Dormant No More: Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall Erupts
Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula enjoyed a centuries-long respite from fire and ash, but that came rumbling to an end the night of March 19, 2021. That’s when the Fagradalsfjall volcano let loose with an eruption that began spewing lava across the landscape from a fissure approximately 1,600 feet long.
The last time the volcano erupted was some 800 years ago. But it was by no means dormant these many centuries as magma built up beneath the land and finally let loose. Located in the southwest corner of Iceland, a glare from the red-hot lava flow was visible from the capital city of Reykjavík a full 20 miles away!
Earth sent ample warning signals. The region experienced as many as 40,000 earthquakes over the course of several months. Some 20,000 of those occurred in the weeks immediately preceding the eruption.
Fortunately, the area around the erupting fissure is largely uninhabited, so no damage to property or injuries to people have been reported, and lookieloos are being asked to refrain from coming to the peninsula on an adventure jaunt so as to keep them out of harm’s way—and out of the way of first responders. In addition, air traffic was temporarily suspended pending measurements of ash danger, an especially necessary precaution given that Iceland’s main Keflavik International Airport is located just five to six miles from the Reykjanes Peninsula. A “code red” aviation warning was soon lowered to “orange” when minimal ash fall was detected.
Apparently, reykjanes means “smoking peninsula.” It most certainly is living up to its name at present!
STONEHENGE: THE DEBATE CONTINUES
Mysterious Stonehenge has ignited endless research, debate, and speculation. When was it created and why? Who created it? And—more to the point for this article—where did they get the earth resources to construct it?
While some of the immense stone boulders used to build Stonehenge are native to the area of southern England where the ancient monument stands, “bluestones” have been traced
to rock quarries 175 miles away in western Wales. In addition, analysis of chemical elements in ancient human remains found at Stonehenge indicate that a large population there had Welsh roots.
One team of researchers led by Mike Parker Pearson (University College London) now believes they have located a sort of “protoStonehenge” at a place called Waun Mawn in western Wales not far from those old bluestone quarries. There, it appears a stone circle with roughly the same dimensions as Stonehenge once stood but was dismantled. Signatures in the ground indicate where stones stood and how they were arranged—and one such hole is an exact match in size and shape for a bluestone at Stonehenge with a unique five-sided cross section.
Parker Pearson speculates that sometime 5,200 to 5,400 years ago, a huge stone circle at Waun Mawn was totally dismantled as an entire population left western Wales, along with their sacred rocks, to settle and construct a new temple we now call Stonehenge. Other researchers say the discoveries made to date at Waun Mawn (which is still in early stages of excavation) “need further work.”
The ultimate source of the Stonehenge stones? The debate continues!
NEWLY FOUND MAMMOTH DNA TELLS A LONGER, FULLER STORY
In days of old, paleontologists had just bones and imagination to tell the story of life gone by. My, how times have changed! Increasingly, paleontology labs are looking a lot like biology labs equipped to perform sophisticated genetic analyses.
Per a recent issue of the journal Nature, one of those labs has been kept busy analyzing what is reported to be the oldest animal DNA discovered to date. The samples came from mammoth molars dug up from Siberian permafrost decades ago. They have been dated as far back as 1.2 million years!
DNA analyses allow for more sophisticated comparisons than can be told simply from the bones of critters that, superficially, may have looked an awful lot alike. They also allow for comparison with modern-day critters that may have descended from the fossils in question.
In this instance, researchers say that two of the mammoths recently examined via DNA analysis may represent two entirely different lineages. One may have given rise to woolly mammoths, but the other seems to represent a previously unknown line that, perhaps, eventually led to Columbian mammoths.
While represented by just tiny snippets invisible to the naked eye, DNA samples are telling a longer, fuller version of the big story of elephant evolution.