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Scientists link deep wells to deadly Spain quake

Posted: October 22, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News
Tags: earthquakes, news

MADRID (AP) — Farmers drilling ever deeper wells over decades to water their crops likely contributed to a deadly earthquake in southern Spain last year, a new study suggests. The findings may add to concerns about the effects of new energy extraction and waste disposal technologies.

Nine people died and nearly 300 were injured when an unusually shallow magnitude-5.1 quake hit the town of Lorca on May 11, 2011. It was the country’s worst quake in more than 50 years, causing millions of euros in damage to a region with an already fragile economy.

Using satellite images, scientists from Canada, Italy and Spain found the quake ruptured a fault running near a basin that had been weakened by 50 years of groundwater extraction in the area.

During this period, the water table dropped by 250 meters (274 yards) as farmers bored ever deeper wells to help produce the fruit, vegetables and meat that are exported from Lorca to the rest of Europe. In other words, the industry that propped up the local economy in southern Spain may have undermined the very ground on which Lorca is built.

The researchers noted that even without the strain caused by water extraction, a quake would likely have occurred at some point.

But the extra stress of pumping vast amounts of water from a nearby aquifer may have been enough to trigger a quake at that particular time and place, said lead researcher Pablo J. Gonzalez of the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Miguel de las Doblas Lavigne, a geologist with Spain’s National Natural Science Museum who has worked on the same theory but was not involved in the study, said the Lorca quake was in the cards.

“This has been going on for years in the Mediterranean areas, all very famous for their agriculture and plastic greenhouses. They are just sucking all the water out of the aquifers, drying them out,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “From Lorca to (the regional capital of) Murcia you can find a very depleted water level.”

De las Doblas said it was “no coincidence that all the aftershocks were located on the exact position of maximum depletion.”

“The reason is clearly related to the farming, it’s like a sponge you drain the water from; the weight of the rocks makes the terrain subside and any small variation near a very active fault like the Alhama de Murcia may be the straw that breaks the camel*s back, which is what happened,” he said.

He said excess water extraction was common in Spain.

“Everybody digs their own well, they don’t care about anything,” he said. “I think in Lorca you may find that some 80 percent of wells are illegal.”

Lorca town hall environment chief Melchor Morales said the problem dates back to the 1960s when the region opted to step up its agriculture production and when underground water was considered private property. A 1986 law has reduced the amount of well pumping, he said.

Not everyone agreed with the conclusion of the study, which was published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience.

“There have been earthquakes of similar intensity and similar damage caused in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries when there was no excess water extraction,” said Jose Martinez Diez, a professor in geodynamics at Madrid’s Complutense University who has also published a paper on the quake.

Still, it isn’t the first time that earthquakes have been blamed on human activity, and scientists say the incident points to the need to investigate more closely how such quakes are triggered and how to prevent them.

The biggest man-made quakes are associated with the construction of large dams, which trap massive amounts of water that put heavy pressure on surrounding rock.

The 1967 Koynanagar earthquake in India, which killed more than 150 people, is one such case, said Marco Bohnhoff, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam who wasn’t involved in the Lorca study.

Bohnhoff said smaller man-made quakes can also occur when liquid is pumped into the ground.

A pioneering geothermal power project in the Swiss city of Basel was abandoned in 2009 after it caused a series of earthquakes. Nobody was injured, but the tremors caused by injecting cold water into hot rocks to produce steam resulted in millions of Swiss francs (dollars) damage to buildings.

Earlier this year, a report by the National Research Council in the United States found the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas was not a huge source of man-made earthquakes. However, the related practice of shooting large amounts of wastewater from “fracking” or other drilling activities into deep underground storage wells has been linked with some small earthquakes.

In an editorial accompanying the Lorca study, geologist Jean-Philippe Avouac of the California Institute of Technology said it was unclear whether human activity merely induces quakes that would have happened anyway at a later date. He noted that the strength of the quake appeared to have been greater than the stress caused by removing the groundwater.

“The earthquake therefore cannot have been caused entirely by water extraction,” wrote Avouac. “Instead, it must have built up over several centuries.”

Still, pumping out the water may have affected how the stress was released, and similar processes such as fracking or injecting carbon dioxide into the ground — an idea that has been suggested to reduce the greenhouse effect — could theoretically do the same, he said.

Once the process is fully understood, “we might dream of one day being able to tame natural faults with geo-engineering,” Avouac said.

___

Jordans reported from Istanbul. Ciaran Giles in Madrid and AP Science Writer Alicia Chang in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

History in the Remaking — Göbekli Tepe

Posted: October 21, 2012 by phaedrap1 in Monuments, News
Tags: Ancient history, Archeology

A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill”—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.

Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt’s German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is “unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,” according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford’s archeology program. Enthusing over the “huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art” at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: “Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.”

Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the “high” religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that “the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,” and Göbekli may prove his case.

The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. “You don’t move 10-ton stones for no reason,” Schmidt observes. “Temples like to be on high sites,” he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. “Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world.”

Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. “In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image,” says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe “is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods.”

The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. “The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture,” he says.

Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent’s northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins. Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area—perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance—a few centuries after Göbekli’s founding. Animal husbandry also began near here—the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.

The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls “scary, nasty” creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were ex-posed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial. Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt’s great theoretical claim. “There are no traces of daily life,” he explains. “No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here.” Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site “was not a village,” Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man’s first house was a house of worship: “First the temple, then the city,” he insists.

Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. “The problem with this discovery,” as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, “is that it is unique.” No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.

The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American’s notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. “In one minute—in one second—it was clear,” the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.

Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest “dig house” in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.

Disputes are normal at the site—the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. (“Three groups,” the archeologist says, exasperated. “Not two. Three!”) So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.

Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This “clear digression” followed by a sudden burial marks “the end of a very strange culture,” Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and “when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones.”

Author

Patrick Symmes

Evidence of Viking Outpost Found in Canada

Posted: October 21, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News
Tags: Ancient history, Canada

Sharpeners may be smoking guns in quest for New World’s second Viking site.

Archaeologists dig in the Tanfield Valley.

For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America’s east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors.

It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas.

While digging in the ruins of a centuries-old building on Baffin Island (map), far above the Arctic Circle, a team led by Sutherland, adjunct professor of archaeology at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a research fellow at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, found some very intriguing whetstones. Wear grooves in the blade-sharpening tools bear traces of copper alloys such as bronze—materials known to have been made by Viking metalsmiths but unknown among the Arctic’s native inhabitants.

Taken together with her earlier discoveries, Sutherland’s new findings further strengthen the case for a Viking camp on Baffin Island. “While her evidence was compelling before, I find it convincing now,” said James Tuck, professor emeritus of archaeology, also at Memorial University.

Archaeologists have long known that Viking seafarers set sail for the New World around A.D. 1000. A popular Icelandic saga tells of the exploits of Leif Eriksson, a Viking chieftain from Greenland who sailed westward to seek his fortune. According to the saga, Eriksson stopped long enough on Baffin Island to walk the coast—named Helluland, an Old Norse word meaning “stone-slab land”—before heading south to a place he called Vinland.

In the 1960s two Norwegian researchers, Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad, discovered and excavated the Viking base camp at L’Anse aux Meadows (map) on the northern tip of Newfoundland—the first confirmed Viking outpost in the Americas. Dated to between 989 and 1020, the camp boasted three Viking halls, as well as an assortment of huts for weaving, ironworking, and ship repair.

Viking Yarn

As reported in the November issue of National Geographic magazine, Sutherland first caught wind of another possible Viking way station in 1999, when she spotted two unusual pieces of cord that had been excavated from a Baffin Island site by an earlier archaeologist and stored at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec.

Sutherland noticed that the strands bore little resemblance to the animal sinew Arctic hunters twisted into cordage. The cords turned out to be expertly woven Viking yarn, identical in technique to yarn produced by Viking women living in Greenland in the 14th century.

The discovery prompted Sutherland to scour other museum collections for more Viking artifacts from Baffin Island and other sites. She found more pieces of Viking yarn and a small trove of previously overlooked Viking gear, from wooden tally sticks for recording trade transactions to dozens of Viking whetstones

The artifacts came from four sites, ranging from northern Baffin Island to northern Labrador, a distance of a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers). Indigenous Arctic hunters known as the Dorset people had camped at each of the sites, raising the possibility that they had made friendly contact with the Vikings.

Intrigued, Sutherland decided to reopen excavations at the most promising site, a place known as Tanfield Valley on the southeast coast of Baffin Island. In the 1960s U.S. archaeologist Moreau Maxwell had excavated parts of a stone-and-sod building there, describing it as “very difficult to interpret.” Sutherland suspected that Viking seafarers had built the structure.

Clues Etched in Bronze, Brass, and Iron

Since 2001 Sutherland’s team has been exploring Tanfield Valley and carefully excavating surviving parts of the mysterious ruins. They have discovered a wide range of evidence pointing to the presence of Viking seafarers: pelt fragments from Old World rats; a whalebone shovel similar to those used by Viking settlers in Greenland to cut sod; large stones that appear to have been cut and shaped by someone familiar with European stone masonry; and more Viking yarn and whetstones. And the stone ruins bear a striking resemblance to some Viking buildings in Greenland.

