Cosmic Glue

  "This is a very different kind of city," says the lead author of the new study. Tom Hale LiDAR scans showed the island of Tongatapu was home to low-density urbanization 700 years earlier than previously thought Image credit: Phillip Parton/ANU. L asers have been used to uncover a long-lost city's remains on the Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga. Placed along the idyllic Pacific shores and palm trees, the ancient ruins show that urban environments emerged in the region way earlier than thought – and long before Europeans arrived.  Archeologists at the Australian National University used aerial LiDAR scanning to map the landscape of Tongatapu, which hosts Tonga's capital city, Nukuʻalofa. This revealed imprints of settlements that shared the traits of other urban settlement systems found elsewhere in the world, including extensive roads, fortifications, communal structures, and thousands of earth mounds.  They also found evidence of large soil mounds calle...

A new book details the 'race against time' as archaeologists search ice fields for emerging artifacts Amanda Buckiewicz · CBC News · Posted: Dec 20, 2024     Ecologist Lisa Baril admiring the view in Peru as she researched the book. (John Cataldo) Quirks and Quarks 17:51 How ancient artifacts emerge from melting ice In the year 1991, a group of hikers stumbled upon an amazingly preserved 5000 year-old corpse in the mountains on the border between Italy and Austria. It came to be known as Ötzi the Iceman, a glacier mummy who had been locked up in an ice sheet, frozen in time for milllenia. And it turns out, Ötzi was just the beginning.  As our climate warms, the Earth's glaciers and ice patches are melting. And in the decades since Ötzi's discovery, thousands of artifacts made of wood, fur, feathers and other perishable materials have been popping up around the world after being released from their frigid time capsules. This has all led to the development ...