If you have opinions or additonal information on the structures considered herein, or anything similar, then the writer (John) would much like to hear from you - please email to:    john.mail "at" ozemail.com.au

~~

 

PREFACE

The writer, who lives in Sydney (New South Wales) is a geologist who many years ago worked in the Northwest Section of  the Geological Survey of New South Wales (GSNSW, 'the survey' or 'geo-survey').

Although the GSNSW has never set out specifically to address or investigate any of the features discussed herein, they of course have been run across by geo-survey geologists, and no doubt by other geologists, more or less in passing - indeed of the "mysteries", that atop of Mt Oxley is something of a tourist feature which has been much visited by Japanese and other tourists.   What Japanese thoughts have been on it is unknown, but  being popular with tourists and well publicised this feature probably has been seen by geologists from other countries as well.

Because some of the curious features gathered and considered herein have no obvious geological explanation, some geologists have on first seeing them thought they'd likely be of human origin.   That was early thought the case for earth mounds north of Broken Hill (until one Broken Hill geo-survey geologist, Peter Buckley, tried estimating the amount of 'dirt' involved and if former meagre food resources and low population numbers of humans could have moved/reshaped such amounts.  Peter concluded "no", that humans have not made these features.   Similarly with the "disturbed-looking" area of angular stones atop of Mt Oxley.   At least some geologists when first seeing this feature thought humans probably made it, and more recently another GSNSW geologist when first sighting these stones thought they looked like artillery impact.   However there is no evidence that artillery ever fired on Mt Oxley, not even the semi-mythical "Barigal guns" thought to have been heard by early settlers in inland Australia.   Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Aborigines ever had any connection with this stone pile.

For both the "blows" of Lightning Ridge and the stone pile atop of Mt Oxley at least two people have postulated they are result of ascending fluids (mud/gas/water).

The people best known for developing or pursuing/extending rising fluids theory in NW NSW (and adjacent SW Queensland) are a former GSNSW colleague of the writer, Mr Simon Pecover (who later wrote extensively on this topic and after leaving Government service also took out opal exploration licences) and Mr Byron Deveson who is a geochemist living near Canberra (at Waramanga) in the Australian Capital Territory (an enclave within New South Wales).   The writer doesn't know Byron personally although we have corresponded on these matters via email after mentions of Bryon's work and theories were found in Lightning Ridge local news media.

Byron's thoughts and theories are fairly fully (it is thought) represented herein within gathered Lightning Ridge media snippets.  As regard's Simon's  thoughts and theories on rising (warm) water and its effects, at the opal fields, there is certainly much more than I have yet had opportunity to insert or refer to herein.

As may be seen, Byron Deveson has envisaged "exploding springs".   The writer has (at the time of working in the NW Section) visited SW Queensland and has seen the mound springs there.   It is said these can, and occasionally do, "explode" with a loud noise audible for miles around.  A photograph of a tourist sign stating such is showing below.   Over the years many enquiries have been made to the local authorities on "what is the source of this (information)" but none have yet stated where this information was obtained.  Similar enquiries to Bourke Council on Mt Oxley or anyone interested in it also yielded no information - nor anyone currently interested in such matters (although people, probably at least one of them living locally, have certainly written on the Mt Oxley "mystery" in the past.   GSNSW geologist Rosemary Hegarty visited Bourke and Mt Oxley in 2008 and discovered that a brochure exists called "MT OXLEY - The History and  the Mystery".   Who the author of that is has not yet been determined.

Although any evidence of supposedly 'exploding' mound springs of the Great Australian Basin has yet to be tracked down, a literature survey on mound springs and mud volcanoes confirms that although such things mostly expel their fluids quiescently, they DO occasionally explode.  Those of Sakhalin Island are particularly noted for erupting violently.  Other interesting historical observations exist which confirm the expected erosional fragility of surficial expelled mud landforms.   For example, the famed naturalist Alexander von Humboldt accompanied by botanist Aimé Bonpland travelled from Europe in 1799 to explore the great Orinoco River system of South America, followed later by exploring southwards down the Andes.  At Turbaco near Cartagena (present day Columbia) heard of local  volcanoes which he visited and sketched, finding instead that they consisted of mud and emitted gas ("air") rather than lava.  He termed them "air volcanoes".   Although they were a wonder of their time (with associated legend - cited below) it seems they have now grown rather inactive and have eroded since Humbold't time (although no good modern description of them has been found).  This is not unexpected and confirms that eruptive mud mounds might disappear in only a matter of centuries.

The artesian periphery of  the Great Australian Basin has been contracting, and although there likely were both artesian springs and mud mounds within NSW in the past nothing very noteworthy seems to still remain.   Some of the known artesian upwelling points in northwestern NSW are discussed herein.  Some of them are very minor and it is readily seen how any trace of them might quickly be lost or obscured if they stopped being active.   If those who believe that things like the Lightning Ridge "blows" are the conduits of rising fluids are correct then artesian springs, exploding or otherwise, probably would have a history in NSW extending back through much of the Tertiary.

The other category of unsolved-origin mystery in northwestern NSW is earth mounds.   These are now known  to be very extensive in distribution and their range extends into adjacent states.  

My own first encounter with such mounds came in the 1980s.   At that time I was engaged in a protracted literature survey and on-ground reconnaissance to locate and compile information on old mines and prospects in the Bourke-Cobar-Nymagee region.  In the context of such activity a sighted mound could be a cause of joy or satisfaction - as maybe indicating the rim of spoil that usually occurs around a shaft or prospector's hole.  Any such hole would always be a place to pause and make observations at - what were "they" ('old-timers'?) looking for here, and why, and were there any indications or clues left in the spoil that anything of note was turned up.  

Thus when out west of Cobar one day and a mound was spotted it was expected that another prospecting hole had been found.   But even before getting to the mound there was something that became wrong with this idea, for it became obvious that there was not one mound but many.  Even without getting out of the vehicle the idea they may have been made by old prospecting dissipated.  I had already literature researched this area and it has no known old prospecting or minor 'rushes' that could have lead to many holes being dug.  I knew that had this been closer to Bourke the idea of an unknown old prospecting area could be entertained since for some reason prospecting and mining had not been very thoroughly recorded, or records perhaps had been lost.  But in the Cobar area the recording had been much more thorough and I did not think finding an 'unknown' prospecting field was at all feasible.  So if not caused by humans, what made them.    I vaguely thought maybe pigs of 'wombats', as I had seen some extensively animal disturbed areas in the highlands of southern NSW.   But wombats were unknown this far west and did pigs ever do anything like this - I had no idea.   In any case, even if pigs did mess up the ground sometimes I felt the structures must be too big for pigs to have been involved.  Their size was such that some could accomodate the whole length of a short wheel base 4WD driven up over the mound.   Some had concave depressions at the top, some did not.   Whatever these mysterious or puzzling structures were, I felt they were not of any apparent geological origin (unless perhaps a soil swelling phenomenon like gilgai) and they were unconnected with what I was being paid to find and record.   Thus, vehicular passage over the trackless ground pushed on - no notes were taken about the mounds yet they were not entirely forgotten.   Some have since suggested to me that what I saw were just mallee fowl nests, but I never thought that at the time - they seemed too big for that.

 

 

 

OTHERS HAVE RECORDED ABUNDANT MOUNDS

 

Photograph by Kingsley Mills of an enigmatic mound in NW NSW, in the Kayrunnera 1:100K sheet area.

(Plate 33 in the Notes for the Nuchea 1:100K sheet geological map, by Peter Buckley)

Many years after I first saw puzzling mounds in the Cobar area I became aware that other geologists had seen such mounds and that some had begun thinking that Big Birds may have made them - literally vanished members of the megafauna.   One geologist, very experienced in the Cobar area, who well knew of them, and who was also a bird fancier and expert, was Mr Leigh Schmidt (REF:  Schmidt, B.L., 1978.  Birds of the Cobar region, New South Wales.  Australian Birds, 12, 61-86).   Others who had gotten interested in enigmatic mounds were geologists Peter Buckley and Kingsley Mills, both working out of the Broken Hill office of the mines department (Geological Survey of NSW, currently in the Primary Industries department). 

Putting together what these geologists, and some others (rangeland workers - CSIRO, unis), have mentioned at various times it seemed that there must be hundreds of these mounds, and that their distribution would stretch from southwestern Queensland across western New South Wales and into South Australia.

CSIRO's Jim C. Noble (in "Relict surface soil features in semi-arid mulga (Acacia aneura) woodlands", The Rangeland Journal, 1993, 15[1], 48-70) has noted near Lake Mere in northwestern NSW some ca. 10m diameter circular mounds, some with well-defined central depessions, which he believed were probably constructed by animals.  He suggested that the mallee fowl (Leipoa ocerlata) could have built them.  He also noted bigger ones, ca. 30m diameter, which he suggested the burrowing bettong (Bettongia lesueur) might have constructed.  He was aware, pers. comm. from L. Schmidt, of a similar large mound measuring 32m in diameter and 1.7m height, having been observed by Schmidt in the Cobar district.   Others elsewhere have noted that the some other animals can build substantial mounds, such as the false water rat.   The burrowing bettong however is regarded as a prime contender.

A young burrowing bettong.  Females may mate again on the day after birth and any

fertilised egg remains in arrested gestation until weaning of the pouch young.

(Photo via Heirisson Prong threatened species project)

Former distribution of the burrowing bettong.

Noble called his research on possible mallee fowl mounds his "CDK research" (meaning Chief Doesn't Know).  It has been continued with, and a recent article by him and others is "Landscape ecology of the burrowing bettong: Warren distribution and patch dynamics in semiarid eastern Australia", Austral Ecology, 2007, 32(3), 326-337.  In this paper the bettong are promoted to the rank of "landscape engineers" and their effects held to be quite appreciably beneficial.  Attempted re-introduction may follow.

 

A mallee fowl mound at Eyre Peninsula, S.A.

 Some few mounds might be man-made.  The explorer John Oxley in 1817 saw this one near the Lachlan River.

This earth mound was recorded as about three feet high.  The NSW government later erected a cairn here.

( Ida Lee, 1925.  "Early Explorers in Australia".)

 

EXTRACTS FROM NUCHEA NOTES

( In part taken from Peter Buckley's Nuchea 1:100K sheet geological notes, GS2003/164 )

Enigmatic Landforms

Throughout the parts of the Nuchea sheet underlain by pre-Mesozoic basement, a prominent feature of the landscape is the presence of mounds composed of locally gathered small stones that rarely exceed 5 cm in diameter. The typical mound is "hemispherical" and about 20 m in diameter and 1 m high (about 350 tonnes) although some individual mounds range from 10 to 30 m in diameter and up to 2 m in height (Plate 33). Occasional elongate mounds to 40 m by 20 m, are usually 2 m high. Annular rings about 30 m in diameter with an opening gap, composed of the same material, also occur. It is apparent that many of these features are of some antiquity as there are a few that are cemented with travertine limestone and one on the Yancannia sheet that is overlain by a vegetated east-west sand dune (Mills pers com).

The mounds' mode of formation may seem to be a trivial side issue, but under a regime of increasing pressures on land use, such as grazing and mineral exploration, determining the nature of the mounds may prove to be an important task. Already, many of the larger mineral exploration companies conduct archaeological drill site clearances as a routine part of the exploration cycle. The only way to determine the mode of formation of this enigmatic landform is to gain more information, for example their distribution and morphology need to be documented and consideration given to an investigative excavation. Thermoluminescent or radio carbon dating of the mounds may help to elucidate the matter.

While arguments have been advanced that these mounds could be the result of the activities of some pre-historic animal, or be the remnants of an extensive plateau cover of outwash conglomerate, Mills (pers comm 2001) believes their morphology, siting and composition suggests that they are anthropogenic. Possible correlatives exist overseas, as many societies have constructed burial mounds, such as the Indian burial mounds of Wisconsin and the serpent effigy mounds of Peebles, Ohio.  [ PS: These extracts refer to 2003, and.  Dr Mills, pers comm. 2008, later changed his mind on thinking that the Nuchea sheet mounds are man-made. ]  

 

 

An "Indian mound" typical of those that the western NSW earth mounds were first compared with.

