'Mysterious' Baltic Sea Object Is a Glacial Deposit
By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com – 3 hrs ago
Closeup of sonar image of the "UFO" …http://news.yahoo.com/mysterious-baltic-sea-object-glacial-deposit-154845865.html
A feature on the floor of the Baltic Sea that was discovered last summer by Swedish treasure hunters is making headlines once again.
The latest media coverage draws upon an hour-long radio interview with Peter Lindberg, head of the Ocean X Team (which made the "discovery"), in which Lindberg delivers a string of cryptic and titillating statements about the "strange" and "mysterious" seafloor object his team has been exploring for a year.
Lindberg discusses various possibilities for what the object might be: "It has these very strange stair formations, and if it is constructed, it must be constructed tens of thousands of years ago before the Ice Age," he said in the radio interview.
(The peak of the most recent Ice Age occurred some 20,000 years ago.)
Atlantis is a mythical underwater city referred to in ancient legends.
Lindberg acknowledges that the object could instead be a natural formation, such as a meteorite that penetrated the ice during the Ice Age, or an underwater volcano;
however, he gives the impression that scientists are baffled by it. Geologists, for example, have supposedly told him the object "cannot be a volcano."
Also adding titillation, Lindberg says a documentary is being made about the seafloor anomaly — the location of which he has not disclosed — and he's saving some juicy details for the footage. "We're not telling everything," he said. "We will reveal some quite interesting things in the documentary."
The divers recently gave samples of stone from the object to Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University.
Swedish tabloids quote Brüchert as saying: "I was surprised when I researched the material I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock. My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago."
In other words, an expert appears to back up their claims that this seafloor object is unexplained, and perhaps is an Atlantis-like ancient building complex. To double check, Life's Little Mysteries consulted that expert. Turns out, neither he, nor any of the other experts contacted about the Baltic Sea object, think there is anything mysterious about it.
"It's good to hear critical voices about this 'Baltic Sea mystery,'" Brüchert wrote in an email. "What has been generously ignored by the Ocean-X team is that most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones."
These, he explains, are exactly what one would expect to see in a glacial basin, which is what the Baltic Sea is — a region carved out by glacial ice long ago.
Along with the mundane rocks, the divers also gave him a single loose piece of basaltic rock, a type of rock that forms from hardened lava. This is out of place on the seafloor, but not unusual.
"Because the whole northern Baltic region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes," he wrote. "Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers."
Glaciers often have rocks embedded in them. At the end of the Ice Age, when glaciers across Northern Europe melted, the rocks inside them dropped to the Earth's surface, leaving rocky deposits all over the place. These are sometimes called glacial erratics or balancing rocks.
Lindberg and the Ocean X Team did not respond to a request for comment on the glacial deposit theory.
Aside from a widely-reproduced illustration recently created by a graphics artist in which the Baltic seafloor object is rendered as a beautiful, Atlantis-like archaeological site, there has only ever been one actual image of the Baltic Sea object: the original sonar scan image captured by the divers last summer, in which the object resembles a crashed UFO spaceship. But experts told us that sonar image should be disregarded.
"The sonar image has numerous artifacts in it that make it difficult to interpret, and I would not place too much confidence in any interpretation until a better processing is done and the details of the type of sonar and particulars are provided," said seabed sonar-scanning expert Dan Fornari, a marine geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "I'm saying the data are lacking in resolution, detail and quantification."
The expert analysis suggests this is just a glacial deposit that the Ocean X Team "discovered" in a low-resolution sonar scan. Widespread media coverage, fame and a worldwide Internet following have since ensued.
Lindberg laments the fact that no organizations will sponsor his investigation.
Some organizations have supposedly told him funding the dives isn't worth their time because the anomaly "might be something very unexplainable."
He asks people to support his and his fellow divers' work by purchasing apparel from the Ocean X website.
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries. We're also on Facebook & Google+.
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_Next News_
Long-lost Egyptian Pyramids Found on Google Earth?By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer | LiveScience.com – Mon, Aug 13, 2012
A self-described "satellite archaeology researcher" has garnered widespread media attention with claims that she has found two possible pyramid complexes in Egypt using Google Earth.
But experts say her pyramids are nothing more than eroded hills infused with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.
Angela Micol, a North Carolina-based woman who blogs at Google Earth Anomalies, says she discovered the two clusters of mysterious, angular mounds in the Egyptian desert while surveyingsatellite images of the terrain using Google Earth, the virtual map program.
In its coverage, Gizmodo asserts that the desert structures look as if they have been "very deliberately arranged," and that they "bear all the hallmarks of ancient pyramid sites."
If Micol's blog is to be believed, Egyptologists have vetted and are currently investigating her amazing discovery. "The images speak for themselves. It's very obvious what the sites may contain but field research is needed to verify they are, in fact, pyramids," Micol wrote on her blog.
Turns out, further field research won't be necessary after all. These mounds are just your common buttes.
"It seems that Angela Micol is one of the so-called 'pyridiots' who see pyramids everywhere," saidJames Harrell, professor emeritus of archaeological geology at the University of Toledo and a leading expert on the archaeological geology of ancient Egypt. "Her Dimai and Abu Sidhum 'pyramids' are examples of natural rock formations that might be mistaken for archaeological features provided one is unburdened by any knowledge of archaeology or geology. In other words, her pyramids are just wishful thinking by an ignorant observer with an overactive imagination." [How Much Would It Cost to Build the Great Pyramid Today?]
(Micol did not respond to an email from Life's Little Mysteries as of the time of publication.)
The large, three- and four-sided hills Micol chanced upon are geologic features known as buttes, Harrell told Life's Little Mysteries. Commonly seen in the local Faiyum Desert, such buttes form when a mound of sediment contains a difficult-to-erode layer. When the surrounding sediment gradually erodes, that resistant layer gets left on top, making the hill flat.
Meanwhile, the smaller hills found in Micol's Google Earth screenshots are circular, and thus nothing like pyramids, Harrell said.
Other geologists attribute the features to the forces of nature as well. "What it looks like to me is an area where a resistant layer of stone is underlain by soft rock, perhaps shales. If that is so, the triangular one looks very much the sort of feature common in the U.S. southwest, and might be called a butte," said Clair Ossian, a geoarcheologist at Tarrant County College who has studied Egypt's sites.
So in summary, sorry folks: nothing to see here but a couple of big buttes. The question is how they garnered so much breathless, and factless, media attention.
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries. We're also on Facebook & Google+.
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