Good morning, all you New Dayists.
It’s Caturday. Yaaaay!!
Welcome to the New Day Cafe open thread.
Get a cup of coffee or tea and pull up to the large table here on the ether.
And some food too
Potato pancake! Yum!
All are welcome to join the fun, the silliness, the conversations. If you don’t know...just ask! Some things really do require a bit of explanation.
There will be a few surprises along the way, all good ones, we hope.
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Pie fights will be met with outrageous ridicule and insults. Trolls will be incinerated and served at the next group BBQ. As briquettes
Imagine yourself back in time, say to 2014, and there you are minding your own business and carrying on with your day. It’s a nice Saturday, you are humming and folding up the laundry, and you get an email from a friend with this image. What do you do?:
Doesn’t that look like an underwater Millennium Falcon to you? As I was looking at that image wondering what it could be, another email arrived with another image attached with the words — Aliens are here!
Eh. Wat?
Okay then.The Millennium Falcon’s Earth twin crash landed and slid along a bit on the seabed, before it came to a stop. At which point I said out loud “oh, sure. They’ve been living here all this time and abiding by their own Prime Directive?”
Uh huh.
Yeah. No. The artifact was found by Swedish Ocean X Team, a company which hunts the seas for sunken ships and sell the things they find in those ships for profit. When they found this thing in the Baltic Sea, they wondered what it was. They claimed that had not seen anything like it before, anywhere:
The divers say that there is a 985-foot-long path that can be described "as a runway or a downhill path that is flattened at the seabed with the object at the end of it."
Peter Lindberg, who is one of the founders of the Swedish Ocean X Team, has always been clear that they are not claiming that this is a spaceship of any kind. They don't, though, know what it is:
“First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else. And since no volcanic activity has ever been reported in the Baltic Sea the find becomes even stranger. As laymen we can only speculate how this is made by nature, but this is the strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver.”
And that’s how the Baltic Sea Anomaly came into being.
Even in the early days of publicity for this anomaly, people tried to focus on the mundane and factual about it, and looked at the way the side scanner may have contributed to a flawed reading, and difficulty in interpreting such images with certitude. As time went on, Ocean X Team made more claims as divers went around the vicinity of the site to investigate what to them looked like charred and burned rocks in the landing site etc. And the experts began to get involved and a different picture began to emerge:
First, the experts have observed no signs of charring in the explorers' newly released photo of an underwater rock pile. "The description of 'charred rocks' is completely unwarranted," said Dan Fornari, a marine geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And, even if the rocks are dark, that is to be expected, said Katherine Croff Bell, chief scientist at the Nautilus Exploration Program. "In contrast to rocks found on land, practically all rocks that have been underwater for a long time are black, so their color doesn't necessarily indicate volcanic or burned origin," she said.
Also, as more experts looked at this anomaly, the less those people thought there was anything anomalous about this object imaged on sonar:
"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.
So, no aliens. Sadly.
Not a Nazi bunker.
Not the Millennium Falcon.
However, I have to admit that as we were discovering what all this was about, my friends and I really enjoyed hurling fake news at each other about it being a UFO/Alien Ship. Even though we knew it was not so. We really enjoyed imagining it could be. And I again discovered in myself a capacity to find fun in such activity, even as we went about finding out the available facts regarding this “anomaly.”
Much of the Baltic Sea area was subject to glaciation, and the conjecture is that this large deposit on the sea floor is a remains of that process — simply a glacial deposit, leftover from that age.
By the time we found everyone’s conclusion, my friends and I were in equal parts disappointed it was not an alien, and yet fascinated by the geologic processes in the great north.
In hindsight what we were doing, and still occasionally do, is mild compared to what we experienced as a nation in the last election and in this midterms. The political kind of fake news is simply frightening.
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What are y’all thinking about today?