The city of Rungholt, said to have been washed away as punishment for its inhabitants' sinful ways, has been discovered beneath the mudflats of the North Sea.
Long-Lost City of Drunkenness, Wealth and Impiety Hidden Under the Sea
Jess Thomson
The long-lost city of Rungholt, said to have been buried beneath the waves as punishment for its hedonistic ways, has now been mapped by archaeologists.
The ancient city, sometimes called the "Atlantis of the North Sea," was found off the north coast of Germany by researchers, having been submerged around the year A.D. 1362.
So the legend goes, Rungholt was notorious for its abundance of pleasures, leading its inhabitants to sinful ways, including drunkenness, impiety, and the flaunting of wealth, the Times reports. These sins came to a head one Christmas, when a group of drunk youths tried to make a priest give a pig the last sacrament at a local inn. The priest prayed to God, asking for the youths to be punished, and per the stories, the very next day, a storm arrived and wiped Rungholt from the map.
The existence of Rungholt has long been debated, but researchers from Kiel University, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, the Center for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, and the State Archaeology Department of Schleswig-Holstein, recently found remains of a church—thought to have been originally in the center of the lost city—within mudflats in the North Frisian Wadden Sea.
"We discovered the church during one week of fieldwork this May, when we were following a row of terps (hidden beneath recent tidal flat sediments) by geophysical prospection," Hannah Hadler, an archaeologist with the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz's Institute of Geography and part of the Rungholt research team, told Newsweek.
A terp is an artificial dwelling mound found in northern Europe and used to provide safe ground during storm surges, high tides and flooding.
"The church was on one of the newly discovered terps, but there were no other buildings around it," Hadler said. "This is not surprising, as other churches in North Frisia are also placed on a terp of their own. We knew that we found the remains of a church by its characteristic foundation with an angular structure in the west, where the tower was probably located, and a round structure in the east (the apse)."
"Compared to other large churches in the region, we saw that our remains were also of the right dimension. We then confirmed our assumption by coring and small excavations that—among others—revealed brick fragments," she said.
Prior to this discovery, there was no solid evidence that previous findings in the area were related to Rungholt. Now, the church and other discoveries point strongly towards this area being the location of the lost hedonistic city.
"What we can say is that all so far known settlement remains—terps, dikes, tidal gates—are of enormous size and the archaeological finds from the tidal flats show a wealthy and certainly important settlement involved in international maritime trade," Hadler previously told Newsweek.
She said: "Our new results—the new 2-kilometer [1.2-mile] row of terps and the central large church—further emphasize the importance but certainly also [the] wealth of the settlement. So, from our point of view, it is highly likely that the settlement is Rungholt."
As with many traces of the past, there are a number of threats facing the preservation of the remains.
"So far, the remains are covered by tidal flat sediment and protected against further erosion," Hadler said. "However, the geophysical image of the terp already shows strong signs of erosion and it is probably sheer luck that this site actually survived more than 600 years in the tidal flats."
"From nearby sites we see that everyday tidal dynamics, i.e. waves, tides, storms, meandering tidal inlets, may cause severe erosion within a few decades or even years. It is thus nearly impossible to prevent the remains from long-term erosion, which increases the need for a detailed investigation of the site."
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/329037ba-11a7-47c8-a957-713cc8abd085.png
Soviet Claims Discovery Of Part Of Lost Continent
IGY Exploration Report Translated
By RAY BRUNER Blade Science Editor
Soviet scientists today have reported the discovery of a remnant of the lost continent of Lemuria, Believed by some 19th Century scientists to have sunk under the Indian ocean more than a million years ago.
The discovery was reported to have been made during the seven-month voyage of the Russian exploration ship Vityaz, as part of Soviet participation in the third International Geophysical Year.
It is possible the announcement may reopen an argument which was thought to have ended by the beginning of the 20th Century. The argument was started by the noted German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. He contended there must have been a vast land area continuous over the present Indian Ocean, Africa and the Malayan Archipelago.
