The subglacial fjords in Antarctica

Earlier this year, new data from ice-penetrating radar revealed a complex landscape of mountains and fjords deep beneath the Antarctic ice in the vicinity of Wilkes Land (east Antarctica).

A team of researchers from the University of Texas, the University of Edinburgh, the Australian Antarctic Division, and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre published a letter in the scientific journal Nature entitled "A dynamic East Antarctic ice sheet suggested by ice-covered fjord landscapes." In the abstract to that article, they wrote that "The identification of this fjord landscape, based on new data from ice-penetrating radar, provides an improved understanding of the topography of the Aurora Subglacial Basin and its surroundings, and reveals a complex surface sculpted by a succession of ice-sheet configurations substantially different from today’s."

This article from the BBC News provides some close-up of the topographic map of the fjord channels, buried under 3,000-plus feet of ice and below today's sea levels. That article quotes one of the team members, Professor Martin Siegert of the University of Edinburgh, saying:

The modern ice sheet couldn't possibly have done this; it has to have been the consequence of an ice sheet that was much smaller than today's. Comparing our data with geomorphological evidence from other regions of the world, we can be pretty confident that these fjords were formed by fast-flowing ice at the edge of the ice sheet. It's the first evidence we have of how the ice was in phases of growth and retreat as it marched across this subglacial basin to form the ice sheet we recognise today.

In their abstract to the article published in Nature, the scientists surmise that the ice sheet probably began forming about 34 million years ago, and then went through numerous cycles of advance and retreat (up to thirty such cycles) for the next 20 million years.

Of course, these conjectures are based upon the assumptions of conventional geology, which argue that Antarctica has been covered by its present sheet of solid ice for millions of years -- long before the arrival of modern man. We have already discussed how the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown -- which explains numerous aspects of the earth more satisfactorily than do conventional theories, and which is particularly helpful in explaining some of the mysterious evidence surrounding Antarctica -- proposes a different mechanism for the origin of a past ice age and the ice now covering Antarctica.

In this previous post, we noted that Dr. Brown argues that in order to achieve an ice age, heavy precipitation over cold continents would be necessary. Warm oceans could provide such heavy precipitation, but the conditions that would yield warm oceans and cold continents are difficult to envision under the conventional uniformitarian theories prevalent today. However, Dr. Brown's hydroplate theory envisions warm oceans immediately after the draining of the floodwaters, as well as higher and colder continents than we have today. The continents would have been higher because after their initial slide and thickening, they would not yet have sunk down into the mantle under their increased weight, and thus the sea levels were also lower than today (note that the recent subglacial radar findings also indicate that the oceans were much lower when these fjords were carved, since they are below today's sea level; previous posts have discussed other evidence for lowered oceans and the way this evidence supports the hydroplate theory more than it does conventional theories: see here and here). The oceans would have been warmer as well, due primarily to the energy released during the sliding of the hydroplates. Thus, for some centuries after the flood, the conditions would have been conducive to heavy cloud cover, precipitation as moist air rose over cold continents, and precipitation in the form of snowfall, which would have led to the formation of ice and advancing glaciers.

Amazingly, there are several medieval maps which appear to depict Antarctica with deep fjords and mountains. This fact is amazing on several levels, not least of which being the fact that Antarctica was not known to modern navigators in the west until the nineteenth century. Even more startling is the fact that many of the coastlines and other details on these maps of Antarctica appear to depict a continent not covered by ice -- or, to be more accurate, to depict it when ice probably covered much of the interior but did not cover the coastline the way it does today.

Among these maps are the Piri Re'is map of 1513 (shown above -- the coastline reputed to be that of Antarctica is along the bottom of the image, below and to the right of the east coast of South America), the Oronteus Finaeus World Map of 1532, and the Hadji Ahmed World Map of 1559. A projection of the Oronteus Finaeus map (see here) compared to the outline on today's maps clearly shows the deep fjords of the medieval map versus the relatively smooth coastline depicted on modern maps based on the ice cap which reaches to the ocean and covers up all the folds of the actual coastline.