These mounds are at Military Ford on the banks of the Buttahatchee River, which flows to meet

the Tombigbee River, Marion County, Alabama.   (Photo:  Ginger, Alabama)

 

 

>>>  Marion County: " We are a county that is chocked full of history and tales of honor and glory.  <s> So who is promoting our cultural and historical heritage to the world? <s>  ... a little known group of county citizens, the Marion County Historical Society.  <s> Membership in the Historical Society hovers at fifteen steady members and a few others who pay the membership dues of $10 per year but do not actually attend the meetings.   One of the major endeavors of the Historical Society is that of the restoration and preservation of the Indian Mounds. These historic Mounds are located on the Buttahatchee River, two miles south of Hamilton, and are along Jackson's Military Highway. The Mounds hold Chickasaw Indian Chief Levi Colbert, after which Colbert County was named, along with numerous other gravesites and artifacts.   Virgil McGuire, a man who others have described as a “walking history book”, gave a vivid portrait of Chief Colbert.  “Levi was best friends with Judge John Dabney Terrell, who is also buried in the Indian Mounds. The two men from different cultural backgrounds both shared leadership qualities and a lifelong friendship. In fact, part of Terrell’s burial clothing was a panther-skinned vest that was presented to him as a gift by Levi Colbert,” said McGuire.  <s> The Indian Mound project tips a hat at our county’s ancient Indian history. John Berryhill, Chief of the Bird Clan of the Echotas, has a vision of a local powwow for tribes around the state and as a stop in the nationwide Trail of Tears pilgrimage. “The Mounds actually belong to the Chickasaw and up further north to the Cherokee. The Echotas are interested in the Mounds for cultural reasons, and we want to see them preserved for the heritage of all Native Americans,” said Berryhill.  The Society welcomes anyone regardless of whether you decide to officially join or not... just come. Come out for Marion County and get behind this project and help not only ourselves but our county!"   [Snipped, from an article by Kay Marshall at km@kaymarshall.com in the "Local Heroes" series for the Tombigbee Electrical Cooperative that's been serving Marion, Lamar, and portions of Fayette, counties since the 1940's [Story of the coop - People living in the rural regions of Marion and Lamar Counties had tried unsuccessfully to get electricity. It was felt that those in rural Marion and Lamar County were too poor to afford electric bills as they were typically farmers who went to bed early and could not possibly use enough electricity to be profitable.  Committed to making a difference, the cooperative’s founders and went house to house getting memberships.  With enough members signed up for service, they went to Montgomery and organized Tombigbee Electrical Cooperative on May 12, 1941].  <<<

An ancient Texan cooking oven mound not unlike mounds west of Cobar.   This mound is at Camp Bowie (once the

 largest World War II military training facility in Texas) just south of the city of Brownwood.  Indians in this area

used large earth ovens.  The rocks used for heating constantly broke apart and were tossed out of the pit,

eventually forming a built up mound.  For decades, these enigmatic mounds found throughout much of

central and western Texas confounded archeologists until a series of them were excavated.

(Texas Beyond History - http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/bowie/index.html )

Mills has recorded the locations of over 450 mounds during the mapping of the Kayrunnera sheet. A quick calculation of the number of mounds by the tonnage of contained material yields a figure in excess of 150 000 tonnes. The endeavour required to amass this figure would suggest that an anthropogenic origin is unlikely as a certain degree of sedentism would be required, more than is possible if leading a nomadic existence. Similarly, construction using only small pebbles <5 cm diameter, unlike many of the native American effigy mounds, suggests that there was some physical limitation imposed on the construction. Perhaps a small animal or colony of animals carrying small stones over generations, where the size of the pebble is limited by the strength of the animal, could explain this feature. Some examples of the mound-building animals from existing fauna are included below. 

These animals either, did occur in, or may have been endemic to the area.  Undocumented or extinct species may have been candidates responsible for mound building. This theory on the origin of the mounds is considered the most likely. Although it seems unlikely that any of the three species described were involved in Koonenberry mound construction, the characteristics and habits of these living examples may be similar to those of an extinct creature that may have been involved.

Many mammals have become extinct since European settlement of Australia, most without documentation of their habits and idiosyncrasies. Members of the extinct Megafauna (Flannery 1994) could also be considered candidates for mound construction.

Malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata)

Malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata) are large ground dwelling birds, somewhat larger than a domestic hen (Figure 19). They belong to a family of 22 bird species known as "megapodes" (meaning big feet) many of which are mound builders. Only the Malleefowl inhabits the drier portions of inland Australia. Described as a ground dwelling bird, Malleefowl will take flight to roost in trees overnight and to escape immediate danger (Benshemesh 1999).

A Malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata) tending a mound.  (Photo: Malleefowl

preservation Group - viz. www.malleefowl.com.au/index.htm).

 

   

 

Malleefowl  busy at mounding up maghemite, south of Nyngan  (Photos:  Peter Buckley 2008)

Once common, their numbers have seriously declined over the last 100 years. Nationally, the Malleefowl is listed as vulnerable and is recognised as a species in need of national conservation efforts (Benshemesh 2000). Malleefowl are unique to the arid and semi-arid regions of Australia. Megapode habitat is generally described as high rainfall tropical/subtropical (east and north coasts of Australia, New Guinea, Philippines, Indonesia and Western Pacific/southern Indian Islands). However, the Malleefowl differs from other megapodes, having adapted to Southern Australian conditions. Figure 20 illustrates the Malleefowl distribution compiled from recorded sightings including many sightings not far south of the Koonenberry belt.

Malleefowl dedicate 9-11 months per year to building and maintaining a large incubation mound of soil, leaves and twigs. The eggs are laid in the mound, buried and left to incubate by heat generated from the composting litter. Malleefowl mounds may be used over many generations and can attain an impressive size of 22 metres in circumference and one metre high. Breeding densities vary. Surveys in South Western Australia indicate an average population of 2 active mounds per square km in 400 mm rainfall mallee habitat areas.

Nicholas Peterson, investigating earth mounds in the Glyde River region of Arhnem Land, in the Northern Territory, for instance, saw mounds as providing access to staple aquatic vegetables and meat during the summer wet season, when access to the wetlands was otherwise difficult (Peterson 1973).  In some instances, termite nests had been collapsed to form the initial mound base, with subsequent fires and camp debris adding to the structure.  Hiscock and Faulkner (2006) found that there may be no surviving indigenous memory, however, that such mounds are manmade.  There has been debate about some of the NT mounds, if they were built by birds or humans (Bowman et al., 1999).   The Orange-footed Scrubfowl (Megapodius reinwardt) can build quite large ‘nests’ (heaps of soil and leaf litter) in the coastal rainforests in northern Australia.   Mounds may be up to 4.5m tall but a typical mound is 2-3 m tall and ca. 10 m in diameter, which can weigh over 50 tonnes.  It is maintained by the breeding pair throughout the year, and the same mound may be used for decades. The below pair are in the Daintree rainforest :

The male and female Orange-footed Scrubfowl form permanent pair bonds and both birds set to work building very

large incubation mounds of decaying vegetable matter.  These "nests" can form mounds of leaves and soil

up to 15m across and 4.5 metres high.   The heat generated by decay matter ensures good incubation of

 their eggs.  No parental care is needed for the new hatchlings who are capable of flight almost as soon

as they dig themselves out of mound.   In more recent times the disturbance of the mounds by feral

pigs which eat the eggs is cause for some concern on the welfare of this mighty mound builder.

(Info/photo:  David & Diane Armbrust, Thylogale Nature Refuge) 

 

 

Birds' nests or Aboriginal middens?

 

"A nondescript brown bird has ruffled a few feathers in archaeological circles following claims that it, and not ancient Aborigines, built the large mounds along the northern coast of Australia."

According to Tim Stone, a postgraduate student at the Australian National University, Canberra, the midden-like structures at Weipa, on the Cape York Peninsula, were built by generations of scrub fowl (Megapodius reinwardt), raking soil and shells into heaps to incubate eggs. They are not, he says, the result of a gradual build-up of camp refuse and material discarded by Aborigines. Artefacts in the mounds were introduced by the birds, together with other debris from the surface of the soil.

Critics of Stone's theory point to cockle shells, which are very common in the mounds.  John Chappel of ANU thinks that both Aborigines and birds may have had a hand in the structures.  Chappel has examined similar mounds at Princess Charlotte Bay, also on the Cape York Peninsula. He found that mounds of cockle shells were built on a beach ridge of shell debris carpeted by a layer of Aboriginal refuse about 40 centimetres thick.  He says "It's conceivable that the Weipa mounds were raked up in the same way by the scrub fowl on ridges carpeted in midden material, but this needs to be confirmed."

The Aborigines themselves have described the mounds as 'natural' rather than man-made.  According to Stone, European indifference to the opinions of local Aborigines ensured that prehistorians and anthropologists continued to believe that the mounds were of human origin.  Stone's theory has received support from biogeographers and geomorphologists, but he has encountered hostility from some prehistorians. His most vigorous critics have been Cambridge-trained researchers, whose influence is widely felt in Australian archaeological circles. Stone counters their criticisms with a claim that these academics have been conditioned by European archaeology and assume that any large unusual feature must be made by humans.

Geoff Bailey, an archaeologist from the University of Cambridge, has examined more than 300 of the deposits at Weipa. He says that the mounds of shells, accepted as Aboriginal middens, are easily distinguishable from the scrub fowl's conical, steep-sided nest mounds which contain mostly sediment.  His reply to Stone's paper is published in Archaeology in Oceania.

Richard Wright, an anthropologist from the University of Sydney, has also seen the mounds at Weipa and believes they are of human origin. Scrub fowl include humus in their mounds because it decomposes, generating heat that aids the incubation of eggs. The question here is how long does it take for most of the humus and other sediment to leach out of the mound, leaving a skeleton of shells.

Wright also argues that the distribution of the mounds does not match that of the scrub fowl - a point that Stone disputes. 'There is some discrepancy between the occurrence of birds and mounds in the southern part of their distribution, but this could be due to the heavy agricultural use of the land in this region and the consequent clearing of the scrub fowl's habitat,' says Stone.

He also rejects accusations that his theory will harm Aboriginal land claims by diminishing the archaeological significance of the sites. "The issue is whether a site is of significance to Aboriginals, not to archaeologists.  A sacred site will remain sacred whether or not it has the blessing of white archaeologists", says Stone.

( Source:  Science: Australian mounds - Birds' nests or Aboriginal middens?   New Scientist., 20 October 1990 by  Debra Mayrhofer.  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817392.900-science-australian-mounds--birds-nests-or-aboriginalmiddens-.html )

 

Western Pebble Mouse (Pseudomys chapmani)

The Western Pebble Mound Mouse is an intriguing little animal that had biologists puzzled for decades. This species was not discovered until 1980, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (WA). The reason that it remained undiscovered for so long was because of confusion with a closely related species, the Sandy Inland Mouse (Pseudomys hermansbergensis). Both species are almost identical in every way, However, there is one main behavioural feature that sets the Pebble Mound Mouse apart.

Western Pebble Mouse (Pseudomys chapmani) carrying pebbles.

The Pebble Mound Mouse builds mounds of pebbles up to 9m2 in area (Anstee et al 1997). These mounds are composed of small, sub-rounded pebbles, all less than 5 cm in diameter, that mainly consist of iron ore. Mounds are usually situated on rocky scree slopes on the many ranges of the iron ore country of the arid Pilbara region. Mounds are built up over many generations (some are thought to be over 100 years old) and are maintained by carrying small pebbles (carried in the mouse's mouth) from the surrounding area on to the mound. One or more active entrances to these mounds may exist, and are characterised by clusters of small pebbles around a large opening. These entrance holes lead into many underground nesting chambers which may extend for several metres underground. The purpose of these amazing mounds is still not known, but it is thought that they provide a cool shelter for the nocturnal Pebble Mound Mice to avoid the daytime temperatures of their arid environment,

which may reach 50^oC in summer (Anstee, et al, 1997). Interestingly, B. Stevens (pers comm 2003) believes a creature with similar mound building habits, may have been active in the Euriowie area, near Broken Hill. However, these mounds are much smaller than those being investigated here.

 

Burrowing Bettong or Boodie (Bettongia lesueur)

In 1817 the French ship Uranie anchored off Dirk Hartog Island in Shark Bay as part of its exploration of the west coast of Australia. Its crew collected a specimen of a small kangaroo unknown to science. It was subsequently described and named after Charles Le Sueur, the artist and naturalist on a previous French expedition to the islands in 1802. It became known as Lesueur's rat-kangaroo Bettongia lesueur.

Today it is more commonly known as the burrowing bettong or boodie. At the time of the French expedition the burrowing bettong had one of the widest distributions of any species of kangaroo. Its range extended from the western slopes of the Great Dividing Ranges in eastern Australia to the west coast, and from Broome in the tropical north to Albany and Adelaide on the southern coast. Many of the first explorers encountered and commented upon the distinctive warren systems of the bettong (Burbidge 1995). These were characterised by dozens of entrances dug under breaks in surface rock with extensive high mounds of spoil around. Burke and Wills encountered them in southern New South Wales on their south-north crossing of Australia in 1860, as did Giles when crossing the great unexplored deserts of central Australia in the 1870s. These warren systems, now occupied by rabbits, are still recognisable today in many parts of outback Australia.

Burrowing Bettong or Boodie (Bettongia lesueur).

