Known as Pluto’s Gate, the famous “Gate to Hell” cave was celebrated as the portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology and tradition. It was said to be located in the ancient Phrygian city of Hierapolis, now called Pamukkale, and described as filled with lethal mephitic vapors. Last week, Italian archaeologists announced that they have…
Category: Geology and Archaeology
Archaeologists find hundreds of human skulls with partial spines attached in suspected Mexican “sacrifice” site
Archaeologists from Georgia State University were digging an empty field in Mexico when they ran across an amazing discovery – hundreds of thousand-year-old human skulls with just one or two vertebra attached indicating the site may have been a religious ritual site used for human sacrifices. The archaeologists made the find in an area that…
12-pound gold nugget discovered in field where hundreds of prospectors had searched before
An anonymous gold prospector using a Minelab GPX-5000 metal detector has discovered a 12-pound gold nugget worth a whopping $315,000 dollars. The prospector was searching in a field near the city of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, in a well-known, previously searched gold prospecting field. It is estimated that hundreds of prospectors had searched the same…
3.5 billion year old fossils found that predate oxygen on Earth
Researchers have found fossils of bacteria in northwest Australia’s Pilbara region, that are dated at 3.49 billion-years-old. That’s older than oxygen and just one billion years after Earth’s formation. The fossils, which are textures on the surfaces of sandstone thought to be sculpted by once-living organisms, are believed to be the oldest visible fossils ever…
Historic spot of Julius Caesar’s assassination may have finally been discovered by archaeologists in Rome
The Grand Canyon’s rock record is missing 1.2 billion years of history
Called “The Great Unconformity”, the Grand Canyon has a 1.2 billion year gap in the rock record. Above the gap is 500 million-year-old sandstone (Cambrian age), a time of billions of shelled marine creatures. Below the gap is metamorphic rock of the Slatherian period aged 1.75 billion years where no fossils exist at all. But…
Archaeologists resume hunt where two thousand year old computing device (Antikythera Mechanism) was found in 1901
Unusual April 2012 Indonesian Earthquake may have broken tectonic plate and created new plate boundary
The April 11, 2012 series of Earthquakes in Indonesia may have been a bigger event than originally thought – they may have broken the tectonic plate. The largest of the quakes was a magnitude 8.7 offshore quake that produced stronger ground-shaking than any earthquake in history. Scientists found it odd that it triggered several earthquakes…