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Recent sonar surveys off the
southeastern coast of the United States have detected dozens of broad furrows
on the seafloor—trenches that were carved by icebergs during the last ice age,
researchers suggest.
The channels, roughly parallel to the
coast, are between 10 and 100 meters wide and typically less than 10 m deep,
says Jenna C. Hill, an oceanographer at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C.
She and her team discovered the enigmatic features while conducting
oceanographic surveys about 100 kilometers off Georgetown, S.C., in the summer
of 2006. Waters in the area range between 170 and 220 m deep, she notes.
Most of the trenches run along
straight paths for several kilometers, and one lengthy furrow stretches almost
20 km. Short berms alongside each groove are presumably composed of material
that was plowed aside when the channels were carved, says Hill.
The seafloor features generally run in
a southwest-northeast direction. However, the researchers noticed that some of
the channels they discovered during a second survey last summer ended with a
semicircular pit at their southwestern terminus. Suddenly, says Hill, the
features made sense: Icebergs had plowed the furrows, and pits marked the sites
where the ice masses became grounded and later melted.
The seafloor culs-de-sac indicate that
the currents driving the icebergs flowed to the southwest, opposite to
prevailing currents today. At present, warm waters of the northeast-flowing
Gulf Stream bathe the region, says Hill. However, she and her colleagues
suggest that an offshore shift in the Gulf Stream at the height of the last ice
age—when sea levels were more than 100 m lower than they are now—would have
allowed glacially fed, iceberg-rich coastal currents to penetrate this far
south. Hill and her colleagues presented their findings last month in San
Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The team's theory "makes
dynamical sense," says John M. Bane, Jr., an oceanographer at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Even today, he says, a seafloor
feature about 100 km southwest of the berg-scoured region—a broad area called
the Charleston Bump—can cause instabilities in the Gulf Stream that deflect the
current offshore for a few weeks at a time, causing reversals in the coastal
current. At the height of the last ice age, when sea levels were substantially
lower, the Gulf Stream may have been more frequently, if not permanently,
deflected offshore.
Most of the wild goats that ravaged
this famous archipelago, denuding some islands of their vegetation, have been
hunted down. The same goes for the wild pigs that ate turtle eggs and killed
small animals. Now comes the biggest problem of all -- people like me.
Tourism has brought prosperity but
it's also creating a new set of problems. Migrants are coming from the
impoverished Ecuadorian mainland to work in the travel industry. The residents
and tourists must be serviced by an ever-growing fleet of cargo ships and
airplanes, which are bringing invasive species as unwanted hitchhikers.
In April, Ecuador's president, Rafael
Correa, declared the Galapagos, an island chain 600 miles offshore, in imminent
danger. He also raised the possibility of restrictions on tourism. Pointing to
unsustainable tourism development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization has put the Galapagos on its "World Heritage in
Danger" list. Fewer than 4% of Unesco's sites are on this list. They could
eventually lose World Heritage designation -- and the tourism draw that goes
with it -- if changes aren't made.
The place to see giant tortoises is
not in the Galapagos National Park, but on private tortoise reserves on Santa
Cruz Island.
"The big problem is that the
Galapagos was a formerly isolated island group that suddenly became part of the
whole world scene," says David Blanton, executive director of the
nonprofit International Galapagos Tour Operators Association.
The other-worldliness of the Galapagos
-- a moonscape inhabited by creatures that exist nowhere else on earth and act
like no others -- is what gives the islands their fascination. The isolation of
the Galapagos made it an ideal laboratory for the theory of evolution. Species
arriving by air or ocean currents had to adapt to the unique conditions of the
islands, which were formed by volcanos rising from the sea bed. This inspired
Charles Darwin to draw up his theory in the mid-1800s -- that only the fittest
survive by gradually changing their physical characteristics to adapt to their
surroundings.
The flightless cormorants, for
instance, a bird native to the Galapagos, exchanged their ability to fly for
stronger legs to enhance their swimming and diving prowess. The marine iguanas,
the world's only seagoing lizard, developed nasal glands to excrete salt.
Many of these native animals,
particularly the large, scaly iguanas, give a prehistoric aura to the
landscape. This is made more dramatic by the volcanic craters in the distance,
the beds of lava dotted with lakes and interspersed with patches of cacti. The
only sounds are those of nature -- the calls of birds, the barking of male sea
lions establishing dominance, the grunting of giant tortoises.
Although right on the Equator, the
cold Humboldt current, which flows by the Galapagos, provides teeming ocean
life that supports many of the islands' species. The snorkeling here is
distinguished not only by the large variety of fish, but by the chance to swim
alongside tame sea lions, penguins and large sea turtles.
The islands' fragile ecosystem can be
easily disrupted, particularly as the increasing number of planes and ships
landing in the Galapagos bring foreign species. Whether insects, snakes or
feral cats and dogs, the invaders can wreak havoc by destroying plants and
other food sources, eating eggs or attacking birds or mammals.
Fire ants, for instance, have been
discovered aboard ships that come from Ecuador and are small enough to slip
through quarantine, says Charlotte Causton, head of the terrestrial
invertebrate program for the Charles Darwin Foundation, a nonprofit group
devoted to conserving the Galapagos. "They radiate out like an army,"
she says of the ants, which wipe out everything in their path including eggs
and vegetation. Increasing quarantine inspections would help combat the
problem, but inspections have dropped 20% in the past five years as the
government has committed less money, says Ms. Causton.
This isn't the only problem, says
Robert Bensted-Smith, a conservationist based in Quito, Ecuador, who for five
years headed the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos. Many new
settlers to the islands become commercial fishermen, fishing legally to supply
the tourist trade or illegally for shark fins to send to Asia, all of which has
an adverse impact on the marine ecosystem. Ships contribute to pollution, and
their anchors damage the sea bottom. Solid-waste disposal creates dumps that
can be breeding grounds for invasive species.