In the online version of his book on the hydroplate theory, Dr. Brown discusses these medieval maps and their implications for the timeline of the Antarctic ice cap:

These medieval maps, copied 2–3 centuries before 1819 (when textbooks say Antarctica was discovered) were probably based on much earlier source maps. These and other medieval maps also suggest much lower sea levels before the Ice Age. (The hydroplate theory explains why lowered sea levels were followed by the Ice Age.) The maps provide additional information on Antarctica’s mountain ranges, plateaus, bays, coastal islands, and former rivers—under about a mile of ice today. Obviously, the Antarctic ice cap grew rapidly and recently as humans were exploring the earth. The ice cap did not grow, as taught for the last century, over millions of years or before man allegedly evolved.

The ongoing discoveries in the Antarctic, including the new details revealed by ice-penetrating radar in the Aurora Subglacial Basin and published earlier this year in Nature, appear to provide additional supporting evidence for the accuracy of Dr. Brown's theory and its predictions.

Walking with Monsters

Here's an Emmy-award winning series called Walking with Monsters, which dramatizes the theory of evolution as if it were fact. Nothing is presented as a theory -- everything is stated authoritatively by the erudite-sounding narrator (Kenneth Branagh), and accompanied by computer-generated animation of lifelike prehistoric creatures.

This portion of the series covers the supposed Silurian period, generally thought to cover the portion of earth's past from 443 million to 416 million years ago. For a discussion of these geological ages, and the reason they may not represent successive time periods but instead may have been mistakenly deduced from sediments that were laid down all at once, see this previous post.

In the above segment, we are introduced to the first vertebrates -- fish -- whom we are told are the ancestors of all later vertebrates, including mankind. "It's thanks to these primitive fish that we can think and solve problems today," the narrator declares at about 4:30 into the above clip. These fish, pictured below, were jawless bottom-feeders possessing a bony head-shield, giving rise to their name, Cephalaspis. The narrator frequently refers to them as "our ancestors" in their struggles to survive and evade the ever-present predators lurking about, noting that we would not be here today in our present form if the arthropods had succeeded in wiping them out.


















As you consider this image of your alleged distant ancestor, the dependence of evolutionary theory upon vast, almost unimaginable ages of time to accomplish such transformations becomes clearly evident. There is simply no way to argue that a limbless, ocean-dwelling scavenger becomes an air-breathing, rational, upright-walking human being overnight. Time is a critical ingredient of the Darwinian formula (which consists of beneficial mutations plus natural selection, plus a whole lot of time).

This requirement for time illuminates the co-dependency of uniformitarian geological theories and Darwinian evolutionary biological theories. Uniformitarian geology proposes that the same uniform processes we see taking place on earth today would be sufficient -- given enough time -- to create all the geological features we see in the world around us.

The gradual erosion processes inherent in ordinary streams, for example, would be sufficient -- given enough time -- to carve the Grand Canyon. No extraordinary or catastrophic event would be necessary (for a discussion of the weaknesses in this explanation for the origin of the Grand Canyon, see this previous post). Similarly, the highest mountain ranges and the deepest ocean trenches can be explained by the supposed ongoing action of tectonic plates drifting about an inch a year on their beds of magma, which over enough time would be sufficient to raise the Himalayas or create the Mariana Trench. Uniformitarian geological theories provide Darwinism with the time that it needs.

The vast periods of time are like the air that Darwinian evolutionary theory breathes. Theories which challenge the gradualist assumptions of modern geology, theories which suggest that the geological features of the world were formed not by the uniform action of ongoing processes but by an extraordinary catastrophic event or events, suck the air out of Darwinian theory. They are therefore opposed vehemently by those committed to Darwinism.

We have already seen extensive evidence of geological features from around the globe which cannot be satisfactorily explained by gentle, gradual, or even tectonic processes. Several of these are listed and linked in this previous post, and since that post was published we have examined numerous other additional examples, including Lake Vostok and the deep liquid lakes on Antarctica, the enormous shield of sediments stretching from Pakistan all the way to Bhutan, and even aspects of asteroids and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the origins of comets.

