One of which was the discovery of mystical stones. Costa Rica's giant stone balls became famous all over the world after the release of the film about Indiana Jones. For science, however, the origin of these strange structures has remained a mystery.
Discovery history
The archaeological site was found relatively recently - about 50 years ago. For a long time, mysterious spheres were hidden in the wild, impenetrable jungle. While cutting down trees for plantations in 1948, workers stumbled upon round stone statues. Scientists immediately became interested in the finds. Several hundred balls had various sizes: the largest ones in diameter reached 3 m and weighed almost 16 tons, the smallest ones did not exceed 10 cm. geometric shapes. They were circles, squares, triangles, stretching for several kilometers. It immediately became clear that the balls were laid by people, but it is not clear for what purpose, and how the stone statues got into this area.
Stone balls of Costa Rica. Origin theories
All balls have a precise rounded shape, which can be created only with the use of measuring technology, and, therefore, the spheres are the work of a person. According to analyzes, the age of the balls is 1500 years. During this period, Costa Rica was inhabited by the Mayan tribes. Scientists are sure that the Indians used a stone processing technology that is not known to modern mankind. Excavations in the area of the finds showed that the balls were brought here through impenetrable swamps and jungles from the quarries, since no tools were found nearby. Scientists have put forward a number of hypotheses trying to explain how the stone balls of Costa Rica appeared among the wild forests.
Theories of the origin of the spheres are different:
- Stone balls are placed in the form of no one constellations ... This combination was necessary for astronomical observations to help calculate the start and end times of agricultural work.
- Ancient civilizations possessed the most powerful military equipment . Balls could serve as cannonballs for throwing weapons. The geometrical placement of the spheres may have been necessary for training activities at the training ground.
- Some scholars believe that the stone spheres represent communication with alien beings ... The delimitations, in the form of which the stones are laid out, are a kind of landing strips intended for space objects.
Manufacturing process
Scientists believe that the Costa Rican stone balls, theories of whose origin have not yet been proven, were made from stone blocks by processing and grinding. The stone breaks off easily with a sharp change in temperature. For this, the workpieces were heated with coals and then sharply cooled with water. Excess pieces were chipped off by striking the stone with harder materials. When the boulders were close to completion, they were sanded with sand or leather. As a result, we got a perfect round shape. Inaccuracies were not detected even when measuring with a tape measure and a plumb line. This proves once again that the Indians had good mathematical and physical knowledge in the field of stone processing.
Transportation
And the way the stone spheres travel to the place where they were found. According to researchers, this distance was tens of kilometers through impenetrable swamps, rivers and forests. It is almost impossible to move the giant stone balls of Costa Rica weighing 16 tons without special transport. Analysis of some of the spheres showed that they were made of shell rock and limestone, which are found on the banks of the Dikvis River. This meant that the heavy boulders were transported deep into the jungle upstream at a distance of 50 km. Unfortunately, the answer to these questions has not yet been found.
Scientists who made reports at UNESCO after careful research did not come to a common opinion and could not give an exact answer where the giant stone balls of Costa Rica came from. Therefore, the finds have not yet been entered into the World Heritage Register.
The mystery of the stone balls of Costa Rica
Costa Rica's Stone Balls are strange, perfectly circular stone formations discovered in the 1930s, one of the greatest mysteries of pre-Columbian America. Hundreds of such stone balls ranging in size from a few centimeters to 7 feet in diameter, the largest of which weighs 16 tons, have been found in the Diquis area of Palma Sur, near the Pacific coast of southern Costa Rica. Most are made of granodiorite, an igneous rock similar to granite. But a few specimens were carved from shell rock - a type of limestone, consisting mainly of shells and their fragments.
How the stone balls were found
Balls were first talked about in the 1930s, when the United Fruit Company cleared the jungle for banana plantations and other fruit plants. The workers of the company found the balls and, recalling the local legend about the spheres covering the gold cores, tried to split them with dynamite, in the hope of finding the gold hidden inside.
Ball Research
1948 Dr. Samuel Lothrop of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University and his wife undertake a comprehensive study of the stone spheres. 1963 - Research results were published. In his report, Lothrop described all 186 known examples and noted that he had heard that there were 45 more balls somewhere in the Yalaki region, where they were, but they were transported somewhere.
Several spheres have also been found in the Pacific Ocean on Kano Island, 12.5 miles to the southwest. This can serve as a confirmation of the version that several hundred such stones were once created. Beginning in the 1940s, stone spheres began to be transported - often they were moved by rail from one end of the country to the other. Some of them can be seen in the National Museum, others in the parks and gardens of the country's capital, San Jose. To date, only six Costa Rican stone balls are known to remain where they were found.
The scientific analysis of the stone balls of Costa Rica has been going on for decades. The work began in 1943 by the archaeologist Doris Zemurrey-Stone, the daughter of Samuel Zemurrey, the founder of the United Fruit Company. She conducted research on stones found by workers at a fruit company, and later became director of the National Museum of Costa Rica and in 1943 her work was published in the journal American Antiquity. There were 5 maps of the area on which 44 stone balls were placed.
According to Stone, these balls could be cult statues, tombstones, or were elements of some kind of calendar. Lothrop's 1963 publication also included maps of the areas where the spheres were found, comparative analysis of nearby pottery and metal artifacts related to stone balls, as well as many photographs and drawings depicting the balls, data on their sizes and notes on the location. spheres.
Archaeological excavations
Later, in the 50s. XX century, archaeological excavations were carried out, thanks to which stone balls were discovered in the south of Costa Rica, along with pottery and other artifacts related to the cultures of pre-Columbian America. Since that time, research has been carried out regularly, but the most thorough ones were the excavations carried out by the archaeologist Iphigenia Quintanilla from the National Museum of Costa Rica in the 90s and 95s of the 20th century.
Versions of the origin of stone balls
For many years, archaeologists have been trying to figure out the origin of these strange balls. The subject of controversy remains whether they are natural objects or man-made. Some of the geologists claim that the spheres are of natural origin. They put forward a theory according to which magma that rises into the air after a volcanic eruption settles on a hot ash-covered valley, then the magma balls cool and form spheres.
According to another version, the granite blocks were in specially dug holes, at the bottom of a huge waterfall and under the influence of the flow of falling water, over time, they acquired an almost perfect spherical shape.
However, a more probable version is that the stones were created by man, especially if we take into account that granodiorite, from which balls are mainly made, does not occur in these places. Deposits of this rock are found in the Talamanca mountain range, about 50 miles from the find.
Archaeologist Iphigenia Quintanilla in the course of field research was able to establish the source of raw materials: she discovered boulders, which can be called unfinished specimens of stone balls. During the excavations of Quintanilla, shards of the balls were also found, which made it possible to restore the method of their creation. To give the stones a rounded shape, most likely they did this: at first, an approximately rounded boulder was alternately affected by heat and cold, until cracks began to appear in the rock, then the surface was leveled with heavy stone sledgehammers, made, possibly from the same material, and polished with some kind of stone tool.
There is only one objection: the stones have an almost perfect spherical shape. They are embossed to the nearest "0.5" ± 0.2% "accuracy. The version might be flawless if the spheres were not carved with such precision. However, the surface of the boulders is not absolutely perfect: the diameters of some of them differ by 5 cm from the parameters of the regular sphere. It is also unclear how the inhabitants of pre-Columbian America could transport and install them in the right places. Skills of this kind indicate a highly developed culture and a well-organized community (although, if the stones were carved right in the quarry, in the mountains, it was not difficult to roll the balls down).
So who created these balls?
The question of who could create these mysterious spheres and why is a more difficult task. According to archaeological data, the spheres were carved for 2 periods. The earliest of these, the Aguas Buenas period (AD 100–500), includes only a few balls. Most of the stone balls in the lowlands of the Terraba River were created in the second period - chiriqui (800-1500), but this can in no way help to clarify the purpose of the spheres.
