Category Archives: NORTH AMERICA

EUROPE, GREENLAND, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Scientists stunned to discover plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice

Scientists stunned to discover plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice

In northwestern Greenland in 1966, US Army scientists drilled through nearly a mile of ice and pulled up a fifteen-foot-long tube of dirt from the bottom. Then this frozen sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

Engineers with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory capture part of an ice core at Camp Century, Greenland, circa 1966.

In 2019, University of Vermont scientist Andrew Christ looked at it through his microscope — and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: twigs and leaves instead of just sand and rock. That suggested that the ice was gone in the recent geologic past — and that a vegetated landscape, perhaps a boreal forest, stood where a mile-deep ice sheet as big as Alaska stands today.

Over the last year, Christ and an international team of scientists — led by Paul Bierman at UVM, Joerg Schaefer at Columbia University, and Dorthe Dahl-Jensen at the University of Copenhagen — have studied these one-of-a-kind fossil plants and sediment from the bottom of Greenland. Their results show that most, or all, of Greenland, must have been ice-free within the last million years, perhaps even the last few hundred thousand years.

Greenland

“Ice sheets typically pulverize and destroy everything in their path,” says Christ, “but what we discovered was delicate plant structures — perfectly preserved. They’re fossils, but they look like they died yesterday. It’s a time capsule of what used to live on Greenland that we wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.”

The discovery helps confirm a new and troubling understanding that the Greenland ice has melted off entirely during recent warm periods in Earth’s history — periods like the one we are now creating with human-caused climate change.

Understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet in the past is critical for predicting how it will respond to climate warming in the future and how quickly it will melt. Since some twenty feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland’s ice, every coastal city in the world is at risk. The new study provides the strongest evidence yet that Greenland is more fragile and sensitive to climate change than previously understood — and at grave risk of irreversibly melting off.

“This is not a twenty-generation problem,” says Paul Bierman, a geoscientist at UVM in the College of Arts & Sciences, Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources, and fellow in the Gund Institute for Environment. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”

The new research was published March 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Beneath the Ice

The material for the new PNAS study came from Camp Century, a Cold War military base dug inside the ice sheet far above the Arctic Circle in the 1960s. The real purpose of the camp was a super-secret effort, called Project Iceworm, to hide 600 nuclear missiles under the ice close to the Soviet Union. As a cover, the Army presented the camp as a polar science station.

A sediment sample from the Camp Century core site.

The military mission failed, but the science team did complete important research, including drilling a 4560-foot-deep ice core. The Camp Century scientists were focused on the ice itself — part of the burgeoning effort at the time to understand the deep history of Earth’s ice ages. They, apparently, took less interest in a bit of dirt gathered from beneath the ice core. Then, in a truly cinematic set of strange plot twists, the ice core was moved from an Army freezer to the University of Buffalo in the 1970s, to another freezer in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the 1990s, where it languished for decades — until it surfaced when the cores were being moved to a new freezer.

For much of the Pleistocene — the icy period covering the last 2.6 million years — portions of the ice on Greenland persisted even during warmer spells called “interglacials.” But most of this general story has been pieced together from indirect evidence in mud and rock that washed off the island and was gathered by offshore ocean drilling. The extent of Greenland’s ice sheet and what kinds of ecosystems existed there before the last interglacial warm period — that ended about 120,000 years ago — have been hotly debated and poorly understood.

The new study makes clear that the deep ice at Camp Century — some 75 miles inland from the coast and only 800 miles from the North Pole — entirely melted at least once within the last million years and was covered with vegetation, including moss and perhaps trees. The new research, supported by the National Science Foundation, lines up with data from two other ice cores from the center of Greenland, collected in the 1990s. Sediment from the bottom of these cores also indicates that the ice sheet was gone for some time in the recent geologic past.

Scientists stunned to discover plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice
Most of Greenland is covered with ice today. But a new study shows that the deep ice at a site called Camp Century in northwestern Greenland entirely melted at least once within the last million years. The research suggests that the landscape may have instead been covered with green tundra, perhaps like this view of eastern Greenland, near the ocean.