All of this evidence points to a catastrophic event in earth's past, an event involving a catastrophic flood accompanied by violent side-effects which gave rise to most of the features we find on earth's surface today (including the portion of earth's surface that is covered by oceans). There is so much evidence, in fact, that it is quite likely that the only reason this explanation is ignored stems from an almost religious devotion to Darwinism among many in academia.

In fact, suggestions of a catastrophic flood will often result not in interested discussion about the relative merits of the evidence supporting such a theory versus the relative merits of the evidence supporting other, more widely-accepted theories, but rather a highly emotional reaction which will probably include ridicule, scorn, personal criticism, and vitriol. This sort of reaction is very revealing (as Shakespeare famously has Queen Gertrude say in Hamlet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks").

Anti-uniformitarian theories such as the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown are so threatening to Darwinists because, while a uniformitarian explanation necessarily requires vast eons of time to allow tiny changes to build up into Grand Canyons, a catastrophic mechanism such as a violent global flood could create geological features very rapidly -- and that means that it could have done so much more recently than Darwinists want to allow. If such a flood took place only 20,000 years ago, or even more recently than that, then that doesn't give Darwinism much time to operate. Such a short period simply isn't enough time for the Cephalaspis shown above to evolve into an air-breathing, walking, warm-blooded, thinking hominid with opposable thumbs.

There is, in fact, evidence that the catastrophic events described by Dr. Brown may have taken place fairly recently. For example, we have previously discussed the fossil trees found near the Arctic Circle in Canada's Arctic Archipelago, as well as the frozen wood of trees found within the Antarctic Circle, where large trees could not grow today. We noted scientific articles stating that some of this wood is not fossilized at all, but will actually float in water and burn when it is thawed out. This argues that whatever moved Antarctica to its current location did so fairly recently, not over a period of vast ages of time by a process of inch-by-inch tectonic drifts.

Similarly, we have discussed the infamous soft-tissues that have been found in various fossils, including dinosaur fossils that are supposed to be over 68 million years old. The idea that red blood cells and other soft tissues could remain intact over such a period of time would never have been entertained by scientists before these fossils were discovered, but now that they have been discovered, academicians are trying to come up with some explanation, rather than admitting the obvious conclusion that the event that buried such fossils may have taken place only a few thousands of years ago rather than tens of millions.

A recent flood does not, of course, automatically prove Darwinian evolution to be wrong. It is quite possible to argue that Darwinian evolution took place in the ages before such a flood, and that it will take place afterwards as well, given enough time. However, such a flood poses king-sized problems, some of which are probably insurmountable. For one thing, if the Cephalaspis pictured above had somehow evolved into an air-breathing land-dweller before the flood, a global catastrophe of the magnitude described by Dr. Brown and supported by the worldwide evidence would set the evolutionary clock back quite a ways, requiring yet another slow climb out of the sea over yet another period of tens or hundreds of millions of years.

Thus, the catastrophic theories which the evidence supports will probably always be violently opposed by devotees of Darwinian evolution.

Happy Birthday to Shaun Tomson

August 21 is the birthday of Shaun Tomson, a groundbreaking surfer with an unmistakeable style.

He has been featured in posts on this blog previously here, here and here.

Above is a link to the iconic 1978 surf movie Free Ride, which features Shaun Tomson and Rabbit Bartholomew along with Mark Richards, Larry Bertleman, and other innovative surfers of the era. Even thirty-three years later, some of the surfing scenes in this movie rival anything that has been captured on film.

The movie's long surf sequences and many slow-motion sequences allow viewers to really study the surf style of the different surfers, which completely changed surfing and which is even more impressive considering the boards they were using at the time.

In the movie, Shaun explains: "I've got this sort of standard in my head of what I think good surfing is, and I always try to exceed that standard."

Happy birthday to a true living legend of surfing -- may he long continue trying to exceed his own standard!

The high science of ancient Egypt

In the previous post, we continued the examination of the fact that the planets have been associated since mankind's earliest recorded literature with measurement and time, a subject which we have touched upon in previous posts such as this one. This concept should be fairly intuitive to us, as even those who have not spent much time observing the planets and the stars and their motions are aware that our modern measurement of time is still connected to the rotation of our own planet and its annual journey around the sun, as well as the monthly pattern of the moon (the moon's rhythms are discussed briefly here).

