Authorities in Pennsylvania along with the FBI have been scratching their heads over multiple reports of loud booming sounds in the middle of the night by residents of Bucks and Lehigh Counties.
Following a joint investigation with the FBI, the best authorities have been able to come up with for the ominous booms which began on April 2 is that they were caused by an individual setting off “explosions.”
A statement from local authorities reads:
Since April 2, 2018 over twenty (20) explosions have occurred in the early morning hours (between hours of 0100-0430) in the Upper Bucks County area. Our local, state, and federal Law Enforcement agencies all take these events very seriously and are working dilligently to protect the citizens of our community. Keeping everyone safe is our shared number one priority. Fortunately to date no one has been injured; however, we are attempting to prevent someone from accidentally getting injured by these explosions, including the individual responsible.
Joe HoldenVerified account @JoeHoldenCBS3
THOSE STRANGE BOOMS in Bucks and Lehigh Counties, appear to have been the result of 20 some explosions. That’s what State Police are concluding. But they need help to further unravel this mystery.
@CBSPhilly
Case closed, pack it up Sherlock.
One resident’s account of what happened seems to back up the explosions theory after a boom was heard in Nockamixon Township by resident Nick Zangly, who told the Bucks County Herald “it was one hell of an explosion,” who lives down the street from a 4-foot wide by 1-foot deep cavity, which he alleges opened up after the blast.
Zangli said there was “nothing in the hole, which was filled with water because of heavy rain over the weekend.” Law enforcement came out Monday to investigate the sinkhole but did not respond to any media requests.
Residents have described the noises as something falling out of the sky or an earthquake.
“I thought that somebody was making a tunnel or space junk fell out of the sky,” said Susan Crompton, who lives in Haycock Township.
“From poachers, gunfire, to explosions to a sonic boom,” said Jerry Hertz of the mysterious sound.
KYW-TV said there had been no shortage of theories among residents, but still, no clear answer of the cause.
“It’s a rumble, it actually like rumbles the ground like an earthquake would happen but with a loud like boom,” Crompton added.
“I’ve been in the military, I’ve got experience with explosives, I was a Navy diver and was definitely not a gunshot,” Hertz said.
Meanwhile, Mysterious booms are not just limited to Pennsylvania, as there have been local reports from across the country of booms rocking towns from coast to coast. Likewise, officials have zero answers to provide their citizens, it is hard to prepare for an event if it is not yet identifiable.
This has nothing to do with human impact on climate change, but instead the activity of the sun and how solar cycles impact our climate as well. It’s based on a mathematical model that shows the sun might “quiet” down in the coming years thus impacting our climate as well. This is not a climate change denial article, please read it before commenting.
A few months ago, NASA published a study showing that Antarctica is actually gaining more ice than it is losing. They made the announcement after using satellites to examine the heights of the region’s ice sheet. The findings contradict the prevailing theory that Antarctica has actually been shrinking, however. The paper is titled “Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses” and was published in the Journal of Glaciology.
The authors of this study are from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the cause of this ice gain isn’t entirely known, but a number of theories are mentioned in the paper. It is worth mentioning, however that NASA was blasted by dozens of their own scientists regarding their global warming stance, even though a number of the world’s top scientists have questioned just how much an impact greenhouse gases have on climate change. You can read more about that here. (source)
Perhaps there are other factors contributing to climate change?
Just a few years ago, Antarctic ice extent had reached an all-time high. (source)(source)
There are many theories as to why this is so, and one of them includes the effects of supposed global warming, but not everyone agrees. That’s a completely separate topic, however, and you can learn more about it in the articles linked at the end of this article.
When it comes to climate change, a lot of emphasis is put on human activity, and rightfully so, as our ways here need to change. Perhaps in our fervour to discover our own culpability in this shift, however, we missed a few things along the way? What about the natural cycles of climate change Earth experiences, and has experienced? It’s a scientific fact that fluctuations in the solar cycle impact earth’s global temperature, as do other massive bodies flying in and around our solar system.
Related: Why We Are Living In The Most Important Time In Our History
The most recent research to examine this topic comes from the National Astronomy Meeting in Wales, where Valentina Zharkova, a mathematics professor from Northumbria University (UK), presented a model that can predict what solar cycles will look like far more accurately than was previously possible. She states that the model can predict their influence with an accuracy of 97 percent, and says it is showing that Earth is heading for a “mini ice age” in approximately fifteen years.
According to the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS):
A new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat. The model draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone. Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645. (source)
Baia was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire – the place where the rich and powerful came to carry out their illicit affairs.
Rome’s ultra-wealthy took weekend trips here to party. Powerful statesmen built luxurious villas on its beach, with heated spas and mosaic-tiled pools where they could indulge their wildest desires. One resident even commissioned a nymphaeum – a private grotto surrounded by marble statues, dedicated solely to ‘earthly pleasure’.
