WN@TL - The Great Sphinx, From the Eocene to the Anthropocene. Robert Schneiker. 2017.11.01

[Music] welcome everyone to Wednesday at the lab I'm Tom Shannon we're here at the uw-madison biotechnology Center I'll sort for UW extension and Cooperative Extension and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers Wisconsin Public Television Wisconsin Alumni Association and the UW Madison science Alliance thanks again for coming to Wednesday night at lab we do this every Wednesday night 50 times a year tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Bob maker he's going to talk about one of the most intriguing pieces of work and geology on the planet the Great Sphinx of Giza bob was born in Milwaukee and went to Nicolay high school and he got his bachelor's degree at UW Milwaukee in geology and also got his master's in geology at UW Milwaukee he's a professional geologist and runs his own company today he gets to talk with us about one of the great puzzles out there in some ways pit some archaeologists versus geologists is that fair yeah that's gonna be an interesting armwrestling match so there are very few things more intriguing than think the great things of he's a forded here and what bob has to say about the great sphinx have you've seen the Anthropocene please join me in welcoming Bob Schneider to Wednesday night the last thanks for being here and thanks for that introduction how I got involved in this is a very unusual story I get to do the add the PBS add PBS changed my life I was watching The Notebook program almost exactly five years ago now descent in December December 19th and I saw dr. mark Lehner who was on the program explaining how the Sphinx today is weathering because of shallow groundwater that's waking up as the water evaporates salt is accumulating in the surface of the rock that rock then expands and it exfoliates and what looks like these giant Pringles potato chips was the mouse right there so this looks like a giant Pringles potato chip and he's actually reaching under it and pulling it off and as he's doing this in the program it goes I hate to do this but this is happening all the time and what happens is that falls on the ground and it turns to dust I knew instantly what was going on here that that is the waters waking up and what I do most the time my real job is I've got a software package that's used by regulatory agencies and environmental consultants to establish cleanup standards for contaminants and soil and to some extent groundwater and everybody understands the process of rain falling on the ground and then it leeches down through the ground and like a coffee maker it picks up some contamination and it carries that down into groundwater nobody understands the process are very few people understand the process where the water is gonna actually wake up carry contamination with it to the surface and then at the surface if it's a volatile substance it'll go to the atmosphere or else it'll bind it'll it'll precipitate out at the soil and do what it's doing at the Sphynx so I was just gonna write a newsletter on the Sphinx that was it I was not gonna do anything else and just just trying done because part of what I do with my software is I also do training in the development of cleanup standards and trying to get that point across is very difficult to people so but isn't the Sphinx in the desert how in the world where is all this water coming from how can there be water shallow groundwater affecting the Sphinx when it's on what I've always been hurt has been referred to as the Giza Plateau well it turns out that's not a very good description it's actually an escarpment and what an escarpment is is an area I'll go to the next slide it slopes down like this and at where the Sphinx is sitting right here it's an excavation that was excavated out and the Nile River oh I shouldn't have done that the Nile River I got to use the mouse the Nile River will at times actually flood the Sphinx excavation so into this area right in here hmm I'll just point to it right there going back a slide so this is the area that we're looking at where the Sphinx is and you can see that the Sphinx is sitting actually below grade the entire Sphinx is you can think of it as having been constructed below grade by the time they went around to carving the body all the material from the head layer up was already used to build the pyramids and then the body itself was excavated out and the material was dragged into the frontier to form this area here which is called the Sphinx temple and the blocks here were cut were dragged out from the quarry here so basically the Sphinx is the remnant in the middle of a quarry this object over here is this is the valley temple and this is the causeway that leads up to Kok raised pyramid and the Sphinx is typically associated with coughers pyramid and that's that sets the time at which most of the Egyptologists assume that it was constructed the body has a weathered appearance to it but the head and you can't see it anymore because it's been covered the rear paws also don't look as weathered as the as does the body itself looks extremely weathered the thing to remember is is that it's an escarpment and that actually at times during high floods the Sphinx would actually have been an island in the Nile this was like really astounding to me when I started learning all of this stuff so what I did as I ran three different scenarios in my software to figure out what's happening to the water at the Sphinx and so prior to construction the precipitation fell on the ground and it either went to surface water runoff or it evaporated the groundwater itself was so deep that the wicking zone didn't and intersect the land surface and so as static it just rose up to a given point and it didn't do anything when they created the Sphinx excavation when they dug down they intersected the capillary rise zone and that turned the wicking out and that's the weathering process that mark was explaining on Nova after that most of the time the Sphinx was had been filled in with windblown sand because it is at the edge of a desert and so the entire excavation filled with sand at that point even though there's only about one inch of precipitation a year there's about a quarter inch point six six centimeters of recharge and even just that one inch of precipitation and again the sand the wicking didn't reach the surface and so you get a little bit of positive recharge so those were the three scenarios and I went to Vancouver and I presented that a little bit more background on what the Sphinx is I already was saying some of this so it's it's a solid rock there's no interior there's no temple inside there's nothing inside here and there there's a couple of borings but nothing much inside it's 73 meters long that's what about 240 feet it's 20 meters tall that's about 66 feet and it is only as far above sea level as it is tall it's only 66 feet above sea level the weather the body of the Sphinx has been assumed to weather somewhere between 0.72 one meters about two to three heat and various modes of weathering have been suggested the blocks that you're seeing on this on the body of the Sphinx they have all been assumed to have been added at a later date after the Sphinx had already weathered for thousands of years and that was to repair weathering and the head there's a lot of speculation on the head having been recarved so the question is how old is it strangely enough there are no inscriptions nobody signed or at least there's no artifact left where somebody signed the artist did not sign this there is no mention of the Sphinx until what's called the dream stealer and that is this object that looks like a door over here oh no what's going on with the mouse it's that object that looks like a door over here we try it this way without that anyways it's a it's a huge slab of granite that was put there and Tut most the fourth put it there what he did is he was out hunting and he had and the Sphinx was eyed he fell asleep in the shadow of the Sphinx and the Sphinx was buried in sand and he had a dream in the dream the Sphinx told him if he were to clear the sand from the Sphinx he would become the next Pharaoh he was not in line to