Lemur Distribution
Its existence, he said, was the only way to explain the present geographical distribution of lemurs and other forms of life. Lemurs are primates lower on the scale than apes and monkeys.
After he had started the argument, fossil remains of lemurs were found in localities to discredit the German zoologist's contention, It was generally thought that this would settle the matter.
The Russian announcement, which has been translated in a report issued today by the U.S. Department of Commerce, stated that the Vityaz crossed the equator six times in voyages over the western portion of the Indian Ocean.
"Here, close to the shores of Africa, is an area of an enormous number of sunken islands," the Russians said. "They are remnants of the lost Lemuria."
Sunken Islands
The scientists probed the ocean bottom at a depth of about three miles. They found sand under a layer of ordinary ocean silt about six feet thick. This, apparently was the surface of the lost continent.
Further investigation disclosed the existence of sunken islands surrounded by coral reefs.
"The system of winds and currents in this region, the presence of submarine mountains and the island archipelagos create conditions favorable to live," the Russians stated.
They also reported discovering new deep currents and "approximately 100 types of previously unknown mammals and fish."
Extensive Elevations
They said many areas studied, which appear on maps as deep blue spots indicating great depths, revealed extensive elevations and individual mountains.
It is possible that the report of the discovery of Lemuria can be substantiated during the forthcoming intensive exploration of the Indian Ocean by 11 nations, including the U.S. and the USSR. This cooperative effort is being organized by the International council of Scientific Unions, which has its headquarters at The Hague.
The floor of the Indian Ocean is less known than the visible surface of the moon. Explorations of the floors of the world's deep water is at about the same stage as the exploration of the new world at the time of John Cabot in the 15th Century when he made his historic voyages to North America.
Myths On Atlantis
Controversies over the lost continent of Lemuria are less well known than the myths of the lost Atlantis, which is still subject of considerable speculation. Since Plato, in ancient Greece, first popularized the Atlantis legend, it is estimated that more than 5,000 books have been written about it.
While Lemuria was supposed to have sunk below the depths of the ocean before the dawn of man, the sinking of Atlantis was believed to have occurred in much more recent times.
I've searched for Lemmy world communities on kbin and came up dry. There's a problem of communication between the sites.
W. Glenn Dennis Interview, 11/19/1990
Creator(s): Department of Defense. Department of the Air Force. Office of the Secretary. Office of the Administrative Assistant. Office of the Deputy for Security and Special Investigative Programs. Research Declassification Team. (1987 - ) (Most Recent)
Series : Moving Images Relating to "The Roswell Reports" Source Data Research Files, compiled 1946 - 1996 Record Group 341: Records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force (Air Staff), 1934 - 2004
Production Date: 11/19/1990
Access Restriction(s): Unrestricted Use Restriction(s): Restricted - Possibly Note: Some or all of this material may be restricted by copyright or other intellectual property rights restrictions.
Scope & Content: This video recording contains an interview with mortician W. Glenn Dennis, alleged firsthand witness to events at Roswell Army Air Force Hospital concerning recovered alien bodies.
Downed 'Object' Aim Of Pennsylvania Hunt
PITTSBURGH (UPI) -U.S. Army officials and the Pennsylvania State Police Thursday night sealed off an area in southwesters Pennsylvania explaining there "is an unidentified flying object in the woods."
A spokesman for a team of radar experts from the Army's 662 Radar Squadron here said, "We don't know what we have yet."
After sealing off a wooded, isolated area at Kecksburg, Pa., about 20 miles south of here, officers said Army engineers were being called to the scene.
The object was found after a flash of orange fire streaking across the sky was reported by airplane pilots and residents in seven states.
Pentagon sources indicated the flash could have been a meteorite.
State police went to the Kecksburg, Pa., area after a woman reported seeing a "round, smoldering object crash to the earth."
No Rockets Fired
Earlier reports said the flash could have been a high altitude test rocket fired over Lake Erie but National Guard and Air Force officials denied any rockets had been fired.
