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From: parry@perfectmail.com (Parry)
Newsgroups: alt.surrealism
Subject: Re: Elag...concrete art
Date: 17 Jul 2003 01:53:47 -0700
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dt3mfc@aol.com (Mike Rodelli) wrote in message news:<ae79afb8.0307160336.5dc35cde@posting.google.com>...
> parry@perfectmail.com (Parry) wrote in message >
> > > > > > * And Oak Island, my favourite buried treasure story:
> > > > > > http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Nova_Scotia/oakisland.htm
> > > > >
> > > > > It is an interesting story, but probably there never was any treasure.
> > > >
> > > > That sort question mark makes the story interesting. But the so-called
> > > > "Money Pit" is such an elaborate and sophisticated engineering feat it
> > > > presumably was constructed in the service of something deemed
> > > > important.
> > >
> > > ....
> > >
> > > I've probably read most of the same material you have but I'm inclined
> > > to doubt nearly all of the early stories. I think the "water trap",
> > > being that it occurs below the water level, is a natural phenomenon.
> >
> > If the water trap were artificial, it would still occur below water
> > level, otherwise there would be needed a pumping system to draw the
> > water up.
> >
> > > It looks to me like a long game of "telephone"... distortion on top of
> > > exaggeration on top of lie with an overlay of fervent hope.
> >
> > I'm not predisposed to either side, as both theories produce a set of
> > riddles. So I suspend an opinion for now, except to say the basic
> > fantasy of the "booby-trap" isn't very sensible. Why would anyone
> > guard a treasure with a mechanism that makes the treasure utterly
> > irretrievable? It would be like Fort Knox having a trigger to destroy
> > its gold if its security is breached.
> >
> > > This Skeptical Inquirer article goes some way towards debunking the
> > > mystery.
> > >
> > > http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-03/i-files.html
> >
> > The Oak Island system could well be all natural phenomena and the
> > story a great case of people seeing what they wish to see, but
> > Nickell's article does little to sway the argument, I thought. The
> > most interesting bits, those that argue the site was produced by
> > natural phenomena, all seem to have been copped from a Smithsonian
> > article by Douglas Preston. Basically Preston is saying that
> > sink-holes sucked man-made materials deep into the earth, and dragged
> > down and buried trees to create the illusions of platforms.
>
> Hi Parry-
>
> I was wondering if you know anything about the geology of Oak Island,
> or if this subject is covered in the Smithsonian article (citation?).
> Sinkholes typically occur in places like Florida and Pennsylvania,
> where there are large deposits of limestone bedrock, which is easily
> eroded by the action of water. Seems to me that Oak Island would be
> composed of metamorphic or igneous rock, which would not lend itself
> to sinkhole formation.
I haven't seen the Smithsonian article (I know which parts were used
in the CSICOP piece because the author spelled it out; the Smithsonian
article is dated Vol. 19, No. 3, 1988), but I've read Oak Island has a
fairly unusual geology. It's reportedly covered with a considerably
thick mantle of glacial till, which is very tough, and 167 feet or so
deep there's a bedrock of anhydrite -- I suppose meaning limestone,
gypsum, sandstone and shale -- which is weak and water soluble. What I
know about geology would fit in a mosquito's pocketwatch and leave
room enough for George Bush's brain, but this suggests to me that
where the mantle was fractured it could become unstable and drop into
the bedrock, though given the thickness of the mantle such a fracture
may be unlikely to occur naturally. The sinkhole theory, though,
requires that diverse materials were dropped into a deep hole over an
extended period of time and were gradually buried by naturally
occurring debris. It's surmised this would have all happened in the
space of about a century. One might expect that the nearby pit which
caved in in 1878 (also considered an entirely natural phenomenon by
the CSICOP article) should itself have filled in with debris by now.
-- Parry
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