be the next Pharaoh to do so he had to kill his brother which he did but he had permission from the Sphinx to do so so that's the first time there's any mention of the Sphinx the it's true like I said earlier it's typically attributed to Khafre or perhaps Khufu and it's a thirty year difference between a father and a son at that point but as I was doing my research thank you as I was doing my research I found that there were a lot of geologists who are saying that the Sphinx is older far older than any of the Egyptologists were willing to accept and they were all using weathering the weathered surface of the Sphinx as the evidence that the Sphinx must be extremely old they all without hesitation want to rewrite prehistory so basically refugees from Atlantis who had originally immigrated from Mars that that built the Sphinx is pretty much what they're saying so they presented the these papers and the biggest one would be Robert Schoch he's a PhD geologists geophysicists from Yale he teaches at Boston University and he teamed up with John Anthony West who's anti science pearl magic and they're both saying that it's it's much older so where did this come from what did the idea that the Sphinx is older actually come from it came from Edgar Cayce I had never heard of Edgar Cayce I talked a lot of people they're astounded that I didn't know who this guy is but I knew nothing of him he was saying that the Sphinx is older and that there's a Hall of Records so that the the people who left Atlantis or while they were in Atlantis they took all of their knowledge and they put it in these repositories and one was in Atlantis itself one is somewhere in the Yucatan Peninsula and the third one is beneath the pot the right paw of the Sphinx in Egypt and it contains the knowledge of Atlantis ancient aliens or again something like that you can't really pin these people down on anything how does he know this how does Edgar Cayce you know this well he in a previous life was there he was he was the one of the high priest these people that you don't get reincarnated you're never that just the laborer he was the high priest who helped design the pyramids and the Sphinx and his name at the time was rock top so this was at 10,500 BC roughly so the question is who would believe any of this well this is mark Lehner this is the guy that was on nova that was explaining that how the Sphinx is weathering today he actually went there in the early 70s as a follower of Edgar Cayce I mean the way I describe it is it's like it's like do you talk to people who are smokers and you're saying well why are you smoking and I said well I did this you know this is not me making this decision this was a teenager making this decision to smoke he was a teenager when he was enthralled with all of this and quite capable and got the funding and went over there and they drilled where the Hall of Records is supposed to be and he found nothing and then he abandoned the idea he's acting as a scientist even though he wasn't a scientist at this point he was not emotionally attached to there so I'm not criticizing him I'm praising him for his ability it was within hours a day at the most after drilling it that he gave up the idea that there was all a Hall of Records beneath the the the paws of the Sphinx so now he's gone to the dark side according to all the Edgar Cayce followers he's you know science he's gone to science and so he's now conceived if you go online you'll find he's talk they already talked about him concealing the truth and he's hindering research mark is not like that I met with Mark and excuse me he was like encouraging me to do the work that I'm doing I went to Boston and met with him he was just the nicest person he's just like he is on TV he's all excited about showing me things so he's not like that at all so the Sphinx is clouded in myth and I knew that the groundwater weaking couldn't fully explain what I was seeing and he got these geologists here claiming that it's older you've got the abrupt abrupt appearance of the Egyptian civilization I just decided to start at the beginning as a geologist to see what I might find I'm not sure I'd find anything for a geologist the beginning is when the rocks were deposited so the rocks that make up the Sphinx were deposited 40 million years ago they're a limestone so 40 million years ago puts it here into the Eocene I didn't know much about the Eocene and I was really puzzled by this thing here I was like okay well what started the Eocene it's the PETM so I'm like well what is the the PETM so it turns out that that's the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum so when geologists divide time up they didn't know for instance that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs they just knew something big happened no idea what that something big was nobody knew anything about the Paleocene Eocene thermal maximum but there's a distinct difference between the rocks and the animals before and after this event so what was it it was a release of three thousand to ten billion tons of carbon this is roughly two this is equivalent to all known fossil fuel reserves are perhaps double all known fossil fuel reserves on the planet and they all it all has a signature of organic carbon so whatever the source is it was it was organic humans have only put this in perspective since 1750 one we released three hundred and thirty seven billion tons so this release occurred somewhere between over 13 years of perhaps even shorter most estimates around ten thousand years I'm finding now that people are thinking more around five thousand years is how long it took to release all of this carbon so what happened well prior to the PETM carbon dioxide levels were about a thousand parts per million during the PETM they climbed to 1600 or perhaps as high as 3,000 parts per million for carbon dioxide global warming of four to eight degrees C extreme ocean acidification and it took earth 50,000 to about a hundred and fifty thousand years to recover from that so where did all this carbon come from well big part of it is they're thinking well no one's really sure is the first answer but it could be the methane hydrates the clathrates that are at the bottom of the ocean is one of the sources they're volcanic baking of or organic sediments is like peat deposits and the northern Atlantic as the ocean as the continents are being ripped apart they're thinking that might be the source it could be in the Antarctic there were no glaciers on earth at this time so it could be the entire Antarctic was was degassing with all this permafrost could be wildfires it's been suggested that it was at least set off by a comet nobody's really sure more more than likely it's more than one source in some sort of brief reinforcing cycles so this is a picture of what Alaska would have looked like during the PETM that's not a photoshopped image so this was taken by Ira Bloc people in this room might know him he was actually a photographer for the Wisconsin State Journal for a while and these pictures have been in like Smithsonian and National Geographic and I asked him if I could use them for this presentation and he said yes so you can see that Alaska looks very different that you've got warm poles and it's not hot at the equator and this is a picture of what Wyoming looked like so Wyoming was much wetter there are alligators that can survive in Wyoming throughout the year the biggest difference is so is wetter but you also didn't have the cold continental interior winters like we're about to experience that didn't happen during the the PETM oh and that person by the way is Scott wing and he studies the PETM at the Smithsonian so what happens when you warm up the planet like that what happened well you can see in this plot here this is a plot of genetic diversity through time and this dip over here is the demise of the dinosaurs and then not much happens until the peop TM comes along and suddenly you get a burst in genetic diversity all sorts of species up here where they've never would that have never been seen before horses rhinos pigs hippopotamus all sorts of different things appear primates our big one an important one and then you've got the only extinction that it