The Mega Blog 2.0a

In this second installment of his three-part report, Dr. Greg Little provides more information about the discoveries made during several recent expeditions to the Bahamas. This month he details the finds at Bimini and next month he’ll conclude the series with a piece on the discoveries at Andros Island.

Highlights of this month’s article include a more comprehensive description of the marble columns, beams and slabs (complete with underwater photos) that I discussed in a previous post and a side-scan sonar image from Bill Donato’s November, 2006 expedition. I’ve personally seen nearly thirty of these images, and some of them are very interesting, indeed. Little describes a dive to one of these sites and explains why he thinks the rectangular formations found there may be the foundations of 12,000 year-old buildings!

Read the entire article at: http://www.mysterious-america.net/bimini2007.html

Drs. Greg and Lora Little will be presenting the results of their recent Bahamas expeditions at the annual Ancient Mysteries Conference in Virginia Beach, VA on October 6, 2007. See http://www.mysterious-america.net./ancientmysteries.html for more details.

As you’ve probably noticed by the links in the upper right margin of this blog’s home page, I’m also the author of a series of mystery adventure novels called the Seeds of Civilization. The stories are loosely based on Graham Hancock’s ancient/lost civilization theory and each novel uses a different unsolved archaeological mystery as its backdrop. One of my main writing goals has been to blend fact and fiction together so seamlessly that the reader loses track of when the switch occurs. I started writing the series several years ago, long before this blog was conceived, but the two seem to be converging this summer. You see, about the time I started the third book, (tentatively titled Triangle) I had just stumbled onto a report about the 2000 discovery of the “lost city of Cuba” by Paulina Zelitsky and her crew off the NW tip of Cuba. MEGA, as it was being called, seemed like the perfect story backdrop, even though it posed some difficult technical challenges for my characters due to its 2,100-foot depth.

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In my writing, the background research is half the fun, and Triangle has been no exception. The search for a technology that would get my characters down to MEGA led me to the Web site of Global Marine Systems, a British company that installs and maintains trans-oceanic communications cables. Many of Global’s ships are equipped with sophisticated ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) that are capable of working at depths of 6,000 feet, more than enough to explore the MEGA site. I contacted Global for more information and not only received a thick packet of printed material and a copy of a video that featured the company, but I also received an invitation to visit one of their vessels at its home port of Victoria, BC, Canada! Although the ship that “stars” in Triangle is fictitious, it’s based on my tour of Global’s Wave Venture – a real, working cable maintenance ship capable of exploring MEGA and many other underwater sites.

While the research at MEGA has been stalled for some time now, that didn’t stop my characters from exploring – and eventually unraveling – the mysteries of the site. In fact, that effort makes up the first third of Triangle. After an unpleasant encounter with some “Cubans”, my characters follow a lead (quite literally) from MEGA to the Bahamas where the story will eventually conclude. Much of the factual information for the Bahamas location is coming from the first-hand accounts of Bill Donato and Drs. Greg and Lora Little that you have read right here on the The Mega Blog. Of course, my characters make fictional discoveries and draw fictional conclusions not suggested by either Donato or the Littles, but the parallels are intentionally close.

Triangle is expected to be complete by the end of the year, and I’m certainly feeling the pressure to finish before Donato and/or the Little’s announce discoveries that may be even more shocking than the fictional end I have planned for my novel!

Call to Action

Unfortunately, fact moves much slower than fiction in real life. While the technology to conduct underwater archaeology exploration clearly exists, the funding often does not. Much of the research described in The Mega Blog is self-funded or funded by small private donations to 501-c organizations. If you would like to help out financially, please send an email to me at rja (at) TheMegaBlog.com and I’ll pass your contact information along to the researcher or organization of your choice. I can not provide you with their contact info, so please don’t ask.