Still, some Arctic researchers remained skeptical. Most of the radiocarbon dates obtained by earlier archaeologists had suggested that Tanfield Valley was inhabited long before Vikings arrived in the New World. But as Sutherland points out, the complex site shows evidence of several occupations, and one of the radiocarbon dates indicates that the valley was occupied in the 14th century, when Viking settlers were farming along the coast of nearby Greenland.

In search of other clues to help solve the mystery, Sutherland turned to the Geological Survey of Canada. Using a technique known as energy dispersive spectroscopy, the team examined the wear grooves on more than 20 whetstones from Tanfield Valley and other sites. Sutherland and her colleagues detected microscopic streaks of bronze, brass, and smelted iron—clear evidence of European metallurgy, which she presented October 7 at a meeting of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology in St. John’s, Canada.

Norse-Native American Trade Network?

Sutherland speculates that parties of Viking seafarers travelled to the Canadian Arctic to search for valuable resources. In northern Europe at the time, medieval nobles prized walrus ivory, soft Arctic furs, and other northern luxuries—and Dorset hunters and trappers could readily stockpile such products. Helluland’s waters teemed with walruses, and its coasts abounded in Arctic foxes and other small fur-bearing animals. To barter for such goods, Viking traders likely offered bits of iron and pieces of wood that could be carved into figurines and other goods, Sutherland says.

If Sutherland is correct, the lines of evidence she has uncovered may point to a previously unknown chapter in New World history in which Viking seafarers and Native American hunters were partners together in a transatlantic trade network. “I think things were a lot more complex in this part of the world than most people assumed,” Sutherland said. James Tuck agreed. “It’s pretty convincing that there was a much larger Norse presence in the Canadian Arctic than any of us thought.”

Heather Pringle

National Geographic

What the Devil? Prince of Darkness Is Misunderstood, Says UCLA Professor

Posted: October 20, 2012 by phaedrap1 in Conspiracy, Occult, Spirituality
Tags: devil, Satan

This is a 2006 article.

He’s not the enemy of God, his name really isn’t Lucifer and he isn’t even evil. And as far as leading Adam and Eve astray, that was a bad rap stemming from a case of mistaken identity.

“There’s little or no evidence in the Bible for most of the characteristics and deeds commonly attributed to Satan,” insists a UCLA professor with four decades in what he describes as “the devil business.”

In “Satan: A Biography” (Cambridge Press), Henry Ansgar Kelly puts forth the most comprehensive case ever made for sympathy for the devil, arguing that the Bible actually provides a kinder, gentler version of the infamous antagonist than typically thought.

“A strict reading of the Bible shows Satan to be less like Darth Vader and more and more like an overzealous prosecutor,” said Kelly, a UCLA professor emeritus of English and the former director of the university’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. “He’s not so much the proud and angry figure who turns away from God as [he is] a Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover. Satan’s basic intention is to uncover wrongdoing and treachery, however overzealous and unscrupulous the means. But he’s still part of God’s administration.”

The view runs in opposition to the beliefs held by many Christians and others about key religious concepts like original sin and the nature of good and evil.

“If Satan isn’t really in opposition to God and he isn’t really evil, then that means the fight between good and evil isn’t an authentic part of Christianity,” Kelly said. “What I’m saying will be scandalous to some people.”

But what would you expect of someone’s whose 72nd birthday fell this year on June 6 (06-06-06) and who felt disappointed when nothing momentous occurred that day? Actually, Kelly is no stranger to bubble-bursting. After digging deep into the history of Valentine’s Day, he pronounced 20 years ago that he had not only uncovered the holiday’s origins but that it should be celebrated in May, not February.

Still, if Kelly could be considered scandalous, it’s not because he doesn’t know any better. Kelly started his academic career at a Jesuit seminary and was ordained in four of the seven holy orders on the way to the priesthood, including the order of exorcist.

“It was at that time that I started my campaign to rehabilitate the devil — to deliver him from evil, as it were,” Kelly said.

“Satan: A Biography” is the culmination of more than 40 years of research into the devil and religious and cultural traditions that have grown up around him. The book is Kelly’s third on the topic.

When it comes to the Old Testament, Kelly insists that Satan’s profile is considerably lower than commonly thought and significantly less menacing. By Kelly’s count, Satan only appears three times in the 45 books that make up the pre-Christian scriptures, the best known being in the Book of Job. On each occasion, Satan is still firmly part of what Kelly calls “God’s administration,” and his activities are done at the behest of “the Big Guy.” But his actions aren’t evil so much as consistent with the translation of “devil” and “satan,” which literally mean “adversary” in Greek and Hebrew, respectively.