It is likely that bettongs were eliminated from mainland Australia by a combination of factors. The alteration of the vegetation understorey by introduced grazers such as sheep and rabbits; direct competition for food and shelter from rabbits. Predation from introduced species such as foxes and cats; and changes in land-use practices to either intensive agriculture in the wetter parts of their range or to grasslands in central Australia dominated by natural fire regimes rather than ancient fire regimes imposed by Aborigines (Burbidge 1995).

 

BIG BIRD  - The large flightless birds

Large flightless birds have a long history.

   

Oh what a big bird your are !    At left is a Diatryma skeleton from Wyoming that is  now at a museum in Helsinki.

At right is a skeleton at the at Museum of Natural History, New York.

 

 

Believed to be the big bird's footprint.   Chuckanut Formation (Eocene), Whatcom County, northwest Washington State.

Other tracks of small birds are on the same slab.  ( Dave Tucker, Geology Department, Western Washington University ) http://paleontologiageral.blogspot.com/2010/07/diatryma-pegadas-fosseis-da-ave-gigante.html

 

The above fossil track became exposed in the rubble of the January, 2009 Racehorse Creek landslide.  In spring of 2010, an incipient fracture began to separate the thin mudstone veneer holding the Diatryma track from the sandstone underlaying it.in the slab.  Also, someone chipped away and removed two of the smaller bird tracks on the margin of the slab.  To conserve this fossil, thought to be the only known fossil track of any large extinct flightless bird a Big Bird slab rescue committee formed to effect its rescue by helicopter and tranportation to the Western Washington University for retention and display.

Whether or not the huge beaked Diatryma was herbivorous or carnivorous has been a matter of conjecture and controversy.  Some artist’s renderings (and  another) depict a presumed very fierce Diatrymas preying on early horses.  Whitmer and Rose (1991) wrote a well illustrated study of the Diatryma jaw mechanics, and concluded that this Big Bird was a meat eater, specializing in bone-crushing.

Other studies, however, have argued for a folivory or leaf eating diet.  It is asserted that a heavy beak would be very useful for cutting tough vegetation, and flightlessness is generally associated with vegetable diet rather than carnivory.  That is because leaves take time and considerable energy to digest in the bird’s stomach, energy that would otherwise be used for flight.  The Chuckanut foot track shed further light on the subject.   Reconstructions of the feet of Diatryma had show long, grasping talons, similar to modern raptors.  Skeletal foot remains, however, do not indicate the amount of flesh covering the bones of the foot. The discovery of a  found track has indicated that there were only very short, small, pointy claws at the front of the toes, not long talons. This condition is more commonly associated with plant-eating birds.  The combination of huge size, flightlessness, and the talon-free toes probably now swings the balance in favour of a plant-eating Diatryma.   Dave Tucker feels this may be to the dismay of many hoping for a more fearsome beast .

The Diatryma was a large, flightless bird living 50 million years ago.

Diatryma thrived during the Eocene epoch.  Skeletons of Diatryma have been found in Wyoming, New Mexico and Europe. 

 

Genyornis, the biggest bird known?   (Art:  Peter Trusler, Monash University)

The Australian big bird Genyornis ecame extinct thousands of years ago, along with many other large animals, the so-called megafauna.

The Australian Megafauna and "The Demon Duck of Doom"

The extinction of the Australian megafauna has received much scientific and media attention, particularly after the publication of Tim Flannery's book "The Future Eaters" in 1994. Megafauna were a suite of large animals that disappeared towards the close of the Pleistocene and include the hippopotamus-sized Diprotodon and Zygomaturus, the giant kangaroo Procoptodon, the marsupial lion Thylacoleo, and the large flightless birds Genyornis and Progura. Flannery and others speculated that the megafaunal extinctions were the result of a 'blitzkrieg': overhunting by early human colonisers combined with fire-stick farming practises which changed the ecology of the continent so dramatically that many larger marsupial species were driven to extinction.

Genyornis, the so-called 'thunder birds' belonged to the family Dromornithidae, a group of large, flightless birds (Figure 24). 'Thunder birds' is one of several names that have been used for this group. Because they were long thought to be related to emus, they were called 'giant emus'; another term was 'giant runners'. The western Victorian Aboriginal term, 'mihirung', has been applied to these birds; it comes from a legend about 'giant emus' that once lived in the area (Rich and van Tets 1985).

These birds are known only from Australia. Most of the records of dromornithids come from the eastern half of the continent, although evidence of these birds is also known from Tasmania and Western Australia.

Dromornithids were superficially like very large emus. Most were heavy-bodied. The legs were powerfully developed, whereas the wings were greatly reduced. The last bones of the toes resembled small hooves, rather than claws. The skull, however, was quite different from that of emus, this was very large, with the enormous bill making up about two-thirds of it (Figure 24). The bill was deep, but rather narrow. At the front, the jaws had cutting edges and at the back, crushing surfaces. There were attachments for large muscles, indicating that the subgenus Bullockornis had a powerful bite (Pain 2000). These birds ranged from about the size of a cassowary up to possibly the largest bird to have lived. Because of this combination of its large skull and possible carnivorous habits and possible waterfowl relationships, Bullockornis was nicknamed 'The Demon Duck of Doom'!! (Archer 1999).

   

Genyornis newtoni, an extinct dromornithid bird from the Pleistocene of Australia (drawing

by Frank Knight from Rich and van Tets, 1985).  The Inset is a Bullockornis planei skull.

Bullockornis planei and G. newtoni are examples of the more heavily built birds.

They stood about 2-2.5 tall and probably reached 220-240 kg

(Murray and Megirian 1998).

 

 

Genyornis is part of the Australian megafauna

 

We know very little about the habits of Genyornis. However, further mound building candidates from the Megafauna are the extinct relatives known mound builders, such as the Malleefowl. These include Progura gallinacea and naracoortensis (Vickers-Rich, pers.com). Van Tets (1974) described hapless individuals that were trapped in the Naracoorte cave system during the Pleistocene. The megapode was 2 to 3 times larger than the present Malleefowl.

Petroglyphs (stone carvings) are a common feature within the Byngnano Range, carved into flat surfaces, such as bedding planes of the Snake Cave Sandstone. It has been suggested that some larger Petroglyphs tracks at Mutawintji may be representations of dromornithid footprints (Vickers-Rich, pers.com.). The polished stones that birds kept in their gizzards (muscular stomachs) occur at a number of dromornithids fossil localities. These stones, called gastroliths, assisted with breaking up coarse food or matter that was swallowed in large chunks. Discovery of gastrolith and or egg shell material in an excavated mound in the Koonenberry Belt would indeed be a smoking gun pointing towards 'A Demon Mound Dwelling Duck of Doom'.

Petroglyph tracks of both emu-sized and dromornithid-sized birds on Snake Cave

Sandstone from Mutawuntji National Park. Coin is 24 mm in diameter.

 (Photo: R. H. Tedford)

(Ref: www.earth.monash.edu.au/ESC2032/LECTURES/Lec19/L19s5p33-.htm).

 

 

MYSTERIOUS EARTHEN MOUNDS MAY ABOUND WORLDWIDE

There are many thousands of mound fields in the world and also numerous attempted explanations for how the mounds may have formed.  These even include the "Unified Theory of Cultural Heritage and Geological History" (a Holocene extraterrestrial impact theory or 'cataclysmic image of geology' - a.k.a. Perigree:Zero hypothesis and cf. Younger Dryas Impact theory).  This young cataclysm theory is not at all recommended here, but if accessed on the internet may conveniently lead to the main references to mysterious mounds.   There have been many studies of them and several good reviews.  Inorganic processes (periglacial, aeolian - such as erosional remnants left by sheetwash or deflation - or even of seismic origin such as liquefaction/dewatering or result of sorting induced by seismic vibrations) and biogenic processes (esp. burrowing rodents) have been speculated upon (as well as lesser non-mainstream speculations like Perigree:Zero).  The seismic origin has been the latest suggestion to arise (Berg, Andrew W., 1990.  Formation of Mima mounds: a seismic hypothesis.  Geology 18:281-284) but has won little acceptance.  That they have originated from animal activity is probably the most popular theory but it is far from universally accepted.  This theory was early on regarded as very unlikely by many but it has had persistence and over time its popularity has grown at the expense of other theories.

New South Wales, Australia, does not have the dense mound fields known elsewhere but in the west of the state 'mysterious' mounds do occur.   The present writer first encountered a field of these west of Cobar.  Many there had central depressions, unlike USA illustrations of prairie mounds below.  The size is similar, with many of the mounds west of Cobar being big enough to totally accomodate a short wheel base 4WD vehicle.  These mounds were seen during routine geological reconnaissance for mapping purposes and there was no reason then, or motivation, to pause from other work to do any investigation of them.  Neither, however, was there any apparent geological explanation which sprang to mind for why they occurred.  Since then the idea that large birds may have formed 'mystery mounds' in western New South Wales have been entertained by a small number of geologists.  Peter Buckley and Kingsley Mills, working out of Broken Hill, and Leigh Schmidt who did extensive work in the Cobar area and also studied the local birdlife, observed a great number of these mounds.  Mr Schmidt went on to later observe many more in South Australia.  It is understood that he excavated in some in the Cobar region, for possible shell fragments which might confirm that these were built as incubation mounds, or for anything else of interest.  However, nothing remarkable was found internally.   Little detail has been published on the mounds in western and northwestern NSW but P. Buckley has recorded their existence in published map notes.  Geologist Greg Macrae who did mapping on the Nymagee 1:100,000 map in the early 1980s saw many mounds in the area south of Nymagee which were about 5m in diameter, 1m high and with a central depression (pers. comm.).   Such smaller mounds may be due to the modern mallee fowl, and Greg assumed this to be the case, especially as there is a mallee fowl colony living at Round Hill south of Mt Hope.

 

   

Mounds made wheelchair accessible at Mima Prairie,

12 miles south of Olympia, Washington State.

 (Photos: Dave Scheifelbein [L], Victor Scheffer [R])

 

 

Early air photo of mounds at Mima Prairie.  (Photographer:  Unknown)

Not all mounds have tadpole-like tails as shown here.  James Cooper

in 1859 envisaged water flow in giant estuaries as their cause

(but which their wide distribution would not support at all)

 

 

Map of prairie mound areas in the USA  (Science Frontiers No. 119, Sep-Oct 1998)

 

 

 

Dense distribution of mounds (light dots) southeast of De Quincy, Louisiana.

(Government airphoto, 1940)

 

Unexplained mounds will always be mysterious.  Millions of them are known, in North America, Africa, Australia and China.  Some are scattered; but there are many very dense fields of them as in the above airphoto.

Beth Geigler wrote of them in Sunset magazine, June 2002, and quoted University of Washington geology professor Bernard Hallet: "There's no obvious reason why they should be there".   After two centuries of speculation scientists are mostly still baffled by prairie mounds and there is no commonly accepted origin known for them. 

Beth reported: 'Some geologists believe that violent earthquakes shook the loose prairie soils into neat heaps .... some (zoologists) believe that ancient potato-size pocket gophers created the mounds over generations of frenzied territorial construction.  Most other theories - that they are Native American burial mounts, for example - have been refuted'.  

Prairie mounds near Vesta, Arkansas (Photo:  David Collins)

In 2004 David Collins of Russellville, Askansas (age 55, son of a serviceman or Army brat, who likes motorcycles, archaeology, collecting stuff and history - according to his blog) took a long ride on highway 22 West around the town of Vesta.  There he discovered the Cherokee Pairie Natural Area which he hadn't previously known existed.  He was interested to find many pairie mounds there.  He recognised them, he wrote, because prairie mounds also occur in the area of River Valley near his home town of Russellville - "If you look carefully where my bike is shown, you can see the pairie mounds".  He noted that Arkansas was a major area for them.  They are the type of mound, he added, that scientists had never figured out.  Cherokee Prairie Natual Area is located 2 miles north of Charleston.  Also, the Roth Prairie Natural Area near Stuttgart is covered with low prairie mounds rising up to three feet in height.

In 2006 (15 July at the 18th World Congress of Soil Science, Philadelphia) Donald Lee Johnson of University of Illinois Geography Department and Diana N. Johnson of Geoscience Consultants (Champaign, Illinois) gave a paper entitled "Mima mounds as upper soil or whole soil biomantles: what happens morphologically when the bioturbators depart?".   Their paper discusses tendency for a lag of stones to develop at the base.  The basal stone layer may be a metre or more thick.  Although many bioturbators may have been at work, the mounds are regarded as mainly the work of pocket gophers (Geomyidae).  They regarded the mounds at Mima to have been only very recently abandoned.   Donald Johnson and Jennifer Horwath (Geomorphology, 2006.  Vol. 77, issues 3-4, pp. 308-319) studied the mounds of Diamond Grove Natural Area near Joplin in Missouri and concluded that the pocket gopher (Geomys bursarius), aided by other biota, created them.   Johnson believes that mima-type prairie mounds are of fossorial rodent point-centred bioturbational origin, and those formed from initial gravelly soils form two-layered biomantles as the mounds develop.