One of the interesting aspects of the ancient myths that is pointed out by the authors of Hamlet's Mill and which is mentioned in yesterday's post is the fact that each of the planets were conceived of as measuring time differently -- Jupiter by "throwing," Saturn by "falling," and Mercury by means of a stylus.

They recount the story told by Jacob Grimm (1785 - 1863), one of the "Brothers Grimm" of Grimm's Fairy Tale fame and a highly accomplished linguist, philologist, and scholar of mythology. The authors of Hamlet's Mill quote one of the medieval Dutch legends recorded by Grimm, and then go on to explain its connection to Mercury:

And there is an even less suitable measure to be had, a veritable stylus. Jacob Grimm gives the story: "The medieval Dutch poem of Brandaen . . . contains a very remarkable feature: Brandaen met on the sea a man of thumb size, floating upon a leaf, holding in his right hand a small bowl, in the left hand a stylus; the stylus he kept dipping into the sea and letting water drip from it into the bowl; when the bowl was full, he emptied it out and began filling it again. It was imposed on him, he said, to measure the sea until Judgment-day." This particular "instrument" seems to reveal the surveyor in charge in this special case. Mercury was the celestial scribe and guardian of the files and records, "and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters," as Plato has it (Phaedrus 274). Hamlet's Mill 271.

Interestingly enough, the Greek god Hermes (who in Latin and Rome would be called Mercury) corresponds to the Egyptian god Thoth, as can be seen in many ancient writings such as the works of Plutarch. Egyptian Thoth was also associated with science, wisdom, draughts, and of course writing, and was often depicted with a stylus and writing tablet, as in the illustration above from the Papyrus of Ani.

The work of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887 - 1961) formed the jumping-off point for John Anthony West in Serpent in the Sky, which has been mentioned in posts several times previously (see here and here for example). In his book Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, Schwaller de Lubicz explains the connection between the sciences presided over by Thoth -- the wisdom of ancient Egypt, or the "sacred science" as de Lubicz calls it -- and the origin of the terms for Hermetic knowledge and alchemy:

Yet it was quite natural for any scribe to call himself a "servant of Thoth" -- the "patron of writing." The Greeks, therefore, in their contact with a declining Egypt, were prompted to speak of science in general as belonging to Thoth, or Hermes. The meaning of "sacred science" was thus vulgarized under the term "Hermetism."

In truth, the purpose of this modest offering is to convey a succinct understanding of the important reality of sacred science -- which is not to be confused with the vernacular meaning conveyed by "Hermetism." This undertaking demands a look at the history of thought in the West and at the history of man in the light of that thought.

What is the general attitude in our day toward this Hermetic science usually referred to as alchemy? The word is of Islamic origin and signifies "the science of al-Kemit" encountered by the Arab invaders of Egypt, that ancient Kemit which gave so much light to an Islam setting out to conquer the world. For nearly everyone, alchemy is the science of "making gold" and nothing more. For some, it is a fantasy; for others, a mysterious science of fascinating discovery. There are also the "spiritually minded" who consider alchemy to be a psychospiritual science of transforming consciousness, and the acquisition of psychic if not spiritual powers. 7-8.

The origin of these words for mysterious knowledge in the science of ancient Egypt is significant, as Schwaller de Lubicz clearly explains. But where did the Egyptians acquire this knowledge? Is there evidence that they developed it by slow process of trial and error over the long span of forty centuries of Egyptian civilization? There is not. On the contrary, as John Anthony West points out in his book, the most amazing aspects of Egyptian civilization -- not least including their sophisticated and beautiful system of hieroglyphic writing -- appear from their inception to have been fully developed. He puts forth extensive evidence to support the conclusion that "Egypt did not 'develop' her civilisation, but inherited it" (197):

Egyptologists postulate an indeterminate (and indeterminable) period of 'development' prior to the First Dynasty. This assumption is supported by no evidence; indeed the evidence, such as it is, appears to contradict the assumption. Egyptian civilisation, taken field by field and discipline by discipline (even according to an orthodox understanding of its achievement), renders unsatisfactory the assumption of a brief development period. The much vaunted flowering of Greece two thousand years later pales into insignificance in the face of a civilisation which, supposedly starting from a crude neolithic base, produced in a few centuries a complete system of hieroglyphs, the most sophisticated calendrical system ever developed, an effective mathematics, a refined medicine, a total mastery of the gamut of arts and crafts and the capacity to construct the largest and most accomplished stone buildings ever built by man. The cautiously expressed astonishment of modern Egyptologists hardly matches the real magnitude of the mystery. 196.

