Hollow Earth

Expeditions exploring deep, mysterious tunnels and caves in various parts of the world return with strange tales of subterranean civilizations, cities and advanced yet ancient technology.There is something fundamentally and primally mysterious about caves and tunnels. Maybe it's their darkness or the fact that they open into the very body of the Earth. They are invariably the subjects of adolescent adventure stories, such as the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew mysteries, and R.L. Stine's books.And they serve as backgrounds in excitingstories directed at older audiences as well, such as Jules Verne's A Journey to the Center of the Earth and the Indiana Jones films.

Tunnels represent the unknown and touch the fears that reside deep in the primitive human subconscious. Recently, I've come across several sites on the Web that tell what some believe are true stories of vast underground networks of tunnels. And they are no less mysterious and fantastic than those used as settings in the fictional tales mentioned above. It's not that the tunnels merely exist and are unknown to most people, it's what they contain, who built them, and why - and that takes us into the deepest recesses of the unknown.People who claim to have first- or second-hand knowledge or experience with these tunnels make many astonishing claims: that they contain long-lost cities; that they are inhabited by advanced civilizations(perhaps the descendents of Atlantis); that they are bases for extraterrestrials and their flying saucers; that they are bases for secret government installations. The government no doubt has top-secret military installations deep within mountains and perhaps underground, but this, of course, is the least fantastic of the stories. Here are highlights of some of the more extraordinary claims.Grand Canyon MysteryThe April 5, 1909 edition of The Phoenix Gazette carried a story entitled "Explorations in Grand Canyon" According to the article, a man named G.E. Kinkaid made an astonishing discovery while on an expedition, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, in the Grand......

Scientist said this week they had drilled into the lower section of Earth's crust for the first time and were poised to break through to the mantle in coming years. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) seeks the elusive "Moho," a boundary formally known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity. It marks the division between Earth's brittle outer crust and the hotter, softer mantle.The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor,appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness.The new hole, which took nearly eight weeks to drill, is the third deepest ever made into the floor of the sea, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The rock collection brought back to the surface is providing new information about the planet's composition."It will provide important clues on how ocean crust forms," said Rodey Batiza, NSF program director for ocean drilling.Already the types of rocks recovered show thatconventional interpretation of Earth's evolution are "oversimplifying many of the features of the ocean’s crust," said expedition leader Jay Miller of Texas A&M University. "Each time we drill a hole, we learn that Earth’s structure is more complex. Our understanding of how the Earth evolved is changing accordingly."

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science