A suggested biogenic or animal agency origin of the mounds has been afloat for a long time, since 1827 and increasingly popular since the 1940s (the Dalquest-Scheffer hypothesis of 1942, proposed for Mima area mounds).  William Darby (1817) described great numbers of mounds, up to 12 ft wide, at Mamou prairie in southwest Louisiana: "The origin of those hillocks have given birth to many speculations: all perhaps wide of the truth; the most reasonable hypotheses ascribe them to a kind of mole".  This is considered by David R. Butler in his 1995 book "Zoogeomorphology: Animals as Geomorphic Agents".  The theory proposes that the mounds are the result of centripetal preferential translocation of fines accompanying the outward tunneling of fossorial animals such as the geomyid pocket gophers.  Koons (1926) believed he witnesses the rise of two mounds over a 5 year period as a result of gopher work.  The chief doubt raised against the theory is why are there masses of these mounds all of similar size; without there being a continuum of sizes observed, from small incipient ones through to mature mounds.

 

ASSORTED "BIG BIRD" NOTES

(under construction)

 

   

 

... when birds were big and horses were small?

     plump chick, big eggs

 

An elephant bird egg market stall in Madagascar.  (Photo: Stephen DeVogel)

People standing on a mound rich in egg shell of the elephant bird.  At what are thought

to be ancient nesting sites huge numbers of egg fragments are present.   These 

particular mounds however are not built mounds, rather erosional mounds.

Life-sized Elephant bird reconstruction; with Peter Buckley, who has been a principal advocate in NSW

of a 'big bird' approach to understanding the myriad mystery soil mounds of western NSW and

adjacent States.   (Photographed:  Jan 2010 at Australian Maritime Museum in Sydney, this

model being on loan from the American Museum of Natural History.)

The elephant bird (Aepyonis) is likely the largest bird that ever lived and was known to mankind - some think it is likely the bird called the Roc or the Rukh in the stories of Marco Polo and Medieval Arab voyagers.  Concerning the island of Madagascar, Marco Polo wrote that the Great Khan had sent him to investigate curious reports of giant birds.  The first French Governor of Madagascar wrote in 1658 of a large bird which lays eggs like the ostriches and "seeks the most lonely places".  In the face of human hunters the bird had likely shrunk back to the remote deserted parts of the island, and by 1700 it was gone forever.

Aepyonis was rattite bird which seems to have died out around the same time as the other Megafauna of Madagascar.  Sub-fossil bones found on Madagascar include a giant toroise, and hippopotamus remains.

Archaeologists from the university of Sheffield and elsewhere have from time to time searched for any evidence of elephant bird/human interaction on Madagascar (e.g. "Tombs, Landscape and Society in Southern Madagascar - Part 1.   http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/research/madagascar )

Although it is widely assumed that humans exterminated the elephant bird, little definite evidence to support this has been found.  A Sheffield scientific team (archaeologists, anthropologists, geomorphologist, botanist) in 1995-1997 searced for associations of humans and elephant birds but did not have much success in this.  They did, however, draw attention to a small group of thousand-year old shell "middens" at the Manambovo river mouth that have potential to yield evidence of elephant bird eggshells exploited by humans as a food source.  In 1962 Professor Pierre Vérin excavated two middens at Talaky in the dunes on the west side of the Manambovo river mouth.  Therein he found Aepyonis eggshells in association with pottery and human occupation that radiocarbon dating places as 10-12th centuries AD (Battistini, R., Vérin, P. and Rason, R., 1963.  Le site archéologique de Talaky.  Annales Malgaches 1, pp. 111-127). 

The southern coastal fringe of Madagascar contains numerous scattered fragments of the elephant birds' eggs and deflation of dune sand many lead to a carpet of concentrated fragments in some areas.  Complete unbroken eggs are obviously to be found and stream out to the world's fossil collectors as the photo above shows (and they can be found on sale via internet search at many sellers of minerals and fossils).  Details of the occurrence of the presumed rare unbroken shells have not yet been located.  Obviously with so much shell fragment as a 'constituent', likely reworked in places, of the sediment/soil in sandy areas care must be made in interpretation of any associations.  In some places both the egg shell fragments of the giant bird and pottery fragments (10-18th centuries) are found weathering out of dune sands.  The Sheffield archaeologists hoped to further excavate to check whether early inhabitants were really eating the eggs as surmised by Professor Vérin.   There efforts however were inconclusive.  They did find two broken but relatively complete (and hence likely near where laid) eggs in the surrounding dune sand.  A major program of dating shells and human occupation traces is needed to correlate things in this area, coupled with stimulated luminescence dating of associated sediments.  Reports on how many intact eggs are being found and sold vary widely.  Some say complete eggs are very rare and but few in toto have ever been found, but this does not seem to be the fact.  In 1999 one single seizure of them in Le Havre comprised a smuggled consignment of 315 eggs (Newsweek International, 19 July 1999).  Part of the disparity in reported numbers may be because suppliers of fossils have grown very skillful in assembling suitable 'complete' eggs for the collectors market from fragments.

According to newspaper reports of the time, in 1992 children (six children by some accounts) found an elephant bird egg in sand dunes about one kilometre inland at a site about 200 km north of Perth (actually near Cervantes, about 250 km north of Perth) [One of the better early reports is in Issue 1866 of New Scientist magazine, 27 March 1993, page 6).  This was reported worldwide as the find ever of an elephant bird egg find south of Madagascar.  John Long, the Western Australian Museum curator of vertebrate palaeontology, tells (in "The Dinosaur Dealers" - Long, 2002  Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest) a different account of the find.  He stated the find was in January 1993 (but it may have been around Christmas, 1992).  He did not state schoolchildren found it but that: "nine year old Jamie Andrich was playing in the high sand dunes around the beach just north of Cervantes, Western Australia, when he made a remarkable find.  Poking out of the sand was a giant white egg".  Long immediately recognised it as an elephant bird egg and "guessed it to be about 2000 years old".   Long visited the site and recorded it was about 300m inland, not a kilometre, and in low dunes about 2m above sealevel.  A radiocarbon dating yielded an age of 2000 years +/- 75 years, so that Long had made a lucky exact guess about the age.  Long, however, tried to get it from the family (who were trying to auction it) by arguing that it was found on a Crown reserve and belonged to the Crown.  The family was infuriated and took the egg back to Cervantes and re-buried it.  They later dug it up and accepted a payment of AUS $25,000 from the government for it (Tooher, J., 1998.  Jamie and the elephant egg.  Australian Property Law. 6, pp. 117-143).  Long and others postulated that the egg might have floated there across the ocean (Long, J., Vickers-Rich, P.,  Hirsch, K., Bray, E. and Tuniz, C., 1998.  The Cervantes egg: an early Malagasy tourist to Australia.  Records of the Western Australian Museum. 19, pp. 123-129).  As a result of the expression of the "floated to Australia" idea, some subsequent descriptions of the species incorrectly add that an Aepyornis egg washed up on the West Australian coast (in the 1990s) with no explanation for this strange event. 

However, there is another claim that in 1930 a ten year old boy, Victor Roberts, found one in sand dunes near the coast, south of the Scott River, about 200 km north of Perth.  Victor Roberts later on became a cattleman and Councillor of the Augusta-Margaret River Shire.  In 1968 he wrote about his find and stated that there was present "at least part of a skeleton just a short distance away.  I distinctly remember that there was a very large skull with a beak on it." ("The Big Egg", Weekend Magazine (supplement to Weekend News), Perth. January 6, 1968, p. 9).  

According to Mr Roberts, he kept his egg in a cupboard for many years and tried from time to time to relocate his find, which he stated was in an area of shifting sands.  He was hoping for a funding grant to continue searching .. but it never came and his hope for such faded after 36 years.  Sometime by late 90s Mr Roberts had given his egg to the Western Australian Museum. 

 

 

 

STONE PILES AND MOUNDS

 

Besides earthen mounds stone mounds can be mysterious/odd too.

 

 

Stone mounds at  Laufskálavörður, Iceland - what caused these?   Many stone mounds are man-made.

(Photo:  Danny Yee)

 

 

Extensive work of stacking stone to form Celtic burial mounds, Inverness, Scotland.

 

 

 

Is this "Big Bird"?   A mound of angular stones in the form of a giant bird (eagle?) 9 miles north of Eatonton, Georgia.

The  mound rises some 10 feet above ground level and consists of thousands of small to medium size

angular pieces of quartzite.  During the 1930s A. R. Kelly of the University of Georgia excavated

the breast area of Rock Eagle, finding a single set of human remains and a projectile point

that  may or may not be associated with the effigy. (Photos: Brian Collier)

"Other curiosities of the Woodland era again involved accumulating staggering amounts of earth and other materials to form well-defined shapes, often in the forms of animals. Some of these conceptions reveal their designs only through an aerial view, often impossible for their builders to achieve without climbing tall trees. But erect them they did, even though they would have had difficulty seeing the full extent of their accomplishments.  In Putnam County in central Georgia, for example, thousands of stones are piled into the shape of a gigantic bird. Popularly known as Rock Eagle, the formation might represent a buzzard or perhaps a mythical bird. A second formation, quite similar to Rock Eagle, exists nearby in the same county, but is less well known. And in southern Ohio, a colossal serpent of dirt averages 20 feet wide and five feet high and stretches 730 feet long. The formation has intrigued many who have flown over the land and seen its curling shape" ( Grains of Pollen, Mounds of Earth - 1000 B.C. to A.D. 900 The Woodland Era - http://www.nps.gov/seac/beneathweb/ch7.htm ).

 

 

MOUNDS THAT MARK COOKING SITES

 

Many mounds are thought to mark habitation or cooking sites.    These have also been termed cooking mounds, ground ovens, camp ovens, tribal ovens and so forth.

 

 

 

 

Excavations at piles of angular rocks at Camp Bowie - "burned rock middens"

 

For decades, enigmatic deposits of angular broken-looking rocks, found throughout much of central and western Texas, confounded archeologists and landowners alike.  Currently they are interpreted as burned rock middens and Camp Bowie (a former large military camp) is a typical area for them (Viz. "Exploring Burned Rock Middens at Camp Bowie" - http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/bowie/index.html  )

 

The question of how these hot rock cooking ovens functioned has been studied at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory .  Most of the middens formed around a central baking pit.  While many kinds of plant and animal foods could has been baked in earth ovens, it is a labor-intensive method and is believed to have been employed mainly to cook certain kinds of plants.  For a small earth oven, the first step is digging a pit, usually a shallow pit a foot or so deep and 3-5 feet across. Within this oven pit a blazing wood fire is first built and when well alight large rocks are heaped upon it.   As the fire burns down, the rocks become very hot - sometimes even glowing hot. Using a long fire pole, the cook arranges the hot rocks into a circular bed with a flat or concave upper surface. This hot rock bed will then function as a heating element or thermal storage device that holds and slowly releases heat.   When this is functional a thick thick layer of green plant material such as wet grass is placed on the rocks.  This layer keeps the food from direct contact with the rocks and coals and, most importantly, releases steam. The food layer is added next and covered with an upper layer of packing material that adds more moisture and keeps the food clean. The final addition is an earthen cap which holds the steamy heat within the oven.

A well constructed earth oven may stay hot for many hours - up to 48 hours in some cases.   After the desired cooking time is up, the earthen cap, upper packing material, and the food layers are removed, leaving the bottom layers undisturbed.   Cooks often reused an existing oven pit, which was much easier than digging a new one.   For re-use they they first had to clean out the pit and dismantle the old heating element.   As they did this, they sorted the rocks at the bottom of the pit. Any large rocks that remained more or less intact were stacked for reuse, whereas the numerous fist-sized fragments broken by thermal cycling were tossed aside away from the oven, forming a debris ring or mound around the pit.  The more often the pit was re-used, the larger the ring or "midden" of broken rock surrounding it would become.

A bibliography of burned rock middens and fire effects on rock is at http://frank.mtsu.edu/~kesmith/TNARCHNET/Pubs/fcr.html

 

Other large earth ovens have been studied elsewhere in the southern USA.  At at Late Woodland era site called Simpson's Field in Anderson County, South Carolina, an oven was found that is so deeply excavated in the ground that an average-sized woman could stand inside and have only her head be visible. A dark stain of charcoal alerted searchers to the oven's existence. 

 

This oven was about five feet wide and four-and-a-half feet deep.  Dean Wood, who directed the excavation, speculates that to use the oven, people layered wood generously in the pit, set it afire, then tended the blaze until the flames reduced to red-hot coals. They put rocks heated in a fire above ground into the pit next, to radiate more heat. Then they added moistened leaves and grasses, and on top of them placed the meat. They then carefully covered the meat with more insulating vegetation.  The last layer they added was dirt, heaped on until the entire pit was covered, trapping the considerable heat generated by the coals and rocks.  Sometime later, they removed the dirt and leaves and ate the now-baked food.  ( Grains of Pollen, Mounds of Earth - 1000 B.C. to A.D. 900 The Woodland Era - http://www.nps.gov/seac/beneathweb/ch7.htm ).

