Myths Help Geologists Understand Modern Threats

morleron writes "According to a report in the "Guardian Unlimited" geologists have begun using ancient myths as clues to geologic events in Earth's past. Among other things scientists have followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago; the discovery that a volcano on Fiji is active instead of dormant as has been thought for years; and that the Biblical and Near Eastern myths of a world ending flood are probably based on the sudden inundation of the Black Sea when the landbridge that used to link Turkey with Europe - what is now called the Bosporus - suddenly collapsed some 7600 years ago. It's amazing how much information our ancestors passed on in oral and early written myths...we're finally getting smart enough to listen."

Comments

NO problem...

[Spytap]

Hey, as long as Myths are treated as such, and not absolute fact. At that point it gets hard to sort through what may be helpful, and what may just be white noise...

Re:NO problem...

[Bazzalisk]

Most of the world? Not realy. Religious fundementalists have alot of Power in the US and the middle-east, but in Africa, Europe, and most of Asia they are a minority voice with little power. (Which isn't to say that religious groups don't have power, but they're very rarely "fundementalists")

hardly surprising, really

[quest(answer)ion]

folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have been trying to track down the historical basis for myths and legends for as long as their professions have existed. i guess the real news is that geologists and other hard scientists are starting to listen to folklorists and anthropologists, taking cross-cultural similarities traditions seriously as sources of insight about global climatic events in the pre-historical or semi-historical past rather than as amusing consequences or the result of some sort of freakishly convergent cultural evolution.

i figure as the amount of what we know about the earth's climatic and geological history increases, the more of these correlations with myth we'll find. i think the idea of being able to predict localized patterns of geological events like eruptions and earthquakes is what's really seductive, i don't know what kind of value this sort of new insight will have for predicting major natural disasters will have on a human timescale, though. saying an earthquake will happen in the next 200 to 1000 years is next to useless in terms of preparing for it in the short-term.

hell, the history channel loves to tell us that according to the mayan calendar, this age of the world will end in 2012. doesn't necessarily mean we'll have another great flood on our hands, but it certainly makes for good tv.