The combination of these cores from the center of Greenland with the new insight from Camp Century in the far northwest gives researchers an unprecedented view of the shifting fate of the entire Greenland ice sheet.

The team of scientists used a series of advanced analytical techniques — none of which were available to researchers fifty years ago — to probe the sediment, fossils, and the waxy coating of leaves found at the bottom of the Camp Century ice core. For example, they measured ratios of rare forms — isotopes — of both aluminum and the element beryllium that form in quartz only when the ground is exposed to the sky and can be hit by cosmic rays. These ratios gave the scientists a window into how long rocks at the surface were exposed vs. buried under layers of ice. This analysis gives the scientists a kind of clock for measuring what was happening in Greenland in the past.

Another test used rare forms of oxygen, found in the ice within the sediment, to reveal that precipitation must have fallen at much lower elevations than the height of the current ice sheet, “demonstrating ice sheet absence,” the team writes.

Combining these techniques with studies of luminescence that estimate the amount of time since sediment was exposed to light, radiocarbon-dating of bits of wood in the ice, and analysis of how layers of ice and debris were arranged — allowed the team to be clear that most, if not all, of Greenland, melted at least once during the past million years — making Greenland green with moss and lichen, and perhaps with spruce and fir trees.

And the new study shows that ecosystems of the past were not scoured into oblivion by ages of glaciers and ice sheets bulldozing overtop. Instead, the story of these living landscapes remains captured under the relatively young ice that formed on top of the ground, frozen in place, and holds them still.

In a 1960’s movie about Camp Century created by the Army, the narrator notes that “more than ninety percent of Greenland is permanently frozen under a polar ice cap.” This new study makes clear that it’s not as permanent as we once thought. “Our study shows that Greenland is much more sensitive to natural climate warming than we used to think — and we already know that humanity’s out-of-control warming of the planet hugely exceeds the natural rate,” says Christ.

“Greenland may seem far away,” says UVM’s Paul Bierman, “but it can quickly melt, pouring enough into the oceans that New York, Miami, Dhaka — pick your city — will go underwater.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Hundreds of Artifacts Returned to Mexico by Arizona Homeland Security

Hundreds of Artifacts Returned to Mexico by Arizona Homeland Security

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) returned 277 pre-Columbian artefacts to Mexican officials Tuesday during a repatriation ceremony in the Mexican Consulate in Nogales.

Hundreds of Artifacts Returned to Mexico by Arizona Homeland Security

The pieces were recovered after two separate investigations by HSI special agents assigned to Phoenix and Nogales, Arizona. Scott Brown, special agent in charge of HSI Phoenix, presented the relics to Mexican Consul General Ambassador Ricardo Santana and Jose Luis Perea, director of the Mexican Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) in Sonora, Mexico. The Mexican officials accepted the relics on behalf of the people of Mexico.

“The cultural significance of artefacts from regions around the world extends beyond any monetary value,” said SAC Brown. “The pieces, like those discovered, are fragments of history; and it is an honour to return them to their rightful home country. HSI fully supports the importance of antiquities and cultural property, and it is through these repatriations that new generations are able to experience a part of their nation’s story.”

HSI Arizona returns hundreds of pre-Columbian artifacts to Mexico

The HSI Phoenix case began Oct. 8, 2013, when special agents were contacted by a representative of the Chandler Historical Society regarding multiple suspected pre-Columbian Chinesco-Western pottery figures with origins as far back as 100 B.C., which were in the possession of the City of Chandler Museum.

HSI special agents promptly met with the museum’s director who turned over 10 Shaft Tomb artefacts for further review and investigation. Through archaeological expert analysis, the authenticity of these artefacts was confirmed as being more than 1,500 years old and originating from Mexico.