In Australia there have been many scattered records of ground ovens and mounds thought to result from cooking or other habitation activities.   Many are recorded from western Victoria and South Australia (e.g. Adelaide plains).   A few examples follow:

* A 1908 newspaper article described  small ‘hillocks’ on the slopes near the Little Para River, as comprising Aboriginal ovens, decomposed vegetable matter and ashes (The Advertiser 5/1/1908).

* Local history of the Gawler River district include accounts of Aboriginal people moving along the river, constructing huts around large ‘perpetual’ fires which were later evidenced by ‘wide circles of ash, baked clay and artefacts’ (Reddin 1985, p. 80).

* A 1926 newspaper story quoted a resident of Two Wells about earth mounds in the area.  These measured about 10m in diameter and 1m in height, and were generally regarded as having been ‘tribal ovens’ (Register 22/4/1926).

* In 1957 Norman Tindale, ethnographer with the South Australian Museum, recorded a number of mounds at Bolivar.  He excavated in two of the largest mounds, revealing ashy sediment a metre thick which contained oven stones and a few bones  (Tindale Notebook II, 21/2/1957, p. 417).

* In 1970 skeletal remains found at Greenfields were reported on by the South Australian Museum.  The terrain was flat except for occasional earth mounds.  Children had dug out skeletal material from two of these mounds.  One mound was littered with  quartz chips and pieces of charcoal (Choate 1970, pp. 2-4).   One of the mounds measures 60m in diameter, and comprises and estimated thousand cubic metres of material.  More skeletal remains were unearthed in 1992.  (Draper 1992).

* Over 30 mounds have been recorded on the northern Adelaide Plains, and most are in clusters around the lower outwash plains of Dry Creek and the Little Para and Gawler Rivers  (Wood 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001; Wood and Westell 2002).

 

REFERENCES (general and mound references):

Balme, J. and Beck, W., 1996.  Earth mounds in south eastern Australia. Australian Archaeology.  42:39-51.

Belperio, A.P. and Harbison, P., 1992 St Kilda, Greenfields and the MFP-Australia Site: A geological excursion guide to natural, artificial and reclaimed wetlands.  Department of Mines and Energy Geological Survey, South Australia Report Book 92(38).

Bowman, D.M. and J.S., Panton, W.J. and Head, J., 1999.  Abandoned Orange-footed Scrubfowl (Megapodius reinwardt) nests and coastal rainforest boundary dynamics during the late Holocene in monsoonal Australia.  Quarternary International, vol. 59, issue 1.  Pp. 27-38.

 

Coutts, P. J. F., Henderson, P. and Fullagar, R.L.K., 1979.  A preliminary investigation of Aboriginal mounds in north-western Victoria. Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey No. 9.

Draper, N., 1992.   Greenfields Kaurna archaeological burial site: Progress report.

Grimes, K.G. (compiler),  1973.  Millungera 1:250 000 Geological Map Series.   Explanatory notes. Bureau of Mineral Resources, Canberra.

Hiscock, P. and Faulkner, P., 2006.   Dating the Dreaming? Creation of Myths and Rituals for Mounds along the Northern Australian Coastline.   Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 16, pp. 209-222.

Pickard, J., 1991.  Artesian springs in the western division of NSW. National Estate Grants Program No: NEP 91-376.

 

Pickard, J. 1992. Artesian springs in the Western Division of New South Wales. Graduate School of the Environment, Macquarie University, Working Paper 9202:1-123.

 

Read, Ian., 2002.  Driving Guide. Australia’s eastern outback. 3rd ed. Little Hills Press.  page 97.

 

Frankel, D., 1991.  Remains to be seen: Archaeological insights into Australian prehistory. Longman Press, Cheshire.

Lourandos, H., 1983.   Intensification. A late Pleistocene-Holocene archaeological sequence from southwestern Victoria. Archaeology in Oceania 18:81-94.

Lourandos, H. and Ross, A., 1994.   The great 'intensification debate': Its history and place in Australian archaeology. Australian Archaeology 39:54-62.

Martin, S. , 1996.   Hay what?  Mounds of the Hay Plain.  Paper presented at the 1996 Australian Archaeological Association Conference.

Peterson, N., 1973.   Camp Site location amongst Australian hunter-gatherers:  Archaeological and ethnographic evidence for a key determinant. Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 13(3):173-193.

Reddin, B., 1985.  My mother said: An anecdotal history concerning South Australia from 1838 to 1910.  Privately published, Adelaide.

Williams, E. 1988. Complex hunter-gatherers: A late Holocene example from temperate Australia. British Archaeological Reports International Series.  423.

Wood, V., 1995.   An Archaeological study of the Proposed MFP Stage One development at The Levels, South Australia. A report to MFP Australia.

Wood, V., 1996.   An archaeological study of the proposed upgrade of the Bolivar Wastewater Treatment plant, Bolivar, South Australia. A report to United Water, Adelaide.

Wood, V., 1998.   Aboriginal heritage study of the Parafield Gardens Zone variation.  A report to the City of Salisbury.

Wood, V., 2001.   Results of the archaeological excavation/survey program undertaken at Bolivar for the proposed relocation of the Port Adelaide treatment Plant and its associated pipeline. A report to United Water. 

Wood, V. and Westell, C., 2002.  An archaeological survey of the Bolivar Wastewater Treatment Plant, South Australia: Work undertaken toward the development of a Cultural Heritage Management Plan. A report to SA Water.

 

 

THE MOUNT OXLEY STONE MOUNDS / CRATERS

 

Disturbed stone atop of Mount Oxley strikes many people as "it must have been man-made", yet there is no evidence findable that there was any human hand in its origin (the writer in the 1980s spoke extensively to Bourke Aborigines about this disturbed stone but none said they knew of any tradition at all regarding it).

 

Mount Oxley is situated 50 kilometres from Bourke on the road to Brewarrina.  Charles Sturt discovered the mountain in  January 1829.  Governor Darling's instructions had been for Sturt should endeavour to get round the Macquarie marshes by the westward, as nothing whatever was then known of that north-west country, and that Sturt should establish a base to the north of Wellington Valley.   On 31st December Sturt crossed the Marra Creek south of the Big Lagoon and reached the Bogan near Cowga, sighting New Year's Range on 1st January. On the following day he reached and named Oxley's Table Land (Mt Oxley).  From the summit of the Table Land he saw in the distant south-west the hills which he named D'Urban's Group.   The party camped (17th January) on a water-hole under New Year's Range. From this camp Sturt and Hume made a short journey southerly over the claypan to the neighbourhood of Stony Hills, north-east of Coolabah,.  They then moved back to the Bogan to a point where a bar of red granite crosses the river. The actual point of contact would be somewhere between Gongolgon and Pink Hills. They followed down the Bogan to a point almost due east of Oxley's Tableland to which they moved on 23rd January. Here the main party camped while Sturt and Hume made a journey to D'Urban's Group. The nature of this group of hills and of Oxley's Table Land evoked in Sturt's mind the concept of these ranges being like islands in the midst of the ocean, "only wanting the sea to lave the base." The inland sea was never far from his mind. [ Charles Sturt - His Life and Journeys of Exploration.  Author: J. H. L. Cumpston.  ]

 

 

 

Mt Oxley (Oxley Tableland) is the NNE elongate patch of Mulga Downs rocks.   Note that its elongation

trend is sub-parallel to northeastly trending boundaries of outcrop areas of Girilambone and

Cobar Group age rocks  to the southeast.   Also two northwesterly trending edges of

Girilambone Group are perceived.  The disturbed area atop of Mt Oxley has such

an orientation.   (Map:  Burton et al., NSWGS Q. Notes No. 127)

 

 

Approaching Mt Oxley from Bourke  (Photo:  Rosemary Hegarty)

 

Atop of Mt Oxley, near Bourke, the appearance of a disturbed looking area of broken stone is a long-standing puzzle.  Descriptions from the past suggests the feature was there before 1911 and probably predates European arrival.

 

Geologist Steven Trigg (pers. comm. 2008) thought the area looked as though it might have been shelled by artillery.  However there is not thought to be any historical likelihood of that, and the diary of the first European explorer to reach  the mountain, Sturt, appears to record something noteworthy there, such that the feature probably predates him.   

 

Besides the artillery idea, others also have wondered if something struck the mountain from the air, to cause the disturbance of rock.   Or if gas erupted from within the mountain (geologically very unlikely); or if the disturbed stone was some Aboriginal or other 'quarrying' of any sort.   Queries were made by the present writer in Bourke in the 1980s, and at that time found nobody who considered quarrying of any sort as a likely explanation of the disturbance of the stone.  Since 1980s the 'craters' of Mt Oxley have become a tourist feature, and typical of the comment on them, by one visitor, is:  "One amazing thing about the top of Mount Oxley is a number of small craters formed in some loose rock piles that it appears were created around the time of it's discovery by Europeans. Sturt reported in 1828 that he heard a loud explosion like a huge gun discharge, however there is no actual evidence at to what has caused these small rocky craters but it is believed it may have been 'gaseous explosions'. Who knows.. but it does create an interest and plenty of discussion".   Or as the tourism material at Bourke Library states: "On top of the mountain you will find craters. It is not known what caused this, but early settlers and explorers, including Mitchell and Wills, reported hearing explosive sounds coming from the area of the mountain".   Geologists (Trigg and others) have also considered subsidence possibilities for generating the observed form of the debris.

 

 

Looking out from the edge of Mount Oxley  (Panoramic view, linked at Google Earth).   These mesa like ranges rising

above the 'endless plains' struck Sturt as being like islands in the midst of the ocean.

Top of Mt Oxley in Google Earth, showing  thin bedded horizontal strata above the cliff edge

and an area of 'cratered' disturbance.   Towards top of view is looking east.

 

Churned stone mounds/craters atop of Mt. Oxley.  Seemingly the "disturbed" area is surrounded

by grassy undistrubed area.    (Photo:  Rosemary Hegarty)

The disturbed area of low stoney mounds / craters, atop of Mt. Oxley, looking east.   (Photo:  Rosemary Hegarty)

Rosemary Hegarty (pers. comm.) of the NSW Geological Survey visited Mt Oxley in May 2008 and took some of the above photos.   She also reported that a brochure exists mentioning them (cover scanned, above) and is available at the tourist information office in Bourke.

 

This full brochure has not yet been obtained.  However, in summary per Bourke Tourist Information Centre, the "craters" on Mt Oxley have been considered by some as perhaps a clue to "one of the persistent mysteries of the outback" - that of loud unexplained booming sounds.  Sturt reported distinctly hearing "a report as of a great gun discharge" three times in his travels; twice in the Stony Desert, and once when near Mt Oxley in 1828.  He recorded that  "It might be surmised to have been some gaseous explosion, but I never in the interior saw any indications of such phenomenon.  Whatever occasioned the report it made such a strong impression on all of us and to this day the singularity of such a sound in such a situation is a matter of mystery to me". 

 

A paper on the subject of the "loud unexplained booming sounds". was published by the pathologist and naturalist (Sir) Dr J. Burton Clelend (1878-1971):

On the occurrence of explosive or Booming Noises in Central Australia ...

ON THE OCCURRENCE OF EXPLOSIVE OR BOOMING NOISES (BARIGAL [ETC] GUNS) IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA: By J. BURTON CLELAND, M.D. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales for 1911, pp. 187–203. Sydney, 1912.

This directly referred, in part, to Mt Oxley.  It relates a report from another naturalist, Mr D.G. Stead, who wrote "In regard to mysterious rumblings or explosive sounds - when I was on the dry Bogan during August of last year, I stayed for two nights on Mr Barton's station at Mooculta. While there, and while discussing various natural phenomena with Mr Reginald Kirkwood, Mr Barton's manager, the former told me that, not infrequently, at the end of the very hot days just around and a little after sundown were to be heard coming from the direction of Mt Oxley (which I could see from there, and which is a distant about fourteen or fifteen miles) rumbling explosive sounds, sometimes loud, sometimes muffled, according to the state of the atmosphere and the direction of the wind.  I suggest that it would probably be caused by bursting rock which had become intensely heated during the day, and was undergoing a rapid cooling process.  He agreed that this was extremely probable, but could not say from actual observation.  He also told me that the summit of Mt Oxley had numerous peculiar crater-shaped conical depressions: these were only about the summit.  This was most interesting to me and I specially noted it in my book at the time.  Upon making a close enquiry later, I found similar sounds had been heard coming from Mount Gundabooka, which I have also seen, and which is about forty miles SSW from Oxley.  Now both of these short ranges stand up like islands in a veritable 'ocean' of plain country, the radiation from which must be enormous".

