Deep earthquakes

(Mobile readers please scroll down to read the post).

This past week, a very powerful deep earthquake of magnitude 8.3 originating 378 miles beneath the Sea of Okhotsk (west of the Kamchatka Peninsula) has scientists wondering whether this is the most powerful deep earthquake ever recorded.

At 3.8 miles deep or 609 kilometers below the surface, it is not quite as deep as the 395-mile deep (631 kilometer) earthquake that occurred below Bolivia in 1994, but at 8.3 it was more powerful than the Bolivia deep earthquake, which was judged to be 8.2.  

Here are two articles describing the recent deep earthquake below the Sea of Okhotsk, one from the "newsblog" of the journal Nature, and one from the website LiveScience.

Deep earthquakes present some challenges to geologists.  In fact, until the Bolivia earthquake, conventional geologists did not believe that deep earthquakes could approach the power of shallow earthquakes.  That's because conventional geologists believe that earthquakes are primarily driven by the engine of heat, primarily by the heat created by the friction and pressure at plate boundaries, which causes rock to suddenly squeeze into a denser form, leading to rapid realignment of material below the surface that creates a chain reaction from the epicenter which is felt as an earthquake.  

Deep earthquakes pose a problem for that theory, in that the heat and pressure so far below the surface are so great that the mechanism used to explain earthquakes at shallower depths would not seem to be a plausible explanation for deep earthquakes.  Whatever caused deep earthquakes, scientists did not believe that deep earthquakes would be as powerful as shallow earthquakes, but the Bolivia quake challenged that view.

As this New York Times Science Page article published in 1995, in the wake of the powerful Bolivia deep quake,  explains:

These upheavals [deep earthquakes], which occur 200 to 400 miles below the earth's surface, are puzzling in that they ought to be impossible. The pressures and temperatures at that depth are so great that rock should undergo no frictional sliding, the mechanism of garden-variety earthquakes near the surface. So most geologists came to believe that the crushing pressures and increasing heat below a certain depth squeezed the rock into forms that were suddenly denser, creating huge cracks that developed into big temblors.

No more. An extraordinarily big earthquake 395 miles beneath Bolivia last June not only shattered records by jolting cities as far away as Toronto but also left the squeeze theory shaken.

A new analysis of shock waves from that earthquake show its fault zone was 30 miles long and 20 miles wide, too big to be explained by the leading theory. In fact, experts say, the quake bears a disturbing resemblance to big ones that occur near the earth's surface.

"It's embarrassing," said Dr. Paul G. Silver, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington who questions the old theory. "It looks and acts and talks like these shallow earthquakes. But it shouldn't exist."

As the article goes on to explain, "The mystery is how earthquakes happen at all at remote depths where temperatures may exceed 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures are 240,000 times greater than those at the surface of the earth. In theory, any rock there should have the consistency of putty, ruling out the brittle fracture and frictional sliding found in faults near the surface."

In spite of the embarrassment of the "experts," that article reassures the reader that: "No matter who wins the intellectual battle, experts agree that deep earthquakes are a general expression of plate tectonics."

Well, that's comforting.

Except that proponents of plate tectonics still have a king-sized problem providing valid explanations for the characteristics of deep earthquakes, as Dr. Walt Brown -- the originator of the hydroplate theory -- explains in great detail in his discussion of the phenomenon.  Here is the beginning of an extended section of his book (the entirety of which can be read online here, or purchased to read in hardcover from his site or from Amazon) dealing with the phenomenon of earthquakes, and discussing the importance of deep earthquakes.

According to the hydroplate theory's model, the reason conventional geologists have a hard time explaining deep earthquakes is that their explanation of all earthquakes is incorrect.  On this page of his book (and the one that follows it), Dr. Brown presents an extended chart that lists features of earthquakes and then compares the hydroplate theory explanation to the tectonic theory explanation for each.  

At the heading of the two columns (hydroplate and tectonic), he explains the two different explanations that the two theories provide for the phenomenon of earthquakes (and the related phenomena of the Pacific basin, including the "Ring of Fire" and the deep Pacific trenches).  

The tectonic model explains earthquakes, deep Pacific trenches, and the "Ring of Fire" (surrounding the Pacific basin) as the product of "subducting plates that have been diving into the mantle for hundreds of millions of years."  As noted above, this explanation sees earthquakes and the related phenomena as primarily driven by heat.

In contrast, the hydroplate theory has a very different explanation.  According to Dr. Brown, "Trenches, earthquakes, and the Ring of Fire are a result of shifts inside the earth during the flood, including the rising of the Atlantic floor and the subsidence of the Pacific floor."  Rather than being driven by heat, these phenomena are primarily driven by gravity, according to the hydroplate theory.

You can explore the list of geological evidence in the two columns and decide for yourself which of the two explanations explains the evidence more satisfactorily.

According to the hydroplate theory, earthquakes today are the result of a cataclysmic event that took place at the time of a global flood.  The initial eruption of floodwaters from under the crust removed the weight of the continents above and led to an upward bulge of the basement rock beneath.  This series of events caused the mid-Atlantic ridge, and led to tremendous friction and melting inside the earth, in a widening cone whose base on the other side of the earth corresponds today (roughly) to the edge of the Pacific basin and the Ring of Fire.

In figure 95, found in note 37 on this page of Dr. Brown's online book, he presents a simplified diagram showing the effect on the inner earth of the proposed upward springing of the floor of the Atlantic after the release of the floodwaters and the erosion of the sides of the continents, which removed weight above the basement rock that forms today's Atlantic floor (this event was discussed in some detail in this previous post). The caption accompanying the image at figure 95 explains:

The mass rising to fill in the blue region of the top cone (the new Atlantic floor) would, as a first approximation, equal the mass passing through the center of the earth. The rock in the yellow cone would experience extreme shearing stresses and deformations, so rock first melted as it approached (and was extruded through) the constriction at the center of the earth. (This is how the earth’s core, shown in red, began.) As the extruded rock melted, it also shrank, by about half, because it was far below the crossover depth. That, in turn, collapsed the deepest foundations on the Pacific side of the earth and produced more shearing deformations and melting immediately above. A runaway situation quickly developed which formed the ring of fire (shown in green), and produced a myriad of fractures in and below the Pacific plate [to see the different colored areas he is describing, visit figure 95 in his book].

(This same sequence of events was also responsible for the creation of our planet's very strong magnetic field, as discussed in this previous blog post). 