HSI Arizona returns hundreds of pre-Columbian artefacts to Mexico

HSI special agents met with the Mexican consulate general of Nogales, director of archaeology in Sonora, Mexico, chief archaeologist for the Cerro de Trincheras zone to view the artefacts, which were authenticated as historically significant artefacts originating from Mexico.

Results of this meeting confirmed the 10 ceramic figurines to be Shaft Tomb artefacts believed to accompany deceased individuals during the last rite of passage circa 100 B.C. to 500 A.D. from the geographic regions of Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima, Mexico. The archaeological experts estimated the value of the artefacts between $26,100 and $45,700.

The HSI Nogales case began in October 2012, after HSI special agents were contacted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regarding numerous suspected Pre-Columbian artefacts that were declared by two Mexican citizens who presented themselves for entry into the United States from Mexico via the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales.

HSI Nogales took custody of 267 artefacts. The items detained included arrowheads, axe heads, hammerheads, spearheads, and small stone carvings. Archaeological expert analysis subsequently confirmed the authenticity of the artefacts as being between 1,000 and 5,000 years old and of significant cultural value.

In March 2013, HSI Hermosillo representatives contacted INAH in Sonora to arrange a meeting with HSI Nogales at the CBP Nogales administrative offices to conduct a thorough examination of the detained artefacts.

The three INAH research professor archaeologists viewed the artefacts and concluded that the 267 individual pieces were pre-Hispanic (aka pre-Columbian) cultural artefacts of Mexican origin from Northwest Mexico. INAH appraised the artefacts at over $124,000.

HSI concluded that all the seized pieces were imported into the United States contrary to law pursuant to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention of 1970 and the Cultural Property Implementation Act, and therefore were to be returned to their proper home of Mexico.

U.S. Consul General in Nogales Laura Biedebach underscored, “The United States government is committed to combating the theft and trafficking of cultural heritage and to preserving and protecting it where it is found. We will continue to cooperate across agencies and borders to ensure that our citizens can enjoy their cultural heritage. We have much work to do to preserve our history for the next generation, but we are in this together and proud to be your partners.”

“This repatriation comes at an opportune time, in the year of a very significant commemoration for Mexico, the 500th anniversary of the taking of Tenochtitlan, which was a heartrending encounter between the cultural universes of Western Europe and America, said INAH Director Jose Luis Perea. “This event allows us to deeply recognize the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico, as well as the resistance and presence of its contemporary indigenous peoples.”

HSI is the investigative arm for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and plays a leading role in criminal investigations that involve the illicit distribution of cultural property, as well as the illegal trafficking of artwork, specializing in recovering works that have been reported lost or stolen. HSI’s International Operations, through its 80 offices in 53 countries, works closely with foreign governments to conduct joint investigations.

Despite increasingly aggressive enforcement efforts to prevent the theft of cultural heritage and other antiquities, the illicit movement of such items across international borders continues to challenge global law enforcement efforts to reduce the trafficking of such property. Trafficking in antiquities is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar transnational criminal enterprise.

HSI is committed to pursuing a strategy to combat transnational organized crime related to the illicit trafficking of cultural artefacts by targeting high priority organizations and strengthening international law enforcement partnerships.

The public, government and private institutions often aid HSI in identifying, investigating and prosecuting illicitly trafficked cultural property. If you have information about the illicit trade of cultural property or art, call the ICE Tip Line at 1-866-DHS-2-ICE or report tips online.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

50 Million Year Old Fossil Identified as Relative of Ostriches

50 Million Year Old Fossil Identified as Relative of Ostriches

The bird fossils were found more than a decade ago, completely intact with bones, feathers, and soft tissues in a former lake bed in Wyoming. Nesbitt cannot hide a grin as he calls the fossil a once-in-a-lifetime discovery for palaeontologists.

“This is among one of the earliest well-represented bird species after the age of large dinosaurs,” said Nesbitt, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences.

“You can definitely appreciate how complete these fossils are,” added Nesbitt of the remains, the focus of a research paper co-authored by Nesbitt and newly published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

Some of the remains are now on display as part of the exhibit “Dinosaurs Among Us” at the New York-based history museum. The fossils Other specimens used in the study are kept by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the Wyoming Geological Survey.