 

 

MUD/GAS/WATER  ERUPTION FORMS

 

Re the possibility of 'exposive' mud springs, a perusal of the literature does indicate that this is not impossible.   Particularly for the Island of Sakhalin there have been reports of such.   Mud volcanoes on Sakhalin have been known to be active throughout historic time and they seem to be related to oil and gas fields.  The eruptions occur frequently, and sometimes explosively.  For example, in March 1959 and September 1961 large and exposive eruptions occurred.   In 1959 the Yuzhno-Sakhalinskiy mud volcano ejected 150,000–200,000 cubic metres of mud, covering 60,000 square metres.  In this eruption, mud with rock fragments and trees was propelled up to ca. 100 m into the air.  The discharge for the Pugachevskiy mud volcano in 1961 was similar, estimated to cover 8000 square metres with and expulsion of some 7200 cubic metres of mud.  This was thrown some 40-50 m into the air.  The diameters of the conduits are reported to be only 30–200 cm.   The Sakhalin mud volcanoes emit predominantly methane gas.  

 REFS:

Gorkun, V. N., and I. M. Siryk, 1968.  Calculating depth of deposition and volume of gas expelled during eruptions of mud volcanoes in southern Sakhalin, Int. Geol. Rev., 10(1), 4-12. ]

Siryk., I. M., 1962.   Mud volcanoes of south Sakhalin: The probable companions of gas and oil fields (in Russian), Geol. Geofiz., 7, 131–138.

 

 

Although there is nothing to support any gas/fluid eruptions in the Bourke region, gas eruptions to surface can

produce both elongate and circular cavities.  This example is from eruption of a gas-water-solids mixture,

forming short lived ebullient springs.   The cause was a leak in 1988 in the pipe connecting underground

gas storage and a pumping station near Teutschenthal in Germany. 

 (Source: E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung: http://www.schweizerbart.de  

- translation http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Hydro/Hutch/GasStorage/other.html )

 

 

 

A circular "blow" about 1.2 m across exposed in the sandstone roof of a mine at Coocoran opal field near

Lightning Ridge.   These features have long been interpreted by some as the trace of artesian

springs.   (Source:  Matthew Goodwin, on the Lightning Ridge Information web

initiative maintained by Wolfgang Johansson)

 

"Blow - a formation resembling a cylindrical 'tube' varying in diameter from a few inches to many feet and found in the actual opal 'level', sometimes containing some opal fragments and made up of a whitish sandy material which is often very hard. Thought to be steam or pressure vents millions of years ago."

( Quotation from an opal terms glossary at:  http://www.opalsdownunder.com.au/articles/speak.php )

 

 

 

Low vent if mud volcano area, Salton Sea.   (UCSD excursion at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea Reserve)

 

Eruptive mud mounds, Salton Sea.   (UCSD excursion at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea Reserve)

 

 

San Diego Association of Geologists trip to Mexicali Valley.

 

A geothermal zone is located in the alluvial plain of the Mexicali valley, above a spreading center bounded by the south end of the Imperial Fault on the northeast and the north end of the Cerro Prieto Fault on the southwest. Both faults are right lateral strike slip, part of the San Andreas Fault system.  Groundwater in sandstones and gray shales from the Colorado River delta are heated at depth.  Formation temperatures at 2500 meters are estimated at 350°C.

 

 

 

Bathing in the  top of the El Totumo mud volcano

 

 

( Photos:  Donna Airoldi )

 

El Totumo is a famous mud volcano 65 feet tall.  There are several mud volcanoes in the area.  In 1999 one nearby mud volcano which unexpectedly erupted and set forth a river of mud destroyed a village and killed one man.   The ones near Turbaco were first described by Alexander von Humboldt in 1801; they still exist today but have eroded and are now more pools of mud than raised cones.   In 1860 F. Bernal wrote (Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society; 1860; v. 16; issue.1-2; p. 197) wrote of the ones Humboldt saw "Turbaco is a village, about fifteen miles from Carthagena, at an elevation of about 980 feet above the sea. At a distance of about three miles

from the village, and at a rather higher elevation, in the midst of a forest, are some twenty or thirty conical hillocks, about 8 or 10 feet high, 

ach with its little crater or orifice, about 2 feet in diameter. These are filled with a muddy water; and every two or three minutes a slight noise is heard, a bubbling-up of air or gas takes place, the muddy fluid runs over, and forms into cakes of blue clay. The water is quite cool, nor is there any present or anterior marks or vestiges of the action of fire or heat".

 

El Totumo is the highest mud volcano in Colombia.  The ones at Turbaco which Humboldt illustrated (below) are now so eroded that they have become traps for straying cattle.

 

The Colombian mud volcanoes occur in several groups within Tertiary clay-rich folded strata, emitting methane and, rarely, oil (Gansser, 1960).  Apart from El Totuma, a large number of similar features are located along the Cordillera Occidental of northern Colombia.  Some activity of mud and methane bubbling has been reported in places (Humphrey, 1963).

 

REFS (not seen):

Gansser, A., 1960.  Uber Schlammvulkane und Salzdome, Vierteljahresschr. Naturforsch. Ges. Zuerich, 105, 1-46.

Humphrey, W. E., 1963.  Sedimentary volcanism in eastern Mexico and northern Colombia, Geol. Soc. Am. Bull., 74, 125-128. 

 

 

 

Drawing of the Turbaco mud volcanoes  (Alexander von Humboldt, published 1804)

( Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the

Years 1799-1804.  By Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. )

 

In May, 1801, Humboldt, accompanied by Bonpland, embarked at Cartagena, whence he proposed going first to Santa Fe de Bogota, and then to the plains of Quito. To avoid the great heat the travellers spent some time at the pretty village of Turbaco, situated on the heights overlooking the coast, where they made preparations for their journey. In one of their excursions in the neighbourhood they visited a very strange region, of which their Indian guides had often spoken under the name of "Volcanitos".  This was said  to be a volcanic district, set in a forest of palms about two miles to the east of Turbaco.  According to a legend, the country was at one time one vast collection of burning mountains, but the fire was quenched by a saint, who merely poured a few drops of holy water upon it.  In the centre of an extensive plain Humboldt came upon some twenty cones of greyish clay, about twenty-five feet high, the mouths of which were full of water.  As the travellers approached a hollow sound was heard, succeeded in a few minutes by the escape of a great quantity of gas. According to the Indians these phenomena had recurred for many years.

 

 

Clearly derivative from Humboldt's image - an engraving in 'Phenomena of Nature', published in London in 1849 for the Society for

 Promoting Christian Knowledge.  This states that the cones are up to twenty-five feet high and "throw out air with considerable force".

 

A further reference states: "In Colombia oil seeps are numerous in many districts.  Mud volcanoes are abundant in the Turbaco field of the Caribbean district and in the Tubara field, 20 miles east of Cartagen.  One hundred mud volcanoes are said to occur in an area of 3 acres near developed oil wells."  (Geology of Petroleum, by William Harvey Emmons, 1922).

 

 

Mud volcano, Orinoco delta.  (Photo: Edgar Guevara)

 

At the Orinoco Delta there is mud volcano activity in the Pedernales-Capure region along the north coast of the delta.  There are at least 7 volcanoes in the area.  Individual volcanoes are usually circular convex mounds of mud 100-300 m in diameter and 10-20 m tall. In several examples, the mud matrix encases cobble to pebble-size clasts of erupted sandstone, chert, and quartzite.  In several examples, tar seeps and pools of oil are present and mud-flow deposits are impregnated with petroleum.  The mud volcano belt parallels a regional fault zone and the South American-Caribbean plate boundary, which suggests that tectonic transpressional stresses are responsible for the diapirism, faulting, and active mud volcanism in the Pedernales-Capure region.  

 

MOUND SPRINGS IN NW NEW SOUTH WALES

The present writer in the 1970s-1980s compiled known spring sites, presumed artesian, between Bourke and Tibooburra, building on a series of photos and notes which were already at the Mining Museum in Sydney (original collector of the information unknown but doubtless done in conjunction with Mines Department Great Artesian Basin reconnaissance studies.  Only a proportion of the recorded sites were re-visited by the writer, who saw considerable "calcrete" (sometimes laminated) at some sites but could not find evidence to diagnose if it was pedogenic or spring-deposited.  Apparent build-ups close to springs favoured it not being solely pedogenic.  Unfortunately all photos and reportage on the springs at the Museum, along with most pre-Earth Exchange records at the Mining Museum, have gone astray or been lost.  Whilst at the Mining Museum the writer was contacted by at least two academics interested in mound springs and all then-available information was passed on.   Also, since then a much more comprehensive study of the mound springs was completed by Pickard (1992).   Pickard was the first person interested in the nature of these springs who attempted to locate and examine all of them.   Pickard's work was the first successful attempt to pull all of the scattered information on these springs together.   He examined most but a few earlier reported sites were not visited or not re-located.  In one site reported as unusual ("The Sounding Ground" 11 km NE of Fords Bridge, not visited) a 30m x 12m area of ground sounds hollow to the feet [cf. for Eulo "The mound is quite hard on top and sounds hollow if you jump on it" http://www.queenslandholidays.com.au/things-to-see-and-do/mud-springs/index.cfm    ].

 

The notes and photos at the Mining Museum indicated that someone else besides Pickard, using simple black and white photos, and typewriter written cards, had earlier started such a project to document the largely extinct springs.  Comparison of the Museum material with the literature survey for the Geological Survey's 1970s "GAB project" did not identify or even suggest who that early investigator might have been (or else it could have been someone who simply donated the photos and notes to the museum?).   Pickard referred to extensive notes on mud springs by Bourke historian W.J. Cameron (Bourke and District Historical Society). 

 

John Pickard is a botanist (author of "Vegetation of Lord Howe Island", 1978) and has been interested in vegetation and landscape changes over time (Quaternary research)  - as well as in plant conservation.    

 

Pickard (1992) established that there are 29 sets of these springs (with ca. 45 springs) in the Western Division of the State.     Also, most of these could very roughly be considered as concentrated in two elongate clusters:  one northwestly (Hungerford-Fords Bridge) and one northeasterly (Yarrangongany-Gooroomera).

 

 

Mound spring locations (Pickard 1992).   The springs influenced the early travel route from Bourke to Queensland border at Hungerford.   Population is sparse.   Fords Bridge has an artesian bore and a permanent population

of eight people.  Hungerford consists of a two or three houses and some rabbits on each side of the

rabbit proof fence.  Sign on the Queensland side of the gate threatens severe consequences for 

not closing it, and on the NSW side it seems more relaxed.  The police are on the Queensland

side as are the places for getting a drink on a hot day.

 

The Bourke-Fords Bridge-Yantabulla-Hungerford route reputedly originated by following the spings watering places.  

It may have been thought for a time that the tapping of artesian water would open the area up to development and these tiny town grew up.  However the development did not persist.  Fords Bridge, on the Warrego River, perhaps once seemed promising and for a time it had a butcher shop, post office, school,and race track.  However in recent years the permanent population has only been 4-8 persons.  The Warrego Hotel at Fords Bridge was, built in 1913 from mud brick.  Because of the dry climate mud brick survives adequately.  It may be the only mud brick hotel still surviving in all Australia(?).   Yantabulla is said to be a shortening of Yanda Bullen Bullen (Aboriginal for “Plenty to eat”).  It once consisted of nine houses, a hotel, store, school, a police station, a Cobb & Co. changing station and a cordial factory.  When the writer first saw it in the 80s it had one habitable house and a diffuse wide area of rubbish which was said to more or less mark where the settlement had once stood.  

 

 

The name Dowling Track for this route derives from Vincent James Dowling (1835-1903) who in 1859

established Fort Bourke Station on the Darling River.  In 1861 he founded Caiwaroo and Eulo Stations

on the Paroo River, and the Yantabulla and Birrawarra settlements in NSW.  He later (1864-65)

 settled at Thargomindah Station in Queensland.   He mapped the Paroo and Bulloo River

systems and made notes on flora and fauna throughout a wide district.

 

 

Rarely, stone piles are believed to be graves.  This one is on Comeroo (NE of Yantabulla)

 

 

This stone pile is interpreted as an intact hearth or cooking oven, western NSW  (Fanning et al, 2008)

 

(REF:    Heat-retainer hearth identification as a component of archaeological survey in western NSW, Australia,   Patricia C. Fanning, Simon J. Holdaway, Rebecca S. Phillipps.   In Press, 2008.)

 

Fanning et al. (2008) used of a fluxgate gradiometer as a tool to verify that concentrations of heat-fractured rock are indeed the eroded remains of heat-retainer hearths.  As the authors wrote,  these hearths were constructed by excavating a depression that formed the body of the oven into which stones and then food items could be placed for cooking.  Like the stone artefacts with which they are commonly associated, their presence on the surface in western NSW today is a consequence of erosion that is exposing them where we can see them, and at the same time causing their destruction. Hearths are no longer being produced, therefore the population is finite and, as a consequence of erosion, declining year by year. It is therefore important to document the record of Aboriginal occupation they present before they disappear.