The threat comes despite the fact that
Galapagos National Park, which encompasses more than 96% of the land on 19 islands,
could serve as a textbook example of environmental consciousness. No tourist
can set foot in the park without a guide, and groups are limited to 16 people.
The ships that carry 100 passengers, the maximum allowed, have at least six or
seven guides. Groups and their guides go ashore in separate inflatable boats,
largely being kept out of each other's way on land. On their morning and
afternoon excursions, passengers have to stay on designated trails, with no
toilet facilities and no smoking or eating allowed.
For tourists, no matter how much
they've read about the Galapagos, it is astonishing to see animals, reptiles
and birds that have no fear of humans. They will allow you to come right up to
them, since they haven't experienced humans as a threat. The guides rigidly
enforce the rule of no interaction between visitors and wildlife -- no feeding,
no petting, no noises to get them to turn around and pose for a picture.
Park authorities are putting
restrictions on islands that are being degraded by overuse. On Daphne Island,
for instance, only one group of 16 visitors is allowed each month because the
few trails erode easily.
Because of the restrictions, there is
never a feeling of being overwhelmed by a flood of tourists as, for instance,
at Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The stark volcanic
islands, whose rugged trails sometimes require rock-hopping or balancing on
slippery surfaces, provide a wilderness experience that isn't marred by being
part of a 100-passenger ship.
The ship I sailed on, Galapagos
Explorer II, is the largest allowed in the islands and one of the most
luxurious. These big cruise ships have come in for criticism from
environmentalists for bringing a new type of tourist, more interested in luxury
and in going to a trendy place.
But if the Explorer was an accurate
indicator, any allegation that the passengers were more interested in cocktails
on-deck than in Darwinism didn't hold water. Some of the passengers were
fanatics, attending onboard lectures day and night -- with topics ranging from
saving the oceans to the life of penguins. Armed with high-powered binoculars
and guidebooks, the birdwatchers were a particularly hardy breed, sometimes
picking out distant birds that the guides had missed.
And while the ship was certainly
comfortable, the 6:30 a.m. daily wakeup call, the difficult hikes, and the
absence of conventional cruise-ship entertainment like live music or nightclubs
were hardly cushy. It presented an opportunity to devote each day to seeing and
studying the Galapagos, and the ability to put aside all the usual distractions
of daily life proved exhilarating.
Some environmentalists say President
Correa's declaration of imminent danger is a positive sign. The Correa
government took over in January 2007 and hasn't yet introduced any measures
that directly affect tourists. But things are starting to change. The new
governor of the Galapagos, known as a dedicated environmentalist, headed the
national park for eight years.
Environmentalists say that the new
Correa government -- unlike previous administrations, where politics and
corruption frequently stifled efforts to protect the islands -- is showing a
willingness to enforce existing regulations and consider new ones. "The
government took ownership of the problems of the Galapagos, and this is making
change possible," says Mr. Bensted-Smith, the conservationist based in
Quito.
Steps are now being taken to tighten
quarantine procedures and to keep out illegal migrants, says Mr. Bensted-Smith.
The government is discussing subjects that were formerly off limits, such as
stopping local boat owners from selling their tourist licenses, which can be
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to outsiders. The government is also
considering doubling the entrance fee for the national park to $200 a person,
which would provide more money for conservation activities.
But the biggest problem so far remains
unsolved: what to do about the flood of tourists. "It's not a simple
solution, because to limit tourism will be to limit income," says Mauricio
Castillo, an official for Unesco in Quito. In addition to restricting the
number of visitors, he says that ways to channel more tourist revenue to the
local islanders are now being considered, as well as raising the costs of a
Galapagos trip, so that higher prices will dampen tourist numbers but still
provide enough revenue.
Some of the passengers on the Explorer
were facing dilemmas of their own about visiting. Several of them said that
they had traveled to the Galapagos this year specifically because of President
Correa's declaration.
"I've always wanted to come to
the Galapagos," said a German physician, who asked that his name not be
used because he didn't want to be painted as a villain. "We heard tourism
will be restricted in the future, so we came now."
As Iowa Republicans prepared to caucus
yesterday, polls showed Mike Huckabee, the Southern Baptist
minister-turned-politician, leading in some polls and placing a close second to
Mitt Romney in others. The core of Mr. Huckabee's support, of course, comes
from evangelical voters. Couching his policy positions in the language of faith
and morality, Mr. Huckabee portrays himself as the dream candidate of the
religious right. In October, he boasted to a gathering of conservative
Christian activists: "I don't come to you, I come from you." The
"language of Zion," he said, was "his mother tongue and not a
recently acquired second language." Echoing the Gospels, he told the Des
Moines Register editorial board that the essence of what made him tick was:
"Do unto others as you would have done unto you." He admitted that
his faith shapes his policy, but "if [voters] understand in what way, I
think that they will say 'good, that's the kind of policy we would like.'
"
But one wonders whether his newfound
supporters would really say that if they took a close look at his policies.
With increasing frequency, Mr. Huckabee invokes his faith when advocating
greater government involvement in just about every aspect of American life. In
doing so, Mr. Huckabee has actually answered the prayers of the religious left.
Since John Kerry's defeat in 2004 at
the hands of at least a few "values voters," the Democratic Party has
been trying to take back God, even launching a Faith in Action initiative at
the Democratic National Committee. Meanwhile, a small but organized group of
liberal religious leaders and faith-based political activists has been trying
to convey the message that, as one recent book had it, "Jesus rode a
donkey." They argue that increasing the government's role in the fight
against global warming, poverty and economic inequality is a biblical
imperative. They usually de-emphasize the importance of abortion and gay
marriage in their agendas, lest they offend the secularist wing of the party.
