Analog SFF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Plato also said that Atlantis was 2,500 miles away from Egypt—something that put it somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. But suppose that number was a similar misreading and should have been 250 miles.

  Suddenly, we have a very, very good candidate for Atlantis, right in the eastern Mediterranean: the Aegean island of Santorini.

  Santorini was part of a large volcano called Thera, and was inhabited by outposts of the seafaring Minoan civilization, based in Crete. Thera has been active on and off for hundreds of thousands of years, most dramatically in a blast that was probably the largest volcanic eruption in human history. That blast, in about 1600 B.C.E., blew a large part of the island into the stratosphere and may have set in motion a chain of events that took down the entire Minoan civilization.[8] The date of the eruption doesn't match perfectly with Galanopoulos’ 900 years, but it's not wildly far off, and the blast had to have had major effects throughout the eastern Mediterranean. “That eruption was a mega-event in the middle of a flourishing culture,” says Floyd McCoy, a volcanologist at the University of Hawaii's Windward Collage. “You don't forget that. I think it stuck as a myth, and the myth that best seems to reflect that is Atlantis."

  * * * *

  Sniffing Gas

  As long as we're talking about Greece, let's take a look at one more Greek story: the oracle at Delphi.

  The oracle was a temple, served by priestesses whose prophecies were held in high regard through centuries of Greek culture. According to Plutarch, the women would first descend to the temple basement and breathe sacred fumes emanating from a fissure in the temple floor. Only then would they make their pronouncements.

  But modern historians didn't believe it. There was no doubt the temple existed, but they thought the entire thing, including the fumes, was an ancient hoax. That's because Delphi didn't sit on a volcano that might have produced intoxicating fumes. Instead, the underlying rock was limestone.

  Visiting the temple ruins in the 1980s and ‘90s, however, Zeilinga de Boer noticed a pair of geological faults running through the area, intersecting directly beneath it. Later, he and some colleagues took a better look at the rock, and discovered that the limestone was rich in hydrocarbons. And suddenly, the ancient story made sense: the priestesses were indeed breathing fumes, but they weren't volcanic gases. Rather, they were hydrocarbons baked out of the underlying rocks by subterranean heat and finding their way to the surface through the faults.

  Zeilinga de Boer and a team that eventually included an archaeologist, a geochemist, and a toxicologist, made tests on water drawn from nearby springs. In 2001, they announced their findings in the journal Geology. The fumes at Delphi, they said, were a mix of several gases, but the most important was ethylene. Until recently, it was used as a general anesthetic for surgery, but in smaller doses, it can make you high. The priestesses might as well have been smoking peyote.

  Today, there's not enough gas to notice except in lab tests. But that's not because it's not being produced in the underlying rocks, Zeilinga de Boer's team suggested. More likely, modern well drilling has altered the water table, causing the gas to go elsewhere (and, since entire neighborhoods aren't getting high on it, probably diluting it, as well.)

  * * * *

  Canoes in Trees

  It's hard to say precisely when geomythology became a serious science. The link between Thera, Crete, and Atlantis was suggested as far back as 1939, but even as the theory spread, it was viewed as an exception. A few myths might be backed by something real, but that didn't mean you could expect the same to apply to others.

  "Five years ago, I couldn't do this without destroying my career,” McCoy said in a 2006 telephone interview.

  Perhaps the field has yet to truly make it. It hasn't been hurt, though, by recent findings in the Pacific Northwest, when researchers began to take seriously Indian legends of killer waves.

  The legends describe in considerable detail changes in the shapes of islands and marshes. But they also contain descriptions of how the ocean waters rose and receded, killing people by throwing their canoes into trees.

  It all sounds rather fanciful—enough so that Brian Atwater, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist based at the University of Washington, says that the legends themselves weren't the motivators for the studies that confirmed them. Rather, scientists were starting to become concerned about the possibility of mammoth earthquakes offshore from the Pacific Northwest.