Clearly, the confidently repeated timelines of mankind's ancient past which we have all been taught are seriously flawed and need to be critically reexamined.

We have seen that the tectonic theory of geology is also seriously flawed and requires a complete reexamination as well. It is the assertion of the Mathisen Corollary that the replacement of the tectonic theory with a more accurate understanding of the forces that shaped the earth in the distant past will shed new light and allow an important new perspective on the mystery of mankind's ancient timeline as well.

Jupiter

The brilliant planet Jupiter is currently visible rising in the east during the night, in close proximity to the rising of the moon, for viewers in the northern hemisphere (for those in the southern hemisphere, see the link below).

At a latitude of about 35° north, Jupiter rises at 11 pm on Friday, August 19, and rises about three to five minutes earlier each night. At the same latitude, the moon rises at 10:38 pm on the same night, and then proceeds to rise around forty to fifty minutes later each evening (the reason for the moon's later rising each evening is described here).

Jupiter travels along the ecliptic path and reaches its highest point in the sky, in a generally southerly direction from the observer in the northern hemisphere, at about 5:45 in the morning on the same night quoted above (which would be early Saturday morning, August 20).

The planet Jupiter is very bright and pretty much unmistakeable if you are looking in the correct direction and have a good idea of the constellations that should be visible in that direction.

Here is an article from Sky & Telescope which contains an illustration of the sky around midnight looking to the east in the northern hemisphere and shows where to find the planet Jupiter in relation to the moon and the Pleiades on the nights of August 19, 20, and 21 (scroll down for the illustration).

If you happen to be observing from the southern hemisphere, this post from the Astroblog of Ian Musgrave shows the orientation of the sky with Jupiter as seen from Adelaide, Australia (where the planet Jupiter rises at around 3:45 am).

As we have seen in previous posts (for example, here and here), there is strong evidence that the ancient gods were named after the planets, rather than the planets being named after ancient gods. This was an important part of the thesis put forward by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill. They argued that the myths about Jupiter (or Zeus in the Greek mythology, and Marduk in the ancient Mesopotamian epics, just as Saturn was Kronos in Greece and Enki in Mesopotamia) somehow encoded important information about the orbit of the brilliant planet that you can see in the sky this week, the largest in the solar system.

For example, they noted the many mythological traditions in which Saturn "gives the measures" to Jupiter, and somehow "retires" from the scene to allow Jupiter to reign supreme over the rest of the gods. Saturn is an extremely important figure in the myths of cultures around the world, and is almost always associated with a lost "Golden Age" as well as with giving the standards of measurement of time and distance, perhaps because it is the farthest planet that can be seen with the naked eye and thus travels most closely to the "celestial sphere" of the fixed stars, as well as because its orbital period around the sun is the longest of the visible planets -- thirty years (this previous post discusses evidence that many ancient cultures celebrated a "jubilee" year in the thirtieth year of a reigning king or pharaoh, which is almost certainly related to the orbital period of Saturn).

De Santillana and von Dechend believe that the abdication of Saturn into voluntary retirement, and the succession to power by Jupiter is related in some mysterious way to the phenomenon of precession, and specifically its slow delay of the constellation Orion, who is associated with Osiris in ancient Egypt and with a god-king who once dwelt among men and ruled over a lost "Golden Age" (see Hamlet's Mill 286, for instance). And yet he still manages to "give the measures" to Jupiter, perhaps by virtue of the periodic conjunctions of the two planets which repeat in a systematic manner throughout the ages and move through the entire zodiac in a period that is fairly close to the duration of a single precessional "age" (see Hamlet's Mill 268).