Figure 86 (located almost halfway down this page discussing earthquakes, trenches, and the Ring of Fire) shows that earthquakes with magnitudes of 5.0 or greater have a distribution with two peak depths -- one at 22 miles and one at 370 miles beneath the surface.  The distribution chart shows that very few earthquakes originate at 222 miles -- the distribution curve has two distinct groupings of shallow earthquakes and deep earthquakes, with very few at the "crossover point" in between the two groups.  It also shows that earthquakes do not originate at depths greater than 410 miles.  

Dr. Brown's theory has an explanation for this surprising evidence.  His theory argues that earthquakes are caused when rock converges upon a point beneath the surface.  But how could rock converge on a point, unless rock that had been at that point were to somehow disappear to allow the surrounding rock to rush in?  Dr. Brown explains that due to the principles of physics, magma (molten rock) will expand and move upwards (towards the earth's surface) if it is above the crossover depth (of 222 miles), and that it will contract and move downwards (towards the earth's core) if it is below the crossover depth.

Shallow earthquakes are often caused when molten rock expands and moves upwards -- like a beach ball being held under the surface of the water, it wants to get up and eventually paths will open up for it to do so, often quite suddenly and with a chain reaction of further melting of the rock around them.  As this takes place, rock in the area will rapidly rearrange and cause an earthquake.

Deep earthquakes are caused by the same process, except that below the crossover depth the magma contracts and seeks to sink down to the core.  When it manages to do so, the rearrangement of rock that takes place creates a deep earthquake.

These are very broad outlines of the forces involved; for a more complete explanation, the reader is invited to examine the several pages of detailed discussion and diagrams in Dr. Brown's book on this topic.  However, it is important to point out that Dr. Brown's theory links deep earthquakes, the Ring of Fire, and the deep ocean trenches to a single originating event that connects all of them.  As you can see from the maps of this recent powerful deep earthquake, it originated in the vicinity of the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench (see map above from the USGS, with last week's earthquake location pointed out by a black arrow that I added based on the USGS report here).

The conventional explanation for the origin of these trenches, as well as the deep earthquake that took place last week, is that the Pacific plate is subducting or diving underneath another plate along these trenches, and that this subduction creates the trenches and the earthquakes.  As the article linked above from the journal Nature explains, the conventional view is that, "The crust is descending fast enough — about 8 centimetres per year — to remain cool enough to rupture even at great depths. The diving plate is thus seismically active down to 650 kilometres or greater."

Never mind the fact that a thirty-to-sixty mile thick plate diving beneath another plate would create intense pressure and intense heat, which would increase dramatically the deeper the plate went (making the above explanation somewhat problematic), the very idea that subduction is responsible for the deep ocean trenches is fraught with problems.  

One of the biggest of these, as Dr. Brown points out, is the shape of the ocean trenches -- they are frequently arcs, and sometimes they have dramatic cusps.  How could a diving plate create an arc?  As Dr. Brown points out, if you bend a thick paperback book in half (to simulate a plate that is subducting), you will have a very difficult time making that bend resemble an arc (in fact, you won't be able to do it).  

The cusps create an even bigger problem.  In the map above, you can see that the recent deep earthquake near the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench was located almost due west of a point where the trench takes a dramatic 90-degree turn.  What kind of subducting plate could create a trench shaped like that?

There are numerous other problems with the tectonic explanation for the deep ocean trenches (including the fact that almost all of them are located along the western portions of the Pacific basin).  Some of those are discussed in previous blog posts, such as this one and this one.  Many more are discussed in detail in Dr. Brown's book.

On the other hand, the mechanism proposed by the hydroplate theory explains the shape and distribution of the deep Pacific ocean trenches very comprehensively, as part of the events of the catastrophic global flood, when the inner earth rose towards the Atlantic and "sucked" the Pacific basin towards the center of the earth.  The evidence supporting this explanation is detailed in Dr. Brown's discussion in points 43 through 56 towards the end of this page in his book.

All of this discussion is not a mere academic argument with no real consequence to our day-to-day lives.  According to Dr. Brown's theory, there could be reasons that powerful and deep earthquakes are becoming more common, and if his theory is correct we could see a tremendous increase in earthquakes at some point in the future.  At the end of the discussion accompanying Figure 87 on this page of his book, Dr. Brown writes:

Drainage into the outer core continues today, releases gigantic amounts of heat throughout the mantle and core,³¹ and will eventually produce many powerful earthquakes.  When this will happen is uncertain.³²

In the footnote at the end of that statement (footnote 32), he restates the same disturbing conclusion:

Nevertheless, earthquakes will someday increase substantially, because heat is building up inside the earth and the shrinkage of rock that melts below the crossover depth increases stresses in the crust and upper mantle. Also, these microscopic movements inside the earth generate heat thousands of times faster than heat escapes at the earth’s surface. This increasing heat melts rock, especially along the relatively hot walls of faults extending from trenches down to the liquid outer core. That melt then lubricates and facilitates further internal movements. [See Endnote 31.]

This prospect for earthquakes increasing "substantially" someday is not exactly comforting.  However, it points to the importance of maintaining the ability to critically examine and question the dominant geological paradigms that inform our understanding of the world around us.  Powerful deep earthquakes such as the one that originated below the Sea of Okhotsk last week expose the weaknesses of the conventional models.  

Events such as this one should cause scientists to consider alternative explanations, such as the theory offered by Dr. Walt Brown, which has a lot of evidence to support it.

The Golden Gate

Above is a beautiful image from Wikimedia Commons of the Golden Gate, the narrow strait opening from the San Francisco Bay (on the left in the image above) into the vast Pacific Ocean (to the right in the image above, which was taken from the North Bay looking south towards San Francisco).  

The Golden Gate is of course spanned by the world famous Golden Gate Bridge, designed and supervised by Joseph Strauss (1870 - 1968) and completed in 1937, which is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful bridges in the world (who are they kidding -- it is undoubtedly the most beautiful bridge in the world).

The Golden Gate is about 1.7 miles wide at the point where the bridge is built across it, and its relative narrowness in comparison to the much larger bodies of water on either side of the strait means that the tides create very swift and powerful currents as the waters flood in from the ocean and then ebb back out in accordance with the tidal cycles each day (for a more detailed look at the tides and the celestial forces which influence them, see this previous post: "Moon, turn the tides . . . gently, gently away").

