Liquid Mercury Found Under Mexican Pyramid 133
An anonymous reader writes: An archaeologist has discovered liquid mercury at the end of a tunnel beneath a Mexican pyramid, a finding that could suggest the existence of a king's tomb or a ritual chamber far below one of the most ancient cities of the Americas. Mexican researcher Sergio Gómez ... has spent six years slowly excavating the tunnel, which was unsealed in 2003 after 1,800 years. Last November, Gómez and a team announced they had found three chambers at the tunnel’s 300ft end, almost 60ft below the the temple. Near the entrance of the chambers, they a found trove of strange artifacts: jade statues, jaguar remains, a box filled with carved shells and rubber balls.
Wow (Score:1, Funny)
And I thought a real king should have had solid mercury in his tomb!
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
A real king has Freddy Mercury in his tomb. (Or preferably all of Queen.)
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Originally he did, but because of Man's imperialist and engineeringist hubris the climate warmed so much that the mercury is liquid today.
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Originally he did, but because of Man's imperialist and engineeringist hubris the climate warmed so much that the mercury is liquid today.
Premises:
1. The freezing/melting point for mercury is approximately -39 C,
2. part of Mexico (south of the Tropic of Cancer) is considered tropical.
Conclusion:
I'm glad the climate has warmed since then.
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Re: Wow (Score:1)
Solids (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile, liquid pyramids have been spotted on Mercury.
Do not (Score:4, Funny)
Do not activate the gate.
Do not activate the gate.
DO NOT ACTIVATE THE GATE!
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This is not gate, this is fifth element.
This is supreme being.
Re: Do not (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, fuck off.
They heated cinnabar ore. You get mercury when you do that. These people had metal, mined, and could build vast structures that weigh more than any skyscraper did for millennia after them.
You don't need a supernatural explanation that they found a liquid metal (a liquid mirror, in effect) fucking intriguing and so prized it as some kind of treasure to bury with their kings.
That people in these ancient eras had brains seemed to be frowned upon, as if we're the only humans who could be allowed to do that. Ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, etc. civilisations all had astounding knowledge and abilities. Just because they were never able to fully capitalise on them and then we suffered a few thousand years of poxy ignorance doesn't mean they weren't geniuses. (Just so happens that several of those millennia were dominated by religious shit, Crusades, etc.).
Antikythera (extremes of "clockwork", gearing and mathematical technology), pyramids, battery technology, steam-powered engines, railways, they had a shit-ton of expertise, but the problem was that the insights were few and far between and hard to do, and secondary to surviving for the most part, so unfortunately they never were able to be joined together in the way we could do now.
Fuck your aliens. Pay your respects to thousands of years of education, science, inquisitiveness, some of the greatest minds who ever lived, single individuals who knew all of established science for their time, amazing insights, and artisans capable of creating their off-the-wall ideas using some of the most difficult craftsmanships in existence.
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lead poisoning is, though.
Only if you do something as insane in hindsight as put lead acetate in the wine as a cheap sweetener. Lead pipes give you tiny trace amounts. Guzzling down cheap vino with a lead based sweetener like the Romans did is a few orders of magnitude more.
The lead pipes myth came from someone who knew about the poisoning but not about the wine so made a bit of a guess - lucky for us a wrong one since there's still some lead plumbing around.
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I dunno about that, all I have to do is look at southern califorina then remember that many homes have high to very high levels of lead in the drinking water.
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Re: Do not (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're thinking of pewter [wikipedia.org]; tin, often (in the past) alloyed with lead.
Of course, for decades we burned leaded gasoline in our engines since it reduced knock so wonderfully, so there are several hundred ppm of lead in the atmosphere that didn't used to be there. It's still there, even though tetraethyl lead has been phased out of use.
Read up on Thomas Midgley Jr [wikipedia.org]. He was a chemist and a prolific inventor, but sadly he set loose some of the nastier industrial chemicals into the world in the last century, somewhat unwittingly.