Democrats have made some inroads with
evangelical voters. A recent Pew poll showed that the percentage of Americans
who see the party as friendly to religion has increased to 30% from 26% since
2006. But no one has articulated the message of the religious left more
effectively than Mr. Huckabee.
In August, he told a group of
Washington reporters that the application of his faith to politics must include
concerns for the environment, poverty and hunger. "It can't just be about
abortions and same-sex marriage," he said. "We can't ignore that
there are kids every day in this country that literally don't have enough food
and adequate drinking water in America."
As governor, he championed the ARKids
First, which extended free health insurance not only to children of the working
poor but to some lower middle-class families. He pleased teachers unions with his
consistent opposition to school choice and voucher programs. He satisfied labor
by signing into law a minimum-wage hike of 21%. "Inasmuch as ye have done
it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" --
Mr. Huckabee's oft-cited scriptural justification for growing government --
proved costly for Arkansans, who saw government spending double and their taxes
rise about a half-billion dollars during his tenure.
It's unlikely that Mr. Huckabee, as
president, would be able to shepherd a federal marriage amendment through the
House, the Senate and the state legislatures, but signing into law a
cap-and-trade system ostensibly aimed at limiting global warming (something he
has called a "moral issue") would be much easier. If he wanted to
push protectionist "fair trade" policies and a greater federal
government role in health care, a Democratic Congress would be more than
willing to let him live out his faith on the taxpayers' dime.
Looking at the past 30 years of
American politics, many on the religious right reasonably assume that
candidates who speak openly about their faith are conservatives, but that
hasn't always been the case. Jimmy Carter is the most prominent recent example
of left-leaning piety. The author Gary Scott Smith, in "Faith and the
Presidency," reminds us that President Franklin D. Roosevelt even offered
scriptural justification for the New Deal.
Speaking to the Federal Council of
Churches of Christ in America, in 1933, FDR explained that the "object of
all our striving. . . should be to help citizens realize the abundant life
Christ said he came to bring." According to Mr. Smith, "Roosevelt
wanted to ensure that 'all elements of the community' had an equitable share of
the nation's resources. The federal government's social planning, he contended,
was 'wholly in accord with the social teachings of Christianity.' " It is
not hard to imagine Mr. Huckabee -- standing at a podium in the Rose Garden to
announce a raft of government programs -- talking in exactly this way.
In the United States, the only two
major carriers that use the technology compatible with European networks are
AT&T and T-Mobile. As to which has better coverage in the U.S., my own
anecdotal experience is that this varies greatly depending on where you are,
and that neither has coverage that's as good as Verizon's in as many major
cities. However, Verizon (like Sprint) uses a technology that isn't compatible
with European networks, though it has one or two phone models that include both
technologies.
When producers initially began mapping
out season 16 — yes, 16! — of Survivor, they considered making it their second
All-Stars edition. But then they considered something else. ''None of us felt
like a full-on All-Stars was the right choice, because we did it once and since
then so many other shows have done it,'' says host Jeff Probst. ''It felt like
we needed a twist.'' And when has this seminal reality show not embraced a
twist? Enter the Fans vs. Favorites concept of Survivor: Micronesia (debuting
Feb. 7 on CBS at 8 p.m.), featuring one tribe of former Survivor standouts, and
another tribe of newbies who idolize the players they are about to compete
against.
So who was lucky enough to make the
cut? The Favorites tribe features contestants going all the way back to season
7, including two from the recently completed Survivor: China — gravedigger
James Clement and the person who engineered his ouster, Amanda Kimmel.
Survivor: Fiji sends its most popular player, 55-year-old Yau-Man Chan, while
the Cook Islands season is responsible for three contestants: flirt-tastic
Parvati Shallow, triple-crossing Jonathan Penner, and challenge dominator Ozzy
Lusth. Rounding out the tribe is Survivor: Panama 's Cirie Fields, Vanuatu's
Eliza Orlins and Ami Cusack, and Survivor's biggest villain ever: Pearl Islands
' Jon Dalton (a.k.a. Jonny Fairplay), who once famously faked his own
grandmother's death to further himself in the game. ''You can't do the season
and not invite your most notorious person,'' says Probst. ''And Fairplay
delivered, I will say that.'' Does that mean he delivers a victory? Don't bet
on it, laughs Probst. ''This guy is no threat to win this game — zero.''
No people from the highly regarded
Palau or lowly regarded Guatemala seasons made the trip. That is in large part
because two popular contestants — Stephenie LaGrossa and Bobby Jon Drinkard —
already appeared in both those seasons, and Palau's winner, Tom Westman,
declined to participate. (No other past winners were chosen.) Survivor:
Micronesia was shot on many of the same beaches as the Palau season, and will
also feature the return of Exile Island, which was absent from Survivor: China.
The Fans taking on the Survivor
two-timers include a large-and-in-charge firefighter (Joel Anderson), a beauty
pageant coach (Chet Welch), a golf course vendor (Kathleen Sleckman), and a man
who scoops ice cream for a living in Hell…Michigan, that is (Erik Reichenbach).
In contrast to recent seasons, where contestants were heavily recruited and
largely unfamiliar with the program, the new players of Micronesia are all
followers of the show. How they fare against their heroes remains to be seen.
The effects of the Indian Ocean
tsunami of December 2004 are only too well known: It knocked the hell out of
Aceh Province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leveling buildings,
scattering palm trees, and wiping out entire villages. It killed more than
160,000 people in Aceh alone and displaced millions more. Similar scenes of
destruction were repeated along the coasts of Southeast Asia, India, and as far
west as Africa. The magnitude of the disaster shocked the world.
What the world did not know was that
the 2004 tsunami—seemingly so unprecedented in scale—would yield specific clues
to one of the great mysteries of archaeology: What or who brought down the
Minoans, the remarkable Bronze Age civilization that played a central role in
the development of Western culture?
