03 March 2010

Nasca

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Published: March 2010

Nasca

Nasca

Spirits in the Sand

The ancient Nasca lines of Peru shed their secrets.

By Stephen S. Hall
Photograph by Robert Clark
From the air, the lines etched in the floor of the desert were hard to see, like drawings left in the sun too long. As our pilot cut tight turns over a desert plateau in southern Peru, north of the town of Nasca, I could just make out a succession of beautifully crafted figures.
"Orca!" shouted Johny Isla, a Peruvian archaeologist, over the roar of the engine. He pointed down at the form of a killer whale. "¡Mono!" he said moments later, when the famous Nasca monkey came into view. “¡Colibrí!” The hummingbird.

Since they became widely known in the late 1920s, when commercial air travel was introduced between Lima and the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, the mysterious desert drawings known as the Nasca lines have puzzled archaeologists, anthropologists, and anyone fascinated by ancient cultures in the Americas. For just as long, waves of scientists—and amateurs—have inflicted various interpretations on the lines, as if they were the world's largest set of Rorschach inkblots. At one time or another, they have been explained as Inca roads, irrigation plans, images to be appreciated from primitive hot-air balloons, and, most laughably, landing strips for alien spacecraft.
After World War II a German-born teacher named Maria Reiche made the first formal surveys of the lines and figures—called geoglyphs—outside Nasca and the nearby town of Palpa. For half a century, until her death in 1998, Reiche played a critically important role in conserving the geoglyphs. But her own preferred theory—that the lines represented settings on an astronomical calendar—has also been largely discredited. The ferocity with which she protected the lines from outsiders has been adopted by their caretakers today, so that even scientists have a hard time gaining access to the most famous animal figures on the plain, or pampa, immediately northwest of Nasca.
Since 1997, however, a large Peruvian-German research collaboration has been under way near the town of Palpa, farther to the north. Directed by Isla and Markus Reindel of the German Archaeological Institute, the Nasca-Palpa Project has mounted a systematic, multidisciplinary study of the ancient people of the region, starting with where and how the Nas ca lived, why they disappeared, and what was the meaning of the strange designs they left behind in the desert sand.
As our plane banked into another turn, Isla, a native of the highlands who works at the Andean Institute of Archaeological Studies, kept his broad, high-cheeked face pressed to the window. "Trapezoid!" he shouted, pointing out a huge geometrical clearing looming into sight. "Platform!" he added, gesturing with his finger. "Platform!"
Platform? He was pointing at a small heap of stones at one end of the trapezoid. If Isla and his colleagues are right, such unprepossessing structures may hold a key to understanding the true purpose of the Nasca lines. The story begins, and ends, with water.
The coastal region of southern Peru and northern Chile is one of the driest places on Earth. In the small, protected basin where the Nasca culture arose, ten rivers descend from the Andes, to the east, most of them dry at least part of the year. These ten fragile ribbons of green, surrounded by a thousand shades of brown, offered a fertile hot spot for the emergence of an early civilization, much as the Nile Delta or the rivers of Mesopotamia did. "It was the perfect place for human settlement, because it had water," says geographer Bernhard Eitel, a member of the Nasca-Palpa Project. "But it was a high-risk environment—a very high-risk environment."

02 March 2010

NASA: Quake Shifted Earth's Axis, Shortened Day

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NASA: Quake Shifted Earth's Axis, Shortened Day

Updated: 4 hours 33 minutes ago
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(March 1) -- Apart from claiming the lives of hundreds of people and wreaking enormous property damage, Chile's massive earthquake has likely altered the distribution of the Earth's overall mass, scientists from NASA say.

As a result, the length of a day is now a little shorter than it was before Saturday's magnitude 8.8 earthquake. 

"The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds [millionths of a second]," Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Bloomberg. "The axis about which the Earth's mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds [about 8 centimeters or 3 inches]."

The speed that the Earth rotates also increased slightly in 2004 following the earthquake that struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. That 9.1 earthquake shortened the length of an Earth day by 6.8 microseconds, scientists say.

The reason is that sudden changes in the dimensions of the Earth's tectonic plates, like those experienced in the earthquakes in Chile and Indonesia, can alter the velocity. 

David Kerridge, the head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, likened the change in rotation speed to what happens when a figure skater draws her arms in close to her body while spinning. "As she pulls her arms in," Kerridge told Bloomberg, "she gets faster and faster. It's the same idea with the Earth going around: If you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes."

01 March 2010

Man, daughter fall 13 floors in Chile quake

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Man, daughter fall 13 floors in Chile quake

People look at a collapsed building in Concepcion, Chile, Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010.AP – People look at a collapsed building in Concepcion, Chile, Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010. A 8.8-magnitude earthquake …
CONCEPCION, Chile – When their 13th-floor apartment began to shake, Alberto Rozas pulled his 7-year-old daughter into the bathroom doorway and waited for it to stop.
Instead, they fell.
Plummeting as their brand-new apartment building toppled like a felled tree, they hugged each other all the way down.
Rozas had no idea which way was up until he looked through his apartment's shattered window and spotted light — "the light of the full moon."
Rozas and his daughter, Fernanda, clambered up and to safety with nothing more than a few cuts, scrapes and bruises.
"The earthquake and the fall were one single, horrible thing," Rozas told The Associated Press on Sunday. "I held onto her and she never let me go."
Rozas' neighbors who lived on the other side of the hall found themselves trapped beneath the structure, while rescuers painstakingly used electric saws and a generator-powered hammer to cut into the concrete.
"We don't have any listening devices or cameras," said Ian Argo, a firefighter commander.
As of Sunday, 23 people had been pulled alive from the 15-story Rio Alta building and seven bodies had been removed. An estimated 60 people remained trapped inside.
Socovil, the company that opened the concrete-and-glass structure last June, issued a statement saying it had complied with all building codes. But many residents were angry.
"The construction was obviously poor," Rozas said.
Abel Torres, 25, had a view of the Bio Bio River from his sixth-floor apartment. He had just gotten home from his job at a nightclub when the quake hit at 3:34 a.m.
"My TV fell on top of me and suddenly I saw stars shooting across my window," he said.
Torres and his roommate stacked furniture to reach that window — now a skylight — and escaped without clothes, coated in dust.
On the second floor, Maribel Alarcon and her husband Gunther rushed to comfort their 2-year-old son Oliver when he started crying moments before the temblor.
Their concern was their salvation: Oliver's bedroom was the only place spared in their apartment.
"We prayed a lot," Alarcon said. "And if God let us survive, that was because someone was going to rescue us."
Much higher in the building, Rozas was sleeping alongside his daughter when the shaking began.
"There was dust, noise, everything falling," he said. "We went to the bathroom doorway. Then there was the fall. Finally it stopped."
After they climbed out of the wreckage, Rozas took Fernanda to her mother's house, then returned to help firefighters understand the layout of the toppled building.
He retrieved medicine and clothes for Fernanda. And his own guitar.

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