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Wow, that guy just kept causing problems. That he eventually strangled himself on a bed pulley system of his own design seems like a pretty fitting (and ironic) end to his life.
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Lots of theories about the demise of these civilizations.
As Jared Diamond said, all you need are: Guns, Germans and Steel. If you buy a Heckler & Koch MP7, you get three in one, and are ready to conquer South America.
Hey, you da big Inca? You think you bad, mutha fucka . . . ? Meet Heckler & Koch!
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Lots of theories about the demise of these civilizations. I don't recall mercury poisoning being discussed as a contributor, but it seems plausible.
If Lead and Mercury were as dangerous as the State of California thinks, most of us would either be long dead or "not exist" because their parents died!
The compounds are not a good idea to eat, but thats different.
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In modern history, we're known to do things with uranium and lead that we shouldn't have.
And radium! [wikipedia.org]
Re: Do not (Score:5, Informative)
(Large scale extraction is now usually done by cyanide leaching, since that's somewhat less nasty than mercury amalgamation; but small scale miners often still use mercury. As one might imagine, the 'now heat the amalgam with a blowtorch to drive off the mercury and recover the gold' step is about as good for you as it sounds, possibly worse.)
Re: Do not (Score:4, Funny)
I know, right? It wasn't aliens that built the pyramids, or anything supernatural. It's stupid to think that.
Everybody knows it was Anunnaki, our ancestors, the Shining Ones, who gave this technology to humans over 250,000 years ago.
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> I know, right? It wasn't aliens that built the pyramids, or anything supernatural. It's stupid to think that.
Exactly. A civil engineer wanted to figure out how the pyramids were built, so he went around asking the experts - Egyptian stonemasons (modern ones). The most plausible answer they came up with is the "shadouf" - the lever and water bag device for raising water from the Nile to irrigate fields. Pretty much everyone at the time would have been familiar with it. To raise stones for the pyrami
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Sounds plausible, except how does that lever get the stones to the top of a 455' structure? The widest "step" doesn't seem like it would allow room for enough guys to exert 800 lbs on a lever, much less for
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I've also been to the pyramids. Stunning works.
The thing that's struck me about the mystery of ancient construction methods is...just that they chose to make things with such large stones. If you can cut stones precisely as they could, why not cut them again? It must be simpler to cut a two-ton stone into four 500lb blocks and move those. The fact that they chose to use such large stones implies they had a simple method of moving them.
Particularly when you look at some place like Pumapunku [wikipedia.org] where they've got
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... Why did all of the ancient world decide to use massive stones, and only later civilizations realized "oh wait this is way easier with smaller bricks." Odd. ...
Probably because big stones are way more impressive. And last longer. But it still leaves the question of how.
Keep in mind, though, that most Archeologists have never built with things bigger than a matchstick. They need to consult more Engineers. 8-)
By the way, there is evidence of a ramp built into the great pyrimid, turning at the corners, that was coverd up by the "sheathing" stones. You can even see a hollow at the edge where the stones are missing.
Re: Do not (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay your respects to thousands of years of education, science, inquisitiveness, some of the greatest minds who ever lived, single individuals who knew all of established science for their time, amazing insights, and artisans capable of creating their off-the-wall ideas using some of the most difficult craftsmanships in existence.
THIS!
Ah yes, the" Ancient Aliens" mindset of some folks. It's so damn amazing how some people assume that humans are all too stupid to have ever done anything worthwhile or clever, and needed "aliens" to come teach us.
People have their problems. We like to kill each other for fun, and we can be really nasty to each other at other times. But we're actually pretty damned smart when you think about it. Our ancestors were capable of a lot of amazing things, and there really isn't the need to invoke beings that had to come help us because humans are soooo stoopid. An intelligent person from say Pharonic times, would be able to understand modern technology after some exposure to it. They weren't stupid, not even close.
Having watched that AA show a few times, it is just one long argument from personal incredulity. And the problem with accepting arguments from personal incredulity is that the biggest idiot in the room always wins.