Europe’s first great culture sprang up
on the island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea, and rose to prominence some 4,000
years ago, flourishing for at least five centuries. It was a civilization of
sophisticated art and architecture, with vast trading routes that spread Minoan
goods—and culture—to the neighboring Greek islands. But then, around 1500 B.C.,
the Minoan world went into a tailspin, and no one knows why.
In 1939, leading Greek archaeologist
Spyridon Marinatos pinned the blame on a colossal volcanic eruption on the
island of Thera, about 70 miles north of Crete, that occurred about 1600 B.C.
The event hurled a plume of ash and rock 20 miles into the stratosphere,
turning daylight into pitch darkness over much of the Mediterranean. The
explosion was recently estimated to be 10 times as powerful as the 1883
eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia, which obliterated 300 towns and villages and
killed at least 36,000 people. So extreme was the Thera eruption that many
writers linked it to Plato’s legend of Atlantis, the magnificent island city
swallowed up by the sea. Marinatos’s theory was bolstered in 1967 when he dug
up the ruins of Akrotiri, a prosperous Minoan town on Thera that had been
buried in volcanic ash. Akrotiri became famous as a Bronze Age Pompeii because
the ash preserved two-story dwellings, exquisite frescoes, and winding streets
almost intact.
On further examination, though, the
ruins did not confirm the theory. It turned out that the pottery on Akrotiri
was not from the final phase of Minoan culture; in fact, many Minoan
settlements on Crete continued to exist for at least a generation or two after
the Thera cataclysm. Archaeologists concluded that the Minoans had not only
survived but thrived after the eruption, expanding their culture until they
were hit by some other, unknown disaster—perhaps some combination of fire,
earthquake, or foreign invader. Thera’s impact, it seemed, had been
overestimated. But startling new evidence is forcing archaeologists to rethink
the full fury of the Thera explosion, the natural disaster it may have triggered,
and the nature of the final blow to the once-great Minoan civilization.
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Each summer, thousands of tourists
encounter the Minoans at the spectacularly restored ruins of Knossos, an
11-acre complex four miles south of Crete’s capital, Heraklion.
Late-19th-century excavations by Sir Arthur Evans revealed Knossos to be a
vast, intricately engineered, multistory building, complete with flushing
toilets, statuettes of bare-breasted priestesses, and frescoes of athletes
vaulting over bulls. In 1900, Evans discovered an impressive stone throne, from
which he believed the legendary King Minos and his descendants had presided over
Bronze Age Crete. In the 1980s, however, a new generation of archaeologists,
including Joseph Alexander “Sandy” MacGillivray, a Montreal-born scholar at the
British School at Athens, began questioning many of Evans’s assumptions.
Smaller-scale versions of Knossos have turned up at nearly every Minoan
settlement across Crete, and scholars now suspect there was no single king but
rather many independent polities.
MacGillivray also became interested in
how the civilization ended. At Palaikastro, in the island’s far northeastern
corner, MacGillivray and his colleague Hugh Sackett have excavated seven blocks
of a Minoan town of perhaps 5,000 inhabitants, their plastered and painted
houses arranged in a network of tidy paved and drained streets. One striking find
was the foundations of a fine mansion, paved with fancy purple schist and white
limestone and designed around an airy central courtyard “of Knossian
pretensions,” as MacGillivray puts it. “But after the house was destroyed by an
earthquake, it was abandoned and never rebuilt, and that preserved some things
we had a hard time explaining.”
The house was dusted with a powdery
gray ash, so irritating that the diggers had to wear face masks. Chemical
analysis showed that the ash was volcanic fallout from the Thera eruption, but
instead of resting in neat layers, the ash had washed into peculiar places: a
broken, upside-down pot; the courtyard’s drain; and one long, continuous film
in the main street outside. It was as if a flash flood had hosed most of the ash
away, leaving these remnants behind. Some powerful force had also flipped over
several of the house’s paving slabs and dumped fine gravel over the walls—but
this part of the site lies a quarter of a mile from the sea and far from any
stream or river.
That wasn’t the only oddity. Another
building “looked like it had been flattened, the whole frontage facing the sea
had been torn off, and it made no sense. And we asked ourselves, could a wave
have done this?” MacGillivray says.
The strangest and most significant
find, however, was a soil layer down by the beach that looked like nothing
MacGillivray had ever seen in four decades as a field archaeologist. A
horizontal band of gravel about a foot thick was stuffed with a mad jumble of
broken pottery, rocks, lumps of powdery gray ash, and mashed-up animal teeth
and bones. Perhaps an exceptionally violent storm had inflicted this chaos,
MacGillivray considered, but he began to suspect that a tsunami was the more
likely culprit.
The statue at Mallia may have been
smashed and burned during an
uprising against the Minoan elite.
MacGillivray invited Hendrik Bruins to
Palaikastro. The Dutch-born geoarchaeologist and human ecologist had a
reputation as a skillful analyst of the thorny dating controversies that beset archaeology
in the Middle East, but figuring out the chaotic layer overlooking the beach
presented a novel scientific challenge. “Identifying a tsunami deposit is a
completely new field,” Bruins explains. “Until the early 1990s, earth
scientists didn’t even recognize that tsunamis do more than just destroy the
coast—they leave distinctive deposits behind as well. I needed to do a lot of
different tests to convince myself, as well as my colleagues, that we were
dealing with a tsunami and not something else, like debris from a storm surge.”
Another building looked like it had been
flattened. Could a wave have done this?
Bruins sent thin sections of the
chaotic deposit to micropaleontologist Chaim Benjamini, a colleague at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Benjamini identified the tiny
round shells of foraminifera and fragments of red coralline –algae; these marine organisms
suggested that the ocean, rather than a river or a flash flood, had been
involved. If the marine organisms had been scooped up from below sea level and
dumped on the elevated promontory, something much bigger than a storm surge
must have pounded the coast of ancient Crete.
