The mystery of the Roman 'gate to hell'

cnn.com

46 points·evo_9··12 comments

The end of the article suggests that the presence of oil lamps at the site may indicate that some rituals were performed at night. An alternative use of lamps, day or night, would be to detect how high the carbon dioxide layer was.

Good point. The 'priests' must have had some failsafe method of judging when it was safe for them to approach the entrance. Nobody wants to be the canary in the coal mine, I guess.

...and you don't want your performance ruined by the sacrificial animals remaining stubbornly alive, either!

That can be neatly worked into a sign from the gods, so no problem there.

From the abstract of the paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12520-018-0599-...

"Two thousand years ago, only supernatural forces could explain these phenomena from Hadean depths whereas nowadays, modern techniques hint to the well-known phenomenon of geogenic CO2 degassing having mantle components with relatively higher helium and radon concentrations."

We already had a post about this coming through a few days, didn't we?

I want to go and visit this place the cave i want to explore this place

tl;dr Carbon dioxide comes out of fizzures in the ground and asphyxiates the animal.

But it doesn't kill the priests.

Because they are taller and breathe above it, carbon dioxide bogs lie low

No giraffes were harmed during the making of this ritual.

I want to go and visit this place the cave

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