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An intelligent person from say Pharonic times, would be able to understand modern technology after some exposure to it.
It's something that somewhat pissed me off in the movie The Mummy: they used Imhotep as the bad mummy came back to life. It's an insult to that guy who was a true genius of Galileo/Newton/Einstein caliber. 5 millennia ago he wrote medical texts, built the very first pyramid (still standing), invented collumns, performed surgery, astronomy, poetry, philosophy, was a prime minister, was born a commoner but was accorded divine status after his death... One of his diagnostics is still used in current medical te
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Exactly. The big trick way back when was a limited written history. When craving into stone tablets you only hit the highlights and none of the gritty details. So people ended up duplicating each other's work hundreds if not thousands of times before paper copies started getting created. And even once we had paper the data was so far separate from each other that compiling and knowing what was in the complications took another couple of thousand years.
Even today you can't get all of human knowledge easi
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Exactly. The big trick way back when was a limited written history. When craving into stone tablets you only hit the highlights and none of the gritty details. So people ended up duplicating each other's work hundreds if not thousands of times before paper copies started getting created.
Savages! Wonder why it took that long for Copyright to be invented.
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They don't just do that for ancient peoples. I've heard theories about modern technology coming from aliens. The great minds from 70 years ago to today that developed the computer technology that almost everyone on Slashdot benefits from? Ada Lovelace? Alan Turing? The geniuses at Bell Labs? Fairchild?
Nope. Aliens.
If one of us make something amazing, you can count on some group saying aliens did it, and it'll only take a generation or two.
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Neither Ada Lovelace nor Alan Turing have directly contributed to computer technology, both were brilliant mathematicians and Alan Turing made important contributions to the theory of computability but that is at most indirect involvement of actual computer development.
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That's not how things work.
The Mayans were a civilization based on water control. Water is necessary to survive and was only available seasonally in the region the Mayans originate from. The Mayan kings developed ways to control water, which in turn got them the following of their subjects, which allowed them to have a massive workforce available to build more sophisticated ways to control water, as well as the incentive to develop the technology further to stay in power.
Something similar happened to all an
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Citation needed. Big time.
Sure, people must have been happy under the whole feudal serfdom/slavery system. I mean, it was great if you were a noble or king but it sucked big time for everyone else. Existing (you could hardly call it living) in squalor, ignorance, and poor health in a vermin-infested h
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Honestly, the explanation may be even simpler again.
This pyramid dates back 1800 years, but 2200 years ago China's first emperor had his own tomb built, and whilst it has not been excavated it is long rumoured to have been filled with rivers of mercury, and of course, jade, which is common in China.
So as much as we like to pretend otherwise in many Western history books it's feasible that there was, in the intervening 400 years, some knowledge transfer and trade from China to Mexico, and that this Mexican p
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The swearing was probably intended more as an expression of how the poster felt about the topic, and the GP's opinion thereof.
Sometimes swearing is used just to communicate intensity of feeling, not necessarily to be more convincing.
You probably already know that though, and are just whining because your puritan sensibilities were offended.
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Perhaps he just _really_ like aliens?
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"It started with the philosophical notion that a rational God would make a rational universe that could be understood by humans."
And the evidence that it started with that is...?
Bert
“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” George Carlin
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Re: Do not (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not jumping to conclusions, but the people who have been making the case for historical alien visitors
Although I acknowledge that they're good workers, you should know that Mexicans aren't considered aliens in Mexico.
crap (Score:1)
An English primer was not among them, it would seem.
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An English primer was not among them, it would seem.
The English Prime Minister never made it to Montecello's Pyramids, it was the Spanish under Francesco Bizarro that discovered them.
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Not a native speaker here. What is wrong with that sentence?
Ber
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OK, I now see it. Amazing how the brain fixes things for you. It is like reading msaehd up wrdos and still being able to make sense of that.
Bert
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OK, I'm going to call bullshit here.