The strange pattern of gravel deposits
in the town offered further evidence of a deep oceanic disturbance. Then there
were lumps of gray ash in the beach layer, “resembling unstirred instant-soup
lumps at the bottom of a cup,” according to Bruins. He sent samples of these
lumps to two state-of-the-art geochemistry labs in Germany, which analyzed the
sample’s geochemical signature. The results of both tests were identical: a
perfect match between Theran ash and the “soup lumps” on the beach.
Finally, there was the question of
when all this disruption occurred. Bruins sent fragments of cattle bones and
seashells from the chaotic layer to the radiocarbon dating lab at the
University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Because of well-known problems in
calibrating dates from 3,500 years ago, he knew the lab would be unable to pin
down the exact calendar age of the samples, but the uncalibrated measured age
of the cattle bones closely matched the latest equivalent dates for the
cataclysm on Thera.
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
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Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
All the clues pointed to one answer: A
giant wave had struck Palaikastro Bay while freshly fallen ash from Thera was
still lying about, inundating the town for miles inland and streaking it with
strange patterns of ash. But could even a giant wave be big enough to wipe out
an entire civilization?
MacGillivray consulted Costas
Synolakis, an energetic Greek-born earth scientist at the University of
California at Los Angeles, where he pioneered the predictive computer model
used by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. Synolakis’s first
attempts to model tsunamis in the early 1990s began as a solitary exercise.
Everything changed after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Synolakis visited
Banda Aceh, the city in northwestern Sumatra closest to the epicenter of the
undersea quake, where hundred-foot waves had destroyed a city of more than
150,000 people in minutes. “It was a surreal, absurdist landscape,” he says.
“It took an effort of imagination to conceive that people had ever lived
there.” Almost overnight, Synolakis’s expertise in computer modeling of
tsunamis became a focus of worldwide scientific and media attention.
In 2000, Synolakis had con- sulted on
a study to model a hypothetical Minoan tsunami. He found that no matter how
steep the waves were when they started out at Thera, they dissipated quickly,
reaching only three to nine feet at most when they hit Crete, some 70 miles
away. The study concluded that such waves could have been “disruptive,” but not
devastating, to Minoan Crete.
Synolakis was still thinking that way
when he visited Palaikastro in May 2006. Then MacGillivray took him down to the
beach. “The moment I looked at that debris layer, I was absolutely stunned,”
Synolakis says. “The image that came to me, right then and there, is what I saw
everywhere after the December 2004 tsunami: a blanket of cultural debris,
broken dishes, broken glass, bits of bone, people’s belongings scattered
everywhere. It looked exactly like that kind of debris carpet, and you don’t
get it in a smaller tsunami. The presence of this chaotic deposit suggested
that the tsunami was at least three or four meters [10 to 13 feet] at the
shoreline.” What had begun as a casual visit now turned into a full-blown
research project. Synolakis hired a boat and took depth measurements of the
seabed in Palaikastro Bay. When he tested the hillside behind the Minoan town
to establish how far the wave had penetrated inland, he found what appeared to
be more layers of chaotic debris at an astounding 90 feet above sea level.
About 60 miles to the west of
Palaikastro, near the palace of Mallia, the research team found yet another
strikingly similar chaotic deposit. Plugging in all the new data, Synolakis
drastically revised his tsunami model. “When we put it all together,” he says,
“we’re looking at a wave that’s on the order of 15 meters [50 feet] when it
hits the shore at Palaikastro. This is a gigantic wave, much larger, wider, and
longer than we thought; its volume is 10 times more than what we estimated only
six years ago. We’re talking about an extreme event, certainly on the order of
the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster.”
With eyewitness video of that disaster
lingering in everyone’s minds, it took little imagination to visualize the
physical destruction that must have hit Palaikastro, Mallia, and elsewhere
along the Cretan coast. But evidence suggests that the Minoans survived the
disaster for at least a generation or two; the real end came later, in an
outbreak of fiery vandalism. Throughout Crete, temple-palaces were burned and
ransacked, and there are no obvious signs of battle, invasion, or natural
disaster at these ruins. Of all the great Minoan palaces, only Knossos
survived; eventually it was taken over by the Mycenaeans, the mainland Greeks
who prospered as the fortunes of Crete declined.
A leader of the Palaikastro team, Belgian
archaeologist Jan Driessen, contends that the wave of destruction was the tail
end of a spiral of instability that the Thera catastrophe set in motion. A
steep drop-off in the number of Minoan sites suggests that there had been a
famine or an epidemic, one perhaps touched off by the environmental effects of
the eruption combined with the later tsunami.
There may have been a spiritual crisis
as well. At Palaikastro, archaeologists found that a shrine had been violently
destroyed and a cult statuette deliberately smashed and burned. Driessen
suggests there may have been a reaction against the religious cult represented
by the statuette, perhaps as part of a populist uprising against the elite in
their villas and temple-palaces. The loss of life and livelihood after the
eruption may have aggravated problems of class difference and widened the gap
between the elite and the commoners, which Driessen says “existed already in
Minoan society.”
The terrifying scale of the Thera
eruption, followed by the devastating force of the giant tsunami it created,
may have led to a gradual unraveling of the values and beliefs that had
sustained this brilliant civilization for so long. In his poem “The Hollow
Men,” T. S. Eliot writes these famous lines: “This is the way the world ends /
This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a
bang but a whimper.”
For the Minoans, it appears their
world ended with both.
While teaching physics at École
Polytechnique in France, physicist Jean-Baptiste Masson used hair fibers as an
example of a complex system that could be modeled simply. The example made him
wonder: Does curly hair get more tangled than straight hair? He thought that a
person sporting, say, Shakira’s mane of curls would have more kinks than
someone with pin-straight hair, but he wasn’t sure.