To understand why the tidal currents through the Golden Gate are so powerful, it may be helpful to imagine the "jet sprayer" faucet feature found on many modern kitchen sinks.  When you turn on your regular kitchen faucet, the water will come out at a certain moderate rate, but when you pull out the "jet sprayer" and depress the trigger, the water will suddenly come out with greatly increased force and pressure, even though you did not increase the water flow at the tap in any way.  Why does the water increase in power so much?  Because it is being forced through a much smaller opening (typically, through many pinhole openings, rather than through one larger faucet opening).  This is similar to the effect you get with a garden hose, when you suddenly constrict the opening with your thumb (again, the smaller gap creates an immediate increase in stream pressure, even though you did not increase the water flow at the tap in any way).

This same principle acts to greatly increase the power of the flood tide and ebb tide through the Golden Gate.  The strength of these tidal currents, and the generally cold water temperatures, helped make the notorious Alcatraz one of the most difficult prisons in the world from which to escape.  Alcatraz is pictured below, to the left of the left-hand tower in the photo as the viewer is looking at the image:

What mighty forces created this narrow gap between the San Francisco Bay and the great Pacific?  Wikipedia vaguely tells us that "San Francisco Bay is thought to represent a down-warping of the Earth's crust between the San Andreas Fault to the west and the Hayward Fault to the east, though the precise nature of this remains under study."  The entry goes on to speculate that a confluence of rivers flowing into this unexplained "down-warping" from the Great Central Valley then created the Golden Gate.

Such an explanation is typical of the kind of "hand wave" often given in place of a rigorous explanation when the conventional models have a hard time dealing with the details of the case.

In contrast, the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown offers a different hypothesis, based upon the overarching framework of Dr. Brown's comprehensive theory -- a hypothesis which finds evidence to back it up at other narrow straits around the world, and one which makes predictions about what someday will be found beneath the silt that currently blankets the bottom of the Golden Gate.

In the section entitled "Canyons" found near the end of this long webpage in his online book detailing his theory, Dr. Brown explains:

Drainage of the waters that covered the earth left every continental basin filled to the brim with water. Some of these postflood lakes lost more water by evaporation and seepage than they gained by rainfall and drainage from higher elevations. Consequently, they shrank over the centuries. A well-known example was former Lake Bonneville, part of which is now the Great Salt Lake.    

 

Through rainfall and drainage from higher terrain, other lakes gained more water than they lost. Thus, water overflowed each lake’s rim at the lowest point on the rim. The resulting erosion at that point on the rim allowed more water to flow over it. This eroded the cut in the rim even deeper and caused much more water to cut it faster. Therefore, the downcutting accelerated catastrophically. The entire lake quickly dumped through a deep slit, which we today call a canyon. These waters spilled into the next lower basin, causing it to breach its rim and create another canyon. It was like falling dominoes. The most famous canyon of all, the Grand Canyon, formed primarily by the breaching of what we will call Grand Lake. It occupied much of southeast Utah, parts of northeastern Arizona, and small areas of Colorado and New Mexico. [See the map on page 201 and pages 202–235.] Grand Lake, standing at an elevation of 5,700 feet above today’s sea level, quickly eroded its natural dam 22 miles southwest of what is now Page, Arizona. As a result, the northwestern boundary of former Hopi Lake (elevation 5,950 feet) was eroded, releasing waters that occupied the present valley of the Little Colorado River.

With thousands of large, high lakes after the flood, many other canyons were carved. “Lake California” filling the Great Central Valley of California carved a canyon (now filled with sediments) under what is now the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Strait of Gibraltar was a breach point as the rising Atlantic Ocean eventually spilled eastward into the Mediterranean Basin. The Mediterranean Sea, in turn, spilled eastward over what is now the Bosporus and Dardanelles, forming the Black Sea.

Note that this explanation is rigorous and detailed, it is built upon the fundamental principles of Dr. Brown's overarching theory, and that overarching theory is supported by extensive geological evidence from around the globe (see for instance"The Grand Canyon and the Great Flood," "The Ganges Fan, the Indus Fan, and the Great Flood," "The submarine canyons of California's Central Coast," "Geoids, relative gravity differences, and the deep Pacific trenches," "The bizarre 'barbed tributaries' of Marble Canyon," "Extraordinary sediment deposit from Pakistan to Bhutan supports hydroplate theory," and many others on this blog and in Dr. Brown's book).

It is also important to note that Dr. Brown's theory provides a comprehensive model from which it is possible to make predictions, and that Dr. Brown has published many such predictions in the past.  The ability to make predictions is one of the hallmarks of a true scientific hypothesis. Many of Dr. Brown's predictions have already been proven correct; others have yet to be proven.

In the case of the "downcutting" action described in the passage quoted above, in which large bodies of trapped water, left over from a global flood event, catastrophically breached, leading to the carving-out of V-shaped canyons, Dr. Brown has predicted that:

The crystalline rock under Gibraltar, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and the Golden Gate Bridge will be found to be eroded into V-shaped notches. (This prediction, first published in 1995, was confirmed for the Bosporus and Dardanelles in 1998⁹⁰ and for Gibraltar in 2009.⁹¹)

In other words, Dr. Brown has applied this theory to the straits at the Dardanelles, the Bosporus, and the Straits of Gibraltar (all in the region of the Mediterranean), as well as to the Golden Gate.  He predicted in 1995 that V-shaped canyons could be found under the silt of each of these straits, because he believed that all were carved by the same type of event (the violent breaching of a narrow barrier by a large, trapped body of water). His predictions were later found to be correct in the Bosporus, the Dardanelles, and the Straits of Gibraltar.  

You can see images with cross-sections of the Dardanelles Strait in this scientific publication from September, 2012, showing the type of V-shaped notch predicted by the hydroplate theory.   Dr. Brown's prediction has yet to be proven at the Golden Gate, but perhaps it will be in the future.

The evidence would appear to suggest that the beautiful Golden Gate represents yet another strong supporting argument in favor of the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown.

Why does earth's inner core spin differently from the rest of the planet?

Here's a link to a recent article entitled "Earth's center is out of sync," which discusses recent work by scientists which reveals more information about earth's inner core, thousands of miles beneath our feet.

The article discusses a new study published in Nature Geoscience entitled "The shuffling nature of Earth's inner core revealed by earthquake doublets," by Hrvoje Tkalčić, Mallory Young, Silvie Ngo and Malcolm Sambridge of the Australian National University, Canberra, and by Thomas Bodin of UC Berkeley's Berkeley Seismology Laboratory.

