Antarctic water world uncovered

[alkemical]

Antarctic water world uncovered

Giant "blisters" containing water that rapidly expand and contract have been mapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

Fed by a complex network of rivers, the subglacial reservoirs force the overlying ice to rise and fall.

By tracking these changes with Nasa's Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) scientists were able to map the extent of the subglacial plumbing.

The results, published in the journal Science, show that some areas fell by up to 9m (30ft) over just two years.

"We didn't realise that the water under these ice streams was moving in such large quantities, and on such short time scales," said Dr Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, and one of the authors of the paper.

"We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months."

The results are important for understanding how the Antarctic Ice sheet, which contains nearly 90% of the world's ice, may respond to global warming and how much it may contribute to sea level rise.

(con't on site)

[alkemical]

Piri Reis map


Antarctica
Scholars believe the resemblance of the coastline to the actual coast of Antarctica to be tenuous. For centuries before the actual discovery of Antarctica, cartographers had been depicting a massive southern landmass on global maps based on the theoretical assumption by Europeans that one must exist, if only to balance the landmass of the North. The landmass in question on the Piri Reis map would thus be simply a continuation of this tradition, with its debatable resemblance to the actual coastline being coincidental. It was widely believed that South America and, once its northern coastline was discovered, Australia, must be joined to this land mass, which was thought to be very much bigger than the real Antarctica. This theoretical southern continent, the Great Southern Land or Terra Australis Incognita (literally Unknown Southern Land), in various configurations, was usually shown on maps until the eighteenth century.

An alternate view is that the "Antarctic" coast is simply the eastern coastline of South America skewed to align east-west due to the inaccurate measurement of longtitude or to fit it on the page 1. Close examination of the coastline supports this view, revealing depictions of the basins at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan and the Falkland Islands. 2 The annotations on the map itself, stating that this region is hot and inhabited by large snakes do not fit with the likely climate and fauna in Antarctica in the 1500s. Similarly the map states that "spring comes early" to the islands off the coast, which is true of the Falkland Islands but not of any islands close to the Antarctic mainland.

Hapgood suggests that the Antarctic section of the map was copied at an incorrect scale to the rest of the map and resulted in the distortion and enlargement of the continent on several ancient maps. This would explain why there is no waterway between South America and Antarctica. He suggests several points of continuity between the Piri Reis Map and modern maps of the continent below the ice caps.

Since the Antarctic continent was not officially sighted until 1820 and its full coastline was not known until much later, this claim, if true, requires major revisions to the history of exploration.





At the mountains of madness

Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core (1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a hollow earth. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," writes critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques; in both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's shoggoths.[7]

Other possible sources include A. Merritt's "The People of the Pit", whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After", a story about dinosaurs hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition Weird Tales. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared the story to be a "rotten", "cheap", and "puerile" version of an idea he had come up with years earlier, and Joshi suggests it may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of earth's history."[8]

The long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Some details of the story may have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 novel of Arctic exploration, The Purple Cloud, which was republished in 1930.[9]

Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, is a clear precedent for At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.[10]


The Hollow Earth Explorer has a New Champion
Advanced Planetary Explorations, LLC staff writer

Brooks A. Agnew, PhD has been elected to lead the North Pole Inner Earth Expedition (NPIEE). He is a scientist and an engineer with more than 20 years of experience as a launch manager. The religious and scientific idea that the Earth is hollow has been around for more than 600 years, carved into the celing of places like Rosslyn Chapel and reaching serious notoriety with the likes of Edmond Halley in 1692.

Now, after more than half a millennia, the first civilian expedition is being mounted to reach what the best historians in the world have determined to be the most likely location for an opening through the crust into the interior of the Earth. There have been challenges to this team already, not the least of which was the untimely and unexpected passing of the former expedition leader, Steve Currey.

[Spider]

Junk Science everyone knows it is because the Dinos farted ........

[cbs1177]

Originally Posted by §Pide®

Junk Science everyone knows it is because the Dinos farted ........

