UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The mysterious climate crash that changed everything

Roughly 12,800 years ago, the Earth experienced a sudden, violent cooling event known as the Younger Dryas. Within decades, global temperatures dropped, megafauna went extinct, and entire ecosystems unraveled. No one knows exactly what caused it.

One of the most controversial theories—the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis—suggests that fragments of a massive comet struck Earth, triggering wildfires, floods, and atmospheric collapse. If such an impact occurred, it could have erased entire cultures in one swift blow.

But is there any trace of what may have existed before that disaster?

3 Gigantic Mesoamerican Pyramids Shrouded in Mysteries

In 1861 a Scientist “Invented” the First Spaceship

Göbekli Tepe wasn’t alone

Did lost civilizations before history vanish in a forgotten global disaster? Gobekli Tepe is, by far, the oldest temple in the world and apparently, it is connected to a massive comet impact from around 13,000 years ago.

Gobekli Tepe is, by far, the oldest temple in the world and apparently, it is connected to a massive comet impact from around 13,000 years ago.

The discovery of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey stunned archaeologists. This is wihtout a doubt one of my favorite sites, for many reasons. Dated to around 9600 BCE, it predates Stonehenge and the pyramids by millennia. Its massive stone pillars, many over 5 meters tall and weighing up to 20 tons, were arranged in circular enclosures—carved with animals and symbols whose meanings are still unknown.

And yet, Göbekli Tepe is not alone.

Karahan Tepe (Turkey), just 35 km away, is even older and features human-like statues and T-shaped pillars similar in style.
Nevalı Çori, buried under a modern dam, showed early megalithic architecture from around 8500 BCE.
Wadi Faynan (Jordan) and Ain Ghazal (Amman), both Neolithic sites, reveal complex social structures and large-scale building from 8500–7500 BCE.
Tassili n’Ajjer (Algeria), though harder to date precisely, holds cave paintings of beings in strange suits, possibly over 10,000 years old.

These discoveries raise a serious question: How did people with no known agriculture or writing build such monuments? Did they inherit knowledge from an earlier culture—one wiped clean from the record?

Cities beneath the sea

During the last Ice Age, sea levels were more than 100 meters lower than today. As the glaciers melted, coastlines vanished. Much of humanity’s early settlements—always near water—would now lie submerged, often beyond reach of standard archaeological tools.

And yet, some of them have been found.

Dwarka, off the coast of India, is an underwater city with stone walls, grids, and anchors, dated by some researchers to at least 7500 BCE.
Pavlopetri (Greece), a sunken Bronze Age city, features streets, buildings, and a central square—submerged around 1000 BCE, but possibly older.
Atlit Yam (Israel), buried beneath the Mediterranean, contains stone houses, graves, and a stone circle—dated to 7000 BCE.

These cities suggest an entire world of early human habitation may now lie underwater—unmapped, unstudied, and forgotten. We know more about the surface of Mars then the surface of our oceans. And that is a fact.

Gaps too large to ignore

Archaeology is often focused on what can be confirmed. But it’s the missing pieces that tell another story. There is a gap of thousands of years between the Ice Age and the rise of “official” civilizations like Sumer and Egypt. Yet in that gap, we find stunning stonework, monumental architecture, and sudden cultural shifts.

Even the Sphinx at Giza has been reexamined by some geologists, who point to weathering patterns consistent with heavy rainfall—rain that Egypt hasn’t seen since at least 7000 BCE. Of course this is a massive controversy and this timeline is not acepted in mainstream science.

If these structures predate what we call history, who built them?

Are myths memory?

Ancient cultures from every corner of the world carry stories of floods, sunken lands, and golden ages lost to time. The Greeks had Atlantis. The Hindus speak of long cycles of destruction and rebirth. The Sumerians recorded kings reigning for thousands of years before the flood.