The new species is named Calciavis grandei — with “calci” meaning “hard/stone,” and “avis” from the Latin for the bird, and “grandei” in honour of famed palaeontologist Lance Grande who has studied the fossil fish from the same ancient North American lake for decades.

The fossils of Calciavis found in the US shows us that the flightless bird group that includes Ostrich of today had a much wider distribution and longer evolutionary history in North America.

The bird is believed to be roughly the size of a chicken, and similar to chickens, were mostly ground-dwelling, only flying in short bursts to escape predators.

Nesbitt began studying the fossil in 2009 whilst a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, under Professor Julia Clarke, whom Nesbitt considers an important mentor. Clarke co-authored the paper with Nesbitt, who joined Virginia Tech’s faculty in 2014.

The work was funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation’s Earth Sciences Directorate.

Two fossils of Calciavis dating from the Eocene epoch — roughly between 56 million and 30 million years ago — were found by fossil diggers within the Green River Formation in Wyoming, a hotbed for extinct fish. “These are spectacularly preserved fossils, one is a nearly complete skeleton covered with feather remains, the others are nearly as complete and some show soft tissue remains,” said Nesbitt.

“Fossil birds are rare,” added Nesbitt, adding that as bird bones are hollow, they are far more fragile than most mammal bones, and more likely to be crushed during fossilization. One of the fossilized birds in this rare case apparently was covered in mud soon after death.

The former lake in which the fossil was found is best known for producing scores of complete fish skeleton fossils, but other fossils such as other birds, plants, crocodilians, turtles, bats, and mammals from an ecosystem roughly 50 million years old.

Included in the extinct group of early Palaeognathae birds, the Lithornithidae, Nesbitt and Clarke call the bird a close relative of living ostriches, kiwis, and tinamous now living in the southern continents. After tropical forests disappeared in North America, Calciavis and other more tropical birds went extinct, said, Nesbitt and Clarke.

“Relationships among species in this lineage of birds have been extremely contentious,” said Clarke. “We hope the detailed new anatomical data we provide will aid in finding a resolution to this ongoing debate.”

“The new bird shows us that the bird group that includes the largest flightless birds of today had a much wider distribution and longer evolutionary history in North America,” Nesbitt said. “Back when Calciavis was alive, it lived in a tropical environment that was rich with tropical life and this is in stark contrast to the high-desert environment in Wyoming today.”

50 Million Year Old Fossil Identified as Relative of Ostriches

The Calciavis skeleton will be important to interpreting new bird fossils and other fossils from the Eocene epoch that were collected decades ago. “This spectacular specimen could be a ‘keystone’ that helps interpret much of the sparse fossil of birds that once lived in North America millions of years ago,” said Nesbitt.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

New World Dog Bone Fragment Dated to 10,200 Years Ago

New World Dog Bone Fragment Dated to 10,200 Years Ago

According to a Science Magazine report, a 10,200-year-old fragment of dog bone has been identified among thousands of ancient bone pieces discovered in a cave on the west coast of Alaska in 1998. 

The find supports the idea that dogs accompanied the first humans who set foot on these continents—and that both travelled there along the Pacific coast.

“This is a fantastic study,” says archaeologist Loren Davis of Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not involved in the research. “If the coastal migration theory is correct, we should expect to see exactly the kind of evidence reported in this study.”

A map shows the location where a dog bone dated to be from 10,150 years ago was found.

Researchers once thought humans initially entered the Americas about 12,000 years ago. That’s when thick glaciers that covered much of North America began to melt. This opened a corridor, which allowed people to trek from Siberia across now-submerged land in the Bering Sea, and then into North America on the hunt for mammoth and other big game.

But over the past decade, archaeologists have shown people might have begun to move into North America much earlier. To get around the glaciers, they would have island-hopped by boat and walked along shorelines exposed to low sea levels. They travelled from Siberia through the Alaskan archipelago about 16,000 years ago, eventually making their way down the Pacific coast.