I thought dinos gave us oil so we could destroy ourselves.

[BroncoBuff]

Antarctica is the lost continent of Atlantis! A long time ago, it was further north, and a highly advanced civilization lived there. It's all in this book:

[Rohirrim]

So the next thing to wonder about: If there are giant pockets of water under the Antarctic, and they are held in place by massive glaciers, what happens if one of those glaciers cracks open, releasing a massive pocket of water, and that water tumbles into the sea? I suppose you're talking about a pretty healthy tsunami?

[alkemical]

Location
Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W”. The sound was given the name “Bloop”.

Charles Stross's novella 'A Colder War' implicitly locates R'lyeh in the Baltic Sea: it describes Cthulhu as being "scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor" [1]. This is presumably because a Baltic location was more convenient for Stross's plot.



Bloop


[edit] Analysis
The sound, traced to somewhere around 50° S 100° W (South American southwest coast), was detected repeatedly by the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array, which uses U.S. Navy equipment originally designed to detect Soviet submarines. According to the NOAA description, it "rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km." Though it matches the audio profile of a living creature, there is no known animal that could have produced the sound. If it is an animal, it would have to be, reportedly, much larger than even a Blue Whale, according to scientists who have studied the phenomenon.

The site of the Bloop is remarkably close to the site of the fictional city of R'lyeh from H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Call of Cthulhu, where an ancient undersea monster (Cthulhu) lies sleeping. Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 123°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean, with the bloop also being targeted somewhere in that range [1].

[alkemical]

The wave that destroyed Atlantis

By Harvey Lilley
BBC Timewatch


The legend of Atlantis, the country that disappeared under the sea, may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe's earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami.


Until about 3,500 years ago, a spectacular ancient civilisation was flourishing in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The ancient Minoans were building palaces, paved streets and sewers, while most Europeans were still living in primitive huts.

But around 1500BC the people who spawned the myths of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth abruptly disappeared. Now the mystery of their cataclysmic end may finally have been solved.


A group of scientists have uncovered new evidence that the island of Crete was hit by a massive tsunami at the same time that Minoan culture disappeared.
"The geo-archaeological deposits contain a number of distinct tsunami signatures," says Dutch-born geologist Professor Hendrik Bruins of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

"Minoan building material, pottery and cups along with food residue such as isolated animal bones were mixed up with rounded beach pebbles and sea shells and microscopic marine fauna.


"The latter can only have been scooped up from the sea-bed by one mechanism - a powerful tsunami, dumping all these materials together in a destructive swoop," says Professor Bruins.
The deposits are up to seven metres above sea level, well above the normal reach of storm waves.

"An event of ferocious force hit the coast of Crete and this wasn't just a Mediterranean storm," says Professor Bruins.

Big wave

The Minoans were sailors and traders. Most of their towns were along the coast, making them especially vulnerable to the effects of a tsunami.

One of their largest settlements was at Palaikastro on the eastern edge of the island, one of the sites where Canadian archaeologist Sandy MacGillivray has been excavating for 25 years.

Here, he has found other tell-tale signs such as buildings where the walls facing the sea are missing but side walls which could have survived a giant wave are left intact.

"All of a sudden a lot of the deposits began making sense to us," says MacGillivary.

"Even though the town of Palaikastro is a port it stretched hundreds of metres into the hinterland and is, in places, at least 15 metres above sea level. This was a big wave."


But if this evidence is so clear why has it not been discovered before now?
Tsunami expert Costas Synolakis, from the University of Southern California, says that the study of ancient tsunamis is in its infancy and people have not, until now, really known what to look for.

Many scientists are still of the view that these waves only blasted material away and did not leave much behind in the way of deposits.

But observation of the Asian tsunami of 2004 changed all that.

"If you remember the video footage," says Costas, "some of it showed tonnes of debris being carried along by the wave and much of it was deposited inland."