More than 2,000 years ago, Baia was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire – a resort town approximately 30km from Naples on Italy’s caldera-peppered west coast that catered to the whims of poets, generals and everyone in between. The great orator Cicero composed speeches from his retreat by the bay, while the poet Virgil and the naturalist Pliny maintained residences within easy reach of the rejuvenating public baths.
It was also the place where the rich and powerful came to carry out their illicit affairs.
“There are many tales of intrigue associated with Baia,” said John Smout, a researcher who has partnered with local archaeologists to study the site. Rumour has it that Cleopatra escaped in her boat from Baia after Julius Caesar was murdered in 44BC, while Julia Agrippina plotted her husband Claudius’ death at Baia so her son Nero could become emperor of Rome.
“She poisoned Claudius with deadly mushrooms,” Smout explained. “But he somehow survived, so that same night, Agrippina got her physician to administer an enema of poisonous wild gourd, which finally did the trick.”
Mineral waters and a mild climate first attracted Rome’s nobility to Baia in the latter half of the 2nd Century BC, and the town was known to them as the Phlegraean (or ‘flaming’) Fields, so named because of the calderas that pockmark the region.
“I visited the site as a boy and the guide poked an umbrella into the ground and steam and lava came out,” Smout recalled.
The calderas were revered by the ancient Greeks and Romans as entrances to the underworld, but they also fuelled a number of technological advancements: the local invention of waterproof cement, a mixture of lime and volcanic rock, spurred construction of airy domes and marbled facades, as well as private fish ponds and lavish bath houses.
But given Baia’s sinful reputation, it is perhaps fitting that the abundance of volcanic activity in the area was also its downfall. Over several centuries, bradyseism, the gradual rise and fall of the Earth’s surface caused by hydrothermal and seismic activity, caused much of the city to sink into a watery grave, where it still sits today.
Tourist interest in the once-popular coastline was only renewed in the 1940s when a pilot shared an aerial photo of an edifice just below the ocean’s surface. Soon, geologists puzzled over boreholes left by molluscs on ruins found near the shore, tell-tale signs that parts of the hillside had once dipped below sea level. Two decades later, Italian officials commissioned a submarine to survey the underwater parts of the city.
What they found was fascinating: since Roman times, underground pressure has caused the land surrounding Baia to continuously rise and fall, pushing the ancient ruins upwards towards the sea’s surface before slowly swallowing them again – a kind of geological purgatory.
The ruins beneath the sea’s surface were the province of just a few intrepid archaeologists until recently. The underwater archaeological site was not formally designated a marine protected area and until 2002, which is when it opened to the public. Since then, 3D-scanning technology and other advances in marine archaeology have offered first-time glimpses into this chapter of antiquity: divers, historians and photographers have captured submerged rotundas and porticos, including the famed Temple of Venus (not a temple, but a thermal sauna) – discoveries that have in turn provided clues to Rome’s most outrageous debauchery.
Because of the undulation of the Earth’s crust, these ruins actually lie in relatively shallow water, at an average depth of 6m, allowing visitors to see some of its eerie underwater structures from a glass-bottomed boat, or videobarca. Local diving centres such as the Centro Sub Campi Flegreo (who partnered with the BBC on a recent documentary about Baia) also offer snorkelling and scuba tours of the submerged city a few kilometres out in the Tyrrhenian Sea. On a calm day, visitors can spot Roman columns, ancient roads and elaborately paved plazas. Statues of Octavia Claudia (Emperor Claudius’ sister) and Ulysses mark the entrance to underwater grottos, their outstretched arms flecked with barnacles.
There’s plenty to see above the water line, as well. In fact, many of the submerged sculptures are actually replicas; the originals can be found up the hill at the Baia Castle, where the Archaeological Superintendency for Campania manages a museum of relics pulled from the sea. Many above-ground Roman ruins are also visible nearby at the Parco Archeologico delle Terme di Baia, the portion of the ancient city still above sea level. Excavated in the 1950s by Amedeo Maiuri, the archaeologist who also unearthed Pompeii and Herculaneum, the on-land historical site features the remains of mosaic terraces and domed bathhouse.
Surrounding the Parco Archeologico delle Terme di Baia, modern Baia is a shadow of its former magnificence, though it still captures the spirit of idleness and pleasure. These days the coastline that was once peppered with mansions and bathhouses features a small marina, a hotel and a handful of seafood restaurants lining a narrow road running north-east toward Naples.
Time may be running out to see this lost relic of ancient Italy’s opulence: seismologists predict further volcanic activity along Baia’s coast in the near future, rendering the city’s fate uncertain once again. Twenty small earthquakes were recorded in the area this past year alone, and talk in recent years has touched on permanently closing the sunken ruins to visitors.
For now, however, visitors can search this underwater city for a hidden entrance – if not to the underworld, then at least to some spectacular subterranean treasures.
Source: 10,000-Year-Old Mysterious Tunnels Discovered in Brazil — There’s Hundreds of Them | Humans Are Free
With permission from
humansarefree.com
June 10, 2017
Hundreds of tunnels — which date back at least 10,000 years — have been discovered in Brazil. Some of the tunnels feature mysterious claw marks’ on the walls.