So Masson enlisted hairdressers to
count the tangles in 123 limp-locked people and 89 curly-haired people.
Straight hair had an average of 5.3 tangles, nearly twice as many as curly
hair. Masson then created a model to help him understand why straight hair is,
oddly, more prone to knotting. His answer: The greater the angle of
intersection, the more likely the hair will knot. Curly strands intersect more
often, but strands of straight hair rubbing together at steeper angles than
curly hair make for more knots.
Harry Miles recalled being home on
leave for Christmas, relaxing with his family. His brother was telling a joke
he’d heard a thousand times, but the punch line always got him. “I was
hysterically laughing, and then my head went limp,” Mr. Miles said. “It was
baffling.”
A minute later, he felt normal again.
“I’m fine,” he told his family.
A few months later, while on guard
duty on a ship in the Mediterranean, Mr. Miles found himself lying on the
ground, unable to move. His commanding officer and several doctors stood over
him. “I could hear them all talking, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I was asking
myself, how come I can’t move?”
Again, the episode was over within
minutes. The event was chalked up to heatstroke, and he returned to duty. By
the time I learned about this event, it was almost 50 years later, when Mr.
Miles was 71. I had taken over his primary care when his former doctor moved
away.
“Doctor, excuse me. . . . I’m getting
a spell,” he said. His words were starting to slur. “I’m trying to fight it
off.” Then he crumpled in slow motion. His eyelids drooped, his facial muscles
sagged, his head hung down, and a moment later his whole body slumped in the
chair. “I can talk to you, but it will be hard to understand me,” he mumbled.
I had no idea what to do. Was my
patient going to slide to the floor or pass out completely? I called for a
nurse and asked her to keep an eye on him. I found his wife in the waiting
room, and we hurried back together. She sat down next to her husband and
whispered to him. For the next five minutes, she stroked his limp hand as he
talked to her incoherently. From his slouched position, he managed to grimace
and tense his chest muscles. Then it passed. He stood up and apologized.
That’s when I learned about Mr.
Miles’s unusual medical history. He had been told that cataplexy was the cause
of those strange episodes. In cataplexy, a strong emotion like laughing,
surprise, anger, or fear can make a person suddenly go weak while completely
awake. Some cataplectics have very mild attacks, like a slight weakening of the
eyelids or facial muscles; for others, the whole body becomes limp. Mr. Miles
said that the attacks had stopped for many years but then resumed while he was
a high school teacher, coach, and lifeguard.
But there was more going on. About 20
years ago, he was also diagnosed with narcolepsy, a disorder characterized by
excessive daytime sleepiness and periods of irresistible sleep. Although he had
been taking Ritalin to keep alert, it was no longer controlling the problem. He
had been feeling exhausted, as if he had been sleep-deprived for days, and the
cataleptic attacks were occurring almost daily.
Cataplexy most commonly occurs among
people with narcolepsy, and it has to do with entering REM sleep (a state in
which dream-induced paralysis occurs). In 2000, researchers discovered that an
important brain hormone called hypocretin is dramatically reduced in people
with narcolepsy and cataplexy. Hypocretin acts like the body’s own caffeine: It
stimulates areas of the brain that maintain wakefulness. But studies have shown
that people with narcolepsy and cataplexy have only 10 percent of the normal
amount. Thus, people with low hypocretin may fall into REM sleep—with their
muscles lax, their minds awake, sometimes dreaming or even hallucinating—in the
middle of the day.
Most of the time, Mr. Miles could
fight off the impulse to sleep. But when the cataplexy began to recur, he was
in trouble. Ritalin did nothing for the sudden muscle weakness. If he tensed
his muscles, he could usually ward off an impending attack, but he felt
self-conscious. Teaching and coaching, and especially lifeguarding, became too
risky. Eventually he lost his job and had to further curtail his activities.
Even a chat with a neighbor could lead to an attack. He began staying at home
almost all the time.
When I saw Mr. Miles in my office
about six months after our first meeting, the news wasn’t good. Almost
immediately, his words started to run together. “I’m getting the attacks all
the time,” he said, struggling to keep his head up. “I’m exhausted. . . . The
Ritalin isn’t working anymore.”
He looked as though he had fallen
asleep—his arms were splayed out, his head rested on his shoulder, his body had
slid down in the chair, and his eyelids were barely open—but I knew he was
awake. Three minutes later the attack was over. I prescribed Prozac
(fluoxetine), an antidepressant that can sometimes help lessen the symptoms of
cataplexy, and increased the dose of Ritalin. But when he called a month later,
he said that the new combination wasn’t helping. He was losing hope that he
would ever lead a normal life again.
Finally, a year later, a breakthrough
came. Researchers found that a sedative drug called Xyrem seemed to help people
with cataplexy. Patients on Xyrem slept better at night and had fewer
cataplectic attacks during the day. But this wonder drug comes with baggage.
Also known as the pharmaceutical form of GHB (short for gamma-hydroxybutyrate),
it is none other than the infamous date rape drug (and was the poison in some
very dangerous Chinese-made toys). Originally marketed in the early 1990s as a
dietary supplement for improving athletic performance and for sleep, it was
reclassified as a prescription drug by the FDA and approved for use only under
some of the tightest restrictions that exist for any pharmaceutical. A single
pharmacy provides it, and doctors and patients must register with the pharmacy.
A sleep specialist prescribed Xyrem
for Mr. Miles, and over the past year his life has improved immensely. A few
months ago, during a checkup, I asked him about his last full cataplectic
attack. He paused. “You know, I can’t really remember,” he said. “I felt one
coming on a few months ago, but it was very mild. It wasn’t hard to fight it
off.”
He gave a little laugh. “I’m a normal
human being again.”