Let's bypass such a convenient explanation as the intervention of aliens and Atlanteans. The original theory is that they were created by a highly developed prehistoric culture and served as antennas for the ancient worldwide electrical network. But without concrete evidence, such a theory is groundless and seems as mythical as the legend that the locals had a potion that was able to soften rocks.
Why were the Costa Rican stone balls created?
It has not been established exactly what these spheres were created for. This is especially difficult to find out because most of the balls have been transported to other places. This issue is important because the placement of the balls appears to have played an important role in the lives of the people who created them. It should be noted that initially many balls were arranged so that each place corresponded to the position of the Sun, Moon and all planets known at that time. There is even a version that they reflected the entire solar system.
In the 1940s, while studying the balls, Lothrop noticed that some of them had rolled down the nearby hills that once housed dwellings. Probably, the spheres at one time were located in the center of settlements, on the tops of the hills. In this case, they could not be used in astronomy and, of course, in navigation. Most likely, for more than a thousand-year history of existence, stone balls performed many functions that have changed over time. An interesting version is that the laborious production of balls in itself could be an important ritual process. At the same time, it played the same role (and perhaps even more significant) as, in fact, its result.
Nowadays
2001 - With the assistance of various government agencies, the National Museum of Costa Rica began transporting the balls from San Jose through the high mountain range to the places where they were found. Nowadays, they are protected in a storehouse, but when the cultural center is built, the spheres will be placed in it and they can be seen in the very places where they were originally located in the Dikvis delta.
Archaeologists today find balls in the muddy sediments of the Dikvis delta. Today, stone balls can be seen in museums in Costa Rica, they decorate the lawns in front of various official buildings, hospitals and schools. Two of them were taken to the United States: one is on display at the Museum of the National Geographic Society (Washington, DC), and the other is in the courtyard of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Costa Rica's stone balls also adorn the gardens of the wealthy as symbols of their position in society.
Costa Rican stone balls
Another megalithic mystery, which, among similar ones, again turned out to be completely insoluble for modern adherents of academic science, was the mystery of the stone balls of Costa Rica. And in front of me - how many of them there were already: the flying machines of the ancients, and the pyramids of Egypt, and Stonehenge, and Karnak, and Mitla, and the labyrinths of the North - you cannot list everything, again and again the age-old question arises - will I cope with this task Can I solve this ancient crossword puzzle too? And as it was with others: at first - as if everything is in darkness, and then more and more, and at first small, and then - and larger details of clarity appear ... And there, you see, - that's the result!
But, everything is in order.
In the late 1930s, a local newspaper reported an unexpected find in the jungles of Costa Rica, this small Central American republic. It turns out, cutting through a clearing, the workers of the fruit company stumbled upon a scattering of stone balls out of nowhere. Among them were huge ones, reaching 3 m in diameter and almost 16 tons in weight, and there were also very small ones, having a diameter of no more than 10 cm.Not without a curiosity: the workers who discovered these objects recalled the local legend about the spheres covering the gold cores, and they tried to split them with dynamite, hoping to find, like Balaganov and Panikovsky, the gold hidden inside. But, for some reason, their expectations were not met, nothing foreign was found in the core, everything was just a solid stone.
The original location of the discovery of the stone balls
The original stone balls were found in the Terraba delta near the cities of Palmar Sur and Palmar Norte. Subsequently, it turned out that they are scattered throughout Costa Rica from the north (Estrella valley) to the south (Coto Colorado river).
Several balls were found in the Diquis delta, others were found in the Jalisco area near the city of Aulaluco de Mercazo in Mexico, in the area of Los Alamos and in the state of New Mexico (USA). It should be noted that all these areas are distinguished by rather active volcanic activity ...
In 1967, an engineer who worked in the silver mines of Western Mexico and was fond of history and archeology, told scientists from the United States that he found in the mines the same balls as in Costa Rica, but much larger. In his opinion, they were made by the Aztecs. This sensational statement had the effect of a bomb exploding. Then in Guatemala, on the Aqua Blanca plateau, located at an altitude of 2000 m above sea level, near the village of Guadalajara, an archaeological expedition discovered hundreds of balls, which were an exact copy of the Costa Rican ones.
Stone sphere in the courtyard of the National Museum of Costa Rica
Scientists managed to find similar stone balls in completely different places on our planet - in the Kashkadarya region of Kazakhstan, Egypt (Kharga oasis), Romania (Kostesti), Germany (Eiffel), Brazil (Corupa deposit), Chile, New Zealand and even on Franz Josef Land (Champ Island). And in 2008-2009, they began to be found on the territory of Russia - in Siberia, the Krasnodar Territory and the Volgograd Region.
As you can see, there are many stone spheres on Earth. But still the balls of Costa Rica are considered the most unique of such products. Their quality is admirable: some have such an absolutely regular shape and smooth surface that the question involuntarily arises: how were they made? And what is their purpose?
The National Museum of Costa Rica has a catalog of about 130 spherical stones that have survived to this day. But there are many more balls not listed. In general, more than 300 stone spheres have been found in Costa Rica. There are undoubtedly many more to be found: they are hidden underground and in the dense jungle.
Counting these ancient monuments caused a number of difficulties: many of them were removed from their former place and are now one by one in the gardens and temples. Other similar stone artifacts adorn official buildings in Costa Rica, such as the Legislative Assembly, or hospitals and schools. They can be found in museums, as well as in the estates of the country's wealthy residents. Two balls are on display in the United States: one of them is in the museum of the National Geographic Society in Washington, the other is in the courtyard of the Museum of Archeology and Ethnography at Harvard University.
Location geometry
The earliest studies showed that the balls were located, as a rule, in groups of three to forty-five pieces. Many of the balls, some of them in groups, were found at the top of the mounds. But the most amazing thing happened next. Costa Rican scientists, interested in stone balls, decided to look at the find from above, from the air. The helicopter rose above the jungle - and under it suddenly a page from a textbook on geometry, stretching for tens of kilometers, floated under it. Rows of balls folded into giant triangles, squares, parallelograms, circles ... Lined up in straight lines, some - exactly oriented along the "north-south" axis ...
These geometric constructions were then used in the advancement and some hypotheses of functionality.
Hypothesis 1. Balls in groups are arranged, like models of some constellations. It is possible that these bizarre stone mosaics of balls were intended for astronomical observations associated with calendar calculations and timing of agricultural work. In this case, it is quite appropriate to assume that somewhere nearby there was a highly developed civilization - the predecessor of all the ancient civilizations of Central America.
Hypothesis 2. As already mentioned, one group of four balls was aligned with a line oriented to magnetic north. This has led some scientists to speculate that they may have been placed by people familiar with the use of magnetic compasses or astronomical orientation.
In general, there have been plenty of versions of the functional purpose of stone balls. I am not going to comment on them, just, in addition to the indicated 2 hypotheses, I will list others:
the spaced balls are like constellations, they are symbols of heavenly bodies, a reflection of the entire solar system;
balls served to mark the boundaries between the lands of different tribes;
these are the navigational instruments of a highly developed ancient civilization - Atlantis;
stone spheres are symbols of social status;
or maybe these are the balls of the gods when they played their game?
guests from other cosmic worlds chose this place of congestion of balls as their permanent cosmodrome, and the huge spheres are therefore located in the form of boundary lines, which performed a function similar to the current landing strips of airfields;
some archaeologists believed that under the balls there could be a kind of capsule with messages from our alien brothers in mind, left by them when they finally decided to leave our planet;
most likely, over the more than a thousand-year history of their existence, the spheres have performed many functions that have changed over time;
an interesting version is that the labor-intensive production of balls in itself could be an important ritual process. Moreover, it played the same role (and maybe even more significant), as, in fact, its result;
the ancient inhabitants of Costa Rica were surprisingly warlike and possessed powerful technical military means. For example, they could have projectiles of exceptional power. Stone balls are just "projectiles" scattered across the battlefield. Maybe it was not even a battle, but here military exercises (maneuvers) took place, a huge field is a kind of training ground for throwing weapons.
