Using folklore for good instead of for woo-woo inanity.

[theweaselking]

On the banks of Siletz Bay in Lincoln City, Oregon, officials dedicated a memorial last week to one of America's worst calamities: a huge earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands of Native Americans 300 years ago.

But the memorial's main job is not to commemorate the disaster, which has only just come to light, but to warn local people that similar devastation could strike at any time.

The area sits over massive fault lines whose dangers have been highlighted by a startling new scientific discipline that combines Earth science studies and analysis of ancient legends. This is geomythology, and it is transforming our knowledge of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, says the journal Science.

According to the discipline's proponents, violent geological upheavals may be more frequent than was previously suspected.

Apart from the 'lost' Seattle earthquake, geomythology has recently revealed that a volcano in Fiji, thought to be dormant, is active, a discovery that followed geologists' decision to follow up legends of a mountain appearing overnight.

Geologists have found that Middle Eastern flooding myths, including the story of Noah, could be traced to the sudden inundation of the Black Sea 7,600 years ago. The Oracle at Delphi has been found to lie over a geological fault through which seeped hallucinogenic gases. These could account for the trances and utterances of the oracle's mystics.

'Myths can tell us a great deal about what happened in the past and were important in establishing what happened here 300 years ago,' said Brian Atwater, of the US Geological Survey in Seattle.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"Geologists have found that Middle Eastern flooding myths, including the story of Noah, could be traced to the sudden inundation of the Black Sea 7,600 years ago."

Since disproven, I'm afraid. See

http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.arts.sf.composition/msg/feac1fd3fbc2faae?dmode=source&hl=en

for a somewhat cranky discussion.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And anyway, the Middle East includes this large, culturally influential region that is a large, flat region between two tremendous rivers. Be a bit off if the local myths didn't include the odd bit of unrequested water surplus.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It would be, at that.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

We seem to have an affinity for building near water (river and coasts) which must have been deucedly inconvenient at the beginning of this interglacial.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If only water weren't so damned useful for a city. Poor design of the oceans and rivers, must have been.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, truly biblical magnitude floods weren't unknown in North America or Siberia. Unfortunately, the cultures with the best view probably didn't survive the experience of seeing what multiple Lake Ontarios draining out over days looks like from the region in the way.

There must have been people at the other end, who went to go fish in Lake Agassiz, only to find the shoreline had moved. I wonder if they left stories about vanishing lakes?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Heh. Good thinking on their part, but it's a pity that the article didn't mention Schliemann's use of the Illiad to discover the site of Troy in the 1870s; it's a classic in archeology.

-- Steve's found that cross-pollination from different disciplines often results in very interesting brain-children.