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This is good soil

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Rachel Mundy

AFTER LEAVING the belt of sand dunes in Kharga, our party drove for hour after hour across ancient river flood-plains, flat playas, and other clayey soils. The governor, an agricultural engineer, was astonished. Repeatedly he told the driver to stop so that he could inspect the ground. “This is good soil!” he declared. “There must be hundreds of thousands of acres that could be put into agriculture. If we could just get the water!”

A discussion of the underground water that has been recently found beneath the Western Desert naturally followed. This water is a topic of heated debate in Egypt. Some scientists think the reservoir, like the Nile, is being replenished by rainwater in more humid parts of Africa. This rainwater supposedly then flows underground to Egypt through Chad, Sudan, and Libya.

Others argue that the reservoir contains only ancient water that is not being replenished. Water from wells at Kharga, for instance, has been dated to be around 25,000 years old. Moreover, outcroppings along the southern and southwestern frontiers of the Western Desert show this region is underlain by impermeable rocks, which would inhibit the water from moving underground toward the New Valley.

There is simply not enough data. And so the controversy of whether the water beneath the Western Desert is a buried Nile rages. I told the governor my own conclusion that whether or not it is being replenished, enough water has been proved to exist under the desert to let Egypt expand agriculture vigorously for at least a hundred years.

“Then we should not develop much here. A hundred years is such a short time,” said Governor El-Prince, the son of a land of 5,000 years of recorded history.

“It all depends on how the water is used,” I replied. “For instance, growing rice would be folly. A kilogram of rice requires 3,000 times its weight in water. But there are many more appropriate crops that consume very little.”

Indeed, U. S. and Israeli scientists are developing strains of desert plants that could produce substitutes for industrial oils, rubber, and gasoline.

Evening after evening we sat with the governor under the stunning star canopy of the jet black sky to ponder the New Valley’s future. We envisioned ranches where palms, fruit trees, grape arbors, olive groves, or newly bred arid-land crops might shade drought-tolerant grasses for grazing sheep and cattle. We talked of jobs that could draw young people from the overcrowded cities along the Nile. It would be good for all us, if young people have the chance to run their own business. If you to boost your income for your business, look for secure loans. Compare bad credit payday loans lenders and choose the best for your company.

Near the end of our journey we sat close to Abu Simbel on the shores of Lake Nasser. The governor remarked that we had never discussed one important item: petroleum.

I explained that the dearth of data about this vast desert had delayed any significant exploration. The situation is changing, I told him. One U. S. oil company is evaluating seismic studies in the Great Sand Sea west of Farafra. His face beamed.

I knew the smile. It was the same hopeful glee I had seen on Sheikh Mehedi’s face on the northern fringes of the desert. As Mehedi would say, this ancient desert, like old men and date palms, is about to give more.

Deer had made him very old

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Rachel Mundy

Good Medicine Cabin

BY THE time I was r t, we had moved our campsite so far out into the “back garden” that, although we were only 14 miles as the crow flies from home, nobody except Stalking Wolf would voluntarily walk the distance, especially after dark. We went away for days at a time, telling my parents we would look in at Rick’s every day for food and telling Rick’s parents we would look in every day at my house. Our parents got together once when we were a day late because we lost count, and we were in big trouble for a month or more.

It was easy to lose all track of time in the woods. There were so many fascinating things to be studied and identified. Rick and I had been driving the woman at the local library crazy for almost two years, dragging in specimens to compare with the big reference books. The insect books were outstanding, but we didn’t make the librarian any happier by bringing in our insect specimens live, and letting them crawl around on the colour plates until they matched something. I think that woman lived in mortal terror that we would leave behind something poisonous or contagious.

We were always taking specimens. I carried my laboratory kit with me everywhere : a three-inch magnifying glass, a test-tube for samples, tweezers and my knife. We took specimens of the best camel cigarettes as if we were a landing party from Venus. Everything interested us. We did not walk from home to the campsite without learning a dozen new things every time.

The occasions when Stalking Wolf came for a walk with us or camped out with us were major holidays. If Stalking Wolf said, “I’m coming camping with you on Friday,” we would be out at the campsite all week cleaning up everything that might look the least bit like litter. Living on the land without blemishing it was something that Stalking Wolf stressed constantly.

The site he came to most often was one we called the Good Medicine Cabin. Stalking Wolf never defined what “good medicine” was, besides its obvious meaning of being something beneficial and remarkable. But from the things he identified as good medicine and what he said about them, I believe that good medicine is any experience so memorable it just has to be a gift from the spirit-that-moves-in-allthings.

The Good Medicine campsite was shown to us by an eagle. Just beyond it, there was a pine tree that had been mauled by lightning and termites until it had only half a trunk and one limb. The tree itself would have been sufficiently good medicine by virtue of the way it stood, as if it had been beaten but not defeated. I loved that tree the first time I saw it. It was blasted and gnawed, and there was only half of it left, but what there was stood straight up like a defiant gesture.