caused was benthic foraminifera particularly the new me ladies and they quickly recovered after this extinction event and he it isn't due to plate tectonics because you could have both think well of course maybe North America was closer to the equator and that's the reason that you had the the the warmer winters and the rainforests extending all the way to the Arctic Circle no I mean when you look at this you can instantly recognize that that's Earth it looks pretty much the same as now there's a couple of differences big one would be there's a gap between North and South America and Africa is an island so you can envision some sort of ocean current cutting through those areas in keeping the planet somewhat more temperate but it's instantly recognizable that that is in fact earth and it turns out that the PETM was not the only one that this happened more than once he got the Eocene thermal maximum to the Eocene thermal maximum three the early Eocene climatic optimum the middle eocene climatic optimum the middle miocene climatic optimum and there are more and I'm sure there's more yet to be found my favorite one is the Elmo and not because of the character on Sesame Street but because it stood for you've seen layer of mysterious origin because they didn't know what they had when they found this and it's now called the Eocene thermal maximum - so I like I like Elmo so what does this have to do with the Sphinx I'm supposed to be giving a lecture on on the Sphinx so I was spending my time looking at all these hyper thermals gone this is the coolest thing I never knew anything about hyper thermals why have I never heard anything about this and I was like no I'm supposed to be doing research on this thing so I went back and I pulled out some really old photos before the Sphinx is repaired and I looked at the head and I said oh my the heads a hyper thermal I just looked at this photo and I just said yeah because you can see in these cores here there's there's this dissolution horizon associated with the acidification of the ocean so instead of depositing limestone the lime stones eroding away and then you get this clay rich layer that's darker and it's far more weather resistant and I looked at the neck here and I'm like that's a hyper thermal I thought this was such a crazy idea I didn't even look into this for months I mean for one thing the head is about nine meters thick and typical hyper thermal is only about one meter thick when I started looking and I realized it was the Miko the Miko turns out to be eight and a half nine times longer than all the other hyper thermals and I'm like oh so I actually went to Boston and I met with mark Lehner and I explained what I was doing and I got to this point and he was very interested in this and he said well who would know more Oh actually ole I mean I'm getting a hem myself so I wasn't looking at this yeah simple that is so so I said well Scott wing at the Smithsonian he knows all about hyper thermals well he wrote back and he said what a very intriguing possibility and he also wrote back and he said that the Miko is an SBC 17 and I'm thinking sbz 17 or 18 whatever it takes I'm channeling mr. mom I have no idea what sbz 17 is but it didn't take me very long to find this paper and in it there is a particular value in it it lists fossils and if you find those fossils you're dealing with very specific small divisions in geologic times so this is sbz 14 15 here's sbz 16 17 18 19 so there's a particular fossil new Milady's geezy and seus named after the Giza Plateau and Mark Lane are mapped it here in the Sphinx I darken that column to show where he's identified that that fossil exists and so when that species goes extinct that puts you into sbz 17 I was like your king I actually found then another fossil in the formation above so I bracketed that this and yeah the Miko appears to be in that in the actual head of the Sphinx and it starts at the chin so the Miko starts at the chin and I'm not sure what's going on between the the extinction of the numa light is Giza hen seus and the Miko it might be an on-set it's very soft rock so it might be the ocean acidification maybe it tells us something about the onset of the Miko so I make sure I covered everything here so eventually though the Eocene comes to an end and it ends with this thing and Tom you would know the correct correct pronunciation of that it's a French term excuse me Branca pure I'm gonna call it what it means is the great change in continuity and so something again something happened something big geologists have identified that there is something that different between the Eocene and the legacy what is that well this is what earth looked like at the end of the Eocene I don't get it it looks pretty much like now you've still got north and south america are detached africa is still an island probably the biggest difference here is you've got india is beginning to ram up into asia and when it does it creates the himalayas and with the himalayas the rock gets pushed up into the atmosphere that causes increased weathering and that weathering decreases carbon dioxide levels so the earth is going to cool because the Himalayas have gone up and all this you've got all this increased weathering so maybe that's what's going on then you have a couple of craters again dated to exactly at the end of the EU scene you got the Papa Gaia if that I'm pronouncing that correctly crater in Russia it's 62 miles across it is the fifth largest known crater on earth then you have the Chesapeake Bay crater it is 53 miles across it is the ninth largest crater on earth and then there's another one off of New Jersey called Toms Canyon 14 miles across not ranked but all dated - exactly at the end of the EOC so whatever happened and the grand copula it it caused temperatures around the world to drop that caused an extinction event when the temperatures dropped Antarctic glaciation starts that draws ocean levels down that exposes the rock where the Sphinx is where the that has been an area that it's been in the ocean now it's exposed his land and weathering starts and soon the early Nile River begins to float about ten million years ago that the tea theists tennis ocean closes the the eastern end of the of that out of the Mediterranean forming the Mediterranean ocean at about six point five million years ago the Mediterranean gets pinched off by gibralta and Spain and it's called the the Messi in is a salinity crisis it sounds like they ran out of salt but what actually happened is is that the Mediterranean dried up and became a huge Death Valley it was about five kilometres deep at its deepest pressures were about one point seven times that at sea level and there were temperatures of eighty degrees C it's estimated about a hundred and seventy five degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom of the of that Death Valley so what happened is is all the rivers that are flowing into the Mediterranean now are cutting canyons because they're gonna cut depending upon how high they are what's the amount of relief I'm sure the first geologist who ever saw this that that can't happen you cannot cut a river cannot cut below sea level it's just completely impossible I'm sure they were looking at this plate you either have to raise Africa a couple miles into the air or you have to drain the Mediterranean like either one's ever going to happen well it was the Mediterranean and so it's a huge Canyon formed here and you can see where Cairo is so if the Sphinx were there it'd be looking it'd be having a great view looking down into this canyon in front of it then you have the sampling flood at about five point three million years ago what happened is the Atlantic Ocean cut open by gibralta and started filling the basin it took it about two years you can see that there's water rushing in at a there's water rushing in from the Atlantic and its first filling this Basin and after it fills this part of the Basin it comes down over here and it starts filling the other part of the and refilling the Mediterranean so now the Sphinx has an ocean view if it were there then you get the mid Pliocene Warm Period so that's about 3.3 to 3 million years ago carbon dioxide around pretty much like