1968 ends
The Latvian Crater Problem, By E. Sykes
1966
The small island
of Osel or Saaremaa in the Gulf of Riga
is well known because of the group of meteoric craters at the Lake of Sall
or Kallijarv, near Arensberg or Kuresaare. The alternative names are simply
because the sites are better known by their German names than by any others.
The original owner of the site was a certain von Moller, who prettified the
largest crater, a circular lake some 200 feet in diameter and built a
summerhouse by its edge. However the first official mention was by a local
historian, J.W. Von Luce, who wrote it up in 1827. About no pieces of meteoric
Iron could be found, proably because the island has been inhabited since the
earliest times and any surface fragments would have been found and used.
However, after ten years searching, Reinwald found pieces of meteoric iron in
two of the smaller craters, nos. 2 and no. 5. No. 2 is particularly
interesting, as it is a double crater.
There is only one legendary story of a falling star, which
fits in with this Latvian beauty. Phaethon, the son of Phoebus-Helios, the
sun-god, by Clymene the famous Libyan beauty. Phaethon tried one day to drive
the Chariot of the Sun, but lost control of the wild horses to which it was
harnessed, and their passage close to earth set it to fire, Lybia being parched
and Africa ablaze, the heat being so intense that the inhabitants changed color
from white to black. Zeus killed Phaethon with a thunderbolt,
and his body fell into the river Eridanus. The naiads of the stream rescued it
and Clymene, with the three sisters of Phaethon, The
Heliades (Phaethusa, Aegle, and Lampetia) wept for it so much that they
eventually took root in the ground and became trees. Their tears, hardened by
the Sun in his wrath, became lumps of Amber, "with which all women love to
adorn themselves." Another classical source is the Timaeus where,
referring to the discussion between Solon and the High Priest of Sais, Plato
notes that in the opinion of the High Priest the Phaethon story was a myth
referring to "a deviation from its course of one of the bodies moving
round the Earth and heavens, causing a great conflagration of things on earth,
such as occurs at long intervals of time" an accurate description of the
effects of the fall of a large meteorite. There does not appear to have been
such an event in Europe since the that time, the most
recent one being the Tunguskays meteor in Siberia
in 1908. But, nevertheless meteorites do fall and when this happens the results
are serious. The finest amber in the world, the honey colored succinite, comes
from a short stretch of the Baltic Coast stretching south west from Riga, the Samland of history. It has always
been somewhat of a mystery why such enormous quantities have been found here,
the museum at Konigsberg used to be filled with thousands of specimens,
containing in their transparent graves, types of every type of early insect
known of in Europe. An interesting side line of history on this is that Poppea
the wife of Domitius Nero had honey colored tresses which caused him to call
them 'Succini' in verses addressed to her. However it was not until Herodotus
wrote of "A river which the barbarians call Eridanus, empties itself into
the Northern Sea, whence as the tale goes, amber is
procured". The main amber route was from Danzig down the Vistula to
Czecstochowa, where there was a market where the traders from the north met
those from the South, who took their wares to the Black
Sea. One wonders whether the falling meteor might not have
destroyed all the trees for hundreds of miles, this creating the supplies of
imperishable amber. The Eridanus was identified by Claudius Ptolemy with the
Rudon, now the Duna, which flows into the Gulf of Riga.
A clue as to the date of the occurrence is given by Hesoid who observes that
Phaethon had a step brother named Aeetes, whose mother was Perseis the sister
of Clymene. This Aeetes was the Ruler of Colchis
at the time of the visit of the Argonauts, between BC 2,000 and 1,100 B.C.. The identification is that of Eumelus who wrote
"The realm of the fair built Ephyra to Aeetes fell….but he went to Colchis". The identification of Kaalijarv with the
Phaethon story was largely due to Reinwald, who had managed to start a small
museum to house his finds near the site, presumably in what had been the von
Moller's summerhouse. In the note which he published about this he stated:
"Kaalijarv has been known for a long time to its friends and has been
visited every year not only by tourists but by also scientists. However until
now they had not been aware that they have inspected the only site in Europe where meteoritic craters still exist. This must be
a portion of the factual basis of the Phaethon myth, now the problem is to
discover where the main body of the meteorite fell." Reinwald found that
the area of the craters was built up of Silurian dolomite which had penetrated
a sand colored quaternary overlay and that in the funnel of the crater pieces
of charcoal of up to 2/1/2 inches in size which may well have been burnt
embers. He observed that the layers of between four and 8 inches from the
craters showed their antiquity. Unfortunately the last stages in this
investigation occurred just before the war and in the interim nobody knows what
happened to Ivan Reinwald, to the museum, or whether further investigations
have been made. However a casual glance at a map of the Baltic
Sea gives a clue as to the path followed by the meteorite. The
curves of the Frische Nehrung from the Danzig to Konigsberg-Pillau, and those
of the Kunsche Nehrung from Crantz to Memel-Klaipeda, appear to fit in with a
fair sized meteorite dropping into the sea about 100 miles off the coast, as
indicated on the map. This gives a track from just outside Stettin in the
direction of Kakisami on Lake
Ladoga. For the moment we
have no idea in which direction it would have been put up simply as indicating
a method by which it is easily possible for the resources of half a dozen
different academic disciplines to be invoked in order to give a solution to
something which happened thousands of years ago, but was still within the
historical period, which for the Old World started in 5,000 B.C.. The same
methods could be easily be applied in North America, whether in Ontario or in Arizona,
where there are meteoric craters plus an accumulation of myths and legends
which only require a modicum of sorting out. It is always dangerous t neglect
available sources of information because of prejudice against folklore. E.S.
Webmaster Note- What a perfect example of what science so
often overlooks, and yet throw myths away as rubbish, and historical non-sense
to be only burned latter by the rejection of their overlooking egoistic system
that man was only smart once, and man does not ever describe things correctly
because he was always just a monkey. Well they already did disprove themselves
by this one stated truism, "monkey see, and monkey do". If the monkey
saw the comet and ran away to only return to explore what happened latter a
natural curiosity is well known to them, would they not look down and go
"hmmm, why does this taste like blood, why does this taste like charcoal,
and hmm why does this taste like it burns though it does not have burn taste,
well they would not immediately conceive radiation but they would in myth say
do not eat this it will kill you. They turning into man would say later forget
just the effects, what about the iron, what about the amber, what about the
glass, and how come it was an explosion like the sun radiating everywhere? It
would not take long to give it the class of some moving object they already
were familiar with like a burning horse in a fire, or a flaming colored bird,
or a eventually in a chariot………
The Site of Atlantis, E.
Sykes 1969 begins
(This is
where I got the name for my site, Atlantisite.com because it is where I think
big stuff will show up on Atlantis locations, outside just of Bimini, Cuba,
Haiti, Bermuda, Canary Islands, Cape Verde, or the Tongue of the Ocean.)
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