For decades, such stories were dismissed as metaphor. But as more evidence comes to light, researchers are beginning to ask: Were these myths rooted in real events—the fading memories of a civilization that fell beneath the waves?

The future of the past

Advances in LIDAR scanning, satellite imagery, and underwater exploration are rapidly transforming our view of the past. New sites are being discovered in the Amazon, under jungles in Cambodia, and possibly even beneath the sands of Egypt.

As our tools improve, so do the odds of finding proof—of cities that came before, of cultures lost to sea and flame, and of a history far deeper than textbooks allow.

What if we’re the second or third version of civilization?

What if everything we’ve built rests on the bones of a world we’ve already lost? The clues are mounting—and the silence between them might be the loudest signal of all. Did lost civilizations before history disappear in a global catastrophe? From sunken cities to ancient monuments, new clues suggest we’ve barely scratched the surface. And what if we are just a second or ever thrid version of civilization. But more on that, in a different article.

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The weather gets a little wild and weird on Jupiter. How wild? Spacecraft instruments have measured strong winds, tracked fierce lightning, and found huge methane plume storms rising from deep beneath the clouds. How weird? Think: mushballs raining down like hailstones. They're made of ammonia and water encased in a water ice shell. According to planetary scientists, these mushballs plunge through the Jovian atmosphere. What's more, they probably form on the other gas and ice giants, too.

According to planetary scientist Chris Moeckel and his former advisor Imke de Pater at UC Berkeley, the proof for these strange Jovian slushies came from 3D visualizations of the Jovian atmosphere. You can't tell they're there just by looking at the clouds, however. You have to find a way to peer into the atmosphere and measure the chemical fingerprints of the gases it contains. In 2020, data from the Juno mission and observations by radio telescopes on Earth uncovered strange "nonuniformities" in ammonia gas distribution around the planet. In other words, it isn't distributed evenly throughout the atmosphere. The Juno data in particular showed that ammonia isn't just poorly distributed - it's actually depleted to atmospheric depths of about 150 kilometers, according to de Pater.

“Juno really shows that ammonia is depleted at all latitudes down to about 150 km (93 miles), which is really odd,” said de Pater, who discovered 10 years ago that ammonia was depleted down to about 50 km (31 miles). “That’s what Chris is trying to explain with his storm systems going much deeper than we expected.”

A flattened map of Jupiter reveals the distribution of ammonia beneath the planet’s cloud tops, extending tens of kilometers below the visible cloud deck. Red regions indicate where ammonia is depleted, while black regions show where it is rising from deeper within the atmosphere. The depleted zones appear in bands flanking the equator (0° latitude on the map) and at the poles (not shown), while the upwelling of ammonia is most prominent just north of the equator. The striking absence of deep activity in the mid-latitudes suggests that most of Jupiter’s atmosphere is relatively shallow, with only a few storms punching deeper into the planet.

Credit Chris Moeckel and Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley

Follow the Ammonia Trail

To explain that missing ammonia, another scientist named Tristan Guillot proposed a wild idea: that strong updrafts during storms on Jupiter can lift ice particles high above the clouds. There, the ice mixes with ammonia vapor, which melts the ice into a slush. Just like on Earth, as the ice balls rise and fall, they grow. Eventually, these softball-sized mushballs fall back into the atmosphere, taking the ammonia with them. This helps explain why ammonia appears to be missing from the upper atmosphere: it’s being dragged down and hidden deep inside the planet, where it leaves faint signatures to be observed with radio telescopes.

To Moeckel and others, that idea seemed like an "out there" explanation. "Imke and I both were like, ‘There’s no way in the world this is true,’” said Moeckel. “So many things have to come together to actually explain this, it seems so exotic. I basically spent three years trying to prove this wrong. And I couldn’t prove it wrong.”

