Mayan 2012 Doom Date Off By 50-100 Years!

(YahooNews) It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.



A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)



The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.



Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.



"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct."



But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.



"If the Venus Table cannot be used to prove the FMT as Lounsbury suggests, its acceptance depends on the reliability of the corroborating data," he said. That historical data, he said, is less reliable than the Table itself, causing the argument for the GMT constant to fall "like a stack of cards."



Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong. Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.

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Huge Asteroid will hit Antarctica in 2012

University of British Columbia Professor published an on-line article that projected an 800m asteroid would hit Antarctica in the fall of 2012.



His article was on the phas.ubc.ca website for 2 days before it abruptly disappeared. The initial data was gathered by The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub millimeter Telescope (BLAST) at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. The theorized asteroid was then tracked by Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, which (with the Adaptive Optics Bonnette) supplies probably the sharpest images currently obtainable from the ground.





One week after this mysterious article disappeared, “Canadian and American astronauts say the world needs to prepare for the big one — the asteroid impact that could one day devastate the Earth.Veteran Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is president of the Association of Space Explorers, which has prepared a detailed report on the asteroid threat. The Canadian Space Agency intends to launch NEOSSat next March to look for asteroids that may be hiding near the sun. The $15-million suitcase-sized satellite will circle about 700 kilometers above the Earth. A Canadian Space Agency official says NEOSSat is expected to detect hundreds of new asteroids during its first year of operation. It will also monitor the heavy traffic of satellites now orbiting the Earth to try to prevent possible collisions.”



The article hypothesized a 94% probability that the asteroid would impact on the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf and cause 2/3 of ice on Antarctica to crumble into sea. The article surmised the total collapse of all Antarctic ice within 2-4 months after impact. “A deep enough impact would crack the ice shelf like a window and total structural collapse would be inevitable, a few months at the outside.” If the ice on Antarctica was added the the world’s ocean it would raise them by 70 meters.

In January 12 and January 13, 2010, an area of sea ice larger than the state of Rhode Island broke away from the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf and shattered into many smaller pieces. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites captured this event in this series of photo-like images. The ice of the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf can be as thick as 600 m; the water below is about 1400 m deep at the deepest point. The international Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf Programme (FRISP) was initiated in 1973 to study the glaciological regime of the ice shelf.





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Massive solar storm to hit Earth in 2012 with 'force of 100m bombs'

Astronomers are predicting that a massive solar storm, much bigger in potential than the one that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month, is to strike our planet in 2012 with a force of 100 million hydrogen bombs.



Several US media outlets have reported that NASA was warning the massive flare this month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had the potential to wipe out the entire planet's power grid.

Despite its rebuttal, NASA's been watching out for this storm since 2006 and reports from the US this week claim the storms could hit on that most Hollywood of disaster dates - 2012.



Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale. The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.



"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke as saying.



"A bold statement and one taken seriously by those it will affect most, namely airline companies, communications companies and anyone working with modern GPS systems.



"They can even trip circuit breakers and knock out orbiting satellites, as has already been done this year," added Reneke.



No one really knows what effect the 2012-2013 Solar Max will have on today's digital-reliant society.



Dr Richard Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics division, told Reneke the super storm would hit like "a bolt of lightning", causing catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.



NASA said that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause "1 to 2 trillion dollars in damages to society's high-tech infrastructure and require four to 10 years for complete recovery".



The reason for the concern comes as the sun enters a phase known as Solar Cycle 24.



Most experts agree, although those who put the date of Solar Max in 2012 are getting the most press.



They claim satellites will be aged by 50 years, rendering GPS even more useless than ever, and the blast will have the equivalent energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs.



"We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be," Fisher told Reneke.



"Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the Earth and it's rapid, just like a lightning bolt. That's the solar effect," he added.



The findings are published in the most recent issue of Australasian Science.

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"Doomsday" seed vault hits 1/2 million mark

Arctic repository houses at least one-third of the world's crop seeds

OSLO, Norway - Two years after receiving its first deposits, a "doomsday" seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it the world's most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault's operators announced Thursday.

Cary Fowler — who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the North Pole, said the facility now houses at least one-third of the world's crop seeds.

"In my lifetime, I don't think we'll go over 1.5 million. I'd be rather surprised if we go over a million," Fowler told The Associated Press. "At that point, we'd have all the diversity in the world ... and the most secure samples."

Located in Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around the globe. It was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world's other 1,400 seed banks, in case their deposits are lost.War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. The Svalbard bank is designed to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.

Despite the rapid progress, Fowler said the bank still has significant holes in its collection.

"There are a few unique collections that we don't have up there yet — Ethiopia and some of the Indian materials and some of the Chinese materials," he said.

The most recent additions include a mold-resistant bean from Colombia and a collection of nearly every agricultural soybean species developed in the U.S. in the last century.

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Full credit goes to the The Associated Press for this article