The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

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I have difficulty taking this one seriously, which might not be an utter surprise, given the fact that we’re talking about a post about an alleged research project posted to a science fiction site. An unnamed “researcher” (identified elsewhere as Mark Holley of Northwestern Michigan College) claims to have found a Stonehenge like arrangement of boulders at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Looking at the picture included in the article, the only thing circular in it seems to be the field of view.

A thumbnail of what is said to be a sonar image of this supposed find can be seen below. How would you describe the distribution of the rocks you see in this image – as being a circular arrangement, or as something more linear, with a little random scattering – as one would expect to see if the river of ice that carved out the canyon that became Lake Michigan had melted, and dropped the rocks?

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How would a stone circle – were one present – end up at the bottom of a Lake that every child growing up near its shores knows was carved by glaciers? The article states “These submerged stones could have been raised by local populations at a time when part of the lake bed was dry, in the late Ice Age.” Except that the Lake, again as we all grow up knowing, was initially filled with the water from the glacial melt, so there was no such time – the Lake has been retreating, not advancing, over the millenia.

Another user (lprnal) tries to make the blog writer’s suggestion sound more reasonable than it is, saying “lake michigan has been shifting and evolving for quite a while now, and sometimes it’s not slow at all. For example in the door peninsula, there are bluffs which are quite high you can stand on, that used to be right on the edge of the water.”, but again, this is not due to the ground around the lake moving, but to the level of the lake dropping.

So I found this all quite strange. … read

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