  What they knew was that there was a large subduction zone offshore, similar to the one that would later produce the tsunami that devastated Indonesia. But the Cascadia Subduction Zone was thought to be inactive.

  Then, in the 1980s, geologists started finding signs of sudden land subsidence. Archaeologists discovered fishing camps that had been overrun by waves. Growth-ring dating of trees killed by the event put it in 1699 or 1700.

  That alone was interesting because it correlated with Japan's “Orphan Tsunami,” which damaged several coastal villages on January 27, 1700. The Japanese had long known that tsunamis were triggered by earthquakes. But the Orphan Tsunami had struck with no accompanying temblor (hence its name). At the time, the Japanese were puzzled. Now we know that it started in the Pacific Northwest, then traveled all the way across the ocean to strike Japan. And if it could do that, it could certainly throw canoes into trees.

  This discovery, Atwater says, provides an excellent opportunity for “calibrating” myth against reality. And what it shows is that, despite generations of retelling, the legends retained an amazing amount of truth.

  "Here's an event that occurred almost a hundred years before the first European contact,” he says, “and about 150 years before ethnologists started to write down the traditions of these people. By then, smallpox and other diseases had wiped out large parts of the population that could be telling these stories, so what's left has to be only a fraction of what was around. But still, you have an event that's pretty well established from geology."

  More recently, Lori Dengler, a geology professor at Humboldt State University, found something similar in the aftermath of the deadly tsunami that swept Indonesia in December, 2004.[9]

  In most places, the wave caught people unprepared. But on Simuelue Island, so close to the epicenter that the tsunami struck within eight minutes, there were only seven confirmed deaths out of 78,000 people.

  The reason, says Dengler, is that the island was hit by a similar event in 1907, with massive casualties. The survivors told their children, who told their children, and so on, until, 97 years later, everyone still knew that when the earth shook, it was time to run for high ground. When asked where to go for safety, they all pointed to a hillside, about 100 feet above sea level.

  "That's about where I would have told them to go,” Dengler says. In cultures attuned to them, she'd found, oral traditions can still be extremely accurate.

  So, what's the future? Obviously, there are plenty more myths to be explored. Aztec carvings, for example, indicate a belief that the world was destroyed on four occasions: once by jaguars, once by hurricanes, once by fire, and once by flood.[10]

  Other than the jaguars, Zeilinga de Boer says, the Aztec's disasters are geological events that may also have left identifiable traces. “I suspect that once geologists start getting core samples, the pieces will fall together,” he says.

  Other scientists are taking a literal view of the even more ancient myth of a massive flood, recounted in the Bible as the story of Noah. In 1996, marine scientists Walter Pitman and William Ryan of Columbia University shocked geologists by arguing that the melting of Ice Age glaciers, 7,500 years ago, caused water to cut through what is now the Bosporus Strait into the Black Sea, raising water levels by several hundred feet and inundating vast tracts of below-sea-level lands. Describing these arguments in detail is beyond the scope of this article, but they are the stuff of continued debate at geophysics meetings, not to mention websites.

  * * * *

  In general, thi
s appears to be how the field of geomythology is developing. Few if any myths have led to new geological discoveries. Rather, the geology has helped firm up the history surrounding the myths.

  "We find things and then go back to the mythology and say, “My gosh,'” says McCoy.

  The infant field's next step, he believes, is to reverse the current approach and start parsing old legends for clues to previously unrecognized geological events. “I think that's just around the corner,” he says. “It's going to depend on a much closer dialog with historians."

  Still, geologists should find the old stories to be great sources for ideas. “It's like candyland,” he says.

  Copyright © 2009 Richard A. Lovett

  * * * *

  [FOOTNOTE 1: For more on the history of Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Adams, see Fire Mountains of the West, by Stephen L. Harris, 1988, or any of the more recent Pacific Northwest books in the Roadside Geology series.]