The sliver of dog bone supports this hypothesis. Recovered from among more than 50,000 prehistoric animal and human remains excavated near Wrangel Island, researchers didn’t realize it came from a dog until they analyzed its DNA.

This bone fragment, found in Southeast Alaska, belongs to a dog that lived about 10,150 years ago, a study concludes. Scientists say the remains, a piece of a femur, provide insight into the question of when dogs and humans first entered the Americas, and what route they took to get there.

“We started out thinking this was just another bear bone,” says team leader Charlotte Lindqvist, a biologist at the University at Buffalo (UB). “When we went deeper, we found out it was from a dog.”

The bone is about 10,200 years old, making its owner the oldest dog known in the Americas, the scientists report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. (The previous record holders were two 10,000-year-old dogs unearthed in the U.S. Midwest.) And the dog’s DNA holds clues to an even earlier time.

The pup’s genome revealed it was closely related to the first known dogs, which researchers think were domesticated in Siberia about 23,000 years ago.

Based on the number of genetic differences between the Alaskan dog and its Siberian ancestors, the team estimates the two populations split 16,700 years ago, plus or minus a few thousand years.

That’s a clue that dogs—and their humans—left Siberia and entered the Americas thousands of years before North America’s glaciers melted.

“Here we have the genetic evidence, if not the physical evidence, [showing] dogs were already in the Americas with humans 16,000 years ago,” says Durham University archaeologist Angela Perri, who was not part of the team.

The dates also line up with DNA-based estimates for when modern Native Americans split off from ancestors in Siberia, providing another line of evidence to pin down when the first migrations happened.

“Understanding how the dogs moved also shows you how the humans moved,” says Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a graduate student at UB who did the DNA and other analyses.

Perri agrees. The study shows dogs are a useful way to track ancient human migrations, especially when human remains are missing or can’t be sampled because of descendant community concerns, she says. Even without human samples, “dogs can tell us some really interesting things” about our history, she says.

For example, chemical isotopes in the dog bone suggest the pooch ate marine animals. Because dogs aren’t much good at fishing, their masters likely gave them scraps of fish, seal, or whale that they themselves hunted. “It’s a strong indication people are feeding dogs,” Perri says. “Everything in this study points to coastally adopted people and their dogs moving into the Americas.”

CANADA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

12 Year Boy discovers rare dinosaur skeleton in a remote part of Canada

12 Year Boy discovers rare dinosaur skeleton in a remote part of Canada

A 12-year-old boy made the discovery of his lifetime when he discovered a dinosaur fossil dating back 69 million years.

An amateur palaeontologist was walking with his father in a fossil-rich part of Alberta, Canada this July, when he saw bones protruding out of a rock. On Thursday, the skeleton’s excavation was completed.

The kid, Nathan Hrushkin, says that when he first looked at the bones, he was “literally speechless.”

12 Year Boy discovers rare dinosaur skeleton in a remote part of Canada
Nathan Hrushkin, 12, and his father, Dion, discovered the partially exposed bones while hiking with friends in Horseshoe Canyon near Drumheller, Alberta.

“He told the BBC, “I wasn’t even excited, even though I know I should have [been]. “I was in so much shock that I had actually found a dinosaur discovery.”

Nathan, who has been interested in dinosaurs since he was six, often goes hiking in the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s protected site in the Albertan Badlands with his father.

“I’ve always just been so fascinated with how their bones go from bones like ours to solid rock.”

A year ago, they had found small fragments of fossils, and his father guessed that they were falling down from the rock above. So this summer Nathan decided to inspect. The fossilised bones were poking out of the side of a hill.

“Dad, you got to get up here!” he called to his father.

His father knew Nathan had found something by the tone of his voice.

“They looked like bones made of stone – you could not mistake them for anything else,” his father, Dion Hrushkin, said.

“It looked like the end of a femur – it had that classic bone look to it – sticking straight out of the ground.”