“His job is to test people’s virtue and to report their failures,” Kelly said.

Perhaps most surprising is not the figure Satan cuts, but his notable absences in the Old Testament. In the Bible’s first reference to Lucifer, for instance, Satan doesn’t appear — even by implication, Kelly points out. “‘Lucifer’ is Latin for light-bearer,” he said, and was the name given to the morning star, or the planet Venus. Originally written in ancient Hebrew, the passage, on face value, refers to the tyrannical Babylonian king who boasts of his conquests but who is “about to be cast to the ground.” Kelly insists there’s nothing more to the reference than an apt use of metaphor, but the third-century Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria argued in his best known work, “On First Things,” that the reference applied to Satan.

“Origen says, ‘Lucifer is said to have fallen from Heaven,'” Kelly explained. “‘This can’t refer to a human being, so it must refer to Satan.’ Subsequent church fathers found this reasoning persuasive, and so did everyone who followed them.”

Ironically, the only mentions of Lucifer in the New Testament — and there are three of them — refer to Jesus, Kelly said. “Jesus is called ‘Lucifer’ or ‘the morning star’ because he represents a new beginning.”

Another prominent omission in the Old Testament, Kelly said, can be found in Genesis. “Nobody in the Old Testament — or, for that matter, in the New Testament either — ever identifies the serpent of Eden with Satan,” Kelly said. “The serpent is just the smartest animal, and he’s motivated by envy after being jilted by Adam for Eve.”

Kelly traces the correlation of Satan and the serpent to not long after the New Testament was completed. In his “Dialogue With Trypho,” the second-century Christian martyr Justin of Samaria first argued that Satan appeared as a serpent to tempt Adam and Eve to disobey God, according to Kelly.

“This is what I call ‘The New Biography,'” Kelly said. “It starts with Justin Martyr, who implicates Satan in the fall of Adam and Eve. By causing Adam and Eve to fall, Satan caused his own fall.

“The second step in this new and phony biography comes with Origen, who said, ‘No, Satan’s first sin was not deceiving Adam and Eve or refusing to go along with God’s plan of creating Adam in his own image,'” Kelly said. “‘It was to sin out of pride like the morning star, like Lucifer in the passage from Isaiah.’ Turning Satan into God’s enemy is a two-step process.”

Meanwhile, in passages in Luke, Matthew, Corinthians and elsewhere in the New Testament, Satan continues to act as a tester, enforcer and prosecutor but not as God’s enemy, Kelly points out.

“Everyone else has said that by the time Satan gets to the New Testament, he is evil, he’s an enemy of God, but that’s not so,” Kelly said. “The whole biblical picture of Satan is that of a bad cop to Yaweh’s good cop in the Old Testament, and to Jesus’ good cop in the New Testament. Throughout, Satan is someone who works for God.”

A scene in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation is often cited today as evidence that Satan was the deceiver of Adam and Eve, but the interpretation stems from a fundamental misunderstanding, Kelly argues.

“‘That ancient serpent’ refers to the giant sea serpent Leviathan, not the garden snake of Eden,” he said. “In Revelation, Leviathan has morphed into a dragon, or large serpent, with the seven heads and 10 horns, which is still further removed from the seductive serpent who deceived Eve.”

In addition to linking Satan with the Garden of Eden, the passage from Revelation also has been used to prove that Satan fell early on in the Bible, but Kelly insists that is not accurate.

“Satan’s ouster from heaven in Revelation is explained as taking place in the future,” Kelly said. “In Revelation 12:10, a voice says that ‘the accuser of our brothers is cast out, overcome by the testimony of martyrs.’ Since there were no martyrs until Christ died, that has to be in the future.”

Similarly, a passage in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus reports having seen “Satan fall like lightning,” has been misinterpreted, according to Kelly. “Jesus saw the fall in the past because he had the vision the day before he describes it to the apostles,” Kelly said. “But Jesus is referring to a future fall [of Satan] from his position as God’s attorney general.”

This is not to say, however, that Kelly contends that Satan is likeable.

“Jesus doesn’t like him, and Paul doesn’t like him,” Kelly explained. “He represents the old guard in the heavenly bureaucracy, and everyone longs for him to be disbarred as the chief accuser of humankind.”

Source: UCLA

This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Ancient Tomb Found Near Sweden’s ‘Stonehenge’

Posted: October 20, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
Tags: Ancient history, Archeology

The remains of a 5,500-year-old tomb near Ale’s Stones, a megalithic monument where, according to myth, the legendary King Ale lies buried, has been discovered by Swedish archaeologists. The discovery is the product of a geophysical investigation of the area carried out in 2006.