“There’s no geological process in the world that produces long tunnels with a circular or elliptical cross-section, which branch and rise and fall, with claw marks on the walls,” says a geologist.
“I’ve [also] seen dozens of caves that have inorganic origins, and in these cases, it’s very clear that digging animals had no role in their creation.”
Experts in Brazil have discovered hundreds of underground tunnels which date back over 10,000 years.
Interestingly, experts believe that these mysterious tunnels were NOT carved by humans, but by an extinct ancient species.
The discovery was made by Heinrich Theodor Frank, a geologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul — one of the largest federal universities in Brazil.
As Heinrich was driving on the national Novo Hamburgo highway, he noticed a strange hole of around one meter in diameter at a construction site which caught his attention.
Since he was in a hurry to get home, he did not stop. However, a few weeks later he went back to the same place with his family, where he stopped and asked them to wait a moment in the car while he investigated the tunnels.
“I noticed that it was a tunnel, about 70 centimeters high and a few meters in length. The interior was full of scratches,” explains Theodor Frank to National Geographic.
“When I got home I looked for an explanation on the internet, but I did not find anything.”
“Since then I have heard that the tunnels are huge anthills or that they were created by Indians, Jesuits, slaves, revolutionaries and even bears. Some even talk about a great mythological serpent, which dug the tunnels,” he says.
Trying to get to the bottom of the mystery, Theodor Frank eventually sent some photographs to Marcelo Rasteiro, a member of the Brazilian Society of Speleology, who responded by sending an article about paleoburrows, tunnels excavated by any type of living organism in any geological age.
“For example a worm in the Cambrian, a mollusk in the Mesozoic or a rat in the Pleistocene.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as paleoburrows,” says Frank. “I’m a geologist, a professor, and I’d never even heard of them.”
So who could have dug those terrifying labyrinthine tunnels, with their walls covered with scratches?
“When you explore the burrows you sometimes have the feeling that there is a creature waiting for you after the next curve as if it were the lair of a prehistoric animal,” says Frank in an article published by Discovery.
Certainly, these tunnels were not created by the natives of Brazil.
“The Indians who lived in Brazil before the arrival of the Europeans did not know about the existence of iron and therefore had no tools to dig through the hard rocks in which these tunnels are dug,” explains National Geographic.
Curiously, there are hundreds of these tunnels all over Brazil, although many Curiouslyletely filled with sediment that accumulated after the tunnels were abandoned, but the entries are still distinguished in a circular or elliptical form.
Geologist Amilcar Adamy of the Brazilian Geological Survey has confirmed the discovery of a large complex of 600-meter-long tunnels in the state of Rondonia.
Furthermore, Frank notes that “in neighboring countries such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia we have detected a few caves that could also be paleoburrows. In Argentina, there are many of them, mainly in the cliffs of the Atlantic coast, in Mar del Plata.”
As noted by Alfredo Carpineti from IFLScience, over 2,000 burrows have been found, including one just last Wednesday. Scientists believe they were dug between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, although researchers are yet to properly date them.
Frank says that speleothems, or mineral deposits, growing on burrow walls could be used to calculate an age, although that hasn’t been tried yet either.
Giant Armadillos? Mega-Sloths?
“The biggest giant armadillo had a body width of 80 centimeters, while the tunnels reach widths of 1.4 meters and in addition, the ceiling is full of scratches
“I personally believe they were excavated by land sloths, a group of mammals that became extinct in that area about 10,000 years ago,” says Frank.
“There are large tunnels up to two meters high and four meters wide that were undoubtedly excavated by sloths. We do not know the specific species, but surely the largest ones (megatheriums and eremoterios) were too large to dig,” he added.
“We also do not know what the function of the paleoburrows is, perhaps the climate is an explanation: it was drier and hotter than today and the tunnels were isothermal, but this can hardly explain the complex system of tunnels several hundred meters long, which were most likely inhabited by groups of sloths or armadillos.
“The roofs and walls of many tunnels are polished, probably thanks to the friction of the animals’ fur, which moved through the tunnels for decades or even centuries,” concluded Frank.
“So if a 90-pound animal living today digs a 16-inch by 20-foot borrow, what would dig one five feet wide and 250 feet long?” asks Frank. “There’s no explanation – not predators, not climate, not humidity. I really don’t know.”
However, as noted by Discovery, another mystery is the strange geographic distribution of the tunnels.
The so-called paleoburrows are common in southern parts of Brazil, in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, they are, so far, almost unknown just to the south in Uruguay.
Furthermore, experts note that very few of them have been discovered in northern parts of Brazil, and only a handful of possible burrows have been found in other South American countries.
Source and references:
Ancient-code.com
Get Lost in Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna
This Massive Tunnel in South America Was Dug by Ancient Mega-Sloths
Journal Ichnos
Cover image credit: Amilcar Adamy/CPRM