The bones belong to a young hadrosaur and have been dated at around 69 million years old.

Nathan knows that the fossils are protected by law, so when they got home, he and his father logged in to the website for the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which is located in Alberta and devoted to the study of prehistoric life. The museum advised them to send photos of their discovery and its GPS coordinates, which they duly did.

The Badlands are home to many fossils, and a dinosaur – named the Albertosaurus – was discovered by Joseph Tyrell in the late 1800s. But the part of the conservation site where they were walking was not known for fossil discoveries, so the museum sent a team of experts to excavate.

So far they have found between 30 and 50 bones in the canyon’s wall, all belonging to one young Hadrosaur, estimated to be aged about three or four.

“I was probably like most kids, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably my favourite kind [of dinosaur],” Nathan says.

“But after my discovery, it’s most definitely the Hadrosaur.”

The dinosaur is scientifically significant, the museum claims, because the fossil is about 69 million years old, and records from that time period are rare.

“This young Hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta. Nathan and Dion’s find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution,” the museum’s palaeo-ecology curator, François Therrien, said in a statement.

Nathan says he’s enjoyed learning more about dating dinosaur bones, and that the whole process has been “surreal”.

“It’s going to be great to see them, after months of work, finally take something out of the ground,” he says.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Forgotten Graves Found at Florida African American Cemetery

Forgotten Graves Found at Florida African American Cemetery

WJCT Public Media reports that recent excavations have confirmed the presence of 29 grave shafts detected last year during a ground-penetrating radar survey at the site of North Greenwood Cemetery, an African American cemetery that operated from 1940 to 1954.

Archeologists looking at a “forgotten” Clearwater cemetery say that they have found almost 30 grave shafts.

Archaeologists from the Florida Public Archaeology Network, based out of the University of South Florida, and Tampa engineering firm, Cardno Inc., provided a final update on the North Greenwood Cemetery excavation Friday.

The process was done to verify the location of unmarked graves in the African-American cemetery that was identified previously.

“We’ve located a total of 29 graves, and that confirms the data of the results of the ground-penetrating radar survey that was conducted last year, in February and August,” said USF archeologist Jeff Moates.

The archaeologists opened three large areas for excavation, and, in addition to the graves, found a number of artifacts, including two dimes from 1942 and a penny from 1940.

During excavation of the former North Greenwood cemetery site in Clearwater, archaeologists discovered 29 grave shafts, as well as artifacts like this dimes.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the North Greenwood Cemetery was in operation between 1940 and 1954, explaining the coins from that time period.

The land was sold to make room for Pinellas High School and a city pool. The remains of 350 people were moved to Parklawn Memorial Cemetery in Dunedin, but nearby residents of the Clearwater Heights neighborhood felt that the bodies in unmarked graves were left behind.

The excavation revealed that may indeed be the case.

“We’ve uncovered material that you would expect to be associated with graves,” said Moates. “There’s evidence of coffin hardware, decayed remains of coffins, concrete vaults, associated gravestone or headstone materials that are in a kind of a disturbed state.”

“We found an intact aluminum grave marker in the name of the deceased individual, Mr. William Ridley, who was buried in 1951,” Moates added.

During excavation of the former North Greenwood cemetery site in Clearwater, archaeologists discovered 29 grave shafts, as well as artifacts like this grave marker.
Artifacts like this grave marker were of the many found during the excavation process.

Once the community knew that the excavation process was happening, people like O’Neill Larkin, 81, wanted to share their memories of North Greenwood.

“He remembers playing on this cemetery as a boy, there was a popular swimming hole located nearby and Stevenson Creek,” said Moates. “But he remembers coming through here and hunting rabbits and quail and pigeon with his friends. He also had a friend who was a Boy Scout, who unfortunately died on a Boy Scout trip, and was buried in the cemetery.

“And so it’s just stories like that, that the community were able to come by and connect, share with us connecting the memories of this place to the actual physical remains of what they remember to be here.”