Jovian Conditions Conducive to Mushballs

It turns out that conditions in Jupiter's atmosphere could support the formation of mushballs. That atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium, inhabited by clouds in its upper layers. Beneath the clouds and upper atmosphere lies a deeper layer of fluid metallic hydrogen. A rocky inner core lives deep inside the planet. The atmosphere contains smaller amounts of ammonia molecules and water vapor, which rise and freeze into droplets. On Earth, droplets of water fall onto the surface as rain or hail. However, Jupiter has no surface until you get to the core. So, if those droplets do fall, how far down do they go? How big do they get?

An illustration depicting how violent storms on Jupiter — and likely other gas giants — generate mushballs and shallow lightning. The mushballs are created by thunderstorm clouds that form about 65 km (40 miles) beneath the cloud tops and fuel a strong updraft that carries water ice upward to extreme altitudes, occasionally above the visible cloud layer. Once they reach altitudes of about 22 km (14 miles) below the visible cloud layer, ammonia acts like an antifreeze, melting the ice and combining with it to form a slushy ammonia-water liquid that gets coated with water ice — a mushball. The mushballs keep rising until they become too heavy and fall back through the atmosphere, growing until they reach the water condensation layer, where they evaporate. This ends up redistributing ammonia and water from the upper atmosphere (green and blue layer) to layers deep below the clouds, creating areas of depleted ammonia visible in radio observations.

Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/CNRS

This is where the mushballs come in. First, scientists began trying to figure out the strange distribution of ammonia in particular. There were proposals that water and ammonia ice get locked up in hailstones. However, nobody could quite explain how to form them heavy enough to fall hundreds of kilometers through Jupiter's messy atmosphere. That's when Guillot made his proposal for the growth of slushy hailstones.

Making a 3D Model

To understand the weather conditions and the possible formation of those weird mushballs, Moeckel began working on a different approach based on the observational data. “I essentially developed a tomography method that takes the radio observations and turns them into a three-dimensional rendering of that part of the atmosphere that is seen by Juno,” Moeckel said.

Moeckel's 3D picture of Jupiter’s troposphere shows that the majority of the weather systems on Jupiter really are shallow. Most extend down perhaps only 10 to 20 kilometers below the visible clouds. Most of the colorful, swirling patterns in the bands encircling the planet are part of that shallow contingent of clouds.

Some weather, however, emerges much deeper in the troposphere, redistributing ammonia and water and essentially unmixing what was long thought to be a uniform atmosphere. The three types of weather events responsible are hurricane-like vortices, hotspots coupled to ammonia-rich plumes that wrap around the planet in a wave-like structure, and large storms that generate mushballs and lightning.

Tripping with a Mushball

“The mushball journey essentially starts about 50 to 60 kilometers below the cloud deck as water droplets. The water droplets get rapidly lofted all the way to the top of the cloud deck, where they freeze out and then fall over a hundred kilometers into the planet, where they start to evaporate and deposit material down there,” Moeckel said. “And so you have, essentially, this weird system that gets triggered far below the cloud deck, goes all the way to the top of the atmosphere, and then sinks deep into the planet.”

Unique signatures in the Juno radio data for one storm cloud provided an important clue to the mushball formation. “There was a small spot under a cloud that either looked like cooling, that is, melting ice, or an ammonia enhancement, that is, melting and release of ammonia,” Moeckel said. “It was the fact that either explanation was only possible with mushballs that eventually convinced me.”

What About Other Planets?

The 3D model and explanations of mushballs on Jupiter offer a more complete look at the complicated dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere. Interestingly, it's very likely that similar conditions for mushball creation could exist at the other gas and ice giants of the solar system. If so, that would give planetary scientists much more insight into the interiors of those worlds as well as the activities going on in their atmospheres.

In an age of exoplanet research, it's also likely that researchers can use Moeckel's tools to extrapolate what they've seen at Jupiter to similar-type worlds around other stars. Since they can see only the upper atmospheres of distant worlds, the ability to interpret chemical signatures in those atmospheres using radio and other observations is important.