The scientists used measurements of the waves sent through the earth by earthquakes and determined that, not only does earth's solid inner core rotate at a different rate than does the outer earth (which similar studies of earthquake waves had previously suggested) but that this different rotation rate of the inner core varies with time.

Why does the earth's inner core, which is thought to be a solid ball of nickel and iron (primarily) at the very center of the earth, surrounded by a molten outer core, rotate at a different rate -- and in a slightly different direction -- from the rest of the earth?

The answer to that question (as with many other questions involving earth geology) will depend upon the framework or model that informs the person giving the answer.  

As you might expect, the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown provides an answer for this phenomenon, and one which fits in with the hydroplate theory's description of events which would have taken place surrounding the catastrophic global flood which shaped so many of the features we see around us on the planet's surface.

The hydroplate theory argues that the eruption of massive amounts of water trapped beneath earth's crust removed enough continental material to cause the basement rock to bulge "upwards" (away from earth's center), which created the mid-oceanic ridge.  This upward-bulge motion created massive frictional heating and melting inside the earth, but that's not all -- it also caused a massive suction "inwards" (towards the earth's center) on the opposite side of the planet, creating the "hole" that today is known as the Pacific basin.  This shifting of material inside the earth caused enormous friction and melting.

This event also caused the continents to slide away from the center of the Atlantic and towards the newly-created Pacific, a slide which led to the creation of almost all the terrain features we see around us.

Dr. Brown explains how the internal shifting of mass and the accompanying friction and melting led to the creation of both the solid inner core and the liquid outer core of the earth (found in the chapter entitled "The Origin of Ocean Trenches, Earthquakes, and the Ring of Fire" in his book, available online in its entirety here):

Suppose the inner earth initially had a more uniform mixture of minerals. Heating would first melt minerals with lower melting temperatures, which would allow denser grains to settle and lighter grains to rise, a process called gravitational settling. This would generate much more heat and produce more faulting, melting, and gravitational settling. After many such cycles, the earth’s core would form with solid, denser minerals (containing iron and nickel) settling to form the inner core and the melt forming the liquid outer core. Shifting so much mass toward the center of the earth and doubling the density of the rock melting below the crossover depth would increase earth’s rotational speed. Today, the earth spins 365.256 times each year, but there are historical reasons for concluding that a year once had 360 days.³⁵ [For details, see "Melting the Inner Earth" on pages 535–538.]

We saw that the skater in Figure 81 spins faster as she draws her arms closer to her spin axis. Likewise, as denser minerals settled through the magma toward the center of the earth, the inner core spun faster than the outer earth. The inner core is still spinning faster (by about 0.4° per year),³⁶ because the liquid outer core allows slippage.

The above quotation, along with helpful illustrations and diagrams, can be found on this page of that online chapter.  

The sequence of events proposed by the hydroplate theory clearly explain the origin of a solid metal core suspended in a liquid molten outer core.  The situation arose from the massive changes wrought by the bulging upwards on the Atlantic side which pulled rock upwards all the way through the earth to pull rock inwards and downwards on the Pacific side.  Molten rock below a certain depth (called the "crossover depth") sank towards earth's center, where the heaviest and densest materials (primarily nickel and iron) formed the inner crust, and the less dense molten liquid material remained as the outer core.

Dr. Brown explains this process more fully, with plentiful technical details and supporting formulas, in notes referenced and linked in the above block quotation, which can be found here.  Part of that extended discussion reads:

[. . .] during the flood, mass shifts within the Earth generated internal friction, heating, and melting. Melting, especially near the center of the Earth where pressures (and thus frictional heating) were greatest, was followed by gravitational settling of the denser minerals and chemical elements. Rock that melted below the crossover depth contracted. [See “Magma Production and Movement” on page 154.] This produced further mass shifts (faulting), frictional heating, melting, and gravitational settling.  [. . .]

Particles that melted after they fell added to the liquid outer core; denser particles that did not melt or that solidified under the great pressure near the Earth’s center formed the solid inner core. 

The details given also explain why the core of the earth is so hot, and why it spins at a different rate than the rest of the earth.  Like an ice skater going into a spin and pulling in her arms and legs, this process sped up the rotation of the solid inner core inside its liquid outer core.

Dr. Brown once explained to me in a telephone conversation that if the earth were to somehow become transparent so that we could see all the way down to the inner core, we would be able to see that it was rotating at a different speed and direction that we are out here on the earth's surface.  We don't perceive the earth's rotation, so we would feel as though we were staying still, but even so we would see the earth's inner core rotating -- a most amazing thought!  It is probably a fact of which most people are completely unaware -- I was certainly unaware of it until he explained it to me that day.

The hydroplate theory proposes a mechanism by which this startling situation could have come about, and one which fits in with the series of events that would explain so many other pieces of geological evidence on our earth's surface.  The ongoing findings of scientists regarding the inner core appears to be additional supporting evidence for the hydroplate theory.

On the other hand, conventional explanations run into some problems in explaining how the earth's solid inner core and molten outer core originated, as Dr. Brown explains in note 21 on this page of his online book.  This discussion is also very closely related to the question of how earth obtained such a strong magnetic field, which is also covered by the hydroplate theory and discussed in this previous blog post.

Based on the truly astonishing amount of geophysical evidence which Dr. Brown's theory explains, it should be carefully considered as a strong contender for understanding our planet.

Embryonic Lufengosaurus fossils and the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown

Special thanks to Farmer Dan V., an old friend from the airborne days, for alerting me to this fascinating account of the discovery of fossilized dinosaur embryos in southern China (Lufeng County, Yunnan Province), identified as Lufengosaurus, a sauropod reaching lengths of 30 feet.  An adult skeleton of a Lufengosaur is shown above.

The article discusses a report published in the journal Nature, entitled "Embryology of Early Jurassic dinosaur from China, with evidence of preserved organic remains," was written by a team of scientists led by paleontologist Dr. Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto, Mississauga campus.

The fossils are unique in that, unlike other fossilized dinosaur eggs, these allow the paleontologists to study the bones of the developing fossils that are usually inside and unable to be studied.  This enables the bone sizes to be studied in order to determine growth rates of this species before they hatched.  Scientists had previously studied growth rates of young dinosaurs after they hatched, but had not been able to study growth rates that dinosaurs might have undergone before hatching.  As the abstract to the paper explains:

The preservation of numerous disarticulated skeletal elements and eggshells in this monotaxic bone bed, representing different stages of incubation and therefore derived from different nests, provides opportunities for new investigations of dinosaur embryology in a clade noted for gigantism.