9 NOV 1946
Big Navy Antarctic Force Poised With Planes and 5,000 Experts
North American Newspaper Alliance
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8--One of the largest polar task forces ever assembled by the United States Navy is poised to make a 10,000 mile jump to the Antarctic, it was learned tonight.
In a race to gain "strategic" control of what suddenly has become a vital part of the world, the Navy is preparing to send more than a score of planes, a dozen icebreakers and airplane tenders and as many as 5,000 technicians and trained polar experts to explore the subcontinental South Pole.
The mission, described officially as a "top secret" Navy project, is planning to get under way about Dec, 2, it was disclosed, with Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, polar hero and veteran explorer, in charge.
Trained men are being drawn from as far as Alaska and the Aleutians to help man the flotilla of small ice-breakers and dog-sled teams for the project. Personnel transferred to the United States now is being assembled at East and West Coast ports.
Called "Operation High Jump" by Navy planners, the project is expected to head directly for the "Little America" site formerly occupied by Admiral Byrd and to spend at least two months photographing the icy wilderness and exploring the ice cap for evidence of uranium and other sources of atomic energy.
Admiral Byrd, now polar adviser to Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, will be assisted by Capt. Richard H. Cruzen, task force commander, who has direct charge of assembling the men, ships, and materials for the expedition.
Latest Navy reports indicated that if Admiral Byrd--who now is in semi-retirement--is not able to make the trip, Captain Cruzen will head the expedition. If Admiral Byrd goes, however, it will mark his fourth to the South Pole area and his sixth expedition into polar regions.
Officers connected with the expedition declined to state specifically what would be the main object of the trip, but a high-ranking officer emphasized privately that is was of a "highly strategic" nature.
To Test Personnel, Weapons
The expedition not only is part of an international race to find new sources of atomic energy, he indicated, but also is intended to test personnel and new weapons under Antarctic conditions and to map the South Pole area into an operational weather weapon in the event of another war.
The South Polar region, it was pointed out, is the breeding place of cyclones and the "Pandora box" from which weather for all parts of the world originates. Data of winds, currents and ice-flow here would provide the whole backlog on weather in Europe and America.
An officer supervising the expedition's personnel said the project had no connection with another private expedition to the antarctic sponsored by the American Antarctic Association and the New York Geographical Society.
The latter expedition is headed by Naval Comdr. Finn Ronne and Capt. Carl R. Eklund of the Army Air Forces and includes eighteen scientists. It is not scheduled to leave until Jan. 15.
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES
BERLIN, Dec. 19. --The wartime logbook of a german submarine was offered today in support of the contention that sea monsters such as that recently reported seen in Loch Ness, Scotland, exist.
Baron von Forstner, commander of the U-28 during the war, and five of his crew say they saw such a monster in the Atlantic on July 30, 1915. They believe it was killed by the explosion of the British steamer Iberian, which was torpedoed by the submarine.
After the Iberian had sunk almost vertically stern first, there was an explosion at what Baron von Forstner judged to be a depth of about 3,300 feet. Shortly afterward, he and the members of the crew declare, a gigantic animal wriggling violently, came to the surface with pieces of the wreckage and was cast fifty feet in the air, but it disappeared ten or fifteen seconds before a picture could be taken.
Baron von Forstner and the chief engineer evolved a drawing of the monster and added it to the submarine's logbook. The monster was said to be about sixty-five feet long, had two legs in front and behind, all strongly webbed, and resembled a crocodile, so the crew named it "the . submarine crocodile." The Baron believes that the explosion that threw the animal out of the water must have killed it.
In addition to the commander and the chief engineer, the two officers of the watch, the helmsman and another member of the crew were standing on the conning tower. All six men say they saw the monster plainly and agreed in their descriptions of it, which correspond completely with the descriptions of those who reported seeing a monster in Loch Ness, except that no fins were visible.