Intrigued by a circular structure measuring about 165 feet in diameter with a rectangular feature in its center, archaeologists of the Swedish National Heritage Board decided to dig a trial trench.

“The outer circle was difficult to prove, but we did find vague traces at the spot, possibly imprints of smaller stones,” archaeologist Bengt Söderberg told Discovery News.

In the middle, the researchers found “several components” that are evidence of a dolmen, a megalithic portal tomb usually made of two vertical stones supporting a large flat horizontal stone on top.

“The components consisted of imprints of large stones belonging to a central grave chamber, which was surrounded by large stones and a brim of smaller stones,” Söderberg said.

Oriented north-south, the 65- by 26-foot dolmen dated to the Swedish early Neolithic period, about 5,500 years ago.

“We also found a blade, a scraper and some flakes of flint. This is not unusual when it comes to this type of graves,” Söderberg said.

According to archaeologist Annika Knarrström of the Swedish National Heritage Board, the dolmen was likely “the grave of some local magnate.”

“However, we have little data to really tell who was buried there,” Knarrström said.

The newly discovered dolmen lay just 130 feet from the spectacular Ales Stenar (“Ale’s Stones”), also known as “Sweden’s Stonehenge.”

Located near the fishing village of Kåseberga, the structure consists of 59 stones, each weighing up to 4,000 pounds, that appear to form a 220-foot-long ship overlooking the Baltic Sea.

Although some researchers argue that the stone formation was assembled 2,500 years ago, during the Scandinavian Bronze Age, most scholars agree that it dates back some 1,400 years, toward the end of the Nordic Iron Age.

Like Stonehenge, the enigmatic stone ship has raised many theories about its purpose. According to local folklore, it was the final resting place of a legendary leader known as King Ale. Other theories suggest it was an ancient astronomical calendar, a cemetery, or a monument to the Vikings. The newly discovered dolmen might provide new clues on the pre-history of the monument.

“Our findings confirm what we have long suspected: Some stone-built monuments might have stood on the ridge long before the Ale’s Stones,” Knarrström said.

The older stones, as well as those making the dolmen, were most likely reused to build the stone ship.

“This discovery also confirms our belief that the site must have attracted people in all times,” Knarrström said.

Photos: Top: Archaeologists clearing part of the trench with Ale’s Stones in the background. Credit: Annika Knarrström, Swedish National Heritage Board.

Middle: Detail from the west brim of the dolmen. Archaeologist Annika Knarrström puts a mark on one of the many small stones in the brim, after digitally measuring its position. Credit: Bengt Söderberg, Swedish National Heritage Board.

Bottom: Ale’s Stones, also known as “Sweden’s Stonehenge,” consists of 59 stones that appear to form a 220-foot-long ship overlooking the Baltic Sea near the fishing village of Kåseberga. Credit: Anders LageråsI/ Wikimedia Common

Discovery News

Cat leads owner to discovery of ancient Roman ruins

Posted: October 20, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News
Tags: Archeology, Ruins

A cat led its owner into an ancient Roman tomb that may be 2,000 years old. (AFP/Reuters)Mirko Curti was chasing his cat through the streets of his village on Tuesday night when the cat inadvertently discovered a set of ancient Roman ruins.

“The cat managed to get into a grotto and we followed the sound of its meowing,” Curti told the Guardian.

When he caught up to the animal, it had crawled into an opening in the side of a cliff. Inside the opening, Curti stumbled upon a 2,000-year-old tomb “piled with bones” and ancient Roman urns.

The tomb was discovered just outside a residential area in the Roman city of Via di Pietralata.

Archeologists who were called to the site have speculated that it dates back to sometime between the 1st century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D.

Curti described the discovery as “the most incredible experience” of his life.

The archeologists said that recent rains in the area were likely responsible for exposing the tomb and noted that several other similar discoveries have been made in the area in recent years.

Eric Pfeiffer — Yahoo News

No longer the most boring planet: The ‘astonishing’ close-up of Uranus that reveals torrid weather systems and 560mph winds

Posted: October 20, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
Tags: Space

Images are most detailed ever taken of the planet
Planet was initially described as ‘notoriously bland’ by researchers
Scientists now believe weather patterns are constantly changing on the surface

In 1986, when Voyager swept past Uranus, the probe’s portraits of the planet were ‘notoriously bland,’ disappointing scientists, yielding few new details of the planet and its atmosphere, and giving it a reputation as a bore of the solar system.