The fossils suggest very rapid growth, as well as the development and flexing of muscles while still in the egg (something the paleontologists deduced from the asymmetric development of the cross-sections of the leg bones, suggesting that muscle attachments and embryonic muscle flexing were influencing the shape of the developing bones).

How was this monotaxic archaeological treasure trove (a monotaxic site contains the remains of a single taxon or species form, which can be very valuable for comparison and analysis) preserved in the first place?  As the article notes, the scientists believe that "a flood swept through a dinosaur nesting site in what is now southern China. Dozens of embryos were suffocated in their eggs and their bones were separated from each other, carried away, and buried under sediment."

Note that this explanation is in fact consistent with the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown.  Preserving dinosaur embryos would require some extremely unusual conditions, including the rapid flooding and burial under thick wet sediment described above, in order to prevent total bacterial decomposition that eventually takes place under ordinary circumstances. 

In fact, not only are embryonic fossils difficult to preserve, but all fossils fall into this same category: under normal circumstances, bacteria and other organisms break down all dead creatures, whether full-grown or unhatched.  Thus, the existence of fossilized bones from an adult Lufengosaurus is just as incredible as the existence of these embryonic fossils.  For more on this subject, see this post and many others previously published on this blog.

Perhaps the most astonishing piece of information revealed in the study published last month by Dr. Reisz is the revelation that the paleontologists also found "preserved organic remains" in these embryonic fossils -- meaning actual dinosaur tissue that had not been turned to mineral but still contained protein!  This article in PhysOrg gives more detail on that astounding discovery.  In it, Dr. Reisz is quoted as saying:

The bones of ancient animals are transformed to rock during the fossilization process," says Reisz. "To find remnants of proteins in the embryos is really remarkable, particularly since these specimens are over 100 million years older than other fossils containing similar organic material.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-world-oldest-dinosaur-embryo-bonebed.html#jCp

The bones of ancient animals are transformed to rock during the fossilization process.  To find remnants of proteins in the embryos is really remarkable, particularly since these specimens are over 100 million years older than other fossils containing similar organic material.

The scientists believe that the Lufengosaurus fossils come from a period of time between 190 million and 197 million years ago.  The other fossils with preserved soft tissues to which Dr. Reisz is referring are those found in the bones of a T. Rex from "only" 68 million years ago, which means that these Lufengosaurs, if properly dated, predate those preserved tissues by almost another 130 million years!

This previous post entitled "Soft tissue in T. Rex fossils" explains the king-sized problems those T. Rex tissues caused scientists devoted to the conventional models of geology and fossil dating. The problem was that other scientific research had shown that such soft tissue structures could not last more than 10 million years.  Instead of questioning whether their model for dating the fossils might be based on faulty assumptions, they revised their estimate of the length of time that soft tissues could survive.  Looks as though they will have to revise it again!

Of course, they could also consider the possibility that all the strata were laid down rapidly, at the same time, during a cataclysmic global flood, as literally hundreds or even thousands of other independent pieces of evidence around the world appear to suggest.  This possibility is discussed in this previous post and this previous post, among others. In that case, these soft tissue fossils may be far less than 68 million years old (for the T. Rex) and 197 million years old (for the Lufengosaurus).  

However, there appears to be very little chance that such reconsideration will take place, even after this amazing discovery and article by Dr. Reisz and his colleagues.  Most people are too wedded to their foundational assumptions to question them to that extent, just as they were when Alfred Wegener first proposed his radical (for their time) geological theories back in 1912.

In any event, this new fossil discovery appears to be incredibly important in many ways, not least the fact that it adds substantial additional evidence that may support a completely different geological model than the one that is currently dominant.

The bones of ancient animals are transformed to rock during the fossilization process," says Reisz. "To find remnants of proteins in the embryos is really remarkable, particularly since these specimens are over 100 million years older than other fossils containing similar organic material.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-world-oldest-dinosaur-embryo-bonebed.html#jCp

The bones of ancient animals are transformed to rock during the fossilization process," says Reisz. "To find remnants of proteins in the embryos is really remarkable, particularly since these specimens are over 100 million years older than other fossils containing similar organic material.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-world-oldest-dinosaur-embryo-bonebed.html#jCp

Nabta Playa, Karnak, George Dodwell, and Antarctica

In the previous post, we saw a video in which archaeoastronomer and physicist Dr. Thomas G. Brophy analyzed the layout of stones at the ancient stone circle located in the Nabta Playa in a desolate corner of southwestern Egypt.  

Among other conclusions (some of them quite startling and all of them completely devastating to the conventional timeline of mankind's ancient past -- as well as to the assertions of conventional plate tectonic theory, as I argued), Dr. Brophy argues that the six stones inside the circle indicate the positions of the three stars of Orion's belt as it appears during the epoch in which Orion is most upright in the sky as he transits the meridian, as well as the three stars of Orion's head and shoulders during the epoch in which Orion is most tilted to the meridian.

One of the startling aspects of Dr. Brophy's analysis is the fact that calculations of the rate of tilt in Orion, caused by precession, means that the stones representing the belt stars are correct for the period from about 6500 BC up until about 4900 BC, while the stones representing the head and shoulders of the constellation are correct for a much older period, centered on 16,500 BC!

While it is certainly possible that the site's ancient designers were able to calculate the precessional tilt for a period around 16,500 BC, and encode that in the site (especially given the other very advanced skills and knowledge of astronomy that the other aspects of Nabta Playa's monuments appear to demonstrate), it is also possible that archaeoastronomers are mistaken in their calculation of the number of years we would have to go back in order to get Orion to tilt as much as is depicted by the head-and-shoulders stones at Nabta Playa.

The reason their calculation may be off is the assumption inherent in their calculation, that the rate of change of tilt has been fairly constant throughout the vast procession of millennia stretching back to 4900 BC and (even further) to 16,500 BC.  If the rate of change was more rapid during some portion of the time between today and those ancient epochs, then calculations based on a fairly steady rate of change would yield an artificially earlier date than calculations that started with assumptions of (for example) an increasing rate of tilt the farther back in history one goes.

