Free Republic

"A new study led by Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University has strongly suggested that humans are squarely responsible for the disappearance of megafauna during the last 100,000 years. The results have been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B."

Creation stories tend to be outlandish, in keeping with the near impossibility of explaining why the world is the way it is — from the week-long labours of the Old Testament God, to the eternal cycles of the Hindu creator Brahma, to Raven’s metaphysical trickery in Pacific Northwest First Nations tradition. Fanciful as they are, however, these myths have nothing on modern science, whose creation story — which already involves a mysterious Big Bang, perhaps one of many creations ex nihilo in infinite succession — this week got even weirder. At a geophysics conference in California, a series of discoveries...

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed. The fastest and most alarming sea changes to affect mankind occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Seas rose about 130m about 12,000 years ago, at times rising at five metres per century. Sea levels then fell as ice sheet and glaciers grew in the recent Little Ice Age – some Roman ports used during the Roman Warm Era are now far from the sea even though sea levels have recovered somewhat during the Modern Warm Era. Many...

Scientists have discovered a frozen underworld beneath the ice sheet covering northern Greenland. The previously unknown landscape, a vast expanse of warped shapes including some as tall as a Manhattan skyscraper, was found using ice-penetrating radar loaded aboard Nasa survey flights. The findings and the first images of the frozen world more than a mile below the surface of the ice sheet are published on Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience. ... Until recently, scientists studying the Greenland ice sheet for evidence of change under global warming had thought the shapes they discerned beneath the ice sheet were mountain ranges....

About 10 pm, WNW in the sky from central Jersey, moving right to left, split trail, dimming and brightening, biggest one I've ever seen. Probably visible in Eastern PA also.

Teams of archaeologists, students and volunteers will return this month to the site of ancient Jaffa on the central coast of Israel to pick up where they left off in 2013, when they uncovered more of the sensational evidence of a fiery destruction at the site's ancient Amarna period New Kingdom Egyptian fortress gate... ...one team will continue the excavations at the famous fourteenth century B.C. Egyptian fortress gate complex, where in 2013 they uncovered the stark remains of an extensive violent destruction. Excavations in 2012... excavators discovered a commemorative scarab of Amenhotep III dated to the mid-fourteenth century B.C.,...

The remains of a colossal seated statue of Ramses II, thought to be about 13 metres tall and weighing 700 tons, have been discovered in a shanty area of the Upper Egyptian city of Akhmim, adjacent to the open-air museum. The lower part of the limestone statue is seated on a throne, to the right and left of which are figures of two of the pharaoh's daughters and princess- queens, Merit-Amun and Bint-Anath. The statue and the throne are carved from a single block and stand on a huge limestone base covered with carved hieroglyphic texts.

CAIRO, March 28 (AFP) - Egyptian and German archeologists have discovered the head of a colossal statue which could be an image of Nefertari, the queen of Pharaoh Ramses II, a senior antiquities official said Thursday. The head, discovered in the Nile Delta region of Tel Basta, could also belong to her daughter Princess Merit-Amon, the official said. "The head, in granite, stands 3.5 meters (about 11 feet) high and is 3 meters (about 10 feet) wide, and weighs more than 11 tons," the director of antiquities for the Delta, Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, told AFP. "These measurements mean that the...

The Thwaites glacier is one of the most rapidly changing in Antarctica. It’s been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks, after scientists suggested that this sector of the huge West Antarctic Ice Sheet was already on route towards collapse due to warming ocean temperatures. A major collapse of this part of the ice sheet could have dire consequences worldwide, with a global sea level rise of potentially up to 1m. Some models suggest this could take place comparatively rapidly, within a few centuries. But hidden beneath the kilometres of ice in this rapidly changing part of the...

On June 8, the 370-meter (about 1,300-ft.) asteroid 2014 HQ124 breezed by Earth at a distance of just 800,000 miles (1.3 million km). Only hours after closest approach, astronomers used a pair of radio telescopes to produce some of the most detailed images of a near-Earth asteroid ever obtained. They reveal a peanut-shaped world called a ‘contact binary’, an asteroid comprised of two smaller bodies touching. About one in six asteroids in the near-Earth population has this type of elongated or “peanut” shape. It’s thought that contact binaries form when two or more asteroids get close enough to touch and...