North Greenwood is just the latest in a number of forgotten Black cemeteries around the region and state that are being investigated following the discovery of the Zion Cemetery in Tampa in 2019.

Archaeologists will conduct a further study of the recovered objects and share their findings with the City of Clearwater and the local chapter of the NAACP.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

World’s biggest pyramid isn’t in Egypt – it’s hidden under a hill in Mexico

World’s biggest pyramid isn’t in Egypt – it’s hidden under a hill in Mexico

While Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza is by far the most talked-about pyramid in the world, it isn’t the biggest by a long shot. That title goes to the Great Pyramid of Cholula – an ancient Aztec temple in Puebla, Mexico with a base four times larger than Giza’s, and nearly twice the volume.

Why is the world’s biggest pyramid so often overlooked? It could be because that gigantic structure is actually hidden beneath layers of dirt, making it look more like a natural mountain than a place of worship.

In fact, it looks so much like a mountain, that famed Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés completely missed it, and unwittingly built a church right on top of it, as you can see in the image above.

To understand how awesome the Great Pyramid of Cholula is, we must jump back to well before Cortés and his army planted a symbol of Christianity on its peak.

Known as Tlachihualtepetl (meaning “man-made mountain”), the origins of the pyramid are a little sketchy, though the general consensus is that it was built around 300 BC by many different communities to honour the ancient god Quetzalcoatl.

As Zaria Gorvett reports for the BBC, the pyramid was likely constructed with adobe – a type of brick made of out of baked mud – and features six layers built on top of each over many generations. Each time a layer was completed, construction was picked back up by a new group of workers.

This incremental growth is what allowed the Great Pyramid of Cholula to get so big. With a base of 450 by 450 metres (1,480 by 1,480 feet), it’s four times the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

In fact, at roughly 66 metres (217 feet) tall, the pyramid’s total volume is about 4.45 million cubic metres (157 million cubic feet), while the Great Pyramid of Giza’s volume is just 2.5 million cubic metres (88.2 million cubic feet).

World’s biggest pyramid isn’t in Egypt – it’s hidden under a hill in Mexico

The Great Pyramid of Giza is taller, though, at 146 metres (481 feet) high. The ancient Aztecs most likely used the Great Pyramid of Cholula as a place of worship for around 1,000 years before moving to a new, smaller location nearby.

Before it was replaced by newer structures, it was painstakingly decorated in red, black, and yellow insects. But without maintenance, the mud bricks were left to do what mud does in humid climates – provide nutrients to all kinds of tropical greenery.

“It was abandoned sometime in the 7th or 8th Century CE,” archaeologist David Carballo from Boston University told Gorvett at the BBC. “The Choluteca had a newer pyramid-temple located nearby, which the Spaniards destroyed.”

When Cortés and his men arrived in Cholula in October 1519, some 1,800 years after the pyramid was constructed, they massacred around  3,000 people in a single hour – 10 per cent of entire city’s population – and levelled many of their religious structures.

But they never touched the pyramid, because they never found it. In 1594, after settling in the city and claiming it for their own, they built a church – La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios (Our Lady of Remedies Church), on top of the hidden pyramid mountain. 

It’s unclear if the Aztecs knew the mud bricks would encourage things to grow all over it and eventually bury the entire structure, but the fact that it looks more like a hill than a pyramid is probably the only reason it still survives today.

And just as well, because according to the BBC, not only is it the world’s largest pyramid, it retains the title of the largest monument ever constructed anywhere on Earth, by any civilisation, to this day.

The pyramid wasn’t discovered until the early 1900s when locals started to build a psychiatric ward nearby. By the 1930s, archaeologists started to uncover it, creating a series of tunnels stretching 8 kilometres (5 miles) in length to give them access.

Now, over 2,300 years after its initial construction, the site has become a tourist destination.

Hopefully, as our ability to study important sites using non-invasive tools continues to improve, archaeologists will gain a better understanding of how the structure was built, by whom, and how it came to look so much like a mountain.  

