Posted by 2012 | 1 comment

Just what will happen on December 21, 2012

• The orbit of Nibiru, also known as “Planet X”, is on a potential collision course with earth and will pass within a few miles in 2012, bringing destruction in its wake.
• “Global Coastal Phenomena” will begin gradually, but by April 2011 the situation will get much worse. Unusual movements of the Moon brought on by anomalies in the magnetosphere could cause severe coastal disruptions.
• A massive crisis begins in late 2009 or early 2010. Israel may bomb Iran, or H1N1 “Swine Flu” could mutate into a level of extreme lethality. Following this crisis, the Obama administration will be immediately thrown into chaos.
• An asteroid will collide with the earth, making the tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004 look like a pond ripple by comparison!
• The earth’s core will cease to rotate, due to a natural or manmade phenomenon. The result is the total breakdown of this planet’s protective magnetic shield against the deadly solar radiation that constantly pounds the atmosphere.

Posted by 2012 | 0 comments

Ancient city wall discovered

ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2010) — A section of an ancient city wall of Jerusalem from the tenth century B.C.E. — possibly built by King Solomon — has been revealed in archaeological excavations directed by Dr. Eilat Mazar and conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The section of the city wall revealed, 70 meters long and six meters high, is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the southern wall of the Temple Mount.

Uncovered in the city wall complex are: an inner gatehouse for access into the royal quarter of the city, a royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse, and a corner tower that overlooks a substantial section of the adjacent Kidron valley.

The excavations in the Ophel area were carried out over a three-month period with funding provided by Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman, a New York couple interested in Biblical Archeology. The funding supports both completion of the archaeological excavations and processing and analysis of the finds as well as conservation work and preparation of the site for viewing by the public within the Ophel Archaeological Park and the national park around the walls of Jerusalem.

The excavations were carried out in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and the Company for the Development of East Jerusalem. Archaeology students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as volunteer students from the Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmond, Oklahoma, and hired workers all participated in the excavation work.

“The city wall that has been uncovered testifies to a ruling presence. Its strength and form of construction indicate a high level of engineering,” Mazar said. The city wall is at the eastern end of the Ophel area in a high, strategic location atop the western slop of the Kidron valley.

“A comparison of this latest finding with city walls and gates from the period of the First Temple, as well as pottery found at the site, enable us to postulate with a great degree of assurance that the wall that has been revealed is that which was built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the latter part of the tenth century B.C.E.,” said Mazar

“This is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon’s building in Jerusalem,” she added. “The Bible tells us that Solomon built — with the assistance of the Phoenicians, who were outstanding builders — the Temple and his new palace and surrounded them with a city, most probably connected to the more ancient wall of the City of David.” Mazar specifically cites the third chapter of the First Books of Kings where it refers to “until he (Solomon) had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the Lord, and the wall of Jerusalem round about.”

The six-meter-high gatehouse of the uncovered city wall complex is built in a style typical of those from the period of the First Temple like Megiddo, Beersheva and Ashdod. It has symmetrical plan of four identical small rooms, two on each side of the main passageway. Also there was a large, adjacent tower, covering an area of 24 by 18 meters, which was intended to serve as a watchtower to protect entry to the city. The tower is located today under the nearby road and still needs to be excavated. Nineteenth century British surveyor Charles Warren, who conducted an underground survey in the area, first described the outline of the large tower in 1867 but without attributing it to the era of Solomon.

“Part of the city wall complex served as commercial space and part as security stations,” explained Mazar. Within the courtyard of the large tower there were widespread public activities, she said. It served as a public meeting ground, as a place for conducting commercial activities and cult activities, and as a location for economic and legal activities.

Pottery shards discovered within the fill of the lowest floor of the royal building near the gatehouse also testify to the dating of the complex to the 10th century B.C.E. Found on the floor were remnants of large storage jars, 1.15 meters in height, that survived destruction by fire and that were found in rooms that apparently served as storage areas on the ground floor of the building. On one of the jars there is a partial inscription in ancient Hebrew indicating it belonged to a high-level government official.

“The jars that were found are the largest ever found in Jerusalem,” said Mazar, adding that “the inscription that was found on one of them shows that it belonged to a government official, apparently the person responsible for overseeing the provision of baked goods to the royal court.”

In addition to the pottery shards, cult figurines were also found in the area, as were seal impressions on jar handles with the word “to the king,” testifying to their usage within the monarchy. Also found were seal impressions (bullae) with Hebrew names, also indicating the royal nature of the structure. Most of the tiny fragments uncovered came from intricate wet sifting done with the help of the salvaging Temple Mount Sifting Project, directed by Dr. Gabriel Barkai and Zachi Zweig, under the auspice of the Nature and Parks Authority and the Ir David Foundation.