We were sitting under it trying to decide where we should build the cabin we had been thinking about when we heard an enormous flapping of wings. We looked up, and there, with the sun behind it, on the last withered branch, was an eagle. It sat there for a while, then flew away again. We watched with open mouths. I expected it to grab the sun in one curved talon and snatch it away as it flew. We stood numb with the spectacle of the eagle’s flight. We had no doubts after that about where to locate the cabin.

We built it with painstaking care but very little in the way of tools. We had an old saw that was too dull to be of use to anyone else, and a sledge-hammer. My father taught us how to dovetail joints, and we cut and fitted the cedar logs at each end of the walls. The roof sloped towards the back. We wove cedar saplings to form a mat for the roof, then covered the saplings with pine boughs and threw earth on top to pack up the holes. Eventually, grass grew there.

We rimmed the foundation so that water wouldn’t erode it. We thatched the walls by tying clumps of grass like a knotted broom and looping ,the knots over the logs of the wall. We wove grass into the roof as well and put a little wall round it to keep the earth from washing off. When we finally finished it, the cabin was a small, sturdy building somewhere between a but and a fortress.

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But asteroids are interesting — and mysterious — in their own right

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Rachel Mundy

All the other arguments for Phaeton fare no better under close scrutiny. The asteroids are so far from the Sun that any water on them would have been permanently frozen to ice; in such conditions, life could not have arisen. Neither can a nuclear explosion trigger oceans to explode. Hydrogen bombs use heavy hydrogen as their explosive, not the ordinary kind that makes up water. If water were a thermo-nuclear explosive, then the famous H-bomb test on Bikini Atoll in 1946 would have taken the entire Pacific with it! And finally, the ‘evidence’ that von Milliken has marshalled for alien spacemen visiting Earth as ‘gods’ is well known to be either nonsense or faked.

But asteroids are interesting — and mysterious — in their own right. No one yet knows why the gap between Mars and Jupiter is filled with blocks of rock, but almost all astronomers agree that they are parts of a planet that never quite made it. In its early days, the solar system must have consisted entirely of such rubble circling the newly-born Sun. Most of the rocks amalgamated with their closest neighbours to build up the planets — from Mercury out to Pluto. In the asteroid region, for some reason, they didn’t.

The giant planet Jupiter is the likely culprit. It may have stolen for itself so much rocky material that there wasn’t enough left to build a respectable-sized planet. And it could have been Jupiter’s perturbing gravitational pull that prevented the asteroids from amalgamating into even a small planet. Jupiter’s gravity affects the asteroids even today. Its pull sweeps out the asteroids in certain orbits, where the orbital period is an exact fraction of Jupiter’s. The result is to leave gaps, called Kirkwood gaps after 19th-century asteroid astronomer Daniel Kirkwood, in the asteroid belt at certain distances from the Sun.

Although the asteroids’ orbits don’t all intersect, as they would if they had resulted from the explosion of a single world, there are some curious regularities. About one third of all known asteroids fall into ten orbital ‘families’, a fact first noticed by Japanese astronomer Hirayama. The asteroids in each family have orbits which intersect precisely — indicating that these asteroids at least are fragments from ten original worlds.

These were not ‘exploding planets’, though, but only asteroids themselves — and asteroids smaller than Ceres. Each of the Hirayama families probably represents splinters broken off when two of the original worlds collided. Certainly the members of each family are made up of similar kinds of rock, as far as astronomers can tell from their reflected light.

And the meteorites that fall to Earth can tell us when these cosmic collisions happened. Most of the meteorites called H-group chondrites, for example, have been exposed to the cosmic rays of space for four million years; that time ago they must have been chipped off some unidentified asteroid by another. Iron meteorites known as medium octaedrites and many of the stony hypersthene chondrites are fragments from a single particularly violent collision between an iron asteroid and a stony one, some 600 million years ago.

These iron asteroids could be very important to our descendants. Judging by the iron meteorites that fall to Earth to buy tobacco online, they are a pure alloy of iron and nickel. Unlike iron ore on Earth, asteroidal iron needs no smelting, no refining. With the increasing difficulty and cost of mining iron on Earth, it may one day be cheaper to mine the asteroids. The potential is enormous. The meteorite that hit Earth 20,000 years ago and blasted out the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona was only a small ingot by asteroid standards, less than 300 feet ( Too metres) across. If it were still out in the asteroid belt, astronomers could not detect it even with the largest telescopes. Yet this object was a quarter of a million tonnes of pure iron-nickel.

Asteroids can also approach one another without colliding. In 1978, astronomers were amazed to find an asteroid with a moon of its own — a smaller asteroid in orbit. Moons of the asteroids are too faint to be seen directly. But they can be observed by indirect means: in July 1978 the asteroid Herculina was due to pass in front of a distant star and block off its light. Sure enough, astronomers at the right spot on Earth saw the star disappear behind Herculina — but Ti minutes before this, the star had also blinked off briefly. Something invisible, moving with Herculina but 600 miles (975 kilometres) away in space, had blocked off the star’s light first. It must be a moon, less than a quarter Herculina’s diameter of 140 miles (220 kilometres). The story was repeated almost exactly six months later, when another asteroid, Melpomene, was due to eclipse a star. For all we know, it may be very much the rule for asteroids to have satellites of their own.