The planets were clearly associated with measuring out time (see this previous post for some further discussion of that concept). De Santillana and von Dechend note that ancient myth seems to differentiate the manner in which different planets measure out time. Mercury, for instance, appears to measure out time with a stylus or writing instrument, which is connected with his role as messenger of the gods (an appropriate role, as his orbit around the sun takes only 88 days, as opposed to Jupiter's twelve years and Saturn's thirty). Jupiter appears to measure by "throwing" and Saturn by "falling" (hence the mythical attribution of the throwing of thunderbolts to Jupiter or Zeus, and the mythical connection between Saturn who was "cast down" or fell to an obscure island and Phaethon, who fell from the chariot of the sun, and was in fact struck down by the thunderbolts of Zeus in most accounts as well -- see Hamlet's Mill page 271).

Finally, one other interesting aspect of the mythical Jupiter (whose myths encode important facts about the astronomical Jupiter) is the connection of his Greek and Latin names. Some classical historians have noted that it is quite probable that Jupiter's name in Latin is directly related to his Greek name, Zeus. In Latin, the word for "father" is pater. Some linguists believe the word Jupiter is descended from Zeus pater ("father Zeus") or from Iou pater (the first name being rendered sometimes as "Jove" when the "u" is pronounced as a "v").

Some have also argued that the linguistics of this name may be connected to the name of Noah's son Japheth, who along with Shem and Ham were the fathers of all the different families of man after the flood according to the sacred Hebrew Scriptures.

Armed with this understanding of the connections between the planet Jupiter and the astronomical information about Jupiter that is preserved in ancient myths, be sure to get outside and marvel at this majestic planet in the night sky this week.

Bodhi and Point Break

August 18 is the birthday of the late Patrick Swayze, born this date in 1952.

Twenty years ago, as my class was just graduating from West Point, the movie Point Break hit theaters in the United States, starring Swayze in the role of Bodhi.

Having spent almost every free moment in the previous three-plus years skydiving in California, New York, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona, and having started to surf before I'd learned to skydive, the release of Point Break made a big impression on me in 1991.

Whatever its flaws (does it actually have any flaws?), the movie was probably the most successful fictional depiction of surfing ever made, and took a completely different direction from what had been portrayed on film before. Swayze's portrayal of Bodhi was masterful and broke the mold of Hollywood's typical depiction of surfers. He also did many of his own skydiving scenes and went to the island of Kauai to learn to surf prior to the making of the movie.

While it is still only August 17 here in the US, it is already August 18 in Australia, where the final scene of the movie is supposed to take place, at Bell's Beach (the scene was actually filmed in Oregon), and since surfers there might want to pause to appreciate Swayze's contribution to surf culture as well, this post will go live on Australia's August 18.

Respect.

"Listening to the greatest navigators our globe has ever seen"

We recently published two posts (here and here) discussing the awe-inspiring voyages of the Polynesian Voyaging Society's traditional double-hulled ocean-going canoe Hokule'a and the nearly-lost navigational techniques they use to travel thousands of miles across the open sea using the stars, the sun and moon, and the subtle directional clues provided by the ocean swells, the colors of the sky and sea at sunrise and sunset, and the activities of marine wildlife and birds.

Polynesian Voyaging Society President and Hokule'a wayfinder Nainoa Thompson learned these traditional techniques from master navigator Mau Piailug (1932 - 2010), and he graciously explains some of the outlines of that ancient wisdom on the PVS website and passes it along in person to new students of the craft who participate in the ongoing voyages of Hokule'a.

On this page, entitled "The Celestial Sphere," the PVS explains the celestial mechanics of the circling stars, as well as the celestial mechanics of the paths of the sun and moon throughout the year. It is well worth studying and understanding, and is explained clearly and with excellent diagrams. As explained on that page, an observer at the north pole, looking up at the night sky, would see the entire celestial sphere turning around a point directly overhead (see diagram below).