we've got today a little bit higher a couple degrees of warming sea level rises to 1225 meters so the Sphinx is at only 20 meters so this thing's is swimming in the Mediterranean if it were there at this point there's a narrow gulf that reaches all the way to Aswan which is this 8 on the map right here so it'd be kind of like a fjord kind of thing it would look like then on top of all of this you've got the Pleistocene so we know about that here in Wisconsin do you look out the doors here and you can tell that we had continental glaciation and that's been going on for about the last 2.6 million years and it just ended about eleven thousand seven hundred years ago there's ice on the continents between 1,500 to 3,000 metres if not even more what happens when you lock up all that ice into the the continents ocean levels dropped so this would cut out the Nile would have quickly cut a canyon so something on the order of say Devil's Lake those things would be looking into nothing all that deep so what causes that well that's orbital forcing so that's differences in the tilt so the upper one is showing you how far the earth is tilted so it switches between or varies between about 22 degrees and 24 degrees and goes back and forth like that the shape of the Earth's orbit changes being tugged on by other planets and other things and so that the shape of the orbit changes and then you also have the precession of the equinoxes so sometimes the earth is leaning towards the Sun the northern hemisphere in the summer and sometimes it's leaning away from the Sun on its closest approach so right now it's actually leaning away from the Sun and its closest approach so we're getting warmer winters and cooler summers what happens and the last time that happened was about 5,000 years so Europe lean towards leans towards the Sun and you get increased warming over Europe well that causes increased air hot air rising that sucks the monsoons further north over Africa and it creates the green Sahara so northern Africa has been swinging back and forth between green and desert Sahara for about for something like 20 million years there are 230 separate green Sahara's that have been mapped out over the last eight million years I'm thinking this has a lot to do with human evolution when John Hawks is here is talking about the places that they haven't looked in Africa well this is a big place where people haven't looked mostly because it's too hot right now and in some ways very dangerous what happened is is that all the precipitation falls over northern Africa the higher flows make the Nile Valley completely uninhabitable all this water is being channeled down through into there the Sphinx limestone is going in and out of the Nile River as the water levels go up and down you've got precipitation also falling on the ground and you've got thus acidic groundwater is forming these karst limestone areas so caves and things of that sort so this has been going on for 20 million years the last of the green Sahara periods people are just learning and this is all I can last 20 30 years that people are learning these things so the last one they call the African humid period and so the Sahara was densely populated with people and animals and it could it's considered the world's largest open-air art gallery there's artwork all over in in the Sahara this is just one of the depictions if you've ever seen the movie The English Patient where they start out at the beginning they show that that's the the painting that's the cave of the swimmers and that artwork is dated to about 10,000 years ago so all that water was forced into the Nile so the Nile is the longest river on earth and there's three basic rivers - it's they've got the Blue Nile which is coming in right here from Ethio via the White Nile that comes from the South here and there was another major tributary called the Yellow Nile today it's called wadi huar and that just means it's a dry River Valley but that used to be a major contributor to the Nile River and when the Sahara dried about five thousand five hundred years ago people and animals had leap it just became so inhospitable that they could not stay there as they migrated people first domesticated animals and then plants as they started migrating south they were intercepted over here by the yellow Nile so they're migrating out then they're finding it's very nice in in the in the Nile and that in the yellow Nile there's the river flowing there and then as the climate change they got forced down the yellow Nile and into the Nile Valley so it became the Silicon Valley of its day people were brought in from all over with all sorts of different ideas from different places and they were all concentrated on that narrow little strip and that's the start of the Egyptian civilization it all relates to climate change so now we got the recipe to make the Sphinx we've got the overlying bedrock on the Jesus garment has weathered away during all these African periods and other events the weather-resistant meiko's formed the capstone that the hard layer that's formed the giza escarpment so if there were no miko there'd be no pyramids because they all would have washed away long ago then you've got the Nile is cutting through and creating the Nile Valley and you've got the ancient Egyptians having migrated into the Nile Valley now we just kind of make the Sphinx so how do you do that so I looked at this photo this is it at exactly the same time that I looked at this photo and said wait a minute there's a hyper thermal in the head I went I know how this Fink's was made I just remember that it was like instantaneous to things just as fast as I could think of them the way that the Sphinx was made is it was pounded back you have to understand the tools that they used so this is a mark here is holding a two-handed pound and it is just what you think it's just a rock and they would take that rock and they would bang on to the surface of the other rock and they would flake rock off then he also used what's called a stone hammer so the stone hammer over here is just a rock and they cut two grooves in it and they put some sticks on it and they tied the sticks together with leather and then they would take that and they would bang on to the rock again and they flake rock off the final thing that they had was down over here and that is the copper chisel and they only use that for detailed work because it's not that hard of a tool they just use that when they were doing very detailed work so the Sphinx with this soft rock that's been weathered in and out of all these green Sahara periods when they got around to carving it it was so soft in fact there's places it's so soft you could crumble it in your fingers that weathering occurred prior to the construction not since construction so what everyone is considering is weathering is not weathering part of the evidence is is if you look at this fracture here so this bat this bedrock fracture predates the construction of the Sphinx and if it were weathered by precipitation that also would have been altered by that weathering but it's not it's fairly angular so there's this is not weathered by precipitation what everyone has been considering as weathering by precipitation is actually part of the construction process so um I already went through this I'm saying that there was a high-bred so that it was it was part statue in part pyramid so they had and the rear paws were carved in place but the body sorry the head and the paws were carved in place but the body was pounded back and then covered so that means that these blocks here are original these are not repair blocks these are original blocks some of them at least the first layer of blocks so the I talked about that so the weathered bodies pounded back covered with harder limestone blocks that they quarried elsewhere and brought in and carve that to form the body mark Lehner speculated on this in his dissertation on the Sphinx and then dismissed it he didn't think that this was valid and he gave his reasons why he didn't think it was valid I could give a lot of reasons I don't have time for right now as to why I think this is very valid then you also have people that are trying to use the head to try to