Between the large tower at the city gate and the royal building the archaeologists uncovered a section of the corner tower that is eight meters in length and six meters high. The tower was built of carved stones of unusual beauty.

East of the royal building, another section of the city wall that extends for some 35 meters also was revealed. This section is five meters high, and is part of the wall that continues to the northeast and once enclosed the Ophel area.

Posted by 2012 | 6 comments

Satellite imaging-mayans died due to deforestation

December’s big global warming conference in Copenhagen featured lots of chatter about the future and ways to avoid environmental Doomsday. One of the surprise speakers was Tom Sever, NASA’s recently-retired staff archeologist.

His topic, “Climate Change Impacts on Civilization: Lessons From Space Archeology,” certainly sounds contemporary. But he broke ranks by choosing to look back a thousand years — to the mysterious collapse of the Mayan empire.

Sever is one of the pioneers of satellite imaging technology, also known as remote sensing. His Mayan research (and Copenhagen appearance) is indicative of how far the field has come from the Cold War days of high-tech snooping for missile silos. Satellite imaging now figures into everything from disease prevention to monitoring human rights abuses.

“The applications of remote sensing are only going to keep increasing,” says Sarah Parcak, assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, who has used it to discover more than 130 historic sites buried in the Egyptian desert. “It’s a wonderful tool to track short-term and long-term changes, and it’s fairly cost-efficient.”

For about 20 years, Sever has been examining high-altitude pictures of the rain forests that blanket Central America’s Yucatan Peninsula. He’s able to look back through time by mining the images for information about such variables as soil content and moisture levels, then running that data through computer models.

His conclusion? The Mayans serve as a cautionary tale. They were voracious tree cutters, denuding the landscape to the point where it adversely affected crop yields and rainfall patterns. Multiple factors, including overpopulation, played a role in their demise, Sever notes, but deforestation “was one of them and perhaps a significant component.”

Ron Blom, principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., shared the stage with Sever in Copenhagen. He delved even deeper into the past, talking about how the Earth’s climate stabilized about 11,000 years ago, an “enabling circumstance” that allowed agricultural, non-nomadic societies to take root. But what nature gives, nature can take away.

According to Blom, satellite imaging has shown that the ancient cities of Petra in Jordan and Angkor Wat in Cambodia fell victim to brutally fickle weather. “Drought was the final thing that ruined them,” he says.

Blom and Sever both stumbled into satellite imaging in the early 1980s. Blom was among the NASA scientists who were stumped by the images taken by radar-equipped cameras that had been placed aboard the Challenger space shuttle during its test flights. The photographed terrain looked otherworldly. They eventually realized they were staring at pictures of the Sahara Desert that contained radar-enhanced details the human eye normally couldn’t see, particularly a spider’s web of dried river beds hidden under what had once been lush grassland.

Inspiration struck. Blom became part of a team that directed an archaeological dig near where several of those latent rivers intersected in southern Oman. They were betting that might be a suitable location of the fabled lost city of Ubar. They guessed right.

“It’s not an Instamatic snapshot,” Blom says, referring to all the image manipulating that must be done with most raw satellite photos. “The surface you see with your eye is not the surface the radar sees.”

Sever had taken a job fresh out of graduate school in 1978 as a data processor at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. He began playing around with NASA’s stock of satellite photos in his off hours. He eventually convinced NASA and the National Science Foundation to undertake a small demonstration project in the wilds of Costa Rica.

Boots-on-the-ground exploration subsequently confirmed a secret that satellite images first revealed to him: “We are able to find the oldest footpath in the world,” Sever says.

Archaeologists immediately grasped the significance of satellite imaging. Eyes in the sky can scour hundreds of square miles of land, pinpointing those spots most worthy of pick-and-shovel exploration. But other uses gradually materialized.

Satellite imaging has expanded the scope of human rights activists. Before-and-after aerial photos documented the destruction of villages by government-backed militias in Sudan, as well as the flow of people into refugee camps, which helped the Red Cross better plan its relief efforts. Amnesty International maintains an Eyes on Darfur bank of photos on the Internet with help from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Other organizations have scoured satellite images to monitor Israeli army activity in the Gaza strip, political prison camps in North Korea and evidence of mass graves in northern Afghanistan.

Sever currently teaches at the University of Alabama-Huntsville but continues to do contract work for NASA. He assisted the governments of Central America in setting up a regional satellite surveillance system called Servir in 2005. It’s being employed to detect forest fires and coastal outbreaks of toxic red tide, plus do comparative analysis of air quality. The Servir program has proved so successful that 15 African countries launched a spinoff in 2008.