Difficulties. By now, almost all groups have already been destroyed, so measurements taken about fifty years ago cannot be verified for accuracy. Virtually all known balls have been displaced from their original location during agricultural work, destroying information about their archaeological contexts and possible groups. Some of the balls were blown up and destroyed by local treasure hunters who believed in the fables that the balls contained gold. The balls were rolled into ravines and gorges, or even under water on the seashore.
The question is - where did you come from?
Scientists are still engaged in fierce disputes about the balls, there are many versions of their appearance, but none of them has yet been confirmed. But, there are also 2 main versions - natural and artificial.
Version - geological natural formations
According to it, it is believed that 25-40 million years ago, several dozen volcanoes suddenly woke up in Central America. Their eruptions caused catastrophic earthquakes. Lava and hot ash covered vast territories. It was then that the glassy particles ejected from the vents of volcanoes began to cool. They, they say, were the embryos of gigantic spheres. Around these nucleoli, the surrounding particles of the eruption products gradually began to crystallize. Moreover, crystallization proceeded uniformly in all directions, so that a sphere with an ideal shape was gradually formed.
And then nature acted - through such factors as water, wind and rain, which washed away ash and soil from day to day. Due to this, over time, the "whitened" stone balls appeared on the surface. For example, it has been established that in areas of the Earth with large daily temperature differences (fluctuations), ordinary weathering, called exopholization, "works" very effectively. In this case, the rocks collapse spontaneously as a "falling husk", that is, the outer layers of a stone formation are gradually separated, like the husk of an onion, which, in the end, allows only a solid spherical core to remain "alone".
If the centers of the balls were located close to each other, then the stone spheres could even grow together with one another. And in support of this conjecture, several intergrown such balls were found.
Thus, there appeared not some unfounded assumption explaining the origin of stone balls, but a well-founded hypothesis. It would seem that the mystery of the origin of the stone spheres has ceased to exist, but not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance ...
And all due to the fact that the fact that the balls clearly have traces of grinding does not fit into this - geological - version, and, moreover, they are clearly laid according to some kind of system. And one more objection - balls are found in places where no volcanic activity is observed at all. And the main thing here, the version is not able to explain through volcanic activity the emergence of balls from a material such as granite.
In addition, many balls are made of granodiorite - a hard coarse-grained rock of magmatic origin, which is intermediate in mineral composition between granite and quartz diorite. The granodiorite deposit is located in the foothills of the Talamanca mountain range. But, this factor plays against the geological version: in the area where the balls were found, there is no such material, and granodiorite deposits are found no closer than 50 miles from the place where the megaliths were found.
There are several balls made from coquina, a hard, limestone-like material that is formed in coastal sediments from seashells and sand. Perhaps these balls were brought inland from the Terraba delta.
Spherical formations of the Urals are natural geological objects
And they are also natural objects
Version - hand made
Archaeologists, unlike geologists, recognize that the balls were not made by nature, but by humans. And they believe that these balls were made and laid by very skillful people. But, with what tools did the ancient craftsmen work, who managed to give the stone the correct spherical shape? Suddenly, scientists were faced with an incredible fact: apart from stone spheres in this area, there was not a single object indicating the presence of a person here. No stone tools, shards, or bones were found. Nothing!
And, developing the version, it is believed that the balls were made from huge boulders, which were processed to a spherical shape by chipping off parts and grinding. Granodiorite exfoliates with sudden temperature changes. To remove a thick layer of material, the workpiece must be heated, for example with hot coals, and then quenched with water. When the boulder is already close to spherical, the material is removed by striking it with the same hard material. Finally, the last stage of processing is sanding to a shine. This process is similar to that used in the manufacture of stone axes and stone statues and is believed to have been achieved without the use of metal tools, laser gauges, and alien assistants. To top it off, the ball could be polished with sand or leather.
As one serious scientist explained, I will not promote his name, larger balls " created by the most skilled craftsmen, and their shape is so close to perfection that measuring the diameters with a tape measure and a plumb line did not reveal any inaccuracies”. He also says that the natives had mathematical abilities, extensive knowledge in the field of stone processing and knew how to use tools. But since those tribes, apparently, did not have a written language, there are no records of the technology for making the balls, and information about the method of making, of course, has not reached us.
The question is when?
Aside from all the other unsolved mysteries, it remains unclear when the balls were made. For such items, radiocarbon analysis, which is used to date only biological remains, is not applicable. Therefore, the determination of the age of the stone spheres was carried out according to accompanying objects that were found with them in the archaeological layers. Stone balls have been found in pottery beds from the Aguas Buenas culture, which dates from about 200 BC to 800 AD. Stone balls have been found in burials with gold decorations dating from around 1000 AD. They were also found in beds with crockery shards from the Chiriqui period, dating back to 800 BC. until 800 A.D. This type of pottery was found along with the iron tools of the colonial period, produced up to the 16th century. Thus, balls could be made at any time and for any foreseeable period.
The age of the stone balls is unknown
However, many of the researchers are sure that they were made much earlier - in the most ancient times. A scientist from the USA D. Erickson claims that the balls appeared more than 12 thousand years ago. This, allegedly, is proved by the finds of balls on the seabed, where they were installed at a time when there was still land ...
Who made it?
The balls are believed to have been most likely made by the ancestors of the peoples who lived here before the Spanish conquest. These people spoke the Chibchan language and lived in an area from modern eastern Honduras to northern Colombia. Their current descendants include the Boruca, Teribe and Guaymi peoples. These people lived in isolated settlements, which rarely consisted of more than 2,000 people. They fished, hunted, and worked in agriculture. Crops grown included corn, cassava (a shrub that makes nutritious flour from the roots), beans, squash (a type of summer gourd), papaya, pineapple, avocado, chili peppers, cocoa, and many other fruits, root vegetables, and medicinal plants. They lived in houses that were mostly round in shape with a foundation of river cobblestones.
And in order to claim that it was they who created these mysterious spheres, you need to have more evidence than there is, and therefore the answer to this question remains an insoluble problem.
Way of transportation
Another mystery is the way the balls are transported from the place of manufacture to the place of installation. According to scientists, sometimes this distance was tens of kilometers, and the balloons had to be delivered through the jungle, swamps, rivers ...
How were such blocks transported? What devices were used to "roll" the balls from place to place, making up precise geometric shapes from them? Unfortunately, there were no satisfactory answers to these questions at all.
If the blanks for the balls were obtained at the quarries - stone craftsmen, it is believed that they had to carefully monitor their descent. How to move such a heavy load over such a long distance without modern technology? If granite was mined at a quarry and then transported, then almost a three-meter cube, which was required for a ball with a diameter of 2.4 meters, weighed 24 tons! Probably, the natives had to cut through the dense jungle the wide, smooth road necessary to transport the boulders, which, again, was not an easy task! Other balls are made from shell rock, a material much like limestone found on the seashore near the mouth of the Dikvis River. Then it turns out that the rock was floated 50 kilometers upstream. The balls were also found on Caño Island, located about 20 kilometers from the Pacific coast, etc.
Researchers
The first to study the balls was the archaeologist from the United States D. Stone, who arrived in Costa Rica immediately after the discovery of stone artifacts. And in 1943, in the academic journal of archeology, he published his observations and conclusions, which, which will be characteristic of all future research and researchers, end with the words: " We must classify the perfect spheres of Costa Rica as incomprehensible megalithic mysteries". Everything is exactly the same as another of the authorities of archeology spoke a little later on other stone products, now - the Frenchman P. Gio:" ... megaliths are a nightmare for archaeologists”. And it is impossible not to agree with them.
Then there were many followers and successors of stone balls research, and an inquisitive reader, ready to dive deeper into the topic, can always find reports of their expeditions and materials of work in print. For the same article, suffice it to say that apart from updating the statistics of finds, describing the locations of these stone products, studying the accompanying cultural layers, no solid scientific conclusions have been made. As before, the main questions remained unanswered: who ?, when? and why? made these stones.