There is independent evidence, however, that the tilt of earth's axis relative to the plane of the ecliptic was once violently disturbed, after which its tilt recovered, and that the rate of recovery was faster immediately after the violent ancient disturbance, and has slowed down since then.  If this scenario is correct, then Nabta Playa, while still of extreme antiquity, might represent time periods slightly more recent than those calculated using formulas that do not take into account the more-extreme axial tilt of the earth in ancient times.

In his book presenting the hydroplate theory (the 9th edition of which is now available in its entirety for viewing online here), Dr. Walt Brown discusses the evidence compiled by professional astronomer George F. Dodwell over the course of his career.  In the chapter of his book entitled "The Hydroplate Theory: An Overview," Dr. Brown has a subsection entitled "Changing Axis Tilt" (located near the bottom of this page on his website) which explains:

George F. Dodwell served as the Government Astronomer for South Australia from 1909 to 1952. In the mid-1930s, he became interested in past changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis. He collected almost 100 astronomical measurements made over a 4,000-year period. Those measurements show that the tilt of the earth’s axis smoothly decayed from 25°10' to its present value of 23°27'. Based on the shape of the decay curve, Dodwell estimated that this axis shift began in about 2345 B.C.²⁸ 

George Dodwell's own manuscript discussing the extensive evidence he collected from history documenting this conclusion can be found online here, on the website of  Barry and Helen Setterfield.  It is fascinating reading, full of details from ancient records of the obliquity of earth's tilt with respect to the ecliptic plane, including records and monuments from ancient China, ancient Egypt, and from classical astronomers from ancient Greece up through the Middle Ages and into the modern period.  

One example given by Mr. Dodwell is the famous Temple at Karnak in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes (a portion of which is pictured in the image above), where the rays of the rising sun would enter the long Hypostele Hall of the Temple of Amun-Ra once per year at the summer solstice.  The sun does not go far enough north in its annual migration between the solstice rising points to shine along the original axis of this hall today, and calculations based on a constant rate of change due to precession yield a date of initial design and construction that appears to be earlier than the epoch in which archaeologists believe the temple was designed and built.  Mr. Dodwell explains, however, that calculations which take into account the more extreme tilt and the rate of decay he found from ancient records and monument around the globe would yield a more consistent date.

The upshot of all his careful examination is the irresistible conclusion that the earth's tilt was much greater the further back in time one looks, such that the line of the tropics (the Tropic of Cancer and of Capricorn) came further north and further south of the equator in ancient times, and the northernmost and southernmost risings of the sun on the summer and winter solstices were further north and south along the eastern horizon than they are today.  A curve drawn through a graphing of the obliquity measurements throughout the centuries shows a decay curve indicating a massive force imparted an unusual and excessive tilt to earth's axis, which has been correcting since that time, with the rate of correction much faster in the centuries immediately after the catastrophe (whatever it was) and the rate of correction slowly and asymptotically approaching the current angle of tilt.  

In other words, if we project back in time without taking this curve into account, we will be unaware of the much more rapid rates of change that took place in ancient times, and our calculations will be in error.  This possibility is something that analysts of Nabta Playa should consider.  Nevertheless, Dr. Brophy is certainly to be commended for his incredible analysis of this relatively recently-discovered archaeological site, and the possibility that the site encodes knowledge of axial tilt that may have been made more severe and may have changed more rapidly due to an ancient catastrophe does nothing to take away from the amazing implications of the monuments in the desert at Nabta Playa.  In fact, the possibility only adds to its significance, in my opinion.

While George Dodwell believes that an ancient asteroid impact with earth might have been the violent force that knocked earth's axis out of kilter and from which the axis has been recovering ever since, Dr. Brown provides cogent arguments to reach a different conclusion.  Among Dr. Brown's arguments are problems with the asteroid theory, and the argument that if the hydroplate theory is correct, then the events surrounding the flood would have rapidly altered the balance of the earth (principally through the rapid pushing up of the earth's major mountain ranges, and especially the Himalayas).  

The rapid formation of the Himalayas, according to the principles of physics, would have led to "Earth's Big Roll," an event for which there appears to be extensive evidence around the world, including in the continent of Antarctica, in certain features under the Indian Ocean, and in areas of the far north in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (among other places on earth).  To review some of this amazing evidence please visit some of the previous posts on that topic, including:

• "Earth's Big Roll"
• "Antarctica"
• "Palm trees discovered in Antarctica!"
• "90° East Ridge"
• "Lake Vostok and the deep liquid lakes on Antarctica"
• "What was this large ancient river fish doing in Ellesmere Island?"
• "Mammoths and the Flood"
• "Titanosaurs? In Antarctica? (Moooo)"

The Nabta Playa circle demolishes conventional theories

The ancient monument at Nabta Playa, in the desolate Sahara desert of southwestern Egypt, has been called one of the earliest aligned structures of mankind's ancient past.  Consensus opinion currently indicates that usage of the site may have begun around 4500 BC (based on carbon dating analysis described in this 2007 article), although some analysts have provided arguments which suggest that the site may have been designed even earlier than that.

Nabta Playa is an extremely arid basin just south of the Tropic of Cancer (see map below).  In 1973, a team of archaeologists led by Fred Wendorf discovered pottery fragments in the remote region and began excavation of what they learned was a site of incredible antiquity.  In 1990, they discovered a stone circle monument, publishing an article about this site for the first time in 1998.  Thus, the site is still somewhat recently revealed to the wider public, and discussion and analysis of its implications are ongoing.

Some of the most intriguing analysis of the site has come from physicist and archaeoastronomer Dr. Thomas G. Brophy, who in 2002 published The Origin Map: Discovery of a Prehistoric, Megalithic, Astrophysical Map and Sculpture of the Universe.  In the video segment above, he discusses his analysis of the site, analysis which if correct has stunning implications which completely upend the conventional timeline of mankind's ancient past.

Dr. Brophy begins by noting that the structure consists of an outer ring which contains clear "gate" features forming two pathways or alignments through the circle, one along a line running northeast to southwest and indicating the summer solstice sunrise, and one running north-south through the circle (the "meridian sightline").  Inside the circle are six stones, which Dr. Brophy believes should be seen as two sets of three.  On pages 9 and 10 of his 2002 book, Dr. Brophy explains his insight into the northern set of three of these inner stones in the Nabta Playa Calendar Circle:

A user of the calendar circle diagram, standing at the north end of the meridian sightline window, would look down on the stone diagram and see a representation of the stars of Orion's Belt just as they appear on the meridian in the sky when the user looked up.