Archaeological work on the island of Gökçeada has revealed that an earthquake occurred in the region 4,700 years ago, followed by a tsunami. Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University Geology Department Professor Doğan Perinçek said they had found the traces of the earthquake and tsunami during works between 2006 and 2008. Gökçek made a statement June 2 after an earthquake measuring 6.5 that occurred on May 24 in the region. He said both he and Professor Halime Hüryılmaz had found traces of an earthquake that occurred in 2680 B.C. following work in the area of Yenibademli. “The earthquake broke the walls of...

A new analysis of lunar rocks brought home by Apollo mission astronauts has shed fresh light on the violent birth of the moon. Researchers in Germany have found small but distinctive chemical signatures that suggest the moon formed when a giant planetary body slammed into the early Earth 4.5bn years ago. Scientists have several theories for how the moon may have formed, but the "giant impact hypothesis" has been the leading explanation for some time. A cataclysmic impact between the Earth and a Mars-sized planet, known as Theia, would have scattered rock and dust from both bodies out into space,...

A Curtin University researcher has shown that ancient volcanic eruptions in Australia 510 million years ago significantly affected the climate, causing the first known mass extinction in the history of complex life. Published in prestigious journal Geology, Associate Professor Fred Jourdan from Curtin’s Department of Applied Geology, along with colleagues from several Australian and international institutions, used radioactive dating techniques to precisely measure the age of the eruptions of the Kalkarindji volcanic province – where lavas covered an area of more than 2 million square kilometres in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.Dr Jourdan and his team were able...

Got any plans Tuesday? Good. Keep them but know this. That day around 3 p.m. CDT (20:00 UT) asteroid 2014 KH39 will silently zip by Earth at a distance of just 272,460 miles (438,480 km) or 1.14 LDs (lunar distance). Close as flybys go but not quite a record breaker. The hefty space rock will buzz across the constellation Cepheus at nearly 25,000 mph (11 km/sec) near the Little Dipper at the time. Observers in central Europe and Africa will have dark skies for the event, however at magnitude +17 the asteroid will be too faint to spot in amateur...

Nabhan is a former teacher in California and now lives in Pittsburgh. He became interested in earthquakes while he was the earthquake preparedness coordinator for the school he worked at. He says he noticed every earthquake happened at dusk or dawn. “I realized this sort of conscience doesn’t happen in science. These dawn and dusk quakes during new and full moons are the paradigm on the west coast,” he said. “All six great quakes that have struck in Los Angeles that have killed people since the 30s, all of them, dawn or dusk [quakes]. How can earthquakes be predicted? Nabhan...

A handful of tree ring samples stored in an old cigar box have shed unexpected light on the ancient world, thanks to research by archaeologist Sturt Manning and collaborators at Cornell, Arizona, Chicago, Oxford and Vienna, forthcoming in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. The samples were taken from an Egyptian coffin; Manning also examined wood from funeral boats buried near the pyramid of Sesostris III. He used a technique called “dendro radiocarbon wiggle matching,” which calibrates radiocarbon isotopes found in the sample tree rings with patterns known from other places in the world that have already...

In 1989, Edward Bryant climbed a point on the southeast coast of his native Australia with a colleague and found an odd jumble of boulders well above the surf. A big wave, he thought, maybe a tsunami from an earthquake, must have tossed them up there. Over the next few years, however, the University of Wollongong geologist explored hundreds of miles of coast and found more signs of wave action, hundreds of feet above the water--too high for any quake-spawned surge. An astonishing hypothesis of devastation from outer space formed in his mind. It gathered some praise, along with many...

...Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a stalwart believer that global warming is a “hoax,” dismissed the report as a publicity stunt. Perhaps the senator needs a history lesson, because climate change has been leading to global conflict — and even the collapse of civilizations — for more than 3,000 years. Drought and famine led to internal rebellions in some societies and the sacking of others, as people fleeing hardship at home became conquerors abroad. One of the most vivid examples comes from around 1200 B.C. A centuries-long drought in...

Here, for the first time (to our knowledge), we are able to demonstrate unambiguously that the impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg, ∼66 Mya) was followed by a so-called “impact winter.” This impact winter was the result of the injection of large amounts of dust and aerosols into the stratosphere and significantly reduced incoming solar radiation for decades. Therefore, this phase will have been a key contributory element in the extinctions of many biological clades, including the dinosaurs. The K–Pg boundary impact presents a unique event in Earth history because it caused global change at an unparalleled rate. This detailed...

~snip~ In 1967 British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system. For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars. However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we’re picking up alien messages...