So, attempts to make a scientific analysis of the stone balls of Costa Rica have been going on for over 60 years. But, as they say, things are still there ...
Not so long ago, the question of assigning the status of a World Heritage Site to these ancient artifacts was also raised before UNESCO. D. Hoopes, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas and head ofGlobal Indigenous Nations Studies Program.
Scientist D. Hoopes next to the ancient stone riddle
And he, having carried out the necessary research with his colleagues, on his return from a trip to Costa Rica made a presentation at UNESCO, excerpts from which are given below.
The earliest reports of these stones date from the late 19th century, but these reports were scientifically confirmed only in the 1930s, so they can be considered a relatively recent discovery, said Hoopes. - Official science dates the stones to 600-1000 AD, but they all appeared before the Spanish Colonization of America. We determine the age of balloons by the style of manufacture and radiocarbon analysis of items found with the balloons. One problem with this technique is that it reports the date the balls were last used, but not the date they were created. These objects could have been used for centuries and are still in the same places for thousands of years. Therefore, it is very difficult to determine the exact date of creation.
According to Hoopes, pseudoscientists have perverted the general idea of stone balls. For example, some publications claimed the stones belonged to the "disappeared" continent of Atlantis, while others suggested that the orbs were navigational aids, or that they were associated with Stonehenge, or giant heads from Easter Island.
Myths based on many incredible theories about imaginary ancient civilizations or about alien visits, Hoopes categorically rejected. However, in return, he did not present a single version of his that sheds at least some light on the solution to the balls of Costa Rica.
We really don't know why they were made, ”Hoopes admitted. “The people who made them did not leave any written records. We can only make guesses based on historical dates and reconstruction of the environment. The culture of the people who made them disappeared shortly after the Spanish conquest. Therefore, there are no myths or legends about why these balls were made.
The only mystery that the scientist was supposedly able to explain is the way they were made.
Most likely, the main techniques were hammering, drilling and grinding stones, - explained Hoopes. - Found some balls with traces of hammer blows. We believe that this is how they were created: by hammering on large stones and carving a spherical shape.
So, this one, if I may say so, is "the main one on the balls", under the pressure of questions from the members of the UNESCO commission, but not forgetting to throw a handful of dirt at the ufologists, both himself and his science signed in complete professional inconsistency and helplessness. So who should be called pseudo- and pseudo-scientists if not such hoopes?
So, modern researchers have no answer yet. Therefore, the question of assigning the status of a World Heritage site to the balloons also remained open.
Introduction.
Many researchers of the Cosmos understood that it contains a kind of highly organized, most likely, intelligent substance, which, if it does not control natural processes, then regulates them so that they do not go beyond the permissible limits in their power, leading to the destruction of everything - to chaos. Such an anti-entropic principle is possessed by all of us known life on a carbon protein-ribonucleic basis. This life is able to regulate the processes occurring in the substance of the lithospheres, hydrospheres and atmospheres, maintaining them in a certain stable state, despite changing external factors. Much is known about such an organizing substance. Anyone who wishes can read the works of ecologists, biogeochemists and find there a lot of confirmation of these words of mine.
But is the only form of highly organized matter a substance called "life" (carbon protein-nucleic acid life)? Scientists have tried many times to come up with silicon-based life - a kind of living mountains and living stones on the surface of planets. However, the results of such attempts were not very convincing. Silicon is not suitable for creating living things.
But now there is an amazing natural phenomenon observed in various parts of the Earth. So far, no one can explain its reason clearly. We are talking about the so-called Moeraki boulders, also known as the "watermelons of the Prophet Elijah." Someone takes them for dinosaur eggs, someone - for the fruits of ancient marine plants, and some even put forward the assumption that these are the remains of UFOs.
The phenomenon is really strange. Imagine an almost perfectly shaped stone or iron ball with a diameter of ten centimeters to three meters. If someone happens to come across such an "egg" split, then inside he can find a cavity with crystalline formations on the inner surface. And in other balls of the same kind there are no cavities - they are all-stone.
The most famous collection of these balls is located in a fishing village in New Zealand. The balls are lying right on the beach. Moreover, all stones have a different structure - some of them are impeccably smooth, others - like a tortoise shell, rough. Some are split into pieces or with huge cracks.
But in order to admire the "watermelons of Elijah the Prophet", it is not at all necessary to go to New Zealand. They are found in China, in Israel. There are the same round stones in Costa Rica, they are called "balls of the gods" there. These stones are considered man-made, they are called "the eighth wonder of the world" and they are under state protection. The largest "balls of the gods" in Costa Rica are 3 meters in diameter and weigh about 16 tons. And the smallest are no more than a children's ball, they are only 10 centimeters in diameter. The balls are arranged singly and in groups from three to fifty pieces, sometimes the collection of balls form geometric shapes.
There are similar formations in Russia (however, Russian "eggs" are not considered man-made). For example, mysterious stone balls were discovered in the village of Boguchanka, in the north of the Irkutsk region. Local residents are sure that this is a UFO, for the reason that the balls look like they are made of metal.
Where did this "wonder of the world" come from? The assumption that the stone balls are dinosaur eggs does not hold water. Scientists reject this assumption for the reason that even the largest dinosaurs could not have such huge eggs. The appearance of some stone balls is sometimes explained by the effect of glaciers, which supposedly carried fragments of rocks inside themselves, moved, dragged these fragments and gradually gave them a smooth shape. I saw a lot of glacial boulders, but I never came across spherical boulders.
The most daring hypotheses claim that this is the creation of the cosmic mind, because there are not only stone, but also "iron balls", and some are also hollow from the inside. Official science considered that this is a geological formation, and even gave it its name - geodane - a closed cavity in any sedimentary or volcanic rocks. Such geodans were formed, according to these scientists, from clots of liquid magma ejected from the vent of a volcano and, having cooled down, turned into a stone ball. But these are all just assumptions. Most of these formations are estimated to be at least 60 million years old.
Stone ball.
Stone balls in Turysh collapse like “falling husks”. Note that the "husk" is the outer layer of the ball, which is composed of a substance different from the core.
A stone ball with a layered structure. Photo by Vasily Dyatlov and Andrey Zamakhin.
Deposits of stone balls.
In the west of Kazakhstan, in the Caspian region, there is an underexplored area called Turysh. Here, over several square kilometers, there is a ridge of bizarre stone formations, of which there are hundreds. The overwhelming majority of them have an almost ideal ball shape, and their sizes vary from two meters in diameter to the size of a cannonball. Hundreds of such mysterious stone balls are scattered across the deaf Kazakh steppe. They appeared here about 8-9 million years ago.
It is natural for a person to see the manifestation of higher powers in everything unusual. Indeed, it is hard to believe that an unknown master did not have a hand in the creation of these unique stones. But who could it be? "Not people!" - another lover of the unknown will exclaim. However, the person really did not touch the balls. Or - hardly touched.
They try to explain the appearance of balls by the process of crystallization of rocks either in the thickness of volcanic ash, or in the thickness of sand. When sand is impregnated with a solution that rises, for example, from the depths, crystallization centers appear in some areas of the sand mass, growing like a snowball. By interacting with quartz, the solution promotes the formation of large and small round stone balls. The crystallization process spreads evenly in all directions, which gives a spherical shape to the formations. The question is: why crystallization proceeds uniformly in all directions. This hypothesis does not answer this question.
Nodules on Easter Island.
Andrey Astafiev explains the origin of Kazakhstani stone balls as follows: “Local balls were formed under the influence of tidal processes in the sea. In favor of the "marine" version is the fact that they contain shell rock. Water covered the land in this area many millions of years ago, and in the Miocene (8-9 million years ago), when the Tethys Ocean retreated, large areas of land were exposed, and bizarre rock formations remained on its surface. For millions of years, the wind has done its job, giving the stones the correct rounded shape. Powerful wind currents so cut the surface of the balls that it is now full of cracks. "
The weak point in this hypothesis is the assumption that the wind gave the stones a rounded shape. I observed rocks in the Gobi Desert that had been exposed to wind erosion for a long time. No roundness, let alone balls, did not work out. And from erosion, the balls simply begin to collapse, which we see on some of them. In this case, the rocks collapse spontaneously as a “falling husk”, that is, the outer layers of the stone formation are gradually separated, like the husk of an onion, and as a result, only a solid spherical core remains. Some large nodules are split as if they had been carefully cut in two by someone, with the cut always facing south. They look like real locators or satellite dishes! The spheres split in two look like a cutaway model of the Earth.
