I’ve wondered before if the echo, imprint of every sound ever made wasn’t somehow embedded in the environment, to be subtly teased out by the right quiver of instruments and detectors, and now see that archaeologists have achieved something even more interesting that speculative acoustic conservation by studying the pottery shards of ancient civilizations.
Researchers found that ores mixed in with clay act as archive, a snap-shot of geomagnetic activity that was happening invisibly in the skies, except maybe as auroras, by cementing the orientation of the minerals when the clay is fired in the kiln. Clay and ceramics being produced at the present time, stretching back over aeons, all record the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field and represent an untapped chronicle of how the Earth has been protected from cosmic radiation and digging down through the strata of
pottery fragments gives an indication of the periodicity of powerful spikes in the intensity of geomagnetic events, ones which may have been harmless in ancient times but which would now certainly disable the power grid and present an unimaginable disruption to the way we live.