In a brand new article (see: http://mysterious-america.net/bermudatriangle0.html), Dr. Greg Little describes some amazing discoveries made on several recent expeditions to the Bahamas. Using side-scan sonar, sites were located near Bimini and Andros and on the Grand Bahamas Bank. According to Dr, Little, subsequent follow-ups to these sites revealed “rectangular formations lying in 100 feet of water off Bimini, several unusual stone formations 20+ miles out on the Great Bahama[s] Bank and the ’rediscovery’ of an underwater ‘mass’ of fully dressed marble beams, an exquisite marble building apex, marble columns, and numerous huge, rectangular flat slabs of white marble”

North of Andros Island, Drs. Greg and Lora Little also discovered an underwater wall constructed from huge blocks and slabs of limestone and genuine archaeological evidence now points to the existence of an ancient maritime culture that operated in the Bahamas during ancient times.

During the most recent expeditions, the Littles also investigated a number of airplane wreckage sites – both underwater and on land. They have offered to share specific details they have collected with anyone who can help identify the aircraft.

Drs. Greg and Lora Little will be presenting the results of their recent Bahamas expeditions at the annual Ancient Mysteries Conference in Virginia Beach, VA on October 6, 2007. See http://www.mysterious-america.net./ancientmysteries.html for more details.

A recent Reuters article by Michael Kahn (read here) makes some sobering predictions about the effects of a sudden rise in sea levels that might occur as the result of a tsunami or massive earthquake. According to a U.S. Geological Survey team leader, more than 1 billion people live in low-lying areas that could be affected by such disasters, and millions of square miles of coastal land are potentially at risk.

While the focus of the article is on the use of new Survey team mapping techniques to aid in global disaster planning, there are a couple of comments that might shed some light on the possible fate of MegaAmerica’s lost maritime civilization.

Although the biggest surge of the 2004 Asian tsunami was nearly 100 feet (30 meters), the Survey team leader dismisses the possibility of such large sea level rises on a global scale. Then, in a statement that’s almost an aside, he recalls that 10,000 years ago the earth’s sea levels rose 65 feet (20 meters) in a mere 500 years when the continental ice sheets collapsed! Such an event would have been devastating to the Caribbean/Gulf basin and could have submerged all evidence of an entire culture. In my opinion, it’s time we spend more effort and money on serious underwater archaeology and less of the same digging in the sands of the Egyptian desert.

In a recent email, blog member Ron Smith suggested that my Sea Level Rise chart in the previous post doesn’t take into account the Younger Dryas interval, so I did some digging and I believe he’s correct. Here’s what I learned:

The Younger Dryas interval was an unusually cold period that interrupted the last deglaciaction. As the glaciers began to melt, the temperature of the earth – and the levels of the seas – began to rise as well. But something happened about 12,800 years ago that reversed this trend for more than a thousand years. Then, as quickly as it had come, the Younger Dryas event ended and temperatures in northern hemisphere rose by as much as ten degrees Centigrade in ten years! Compared to the current global warming trend of less than one degree per hundred years, the YD interval was a catastrophe of major proportions.

The exact timing of the Younger Dryas interval has a fairly wide margin of error, but evidence of its occurrence comes from a number of sources, including glacial deposits, tropical and polar ice caps, pollens, lake and marine sediments, tree rings, corals and speleothems. Furthermore, evidence appears from Greenland to China, indicating that this was not just a regional problem.

There’s a lot of speculation about what might have initiated the cold snap, but one explanation I ran across frequently was a meteor impact in the area of theGreat Lakes. This could have caused an extraordinary amount of fresh water to be released through the St. Lawrence valley and into the North Atlantic which, in turn, disrupted the thermohaline circulation of the Earth’s oceans and produced global climate changes.

The graph below depicts the rate of sea level rise (not the actual depth) in centimeters per century over the past 20,000 years. Except for just the last few years (extreme right side), the seas have been experiencing a nearly constant and very gradual rise since about 1,000 B.C. Compare that to the dramatic events of the two most recent “spikes” and you begin to understand how ancient civilizations could have literally disappeared off the face of the earth.

For more information on Younger Dryas I suggest:

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/arch/examples.shtml

http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/mayews01/node6.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data_glacial.html

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q2/211/groupD/page5.html

http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/YoungerDryas.pdf

I’m still looking for a direct sea-level vs. year chart that takes into account the Younger Dryas interval. If you know where I can find one, please drop me a line.

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