Is a perfectly well constructed bit of English.
So what the hell are you bitching about? If you think that's needing an English primer, maybe it's you who needs one?
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I'm pretty sure it's not a perfectly well constructed bit of English.
But honestly, I don't blame you for claiming it's not, I read it correctly 3 times before I realised it's actually incredibly broken.
It seems I have the capacity to automatically filter out terrible English unless I'm really trying hard to look for it. I'd wager you do too :)
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As quoted, "they found a trove of strange artifacts" seems perfectly good to me.
I'm simply not seeing where it's not valid English.
So, tell me oh wise one, what's wrong with it? It's no different than "they found a pile of stuff" in terms of syntax.
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Here is what they said, followed by what you just said they said.
they a found trove of strange artifacts
they found a trove of strange artifacts
Hopefully side by side you can more easily spot the blatant illiteracy :)
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Wow ... human monkey brain stupid ... I looked at it again and again and my brain apparently fixed it each time.
Thanks, because I simply wasn't seeing it. :-P
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Yeah tell me about it, as I say I was struggling at first and figured maybe it was a snobbish reference to the use of artifact rather than the British English but basically never used artefact.
It wasn't until I literally parsed it word by word taking a pause in between that I caught it. It's a rather fantastic example of inbuilt human brain automatic error detection and correction though :) Judging by the replies it caught quite a few people - I think there's a psychological study in there somewhere!
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You didn't use any word implying likelihood or probability. You're making stuff up.
P.S. Reading comprehension. No "for".
Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Near the entrance of the chambers, they a found trove of strange artifacts: jade statues, jaguar remains, a box filled with carved shells and rubber balls.
What's strange about any of that?
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Near the entrance of the chambers, they a found trove of strange artifacts: jade statues, jaguar remains, a box filled with carved shells and rubber balls.
What's strange about any of that?
After 1800 years of solitude, the rubber balls were still bouncing!
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Frankly a rubber ball bouncing on its own for even a full minute would have me nervous.
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The ancients invented Flubber.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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The carved shells? They were from a Mossberg 500 Tactical Persuader pump action shotgun.
Sounds like the beginning of a *bad* scifi movie. (Score:2)
The preserved ship was found underneath the tombs, hidden safely in a pool of mercury from those who sought its destruction millennia ago. But now the pool has been emptied, and the ship's beacon detected, awakening the ancient enemy, who even now races to their final destination, readying massive engines of destruction, pointing them at a small, insignificant planet, called... Earth (zoom out to stock photo of Earth in space - Cue "threatening alien" theme).
Burial site of the first emperor of China (Score:3)
You'd know him from the Terracotta warriors uncovered. The Burial site is close to being a wonder of the world and it's known where it's at. They won't dig there due to the high levels of Mercury measured at the site, a vast simulated area of water was created using Mercury in the tomb (as claimed by legends). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q... [wikipedia.org]
All of the early civilizations of pre-Columbian America used Cinnabar (a source of Mercury) in their rituals and almost always at burial sites due to it's red color.
Re:Burial site of the first emperor of China (Score:4, Informative)
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While there are high levels of mercury there, it isn't at a level that is particular unsafe and not the reason they've yet to open it. Various other tombs had been devastated by half-ass archeology attempts several decades ago, and the Chinese don't want to mess up something so important. They've been working on some more minor tombs in the area and want to make sure that one is done right.
I agree. While the levels of Mercury are very high, they do want to do this one right and in no hurry.
I hate these archaeology posts lately (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've probably done more photography underground than you have, by several hundreds of photos. It's not actually an easy task, particularly if you're needing photos up to research standards let alone publication standard.
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How about some silicon balls [neuticles.com]
Emergency (Score:3)
It's not Mercury; It's Naquada (Score:1)
Molten metal beneath a pyramind. 'Nuff said. Notify SG1 and prepare for the onslaught by the goa'uld.
What did they expect? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course it would be liquid mercury. Now I'd be surprised if they found solid mercury down there!