More than just matching the appearance of the stars of Orion's Belt at that time, the ground stones indicate the sky stars at the special time of summer solstice as identified by the solstice sightline window in the calendar circle.

As Dr. Brophy explains in the book, and in the video above, the motion of precession not only "delays the sky" through the ages such that a different zodiac sign is in the position above the rising sun before sunrise on the March equinox (creating the different precessional ages such as the Age of Pisces or the Age of Aquarius), but it also changes the angle that the constellations such as Orion will appear to a viewer at the same location on our planet throughout the different ages.

The angle of the stones representing the belt stars appears to be correct for the period between 6400 BC and 4900 BC -- an archaeoastronomical dating of incredible antiquity.  This was the period of least tilt of the constellation Orion with respect to the meridian (when the constellation is most vertical and the belt stars are the most horizontal).

Dr. Brophy then goes on to an even more significant hypothesis, which is that the southern three stones represent the head and shoulders of Orion, but that they are at an angle when Orion is at his greatest tilt from the motion of precession.  The implications of this proposal, however, are revolutionary.  Due to the very slow motion of precession, the time period indicated by the stones representing the head and shoulders of the constellation would center around 16,500 BC!

Even if these stones were not erected at such an unbelievably early date, it is not inconceivable that they were erected around the first set of dates (those indicated by the tilt of the belt-star stones), and indeed conventional archaeologists currently date the site to a time quite close to Dr. Brophy's astronomically-derived date.

If so, and if Dr. Brophy is also correct about the southern set of stones indicating the head and shoulders of Orion at the period of greatest tilt of the constellation (caused by precession), then this would mean that the ancient designers of the Nabta Playa circle were aware of precession (something conventional historians believe was unknown until about 125 BC), and further that they understood precession to an astonishing level of sophistication, such that they could calculate and diagram the maximum tilt that precession would cause to the familiar stars of Orion!

Either that, or the designers of Nabta Playa were in touch with someone who could (or that the information was handed down from someone who knew these things, pushing the antiquity of this sophisticated understanding even further back in time).  

This proposition clearly has enormous implications.  The evidence that the ancients understood precession to a degree far more precise than that achieved by Hipparchus or Ptolemy (the first astronomers that conventional scholars say were able to detect and understand the phenomenon) is quite extensive, and fills a good portion of the discussion in Hamlet's Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend (as John Anthony West points out in the video above).

The entire Maya Long Count / 2012 phenomenon is based upon clear evidence that the Maya had sophisticated understanding of the effects of precession and could predict with a high degree of accuracy its effect upon the angle and rising times of celestial bodies -- in their case, a special part of the Milky Way galaxy, as discussed in several previous posts, such as this one.  The extreme antiquity of the dating of the  Nabta Playa site, however, pulls back the curtain on a whole new corridor of time stretching into a distant past during which mankind apparently knew far more than modern academics will acknowledge.

However, this revelation is only the beginning of the incredible aspects of the Nabta Playa site which physicist Dr. Brophy finds evidence for.  The circle discussed above is actually part of a three-dimensional structure that continues below the level of the surface of the earth, and includes bedrock many feet below which has apparently been worked by tools into some sort of art form -- but where conventional archaeologists see a "cow" that might have been a stand-in to represent the sacrifice of an actual cow, Dr. Brophy sees a representation of the Galactic Center encoding more precise knowledge that ancient people simply should not have possessed, according to the conventional timeline of history.  Dr. Joseph Farrell explores these aspects of Dr. Brophy's analysis of Nabta Playa in his book Grid of the Gods, a text discussed in this previous post.

Further, the Calendar Circle site is also located within a larger context of other stone monuments in the Nabta Playa basin, and Dr. Brophy believes that the distance and direction relationships among these sites also encodes extremely precise astronomical information (see the continuation of the above-linked video here).

As Dr. Robert Schoch explains on pages xxii - xxiii of his foreword to Dr. Brophy's book:

The megaliths are arranged at various distances from a central point, known as "Complex Structure A."  As you can read in detail below, Brophy interprets these distances from the central point as recording a) the actual distances of the stars in question from our solar system, and b) the speeds that the stars are moving away from us.  The information and interpretations that Brophy extracts from the Nabta megaliths correspond to a high degree with modern knowledge of these parameters for these specific stars.  Further, analyzing smaller companion stones associated with the primary "star" megaliths, Brophy suggests that the builders of the Nabta site may have had information about planetary systems or companion stars associated with the six stars in question -- information that we do not have today!  And then there is the "Cosmological cow stone."  Does this stone encode information about the origin of the universe, the age of the solar system or universe, the structure of the galaxy and universe, and / or the fundamental constants of nature?  Read Brophy's analysis and see what you think.

These possibilities are even more staggering, clearly, than the possibility that the designers of Nabta Playa knew about precession to a degree far beyond that attained by Hipparchus or Ptolemy thousands of years later.  We are accustomed to thinking of Planck's constant, for example, as a discovery of quantum physicists working in AD 1900 and after -- not 1900 BC and certainly not 4900 BC!  And yet this constant is one of those "fundamental constants of nature" that Dr. Schoch refers to above that Dr. Brophy sees in evidence among the dimensions of the monuments in Nabta Playa in Egypt.

Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, it would be prudent to examine Dr. Brophy's discussion and analysis of the evidence and to keep an open mind while doing so.

Moving back a bit from possibilities such as awareness of quantum physics, it is fairly clear that the designers of the Nabta Playa circle created a summer solstice alignment, as well as a meridian alignment which may well line up with the belt stars of Orion (which Dr. Brophy's analysis shows were along that meridian around the summer solstice during that epoch).  Setting aside even the evidence that these ancients might have understood precession, one huge question still remains for proponents of the conventional theories, and that is: how are archaeologists and archaeoastronomers even able to make calculations about the location of Orion in reference to this site, if the site is over 6000 years old and if continental drift has been going on for all these years the way proponents of plate tectonics believe?

At the very least, Nabta Playa should blow the theory of plate tectonics wide open.  Unless, of course, we want to argue that Nabta Playa is a big hoax, and that the stones were actually set out there in the 1970s by clever archaeologists and physicists who threw in references to the Planck constant and precession just to fool people (but who forgot about the motion of plate tectonics, or didn't take it into account, since plate tectonics was still something of a novel theory even in the 1970s).

