earthstory:Great Blue Hole sheds light on Maya collapseLocated off the coast of Belize in an idyllic
earthstory:Great Blue Hole sheds light on Maya collapseLocated off the coast of Belize in an idyllic coral reef, the blue hole is part of a karst limestone landscape that was flooded by sea level rise at the end of the last ice age (see http://on.fb.me/1KbMC2M). Made famous by one of Jacques Yves Cousteau’s films (for our biopic see http://on.fb.me/1wcAeKd), it is a famous site in the diving world that he first made possible by inventing the aqualung.The cave has already been used in research on Saharan dust transport across the Atlantic since its depths make an ideal sediment trap, and now new work has confirmed the inference from other sources that the Maya civilisation fell after a series of long droughts. They used a series of sediment samples from the epoch of their demise (around 800-1000 CE) and compared the changing ratios of aluminium and titanium, which reveal periods of heavy rainfall from tropical cyclones (the source of most of the water that kept the Mayans alive). Keep reading -- source link