Ancient legends associate the appearance of stone balls with the love of the gods for the ball game. The gods amused themselves by tossing these stone balls. In those places where they competed, there were placers of these ancient "sports equipment". The most striking example in this regard is Costa Rica. It can be clearly seen from the air that with the help of stone balls, the ancient inhabitants of this country, with one guided purpose, laid out giant geometric figures. Why this was done is a mystery. As, in fact, a mystery and how it was possible to move heavy stones over long distances. Kazakhstani balls are lying, in all likelihood, in the same place where they once came out from under the water, and do not form regular figures.
The stone ball has a clearly layered structure, which is probably due to its formation. These layers can be the result of successive stages of crystallization of the substance from the melt.
The age of this ball is determined at 180 million years. There are two distinct layers here: a thick upper layer and a thin lower layer. The cavity could have formed in the place of the dropped out nucleus. Or maybe the cavity was originally inside the ball?
Huge stone balls have recently been found near Volgograd. Many considered them to be fossilized dinosaur eggs; many researchers were baffled by these balls. These balls were discovered by Nikolay Pekhterev, a shepherd from the village of Mokraya Olkhovka. Descending into the ravine, Nikolai saw that at its very bottom, on the side of the mountain, there were strange spherical stones - 12 balls a little over a meter high were neatly sticking out of the clay, washed out by streams of water, in a suspiciously correct order. The distance between them was about three meters. Nikolai tried to pick off a piece from one, but nothing came of it. The shepherd told about what he had seen in the village, and in the morning the whole Wet Olkhovka reached out to look at the miracle. The local tractor driver even took a sledgehammer with him: after several blows, one of the balls was split in half. To the amazement of the audience, the stone formations turned out to be hollow: a petrified dark mass lay in the cavity. The find was reported to the Kotovskiy district administration. The deputy head of the administration, Irina Mironova, went to the site to make sure that another anomaly had appeared. After thinking, the inhabitants came to the conclusion - in front of them is either a clutch of ancient dinosaurs, or something from the unknown, cosmic.
Balls found in a ravine near Volgograd.
A hollow ball found in a ravine near Volgograd.
Ufologist Vasily Krutskevich explained the formation of balls as follows: stone balls are special geological formations of sand called nodules. They form in sedimentary rocks on the seabed as a result of the crystallization of minerals around the so-called central grain. Such formations are found in places where millions of years ago there was a sea, and after the geological rearrangement of the Earth's surface, the water moved away. If the rock, where the nodule "grew", has the same permeability in all directions, then the nodule will have the shape of a ball. The sizes of such spheroids range from microscopic to three meters in diameter. These balls are considered a sight of the world scale, and it never occurs to anyone to hammer them with a sledgehammer. But in Mokra Olkhovka they simply did not know about nodules. But the fact that the stone balls are hollow inside makes the version of the nodules very doubtful.
On the inner side of the shell of the balls all over the surface there are fossilized veins, like on the hymen of an ordinary chicken egg, so the version of the dinosaur clutch has become the main one for many. However, the final answer could only be given by objective laboratory studies. Krutskevich handed over the fragments of the shell and the substance found inside, in the laboratory of two universities in Volgograd. Spectral analysis and research with the help of all kinds of chemical reagents made it possible to reveal the composition of the fossilized shells of "eggs". 70% of their shell consists of silicon dioxide, 0.2% of iron and magnesium were also found in it, and laboratory tests could not determine the rest of almost 30%. Experts from these laboratories stated that the substance was of unknown origin. The insides of the "eggs" were unambiguously identified as caked organic matter.
Stone balls in the Volgograd steppe.
The researchers were puzzled a lot. The version of eggs is supported by a shell with signs indicating that it is a shell, and the remains of organic matter inside. It looks like the organics were exposed to intense heat and the giant dinosaur embryos died. Maybe there was some kind of fault and magma suddenly "spat" out of it? Geologists could answer this question if they were interested in the find, but, unfortunately, they were not very interested.
Dinosaur eggs.
However, all experts who deal with ancient lizards agree that the balls are too large for dinosaur eggs. A six-year-old boy from Mokra Olkhovka easily fit into the broken egg. What kind of animal must have been to lay such eggs? Indeed, until now, the largest dinosaur egg known to science was found in China, its diameter is 46 cm. It was the size of a large melon, but not a meter in size. In addition, sometimes fossilized shells fall into the shells of stone balls. It is difficult to imagine that in the shell of dinosaur eggs there were such distinct imprints of shells of sea mollusks.
I happened to see real fossilized dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. They even have a drawing that was on the top of the shell. The size of these eggs: length about 20-30 cm, width - about 10-15 cm.
A fossilized dinosaur egg from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. Photo by A.V. Galanin.
Fossilized dinosaur eggs from Bayanzag Canyon.
Basically, nodule stone balls can be confused with fossilized dinosaur eggs. But dinosaur eggs are not so round or so huge. In addition, where fossilized eggs are found, dinosaur bones are also found.
Dinosaur eggs found in China.
Fossilized dinosaur eggs found in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France in 1859 by an amateur priest and geologist John Jacques Nouchet.
Dinosaur eggs had very strong shells and were no different from bird eggs or other reptile eggs. Many dinosaurs themselves created nests in order to hatch their offspring. In the Gobi Desert, dinosaur nests are shallow, mostly small holes made in the ground, or low rounded mounds with a dent in the middle. From all this, it is clear that dinosaurs reproduced by laying eggs in nests and then incubating them. Females arranged eggs in nests in a semicircle; such clutches were found there everywhere.
Dinosaur eggs from China.
Stone balls are not the work of human hands.
Volgograd stone hollow balls are about a meter or more in diameter and consist of silicon and metal. Some clearly show traces of corrosion, which confirms that they contain some kind of metal. In the cavities inside the balls, there was a mixture of fine sand with granular metal. It is known that hundreds of millions of years ago there was a sea and an underwater volcano in this area. During the eruption, the volcano emitted not only steam, but also water-insoluble minerals. From the high temperature in the mouth of the volcano, they melted and combined into one, and after cooling they fell to the bottom. But this hypothesis does not explain why all objects have the same spherical shape and are in close proximity to each other. So maybe G.V. is right. Tarasenko, and these stone balls are really the products of underground ball lightning?
In the 40s of the twentieth century, in the tropical thickets of Costa Rica, workers who were cutting down dense thickets of the tropical jungle for banana plantations, unexpectedly stumbled upon giant stone statues of the correct spherical shape. The largest ones reached three meters in diameter and weighed about 16 tons. And the smallest were no more than a children's ball, only 10 cm in diameter. The balls were placed singly and in groups of three to fifty pieces, sometimes groups of stone balls formed geometric shapes. The stone balls of Costa Rica are composed of gabbro, limestone or sandstone.
In 1967, an engineer and lover of history and archeology who worked in silver mines in Mexico reported that he had found the same balls, but much larger in size, in the mines. After some time, on the Aqua Blanca plateau in Guatemala at an altitude of 2000 m above sea level. archaeologists have found hundreds of similar stone balls. Similar stone balls were found near the city of Aulaluco in Mexico, in Palma Sur in Costa Rica, in Los Alamos and in the state of New Mexico in the USA, on the coast of New Zealand, in Egypt, Romania, Germany, Brazil, Kashkadarya region. in Kazakhstan and on Franz Josef Land in the Arctic Ocean.
Stone ball from Costa Rica. Here it is turned into an element of landscape architecture.