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

The secret cave lies hidden below the enormous ‘Moon Pyramid’

The secret cave lies hidden below the enormous ‘Moon Pyramid’

An underground cave hidden under a Mexican pyramid provides clues about Teotihuacan’s urban architecture, one of the oldest and most vibrant cities of ancient times. Located about 80 kilometres outside present-day Mexico City, Teotihuacan peaked long before the Aztecs in AD 300-650. Three monumental pyramids were arranged along the 2.4-kilometre ‘Path of the Dead’ in the area.

Two of the pyramids had already been known to overlie caves and tunnels, which were excavated by Teotihuacanos to procure building materials, and were later rebuilt for activities such as astronomical observation, veneration of death and the enthronement of rulers.

Denisse Argote at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City and her colleagues measured the electrical resistance of the ground beneath the third structure, the 43-meter-high Moon Pyramid.

The sprawling Moon Pyramid at Teotihuacan, Mexico, was dedicated to the feminine deity of water, according to one theory.

They discovered a partially filled cavern about 15 meters underneath the edifice.

Unlike the other caves, this one seems to have formed naturally. Argote and her colleagues think the first settlers of Teotihuacan might have chosen it to be the focal point from which the rest of the city was planned.

Hard Science Unlocks Secrets of Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Moon

Previous archaeological digs at Teotihuacan have revealed a series of man-made tunnels beneath the Pyramids of the Sun and of Quetzalcoatl, the latter of which is also called the Temple of the Feathered-Serpent.

These had mostly been excavated for construction materials in upper structures, and according to a report in Heritage Daily, these tunnels were later “repurposed for astronomical observations and for venerating death in the underworld.”

The team of scientists applied ERT and ANT surveys, which are non-invasive geophysical techniques analyzing the electrical resistance of the ground beneath the structure.

They identified a natural void beneath the Pyramid of the Moon and a partially filled cavern at a depth of 15 meters (49 ft.) Contrasting with the man-made tunnels beneath the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, the researchers believe that the cave under the Pyramid of the Moon “formed naturally,” and had been a focal point for the early settlers, in turn, influencing how the city was planned out.

Otherworldly Architectural Town Planning

The discovery under Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Moon help’s explain the city’s urban design.

With the placement of the pyramid at the end of the Avenue of the Dead, at the foot of Cerro Gordo, shaped to reflect the contours of these mountains, the researchers theorize that it was “symbolic of a connection between the avenue and the watery underworld, whereas the mountain serves as an anchor to the earth.” They said the impact of this discovery opens a discussion about the original planning of Teotihuacan’s urban design.

The first human establishment in the area dates back to around 600 BC when farmers began tilling the Teotihuacan Valley, which at that time had a total population of about 6,000 inhabitants.

However, due to the development of successful agricultural technologies, from 100 BC to 750 AD, Teotihuacan morphed into a huge urban and administrative centre with cultural influences throughout Mesoamerica.

Mapping the Ancient Underworld

Period III, from 350 to 650 AD, the so-called classical period of Teotihuacan, had an estimated 125,000 inhabitants. At that time it was one of the largest cities of the ancient world – with over 2,000 buildings in an 18 square kilometre (6.95 sq. mile) area.

This period saw the massive reconstruction of monuments; including the decorating of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent which dates back to an earlier period.

Period IV, between 650 and 750 AD, marks the end of Teotihuacan as a major power in Mesoamerica. The remains of the homes of the city’s elites, which line the Avenue of the Dead, bear burn marks which lead archaeologists to hypothesize that the city experienced waves of violent social unrest that brought about the city’s decline.

What the newly discovered cave system essentially does is answer the question “why” the first settlers stopped here and started building precisely where they did, and not say 10 miles east or five miles south.

The cave beneath the pyramid suggests that people revered this natural access to the underworld so much that around it they built one of the most influential and biggest cities of the ancient world.

And the remains of that vast crumbling ancient city, which was aligned with the Sun, moon, and stars, it would seem, is a 1:1 map of the underworld – with the Avenue of the Dead acting as the main channel to the other side.