 

 

 

Small size of a spring at Coonbilly (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Small spring vent in floor of Lake Eliza (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Small spring vent with bubbling, at western side of Perry Lake floor (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Liquid mud extruding at Thooro Springs (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Gravel covered spring mound at Lila Springs  (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Closer view of the gravel covered spring mound at Lila Springs  (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Small crater atop a gravelly mound at Native Dog Springs  (Pickard 1992)

 

 

Low raised rim around a vent at Youngerina Springs  (Pickard 1992)

 

 

REFS:

 

Pickard, J. 1992. Artesian springs in the Western Division of New South Wales. Graduate School of the Environment, Macquarie University, Working Paper 9202:1-123.  [Report for National Estate Grants Program No: NEP 91-376.]

 

 

 

 

MENTIONS OF "EXPLODING" MOUND SPRINGS 

 

 

 

Tourist sign at mound springs 9 km west of Eulo, in Queensland (S 28'08.987
E 144'57.199) states they can explode.  (Exact source of info:  Unknown)

 

Some statements on this have been recorded by the Lightning Ridge press and also published, from a Canberra chemist interested in mineral exploration, Byron Deveson.   Byron has been interested in mounds springs for a number of reasons - especially in regard to opal, but also other minerals.  Like others have done he has noted how early explorers mentioned "Barisal" sounds in the Great Artesian Basin area in the 19th century.  He is also interested if aboriginal legends may mention such noises and/or  activity at mounds - since when now-extinct mounds were active they could have been a focus of Aboriginal activity.  

Further gatherings are added in rough manner for the moment.   Some mentions found are probably from reporter notes from talks.  A better source, however, is a paper:  "The Origin of Precious Opal" by B.Deveson,  in Vol. 22, No. 2, , pp. 50-58, of the Australian Gemmologist  (click here for link) .   This contains material on exploding mound springs as in the following extract:

 

"""""

‘Exploding’ mound springs and the origin of blows

"A notable feature of Lightning Ridge opal is its common association with breccia pipes, known as blows. Breccia is also noted on other opal fields. It is known that artesian springs in other parts of the world can form breccia pipes, although the mechanism of their formation is not clear. There is both anecdotal and field evidence that some Australian mound springs occasionally erupt explosively, ejecting gravel and boulders 600 mm in diameter from rock derived from a formation 150 metres below (e.g. mound springs near Malpas, Queensland (see Grimes) and mound springs in the Eulo-Yowah district). Mound springs in the Eulo area are reported by Read (2002) to occasionally explode and then ooze a blue mud which changes to green in contact with air, and then dries to a brown colour."

"Further evidence of intermittent explosive activity of mound springs is found in the general form of many of the nearly extinct springs in NSW. Often, these (e.g. Tooloomi, Mascot, and Native Dog mounds springs) have the form of shallow craters surrounded by gravel and boulders, while there is paucity of such material in the general vicinity, and the springs are occasionally surrounded by broken silcrete boulders reminiscent of the surface expression of blows on the Lightning Ridge opal fields See Pickard 1991."

Address for correspondence:

 

Byron Deveson

PO Box 34

Waramanga

ACT 2611

redmud@bigpond.com

"""""

 

Deveson's "There is both anecdotal and field evidence that some Australian mound springs occasionally erupt explosively, ejecting gravel and boulders .." might also be compared with a statement in Pickard (1992) "Anedotes suggest that pressure may build up in springs which then discharge with almost explosive force spewing gravel, mud and bones out of the vent.  This may account for the crater-like shape of many vents."   Pickard (1992) recorded that Mrs O'Malley of "Youngerina" stated that about 35 years previously her husband saw water spurting up from Mother Nosey Spring.   She also noted that kangaroos and other animals would sink into the mud of the springs and about three months later the bones would be spewed back up.  Pickard recorded that Peter Dunk (lessee of "Waroo") mentioned "explosion-like force" of water at Currawynia Springs in Queensland which ejected a large quantity of old bones.  

 

"""""

 

Mr Deveson (pers.comm.) has updated on his interests in circular disturbances ("blows") at Lightning Ridge, and it is learned that he has also considered impact origin for some Lightning Ridge feartures, besides the upwards water flow idea.  A company associated with him (Opal HiTech) located a large (400m diameter) clay "diapir" at Lightning Ridge which is about 20m high.   They also found a well developed shatter cone about 200m from this diapir, and so postulated an impact influence.  The company's photogeologist, Dr Brian Senior, has located smaller clay "diapirs" in the same general area.  Senior and Deveson are intending to document this in a journal article.   Byron Deveson notes that breccia pipes are "very common" on the opal fields and that in places there are piles of stones around the surface of these pipes.   Bryon has considered it possible that some breccia within pipes ("blows") got washed out by rapid flows of water.   At the 400m diameter clay diapir he considers to have been initiated by impact (because of shatter cone presence) the interpretation is that overlying silcrete and sandstone was removed and liquified claystone ("opal dirt") rebounded and/or was squeezed up.  This resulted in the claystone being now at a level 20m higher than it is outside the diapir. 

The growth and collapse of mud mounds at two sites in northern NSW has been observed, and investigated by researchers at the Water Research Laboratory, UNSW School of Civil & Environmental Engineering.   The most  detailed investigations were carried out near Lake Goran, where mounds grew from a flat field in 1989 to measure 4-8 m in diameter and 1.2 m high.  Despite the recent appearance, and then collapse of the mounds in 2001, datings showed spring activity back to the late Pleistocene or early Holocene.   It was concluded that the growth and collapse of there mud-mound springs was related "intermittent magmatic gas discharge".  

 

REFS: 

Acworth, R. I. and W. Timms (in press).   “ Hydrogeological investigation of mud-mound springs developed over a weathered basalt aquifer on the Liverpool Plains, New South Wales, Australia.” Hydrogeology Journal.

Jones, N. T., M. A. Kavanagh, et al., 1998.  Hydrogeological investigation of a mound springs site in the Lake Goran catchment, Liverpool Plains, NSW., In: Proceedings of the International Groundwater Conference, "Groundwater: Sustainable Solutions", Melbourne, 8-13 February 1998.

Jones, N. ,  1997.   Hydrogeological investigation of El Roi moundsprings., MSc. thesis, UNSW Groundwater Centre, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

 

 

"""""  MISCELLANEA (Other collected notes).

June 10, 2004

EXPLODING artesian springs are the birthplace of opals, according to Canberra chemist, Byron Deveson. Mr Deveson has been testing a new theory on the formation of opals in Lightning Ridge this week.

If the theory, to be published by Australian Gemmologist, is right then opal is still being created. To test his ideas he is asking for "anyone who may have witnessed or heard an unexplained explosion" around artesian springs to get in touch with him. "There is both anecdotal and field evidence that some Australian mound springs occasionally erupt explosively, ejecting gravel and boulders 600mm in diameter," Mr Deveson said.

For instance in 1828 along the Darling River, explorer Charles Sturt recorded that when he was on Mount Oxley he heard "a rolling barrage like heavy artillery," he said. "He sent his tracker up a tree, but never did find the cause. "There are Aboriginal legends in the Northern Territory about 'desert noises' and in Bangladesh they call their exploding mound springs, 'Barisal guns'. At Eulo near Cunnamulla there were reports of noises every few years, while pebbles and boulders of exotic rock have been noted on many of the opal fields. Patches of gravel, some 10m thick which miners find at The Ridge "originated from unconsolidated gravel at the base of the Great Artesian Basin (GAB) that have been brought to the surface by the long term action of mound spings," he said.

Breccia pipes were evidence of sometimes repeated disturbances occuring in the clays. Gravel could block the springs causing huge water pressures to build up behind it, he said. They may block the spring completely or it may clear the blockage with periodic explosions. Backing his claim was evidence of gold, tungsten, silver and platinum found in Ridge opals and the presence of topaz crystals in the gravels, Mr Deveson said. There are two nearby sources of topaz - one of them in the New England area. "But topaz is a soft mineral of tin, that doesn't travel well," he said. The other source is the Gilmore Suture, a tin, tungsten and gold mineralisation belt within the basement of the GAB near Lightning Ridge.

Mound springs have all the ingredients for opal, Mr Deveson said. They are silica-rich, alkaline and high in minerals - and are found, both active and extinct near continental fault lines at Lightning Ridge, Mehi, Lila Springs, Nymagee, White Cliffs, Anda-mooka, Coober Pedy and Eulo/Yowah. Mr Deveson isn't the first to make the connection with artesian springs, fault lines and opals but what he adds is the fireworks.

(.. continued)

"""""

Eggheads & hard hats swap theories

 

Posted on Aug 18, 2005, 15:57

MORE than 200 miners, gem collectors and opal enthusiasts gave opal theories a workout with academics and researchers at the National Opal Symposium on Tuesday. The popular geological updates session attracted people who chearfully admitted they cut science classes at school but were utterly rapt working out how the theories meshed with what they saw and experienced as miners. It was the first chance for most to hear chemist Byron Deveson’s account of the role of mound springs in opal formation and Dr Patrice Rey on the role of hydraulic fracturing to form opal in boulder opal. Others grappled with Dr Simon Pecover’s theory on the role of breccia pipes in opal formation which had silica rising rather than falling came up against resistance from miners happy with the idea that opal formed by weathering of the sandstone cap.

 

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Youth of Opal sparks debate
Aug 18, 2005, 15:58

RESEARCH indicating opals may be as young as 10,000 years turned a lot of assumptions on their ears, during the geological updates at the National Opal Symposium on Tuesday. Katie Dowell, a post-graduate student at the Australian National University updated miners on her earlier work on the age of opal which indicated it could be between 10,000 and 20,000 years old, not the millions of years which opalised fossils would indicate. Byron Kennedy said young opal would not impact on his mound spring theory of opal formation because of the exchange of water throughout the system but Elizabeth Smith said she did understand how the fine structure of opalised fossils could have been formed. “You can’t argue with the age of dinosaurs so if opal is this young something has to be going on,” Ms Smith said. Among the interesting data uncovered, Ms Dowell found that despite the fact silica can take a multitude of forms, the structure of silica in gem opal was exactly the same as that found in the structure of plants. And despite research presented to the first symposium of bacteria found in opal, Ms Dowell said she had been unable to repeat that work. “We found any bacteria was the result of contamination, and we found no evidence of bacteria from slides prepared in sterile conditions in the biology department,” she said.

Lightning Ridge News is published by

 

2/91 Morilla St
P.O. Box 980
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Editor: Noni Rutherford
email: boaa@bigpond.net.au

[Note: "THE ORIGIN OF PRECIOUS OPAL" by B.Deveson did appear in Vol 22 Number 2, April - June 2004 , pp. 50-58, of the Australian Gemmologist.   However it may not have included all as is noted above from the Lightning Ridge press account of the same time - check.]

 

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OTHER VIEWS ON "BARISAL GUNS" SOUNDS

 

The Guns of Barisal and Anomalous Sound Propagation

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Source:  http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/waves/barisal.htm

 

Barisal is a small port on the Tetulia mouth of the River Ganges, on the northern shore of the Bay of Bengal, about 130 mi. east of Calcutta, and about the same distance south of Dacca, in Bangladesh. From the 1870's there were reports of hearing sounds resembling cannon fire, coming from the south or southeast. They occurred mainly from February to October, very seldom from November to January, and the source was unknown. The sounds were often multiple, in groups of two or three.

Similar sounds, called in the Netherlands and Belgium mistpoeffers, or in Italy brontidi, or marinas, or in the Phillipines retumbos, or elsewhere fog guns, were heard from time to time. They were reported from Passamaquoddy Bay in southwestern New Brunswick, in Belgium and Scotland, at Cedar Keys, Florida, Lough Neagh in Ireland, and in Western Australia, and in Victoria State. They were reported on an Adriatic island in 1824, at Franklinville, NY in 1896, and in northern Georgia. Lewis and Clark heard then on 4 July 1808. Though often heard at coastal locations and beside lakes, they were also heard away from bodies of water, and were described as booms, like thunder.

You may read in encyclopedias that the Guns of Barisal are supposed to be caused by earth movments too feeble to be felt. Earthquakes can make noises, but not when no movements are felt, and the noises are not like guns. The Guns, indeed, show no correlation with local earthquake activity. It is quite improbable that earth movements are the cause. When a search was made for possible sources, nothing was ever found. Sometimes it was thought that they might come from blasting a few miles away, but when this was investigated, nothing was found. The Barisal guns themselves came from the vastness of the Bay of Bengal. Thunderstorms were not reported at the time of the observations, but thunderstorms cannot usually be heard more than a few kilometers away. That the Guns were often heard near water means only that such locations were quiet enough to make unusual sounds noticeable. Not all the Guns were heard near water, anyway.