Stone balls from Costa Rica.
Some geologists attributed the appearance of stone balls to volcanic activity. But a sphere of ideal round shape can form if liquid magma solidifies in zero gravity and crystallizes it uniformly in all directions. According to Elena Matveyeva, Candidate of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, the balls could emerge from the sedimentary strata as a result of the so-called exofolization - weathering in areas with large daily temperature drops. In the same place, where the temperature is more stable, they find similar balls, but already underground. I must say that this explanation is also very doubtful.
Stone ball from Costa Rica.
Klerksdorp balls.
Most likely, ball lightning was involved in the formation of Klerksdorp balls, which also took place in an oxygen-free atmosphere billions of years ago. Confused only by the scars encircling these bodies in the middle.
In addition, the ancient volcanoes could not correctly position the balls in the form of certain shapes, moreover, some balls have obvious traces of grinding on the surface! And although a significant part of such balls, it seems, really have a purely natural origin, some specimens, for example, Costa Rica balls, do not fit into the framework of this theory in any way, since they have obvious traces of alignment and grinding. More than 300 stone spheres have now been found in Costa Rica.
In my opinion, naturally occurring stone balls could have been polished. They could have been used for aesthetic or ritual purposes in the ancient states of Mesoamerica. These balls could be taken to places of worship and arranged in accordance with the legends or cosmogonic ideas of these peoples. They could be worshiped as messengers of the gods. For ritual or astronomical purposes, the balls were arranged in groups in the form of geometric figures corresponding to constellations in the sky, or some other structure. But how were such heavy objects moved? There were no horses or oxen in Mesoamerica, and they did not use the wheel. Most likely, the balls were rolling on a specially arranged solid surface.
Extremely ancient metal spheres are occasionally excavated in South African mines near the town of Ottosdal in the Western Transval. The rock strata from which these spheres are extracted are approximately 2.8 billion years old. Archaeologists who have studied the finds do not doubt their artificial origin, but geologists do not agree with them.
Klerksdorp balls, according to geologists, are of natural origin. The results of petrographic and X-ray structural analysis of these objects showed that they consist of either hematite or wollastonite with a small amount of hematite impurities, and many of the ones extracted from unaltered pyrophyllite layers are formed by pyrite. These are natural pyrite nodules that have undergone various degrees of natural weathering and oxidation. At the time of the formation of these balls, there was no oxygen atmosphere on Earth. Making balls by people is absolutely out of the question.
It is believed that the stone balls were formed under the influence of the glaciers of the Great Glaciation. Moving, these glaciers dragged rock fragments in their thickness, turned them and polished them, giving them a perfectly round shape. Absolutely round boulders are also found in the folds of the stone bed of mountain rivers, where the fast current, rotating the stones, supposedly turns them into spheres over time. But, in my opinion, so far this is also one of the unconvincing versions. The probability of the formation of balls during these processes is very small, and many stone balls are found.
When they found stone balls in Costa Rica, they considered them to be the undoubted work of human hands. Therefore, it was archaeologists who began to study them. The first scientific study of Costa Rican balls was undertaken by Doris Stone in 1943, when it was published in American Antiquity, the leading academic journal on archeology. Archaeologist Samuel Lothrop from Harvard University conducted a study of the balls in 1948. A final report on the results of his research was published by the Museum in 1963. It provides detailed descriptions of pottery and metal objects found near the balls, contains many photographs, drawings of balls, results their measurements, their relative position and stratigraphic contexts. In the 1980s. the areas with balls were investigated and described by Robert Drolet in the course of his excavations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s. Claude Baudez and his students at the University of Paris returned to the Lothrop excavation to undertake a more thorough analysis of the pottery and to obtain a more accurate dating of the ball layers. This study was published in 1993. In the early 1990s. Enrico Dala Lagoa defended his dissertation on the topic of stone balls. 1990-1995 the stone balls were studied by the archaeologist Iphigenia Quintanilla under the auspices of the National Museum of Costa Rica. She was able to unearth several balls in their initial (natural) state. The results of archaeological research on stone balls are presented in the following publications:
Lothrop, Samuel K. Archeology of the Diquis Delta, Costa Rica. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Vol. 51. Harvard University, Cambridge. 1963.
Stone, Doris Z. A Preliminary Investigation of the Flood Plain of the Rio Grande de Terraba, Costa Rica. American Antiquity 9 (1): 74–88. 1943.
Stone, Doris Z. Precolumbian Man Finds Costa Rica. Peabody Museum Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1977.
Baudez, Claude F., Nathalie Borgnino, Sophie Laligant & Valerie Lauthelin Investigaciones Arqueologicas en el Delta del Diquis. Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, Mexico, D.F. 1993.
Lange, Frederick W. (ed.) Paths Through Central American Prehistory: Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Haberland. University of Colorado Press, Boulder. 1996.
However, when stone balls were discovered in many regions of the globe and in considerable quantities, the hypothesis of their artificial origin began to quickly lose its supporters.
Stone balls from the land of Frans Joseph.
Stone ball on Champa Island in Franz Josef Land.
Champa Island is one of the many islands of the Arctic archipelago Franz Josef Land, which belongs to the most remote corners of Russia and is little studied. The territory of this island is relatively small (only 375 sq. Km) and is attractive not so much for its picturesque, untouched by civilization, Arctic landscapes, as for mysterious stone balls of rather impressive size and ideally round shape. It is hard to imagine that someone here once carved these stone balls from boulders.
The central core of these balls has a lighter color: it is obviously of a different composition and density. It is clear that stone balls should be investigated not so much by archaeologists as by geologists in order to obtain information about the processes taking place inside our planet in order to improve the model of the internal structure of the Earth.
Such balls could form only under conditions of insignificant gravity or even under full weightlessness, i.e. in conditions completely different from those in which they now find themselves.
Spherolites of Champa Island are stones of densely compacted and fused sand. They are clearly not of volcanic origin, and in some of them even the teeth of ancient sharks have been found. The dimensions of many balls reach several meters (some of them are difficult to fully cover even for three people), although there are also perfectly round stone balls from several centimeters in diameter. Some balls seem to be dug in the ground, others just stand on the surface. Here you can also find many stones that look more like cobblestones. Perhaps, under the influence of wind, water and cold, they have lost their ideal original roundness.
There is a version that the stone balls are the result of washing ordinary stones with water, that long-term washing gave them such an ideal rounded shape. But if with stones of small sizes this version still sounds at least somewhat believable, then in the case of three-meter balls it is, to put it mildly, not very convincing.
Some are inclined to consider these balls the result of the activities of an extraterrestrial civilization or the mythical civilization of the Hyperboreans. But that doesn't sound very convincing either. Why on earth would a civilization that significantly outstripped ours in its development, hew the rocks, making a stone ball out of them? To convince earthlings of your power and at the same time stupidity?
Stone balls on Champa Island in Franz Josef Land.
One might think that there is a whole garden of stone balls on Champa Island, that the island is literally dotted with them. But this is not the case. Most of the stone balls are located along the coast, and not a single one is found in the center of the island. This gives rise to another riddle, to which there is no answer yet.
It is also surprising that stone balls have not been found anywhere among all the other Arctic islands. Or maybe not found yet?
Why are the stone balls concentrated on Champa Island, where did they come from here? There are many questions, but the answers to them have not been found so far.
Broken stone ball on Champa Island.
I believe that the stone balls on Champa Island were swept away for a long time by the glacier, which flowed from the mountains to the coast, i.e. top down. It was he who “collected” the stone balls on the coast. Here the balls, melting from the glacier, simply fell out of it. Perhaps some part of the balls inside the breaking away icebergs floated into the sea, and there, over time, stone balls will also be found at the bottom.
When the glacier dragged stone balls, it often destroyed them, as can be concluded from this photograph. But in the photos above, we can also see one ball split in half.