However, researchers today revealed new images that reveal the planet is actually home to torrid and bizarre weather patterns unseen on any other planet.

Researchers used a new technique at the Keck Observatory to reveal in incredible detail the bizarre weather of the seventh planet from the sun.

The sharpest, most detailed picture of Uranus. The north pole of Uranus (to the right in the picture) is characterized by a swarm of storm-like features

THE ‘NOTORIOUSLY BLAND’ PLANET

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, and is named after the ancient Greek deity of the sky Uranus (Ancient Greek: Οὐρανός), the father of Cronus (Saturn) and grandfather of Zeus (Jupiter).

Though it is visible to the naked eye like the five classical planets, it was never recognized as a planet by ancient observers because of its dimness and slow orbit.

It is similar in composition to Neptune, and both are of different chemical composition than the larger gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.

Astronomers sometimes place them in a separate category called ‘ice giants’.

Like the other giant planets, Uranus has a ring system, a magnetosphere, and numerous moons – but is unique because it is tilted sideways.

The images reveal the planet’s deep blue-green atmosphere is thick with hydrogen, helium and methane, Uranus’s primary condensable gas.

Winds blow mainly east to west at speeds up to 560 miles per hour, in spite of the small amounts of energy available to drive them.

Researchers say the atmosphere is almost equal to Neptune’s as the coldest in our solar system with cloud-top temperatures in the minus 360-degree Fahrenheit range, cold enough to freeze methane.

‘My first reaction to these images was ‘wow’ and then my second reaction was WOW,’ says AURA’s Heidi Hammel, a co-investigator on the new observations and an expert on the atmospheres of the solar system’s outer planets.

‘These images reveal an astonishing amount of complexity in Uranus’s atmosphere.

‘We knew the planet was active, but until now much of the activity was masked by noise in our data.’

Large weather systems, which are probably much less violent than the storms we know on Earth, behave in bizarre ways on Uranus, said Larry Sromovsky, a University of Wisconsin-Madison planetary scientist who led the new study using the Keck II telescope.

The scalloped band of clouds near the planet’s equator may indicate atmospheric instability or wind shear: ‘This is new and we don’t fully understand what it means.

‘We haven’t seen it anywhere else on Uranus,’ said Sromovsky.

‘Some of these weather systems stay at fixed latitudes and undergo large variations in activity.

‘Others are seen to drift toward the planet’s equator while undergoing great changes in size and shape.

‘Better measures of the wind fields that surround these massive weather systems are the key to unraveling their mysteries.’

The team believe the primary driving mechanism for the strange weather must be solar energy because there is no detectable internal energy source.

‘But the sun is 900 times weaker there than on Earth because it is 30 times further from the sun, so you don’t have the same intensity of solar energy driving the system,’ said Sromovsky.

‘Thus the atmosphere of Uranus must operate as a very efficient machine with very little dissipation.

Previous images of Uranus, such as this one taken in January 2004, failed to spot the weather conditions.

‘Yet the weather variations we see seem to defy that requirement.’

The new Keck II pictures of the planet, according to Sromovsky, are the ‘most richly detailed views of Uranus yet obtained by any instrument on any observatory.

‘No other telescope could come close to producing this result.’

The images were released in Renoat a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences.

The team used used Keck II, located on the summit of Hawaii’s 14,000-foot extinct volcano Mauna Kea, to capture a series of images that, when combined, help increase the signal to noise ratio and thus tease out weather features that are otherwise obscured.

In two nights of observing under superb conditions, Sromovsky’s group was able to obtain exposures of the planet that provide a clear view of the planet’s cloudy features, including several new to science.

The group used two different filters in an effort to characterize cloud features at different altitudes.

Two telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii which were used to capture the new images

‘The main objective was to find a larger number of cloud features by detecting those that were previously too subtle to be seen, so we could better define atmospheric motions,’

New features found by the Wisconsin group include a scalloped band of clouds just south of Uranus’s equator and a swarm of small convective features in the north polar regions of the planet, features that have never been seen in the southern polar regions.

‘This is a very asymmetric situation: There is certainly something different going on in those two polar regions.’

One possible explanation, is that methane is pushed north by an atmospheric conveyor belt toward the pole where it wells up to form the convective features observed by Sromovsky’s group.

‘Perhaps we will also see a vortex at Uranus’s pole when it comes into view,’ the researchers said.

The phenomena may be seasonal, Sromovsky notes, but the group has so far been unable to establish a clear seasonal trend in the winds of Uranus.

‘Uranus is changing,’ he says. ‘We don’t expect things at the north pole to stay the way they are now.