Volcanic eruption

Costas Synolakis has come to the conclusion that the wave would have been as powerful as the one that devastated the coastlines of Thailand and Sri Lanka on Boxing day 2004 leading to the loss of over 250,000 lives.

After decades studying the Minoans, MacGillivray is struck by the scale of the destruction.

"The Minoans are so confident in their navy that they're living in unprotected cities all along the coastline. Now, you go to Bande Aceh [in Indonesia] and you find that the mortality rate is 80%. If we're looking at a similar mortality rate, that's the end of the Minoans."

But what caused the tsunami? The scientists have obtained radiocarbon dates for the deposits that show the tsunami could have hit the coast at exactly the same time as an eruption of the Santorini volcano, 70 km north of Crete, in the middle of the second millennium BC.


Recent scientific work has established that the Santorini eruption was up to 10 times more powerful than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. It caused massive climatic disruption and the blast was heard over 3000 miles away.
Costas Synolakis thinks that the collapse of Santorini's giant volcanic cone into the sea during the eruption was the mechanism that generated a wave large enough to destroy the Minoan coastal towns.

It is not clear if the tsunami could have reached inland to the Minoan capital at Knossos, but the fallout from the volcano would have carried other consequences - massive ash falls and crop failure. With their ports, trading fleet and navy destroyed, the Minoans would never have fully recovered.

The myth of Atlantis, the city state that was lost beneath the sea, was first mentioned by Plato over 2000 years ago.

It has had a hold on the popular imagination for centuries.

Perhaps we now have an explanation of its origin - a folk memory of a real ancient civilisation swallowed by the sea.

Timewatch: The wave that destroyed Atlantis is on BBC Two at 2100BST on Friday 20 April, 2007.

[alkemical]

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com....php?id=128996

With jagged mountain ranges, plunging valleys and majestic lakes, Antarctica has scenery to rival any beauty spot in the world – except that no-one has ever seen the continent's hidden landscape. For more than 25 million years, the fifth biggest continent on the planet has remained locked under a massive ice sheet that has concealed its secrets through out the whole of human history. Entire mountain ranges, volcanoes, rivers, waterfalls and even new forms of life are waiting to be discovered beneath the ice.Now scientists are hoping to reveal the secrets of this hidden Antarctic landscape for the first time with one of the biggest exploration projects undertaken in more than three decades.Using new technology they aim to peer through the ice, which can be up to three miles thick in places, to create the most complete picture of what the ground beneath is really like.Robotic submarines will also be sent down through shafts drilled into the ice to search the depths of lakes that have been found under the ice sheets for new forms of bacteria and other small organisms that scientists believe could be thriving there.Their research promises to reveal more about this lost continent than has ever been known before."We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the land beneath the ice in Antarctica," explained Professor Martin Siegert, one of the leaders behind the exploration projects and head of geosciences at the University of Edinburgh.

"People often forget that there is land beneath all the ice, and it is of fundamental value to us in understanding how the ice flows and the impact it will have on sea level rise."Only the occasional tip of a rocky mountain peeking through the frozen, inhospitable wastes hints at the mysterious landscape below.Antarctica has not always been a frozen land, and around 40 million years ago it had a climate that was warmer than the UK is currently.

[alkemical]

http://www.livescience.com/environme...mountains.html

Huge Mountain Range Should Not Be There

An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually "peel away" more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks.

One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it "shouldn't be there" at all.

[alkemical]

http://www.stealthisknowledge.com/de...-antarctica-2/

Disturbing news has been leaking out from the giant continent at the bottom of the world. Some scientists manning lonely outposts under the drifting and shifting aurora are nearly paralyzed with fear. Their clipped reports are being reviewed by astonished superiors back in the home countries.

Russian researchers posted near the giant South Pole sub-glacial Lake Vostok have reported eerie anomalies and incidents over the past few years that sometimes seem to border on the frayed edge of creeping madness.

