Posted on 01/03/2015 4:10:32 PM PST by Fred Nerks
From my Free Web Book 'AncientCanalBuilders.com'
The largest wide-array man made (or at least non natural) structure in the world is in fact an ancient terra formed systems of agricultural-aquaculture canals in Northwestern Botswana and Northeastern Namibia, north of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. Obviously quite ancient, the canal systems no longer provide free flowing water throughout its 105,000 mile array, but many sections show obvious intention to provide cross sectional irrigation.
These canals are too evenly spaced over too large an area to be any kind of natural formation. Based on entry and exit points, it is readily apparent this system is a very large, controlled agronomy array and/or aquaculture system. Its age is defined by the overgrown nature of the canals, as well as some areas that are covered over with drift and sand erosion.
The entire complex covers an area about equal in size to the State of Arizona in the USA. The canals are an integrated system of apparent irrigation and agricultural (and probably aquaculture) design. The system is about 350 miles in width and about 300 miles in depth. (For the remnants still visible.) This system represents roughly 67 MILLION acres of sustainable agriculture. Given the sophistication of design, it is entirely plausible to assume an above average yield, i.e. feeding well over 90 persons per acre on an annual basis. The system may or may not have provided a sustainable aquaculture (marine farming) environment. I have no reason to suspect that it did not.
Given the size and scope of this complex, (canals are about 1 mile apart on average) and collectively are roughly 350 X 300 miles in a rough rectangular format. (At least the observable parts) There could be, and probably is, much more to this complex than what is visible to the naked eye. Right now, we can identify ancient cultivation of roughly 105,000 square miles.
One square mile = 27,878,400 square feet, or 640 acres, so the entire complex had a sustained producing land mass of (640 acres x 105,000 square miles) or > 67,200,000 acres. (That is 67 MILLION acres)
One linear mile of canal had (750' width x + >12' depth x 5,280') = 47,520,000 cubic ft of water per linear mile.
Entire canal length (105,000 miles x 47.5 million cubic ft per mile) = 5,000,000,000,000 (That's 5 TRILLION) cubic feet of water in the canals. It would be an incredible waste of time and effort to irrigate >105,000 square miles of sustainable agriculture land, and not use the 5 trillion cubic feet of water circulating in the canals for aquaculture farming. I don't think the builders were that stupid.
Different estimates of the numbers of people this sustainable system would supply varies widely, though it is generally accepted that a system like this, if properly managed would provide a complete annual diet for somewhere between 60 to 120 people per acre. Which means this system was in fact providing food for an average of about 5 Billion people.
This array is in fact the largest non natural artifact on the Planet. It can be clearly viewed unaided from the International Space Station at roughly 230 miles up, which cannot be said for any other non natural feature on Earth.
I would suggest that depth of canal(s) must have been significant to compensate for general slight variations in elevation. There seems to be an average elevation variation of about 60', sometime more, and sometimes less.
Your comments are welcome, or you can contact me here:
johnmjensenjr@gmail.com 321-614-5040
First brought to my attention by Gary Schoening Here is his original Vimeo post: http://vimeo.com/64351951
Just because it could have provided food for that number doesn’t mean that it was. Anyone have information on a possible date for all this engineering. I know that the adjacent area, Zimbabwe had some interesting historical buildings of an unusual size and style. Meanwhile as to the question of where they got the water, the answer is probably the Okavango River/Delta. Here is a site showing a large number of photos, maps, etc. of that area.
https://www.google.com/search?q=okavango+delta+map&num=50&newwindow=1&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=qwGpVMPwLIeqggTLkYOACw&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=1600&bih=775
I have now read the whole article and looked carefully at the map and have some conclusions. The writer has given us a fantastically interesting puzzle. Visually, it is much too regular to not be man made. I think I detect variances in widths in different regions. Some areas are more degraded than others. The water source is definitely the Okavango, and perhaps another river to the east which is much smaller. [I once saw a NOVA film showing how that area changed from wet to dry season, and that too was amazing. Huge increase in amount of water and flooded area.] Lines occur both east and west of Okavango, also north and south. Looking at areas between Okavango and Etosha I see faint hints of square and rectangular patches that look like they might have been delineated property areas. Perhaps concurrent with the use of the canals, or perhaps later land holdings.
The author’s thoughts on age refer to 7,000 years ago, and also 11 to 14 thousand years ago, in other words before and after the disaster that caused the Younger Dryas cooling. [SC, time for that Firestone book.]
In response to a question the author spouts some totally nonscientific thoughts on the age of dinosaurs not being 65 million years old because they are found on the surface. He does not seem to realize that many finds have been made of dinosaurs from cliff faces and road cuts into rocks of great age, and also between volcanic deposits that can be precisely dated. For that matter the Leakey’s found most of their million years old hominid remains on the surface of land where the newer layers had washed/eroded away. So far as his grasp of science is concerned, I am reminded of the saying—even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. Nevertheless, he has brought to our attention a truly exciting and complex puzzle on human civilization and is to be thanked.
Agreed. No doubt over time further information in regard to this area will come to hand.
Just because you or I haven’t seen it before does not mean its unknown. In fact I suspect it has been noted for decades.