By Mark Prigg

UK experiences ‘weirdest’ weather

Posted: October 19, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News
Tags: UK, Weather

Rain showers in Portsmouth

The UK has experienced its “weirdest” weather on record in the past few months, scientists say. The driest spring for over a century gave way to the wettest recorded April to June in a dramatic turnaround never documented before.

The scientists said there was no evidence that the weather changes were a result of Man-made climate change. But experts from three bodies warned the UK must plan for periodic swings of drought conditions and flooding. The warning came from the Environment Agency, Met Office and Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) at a joint briefing in London. Terry Marsh, from the CEH, said there was no close modern precedent for the extraordinary switch in river flows. The nearest comparison was 1903 but this year was, he said, truly remarkable. What was also remarkable – and also fortunate – was that more people did not suffer from flooding. Indeed, one major message of the briefing was that society has been steadily increasing its resilience to floods. Paul Mustow, head of flood management at the Environment Agency, told BBC News that 4,500 properties had been flooded this year. “But if you look back to 2007 when over 55,000 properties were flooded, we were relatively lucky – if lucky is the right word – for the impacts we saw this summer,” he said. “The rainfall patterns affected different areas – and also there were periods of respite between the rain which lessened the impact.” Fast moving He said 53,000 properties would have been flooded this year without flood defences. In total, he said, 190,000 properties had received flood protection in recent years. Mr Mustow claimed that flood defences repaid their investment by a factor of 8-1 but admitted that continuing to invest would be a “challenge”, after government cuts to planned projects. But he said that new streams of joint funding from local authorities and private developers had allowed 60 schemes to happen that otherwise would not have gone ahead. He said: “We have to get our heads round the possibility now that we’re going to have to move very quickly from drought to flood – with river levels very high and very low over a short period of time. “We used to say we had a traditional flood season in winter – now often it’s in summer. This is an integrated problem – there’s no one thing that’s going to solve it. The situation is changing all the time.” But scientists present from the Met Office and CEH said not much could be read into the weird weather. Terry Marsh from CEH said: “Rainfall charts show no compelling long-term trend – the annual precipitation table shows lots of variability.” Sarah Jackson from the Met Office confirmed that it did not discern any pattern that suggested Man-made climate change was at play in UK rainfall – although if temperatures rise as projected in future, that would lead to warmer air being able to carry more moisture to fall as rain. She said that this year’s conditions were partly caused by a move to a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation which would be likely to lead to more frequent cold, drier winters – like the 1960s – and also wetter summers for 10-20 years. “Longer term we will see a trend to drier summers but superimposed on that we will always see natural variability,” she said. Whatever happens with the weather, the Environment Agency expects that more and more people will be protected from floods and droughts thanks to water sharing between farmers, water transfer between water companies, and better management of leaks and demand. But Mr Mustow admitted that much more needed to be done to ensure that farmers did not increase flood risk with land drainage schemes and that developers and builders ensured that new developments allowed water to drain into the soil rather than flushing into the sewers.

BBC

By Roger Harrabin

Environmental Analyst

Spectacular Meteor Sparks Fireball Over California

Posted: October 18, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
Tags: meteor, Space

Wes Jones caught the fireball over Belmont, CA, at 7:44 PM PDT, Oct. 17, 2012, using the camera at http://astrobytes.net/AllSky3.html.
CREDIT: Wes Jones

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A spectacular meteor lit up the sky over California Wednesday night (Oct. 17) just days before a highly anticipated meteor shower hits its peak this weekend.

The meteor put on a dazzling display over Northern California when it streaked across the sky at 7:44 p.m. PDT (0244 GMT), according to scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field. The subsequent fireball and sonic boom triggered a flood of reports by witnesses to local news stations and authorities, with accounts coming in from across San Francisco and the Bay Area, according to ABC’s KGO-TV news station.

“At 7:44:44 pm PDT this evening, a bright fireball was seen in the San Francisco Bay Area,” scientists with Ames’ Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) wrote in an update. The project is led by meteor expert Peter Jenniskens of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. “We are checking our CAMS camera results to see if we have a track. Biggest question at the moment is whether this ended over land or ocean.”

The celestial fireworks came just days ahead of this weekend’s Orionid meteor shower peak, which occurs overnight on Oct. 20 and 21. The meteor shower is created by bits of the famed Halley’s Comet as they hit Earth’s atmosphere and flare up in fiery display.

The Orionids are remnants of Halley’s Comet scattered along its orbit, one of the finest meteor showers in the year. The meteors appear to radiate from a point just between Orion’s club and the Gemini twins’ feet, but may be seen anywhere in the sky.
CREDIT: Starry Night Software

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NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., has said the 2012 Orionid meteor shower should create dozens of meteors an hour, weather permitting. Because the moon is just a few days past its dark, “new” phase, it won’t interfere with the weekend “shooting stars” show.

