Bringing the Jomon Era to Life

Jomon Era artifacts are easy to find but not always easy to appreciate. This photography brings them to life. Here is what The Japan Times online edition reports about Jomon Era artifact photographer Tadahiro Ogawa: Camera artist casts new light on Jomon millennia by Edan Corkill Staff Writer Sep 28, 2013 The Jomon Period of Japanese history is so shrouded in the mists of time that any bid to fathom its secrets stretches even the usual astonishing bounds of prehistoric archeology. Yet as amateurs and experts alike have continued unearthing and studying 2,000- to 10,000-year-old examples of Jomon pottery and stone tools for more than a century, the pieces of the puzzle are gradually coming together. It is only six years ago, for instance, that the discovery of unusually large beans — or the holes where they had been encased in the clay of Jomon Period pots — provided concrete evidence that people living in these islands so very long ago had been able to domesticate certain plant species. Such new understandings, of course, normally come courtesy of archeology and science. But there has been another endeavor that has helped bring into focus those mysterious times: photography. Indeed, for the last 30 years Tadahiro Ogawa is one who has dedicated himself to photographing Jomon Period artifacts — and to date he has around 30,000 of them in his picture archive. In fact the Tokyo resident has photographed at pretty much every one of the more than 500 museums nationwide that stocks objects from the Jomon Period — which is conventionally dated at from around 12,000 B.C. to 300 B.C. And due to his policy of granting free use of his photographs to the institutions with which he collaborates, Ogawa’s work has become ubiquitous in the field, adorning the covers of countless books, posters, bags and academic studies — and, in one case at least, even a local phone book. Judging from the evidence to hand, it seems that few of those museums are fastidious about crediting their unpaid photographer, but it is nevertheless easy to identify his handiwork. For starters, Ogawa’s photographs of ancient Jomon clay objects depict vivid and dramatic topographies of shade, shadow, highlights and depth. Where archeological documentation of such finds tends to prioritize even, flat lighting, Ogawa manages to capture in his shots such texture and physicality that it’s as if they are there in the room with you — objects you could reach out and touch and feel. Effortlessly, his images transport you back to a time when such objects were an everyday presence — when they were real rather than being revered antiquities.

Earthquakes=Space Music?

Apparently the waves that travel through the Earth and cause the ground to roll and buildings to rattle are not the only ones produced by earthquakes: Megaquake felt in space AFP-JIJI Mar 12, 2013 WASHINGTON – A European Space Agency satellite circling the Earth was able to detect the massive 2011 quake that ravaged Japan, resulting in the loss of some 19,000 lives and causing massive destruction, a new study said Sunday. “The atmospheric infrasounds following the great Tohoku earthquake . . . induced variations of air density and vertical acceleration of the GOCE platform,” said a report published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The Gravity Ocean Circulation Explorer is the European Space Agency super-sensitive satellite that acts like an orbital seismologist. Scientists argue that earthquakes not only create seismic waves that travel through Earth’s interior, but large tremors also cause the surface of the planet to vibrate like a drum. This produces sound waves that travel upward through the atmosphere.

Carved in Stone

http://www.thewesterlysun.com/news/land-reclaimed-by-nature-yields-its-historic-artifacts/article_6e5d94f4-84dd-11e2-aeb3-001a4bcf887a.html The above link is to an artifact left by Native Americans in Rhode Island, USA. There is a similar (probable) artifact etched into a cliff on Yonaguni, an island in Okinawa. The Native American one looks like a cougar in profile; the Yonaguni one looks like an outline of a sea eagle.

Meanwhile, on Mars...

These days, more and more extreme environments are becoming accessible to sampling. Here are some results from a mission to Mars. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20121203.html

Wish List: A Practical and Accurate Way to Predict Earthquakes

Sunday, Nov. 11, 2012 Geoelectric changes may help 'predict' quakes: researchers Kyodo Researchers claim to have found a correlation between the occurrence of earthquakes in the Izu Island chain and subtle changes in subterranean geoelectricity, a finding that one day might help develop techniques for predicting temblors. The team, consisting of researchers from institutions including Tokai University and Tokyo Gakugei University, analyzed the relation between small changes in geoelectricity around Kozu Island, located 170 km southwest of Tokyo, and quakes in the vicinity with a magnitude of at least 3.0, based on data gathered between May 1997 and June 2000. The geoelectric data were collected during this period through about 20 electrodes buried at intervals of between 100 and as much as 3,000 meters around Kozu. The team studied temblors that struck within 20 km of the island, according to a study published online by a prestigious U.S. science journal. The researchers observed 19 anomalous changes in the strength and movement of geoelectric currents, 11 of which were proceeded by 3.0-magnitude or stronger quakes within 30 days — a 58 percent rate of occurrence, they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. "This rate of probability is statistically significant," said Toshiyasu Nagao, a Tokai University professor who coauthored the study. "There is debate over the existence of precursors to earthquakes, but (this study) indicates that some may exist." The researchers said they excluded geoelectric anomalies caused by factors such as lightning strikes and the sun when determining this rate of occurrence, and reported that a total of 23 temblors with a minimum magnitude of 3.0 struck during the period they examined. They selected Kozu because of its remoteness and distance from any urban environments, which generate a variety of noises that can effect geoelectricity levels. Their technique is similar to the so-called VAN method, which was developed in Greece to predict earthquakes based on seismic electric signals. However, scientists have mixed views on the VAN method's effectiveness and purported 60 percent success rate for forecasting temblors.