figure out exactly who the Sphinx looks like but one of the things that's really important to look at here is that so the Miko is at the base here at the chin then you've got these bedding planes at the mouth and the nose and the eyebrows so to some extent the proportions of the face were controlled by the geology this is not a perfect material that you can make anything you want out of there's restrictions on it nobody even knew what the Pharaoh looked like anyways I'm sure they didn't you know cuz they didn't have photography or anything so unless you met the Pharaoh you wouldn't even know that this doesn't look like the Pharaoh so I don't think you can use the proportions or the of the face to figure out what the age of the Sphinx is in terms of who made it for the last four thousand five hundred years most of the time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand and I'm suggesting that rather than having been weathered the blocks were looted the same is true of the of the pyramids they used to be covered with a white limestone and all that's been looted to build the city of Cairo so it's not unusual looting was a very common practice so there I'm saying there's very little type any bed because it's buried in sand there's no wicking going on so there's very little weathering at all going on for the last four thousand five hundred years as already kind of mentioned this means that you have to revise the construction I mean the repairs so there's been there's this is not a complete list there's been a lot of repairs on the Sphinx this just takes it up to the Roman period but most of what has been considered to be repairs is attributed to tutmes fourth the fourth the guy that fell asleep at the at the base of the Sphinx and and dug it out of sand I'm saying know that most of that if not all of must be attributed to the original construction I'm not sure how to rework this I don't know the details I I'd have to you know sit and look at it but I would argue that we have to change the whole history of the Sphinx in terms of its construction I mean its repairs so my discoveries are that wicking ground waters weathering the Sphinx there were all sorts of different proposals like its dew and wind and and various things that I'm saying no it's wicking ground waters what's weathering the Sphinx today the weathering was turned on by quarrying the limestone and creating the Sphinx enclosure as it's called the Miko is exposed in the head of the Sphinx and the limestone weathered long before constructions so the Sphinx is constructed is a hybrid and most of what's called weathering is actually part of the construction you need to rework to the chronology of the repairs and I'm thinking now I'm done I'm just this guy working out of his condo here in Madison Wisconsin there's nothing else that I could possibly be contributing to the history of the Sphinx and then I see this so there's Lindsey Graham with his thumbs up standing between the paws of the Sphinx it turns out this was a u.s. aid project to repair the Sphinx it's several million dollar project and what they're looking at is there's puddles of water now that are forming in front of the Sphinx so this right here this is the Sphinx temple this is the valley temple that I pointed out before so the Sphinx is just behind over here and so this these puddles here are just forming in the desert where there's never been any puddles before and nobody's really sure where they're coming from you no longer have the annual floods coming because the Aswan Dam has been there since I think 1970 so that's not the source so where's all this water coming from so aecom was hired by US aid to do a ground water model of the Sphinx and design a system to draw the water table down and also tried to some extent to figure out where all that water is coming from so they were saying it was leaking sewers but if it's sewers you'd end up with nitrates in the water and there's no nitrates so it's not nitrates it's it's been assumed that it one of the other ideas is that its municipal water supplies it's possible I mean it is on the higher end of the range of what you'd be expecting for loss from a municipal water supply system but it is possible there's a canal that I'll show you a picture of that in a second there's a canal that that is maybe a quarter-mile away not even that from the Sphinx runs north-south so perhaps that's the source all of these have merit and and you need to evaluate them but what they did they did dubbed groundwater modeling a mod flow model if anybody's familiar with the technique so it's a real high end numerical model and they said that the water is coming from a golf course believe it or not there's a golf course right there and they also installed a multi-million dollar dewatering system interesting enough I mean this has relevance they were trying to figure out what do you do with all this water if you're gonna be pumping all this water out of the ground what do you do with it and so they were thinking of putting it into an evaporation pond and letting it evaporate but they didn't do that because they were like what are we gonna do with all the salt that we're gonna be accumulating so they're well aware of the fact that evaporation rates are really high they when I looked at this report I was like yeah they get it here it is capillary rise this is what got me into this all in the first place they actually put in a series of test pits and they actually measured the capillary rise you can see the color change here they took this being a little darker and that being lighter because the ground water is waking up into that rock and almost like yeah they get it but no they didn't simulate it remember what got me in all this the geologists and engineers don't understand this process well they didn't and the process they didn't include it in the model and I think they really missed it because this is what the area used to look like and there you can see the canal coming I grew up here and I don't know how long that's been there I'm thinking about a hundred years the Sphinx would be located behind this pyramid of a botanist general area but you can see this is all farmland this was all farmland it doesn't look like this today this is what it looks like today it's a different perspective the Sphinx is down over in here I think that's it right there and you've got this it's it's urban here's the golf course by the way right over here that's the golf course so I'm looking at this point yeah I mean it took me a while to figure this out and I did do the modeling too but it's it's again what happened here is is that all the water all the groundwater used to evaporate at the rate of about one and a quarter meters per year you would evaporate into the atmosphere it's now paved we think of pavement here is stopping the ability to recharge groundwater with with the rain falling on it well here it stopped the ability of the water to evaporate out it's trapped underneath it has no place to go the Sphinx is actually staring you can go online and see this at a KFC Pizza it's not very far and you can actually take pictures with Pizza Hut written backwards without because it's on the window and there's also my favorite pictures somebody has a photo of the a slice of pizza and they're holding it up to the horizon creating another pyramid so I did my video so modeling and as I just said it's it's the restriction of evapotranspiration if you were to remove the pavement somehow I'm not saying this is what they should do but I'm just saying if you were to remove it based on my modeling the water table would drop three meters in the first year alone so the other question is is is their system doing any I'm not sure because based on my modeling because they didn't they don't have a depth where they're saying I know that if I get below this depth the Sphinx is protected because they're not even looking at that wicking they just have some idea that lowering the water table will make it better but it may not or they might be pumping more than they need to they don't know what that criteria is the other thing is it took me a long time to realize this but this is gonna be happening elsewhere sea levels rise and you've got