Botswana geological society.
I went back to the Google map and did some close up exploring. As close as 100 feet. I looked in the grooves in several “canals” southwest of the Okavango delta. It appears there are compounds where the canal is being farmed, and then there is a fenced cluster of huts off to the side of the canal, not in the canal. Get the impression they must be finding better water for crops in the canal and don’t want to waste their parcel of cropland by putting their buildings there. Check it out. Night all.
Right on. It would be easy to believe these were man made, unless someone can come with a geological process that I'm not aware of.
“5 billion people???? There are 7 billion people now. Where did they go?”
There is no new thing under the sun, everything you see now has already existed in some part of our distant past, we just don’t remember.
When the harvest is ready the wheat is cut down.
Ping for later.
Gonna keep an eye on this....
“Right on. It would be easy to believe these were man made, unless someone can come with a geological process that I’m not aware of.”
These features are linear sand dunes, and they cannot be manmade due to their formation by bidirectional winds tens of thousands of years ago as evidenced by the geological corings of those features. The corings of the dunes reveal their formation by the winds drowning the prior geological strata and biological material in sand piled up into linear dune formations.
Evolution in Your FaceLake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni
Patterns similar to this exist in dry river beds in Western Kenya. Initially they were dug by people looking for water. Later, gold was discovered and the local tribes dung down to the gravel/bedrock looking for gold.
Understanding linear dune chronologies
http://sajg.geoscienceworld.org/content/110/4/535.abstract
“
Abstract
The degraded linear dunefield of north west Ngamiland, Botswana occurs in a seismically active area, lying to the northwest of the Okavango graben, widely considered to be the tail end of the East African Rift system. To assess the effects of neotectonism on the dunes, an area was selected for examination close to the Gumare fault, which bounds the graben on the northwest side. Digital SRTM data were converted to light shaded representation of the topography. It was found that dune forms only occur along the margin of the rift and on both sides of incising valleys, graded to the graben floor. A selection of long profiles showed dune crests standing some 25 m above the straats at the edge of the rift. The relative relief pinches out away from the fault, towards interfluves that do not depict dune morphology. Landsat satellite imagery shows linear features continuous across the flat interfluves, inviting the incorrect inference from the vegetation that the linear dune forms occur there. A model is proposed that an original linear dune field formed under arid conditions, was entirely flattened under wetter conditions, crest material being washed into the straats, thus obliterating the original dune morphology. Upon rifting and stream incision, these forms are being replicated, an example of equifinality. Replication is suggested to be by the action of infiltrating water, controlled by the groundwater gradients. These observations suggest that the active dunefield significantly predates the tectonic processes. With the additional time required for degradation and replication it would suggest that the dunes are of considerable antiquity. It has already been recognised that the dunefield has a complex history of construction and destruction, to which must now be added a process of base level-controlled replication.”
“Visually, it is much too regular to not be man made.”
On the contrary, it is quite impossible for these features to be manmade. Humans dig canals by taking the top layers of soil off the ditch being dug and upturning those soils onto the bottom of the pile or dune alongside the ditch. As the digging of the canal progresses what was previously the top layers become piled atop the other top layers of soil and the former bottom layers are piled atop the pile or dunes to become the new top layers. In other words, humans digging a canal overturn the soil so the former top becomes the new bottom and the former bottom becomes the new top layer.
Natural linear dune formations do not dig up the strata and overturn them like humans do. The winds blow the sand into long and parallel dunes using sand and dust blown from the surface soils in the adjacent terrain. This sand and dust is progressively piled without a substantial movement of the dunes that would otherwise destroy the parallel symmetry created by the wind patterns. This results in an a long dune structure with the base atop the basement strata and progressing from the older dust and sand strata at the base of the dune to the newer strata of sand and dust at the top of the dune. In other words, the pile of soil is obviously not removed from the basement strata and is obviously not overturned. Instead the dune was piled into place with the old at the bottom and the new at the top, unlike manmade canals and dikes. Geological corings and studies of these formations have demonstrated quite conclusively these are natural linear dune formations running parallel, in part because there is no evidence of artificial or manmade overturnings of the soils in their formation.
Only God can make the wind blow straight enough over a large portion of this curved planet to explain this.
Time for more coffee.
Sounds plausible. Can you tell me what “bi-directional winds” are? Are there other examples of equally spaced “linear dunes” covering such large areas?
The bidirectional winds which produced the linear dunes are themselves the result of the location of the southern Hadley Cell and southern mid-latitude converging over that region of Africa where these linear dune formations and the Kalihara Desert are located. This convergence zone happens to be the convergence region between the two worldwide cells where the southeasterly trade winds transition into the westerly trade winds. The transitional period produces bidirectional winds which persist during the season long enough to result in the parallel lines of dunes. This field of linear dunes is a comparatively microscopic area in comparison to the convergence zone of these two world encircling cells.
These natural features are really not at all unique.
Where ever there is wind and sand in any amount you will find linear dunes.
In Michigan’s upper peninsula they’re covered with vegetation but the dunes are there in parallel lines along the lake Superior shore.
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