Piri Reis Map could point to an ice-free Antarctica in antiquity

Map of the world by Ottoman admiral Piri Reis, drawn in 1513.Only half of the original map survives and is held at the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul.The map synthesizes information from twenty maps, including one drawn by Christopher Columbus of the New World. This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. It is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

The oldest known map of the world was compiled by Ottoman-Turkish admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. He used 10 Arabian sources, 4 maps of India from the Portuguese, and a map of the New World made by Christopher Columbus to compile his map. The map is drawn on gazelle skin.

Only the Western third of the map has survived. It lay undisturbed in the Topkapi Sarayi Library until German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissman discovered it in 1929. According to an online Wikipedia article, Piri Reis Map: 

Amateur historian Gavin Menzies claims in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America that the southern landmass is indeed the Antarctic coastline and was based on earlier Chinese maps. According to Menzies, Admiral Hong Bao charted the coast over 70 years before Columbus as part of a larger expedition under the famous Chinese explorer and admiral Zheng He to bring the world under China’s tribute system.

I became interested in the Piri Reis map while researching background information for my End of the World 2012 Movie. I thought that if the Piri Reis map showed the Antarctica coastline, it meant that one of the sources used in compiling the map had to have been made during the time Antarctica was free of the mile thickness of ice covering it now. If so, it would show evidence of the world undergoing previous cataclysmic events. Perhaps, a pole shift?

Tunguska comet impact in Siberia created a mini end of the world event

Fallen trees at Tunguska, 1927. This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain in Russia.

 On June 30, 1908, a 330-foot comet or meteoroid exploded over the Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia. The 10 to 15 megatons of TNT explosion felled an estimated 80 million trees.

I’ve been researching historical “end of the world” scenarios for my End of the World 2012 Movie. The Tunguska event is the largest comet impact in recorded human history. The shock wave of the blast would likely have registered 5 on the Richter Scale.

If this explosion had occurred over a large metropolitan area, the city would have been destroyed.

Nonetheless, native tribespeople the Evensk, and Russian settlers, who lived in the area, reported seeing a column of light, almost as bright as the sun, moving across the sky accompanied by a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses said that:

The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away. 

Tunguska Event

2012 end of the world in history: dinosaur extinction and Chicxulub Yucatan comet

Badlands near Drumheller, Alberta, where erosion has exposed the KT boundary. From Wikipedia Commons: This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Glenlarson at the english wikipedia project. This applies worldwide.

In editing the End of the World 2012 movie, I’m at the place where I’m looking at previous end of the world scenarios, specifically where I intereview physicist Dr. William Petrachenko on the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Dr. Petrachenko works in the field of geophysics.

It turns out that the dinosaur extinction is associated with a worldwide characteristic in rock strata called the Cretaceous Tertiary Layer or Boundary or K – T Boundary. (This has recently been amended to the K-Pg or Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.) Coincidentally, the K-T Boundary occurs at about 65 million years ago.

As Dr. Petrachenko explains in the movie, at the K-T Layer, scientists have found a higher concentration than is usually found on earth of Iridium. Since comets and asteroids have high concentrations of iridium, the scientists theorized that a huge extraterrestrial object must have hit the earth about 65 million years ago and that the debris or ejecta from the impact would have been carried in the atmosphere all around the earth and fell to the surface creating the K-T Boundary.

Since the extinction of the dinosaurs and this comet/asteroid impact occurred at about the same time–65 million years ago–scientists hypothesized that the comet/asteroid impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

In the photo, above right, rocks above the K-T Boundary are much darker than the lighter-colored rocks below the K-T Boundary. The iridium is found in a narrow band, not visible in this long distance photo, between the two layers.

In the End of the World 2012 Movie, we visit Chicxulub, Yucatan, where the comet exploded 65 million years ago. For more information on the K-T Boundary/K-Pg Boundary, Iridium and the Chicxulub Impact, please see the Wikipedia article, Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.

Mercury Retrograde in Leo is about to begin!

Amazingly, this appears to be a Mercury Retrograde I’m going to love. Usually Merc Retro periods can be amazingly frustrating as far as communication goes, which includes means of communications such as computers, software, and cell phones.

OK, already my desktop computer has gone south. Also, I spent one extremely frustrating day in which I never did figure out why one line among many lines in a PhotoShop image would not show up when I placed the photo into my End of the World 2012 Movie. In the end, I figured out how to show what I wanted to show in another way. Finally, (old wives’ tale: bad luck comes in threes), the third thing: my cell phone modem that connects me to the internet not only would not connect, but it turned out that the cell phone tower needed to be repaired which kept me www-less for a day.

So, I must admit, I have had some Mercury Retrograde-type problems already and Mercury was only in pre-retrograde. The closest planet to the sun has almost stopped moving today and is supposed to begin retrograde motion in a couple of days.

July 15th to August 8th, 2012 Mercury in Leo (retrograde) remind us what we truly love. This respite cycles you back to your own unique story. It’s time to journal, and reflect on your ambitions, how you shine, and what you long to create.

Some serendipity happens that puts you in the spotlight. You reconfirm your talent for leading and encouraging others. You help someone see their own uniqueness. Children, or another kind of pride and joy — like your artistic creation — becomes a preoccupation. This could be time to revive a creative idea, give yourself a pep talk, and make plans to bring it to fruition.