The Orionid meteor shower is one of two meteor displays created by Halley’s Comet, which makes one orbit around the sun every 76 years. The other is the Eta Aquarid meteor shower, which occurs in May. The two meteor showers are created when the Earth passes through streams of dust cast off from Halley’s Comet.

Editor’s Note: If you snapped a photo of Wednesday night’s dazzling meteor and would like to share it with SPACE.com, please send images, comments and your location info to managing Editor Tariq Malik at: tmalik@space.com.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik and SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Huge Moon-Forming Collision Theory Gets New Spin

Posted: October 18, 2012 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
Tags: moon, Space

This artist’s conception of a planetary smashup whose debris was spotted by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope three years ago gives an impression of the carnage that would have been wrecked when a similar impact created Earth’s Moon. A team at Washington University in St. Louis has uncovered evidence of this impact that scientists have been trying to find for more than 30 years. Image released Oct. 17, 2012.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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The moon did indeed coalesce out of tiny bits of pulverized planet blasted into space by a catastrophic collision 4.5 billion years ago, two new studies suggest.

The new research potentially plugs a big hole in the giant impact theory, long the leading explanation for the moon’s formation. Previous versions of the theory held that the moon formed primarily from pieces of a mysterious Mars-size body that slammed into a proto-Earth — but that presented a problem, because scientists know that the moon and Earth are made of the same stuff.

The two studies both explain how Earth and the moon came to be geochemical twins. However, they offer differing versions of the enormous smashup that apparently created Earth’s natural satellite, giving scientists plenty to chew on going forward.

A fast-spinning Earth

One of the studies — by Matija Cuk of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and Sarah Stewart of Harvard — suggests the answer lies in Earth’s rotation rate.

If Earth’s day had been just two to three hours long at the time of the impact, Cuk and Stewart calculate, the planet could well have thrown off enough material to form the moon (which is 1.2 percent as massive as Earth).

This rotational speed might sound incredible, and indeed it’s close to the threshold beyond which the planet would begin to fly apart. But researchers say the early solar system was a “shooting gallery” marked by many large impacts, which could have spun planets up to enormous speeds.

Cuk and Stewart’s study, which appears online today (Oct. 17) in the journal Science, also provides a mechanism by which Earth’s rotation rate could have slowed over time.

After the collision, a gravitational interaction between Earth’s orbit around the sun and the moon’s orbit around Earth could have put the brakes on the planet’s super-spin, eventually producing a 24-hour day, the scientists determined.

Simulation of an off-center, low-velocity collision between two protoplanets containing 45 percent and 55 percent of Earth’s mass. Color scales with particle temperature in kelvin, with blue-to-red indicating temperatures from 2,000 K to in excess of 6,440 K. After the initial impact, the protoplanets re-collide, merge and form a rapidly spinning Earth-mass planet surrounded by an iron-poor protolunar disk containing about 3 lunar masses. The composition of the disk and the final planet’s mantle differ by less than 1 percent.
CREDIT: Southwest Research Institute

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A bigger impactor

Cuk and Stewart’s version of the cosmic smashup posits a roughly Mars-size impactor — a body with 5 percent to 10 percent the mass of Earth. However, the other new study — being published in the same issue of Science today — envisions a collision between two planets in the same weight class.

“In this impact, the impactor and the target each contain about 50 percent of the [present] Earth’s mass,” Robin Canup, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., told SPACE.com via email.

“This type of impact has not been advocated for the Earth-moon before (although a similar type of collision has been invoked for the origin of the Pluto-Charon pair),” Canup added, referring to the largest moon of Pluto.

In her computer models, the symmetry of this collision caused the resulting moon-forming debris disk to be nearly identical in composition to the mantle of the newly enlarged Earth.

Canup’s models further predict that such an impact would significantly increase Earth’s rotational speed. But that may not be a big issue, since Cuk and Stewart’s work explains how Earth’s spin could have slowed over time.

A third study, published today in the journal Nature, determined that huge amounts of water boiled away during the moon’s birth. The finding, made by examining moon rocks brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts, further bolsters the broad outlines of the giant impact theory.

Though the gigantic smashup occurred 4.5 billion years ago, scientists may one day be able to piece together in detail how it all went down, Canup said.

“Models of terrestrial planet assembly should be able to evaluate the relative probability of, e.g., the collision I advocate vs. the one proposed by Cuk and Stewart,” she said.

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer

Date: 17 October 2012