Obvious reason for Hg (Score:2)
They were a civilisation of dentists, and they kept their trove of Mercury around 'cause it's used in fabbing the amalgalm for fillings.
Too cool! (Score:2)
I'd love to don an airtight suit and try to walk/crawl on that river.
According to these [physics.info] documents [dtic.mil], I'd displace .0092 m^3 (9195 cm^3) of mercury (yes, I weigh in at nearly 125 kg).
By using the largest values for foot, calf, and thigh volumes, the second document tells me that I could stand up in the mercury, and that it would come up 15% of the length of my thighs or so.
Assuming I'm vaguely rectangular when I'm supine (41 cm wide by 183 cm tall), I'd float in 1.2 cm of mercury.
Re:Not nerdy enough (Score:5, Interesting)
You're joking. Liquid mercury? Come on, show of hands: Who among us has not at some point in our lives broken open a thermometer in order to play with the mercury inside? That's a nerd rite of passage.
Hell, I'm old enough to remember when they made little maze puzzles with a blob of mercury inside that you'd try to get from one corner to the other. Those were the days before parents raised kids like veal. We had pocket knives, for chrissake. Can you imagine millennial parents giving their precious offspring pocket knives? I had my own .22 rifle by the time I was 10. All the liquid mercury I handled in my life, it's no wonder I'm half an imbecile.
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"Those were the days before parents raised kids like veal."
The above is THE most awesome ( and true ) phrase I have ever seen on Slashdot.
I doff my hat to you, sir !
But you didn't eat it (Score:3)
Washing it down the drain to where it can end up in
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Well...
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I was about to reply that I've seen a few young kids with pocket knives but their parents grew up in places like China and have associated more with older generations in the west than people of their own age.
Maybe if we had more of that now people would see the things properly as tools instead of the NRA insanity of it being an external sign of manhood, patriotism and being ready to o
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Dude your an idiot. A pocket knife is not a firearm. Most kids get pocket knives these days, boys, around 8-10. Its really not that different.
I would not let my children handle mercury, or lead, or really any heavy metals. This is because I am not a negligent parent, and have taught them that things can be toxic, carcinogenic etc because hopefully you can teach them some basic science and aren't just focusing on arming them for the apocalypse that probably isn't coming.
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Dude your an idiot.
Beautiful!
Whose an idiot? (Score:2)
Whose an idiot?
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I would not let my children handle mercury, or lead, or really any heavy metals.
Glad you weren't my parent, (although, I'm sure you're a fine parent)! I would never have had a lead melting kit, (with cowboy molds!), a wood burning kit, (I forget what you were supposed to do with that, but it was great for melting army men, and burning my name into anything wooden), nor likely a dissecting kit, (and all the formaldehyde-soaked creatures I carved up), all while my age was in the single digits. And then, my dentist once gave me a nice blob of mercury to take home and play with - a little
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Burning stuff with various implements and unguided play are still common for many parents. There were always overprotective parents who force their children into rigid molds. Some would have us think that's the best way to treat children, but most of us know better.
In any case, melting lead is not a good unsupervised activity for kids and probably something I would keep them away from. A high level of lead in your blood may explain why you are so aggressive about your way being best
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That you read my post as aggressive and yelling might indicate that you were excessively coddled as a child. Take two paint chips, twice a day, sublingually, for thirty days. Then re-read my post in a soothing, avuncular voice.
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OK maybe it is nerdy for some of us. Posting my original comment was totally worth the rebuttals. Well played.
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If you accept the notion that science is "nerdy", and accept that archaeology is science, it follows that archaeological discoveries are of interest to nerds, with, or without, any mercury nearby. Not that one must be a nerd to enjoy Slashdot. I got laid in high school, yet I'm interested in many of the topics presented here.
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... - but a king's tomb just doesn't cut the mustard for me.
Probably just a high-security warehouse, for the Mercury that they used to extract gold from ore.