But that's why underground lightning, including ball lightning, raged on Champa Island? After all, there are no stone balls on the other islands of this archipelago. Consequently, underground lightning is not enough for the appearance of stone balls. Some other special conditions are needed so that underground ball lightning could give its energy to stone or sand and, “dying”, could themselves “generate” stone balls. In other words, stone balls are petrified underground fireballs.
Stone balls in the Kirov region.
Hunter Anatoly Fokin recently in a remote and deserted area in the Kirov region came across stone balls, it is not clear where they came from here far from mountain structures. The balls with a diameter of one to one and a half meters are stacked in heaps, similar to the clutches of fossilized eggs of prehistoric giantosaurs. Not far from the place of discovery, there is also a dinosaur cemetery, where every year a river flood washes away their bones. But A. Fokin believes that these stones most likely have a natural geological origin and are not dinosaur eggs. According to his version, the glacier rolled them in this way, while dragging blocks from Scandinavia to Vyatka.
Geologists immediately went to the place where the strange stones were found, measured, photographed and spoke with knowledge of the matter that in Europe there is something similar only in a single place - on Franz Josef Land. But the round ones there are much smaller. But if Franz Josef Land is solid bedrock, then the appearance of stone balls on the Vyatka plain confused scientists. And with the glacier, not everything is as A. Fokin believes: the Scandinavian glacier did not reach the Kirov region. I think that these stone balls could have sailed to Vyatka in the thickness of icebergs, which could well have broken off from the glacier on the Franz Josef Islands. At that time, on the site of the Russian Plain, there was a shallow sea, into which icebergs from the Arctic Ocean could well swim.
Internal structure of the globe.
Supposed internal structure of the Earth.
To understand the nature of underground linear and ball lightning, one will have to turn to the model of the inner structure of the Earth. Passing from the crust to the mantle, seismic waves noticeably increase their speed: longitudinal - from 6.3 to 7.8 km / s, and transverse - from 3.7 to 4.3 km / s. This phenomenon is associated with a sharp increase in the density of matter at the boundary of the crust and mantle. With the transition of longitudinal seismic waves from the mantle to the core, their speed sharply decreases - from 13.6 to 8 km / sec. Until now, it has not been possible to detect the passage of transverse seismic waves through the core, since the core dampens them. This is one of the many mysteries of the substance that composes the earth's core.
The average density of the earth's crust is 2.7 grams / cm3; at the border of the mantle increases to 3.3 g / cm3; inside the mantle increases to 6 grams / cm3, and is captured by several small jumps. At the core boundary, the density reaches 8 grams / cm3, and in the central region of the nucleus, apparently, increases to 11 grams / cm3 and even more.
If we consider pressure as the weight of a column of overlying substance, then at a depth of 100 km from the surface it should be 20,000 atm, that is, 20 tons per square centimeter. At a depth of 600 km from the earth's surface, the pressure probably already reaches 200,000 atm. Such pressures are obtained in laboratories; therefore, we can assume how the substance should behave at the base of the earth's crust and even under the crust - in the upper layers of the mantle. But at a depth of 3200 km, that is, approximately at half the earth's radius, the pressure should reach 1500 tons per square centimeter, and at the center of the Earth, the pressure, apparently, exceeds 3 million atm., Or 3000 tons per square centimeter.
How can an increase in pressure affect the properties of the subsoil matter? At high pressures and normal temperatures, the density, strength and, at the same time, plasticity of many substances increase. Recently, pressures of 200,000 atm were obtained at a temperature of about 4000 ° C. X-ray exposure of various substances under high pressure showed that when a certain pressure is reached, a sudden change in their structure occurs. The atoms are rearranged into a new crystalline structure with a higher density and higher binding energy between atoms. In the case of an increase in temperature, this rearrangement can occur at a lower pressure.
As the pressure increases, the distances between the atoms first decrease, and then there is a "deformation" of the atoms themselves, more precisely, the "deformation" of their outer electron shells. At a certain pressure, a transition of electrons inside the atom from one level to another is observed. The approach of electrons to the atomic nucleus leads to a sharp abrupt increase in the electrical conductivity of the substance, since in this case some of the electrons lose their connection with specific nuclei and turn into an “electronic fog”, which is impregnated with the substance at high pressure and high temperature. Many chemical elements that do not conduct electric current under normal conditions, at high pressure acquire the properties of semiconductors, and semiconductors can go into the state of conductors - i.e. acquire the property of metal. Calculations show that even hydrogen can be "metallized" at a pressure of more than 2,000,000 atm.
The substance of the earth's core is in a "metallized" state. The orbits of the outer electrons of the atoms are strongly "deformed", the nuclei of the atoms are brought together, and this explains the high density of matter in the deep interior. The substance of the planet's core is saturated with an electron fog, consisting of free electrons. A decrease in the external pressure should inevitably lead to the transition of the "metallized" state of matter to another - to the one in which the mantle matter is located. This transition must be accompanied by the release of a significant amount of energy. Perhaps, one of the energy sources of the deep bowels of our planet lies in the abrupt changes in the structure of matter at the border of the mantle and the core. Free electrons from the core must diffuse into the mantle, since the planet's gravitational field is insufficient to hold electrons with negligible mass.
With the deepening into the bowels of the Earth, the temperature increases. However, this growth is uneven. The distance, with a deepening by which the temperature rises by one degree, geologists called a geothermal step. In the Phlegrean fields of Italy, the geothermal step in places is only 0.7 m. In other regions it is much higher. On average, for the continents, it is 33 m, and in some places it increases to 100 m and more. But everywhere the temperature rises with depth.
What is in the Earth's mantle - molten plastic magma from which igneous rocks crystallize, or superhard matter? Is the earth's interior heated to temperatures of thousands and tens of thousands of degrees, or are they frozen in cold at temperatures close to absolute zero? This is one of the greatest mysteries of the Earth. There are supporters of both one and the other extreme points of view.
Academician O.Yu. Schmidt believed that the temperature increases with deepening into the bowels only in the outer zone of the planet. And at a depth of about 100 km from the surface, it reaches a maximum - values of 1500–2000 ° C, and deeper the temperature remains constant or even decreases. In this case, in the superdense core of the Earth, the cold of outer space can really reign. So far, it has been possible to observe changes in temperature when deepening into the ground on a negligible segment of the earth's radius, within the length of the deepest borehole (about 13 km) on the Kola Peninsula. O. Yu. Schmidt considered the earth's crust to be stone, the mantle - stone-metal, and the core - metal - an alloy of iron and nickel.
So far, one thing is clear: in the earth's crust, the temperature rises with increasing depth, and at some distance from the surface there are or from time to time there are centers of melting. Molten material from the crust or mantle erupts to the surface through the vents of volcanoes. On the surface, the temperature of liquid lava reaches 1000 ° C, and in the volcanic chamber, the temperature of magma is several hundred degrees higher.
How do the properties of substances change with a simultaneous increase in temperature and pressure? It turns out that with increasing pressure, the melting point of various substances first increases sharply, then this growth slows down, and after the pressure reaches a certain "critical value", the melting temperature begins to suddenly decrease. Crystalline substances, and, consequently, crystalline rocks of the earth's crust, with an increase in temperature and pressure, become plastic, and then acquire the property of fluidity. Upon reaching a certain temperature and pressure, the crystalline state of the substance becomes unstable and transforms into an amorphous glassy state. In the glassy state, as the pressure increases, the substance acquires the property of compressibility and greater plasticity and fluidity.
At a depth of several tens of kilometers from the surface, in a zone of sufficiently high temperatures and pressures, sedimentary and igneous rocks turn into metamorphic rocks, and in areas and zones where pressure decreases, they may melt. Such melting can give rise to individual magma chambers within the earth's crust. At a greater depth - at the base of the earth's crust - the crystalline substance passes into a glassy state, acquires greater plasticity. How does modern science imagine the emergence of magma? Until a few decades ago, most scientists believed that the deep parts of the Earth were completely melted and only from above were covered by a solid earth crust several tens of kilometers thick.