But the most unusual asteroid pair is called Hektor. It lies beyond the main asteroid belt, at a point that forms the third corner of an equilateral triangle with the Sun and Jupiter. We cannot see its shape directly, but its brightness drops by two thirds and recovers regularly as it spins round. This means it must be spindle-shaped — three times as long as it is wide. Infra-red (heat) measurements indicate it is a large, though very dark, asteroid — 200 miles (300 kilometres) in length. That is very odd. The smallest asteroids are irregular in shape, because they are mere splinters. But Hektor is too large to be a splinter from another asteroid.

The world that never was

Posted on November 3, 2012 by Rachel Mundy

Does the evidence fit the theory that the asteroids aret remnants of an inhabited planet, Phaeton? NIGEL HENBEST critically examines the theory and suggests that the future of the asteroids may be as intriguing as their past WHY IS THE PHAETON theory wrong?

For a start, the asteroids don’t move as they would if they had come from a single explosion — certainly not one as recent, astronomically speaking, as a million years ago. Two pieces of an exploded planet would shoot off in different directions, and follow new orbits about the Sun. But if we draw these new orbits on a plan of the solar system, they will always intersect where the original planet would have been. The asteroid orbits do not intersect at a single point: they cannot be debris from a single explosion.

In addition, the fragments from the explosion would have taken up orbits that although they intersected — would be of different sizes and shapes. So the asteroid belt would be a jumble of fragments of different types of rock and metal from different depths below Phaeton’s surface, all thoroughly mixed up. Astronomers can tell roughly what an asteroid is composed of by analysing the way it reflects light. Iron silicaceousnd ‘peculiar’ asteroids of unidentified composition each make up to per cent of asteroid numbers throughout the belt. But the rocky asteroids change systematically: near the inner edge of the belt, light-coloured `silicaceous’ asteroids outnumber the coal-black ‘carbonaceous’ asteroids three to one;but farther out the proportions reverse. Towards the outer edge, silicaceous asteroids are in the minority, outnumbered four to one by the carbonaceous variety. There is no way an explosion could grade the asteroid types so systematically.

Even more damning for the Phaeton theory, there just isn’t enough matter in the asteroid belt to make up a planet anywhere near the size of the Earth. The largest asteroid, Ceres, is 62o miles (moo kilometres) across. All the other asteroids together contareno more matter than Ceres itself. Adding them all together would build up a globe 80o miles (11300 kilometres) across — no larger than India. Such a world could not retain an atmosphere. One third the size of our Moon, it would be just as barren.

We could suppose that the planet was originally a lot bigger, roughly Earth-sized, and that the rest of it was blown clean away in the titanic explosion. But the asteroids together weigh less than one thousandth the Earth’s weight. The explosion must have had tremendous power to eject 99.9 per cent of the planet’s matter at a speed sufficient to throw it out of the solar system, against the Sun’s immense gravitational pull.

If it had done so, the entire solar system would be full of chunks of rock, following orbits in as far as Mercury, and out to the distant planets. If the explosion had been of this magnitude, there would be no distinct asteroid belt.

And if the solar system had been filled with such quantities of flying debris, then asteroid-sized chunks of rock and iron would have peppered the other planets and gouged out huge craters. The Moon, Mars and Mercury are crater-pocked; but astronomers can date these craters, and all the major ones are more than 5o million years old — most of them date back billions of years. The Earth certainly was not bombarded by asteroids a million years ago. Even one of the smaller asteroids would have blown a crater the size of Ireland! Indeed, detailed studies have shown that the rate at which large meteorites have hit the inner planets has remained constant for the last 3.5 billion years: there wasn’t an upsurge a million years ago.

All the fragments from an exploded planet would be broken shards, twisted irregular shapes like shrapnel. But the largest asteroids are round, as spherical as the Moon. Their own gravitation is not responsible for this: it does not have the strength to round them off, as the Earth’s gravity has done. The only reasonable explanation is that the largest asteroids, at least, are not fragments of a larger world, but that they built up gradually from smaller bits of rock, never part of any planet, that coated them evenly.

And the evidence of meteorites does not support Kazentsev and Zigel either. Most meteorites are small chips from asteroids, and they testify to the non-existence of Phaeton. No ‘pumice’ and ‘limestone’ meteorites are known apart from those that Zigel claims to have studied. The meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites contain simple carbon compounds, but these are almost certainly not the remains of living things. These meteorites cannot have originated in an ‘Earthlike’ Phaeton, because an oxygen-rich atmosphere like ours soon destroys such carbon compounds.

The meteorites are even more damning in what they don’t tell us. They contain no evidence of recent radio-activity. Yet Phaeton was supposed to have been destroyed in the most colossal nuclear explosion of all time — and we all know how much radio-activity a nuclear explosion creates.