  [FOOTNOTE 2: The quiz, comprised of twenty questions, first appeared in an article by Jim Dodge in Coevolution Quarterly, Winter 1981.]

  [FOOTNOTE 3: Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.]

  [FOOTNOTE 4: Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, Earthquakes in Human History: the Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions, 2005.]

  [FOOTNOTE 5: See www.helike.org.]

  [FOOTNOTE 6: If the name sounds familiar, Soter previously worked with Carl Sagan on the PBS series Cosmos.]

  [FOOTNOTE 7: The hunt for Helike is described in detail in magazine articles, websites, and a BBC documentary. For one example, see Tom Gidwitz, “City of Poseidon,” Archaeology, Jan/Feb 2004, reprinted on www.tomgidwitz.com/main/poseidon.htm.]

  [FOOTNOTE 8: See: R. A. Lovett, “Geology, Geohistory, and ‘Psychohistory': The (Continuing) Debate]

  [FOOTNOTE 9: See R. A. Lovett, “The Great Sumatran Earthquakes of 2004-5,” Analog, October 2006.]

  [FOOTNOTE 10: These carvings are much in the news because some people believe they predict the end of the world in 2012.]

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: FROM THE GROUND UP by Marie DesJardin

  Sometimes there are second chances....

  Carrie hadn't packed. She'd suspected she might have to, but she didn't want to jinx the funding decision by preparing for the expected result. Now, the packing went surprisingly fast. How much easier it is to fold up one's life and go home than it is to try something new.

  "It won't last forever."

  Carrie ignored her roommate. The pictures from the slim bookshelf went into the case on top of her neatly folded shirts. She laid her uniform on top to cushion them.

  "Funding cycles come and go,” Allison continued. “NASA will get its act together, and manned exploration of space will continue. They can't do it all with robots."

  The bookshelves and drawers were clean. Carrie hadn't brought much with her. The largest part, the part that weighed most heavily, was inside her.

  Allison asked, “Are you going to try JPL?"

  Carrie zipped her suitcase. “I'm going home."

  "To Minnesota? That's good. Take a break, visit your parents—"

  "I meant I'm going to my aunt's old house."

  Allison paused. “Didn't your aunt die?"

  "The house is there."

  "It's in the middle of the boonies. It's probably falling apart."

  "It is."

  "Then why?"

  Carrie picked up her suitcase. “I want to see the sky."

  "There's sky in California, kiddo. Why don't you come home with me? My folks would be glad to put you up. I don't want you brooding—"

  "I'm not brooding."

  Allison threw up her hands. “Fine. Go and see the Minnesota sky. But call me before you sink into a pool of depression."

  "I will."

  Carrie faced her roommate. Curly-haired, dusky-toned Allison, her skin smooth and her intelligence shining in her dark, compassionate eyes. She's our best, Carrie thought. They had the best of us in their hands, and they just sent us away.

  Allison seemed to read her thoughts. “They'll change their minds. They have to."

  "That's the trouble. They start, they stop—but when will we actually go?"

  "Houston isn't the whole industry. We should try for JPL now, before every other former candidate does the same thing."

  "I know. But first, I need to—"

  "—see the sky. I heard.” Allison sighed. “Do what you have to. Good luck."

  But Carrie wasn't going home to see the sky. She was going to see the ground.

  * * * *

  Children don't tell. They cover things up.

  Carrie was eight when she saw the spaceship. There was never a moment's doubt in her mind that it was a spaceship. Even today, she could see the image as clearly as if it had just happened:

  Carrie, walking through the long grass behind her aunt's house, her pudgy toes naked against the brown soil that anchored the strong blades. The break in the grass, the scrape in the mud, the tiny crater where the object had come to rest, half buried in the earth.

