Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Boreades]

OK, no volcano. But there's plenty of ash and sulphur. Where did all the ash and sulphur come from? A different kind of natural disaster. The Sodom and Gomorrah sites (or what remains of them) are located exactly on a fault line along the side of a plain south of the Dead Sea.

Here:
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/20 ... px#Article
It says:
A possible explanation for the destruction of the Cities of the Plain is that pressure from an earthquake caused underground flammable petroleum products to be forced up through the fault lines. They then become ignited and rained down on the surrounding countryside. The sites of Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira are located precisely on the eastern fault line.

Good documentary here (even if it is 'Merican)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFaqBjwcC_0

[TisILeclerc]

The eruption of Thera had an effect felt throughout the world so dropping a bit of brimstone on Israel shouldn't have been a problem.

Here's a megalithic photo of it.



'Thera's eruption was four or five times more powerful than Krakatoa, geologists believe, exploding with the energy of several hundred atomic bombs in a fraction of a second. '

http://www.livescience.com/4846-eruptio ... world.html

Here's somebody's thesis on the eruption. It has a link to a downloadable pdf file. I haven't read it yet but I imagine it will give a lot of vital information of interest to this site.

http://www.santorini-eruption.org.uk/

http://www.santorini-eruption.org.uk/chapters.htm

[hvered]

The thesis that a volcanic eruption, whether Thera, Mt Hekla or wherever, would have devastated the whole of the known world is problematic. Yes, of course surrounding areas would be damaged, at least for a time, by an eruption but the end of an entire society, never mind the world, seems highly unlikely.

There's an interesting discussion on the Megalithic Portal about 'Neolithic science' where several posters appear to consider Thera brought about the end of the Megalithic era without any evidence.

Still, worth a read though in this context 'Greek' is as meaningless as 'Celtic' http://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php ... 50&forum=4

[TisILeclerc]

The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused world wide problems in the early nineteenth century.

'The massive load of sulphate gases and debris the mountain shot 43 km into the stratosphere blocked sunlight and distorted weather patterns for three years, dropping temperatures between two and three degrees Celsius, shortening growing seasons and devastating harvests worldwide, especially in 1816. In the northern hemisphere, farmers from frozen—and abolitionist—New England, where some survived the winter of 1816 to 1817 on hedgehogs and boiled nettles, poured into the Midwest. That migration, the Klingamans argue, set in motion demographic ripples that would not play out until America’s Civil War, almost a half-century later.'

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/wh ... at-summer/

A more scientific report has looked at the Irish Annals and come to the conclusion that volcanic activity played a significant part in disastrous winters and harvest failures over quite a large period of time.

'Our results complement recent work on the contribution of solar variation to historic severe cold winters for United Kingdom (Lockwood et?al 2010,?2011) and reveal a persistent tendency towards winter-season cooling in response to explosive volcanism at Ireland?s climatically sensitive Northeast Atlantic location, as well as the large proportional contribution of volcanism to the occurrence of severe cold events here. The consistency of this response suggests that the region may be a key location for testing the veracity of climate model simulations of volcanic climate impact. We argue that greater emphasis should be placed on the prospect of severe volcanically induced regional-scale cooling in descriptions of the volcano-climate system that often primarily stress dynamical warming as the dominant winter-season impact of volcanism for Northern Hemisphere landmasses. The climatic record of the Annals can yet further contribute to understanding the volcano-climate system as variables that mediate volcanic climatic impacts are reconstructed with increasing confidence. These include not only the seasons, locations, magnitudes and chemical compositions of historic eruptions, but also the pre-eruption states of major modes of climatic variability such as the AO, NAO and ENSO'

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024035/article

There was an article in the Daily Mail yesterday which showed the part that pollen has been shown to play in seeding rain clouds.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... laims.html

'The research, by the University of Michigan and Texas A&M and published in Geophysical Research Letters, highlights a fresh link between plants and the atmosphere'

‘What we found is when pollen gets wet, it can rupture very easily in seconds or minutes and make lots of smaller particles that can act as cloud condensation nuclei, or collectors for water,’ said Dr Allison Steiner, U-M associate professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space science'

If pollen can have such an influence I would imagine that massive volcanic explosions would also play their part in affecting climate and as a result human activity.

[Boreades]

This is interesting stuff.

IIRC, somewhere here (or perhaps somewhere not here) I have posted the suggestion that it was disastrous winters and harvest failures that triggered the collapse of the Roman Empire. Especially in the north.

But, it wasn't a disastrous winter and harvest failure, or wet pollen, that turned Lot's wife into a tourist attraction.

[hvered]

No-one's denying that volcanic eruptions are destructive, TisI, but that's quite different from claiming a volcano brought about the end of a three thousand year-old culture stretching from North Africa to Scandinavia and beyond (as per certain Megalithic Portal folk). Are you telling us the people and their cultures in Indonesia or Ireland similarly disappeared all of a sudden?

Prolonged bad weather can of course have a huge impact on people and their animals but the end of an empire seems rather fanciful. The strength of an empire is its range, the varied resources. Economic and indeed political collapses appear to be man-made wouldn't you say?

If pollen particles are such a major rain-trigger, there'd be rain in summer and considerably less in winter surely?

[TisILeclerc]

Cultures do disappear.

For whatever reason people stopped building megaliths, pyramids etc and today nobody knows how they built them or why. And we certainly couldn't reproduce them using what we assume was at their disposal.

There are megalithic buildings, possibly connected to the Maltese megaliths, under the sea off the coast of Spain. Again we know nothing about these people.

Irish historical legends tell of several invasions by a variety of people yet by the time of the Vikings they could hardly defend themselves. And when the Normans arrived, well, the rest is history.

My original remark was, I think, to do with the rise of water in the Black Sea and the problems it caused for people who lived there as well as the geological effects the extra weight had on the structure of the area. These people were displaced and their civilisation disappeared. Perhaps the survivors moved on and into other lands? We are told that the British Isles are still experiencing the effects of the 'rebound' after the ice age ended.

'If pollen particles are such a major rain-trigger, there'd be rain in summer and considerably less in winter surely?'

It is always summer somewhere. So I imagine there will always be a plentiful supply of pollen. My reference to that scientific report was more to do with the question of where does rain come from. It could provide the reason for why the Amazon rainforest is so important regarding the weather and rain etc.

What we do know is that empires of all sorts come and go even when there appears no obvious reason for them to disappear.

[Boreades]

Is there any evidence of a mega-volcano in Iceland?

In particular, one that might have blighted Blighty with ash clouds and adverse weather?

Have any of our previous wanderings offered any plausible reasons why the builders of Newgrange, Avebury, Stonehenge etc would have decided to emigrate to somewhere drier or warmer? Or were they contractors from somewhere else in Europe and they only had temporary work permits?

[TisILeclerc]

Probably worked for McAlpine's and moved on when the work dried up.

[Boreades]

They worked for "Concrete Bob"?

In my mind, not so far-fetched.

But then I do have this crazy idea that the Romans weren't the first to use concrete.