more you know temperatures rise and you've got more urbanization this is gonna become more and more of a problem all around the planet so I can add to my list of discoveries that are urban ization restricts evapotranspiration so the ground water rises so then I have to come back to at least for a little bit to the conspiracy theorists or whatever you want to call them the thing the people who are saying that the Sphinx is older because they always tell you what they don't want you to know so I'm gonna tell you what they don't want you to know they they talk about how this precipitation is weathered this thing's well the rain didn't just fall on the Sphinx that fellow overall of northern Africa was funneled past the Sphinx it would have made the area uninhabitable it would have been green it wouldn't have been a bare desert totally unrealistic to think that the rain just fell on the Sphinx and then went into the Nile as it looks today the Nile Valley itself was uninhabitable because of all the this high water flow that was coming through there and the Sphinx would have been under water for at least part of the year even today the Hall of Records is permanently under water that's why we have this dewatering system that's going on there there was never enough harder limestone to make a larger that's not possible the lost civilization this is probably the strongest point they had is yes there was this huge disconnect between the Egyptian civilization in other areas in Africa we now know they came from the African humid period the green Sahara there's no evidence of weathering by precipitation I'm saying that's all part of the original construction and sorry no reason to rewrite prehistory it's all good as it is so what in the future what's gonna happen well with global warming we're gonna get sea-level rise so without question at some point the Sphinx is gonna end up in the ocean or maybe not we could create a dam at Gibraltar and restrict the Mediterranean you can then set the Mediterranean at any level you choose so then it doesn't have to go underwater this is a depiction of somebody who's proposed this some time ago increase all this land a key then used for farming so Sicily for instance is now attached to Italy but it's a 10-mile gap that you'd have to fill and you could put this damn it they would generate huge amounts of power and as sea levels continue to rise you'd be generating more and more power but eventually you're gonna get the next green Sahara when that happens the Sphinx and the city of Cairo and everything in the Nile Valley is gonna get washed down into the Mediterranean in about 5,000 years nothing you can do to stop that and Africa is also going to continue to move northward at some point it will pinch off at Gibraltar and the Mediterranean will dry up again and become another Death Valley so now we can answer the riddle of the Sphinx which is do I look old to you and the answer is you don't look a day over 4500 I want to thank people I mean so I've actually met with mark Lehner Matthew McCauley and Glen - they're all people that went to study the Sphinx or currently studying the Sphinx I will block who gave those really cool photos for me to use the Smithsonian Institution Scott wing for coming back with what a very intriguing possibility Neville Agnew is at the Getty conservation Institute I've spoken with him on the phone and exchanged a few emails he's very interested in what I'm doing here in Madison Jean bar and Marie Dvorak she's at the library they've helped me out we've got the anthropology department Henry Bund I spoke with him on some of these ideas and he got the libraries here the research if you want to find something it's here I mean and if it's not here the people are really nice and they got yeah I'll get that for you I can get that from this other library so the ability to come up with this information and of course Tom because I'm not one of the professors here I'm just some guy working out of his home for letting me come in here and doing this presentation so questions question is what was my favorite part of this learning I mean the things that I learned I I could go off on any one of those slides in so many different places that was really fun the cast of characters that I've met are unbelievable I never could have imagined like Matthew McCullough who I just mentioned he came to my presentation in Vancouver he made his money with a hit song sometimes when we touch he produced that song and he took that money and basically funded himself to go to Egypt I mean just the people that I met and just the challenge just but yeah so it was a combination of all those [Music] so the question is why would anybody give permission to anyone to drill anywhere on this on the Sphinx or in any of these monuments nobody asked nobody stopped him they just did it I mean you know that's a good question so long ago was it it was in the 70s when they did that yeah it's just crazy so if you look at the Sphinx you can kind of see it in this sea under by the neck where it's kind of filled in that's all concrete and this guy just decided to do that he'd just poured concrete all over the Sphinx not mark Lehner this is a 1925 I've got his name breezy something like that he's to import concrete all over it and and everyone is in agreement that it was just one of the worst things could've ever done he thought he was making the making it better for tourism now nobody nobody stopped him in fact mark or Zahi Hawass who I have not met stopped Robert Schoch from doing geophysics and he's saying well he's out there is not doing anything invasive is just doing seismic snow you have to drill holes to put these geophones in and then you have to anchor the geophones to the rock to make a solid connection so it's not as non-invasive as they try to pretend it to be no other questions ah so let me see if I can get back to that slide that's a good question as soon as you said fractures I like I skip something this is as good as any so the question is why did that why is that fracture indicate that it's predating actually I think or another I'll go with that one why that has to have predated the weathering so what happens with rock is it gets fractured from pressures that are put on it and if you were to map it out it looks very much like a safety glass broken car window you have kind of like these parallel lines all over and there's a series of those there's another one just behind and they tend to be fairly uniformly spaced so that that fracture was there long before the rock was ever excavated that that was broken by the tectonic forces the reason I'm saying that it's not weathered I'm not sure if this is answering your question but if you look at it I can't go over there if you look at it right here this if you were to look straight down on that that would be pretty angular so how come this has got that angular sort of feature why wouldn't it also take on the weathered appearance if I were to sight down in this direction back and forth in this direction I'd see the rock kinda go it looks like that so if it's precipitation that's falling on if that's weathered here well it would fall into that crack and to some extent it would widen the crack and it would cause that weathering and especially if you look at where everything's got like a corner like that that's where a lot of the weathering is going to occur so it wouldn't take very long for that to weather into rounded appearance and it should be more similar maybe not as whether it as a fully exposed section but a little bit more weathered what was my least favorite part wasn't my least favorite part were there were times I was thinking why am i doing this I am wasting my time I have I'm not gonna find anything I mean the amount of information that I read through to find these little nuggets you would not believe the amount of information that I read and I could go off on tangents and Tom heard me two weeks ago talked about the Nile explorers because I was thinking well what's going on here is very much related to the history of the Nile and to me that was like where the where I'm gonna find a big part of the story I had no idea where that story was so there were times I was very frustrated