There are many other sites whose ongoing alignments also argue strongly against plate tectonics, among them the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Sphinx, and the ancient megalithic temples on the islands of Malta.  No one can argue that those sites were secretly constructed in the 1970s. However, the extreme antiquity of Nabta Playa (if it is an authentic ancient site, that is) should set a new record in sites unaffected by tectonic motion.  (Of course, it is quite possible that the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid are much older than conventional academics think that they are -- perhaps even older than Nabta Playa).

Add to that the possibility that Nabta Playa encodes the knowledge that Dr. Brophy demonstrates that it does, and the site completely demolishes most of the foundations of the history departments and the geology departments of most modern universities.  None of this should be surprising to readers of this blog or those who are familiar with the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown.

Where do Saturn's rings come from?

In the previous post, we looked at evidence that the Maori of Aotearoa / New Zealand were aware of the rings of Saturn and had stories and traditions describing Saturn as a beautiful and wayward woman who wears a circlet in her hair -- truly amazing in light of the fact that the rings of Saturn are not visible to the human eye, or even with telescopes of the type that Galileo built in 1610.  This evidence is very difficult to explain.

Equally mysterious is the question of where Saturn's rings came from in the first place.  In this article from February, 2012 published on the NASA website entitled "The Real Lord of the Rings,"  planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi of NASA's Ames Research Center explains:  "After all this time we're still not sure about the origin of Saturn's rings. But lately there's a growing awareness that Saturn's rings can't be so old."

The reasons given for concluding that the rings are not the ancient remnants left over from the formation of Saturn or the solar system -- billions of years ago according to conventionally-accepted theories -- include 

• the fact that they are still shiny and bright, undarkened by accumulated dust,
• the fact that small moons orbiting through the outermost regions of the ring system are gaining angular momentum at the expense of the rings, and thus . . .
• the fact that the rings will probably collapse into the giant planet within a period of time measured in millions of years.

"This is a young dynamical system," Dr. Cuzzi says.  Dr. Cuzzi won the prestigious Kuiper Prize in 2010 for his lifetime contributions to planetary sciences. 

Another reason for believing that Saturn's rings must be young was given by Dr. Cuzzi in an article published in January, 1985 in Sky & Telescope entitled "Ringed Planets -- Still Mysterious II."  In that article, he explained that expectations of "erosion" of the rings would suggest that they might be completely destroyed only 10,000 years after forming -- and that even if that figure is too low, the rate of loss poses a huge problem for explaining the existence of these rings for long periods of time.  Dr. Cuzzi writes:

Yet nonstop erosion poses a difficult problem for the very existence of Saturn's opaque rings -- the expected bombardment rate would pulverize the entire system in only 10,000 years!  Most of this material is merely redeposited elsewhere in the rings, but even if only a tiny fraction is truly lost (as ionized vapor, for example), it becomes a real trick to maintain the rings since the formation of the solar system.

The above passage was cited in a footnote by Dr. Walt Brown, the creator of the hydroplate theory, in a footnote to his discussion of planetary rings and their possible relationship to his theory.  According to Dr. Brown, "Planetary rings form when material is expelled from a moon or asteroid passing near a giant planet."  

His theory proposes that most of the asteroids and asteroid-like bodies in our solar system (including many of the irregularly-shaped moons orbiting various planets, including Saturn, which are likely captured asteroids) originated as material violently expelled from earth during the events surrounding a cataclysmic flood, and that asteroids and comets generally contain quantities of ice, originating from earth as water that was jetted out of the earth at tremendous velocities during the same cataclysm.  His discussion of the origin of asteroids and meteoroids begins on this page in his book and continues on for an entire chapter.

This previous post discusses some of the aspects of asteroids according to Dr. Brown's theory, and explains that:

Because larger asteroids are held together with a "weak glue" of ice (which originated in the water blasted into space along with the rocks during the violent explosion that initiated the global flood event), impacts from other space rocks sometimes cause this water to melt and to begin to vent into the vacuum of space. When this happens, asteroids resemble comets: in fact, comets and asteroids are pretty much the same animal, except that asteroids have spent most of their existence in closer orbits to the sun and most of them have lost all of their ice -- with some of the larger ones retaining icy mantles below the surface which are still subject to being released later on by impacts. Most comets, on the other hand, have wider orbits and still retain ice, which is still venting. 

In fact, as Dr. Brown points out, material venting from Saturn's moon Enceladus has now been confirmed as contributing to the material in that ring.  Here is a link to an article discussing evidence which suggests that the material coming from Enceladus does not originate from an "underground ocean" on that moon, as was proposed by some theorists.  In that article, one scientist says of the material jetting out of Enceladus: "It could still be warm ice vaporizing away into space. It could even be places where the crust rubs against itself from tidal motions and the friction creates liquid water that would then evaporate into space."  Such an explanation would certainly appear to fit in with the predictions of Dr. Brown's theory.

There is another proposal for the existence of Saturn's rings which, like Dr. Brown's hydroplate theory, stands outside of the pale of presently-accepted scientific orthodoxy (and remember that, in the words of the distinguished Dr. Cuzzi, orthodox theorists still have no settled explanation for the origin of Saturn's rings), and that is the idea that intelligent beings are creating them!

The above video shows some strange images of streaking objects cutting across Saturn's rings (in fact, the F-ring), including some objects whose path appears to turn back and forth a few times, taken by NASA spacecraft including Cassini.  Here is an article on the internet by someone caustically "debunking" the UFO theory, calling it "BS," and "crap," and "transparent nonsense," and asking why alien spacecraft would want to fly around in Saturn's rings.  The writer asks sarcastically: "So, aliens traveled across light-years to … circle Saturn for eons playing in the ring system. No doubt that would be fun, but it’s hard to imagine any other incentive."

However, those who propose the theory that some intelligence is actively creating the rings do offer an incentive.  In the video below, David Icke discusses some of the same footage and argues that a reason that malevolent intelligences might want to construct such rings could be to transmit or amplify frequencies with inimical effects upon men and women on earth:

There are other reasons to be cautious before simply eliminating any theory which proposes the activity of extraterrestrials (see this previous post for a discussion, among others).  While such a theory may strike some as absurd, remember that orthodox science still has no clear explanation for the existence of Saturn's rings at all.  This fact alone argues that we should be open to alternative explanations, and carefully consider those that have been offered to explain the evidence that we find in the existence of Saturn's rings.