The north star, marked in the diagram above by a star, would not appear to move (actually, because it is just slightly off of the exact true celestial north pole, it would move in a tiny circle, but for purposes of this discussion it can be understood to mark the celestial north pole and thus to remain stationary while the rest of the sky appears to turn). However, stars that are located some angle away from the north celestial pole would appear to trace out a circle around the celestial north pole as the earth turns. These circles are marked in the diagram above as blue circles with arrows indicating the direction of the star's apparent daily motion (opposite to the direction of the earth's rotation).

The Polynesian Voyaging Society, however, does not typically sail across the north pole, but rather through the Pacific latitudes north and south of the equator. To an observer sailing across the equator, the apparent motion of the stars in their courses would be quite different than to our observer sitting at the north pole. Below is a diagram of the courses of the stars at the equator.

In this image, the surface of the ocean upon which the observer is sailing has been added as a light-grey disc. The north celestial pole and the north star are now located on the horizon at due north (left in this diagram and marked with the north star). The south celestial pole is similarly located on the horizon at due south (not depicted on the diagram above). The courses of the stars will now be perpendicular circles, but half of these circles will take place below the horizon. As the earth turns, the stars will appear to rise out of the eastern horizon in vertical courses, arc overhead, and descend on vertical courses to the western horizon, where they will again disappear.

We can now understand how an expert navigator who knows the stars could set his vessel's course by lining up known sight-marks on the beam of his vessel with a known rising star. If he were exactly at the equator, for example, and wanted to head due north, he could sight to a star known to occupy declination 0° (along the celestial equator) and keep it 90° to his course, thus pointing his prow due north. He could use such a star even after it had risen many degrees in the night sky, because he knows it rises perpendicular to the horizon and thus he can mentally trace its course back down to the horizon and use it for many hours as a guide. If he wanted to take a heading some degrees west of due north, he could sight to a star along the celestial equator but place it those same number of degrees further than 90° to his starboard beam, thus turning his prow west of north by that number of degrees (or, as described on this webpage, within one of 32 headings of 11.25° degrees each, each of which can also be divided for even greater precision).

Likewise, if he knew of a star that was at declination +19° (which is to say, 19° on the north side of the celestial equator) and he did not have a star along the celestial equator to use, he could still orient his vessel due north by lining up that star's rising point 19° forward of due east (or at 81° in his mental compass). If he desired a heading that was west or east of north by some number of degrees, he would simply make the desired adjustment to the alignment that he kept that star.

Between the north pole and the equator, the stars in their courses will not rise perpendicularly out of the ocean as they do at the equator, nor will they make circles in the sky parallel to the horizon as they would at the north pole. Instead, the north celestial pole will be tilted by the same number of degrees that the observer is north of the terrestrial equator. In the diagram below, the observer has proceeded north from the equator to a latitude of about 30° north, and because he is going towards the north star it is rising up out of the ocean as he proceeds north (remember that it was on the horizon at due north when the vessel was at the equator). As it rises up, the stars in their courses which appear to circle the north celestial pole due to the rotation of the earth will still trace out perfect circles, but these circles will now be tilted as indicated in the diagram.























The navigator could still set his course by a star rising along the celestial equator or rising at a known declination on either side of that celestial equator (such as our star tracing a circle at a declination of 19° on the north-star side of the equator), but he must remember that the star no longer rises perpendicularly as it did at the equator, so as it climbs higher in the night sky he must mentally draw it back to the horizon at an angle corresponding to his vessel's northerly latitude.

All of this fascinating detail is described on the Polynesian Voyaging Society website page discussing the Celestial Sphere and also on this page entitled "Holding a Course."

Perhaps the most fascinating detail of the techniques that Nainoa Thompson uses is described on the page entitled "Hawaiian Star Lines and Names for Stars." There, the text explains that, "To help remember the pattern of stars in the sky, Nainoa Thompson has organized the sky into four star lines, each line taking up about one fourth of the celestial sphere." These star lines are quadrants of the celestial sphere like the wedges of an orange cut into four equal wedges. As the earth turns, these wedges or star lines -- each containing recognizable constellations such as Orion or Scorpio or the Great Square of Pegasus -- rise up out of the eastern horizon and then move overhead, setting later into the western horizon.

