
American investigators said about 3,000 museum pieces were still missing, mostly not of exhibition quality.
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I hope all this gets through. I am not real good at copying, pasting, etc.
If it doesn’t I will try and give the sources, at least.
But a 5000 year long record keeping project?
That has to be some kind of record.
One of the things I found interesting during the Iraq invasion was the confidence the intelligence guys had that they would find records of all the stuff Hussein was accused of. One quote I remember was “These guys are compulsive record keepers.”
I guess so.
That seems to tie in with one of the drying periods of the Sahara that we have previously talked about. Anyone recall off hand?
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