Now THIS is Scary

The science isn't in place yet for accurate predictions. It's like suing the weatherman if a tornado touches down. Italy Orders Jail Terms For 7 Who Didn’t Warn Of Deadly Earthquake By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO Published: October 22, 2012 ROME — Seven prominent Italian earthquake experts were convicted of manslaughter on Monday and sentenced to six years in prison for failing to give adequate warning to the residents of a seismically active area in the months preceding an earthquake that killed more than 300 people. Speaking in a hushed courtroom in L’Aquila, the city whose historic center was gutted by the April 2009 earthquake, the judge, Marco Billi, read a long list of names of those who had died or been injured in the disaster before he handed down the sentences to six scientists and a former government official. The defendants, who said they would appeal the decision, will also have to pay court costs and damages of $10.2 million. The seven, most of them seismologists and geologists, were members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, which met shortly before the quake struck — after weeks of frequent small tremors — but did not issue a safety warning. The verdicts jolted the international scientific community, which feared they might open the way to an onslaught of legal actions against scientists who evaluate the risks of natural hazards. “This is the death of public service on the part of professors and professionals,” said Luciano Maiani, the current president of the risk commission, according to the news agency ANSA. The legal and media pressure prompted by the trial have made it impossible to carry out professional consultancies for the state, he said, adding, “This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.” Thomas H. Jordan, a professor at the University of Southern California, led a commission that after the disaster advised the Italian government about better ways to communicate earthquake risks to the public. He described the verdicts as incredible, “given that they have just convicted scientists for basically doing their job during a time of crisis.” “I’m afraid it’s going to teach scientists to keep their mouths shut,” he added.

Self-Induced Earthquake in Dallas?

The process called "fracking" is controversial. Here's a good reason to stop doing it: Unusual Dallas Earthquakes Linked to Fracking, Expert Says By Eli MacKinnon, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer | LiveScience.com – 3 hrs ago Three unusual earthquakes that shook a suburb west of Dallas over the weekend appear to be connected to the past disposal of wastewater from local hydraulic fracturing operations, a geophysicist who has studied earthquakes in the region says. Preliminary data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) show the first quake, a magnitude 3.4, hit at 11:05 p.m. CDT on Saturday a few miles southeast of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport. It was followed 4 minutes later by a 3.1-magnitude aftershock that originated nearby. A third, magnitude-2.1 quake trailed Saturday's rumbles by just under 24 hours, touching off at 10:41 p.m. CDT on Sunday from an epicenter a couple miles east of the first, according to the USGS. The tremors set off a volley of 911 calls, according to Reuters, but no injuries have been reported. Not a coincidence Before a series of small quakes on Halloween 2008, the Dallas area had never recorded a magnitude-3 earthquake, said Cliff Frohlich, associate director and senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. USGS data show that, since then, it has felt at least one quake at or above a magnitude 3 every year except 2010. Frohlich said he doesn't think it's a coincidence that an intensification in seismic activity in the Dallas area came the year after a pocket of ground just south of (and thousands of feet below) the DFW airport began to be inundated with wastewater from hydraulic fracturing. During hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," millions of gallons of high-pressure, chemical-laden water are pumped into an underground geologic formation (the Barnett Shale, in the case of northern Texas) to free up oil. But once fractures have been opened up in the rock and the water pressure is allowed to abate, internal pressure from the rock causes fracking fluids to rise back to the surface, becoming what the natural gas industry calls "flowback," according to the Environmental Protection Agency. "That's dirty water you have to get rid of," said Frohlich. "One way people do that is to pump it back into the ground." In a study he recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Frohlich analyzed 67 earthquakes recorded between November 2009 and September 2011 in a 43.5-mile (70 kilometers) grid covering northern Texas' Barnett Shale formation. He found that all 24 of the earthquakes with the most reliably located epicenters originated within 2 miles (3.2 km) of one or more injection wells for wastewater disposal. The injection well just south of DFW airport has been out of use since September 2011, according to Frohlich, but he says that doesn't rule it out as a cause of the weekend's quakes. He explained that, though water is no longer being added, lingering pressure differences from wastewater injection could still be contributing to the lubrication of long-stuck faults. "Faults are everywhere. A lot of them are stuck, but if you pump water in there, it reduces friction and the fault slips a little," Frohlich told Life's Little Mysteries. "I can't prove that that's what happened, but it's a plausible explanation."