I thought I'm just wasting my time on this and no one's gonna care oh no they didn't leave when it was green they lived in the greenness yeah it'll be good for the Sahara because you'll suddenly have all that land and I forgot to mention that the area here if you look at the desert part here but this doesn't part that's about the size of the lower 48 states to put this into perspective so these lakes are huge there were fish six feet long that people were fishing on and living on so yeah you suddenly would have a huge part of the planet that you could now live in but the Nile Valley no oh it's going to come again because of these orbital changes here so the the earth is gonna in five thousand years so right now the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun and our orbits closest approach to the Sun and five thousand years about it's gonna be facing towards the Sun and that's gonna cause Europe to get much hotter and that is gonna cause all this air to rise over Europe and it then it sucks the monsoons north over Africa all that air rising in Europe what's kind of interesting I don't think I mentioned this that the first person to go through and figure out all of this was James Croll anybody ever hear him he was that he worked at the University in the geology department a University of Glasgow but he was the janitor he taught himself geology and he was the first person to go through and work all of this out they gave him a position afterwards and point out to us where the concrete caller oh okay you see if I can find a good photo oh really yeah so the concrete is this he let me go let me go to this one it's this right here this this section here that's all concrete on both sides they've kind of make it look like blocks there's other pieces in the head that are concrete that right here is all concrete so you can see that's why I went to look at where is it right here there's an older there's an older photo of it so that's prior to the concrete being put in yeah so this one you can also see which what do you want oh there was a better photo let me see what I can come up with that there was a really great one that showed the fractures here we go so this fracture so these are the fractures you can see they're somewhat uniform we've looked at this one before there's another one here this one here actually has a name it's called the major fissure and it's actually a cave and I looked up the definition of a cave to make sure I'm using that term properly and I was actually talking to John about this a cave is a void in the rock large enough for a person to enter that's what's considered a cave and it was actually this fracture here this rock was so weathered and crumbled I don't think they knew that was there I think it was below this upper layer here and they when they excavated it they found that and they actually extended the body to accommodate this really empty zone that they had to fill with blocks from the beginning oh the concrete would be right under here so you wouldn't be seeing this right here that area here by the neck so it's kind of it's easier to see that so the concrete again here that's all concrete right here this section in here this is all concrete this is concrete over here there's a concrete patch up in here there's like this gouge that was taken out a lot of this stuff here if you look at it comparing old and new no it's all concrete I don't know I mean so where did the the nose actually according to mark Lehner and a lot of other people was chiseled off and and he's actually looked and identified when the chisel marks are where they somebody pride in and and pounded and and chipped it off and it was long before Napoleon ever got there the fact Napoleon was one of the first people to really study it he brought in a group of scientists and they looked at so I was the first scientific study as well as they could do in the date he was very interested in it so no he didn't destroy it second part of your question was I mean I heard that too I have to be honest I was never really that interested in it when this program was on I sort of had it on in the background and then when he got to the wicking I was like oh what's this and that kind of drove me into all of this a lot of religions probably has more to do with Islamic religion than it does the Christian religion the gas people go in and deface some something that they assume is a false God and you know there's another it's the country okay good question so they there's a lot of people who say that yes if you didn't do something the head would have fallen off already I don't know I don't think so I think it would still be there it's not that big what are the efforts there it's like non-stop they're constantly repairing the Sphinx I don't oh yeah here we go there there's blocks being added here all the time to the Egyptians the Sphinx really is their symbol of their country this is sort of Mount Rushmore the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty all combined into one for them lissa this is it and one time while they were actually doing restorations a chunk of it right here fell off so most of the restoration work has been done even until recently without the archeologists the Egyptologists involved they just get some engineers in there and they start doing stuff and the archaeologists are like no do that so a lot of the blocks that were on it as I understand it they've been removed and nobody knows where they went so a lot of the history has been removed because of the repairs but yeah so there but it's an ongoing thing the repairs are being made all the time I think that's kind of quieting down out but I don't know I really know the details no no so what happened is is that the the Sphinx when they then and I think they knew this beforehand there's several what I would call test borings and the Sphinx so you wouldn't start a project like this like you didn't desire they they didn't put in that dewatering system they SPECT out those pumps and they knew what rate at which they need to pump them to get the water out of there they put in several tests borings there's a hole in the top of the Sphinx head I have no idea how far down that goes there's one in the back of his things that I think was supposed to be outside so they already knew when they were gonna be carving this that they're gonna encounter in my opinion this very very soft rock so they had given how soft it is and the tools that they use it just flaked back and so they were realizing you can't do anything about that so what they did is they put harder blocks on top of it they put a veneer of blocks on top of this and in fact for whatever reason the first tear they matched it with the undulations on the bottom so those blocks the later repairs there kind of left a gap they filled it with sand they did things but the original series they actually contoured them in and you can kind of see that if I can't zoom in if I on my computer I could zoom in on that but you can kind of get a hint of that right here where that's sort of recessed back and these blocks something and those are the original blocks right there so the whole Sphinx was covered in blocks like the lower portion is now the head was not and the rear paws a little bit of the rear paws were now but the body itself is covered in blocks and then those blocks were carved to make this things just try to get this the Great Pyramid was also covered with very white shiny stones that's what helped and are you suggesting then then you think this broth body here as we see today was actually plaid yeah so the question is was was this originally clad with these blocks yes not only the Sphinx but the side walls so the side walls which where I start out with mark with his hand and said you look at the at the at the Sphinx excavation the sides are in terrible shape to where is that this one so you can see over here this is really ragged it didn't look like that when it was new I'm saying they cover that with blocks and in fact I think when Tut most did his repairs I think he scavenged the blocks from the side walls because we know that he replaced the side walls with brick walls so he built and it kind of enclosed the Sphinx more so I'm thinking he