Mysterious Stone Structure Discovered Beneath Sea of Galilee | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious Stone Structure Discovered Beneath Sea of Galilee

livescience.com

79 pointsfourmii23 comments

The ancient remains of a great and enormous basalt structure, hmm? Now where have I heard of that before... Ah, yes!

"And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth’s dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep." - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (and alluding to his earlier "The White Ship")

Perhaps we should seek the other Basalt Pillar of the West in the Dead Sea.

This guy's predictions have an eerie way of coming up: the unexplained Bloop sound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop) recorded near the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, very near where Lovecraft has R'lyeh, where Ctulhu sleeps; the recent discovery of mountains, hitherto unknown under hundreds of meters of Antarctic ice, just as described in The Mountains of Madness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamburtsev_Mountain_Range, no credit is given on the Wikipedia page to him), and now this.

Sometimes, you need to look for the simple answers not the "exotic" ones. This pile of rocks was created by ships, merchant ships to be specific. You see back in the day you needed a ship with a lot of buoyancy to carry a lot of cargo, more cargo, more money. But unlike today's ships which use computers to pump on or pump out water as needed, your typical merchant 4000 years ago would get a big rock on the 'empty' run (when they were just returning with profits to get more trade goods) and they would dump the rock overboard just before port so they could fill up on oils or skins or other trinkets.

Not very exciting I know. Sorry about that.

[1] ballast pile as result of wreck -- http://www.marinearcheology.org/Shooner.htm

Wait, you're saying rocks on an empty boat, but why not just have an empty boat? Wouldn't a totally empty boat travel faster than boat+rocks?

An empty boat has a higher center of gravity. Thus waves are more likely to capsize (tip it over) it. It is better (from a strictly economic sense) to have a slightly slower functional boat than one that is sunk.

Not sure if that'd apply here - the Sea of Galilee is awfully tiny for the kind of merchant shipping you're talking about, just 33 miles in circumference, max depth of 141 feet, etc.

So according to wikipedia, the Sea of Galilee is 13mi by 8mi. It's a lake. A big, but not very big one. Generally you wouldn't get ships on a lake that size, large boats sure, but not ships. Those boats generally don't need a lot of ballast, particularly because you are't going to get really large waves on a body of water that small. Even if you did, does it even make sense to move ballast stones down to the shore, then put them on a boat across this small of a distance, just to dump them, when in the same amount of time you could probably just load up a mule/horse/camel train and walk around the lake, and for better profit than pulling down the stones. (Note there is lots of historical evidence for trade by boat on the sea, I'm just not convinced of the need for ballast stones, and there is nothing on one side of the lake or the other that suggests an empty return voyage even makes sense).

Some other problems with this theory:

1) Ballast piles from wrecks are much much smaller than 50 meters by 50 meters, and not 5m high.

2) dumping ballast stones wouldn't occur in such a well confined way resembling a pile - there would be more outlying boulders, potentially increasing in density towards a central spot (the designated dump spot) rather than a pile with edges like this.

3) 4000 years ago, it is not clear to me that there were ships with the right properties to need balast stones anywhere. I'll be glad to be shown wrong, it's interesting. Similarly, trading in ancient times like this was usually far more circuit based than "there and back", so you get and drop items every stop.

Has the Sea of Galilee always been a lake with the same dimensions?

Good question. The article and wikipedia suggest not, but I don't have any actual data either way. Hope someone who knows chimes in.

"This pile of rocks was created by ships, merchant ships to be specific."

Is this a supported assertion or a guess?

Awesome discussion. The reasoning on my assertion is as follows:

The description of the pile of rocks, it matches the description of ballast piles outside of ports on the Mediterranean and larger inland seas.

Ship technology from the time [1] tended to flat bottomed and top heavy boats.

Ships in general, but merchant ships in particular, use ballast to adjust their buoyancy so that they sail per their design. In the case of merchant ships ballast is always something of low value and easily removed.

When adjusting ballast without pumps, solid ballast is easier to load on and off than either liquid ballast or sand ballast (which would require shovelling).

In terms of value to pound of ballast delivered, random basaltic rocks achieve excellent efficiencies.

It's certainly possible that this is something else entirely. I don't think we'll know until they do further research, until then it would be fun to hear other's reasoning on what they think this "structure" represents.

[1] http://www.spirasolaris.ca/egyptianship.html

I can't find anything about ballast stones being used on the Sea of Galilee, but there are lots of mentions of ballast bags.

I've seen ballast bags as well (even on nominally "modern" sampan boats). If I were a sailor 4K years ago I'd probably optimize for cost first, speed second. But I don't have a good idea for how much effort it takes to fill ballast bags so I can be very confident in reasoning about where they would fall on that scale.

A 1 meter longest dimension boulder would probably weigh well over 500 pounds (conservatively). This size stone is not something you would use as ballast.

Hmm, that is a fair point. One cubic meter of basaltic rock is closer to 3 tons. There is a point where a rock is too big to be usefully used as ballast.

I don't know, the explanation in the article seems pretty pedestrian to me. Who's looking for exotic answers?

I couldn't tell if the pictures and diagrams were about a stone structure or a 2013 Dodge Avenger, Dart, or Challenger. I swear web publishers sometimes pick the worst things to slap ads on...

Jesus!

No, around 2000 years (third millennium B.C) before him. ;)

It's not written how deep the rocks are, or how much watter were above them in Jesus' time, but just imagine not much and that he knew where they were -- then the scenes where he gets out of the boat to walk on the watter get a very obvious explanation.

Yes, surely the fishermen who were sailing it would be ignorant of shallow rocks right next to the boat. It's not like they would have to avoid hitting them.

Professional fishermen, don't forget. This was their livelihood, so they were very likely good at it and knew the waters.

(I caught the sarcasm and was adding to your actual stance, in case I failed to relay that :) )

Possible, though rather improbable. There is a far simpler explanation.

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