Mercury Retrograde 2012

Only three Maya “books” or codices survived the Spanish conquest of Yucatan

A page from the Dresden Codex showing images from Maya civilization. ~ from Wikipedia commons–this image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

The Maya, an indigenous people of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico plus Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, made folding books written on the inside bark of certain types of fig trees.

Called “codices” (codex in the singular), many were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors and priests.

For example, in July of 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the destruction of all of the codices in the state of Yucatan.

De Landa also destroyed a Maya temple in Izamal, using the stones from the temple to make an elegant convent, which we visit in the Yucatan Travel Movie. Izamal is a gorgeous colonial city only about an hour and a half drive from Chichen Itza and well worth the visit.

The three codices that survived the Spanish conquest are named by the location of the museum where they presently reside.

• The Dresden Codex, is housed in Germany, is made of 74 pages (39 leaves written on both sides), contains descriptions of rituals and astrological information on eclipses of the sun and moon as well as the cycles of Venus.
• To my way of thinking, the Paris Codex, in France, is the most interesting since it deals with the Maya calendar and includes prophecies for various tuns and Katuns.
• The Madrid Codex is the longest at 112 pages and is housed in Spain. Researchers believe it was put together quickly after the Spanish conquest.

Occasionally, hopelessly decayed codices are found in Maya ruins:

Given the rarity and importance of these books, rumors of finding new ones often develop interest. Archaeological excavations of Maya sites have turned up a number of rectangular lumps of plaster and paint flakes, most commonly in elite tombs. These lumps are the remains of codices where all the organic material has rotted away. A few of the more coherent of these lumps have been preserved, with the slim hope that some technique to be developed by future generations of archaeologists may be able to recover some information from these remains of ancient pages.

Maya Codices

Could Doggerland have been Atlantis?

According to an online CBS News – Science article, the underwater land between England and France as well as the land between Scotland and Denmark, were above water until about 5,500 BC. At that time, rising sea levels and a tsunami submerged all of the land except for the remaining British Isles.

Dr. Richard Bates, geophysicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland, says that the now-submerged land provided food for both hunters and gatherers. What’s really exciting is that:

Among fossilized evidence of mammoths and large game animals, divers have found harpoons, flint tools and suspected burial sites they say belonged to residents of the submerged settlement more than 12,000 years ago.

Doggerland, northern Europe’s own lost city of Atlantis, discovered off Scotland

More on the Lost City of Atlantis or What? Doggerland? Submerged off the coast of Scotland

Oil and gas companies searching for fuel below the seafloor are coming up with evidence of a land that was once above water.

For years, fishermen have been dredging up bones in the North Sea.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that geophysicist Richard Bates of the Department of Earth Sciences in St. Andrews, Scotland and his research team are finding promising clues of:

“. . . what may be burial sites, stone monuments, and even mass mammoth graves, which would be evidence of ice age hunting.”

Doggerland, Europe’s lost city of Atlantis discovered

Balling Melons on the 4th

Just in case you’re wondering what I was doing on the 4th of July, let me tell you that for most of the afternoon, I was balling melons--cantaloupes, honeydews, and watermelons. I’ve balled melons before and therefore knew that the activity would exhaust me.

Therefore, just in case you’re wondering why it took me most of the afternoon to ball my melons, let me tell you that it was because I needed to take a rest every once in a while. In fact, that is what I am doing right now.

At this writing, all my melons have been balled with my nifty melon-balling tool. The balls are all chilling in glass containers in the ‘fridge.

Just in case you think I should be all finished, let me tell you that I still have to carve out the watermelon halves so they will become the decorative bowls to hold the melon balls.

And, after that, I am going to lay down and have a really good rest!

Just in case you want to make melon balls for the 4th, or any summertime picnic for that matter, let me tell you that I wish I had consulting this nifty recipe before I started balling my melons. Otherwise, I would have cut open my melons with a decorative edge as in the photos on the recipe site I found on the EHow website in an article called, “How to Make Watermelon Balls.”

If you scroll down, you’ll also see photographs and links to: How to make a fruit salad bowl out of a watermelon; how to carve a watermelon boat; how to carve a watermelon bowl; and most importantly, how to find a sweet watermelon.

OK, enough of my yakking. Time to get back to carving out those watermelon decorative bowls.

What were you doing on the 4th? Or, if you’re in Canada, on the 1st? Dominion Day?

Lost City of Atlantis found between Scotland and Denmark

OK, maybe not the lost city of Atlantis, or, maybe it is. It is an ancient land submerged by the sea, formerly the home of woolly mammoths. Scientists are studying the lost land of Doggerland:

After a 15-year project to unearth the truth about Doggerland, its history has finally been pieced together through painstaking analysis of the bottom of the sea and artefacts brought up from the depths. It was a huge strip of land situated between Scotland and Denmark that existed between 18,000 and 5,500 years BC before being swallowed up by the sea.

Britain’s Real-Life Lost City of Atlantis Found at the Bottom of the North Sea

Missing Nora Ephron

I just saw that Nora Ephron died last week. What a loss. Her movies, such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, are a couple of my favorites. There are some lovely memories of her from friends and colleagues at this link. Do you know she loved to cook? Since Julie and Julia was also hers, it shouldn’t be a surprise. She was 71 and she died from leukemia. Poor thing. She evidently struggled with it for a number of years. Who knew? She kept her illness to herself and only a very few close family members and friends. She’s probably best known for the line, “I’ll have what she’s having,” after Meg Ryan’s fantastic fake orgasm in restaurant in the movie When Harry Met Sally. It feels like a black hole in the space where she used to be. She will be sorely missed.