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How Did the 'Unsinkable' Titanic End Up at the Bottom of the Ocean?
Editor's Note: Twenty years ago, James Cameron's blockbuster film "Titanic" entranced audiences around the globe. But it was less than 10 years ago that Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the Titanic in 1985, revealed to the world that he found the famous shipwreck as the result of a top-secret military expedition. Here's how National Geographic broke the news on June 2, 2008.
The 1985 discovery of the Titanic stemmed from a secret United States Navy investigation of two wrecked nuclear submarines, according to the oceanographer who found the infamous ocean liner.
Pieces of this Cold War tale have been known since the mid-1990s, but more complete details are now coming to light, said Titanic's discoverer, Robert Ballard.
"The Navy is finally discussing it," said Ballard, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett and the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration in Connecticut.
Ballard met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic.
Ballard is also a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)
Surprise Find
Ronald Thunman, then the deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, told Ballard the military was interested in the technology—but for the purpose of investigating the wreckage of the U.S.S.Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion.
Since Ballard's technology would be able to reach the sunken subs and take pictures, the oceanographer agreed to help out.
He then asked the Navy if he could search for the Titanic, which was located between the two wrecks.
"I was a little short with him," said Thunman, who retired as a vice admiral and now lives in Springfield, Illinois. He emphasized that the mission was to study the sunken warships.
Once Ballard had completed his mission—if time was left—Thunman said, Ballard could do what he wanted, but never gave him explicit permission to search for the Titanic.
Ballard said Navy Secretary John Lehman knew of the plan.
"But the Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard said.
"But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots."
Sunken Subs
The Thresher and Scorpion had sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean at depths of between 10,000 and 15,000 feet (3,000 and 4,600 meters).
The military wanted to know the fate of the nuclear reactors that powered the ships, Ballard said.
This knowledge was to help determine the environmental safety of disposing of additional nuclear materials in the oceans.
The Navy also wanted to find out if there was any evidence to support the theory that the Scorpion had been shot down by the Soviets.
Ballard's data showed that the nuclear reactors were safe on the ocean bottom and were having no impact on the environment, according to Thunman.
The Discovery in 1985
Ballard recounts his original voyage in search of the Titanic and its discovery in 1985.
The data also confirmed that Thresher likely had sunk after a piping failure led to a nuclear power collapse, he added. Details surrounding the Scorpion are less certain.
A catastrophic mishap of some sort led to a flooding of the forward end of the submarine, Thunman said. The rear end remained sealed and imploded once the sub sank beneath a certain depth.
"We saw no indication of some sort of external weapon that caused the ship to go down," Thunman said—dismissing the theory that the Russians torpedoed the submarine in retaliation for spying.
Debris Trails
While searching for the sunken submarines, Ballard learned an invaluable lesson on the effects of ocean currents on sinking debris: The heaviest stuff sinks quickly.
The result is a debris trail laid out according to the physics of the currents.
With just 12 days left over in his mission, Ballard began searching for the Titanic, using this information to track down the ocean liner. He speculated that the ship had broken in half and left a debris trail as it sank.
"That's what saved our butts," Ballard said. "It turned out to be true."
The explorer has since used a similar technique to find other sunken ships and treasures, including his expeditions to the Black Sea.
Are these expeditions also part of top-secret missions? After all, the Black Sea is in the volatile Middle East.
"The Cold War is over," Ballard said. "I'm no longer in the Navy."
Andrew Basiago, J.D., is a licensed attorney with Washington State who claims to have participated in classified programs involving time travel and space time portals since 1967...
Botswana "snake rock" may show Stone Age religion
By Alister Doyle January 20, 2007
OSLO (Reuters) - Carvings about 70,000 years old on a snake-like rock in a cave in Botswana indicate that Stone Age people developed religious rituals far earlier than previously believed, a researcher said on Thursday.
Ancestors of Botswana’s San people apparently ground away at a natural outcrop about 2 meters high and 6 meters long (6 by 20 ft) to heighten its similarity to a python’s head and body, said Sheila Coulson, an associate professor at Oslo University.
“We believe this is the earliest archaeological proof of religion,” Coulson, a Canadian expert in Stone Age tools, told Reuters of findings made during a trip in mid-2006 to the Tsolido Hills in northwestern Botswana.
The previous oldest archaeological evidence of religious worship is about 40,000 years old from European caves. The Botswana find bolsters evidence that modern humans originated in Africa, along with religion and culture.
Coulson said the python-like rock had 300-400 carved indentations. In flickering firelight, the patterns might have seemed like scales and given the impression of movement to the rock as part of some sacred rite.
Scores of carved stone items, including 115 points and 22 burned red spearheads, were abandoned on the floor of the cave beneath the snake-like rock. Many had been brought more than 200 km (125 miles) across the Kalahari Desert.
“The snake symbol runs through all the mythologies, stories, cultures, languages of southern Africa,” Coulson said. The cave, with a floor of 26 square meters (280 sq ft), was not known to archaeologists until the 1990s.
SLITHERING PYTHON
In San mythology, humankind descended from a python, and ancient streambeds nearby were believed to have been created by a shake slithering around the hills in search of water.
The archaeologists, with Coulson leading a team funded by a Norwegian research program and Tromsoe University and Nick Walker heading a team from the University of Botswana, found stone tools when they dug a pit two meters deep below the snake.
They estimated that the artifacts were 70,000 years old, based on comparisons with carved stones found in other well-dated sites in Botswana.
“In the upper levels there is a distinct change to objects from the Late Stone Age” which began 40,000 years ago, Coulson said. The scientists were working to get more precise dates.
The scientists believe the cave was a purely sacred site because there were no signs of wider habitation -- animal bones, tools or cooking fires -- such as those found in South Africa’s Blombos Cave of similar age.
At the back of the Botswanan cave was a well-worn chamber, large enough for a shaman to hide and to speak, perhaps in imitation of a snake.
Coulson said she and Walker had decided the findings were startling enough to publicize them before writing up a report for a scientific journal.
DrEvil » Thu Jan 05, 2023 11:41 pm wrote:One thing about talking to our DNA that bothers me: if the DNA talks to us, wouldn't it also have to change in some way while doing so to produce "speech"? In other words: wouldn't we mutate rapidly every time we talked to it? Or is that the whole point of the exercise, to ascend through sacred conversation?
We extend the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts to the statistical study of DNA base pair sequences and find that the noncoding regions are more similar to natural languages than the coding regions. We also adapt the Shannon approach to quantifying the "redundancy" of a linguistic text in terms of a measurable entropy function, and demonstrate that noncoding regions in eukaryotes display a smaller entropy and larger redundancy than coding regions, supporting the possibility that noncoding regions of DNA may carry biological information.
https://www.sciencealert.com/octopus-and-squid-evolution-is-weirder-than-we-could-have-ever-imagined
Octopus And Squid Evolution Is Officially Stranger Than We Could Have Ever Imagined
Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet. In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment....
DrEvil » Fri Jan 06, 2023 7:32 pm wrote:...so what if ghosts are not dead people from the past, but the actual past momentarily overlapping with our time?
I'm leaning more towards the agency within being a sort of bacterial hivemind, something a bit more dynamic and fast moving than DNA, and DNA serving more as the storage platform, or long-term memory, for that hivemind.
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