In September, Parcak branched out from archaeology by being named director of a new Laboratory for Global Health Observation at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Remote sensing identified heavy mosquito breeding areas in Kenya, which then get sprayed to reduce the threat of malaria. UAB is trying to develop similar preventive measures for Lyme disease, studying whether changes in ambient temperature and deer proliferation might be reliable predictors of tick infestations.

Parcak says satellites could play a critical role in locating sources of clean water: “That’s going to be such a huge issue in the next 50 years, especially in Central Africa and India.”

The increased popularity of satellite imaging is owed in part to improvements in the quality and quantity of raw material. Governments have released stockpiles of formerly classified photos into the public domain. Add to that the proliferation of commercial satellites that will shoot panoramic photos on request, although a 15-square-mile image can cost as much as $1,000.

Over the years, grainy black-and-white film has given way to high-resolution, full-color digital pictures. You have a choice of radar, near-infrared, thermal-infrared and LIDAR (Light Dilution and Ranging) formats.

Historically, this has been a strictly land-based technology, something of a handicap on a planet where two-thirds of the surface is submerged. But in October, a Colorado company launched a satellite that reportedly can capture images through almost 50 feet of water.

“I read that and my jaw dropped,” Parcak says.

What’s that about a lost city of Atlantis?

Posted by 2012 | 0 comments

Destruction or Revelation

You probably already know. There is much talk about the world ending December 21, 2012. Pop culture has focused on the Mayan calendar. It ends December 21, 2012. Why do so to join the day as the end of the world? Is it intuitive human mass, a knowingness subconscious? Is it clever marketing? More bluntly, is the prophecy of the Mayan calendar, a hoax or reality? Mayan calendars Did you know there were many Mayan calendar? The Maya were an agricultural people. Their world revolves around the seasons and celestial bodies that have governed these seasons. They had a solar calendar and lunar calendar. They had a calendar that has recorded the celestial journey of Venus and various other schedules associated with their many gods. Why the Mayan prophesy the end of the world? Maybe they did not. Nobody can say that the Mayans intentionally made any such prophecy. Maybe their intention was simply to create calendars, calendars to mark and record their history and to meet their agricultural needs. Three Calendars three most publicized schedules were Mayan Tzolkin, the Haab, and long calendar. According to some calculations, the Mayan calendar is said to be more accurate than our modern Gregorian calendar! The Tzolkin calendar was the calendar or sacred ceremonial. It consisted of 13 numbered days and 20 names. He recorded a cycle of 260 days. The Haab calendar was a solar calendar. It consists of 18 months of 20 days each, plus one month of 5 “nameless” days to the cycle. This is a calendar of 365 days. The Tzolkin and Haab combine to create the calendar cycle, which represents a cycle of 52 years. The long calendar was a calendar of events. That is to say a calendar to count the years. It was a calendar of events, much like our modern Gregorian and Julian calendars. The Maya used it to move forward and backward in time. It is still used today in some modern-day Mayan villages. The schedule covers a long period of about 5125 years. End the mystery and I am sure you are well aware that all schedules end at some point. Our Gregorian calendar end of each year, at midnight December 31 and all again the next day. Our calendars recording a cycle of 365 days. We have a 10 year cycle that we call a decade, a series of one hundred years that we call a century. The Maya were the same. The long calendar ends December 21, 2012, and a new cycle begins. What makes this particular day so mysterious and threatening? It is interesting and important to note that there are a number of things that coincide with this particular date. The prophecy of Hindus at the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of a new world at about the same time. St. Malachi, the prophet predicted the last Roman Catholic pope to be the Benedictine order. The current pope is Benedict XVI. One I Ching scholar correlation that teaching to show an end of our world around the same date. Scientists identify this year as a year of intense solar activity that could have disastrous consequences for our world. That day our sun, earth, and the center of the Milky Way galaxy will be in alignment. December 21, 2012 is the winter solstice. Mayan scholars have translated inscriptions which imply the end. Some researchers interpret the markings to signify the end of the world. These facts imply the end of the world? Only you can make this decision. This short article does little justice to this subject. You owe it to yourself to learn. Regardless of the validity of prophecy, we must always keep an open mind and be prepared for any calamity. Judge for yourself. Is 2012 hoax or reality? Prepare for possibilities. Why not be prepared and be armed with knowledge?

Posted by 2012 | 0 comments

Meditate in Tune with the Calendar

Spring, summer, fall and winter follow each other by the laws of the universe. The mind and spirit travel a similar path.   full story