  There was no metal; this wasn't a human spaceship. But the tragedy was clear. Sometimes Carrie came across baby rabbits, huddled together in their nest of grass. But these things were unlike any she had seen before, all writhing limbs and colors that, while emphatically different from other beings on Earth, were clearly living creatures. But so tiny. The entire impact site was no larger than a basketball. The inhabitants were oddly shaped and naked, twisting within the shattered globe. The shell fragments looked soft and translucent, scattered among the wreckage.

  She didn't know what to do, so Carrie crouched next to the depression and watched the tiny visitors move. She expected them to squeak, like kittens, but they made no noise. Carrie poked one of the clear shell fragments with a fingertip; it was moist and bent beneath her touch. She took her finger away and wiped it on the grass.

  Her aunt's house seemed a vast distance away. If her dad had been home, she would have told him. But her mom was yakking with her sister, and wouldn't want to investigate something peculiar in the grass.

  "You'd have done better to let it be,” she had said the last time Carrie had brought home a baby rabbit, intending to feed it. And her mom had been right, because the rabbit had died within a day. If Carrie couldn't save a baby rabbit, how could she save something that was already so hurt?

  The things were still moving when Carrie took herself in for dinner. All through the meal, helpless forms walked through her mind. When Carrie hurried out again afterwards, it took her some time to find the correct spot in the field. She resumed her vigil. One by one, the forms stopped moving. Carrie stayed by them until it was dark, and her mom's repeated calls drew her inside.

  The next morning it was over. The minuscule remains melted into the ground—crew, spaceship, and all. She might almost have dismissed the entire episode as a dream, had not every visit presented the evidence of her failure in the form of barren earth. As the years passed, the event became so unutterably huge that Carrie could never bring herself to mention it. Her doubts aside, she was ashamed over her cowardice in never even trying to help the strange visitors she had seen.

  When her aunt moved into a group home, Carrie bought the property with her mother's help. No individual could afford to be a farmer anymore, but Carrie's mom was pleased that the property would not be turned over to an agricultural conglomerate. Carrie told no one the real reason why she had to have the land; the unmarked grave could not be pulverized into nonexistence. It was the least Carrie could do to honor the unacknowledged dead. Eventually she went into the astronaut program, because she knew that ot
her beings were out there. But she never told anyone that, either.

  * * * *

  Carrie hugged herself as she walked out the back of the abandoned house towards the field. The grass was shorter now, brown and dry. All around her, the monotonous tilled fields boasted stubby lumps of drought-resistant cabbage. Clouds hung heavily in the sky, grumbling and threatening rain that rarely came. The air was muggy, but the mosquitoes mercifully few. Perhaps they were dying off, as farm animals had all but vanished from the scene.

  Carrie experienced the usual rush of panic when she thought that this time she had lost the crash site for good. Then, out of ground she was certain she had already trodden, sprang the familiar configuration: the slight tilt to the plain, the scrape through the dead grass that now revealed rocks rather than roots, the elliptical stain of the crash site. As always, no grass grew on the site. It had been almost twenty years, and still the ground was bare.

  Guilt mingled with melancholy. Carrie had done what any eight-year-old girl would have done: scattered soil over the melted remains and marked the spot with a stick. Adult Carrie knew she should have done so much more. She should have told her parents. Even if they couldn't have saved the travelers, at least they would be a known part of our universe. No one would cut back on space exploration funding if there was something so immediate and important to investigate. But the evidence was long gone. What could grown Carrie do now? All a belated announcement would accomplish would be to dash her hopes of joining the space program forever. As far as she knew, NASA wasn't fond of taking on astronauts who believed they'd seen little green men.

  Carrie stared at the vacant spot, mulling her thoughts. A patch of earth; all that was left was a patch of earth. Such an insufficient memorial to mark the end of so many dreams.

  Her eyes narrowed. Standing alone among the hissing grasses, idly listening to the rumble of thunder, it struck her: why did the grass never grow back? There had been rain enough to nourish the tough sprouts underfoot. Even the roundish crater had started drifting down the slight incline over the years, more evidence of water flow. Yet the soil on the site never bore seed.