Perhaps the most intriguing crop circle yet made was in England near Barbury
Castle during 1991. The Barbury Castle crop circle also encoded Euclidean theorems
discovered by Gerald Hawkins, author of Stonehenge Decoded. Mysteriously,
the crop circle's design was a copy of a diagram from the 1687 text by a Benedictine
Monk, Practica.
Delphian Tripod from
Montfaucon’s Antiquities
The central triangle in the Barbury Castle crop circle aligned with sites identified by the
Kennewick and Herkimer crop circles points out the most seismically active areas and
highest peaks on the planet:
1) The Juan de Fuca Plate in the north Pacific - Kennewick
2) St. Lawrence Strait in the north Atlatic - Herkimer
3) Coco's Plate in the equatorial Pacific - Teotihuacan
4) Tibetan Himalayas - Center
Considered as a module pointing to topography and seismic
activity in-hand with geometric theorems deciphered by Gerald Hawkins, the Barbury Castle
crop circle is a treasury of planetary science.
Earth battered through history by comets
Researchers say impacts caused global crises, mass extinctions
BY ROBERT S. BOYD
Mercury News Washington Bureau
Published Tuesday, August 17, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News
``My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.''
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
WASHINGTON -- Recent scientific discoveries are shedding new
light on why great empires such as Egypt, Babylon and Rome fell
apart, giving way to the periodic ``dark ages'' that punctuate human
history.
At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental
calamities undermined civilizations around the world. Some
researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with
comets or fragments of comets like the one that broke apart and
smashed spectacularly into Jupiter five years ago this summer.
The impacts, yielding many megatons of explosive energy, produced
vast clouds of smoke and dust that circled the globe for years,
dimming the sun, driving down temperatures and sowing hunger,
disease and death.
Warning for future
The discoveries are changing the way scientists and historians look at
the past -- and offer a warning about what might happen to our planet
in centuries to come.
The last such global crisis occurred between AD 530 and 540 -- at
the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe -- when Earth was
pummeled by a swarm of cosmic debris.
In a forthcoming book, ``Catastrophe, the Day the Sun Went Out,''
British historian David Keys describes a two-year-long winter that
began in AD 535. Trees from California to Ireland to Siberia stopped
growing. Crops failed. Plague and famine decimated Italy, China and
the Middle East.
Keys quotes the writings of a sixth-century Syrian bishop, John of
Ephesus: ``The sun became dark. . . . Each day it shone for about
four hours and still this light was only a feeble shadow.'' A
contemporary Italian historian, Flavius Cassiodorus, wrote: ``We
marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon. We have summer
without heat.'' And a contemporary Chinese chronicler reported,
``Yellow dust rained like snow.''
Researchers say similar environmental calamities occurred around
3200 B.C., 2300 B.C., 1628 B.C. and 1159 B.C. Each led to the
collapse of urban societies in widely scattered portions of the globe.
Destructive as they were, the natural disasters that have plagued Earth
since the dawn of human civilization are but popguns compared with
the truly titanic catastrophes of prehistoric eras.
Learning from fossils
There have been at least five of these monster events, each of which
wiped out most of the creatures living at the time, the fossil record
shows.
The best known was a six-mile-wide meteor that smashed into what
is now the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. The collision
wreathed the planet in clouds of dust, poisoned the atmosphere and
drove the dinosaurs, then rulers of the Earth, into extinction. Traces of
the enormous crater, at least 100 miles across, created by the impact
were found in 1990.
Even that wasn't the biggest blow the Earth has suffered. The mother
of all extinctions, which wiped out 90 percent of living species,
happened about 245 million years ago. Paleontologists say other mass
extinctions occurred about 214 million, 360 million and 440 million
years ago.
Although the evidence is debated, a growing number of researchers
contend that most, if not all, of these ecological disasters are
connected to bombardments from space.
``Recent evidence is converging on the conclusion that mass
extinctions coincided with comet or asteroid impacts, and that
periodic comet showers, triggered by the solar system's motions
through the Milky Way galaxy, may provide a general theory to
explain impact-related mass extinctions,'' said Michael Rampino, a
geologist at New York University.
``After an impact, the dense dust cloud that is created by the impact
spreads through the atmosphere, cuts out sunlight,'' Rampino said.
``This stops photosynthesis and causes the climate to get cold and
dark, leading to the mass extinction of large numbers of organisms.''
These disasters, while terrible for their victims, opened the way for the
survivors to flourish, diversify and -- for humans -- take over the
world.
``We mammals may owe our pre-eminent position atop the Earth's
food chain to a collision some 65 million years ago that wiped out
most of our competition, including the dinosaurs,'' said Donald
Yeomans, a NASA astronomer who tracks comets and asteroids.
These discoveries are lending weight to a revised theory of evolution.
Instead of proceeding gradually by a series of tiny changes, as
Charles Darwin proposed 140 years ago, life developed in a series of
starts and stops, biologists now believe. They call it ``punctuated
evolution,'' periods of slow development interrupted by wholesale
extinctions and recoveries.
``It may take millions of years, but as the new organisms fill all the
new niches that were emptied out, a whole new biosphere is created,''
Rampino explained.
Evidence supporting this catastrophic theory of evolution is
accumulating from many sources:
Studies of oak and pine tree rings in Europe and North America
provide a year-by-year chronology of good times and bad dating
back 5,000 years. Extremely narrow growth rings are testimony to
environmental setbacks that coincide with human catastrophes.
Ice cores recently pulled out of glaciers in Greenland and
Antarctica preserve a record of environmental changes over the last
400,000 years.
Deep ocean drilling and surveys on land have detected more than
150 impact craters -- like the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona --
demonstrating that Earth has been the target of frequent bombardment
from space. Three or four craters are discovered each year, and
many more are thought to be buried underground or in the sea.
Quiet period now
NASA and the Air Force are searching for comets and asteroids
that might be on a collision course with our planet. Fortunately,
nothing of a dangerous size -- arbitrarily defined as more than a
kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter -- has been spotted heading our way
for at least a century. But astronomers say a major impact is
inevitable.
``Earth is currently enjoying a quiescent period,'' said Robert Shoch, a
Boston University geologist. ``But around 2200 AD, it is likely that a
new flow of comet fragments will enter Earth-crossing orbits and pose
a real threat to our planet.''
Obviously, the bigger the object and the faster it travels, the more
damage it causes. A direct hit is not required; simply passing through
one of the streams of cosmic rubble littering the inner solar system can
have unpleasant consequences.
The civilization-shattering events of the historic era ``must have been
near misses, because if we had been hit by a full-blown comet in the
past 10,000 years or so, we wouldn't be here today,'' said Mike
Baillie, a British archaeologist who studies tree rings.
Contents Copyright ©1999, KDuran. All Rights Reserved.
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"The feud between the Mereopes and the [ancient Greek] Ionians
will not cease until the golden tripod which [the god of fire] Vulcan cast into the sea be
brought back into the house of the man who knows the things that are, that were, and that
are to be."