Baron von Forstner believes that it is fully possible for the extreme depths of the see to conceal such animals as yet unknown and that it is possible one could have found its way into the shallower waters of Loch Ness gradually, thus accustoming itself to the altered pressure.
https://www.nytimes.com/1933/12/20/archives/uboat-crew-tell-of-a-sea-monster-wartime-commander-and-men-say-they.html?smid=url-share
MADRID, Sept. 6 (UPI)-- The Spanish Air Force said today an "unidentified flying object" had eluded one of its supersonic jet fighter-bombers as a rash of flying saucer reports spread from Latin America to Europe.
The sighting of a bright object in the night sky yesterday over Madrid caused a traffic jam and sent the United States-built F-104 jet scrambling to find out what it was.
An official air force announcement said the pilot climbed to an altitude of more that 50,000 feet and reported the object was still above him when he had to return to base for fuel. The pilot of another plane flying at 36,000 feet reported seeing the same object.
Air force radar screens picked up the object and said it was flying at 90,000 feet and moving slowly.
https://www.nytimes.com/1968/09/07/archives/ufo-in-sky-over-madrid-eludes-spanish-air-force.html?smid=url-share
A 590‐foot cargo ship with a crew of 37 has been missing since early Friday and is feared sunk in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle, the Coast Guard reported yesterday.
After being directed to the scene 140 miles due west of Bermuda by a United States Navy P‐3, an Argentine freighter recovered an overturned lifeboat froth the vessel, the Sylvia L. Ossa, and detected an oil slick. The missing ship had been bound from Brazil to Philadelphia with a cargo of iron ore.
Hours later, a British ship, the Portland Glenn, picked up a life preserver from the missing vessel with burn marks on it.
“They're picking up quite a bit of debris in the area now,” said a spokesman for the Coast Guard's rescue coordination center, Atlantic division, on Governors Island.
The search was called off two hours after dark last night and will resume at daylight today, the spokesman announced.
Thus far, he said, two long‐range Coast Guard planes, one from Elizabeth City, S.C., and the other from St. Peterburgh, Fla., as well as a Navy plane from Bermuda have searched 8,200 square miles, beginning at a point where the ship was last heard from.
Ships in the area have also been alerted.
“It's not easy to miss a 590‐foot‐long ship on a day with visibility of more than 40 miles and calm seas, so it doesn't seem too hopeful that it's still afloat,” the Coast Guard spokesman said.
Triangle a ‘Mysterious Area’
The Bermuda Triangle, an area connecting Norfolk, Va., Puerto Rico and Bermuda, has been the subject of considerable speculation in books and articles because of its reputation as a mysterious graveyard where hundreds of men, ships and planes have supposedly disappeared without any natural explanation.
“We don't recognize the triangle as having any special qualities over other areas,” the Coast Guard spokesman said, “but it's in that area where the ship was last heard from.”
The Coast Guard was notified that the ship was missing at 9:30 A.M. Friday by the owner, the Omnium Shipping Company of 42 Broadway. This was 41/, hours after the vessel was due in Philadelphia.
The 15,028‐gross‐ton ship, which has a Panamian registry, was built in 1943 and extensively overhauled in 1962.
The owner of the ship could not be reached for comment.
According to the Coast Guard, the owner said when he called Friday that he had last heard from the ship early Wednesday. The report was that the vessel had run into gale‐force winds and high seas and would be late in its scheduled arrival because of reduced speed.
The ship's position was given as 340 miles due west of Bermuda, roughly 600 miles out of Philadelphia, in the Wednesday message. This was the last message from the ship.
The Coast Guard spokesman said that, following standard procedure, the service had waited more than 24 hours to see the ship would be heard from or would appear in port. Then a search was started.
The spokesman said a ship in serious trouble was invariably able to get off “mayday” or emergency distress message, which would result in an immediate search and. rescue operation.
Water temperatures in the area were reported last night to be a relatively warm 79 degrees Farenheit. Waves, however, averaged 6 to 12 feet, with strong gusts up to 30 knots.
Soviet Acad of Sciences Inst of Oceanology deputy dir Prof Andrei Arkadyevich Aksyonov says he has photographic evidence, taken 2 yrs ago by colleague Vladimir I Marakuyev, of manmade stone walls and staircases of what may be remains of Atlantis in Atlantic Ocean, about 275 miles southwest of Portug...