Artificial structure found under two miles of ice

During April 2001 one of the world’s great secrets was revealed: an ancient structure or apparatus that lay encased miles under the hard Antarctic ice was detected by a roving spy satellite. The US military immediately moved to quash the reports and the mainstream news media dutifully complied.

Despite the news blackout, reports still surfaced that a secretive excavation project had commenced on the heels of the discovery. Some European countries formally protested the excavation by the US military.

“If it’s something the US military has constructed down there, then they’re violating the international Antarctic Treaty,” said an aide to Nicole Fontaine, at the time he was the European Parliament’s French president. “If not, then it’s something that’s at least 12,000 years old, which is how long ice has covered Antarctica. That would make it the oldest man-made structure on the planet. The Pentagon should heed the calls of Congress and release whatever it’s hiding.”

The federal government and the Pentagon ignored the calls.

Soon after, some military observers noted that robotic devices were being shipped to the South Pole and speculation erupted about the belief by some that the US Air Force had transported their mammoth nuclear-powered tunel boring machine, the Subterrene, on a C5-A to a secret Antarctic base.

The Subterrene, a cylindrical vessel that is said manned with a crew of four to six, is capable of subterranean travel and has undergone tests in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. Designed to bore through hard rock strata, drilling into the ice would be like a laser cutting through a marshmallow.



After a several minutes, they decided to retrieve the balloon. Despite some difficulty with the winch they succeeded in bringing the balloon back to earth and checked the instruments. McLein stated that everyone was stunned by the readout on the chronometer. It displayed a date decades in the past: January 27, 1965.

McLein claimed the experiment was repeated several times with the same result.

Later, she said, the entire episode was reported to military intelligence and passed on to the White House. Presumably the strange vortex phenomenon–a highly magnetic tunnel to the past–was code named The Time Gate by military intelligence.

Magnetic time tunnel to the past?

As the phenomenon was generated in the same general vicinity as the discovery of the giant apparatus deep under the ice, it’s thought the two may be related.

If indeed a magnetic time vortex is appearing and disappearing over Antarctica–and if the phenomena is not natural, but generated by some unknown technology deep under the icecap–it may reveal the physics of time and could potentially allow control of the past, and by implication the future.

If true, it’s no wonder the military is so intensely interested and so closed-mouthed about it.
…

Time vortex erupts

As one bizarre event followed another, a research team of US and UK scientists accidentally came across a mind-numbing discovery. While working on a joint weather research project, the team witnessed the creation of a spinning vortex of time.

US physicist Mariann McLein allegedly testified that she and her colleagues became aware of a “spinning gray fog” in the sky over their heads. They initially dismissed the phenomenon as merely part of a random polar storm.

The spiraling vortex, however, did not disperse. Stranger still, despite gusts of wind and briskly moving clouds overhead, the weird spinning gray fog remained stationary.

[underrated29]

whats the point of all of this?

[alkemical]

[alkemical]

http://www.universetoday.com/69836/a...f-cosmic-rays/

Antarctic Observatory Finds Weird Pattern of Cosmic Rays

[alkemical]

http://www.disinfo.com/2012/01/antar...ld-discovered/



Antarctic ‘Lost World’ Discovered

Posted by majestic on January 4, 2012
New type of octopus found in Antarctic. Photo: Oxford Univ.

New type of octopus found in Antarctic. Photo: Oxford Univ.

Some of these creatures are pretty sci-fi! From Fox News:

A “lost world” of sea creatures was discovered near Antarctica, British scientists announced Wednesday.

New types of yeti crab, starfish and octopus were among the species found 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) below the surface of the sea, Oxford University researchers said.

The new life-forms were able to exist by feeding off chemicals from black smoke emitted by volcanic hot vents beneath the Southern Ocean, where temperatures can reach 720 degrees Fahrenheit (382 degrees Celsius).

“Hydrothermal vents are home to animals found nowhere else on the planet that get their energy not from the Sun but from breaking down chemicals, such as hydrogen sulphide,” according to Oxford University professor Alex Rogers, who led the research…

[continues at Fox News]