The Wikipedia article on Barisal has only one sentence dealing with the Guns, where it is suggested that they are connected with the tidal bore in the Meghna estuary. Tidal bores are regular phenomena, and if they somehow caused the Guns here, the Guns would be heard regularly, which they are not.

Seneca Lake in New York was the site of noises that were thought to come from the release of bubbles of natural gas from deep in the lake, observed as early as 1903. The bubbles were not ignited, of course, and if they were they would only have burned quietly. They were thought to come from the Oriskany formation, a sandstone that had been drilled for natural gas in the vicinity. These "guns" were still around in 1934, when the gas wells had been exhausted. There were also the "Moodus noises" of the lower Connecticut valley, known to the Indians and heard from 1709 to 1729, 1852 and 1885, and were heard again in 1897. They were described as a thunder and a roar. Unexplained explosions were heard near Deerfield, NH in 1846. All these noises are mysterious, but somewhat unlike the Barisal guns and similar booms.

An apparently different phenomenon was first noticed in 1666, during an engagement of the English and Dutch fleets in the Channel on 1 June. The sounds of the guns were heard in London, but not on the South Downs, Deal or Dover, all points between the battle and London. This was recorded in the diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys as a remarkable occurrence, that the winds brought to them the noise of the guns, but not to the people in between. In 1904 a large explosion at Förde in western Germany was accompanied by similar results. There was a small area in which the sound arrived directly, then a zone of silence, and finally the sound was heard again, at a distance of 100 to 200 km from its source. G. von der Borne explained this as the return of an acoustic wave reflected from a hydrogen or helium zone in the upper atmosphere, and he was supported by van Everdingen, who observed large explosions in the early stages of the World War. It was remarked that the noise of guns firing in Flanders could often be heard in the east of England, especially in the summer, but rarely in winter. When explosions were later made for the explicit purpose of investigating this effect, it was found that the apparent time of propagation showed that the waves reaching the zone of abnormal audibility had travelled on a path considerably longer than the direct one. It became clear that the sound was being reflected in the upper atmosphere.

A munitions factory at Silvertown, an industrial area in the East London Docks on the north bank of the Thames, exploded in January 1917. It could be heard in an elliptical area with a major axis of about 150 km in the NW-SE direction, and a minor axis of about 50 km, centred on the site of the explosion. This is the zone of normal audibility. Beyond, in the zone of silence, the explosion was not heard. About 120 km to the northeast, in Lincolnshire and Norfolk, the explosion was again heard, in a similar but somewhat larger elliptical area, the zone of anomalous audibility. In this region, the report was multiple, consisting of two or more bangs at brief intervals, a consequence of multiple paths.

Reports of strange sounds seem to be very much rarer now, and it is possible that they are being ignored in these noisy times. While rocking gently at anchor on a dark, still night on the Bay of Bengal, such booms will attract attention, but in a noisy city they would never be regarded. Since there are so many sources of bangs and booms in modern times, an odd bang from a great distance would never be recognized. Even in the past reports, the unusual sounds were normally thought to arise in the vicinity. I think it possible that the Barisal guns, and similar phenomena, are the sounds of thunder carried by anomalous propagation over several hundred kilometers to the points where they are heard. In many cases, the sound is described as much like thunder, and to come from the direction of the horizon, with no apparent source, and often in multiple, all of which is characteristic of noises heard by anomalous propagation.

Anomalous Sound Propagation

Very little was known about the upper atmosphere in the years immediately following the World War. The lapse rate in the troposphere was well known from balloon and aircraft ascents. The stratosphere had been discovered by Teisserenc de Bort in 1899, and the tropopause located at an altitude of 10 or 12 km. It was thought that each atmospheric constituent was then distributed independently according to its molecular weight, so that eventually, above about 100 km, the lighter gases, hydrogen and helium, would predominate. This was the basis for von der Borne's explanation of the return of sound to the ground. This explanation was attacked on the ground that the very low atmospheric pressure at high levels would remove most of the energy from the sound wave. Erwin Schrödinger showed that this was not the case, since the amplitude of motion would increase to maintain the energy of the wave, although there would be absorption, as predicted by Rayleigh. However, the altitude required was much too high to transmit sound without excessive attenuation, and so there was still a difficulty.

In 1922, Lindemann and Dobson published results from meteor observations that suggested a temperature of 300K at a height of 60 km. If the temperature was this high at such a reasonable altitude for sound propagation, then a good explanation of anomalous propagation was at hand, avoiding the difficulties with hydrogen and helium. It was not yet known that the photochemical production of ozone created a temperature maximum in the upper atmosphere that was comparable to ground-level temperatures. If θ is the angle that a sound ray makes with the horizontal, and c(z) is the speed of sound at altitude z, then the quantity cos θ/c(z) = constant, from the usual law of refraction. Then, if θ is the inclination of the ray at z = 0, the ray will be reflected at an altitude z such that cos θ/c(0) = 1/c(z), or c(z) = c(0) cos θ. For small angles θ, c(z) does not have to be much larger than c(0).

An additional effect is also important. As far as returning a wave to the ground, the velocity of the wind in the direction of propagation can be added to the velocity relative to the air. Since the temperature maximum is indeed about equal to the ground temperature, a wind in the direction of propagation will encourage return to the ground, while a contrary wind will oppose it. It was, indeed, found that in the winter, when the stratospheric winds were westerly in Europe, there was a zone of anomalous audibility to the east, but none to the west. In the summer, when the winds were reversed, the zone of audibility was moved to the west. On occasion, a second zone of silence and a second zone of anomalous audibility were observed, the sound making a double skip. Surface winds will have no strong effect, except in the launching of the wave.

At the time, there was no way of investigating the upper atmosphere directly. Balloons could only ascend to the stratosphere. Therefore, anomalous propagation of sound became of great interest as a means of probing the upper atmosphere. In 1923, a series of large explosions was set off from La Courtine in central France. These were the first experiments in which accurate time measurements were possible. By analyzing the results, Whipple found that the top of the stratosphere was at 32 km, and that the temperature increased to the value at the ground, 290K, at 46 km. He assumed a stratospheric temperature of 210K.

The present-day standard atmosphere has a ground temperature of 288K, stratospheric temperature 217K at 12 km, with an increase beginning at 25 km, and a maximum temperature of 283K at 50 km. It is clear that Whipple's results are very close to the truth. They were the very first good measurements of temperatures in the upper atmosphere. Whipple carried out further experiments with gunfire. A gun at Shoeburyness could be heard at Grantham, 185 km away to the north. Guns were fired from three points just east of London, and sounds were received at Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, Exeter and North Walsham, using hot-wire microphones. An array of three microphones, with accurate time measurements, allowed the determination of the angle of incidence. Experiments were carried out in December, 1932 with four explosions at Oldebroek in Holland, showing the expected zone of audibility to the east, and none to the west.

At 50 km, a typical temperature is 283K, pressure 0.66 mmHg or 0.88 mb, density 1.1 g/m³, molecular weight 28.966 (same as at ground level), number density 2.25 x 10²² m^-3, collision frequency 6.06 x 10⁶ s^-1, mean free path 75 μm, and speed of sound 337 m/s. Ionization is negligible, since 50 km is well below the D level of the ionosphere. Sound propagates quite successfully under these conditions. Above 50 km, the temperature again decreases, goes through a minimum, and then increases steadily. Ground level temperature is attained again at about 110 km altitude, but here the mean free path is only about 20 cm, so severe absorption except at very low frequencies is to be expected. The molecular weight is about 28.82, already beginning to decrease due to photochemical dissociation. There is also ionization at these levels, which could affect sound propagation. It is conceivable that low-frequency sound could return from such heights, but no observation has been reported.

The absorption of sound is very small, especially in dry air. The Rayleigh-Kirchhoff "classical" absorption due to viscosity is proportional to the square of the frequency, and depends on the ratio of the wavelength to the mean free path of the air molecules. Water vapor introduces a considerable added absorption. However, the upper atmosphere is remarkably dry, so this should have an effect only near the ground. The scattering of sound by turbulence also causes a decrease in intensity, as does the usual spreading. The principal effect of what absorption there is will be to attenuate the higher frequencies, converting a sharp crack into a boom. The initial sound wave from an explosion is usually a supersonic shock wave for a distance, and will certainly be characteristically modified during long-distance propagation.

It was discovered after World War II that at times there was an acoustic velocity minimum in the neighborhood of the tropopause. This meant that sound created at this level would be reflected both above and below, and would be channeled or ducted near this minimum, as sound is in the sea. Not only is the sound absorption very low in the atmosphere, but the spreading in a duct is only 1/r, instead of the usual 1/r²

The hot-wire microphone was often used as an acoustic detector, especially for infrasound. It was invented around the time of the First World War for use in acoustic artillery ranging, and an improved model was developed by Tucker and Paris [Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A221, 390 (1921)] and is described in Wood, pp. 303-305. It consists of a grid of fine platinum wire suspended in a hole in a mica disc closing the mouth of a Helmholtz resonator. A current is passed through the wire to heat it, while its resistance is measured with a Wheatstone bridge. The periodic air currents established when a signal is received cool the wire (at twice the frequency of vibration) and change its resistance. It is very useful for infrasonics, where impedance matching is more important than speed. The hot-wire microphone has no diaphragm to add inertia. It is useful for frequencies as high as 512 Hz, and is quite sensitive. Hot-wire microphones were often used in long-distance sound investigations.

References

W. R. Corliss, Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena (Glen Arm, MD: The Sourcebook Project, 1977). pp. 368-385.

F. J. W. Whipple, Propagation of Sound in the Atmosphere, Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 61, 285 (1935). Also Nature, 118, 309 (1926).

E. G. Richardson, ed., Technical Aspects of Sound, vol. II (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1957). pp. 9-14.

E. Schrödinger, Zur Akustik der Atmosphäre, Physikalische Zeits. 18, 445-453 (1917).

A. Wood, Acoustics (New York: Dover, 1960). pp. 169-177.

G. von der Borne, Physikalische Zeits. 11, 483 (1910). Explosion at Förde, Westfalen in 1904.

E. van Everdingen, Proc. Roy. Acad. Sci. Amsterdam, 18, 923 (1915).

Composed by J. B. Calvert
Created 25 February 2003
Last revised 28 September 2006

 

( Dr James B. Calvert - Associate Professor Emeritus of Engineering, University of Denver
Registered Professional Engineer, State of Colorado No.12317 )

 

 

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Other References:

 

1. G.B. Scott. "Barisal guns." Nature, 53 (January 2, 1896): 197.

2. "Report on Barisal Guns made at a meeting of the Sub-Committee held on the 17th July 1889, to consider the observations recorded during the year 1888." Proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1899 (August): 199-209.

 

 

 

COMMENTS   RECEIVED

Of the various 'mysterious' matters in NW NSW considered above no comments have been received about the area of disturbed stone atop of Mt Oxley.

On the matter of the earth mounds, two archaeologists have commented by email about being not in favour of the theory by some geologists and others that the mounds are not human-made.

The not-human-made theories the them have considered that either the burrowing bettong made them or else that large flightless birds made them.   Comments not in favour of that include as follows:

1)  Re "Because some of the curious features gathered and considered herein have no obvious geological explanation, some geologists have on first seeing them thought they'd likely be of human origin. That was early thought the case for earth mounds north of Broken Hill (until one Broken Hill geo-survey geologist, Peter Buckley, tried estimating the amount of 'dirt' involved and if former meagre food resources and low population numbers of humans could have moved/reshaped such amounts. Peter concluded "no", that humans have not made these features"

Comment:   It is urged to reword this text - It does not represent contemporary archaeological theory or evidence from other mound sites complexes from around Australia.

My first impression of the mound photograph (i.e. koonenberry-mound.jpg)  is it looks exactly like so many mound sites I have seen in archaeological studies that unless proved to be a classical geological formation I would say it is highly probably cultural in origin. Mound sites can occur as single sites or part of a complex of sites. Then the research would begin to determine if it was prehistoric or historic. The archaeological analysis of a core sample of the mound could assist in determining if it was a Megapode mound, shell mound, earth mound, or combination.    Peter Buckley's assumptions may be valid if thinking these mound were made as a construction project however this mind set is modern and not useful for a scientific anthropological/archaeological view.   Australia' north Weipa still contains many examples of shell mound of monumental size that have been determined as of human origin.  They were once also thought to have been impossible to have been made by Aboriginal people. 

Australian archaeology has identified vast complexes of shell and earth mound sites in Western Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland and NSW.

Complexes of mound sites are thought to have evolved over possibly thousands of years and are dated from samples from the base and top stratigraphic layers.

Peter has no evidence for determining the region's population levels in the pre-contact eras.  Current archaeology theory argues that in Australia population varied over time and varied regionally depending on climatic variability.   A site can be abandoned and reoccupied 500 years later.