“There are infinite worlds both like
and unlike this world of ours,” wrote Epicurus. That’s how astronomer Chris
Impey begins his compelling investigation into the history of the search for
extraterrestrial life. Starting with the Greeks and their philosophical
inquiries, Impey traces the scientific work on the origins of life and the
evolution of Earth and of distant worlds. He examines theories on the
conditions required for biological life to arise and how likely it is that such
life exists on other planets in our own or other solar systems. Impey asserts
that water is a promising presence. In fact, NASA’s strategy has been to
“follow the water.” That’s why Mars was an early object of interest and why
Saturn’s moon Enceladus joined the list of possible life holders in 2006 when
the Cassini orbiter spotted geysers at its south pole. Will we one day find
other beings in the universe? Impey isn’t sure, but he does believe that
science is the only tool that can discover them. As he puts it, “The debate over
the existence of ETs might never be settled by observations, but it certainly
can’t be settled without them.”
99999999999
The 2008 presidential race has raised
many questions about the candidates' personal histories. Will Barack Obama's
past drug use preclude a White House future? Will Christian conservatives
forgive Rudy Giuliani his two divorces? Will voters forgive Hillary Clinton for
forgiving Bill?
And what exactly did Democratic
candidate Dennis Kucinich see hovering above actress Shirley MacLaine's house
25 years ago?
This fall, Ms. MacLaine revealed in
her new book that the Ohio congressman had seen a UFO and felt "a
connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." In a Democratic
presidential debate in late October, Mr. Kucinich acknowledged seeing something
airborne that he couldn't identify and then defused the issue with a joke about
opening a campaign office in Roswell, N.M., the capital of unexplained
sightings.
Since then, the long-shot candidate
has refused to elaborate on the experience.
Now, after keeping quiet about the
incident for a quarter of a century, the two people who say they were at Mr.
Kucinich's side that evening have come forward to describe an event which they
say left them convinced that there's intelligent life in outer space.
"At no time did I feel afraid,
even though I felt very small," says one witness, Paul Costanzo. "I
sensed that I was in the presence of a greater technology and
intelligence."
The close encounter, says Mr.
Costanzo, took place in September 1982 at Ms. MacLaine's former home in Graham,
Wash. -- an expansive estate on a ridge above the Puyallup River, with a view
of Mount Rainier.
The 61-year-old Mr. Kucinich, who
declined several requests to comment for this article, had been the wunderkind
mayor of Cleveland in the late 1970s and had met Ms. MacLaine through Bella
Abzug, the late New York congresswoman and feminist. The actress says she
quickly realized she and Mr. Kucinich were kindred spirits. Years later he
asked Ms. MacLaine to be the godmother of his daughter.
"We just thought the same,"
Ms. MacLaine says in an interview. "We have the same political points of
view."
When Cleveland voters ousted Mr.
Kucinich after one tumultuous term, Ms. MacLaine offered him her home as a
sanctuary where he could write his memoirs. He lived there for the better part
of a year.
Also in residence was Mr. Costanzo, a
Juilliard-trained trumpet player and jujitsu black belt, who worked as Ms.
MacLaine's assistant, personal trainer and bodyguard. He and Mr. Kucinich
became good friends, and Mr. Costanzo, now 55 years old, served as deputy
campaign director and security chief for the congressman's unsuccessful 2004
presidential run.
Ms. MacLaine -- well-known for her
fascination with things mystical and extraterrestrial -- was in Canada that
weekend in 1982, performing her one-woman show. But Mr. Costanzo's girlfriend
at the time, a model and actress who is now 50 years old, was visiting when the
UFO incident took place. She spoke after Mr. Costanzo requested she do so, and
on condition that her name not be published.
Here's what happened, according to
separate interviews with Mr. Costanzo and his former girlfriend:
The day was strange from the start.
For hours, Mr. Kucinich, Mr. Costanzo and his companion noticed a high-pitched
sound. "There was a sense that something extraordinary was happening all
day," says the girlfriend. She and Mr. Costanzo say that none of the three
consumed alcohol or took drugs.
As they sat down to a dinner, Mr.
Kucinich spotted a light in the distance, to the left of Mount Rainier. Mr.
Costanzo thought it was a helicopter.
But Mr. Kucinich walked outside to the
deck to look through the telescope that he had bought Ms. MacLaine as a house
gift. After a few minutes, Mr. Kucinich summoned the other two: "Guys,
come on out here and look at this."
Mr. Costanzo and his girlfriend joined
Mr. Kucinich, where they took turns peering through the telescope. What they
saw in the far distance, according to both witnesses, was a hovering light,
which soon divided into two, and then three.
After a few minutes, the lights moved
closer and it became apparent that they were actually three charcoal-gray,
triangular craft, flying in a tight wedge. The girlfriend remembers each
triangle having red and green lights running down the edges, with a laser-like
red light at the tail. Mr. Costanzo recalls white lights, but no tail.
Mr. Costanzo says each triangle was
roughly the size of a large van, while his former girlfriend compares it to a
"larger Cessna, smaller than a jet certainly." Neither recalls seeing
any markings, landing gear, engines, windows or cockpits.
The craft approached to within 200
yards, suspended over the field just beyond the swimming pool. Both witnesses
say it emitted a quiet, throbbing sound -- nothing like an airplane engine.
"There was a feeling of wanting
to communicate something, but I didn't know what," says Mr. Costanzo.
The craft held steady in midair, for
perhaps a minute, then sped away, Mr. Costanzo says. "Nothing had
landed," he says. "No strange beings had disembarked. No obvious
messages were beamed down. When they were completely out of sight, we all
looked at each other disbelieving what we had seen."
At Mr. Kucinich's suggestion, they
jotted down their impressions and drew pictures to memorialize the event. Mr.
