On August 1st, the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more.

The movie recorded by extreme UV cameras onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory shows an enormous magnetic filament breaking away from the sun. Some of the breakaway material is now en route to Earth in the form of a coronal mass ejection (CME, movie).

Seeing the sun erupt on such a global scale has galvanized the international community of solar physicists. Researchers are still sorting out the complex sequence of events and trying to understand why they all happened at once. Stay tuned for more movies and analyses in the days ahead.
Via Spaceweather…

The earth could be hit by a wave of violent space weather as early as Tuesday after a massive explosion on the sun, scientists have warned.

The explosion, called a coronal mass ejection, was aimed directly towards Earth, which then sent a “solar tsunami” racing 93 million miles across space. It is likely to spark spectacular displays of the aurora or northern and southern lights.

Scientists have warned that a really big solar eruption could destroy satellites and wreck power and communications grids around the globe if it happened today. Nasa recently warned that Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”.

The Daily Telegraph disclosed in June that senior space agency scientists believed the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013.

Via the telegraph…

During the last Ice Age, civilisations flourished on what were then the coastal areas of the many parts of the world which, despite glaciations further north, still enjoyed a very pleasant, temperate climate. These ancient settlements are proving to have been much more advanced urban cities than current models of prehistory are prepared to acknowledge.

One trace of evidence of this lost civilisation is found in the Yonaguni Monument. This is a massive underwater rock formation off the coast of Yonaguni, the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, in Japan.

If any part of the Monument was deliberately constructed or modified, it must have happened during the last Ice Age, when the sea level was much lower than it is today (e.g. 39 m lower around 10,000 years BCE) and the monument was above water.

Indeed, this area has experienced major rises in sea levels during and since the Pleistocene (“Ice Age”) and based on well-established standard curves of sea-level rises in the region, as recently as 8,000 to 10,000 years ago the Yonaguni Monument may have been above local sea level.

The main feature (the “Monument” proper) is a rectangular formation measuring about 150 m by 40 m, and about 27 m tall; the top is about 5 m below sea level. Most of its top surface consists of a complex series of terraces and broad steps, mostly rectangular, bounded by near vertical walls.

Kimura claims to have identified at least 15 analogous formations off Yonaguni and Okinawa, including a castle, linked by submerged roads and water channels.

The structure off the coast of Yonaguni has been hailed as “the world’s oldest building” (Barot, 1998), taking the form of a “stone ziggurat”.

Whilst Tiwanaku and Pumapunku are clearly the work of an extremely advanced civilization, some people believe they are also more than 17,000 years old, throwing a spanner firlmy in the works of the Orthodox historians.

The processes and technologies involved in the creation of these temples are still not fully understood by modern scholars. The architectural achievements seen at Pumapunku are striking in light of the presumed level of technological capability available during its construction. Due to the monumental proportions of the stones, the method by which they were transported to Pumapunku has been a topic of interest since the temple’s discovery.

The largest of these stone blocks is 7.81 meters long, 5.17 meters wide, averages 1.07 meters thick, and is estimated to weigh about 131 metric tons (about the weight of 60 cars). The second largest stone block found within the Pumapunka is 7.90 meters long, 2.50 meters wide, and averages 1.86 meters thick. Its weight has been estimated to be 85.21 metric tons. Both of these stone blocks are part of the Plataforma Lítica and composed of red sandstone. Based upon detailed petrographic and chemical analyses of samples from both individual stones and known quarry sites, archaeologists concluded that these and other red sandstone blocks were transported up a steep incline from a quarry near Lake Titicaca roughly 10 km away.

In assembling the walls of Pumapunku, each stone was finely cut to interlock with the surrounding stones and the blocks fit together like a puzzle, forming load-bearing joints without the use of mortar.

The precision with which these angles have been utilized to create flush joints is indicative of a highly sophisticated knowledge of stone-cutting and a thorough understanding of descriptive geometry. Many of the joints are so precise that not even a razor blade will fit between the stones. Much of the masonry is characterized by accurately cut rectilinear blocks of such uniformity that they could be interchanged for one another while maintaining a level surface and even joints.

The blocks were so precisely cut as to suggest the possibility of prefabrication and mass production, technologies far in advance of the Tiwanaku’s Incan successors hundreds of years later.

Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light must suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was an exploding star and record the colorful expanding cloud as the Veil Nebula. Pictured above is the west end of the Veil Nebula known technically as NGC 6960 but less formally as the Witch’s Broom Nebula. The expanding debris cloud gains its colors by sweeping up and exciting existing nearby gas. The supernova remnant lies about 1400 light-years away towards the constellation of Cygnus.

The Orion Nebula is a vast stellar nursery lying about 1350 light-years from Earth.

In March 1993, a tiny remote-controlled robot created by Rudolf Gantenbrink, a German robotics engineer, traveled up airshafts within the Great Pyramid of Giza and relayed to scientists video pictures of a hitherto unknown sealed door within the pyramid. Bauval, a British engineer and writer who has been investigating the pyramids for more than ten years, and Gilbert, a British publishing consultant, use Gantenbrink’s tantalizing discovery as a launching pad for an extended analysis of the purpose of the mysterious airshafts, which lead from the Great Pyramid’s chambers to its exterior, and of the placement of other Fourth Dynasty pyramids. They were sited, the authors argue, to coincide with the key stars of Orion, a constellation that had religious significance for the Egyptians. Bauval and Gilbert claim that the shafts were pointed directly at important stars in Orion–that is, at those stars as they were placed in ancient times. Using astronomical data about stellar movement, they argue that the Orion stars coincide exactly with the pyramids’ positions in approximately 10,400 b.c.–a period the Egyptians called the First Time, when they believed the god Osiris ruled the Earth.

There are three very conspicuous stars in the “belt” of the constellation of Orion that are also called the “Three Kings.”
Like so many other religious and mythological correspondences, the “bright star” and the “three kings” represent motifs that long predate Christianity and are found within Egyptian religion, symbolizing the star Sirius as well as those of the constellation called Orion, along with their relationship to the Egyptian deities Osiris, Isis and Horus.

The idea of the continuous and cyclic rise and fall of Civilisations was first penned by Ibn Khaldūn, as I posted about before, but there is perhaps no better illustration of this than ‘The Course of Empire,’ a series of five paintings done by Thomas Cole 500 years later in 1833-1836.

The Sumerians produced the world’s “first high civilization” and were the world’s first urban non-Semitic people with the earliest traces of them found as far back as 5300BC. This ancient culture spanned the fifth to the second millennium BC in and around ancient Mesopotamia (mainly modern day Iraq but also stretching to Turkey, Syria and Iran) and its scientific and literary achievements had lasting influence throughout the ancient world and down through today.

The Sumerians were the first people to have a complex system of metrology which resulted in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They referred to themselves as the sag-giga, which literally meant “the black-headed people. The cities of Sumer were the first to practice rigorous, year-round agriculture.

What I find fascinating is that as late as the 19th century, the Sumerian culture was completely unknown.  Sumer had “been erased from the mind and memory of man for more than two thousand years.” That is, up until around a Hundred years ago, we had no idea of where we came from. It is clear that what we dont know is still far greater than we do know about our early histroy,  but a lot of the knowledge we have was brought to light with the discovery of  the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh where 30, 000 clay tablets were found.

Another thing I find fascinating, is that the earliest Leaders of Sumeria, who lived amongst, and ruled over the people, were Deified, that is, they were gods. These were Dumuzi, a deity whose worship would have profound influences in Judaism and in Greek mythology, and Gilgamesh, the “supreme hero of Sumerian myth and legend,” his deeds written and rewritten not only in Sumerian but also in other languages.

Sargon the Great was the conqueror (7000 years later we are still fighting over these lands!) that finally brought about the end of the Sumerian people as “an identifiable political and ethnic entity” and began the “Semitization of Sumer.” He went on to later build babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Sumerians believed that rite and ritual were more important than either personal devotion or piety, and that man was “created for no other purpose than to serve the gods.” Bear in mind, these gods were not some abstract entity, but according to the Sumerians, they created the first people, lived amongst and ruled over them.

I have two fascinating books about the Sumerians. Both of which I would highly recommend, this one and this one.

Image by Raphael Lacoste

The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC in ancient Babylon. Hammurabi said he was chosen by the gods to deliver the law to his people, in a story cited as the likely starting point for the Ten Commandments which was written almost 2000 years later.

Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406 C.E.) –  was a North African polymath — an astronomer, economist, historian, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, hafiz, jurist, lawyer, mathematician, military strategist, nutritionist, philosopher, social scientist and statesman (!!!!!!!) —born in North Africa in present-day Tunisia. He retreated into the desert in 1375 and emerged four years later having written one of the most important ever studies of the workings of history.

This volume, commonly known as Muqaddimah or ‘Prolegomena’, became a masterpiece in literature on philosophy of history and sociology. The chief concern of this monumental work was to identify psychological, economic, environmental and social facts that contribute to the advancement of human civilization and the currents of history. In this context, he analysed the dynamics of group relationships and showed how group-feelings, al-’Asabiyya, give rise to the ascent of a new civilisation and political power and how, later on, its diffusion into a more general civilization invites the advent of a still new ‘Asabiyya in its pristine form. He identified an almost rhythmic repetition of rise and fall in human civilization, and analysed factors contributing to it.

Ibn Khaldun’s writings seem particularly relevant today after reading this:
Endgame

I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

Joseph Davidovits (born 1935) is a French materials scientist who has posited that the blocks of the Great Pyramid are not carved stone, but mostly a form of limestone concrete. He holds the Ordre National du Mérite, is the author and co-author of more than 130 scientific papers and conferences reports, and holds more than fifty patents.

Davidovits was not convinced that the ancient Egyptians possessed the tools or technology to carve and haul the huge (2.5 to 15 ton) limestone blocks that made up the Great Pyramid. Davidovits suggested that the blocks were molded in place by using a form of limestone concrete. According to his theory, a soft limestone with a high kaolinite content was quarried in the wadi on the south of the Giza plateau. It was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry. Lime (found in the ash of ancient cooking fires) and natron (also used by the Egyptians in mummification) was mixed in. The pools were then left to evaporate, leaving behind a moist, clay-like mixture. This wet “concrete” would be carried to the construction site where it would be packed into reusable wooden molds. In the next few days the mixture would undergo a chemical hydration reaction similar to the setting of cement.

This would account for the unerring precision of the joints of the casing stones (the blocks of the core show tools marks and were cut with much lower tolerances). Proof-of-concept experiments using similar compounds were carried out at Davidovit’s geopolymer institute in northern France. It was found that a crew of ten, working with simple hand tools, could build a structure of fourteen, 1.3 to 4.5 ton blocks in a couple of days. According to Davidovits the architects possessed at least two concrete formulas: one for the large structural blocks and another for the white casing stones. He argues earlier pyramids, brick structures, and stone vases were built using similar techniques.

Joseph Davidovits sweeps aside the conventional image which cripples Egyptology and delivers a captivating and surprising view of Egyptian civilisation. He charts the rise of this technology, its apogee with the Pyramids at Giza, and the decline.

What I would like to know, is how could they know this technology almost 5,000 years ago? Was it the remnant of an even older (Global) knowledge which was used to build The Trilithon at Baalbeck (12,500BC) as well as other structures and cities in Egypt, Mesopotamia, South America? How did this knowledge come to be lost? If it was something the ancients knew, why, in this modern scientific age has it taken us so long to figure it out? 

Stopped by recently for a walk around the British museum and although there is some really great stuff there the section I went specifically to see containing the ancient Sumerian relics was closed for renovation. Boo!

Mesopotamian mythology is the collective name given to Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian mythologies from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.

The Sumerians practiced a polytheistic religion, with anthropomorphic gods or goddesses representing forces or presences in the world, in much the same way as later Greek mythology. According to said mythology, the gods originally created humans as servants for themselves but freed them when they became too much to handle.

Many stories in Sumerian religion appear similar to stories in other Middle-Eastern religions. For example, the Biblical account of the creation of man as well as Noah’s flood resemble the Sumerian tales very closely. Gods and Goddesses from Sumer have distinctly similar representations in the religions of the Akkadians, Canaanites, and others. A number of stories and deities have Greek parallels as well; for example, it has been argued by some that Inanna’s descent into the underworld strikingly recalls (and predates) the story of Persephone.

According to Sayce:^[1] Don “In historical Babylonia the gods were in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men.”

Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified. And the deification took place during their life-time, in fact, so far as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions they give themselves the title of god.”

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.

Continue reading the New Scientist article here…

Aurorae are produced by the collision of charged particles from Earth’s magnetosphere, they originate from the Sun and arrive at Earth in solar winds.

In one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula.