Free Republic

One thousand years ago, on a floodplain of the Mississippi River near modern-day St. Louis, the massive Native American city known today as Cahokia sprang suddenly into existence. Three hundred years later it was virtually deserted... While analyzing cores from Horseshoe Lake, an oxbow lake that separated from the Mississippi River some 1,700 years ago, Munoz's team discovered a layer of silty clay 19 centimeters (7.5 inches) thick deposited by a massive ancient flood. It's unlikely that the ancient floodwaters were high enough to inundate the ten-story mound at Cahokia's center, a structure now called Monk's Mound... But a flood...

Satellites spot lost Guatemala Mayan temples Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:29pm EST GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Ancient Mayan astronomers aligned their soaring temples with the stars and now modern archeologists have found the ruins of hidden cities in the Guatemalan jungle by peering down from space. Archeologists and NASA scientists began teaming up five years ago to search for clues about the mysterious collapse of the Mayan civilization that flourished in Central America and southern Mexico for 1,000 years. The work is paying off, says archeologist William Saturno, who recently discovered five sprawling sites with hundreds of buildings using a...

PASADENA, Calif. — Shattered cave formations in the central United States may preserve one of the longest records of powerful earthquakes in this region. Historical records from European settlers provide vivid accounts of deadly earthquakes in states such as Missouri, Tennessee and Illinois. For instance, in 1811 and 1812, people saw the ground ripple like ocean waves when the New Madrid Fault Zone unleashed earthquakes thought to be greater than magnitude 8. However, no written accounts exist from before Europeans arrived. And most earthquake faults in the Midwest are hidden deep beneath the surface, so scientists can't dig into the...