Kucinich kept the notes, according to Ms. MacLaine, who said he promised her
recently that he would try to find them.
In an interview with WSJ's Jeffrey
Trachtenberg, actress and author Shirley MacLaine discusses the cosmic scope of
her new book, "Sage-ing While Age-ing."
"It was proof to me that we're
obviously not alone," says the girlfriend.
The next day, the group spotted what
they thought to be military helicopters buzzing around the valley where they
had made the sighting. And the high-pitched sound remained.
Mr. Kucinich called Ms. MacLaine in
Canada to tell her what had happened. "He said it was beautiful, serene,
and it moved him," says Ms. MacLaine, who is supporting Mr. Kucinich's
candidacy. "He was not afraid of it, let's put it that way. Seeing
something that close and sophisticated and gentle."
Ms. MacLaine says she has seen UFOs
from a distance in New Mexico and Peru, but never up close. She was envious.
"I'm the one who reports them, but they never make close visitation. What
am I doing wrong?"
None of the three reported the
incident to the authorities. And over the years that followed, they shared the
story with very few people. "Unfortunately, people are ridiculed when they
say they've had these kinds of experiences, which is why I never came forward
with it," says the girlfriend.
Ms. MacLaine says she called Mr.
Kucinich before she included his UFO sighting in her book, "Sage-ing while
Age-ing," a recounting of her spiritual and professional journeys. "I
can handle it," she says he told her.
My 80-year-old patient was too weak to
get out of bed. His problems started when he felt burning in his chest and
shortness of breath four days before.
His wife, a retired nurse, had been
reluctant to call the doctor over something that might pass on its own.
Eighty-year-old guys have their good days and bad days, after all.
But he became weaker and shorter of
breath with each passing day. When his congestive heart failure became too much
for his wife to manage, she called me at home on Saturday. I sent him to the
hospital 25 miles away by ambulance.
She asked me if I'd be taking care of
him there. I didn't answer right away.
In the last year, I've cut back on my
hospital work quite a bit. After 10 years, I'd done plenty of it. Besides, the
hospital hired doctors to manage cases like this. The specialists, called
hospitalists, are also supposed to improve quality by riding herd on the
details of care, and I get more free time.
There was a hint of pleading in her
voice. In June, when her husband was ill with a urinary tract infection, the
hospital doctor took care of him. He recovered just fine.
But I think the patient and his family
missed me more than they let on at first. Or, maybe I'd missed overseeing the
hospital stays of my patients more than I thought.
Still, I'd delivered two babies the
night before. And I thought for a moment about the possibility of juggling the
care of my patient with my family's weekend plans. "Sure, I'll take care
of him," I said, figuring I could swing it and appreciating that his
family wanted me involved.
Since the hospitalists came on board,
my medical patients have been seeing less of me after they're admitted. It
seemed like a winning situation all around. Initially I was all in favor of it,
but lately I've been having second thoughts.
A large study published recently in
the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the rates of re-admission or
death weren't significantly different for patients cared for by hospital-based
physicians or their family physicians. The patients cared for by hospitalists
got out 0.4 days sooner and their care cost a few hundred dollars less.
At our hospital, my batting average is
better than the hospitalists. How can a family physician compete with a hospital-based
specialist? Although it's not trendy to say so, I think having one doctor in
charge of your care inside of the hospital and out still matters.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
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I believe that long-term knowledge of
patients and access to their complete medical record are of immense value.
Those give me an edge that helps avoid unnecessary tests and consultations with
specialists. Keeping patients under my control also reduces the number of
hand-offs from one doctor to another, minimizing errors.
My patient has memory problems and a
complicated medical history. Another doctor would have difficulty getting the
full picture from him and wouldn't be able to access his office records on the
weekend without calling me. Some doctors wouldn't have made the extra effort.
In the last six months he's seen a
physician's assistant at the VA, a cardiologist, a pulmonologist and a
gastroenterologist in addition to me. He's had tests on his heart, his lungs
and his stomach at two different hospitals. Blood work has been ordered by at
least three different doctors. He didn't follow through on a sleep study and
stopped two medications from his pulmonologist without telling anyone.
The patient forgot to tell the nursing
staff about two of his medical allergies. I stopped them from giving him
morphine for chest pain because he's allergic to it.
He didn't remember the name of the
sleeping pill the VA doctors have had him on for years. He can't sleep without
it. I remembered it, and he had a restful night in the hospital. I restarted
the stomach medication that I knew his gastroenterologist prescribed. He hadn't
been taking it.
After three days in the hospital, he
was well enough for me to send him home.
Perhaps the biggest advantage to
doctors managing their own patients in the hospital is the personal touch. I
provide comfort, compassion and motivation for recovery. Anybody who's ever
been hospitalized knows the reassurance that comes from dealing with someone
you know when you're really sick.
When a hospital physician takes over
care for my patients, the most common complaint I hear from patients is that
they don't know what happened while they were in the hospital. If their
paperwork is slow getting back to me, I have trouble piecing together the
follow-up plan.
Stepping back from inpatient care for
a while gave me a new perspective. I can see what my hospital patients were
missing without me involved, and I've resolved to get back to the wards. As a
new year begins, the doctor is in.
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/ http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&pop=1&indicate=1http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=22156
Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
The preliminary investigation and a
separate congressional inquiry were sparked by the CIA's acknowledgement last
month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods
while questioning two al Qaeda suspects. The Justice Department uses
preliminary inquiries as a first step to determine if there is sufficient cause
to warrant a formal criminal investigation.
John Durham, first assistant U.S.
attorney in Connecticut, has been appointed an acting U.S. attorney to lead the
investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation will assist prosecutors, who
will report directly to the deputy attorney general. Mr. Durham has served as
an outside prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the FBI's use of mob
informants in Boston and helped send several Connecticut public officials to
prison.
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