MOSCOW, May 20 — Plato, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and all you science fiction writers who have puzzled over the riddle of the lost continent of Atlantis, move over for Prof. Andrei Arkadyevich Ak.syconov.
Soviet science may maintain that the so‐called Bermuda Triangle, an area in the Atlantic where mysterious disappearances of ships and planes are said to have occurred, is nothing but water and that flying saucers are optical illusions. But Professor Aksyonov says he has photographic evidence of manmade stone walls and staircases at a depth of 200 feet in the Atlantic Ocean, about 275 miles southwest of the Portuguese coast. Maybe.
“It's possible that .it's part of Atlantis, maybe not the whole thing, but part,” Dr. Aksyonov said. He is a man of established scientific reputation, deputy director of the Institute of Oceanology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
His evidence, he concedes, is limited: two pictures showing 11 stones that he believes bear the mark of human handiwork.
The photographs were taken two years ago, not by Dr. Aksyonov but by a colleague, Vladimir I. Marakuyev,
The New York Times/May 21, 1979
A Soviet scientist says he found ruins on Ampere Seamount. with a submersible camera on the submerged summit of the Ampere Seamount, a dormant underwater volcano about midway between Lisbon and the Madeira archipelago. The ocean floor around the seamount is more than 10,000 feet below the surface.
In his office at the institute, Dr. Aksyonov said recently that he was sorry but he could not show the pictures. “They belong to Marakuyev, and he is very sick with a heart condition in hospital,” he said. “I think they'll be published in one of our scientific journals sometime soon.”
Mr. Marakuyev apparently did not realize what he had until late last year, when he got around to developing film from a 1977 exploration of the seamount that he had made in the Soviet research vessel Moskovsky Universitet. “I don't know why it took him so long to get to them,” Dr. Aksyonov said.
An Offer of Directions
He will not say he has discovered Atlantis, but he offers free directions to anybody else who wants to. “All you would have to do is take a ship with the right equipment to the Ampere Seamount, go down 60 meters, find the stones and bring them up to see if they are man‐made or not,” he said. “It's my personal opinion that they are.”
Accounts of the discovery were published in Europe earlier this spring, and Dr. AksyOnov says they brought amused smiles from oceanographer ‘colleagues in Denmark.
“I asked them, ‘Did any of you believe this?’ They said ‘No,’ and they said they laughed a lot.”
As he describes the pictures, of total of eight only two are really interesting.
‘Typical Wall From Antiquity’
“One of them shows eight stones —four 'square ones and four'. rounded ones, in a line about three and a half or four feet long,” he said. “Specialists who've looked at it say it's a typical wall from antiquity. The second photo shows three equally spaced stones at the left‐hand edge, and it appears to be part of a staircase.”
Dr. Aksyonov just returned from an unrelated oceanographic cruise in his research ship, the Vityaz.
“Heinrich Schliemann, the great 19th‐century German archeologist, found the ruins of Troy in Turkey by studying the poetry of Homer very attentively,” he said. Mr. Schliemann, too, got a skeptical reception at first.
Atlantis was described by Plato in two of his dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. “Plato says that it was located in the Atlantic Ocean and on an island and [tat the tribes living on it took part in wars in southern Europe and in North Africa before one day the island sank between walls of water,” Dr: Aksyonov said. “I believe that the objects in the pictures once stood on the surface too, though specialists say it's difficult to believe the seamount could have sunk so far.” he said.
Cites Lisbon Earthquake
He says that the catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 caused a tidal wave and a flood that left part of the city forever beneath the sea. Something similar, he surmises, may have happened to an island of which the Ampere Seamount would be the submarine remnant.
The legends around Atlantis have been nourished over the centuries. It has been variously located in America, Scandinavia, the Middle East and the Canary Islands, 500 miles south of the Ampere Seamount.
“The ocean is full of mysteries,” Dr. Aksyonov says, “and our investigations are the beginning of our understanding.”
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