What is so fascinating about this mental construct created by Nainoa Thompson is the fact that it sheds some light on the very ancient practice of dividing up the celestial sphere, a practice dating back at least to the very ancient Babylonian mythological records from around 1700 BC (and perhaps even earlier than that, if you believe there was an advanced civilization which bequeathed its knowledge to the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians and dynastic Egyptians, from whence that knowledge was passed on to other successive cultures including the Greeks and the Celts and others).

In Appendix 39 of the indispensable if often-mysterious treatise Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend (1969), the authors discuss the division of the celestial sphere found in ancient mythology. There, they explain that in the Babylonian creation epic known as Enuma Elish, we learn at the end of the Fourth Tablet and beginning of the Fifth Tablet that Marduk / Jupiter surveyed the heavens and the earth and divided up the world, and specifically that he made "Anu, Enlil, and Ea" to occupy their places, and that he "founded the station of Nebiru to determine their (heavenly bands)" in the translations cited by de Santillana and von Dechend (430 - 431).

Later, the authors explain that these "ways of Anu, Enlil and Ea" were divisions of the celestial sphere, bands running parallel to the celestial equator rather than dividing it up like a quartered orange the way Nainoa Thompson does. Each of these ancient Babylonian celestial bands was approximately thirty degrees wide:

The "Way of Anu" represents a band, accompanying the equator, reaching from 15 (or 17) degrees north of the equator to 15 (or 17) degrees south of it; the "Way of Enlil" runs parallel to that of Anu in the North, the "Way of Ea" in the South. 434.

Using the spheres in the diagram above, in which the largest circle represents the celestial equator, the reader can easily envision these ancient "ways" dividing up the celestial sphere. Later, the authors discuss this concept even further, and tie it explicitly to the great navigators of Polynesia:

Mesopotamia is by no means the only province of high culture where the astronomers worked with a tripartition of the sphere -- even apart from the notion allegedly most familiar to us, in reality most unknown -- that of the "Ways" of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades as given by Homer. The Indians have a very similar scheme of dividing the sky into Ways (they even call them "ways"). And so have the Polynesians, who tell us many details about the stars belonging to the three zones (and by which planet they were "begotten"); but nobody has thought it worth listening to the greatest navigators our globe has ever seen; nor has any ethnologist of our progressive times though it worth mentioning that the Polynesian megalithic "sanctuaries" (maraes) gained their imposing state of "holiness" (taboo) when the "Unu-boards" were present, these carved Unu-boards representing "the Pillars of Rumia," Rumia being comparable to the "Way of Anu," where Antares served as "pillar of entrance" (among the other "pillars": Aldebaran, Spica, Arcturus, Phaethon in Columba). 436-437.

The fact that this was all written and published before the rediscovery of the non-instrument navigation techniques that had been preserved among the people of Satawal and before the first voyage of Hokule'a on which Mau Piailug was the navigator is noteworthy -- it indicates that the authors of Hamlet's Mill were onto something, although they could not know it.

The fact that Nainoa Thompson has found it useful to divide the sky up into four "star lines," much the way the ancients including the ancient Polynesians divided up the sky into three "ways" is equally significant, and indicates that the ancient mythologies may well have preserved knowledge that was used for open-ocean non-instrument navigation as well.

In fact, it is quite clear that the wisdom and ocean lore preserved by Mau and his ancestors, and passed on to Nainoa Thompson and the other members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society -- where it is still used to great effect on amazing deepwater voyages across the mighty Pacific and beyond -- may be one of the most significant pieces of ancient wisdom that somehow survived through the ages (even though it came very close to dying out).

It can provide a window onto mysteries of mankind's ancient past that we might never have otherwise understood, or might have only been able to guess at without practical testing. Whether or not one believes that there may have been actual ancient contact between people who are traditionally thought to have been isolated by the mighty oceans is actually less important than the fact that such understanding of and division of the celestial sphere is clearly very handy for those who venture out into the great deeps in traditional vessels without modern instruments. Where it appears in other ancient cultures, we might suspect that some form of similar navigational skills might also have accompanied the celestial knowledge that was preserved in those traditions.

In this way, it appears that all of mankind owes the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and Mau Piailug and Nainoa Thompson, a tremendous debt of gratitude and respect.