ThothWeb - Your Portal to the Unknown - Fantastic tales may actually contain grains of geological truth

As interpreted from the Bible, Noah's ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, now in eastern Turkey. Geologic evidence supports the idea of rising water 7,500 years ago in the Bosporus Strait.

Long ago, according to Indian legends of the inland Pacific Northwest, the twin sons of the Chief Spirit, Wyeast and Pahto, dwelt on opposite sides of the river now known as the Columbia. Mostly, they lived in peace, but occasionally they fought for the attention of a beautiful maiden known as Tah-one-lat-clah.

In the heat of combat, they hurled rocks and fire at each other, scorching the land and frightening its residents until the Chief Spirit came back to restore order. As a sign of truce between the brothers, the Chief Spirit built a beautiful stone bridge across the river, not far below the site of today's Bonneville Dam near Portland.

Then he went away again, and soon enough, the brothers resumed their quarrel. Tah-one-lat-clah tried to intervene but was severely burned in the fray. The bridge was destroyed, and the brothers, chagrined, withdrew to the locations where they remain today, as the mountains white explorers later called Adams and Hood.

Tah-one-lat-clah, now known as Mount St. Helens, also moved away, far from the other mountains. There she nursed her wounds, and there she remained, even after the Chief Spirit returned to heal her disfigurement.

It's a great story (probably somewhat Paul Bunyanized by white missionaries who collected it in the 19th century), but it's just a myth, right? A tale to entertain children and maybe teach a lesson about sibling rivalry?

Maybe not, say geologists.

Such myths were once discounted, but these days scientists are paying more attention. There's even a new field called “geomythology” that draws on everything from Aztec legend to Biblical lore in an effort to better understand the Earth's turbulent history by correlating old stories to actual geological events.

As far back as 1805, Lewis and Clark knew there was something odd about the Bridge of the Gods region. Approaching from upstream, they found the Columbia River to be curiously sluggish, with deep, calm waters in which the boles of dead firs rose from 20 feet below the surface.

Aware that the water couldn't have been that high when the trees were alive, Clark figured that something must have dammed the river, drowning them. When the expedition's boats finally reached the giant boulder field that (unknown to them) the Indians interpreted as the ruins of the bridge, Clark speculated that it must have been formed by a gargantuan landslide – one that occurred recently enough that the submerged tree trunks hadn't yet had time to rot.

As it turns out, Lewis and Clark had everything right but the date.

“They thought it occurred 20 years ago, but it was hundreds,” says John Jengo, a Downingtown, Pa. geologist and Lewis and Clark aficionado. “But there was no way for them to know that.”

Still, the Indians appear to have known. Not only was the landslide old, but the story also reflects the history of the nearby volcanoes. Adams frequently vented steam, and Hood had a series of eruptions several hundred years ago.

Even more interestingly, Mount St. Helens went through a major eruptive cycle 500 to 350 years ago. That period began with the mountain blowing its top in the 1480s (as determined by tree-ring dating). Then, ensuing eruptions slowly rebuilt the mountain from a stumpy pyramid into the elegant cone that persisted until its famous 1980 explosion.

The Bridge of the Gods landslide appears to have occurred in the same era, says Pat Pringle, an earth science professor at Washington's Centralia College who's studied it for two decades. His latest radiocarbon studies of the submerged trees put the date somewhere between 1435 and 1455.

That's a few decades before the start of the Mount St. Helens eruptions, but close enough for storytellers to have combined these events into a single,centuries-spanning tale.

Throughout the world, geologists are discovering that stories once dismissed as myth may contain doses of literal truth. One recent example involves the deadly tsunami that swept Indonesia in December 2004.

In most of Indonesia, 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 Lori Dengler, a geology professor at Humboldt State University in Northern California, is that the island was hit by a similar event in 1907, with massive casualties. The survivors told their children, who told their children, etc., until everyone still knew to run for high ground when the earth shook.

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.

Other scientists are taking a literal view of the more ancient myth of a massive flood, recounted in the Bible as the story of Noah.

Ten years ago, marine scientists Walter Pitman and William Ryan of Columbia University in New York 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.

Other Bible stories may also recount geological events. For example, geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.,explains that it is well known today that the Jordan River has landslides that stop its flow for a few days.

Thus, he says, a story in the book of Joshua that tells of how the river was too high to cross when the Hebrews first reached it, but then dried up to allow easy passage, is “very logical.”

“If you read the Bible carefully, you can see geological events very clearly.”

A non-biblical example is the tale of Helike, a coastal city in ancient Greece, which reputedly disappeared overnight after an earthquake in 373 B.C. The stories were considered to be total nonsense until 2001 when a team, led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Helike Project, and Steven Soter of the American Museum of Natural History, found the ruins beneath several feet of sediment. The city is now believed to have been the victim of liquefaction and a tsunami that ricocheted through the narrow Gulf of Corinth.

The shocking aspect of the myth was the idea that a city could disappear, overnight. But that appears to have been precisely what happened. “The ruins were buried in sediments,” says Zeilinga de Boer.

Other more recent legends describe the destruction of American Indian villages in the Pacific Northwest, long before the coming of the whites. 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 when canoes were deposited in trees.

It all sounds rather fanciful. But in the 1980s, scientists started taking a close look at the seismic stability of the Pacific Northwest coast.At the time, it was known that there was a large subduction zone offshore,but it was thought to be inactive.

Then, geologists started finding signs of sudden land subsidence. Archaeologists discovered fishing camps that had been overrun by waves. Tree-ring dating put the event in 1699 or 1700, allowing it to be linked to Japan's “orphan tsunami,” so-called because it struck without an accompanying earthquake.

The conclusion: The tsunami, which hit on Jan. 27, 1700, started in the Pacific Northwest then traveled all the way across the ocean to strike Japan.

Brian Atwater, a U.S. Geological Survey geologist based at the University of Washington, thinks the Pacific Northwest stories provide an excellent opportunity for “calibrating” this process. That's because the mix of archaeology, geology and Japanese records allows scientists to do an unusually good job of figuring out exactly what happened.

Their findings reveal that the legends retain an amazing amount of truth despite generations of retelling. “Here's an event that occurred almost 100 years before the first European contact and about 150 years before people started writing down the traditions of these people,” says Atwater. “By then, smallpox and other diseases had wiped out large parts of the population. But you have an event that's pretty well established from geology.”

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

“We find things and then go back to the mythology and say, 'My gosh,' ” says Floyd McCoy, a volcanologist at the University of Hawaii.

But, he adds, it's a young field that's only recently become respectable. “Five years ago, I couldn't do this without destroying my career.”

McCoy's work involves a Bronze Age volcanic blast about 1650 B.C. on the Greek island of Santorini. The explosion probably triggered the demise of the Minoan civilization on the neighboring island of Crete, and most likely formed the nucleus for the myth of Atlantis. “That eruption was a mega-event in the middle of a flourishing culture. I think it stuck as a myth, and the myth that best seems to reflect that is Atlantis.”

The infant field's next step, McCoy 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. It's going to depend on a much closer dialogue with historians.”

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

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