had to do that because he had just taken these nice hard blocks and where they came from his own the other side of the Nile in a quarry and I'm me as a geologist I'm wondering because this is called the head to the Mikko what I've been calling the Mikko they would call it the observatory formation or the upper building stone it's the upper building stone was this really high quality rock for them to build things out of and they found it again on the other side of the Nile and so when the Nile floods occurred he was more like a lake the levels would stay high for about three months and there was a harbor not very far from right here and they bring in the blocks and drag them up this natural slope but I'm as a geologist I'm wondering did they know those were the same rocks did they correlate them were they doing something which had which is attributed to you know only in the last 200 years or so that you can say this rock over here is the same layers that miles away over there I wonder so did that answer the question you can see up at the top here you can see that this pyramid is still got its blocks the others were looted and dragged into Cairo to build mosques and who knows whatever correct so when so so the valley was what tom was saying is the whole area was covered up to the head of the Sphinx with solid rock yes and in fact it was that solid rock they had that formed the Jesus garment and that was the desirable Rock the upper building stone again that they used to make the pyramids okay so they quarried it right there and dragged it to make the pyramids and then they ran out and that's when they started collecting it from the other side and bringing it over but the head was was left in place and the Sphinx was carved there oh one of the things I was want to say is that these these you know everyone talks about how smart these ancient people were and I like yeah they they know how to work rock but I would never put the Sphinx at this location because it's in the Nile flood plains if they had just moved it just a little bit up you know just put it up here someplace it would be fine but thousands of years it'd be a great spot so - what's his name rata edgar cayce whatever you want to call him he designed this what was he thinking this is not very smart I don't know I mean my short answer is watch the movie 2001 have you ever seen that it's a great movie it's really boring at times but it's really kind of cool I think that's where much of this comes that it was a science fiction story and it sounds cool it sounds really cool that aliens would come here and help us when I was a teenager everything was Erich von Donnegan people and it was about the same thing I remember they had a commercial on TV and they they advertised this movie saying proof-positive that creatures from other planets that using our skies and oceans as a cosmic playground and I thought well that I didn't believe it but I just thought well that's just too hilarious I'm gonna go see that movie it was terrible it was absolutely horrible I don't know why I think I think it has something to do with the fact that they've got answers to these questions and they don't have to think about them very long I think it makes them happy to have a nice short answer to like that but I'm not sure ask them oh that's good that's kind of funny so what was the pushback none um so you got all these geologists are saying that this Fink's is older and especially Robert Schoch is saying all the geologists agree with him I have yet to meet a single geologist who agrees with him who thinks that this is a reasonable thing that the Sphinx is older is simply based on the weathering for the most part they like me lady they never gave it a second thought I never looked at it i I assumed if there was some discussion on the age of the Sphinx it would be reasonable discussions by reasonable people with reasonable ideas no and and what they do is a lot of this is all about personal attacks that's why I mentioned that thing with mark and how he's hindering research rather than go with the facts and what's there they have to attack each person so I'm wondering what's gonna become in my way I'm sure I'll get these personal attacks because they're not gonna like the facts that I'm gonna be presenting and I got a lot more than what I presented thanks for asking that so where did the concept of the Sphinx come from I think I have some insight so all the Egyptian gods are human bodies with animal heads the exact opposite of this but they're standing upright they're upright statues and so you can't make that if you tried to build that out of rock it would just fall over you couldn't couldn't even begin to ever even conceive of doing that and I envisioned them having a meeting and some artists going you know we could switch it around and we get to put the Pharaohs head on it and then I could just imagine looking yeah let's do that I think that that's where it came from was just we can it was something that they could make as opposed to something they couldn't make I'm sure the Egyptologists would probably disagree with me on that they may have their own thoughts but that that's something that just sticks in my mind when I'm looking at Chris and I'm going out it's it's good I could build it today it is it's too hot and dangerous or is it just the weather and finding everything yes they've found villages on the edge of lakes I know that I don't know I couldn't tell you the question is are there cities and things in the green Sahara I don't know I see it as this thing that's been pumping human evolution for thousands of years because every time that would go green people come in there and they'd be having a great life and then it turns desert and now they got to leave and now they have to either die or innovate and I see that is driving human evolution and it certainly drove Egyptian civilization so I might be reading too much into it though

Channel: Wednesday Nite @ The Lab

Views: 7,536

Rating: 3.8076923 out of 5

Keywords: Biotechnology, UW-Madison, Science, WN@tL, Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, Science Outreach, Wisconsin Idea

Id: 90IYxaMfWZ0

Length: 77min 54sec (4674 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017

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No one knows how old the Great Sphinx is or who built it. Its origin is one of the world’s greatest mysteries yet to be resolved. Robert Schneiker will present geologic and geotechnical evidence on the age of the Sphinx. His presentation contradicts the findings of another geologist/geophysicist, Robert Schoch, who in 1991 presented evidence that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than archaeologists believe. Archaeologists point out that an older Sphinx requires revising the history of civilization. Schneiker’s findings more than 25 years ago triggered a fierce debate between geologists and archaeologists that continues to this day.

About the Speaker

Robert Schneiker holds a MS in geology/geophysics from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He has worked in the environmental consulting industry since 1982. Trained as a petroleum geophysicist, his project experience includes risk-based evaluations, vadose zone and groundwater modeling, remedial investigations, geophysical exploration, and groundwater resources exploration. In 1992, he performed SESOIL modeling for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR). Model results were used to establish soil-cleanup standards for the WDNR NR 720 Rule Series.

Currently Schneiker provides support and training for the SEVIEW software that he developed. His software is used by regulators and environmental consultants around the world to establish soil-contaminant cleanup concentrations. He has presented papers on contaminant transport and fate modeling in the United States, the European Union, and Canada. A registered professional geologist in Wisconsin, Schneiker has conducted numerous training seminars for consultants and regulatory agencies. He is also an avid bicyclist who enjoys kayaking and hiking and has traveled extensively in the U.S., visiting many of the national parks.

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