However, studies have shown that there is no continuous liquid layer at depth. Our planet behaves like a solid body. Moreover, its average hardness exceeds that of steel. Hotbeds of molten material appear only when the pressure in the seat decreases, or when the temperature rises without changing the pressure. Already at a depth of 40–50 km, the temperature of matter in the bowels should exceed the melting temperature of many igneous rocks at normal pressure. However, in the bowels of the Earth, matter is under pressure from the overlying strata, and this increases the melting point. Only if a deep fault is formed in the earth's crust, then the pressure near it drops sharply, while the superheated substance of the interior melts and turns into magma. Dynamically, magma is always unstable and tends to move in the direction of lower pressure - that is, upward. Over time, the magma chamber cools down and finally solidifies again - dies off. The correctness of this explanation for the formation of magmas is confirmed by the constant presence of igneous rocks in deep faults of the earth's crust and by the fact that periods of volcanic activity are replaced by periods of cessation of eruption, sometimes for hundreds and thousands of years.
In recent years, it was found that the development of magmatic activity, along with a drop in pressure and radioactivity, is influenced by the low thermal conductivity of sedimentary rocks. It is, on average, about 2–3 times less than the thermal conductivity of igneous rocks. This means that the cover of sedimentary rocks, almost completely enveloping the deeper zones of the earth's crust, is a reliable heat insulator. Heat accumulates underneath. It is assumed that in the absence of such a cover or its low thickness, magmas arise at great depths, and with a significant thickness of the sedimentary cover - at smaller ones. Some scientists believe that with the accumulation of large strata of sedimentary rocks, magma chambers approach the earth's surface and even move from the mantle to the earth's crust.
There is also another explanation for the phenomena of local heating of the Earth's interior. Mantle material can gradually lose gases. Degassing of the mantle leads to the formation of water in the bowels of the planet through the synthesis of water molecules from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Scientists are of the opinion that this reaction has a chain character and occurs with an explosion and the release of a significant amount of heat.
The third hypothesis links the appearance of magma chambers with the release of highly heated gases of deep origin. Rising from the Earth's mantle, gases partly process, partly melt solid masses on their way. This process appears to be slow and in several stages. First, droplets of the melt appear in the solid material, then it becomes more and more, a mixture of the melt and the solid material abundantly impregnated with it is obtained. The amount of melt increases and eventually magma appears.
It would seem that everything is clear, but where do the "strongly heated gases" come from? Their source is deep bowels: the lower part of the mantle, maybe even the core of the planet. They are born in the process of transformation of the substance of deep geospheres. Maybe they are the products of nuclear reactions taking place at unknown depths. Maybe they are born during some kind of chemical reaction. Here, as before, we are faced with one of the many mysteries of the planet.
Geologists believe that the entire variety of magmas can be reduced to three types: acidic, basic, and ultrabasic. The acidity of magma is determined by its silica content. It is abundant in felsic magmas (more than 65%); upon cooling, granites, granodiorites and some other rocks are formed from them. The basic magmas contain 40 to 55% silica; the most common basic rocks are basalts. Finally, ultrabasic magma is characterized by a very low silica content - no more than 40%. When this magma cools, peridotites, dunites, and other ultrabasic rocks are formed.
Large magma reservoirs can form at a depth of 50–70 km, that is, directly below the earth's crust. But magma, apparently, can originate at great depths, and also form closer to the earth's surface. In 1963, the magma chamber of the Avacha group of volcanoes was located only at a depth of 3–4 km. The subcrustal substance here has penetrated almost to the very surface, and it is possible to "reach" it with a borehole. The least "deep" is granite magma: it is probably formed due to the melting of the lower horizons of the granite shell of the earth's crust - at a depth of about 40 km or less. Fiery blood of the Earth - magma pulsates in the veins of the planet; appearing and disappearing in different places, she lives her unusually complex, largely unsolved life. Its mysteries are closely intertwined with other mysteries of the bowels of the Earth - the bowels of which it is a part and product.
Underground thunderstorms and underground plasmoids.
The original hypothesis “Formation of the dynamo effect and its role in the structure of the planet Earth” was developed by G.V. Tarasenko from Aktau University. The origin of nodules (stone balls), according to G.V. Tarasenko, is associated with electrical discharges in the earth's crust and mantle in zones of active tectonic faults. These discharges are similar to lightning discharges in the atmosphere, with lightning tens of kilometers long. At the end of linear lightning, their closest relatives, ball lightning, also appear. The bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the mid-oceanic ridges is strewn with ferromanganese nodules, which allows us to speak of their origin due to ball lightning in the earth's mantle. During the occurrence of ball lightning, consisting of plasma, the host rocks of the geological layer are transformed and melted. As a result, spherical layers of melt build up in the body of ball lightning and around it. When this spherical molten formation cools, spherical, cylindrical, ellipsoid, almond-shaped and other nodules are formed.
Electric charges of opposite signs accumulate in the core and geospheres of the Earth. Electrons, not associated with the nuclei of deformed atoms, diffuse from the earth's core into the mantle, and from it into the earth's crust. The deficit of electrons in the Earth's core creates a positive electric charge in it due to the excess of protons, and the excess of electrons in the mantle and crust creates a negative electric charge in these spheres. This is how the earth's electrical capacitor appears, which accumulates a huge amount of electrical energy. Periodically, this capacitor breaks through, and electric arcs - underground lightning - appear in the bowels of the planet. Sometimes at the ends of these lightning balls are formed - round plasmoids. Plasma in these plasmoids is confined by a strong closed magnetic field. These spherical magnetic fields in tectonic faults filled with fluid and crushed rock, which are attracted by the electromagnetic field, create stone balls.
Ball lightning in the earth's firmament form ball nodules, while the hot plasma of ball lightning is replaced by mineral formations, and they are preserved in reservoir beds. In spreading zones, spherical nodules fly out of faults and, losing energy, settle to the ocean floor. Submarines in the ocean have repeatedly observed spherical glow, which confirms the electrical phenomena in the oceans.
Underground thunderstorms were also recorded at the Kola Superdeep Borehole, where the inventors and journalists counted them as groans and cries of sinners from the underworld. And on the coast of Ladoga in Karelia in 1996, the earth was, as it were, blown up from the inside, thus forming a smooth, shallow trench. The trees that used to grow in this place were uprooted and thrown aside, and the roots of many of them were charred and smoked. It turned out that the fire scorched them from below, i.e. out of the ground.
Volcanic lightning.
A hundred years ago, geophysicists would have easily explained the sounds at a superdeep well and the explosion in Karelia as a consequence of an underground thunderstorm. “Earth's electricity produces storms that destroy the inner structure of our planet, just as storms in the atmosphere mess up airspace,” wrote Georges Dary in 1903 in his book Electricity in All Its Applications.
The earth is electrified, and strong electric currents incessantly run through it. If the air is dry and hot, or is already so saturated with electricity that it cannot accept the excess of it released by the earth, if the deposits of chalk and siliceous soils are located near places rich in metals, then the accumulation of electricity ultimately leads to a discharge - just like that. the same as happens during an atmospheric thunderstorm. One can imagine what kind of destruction an underground thunderstorm can lead when it is discharged over an area of several square kilometers through various deposits, crevices, depressions, etc. Such discharges are given off by shaking the soil at a distance of hundreds of kilometers. This hypothesis, based on irrefutable facts, was developed back in 1885.
But some time passed, and the hypothesis of an underground thunderstorm by Georges Dary was forgotten by scientists. Now geophysicists are trying to explain the light flashes by the ignition of the gas escaping from the bowels. However, a light flash during the powerful Tien Shan earthquake in 1976 was visible hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter.
In the early 70s, professor of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute A.A. Vorobiev. Gathering a group of like-minded young employees, he embarked on experiments in different parts of the country. Vorobiev and his co-workers expressed the idea that radio waves should be generated during an underground thunderstorm, and if you try to register them, they can become the same harbingers of earthquakes, just as radio waves in the atmosphere are harbingers of ordinary thunderstorms. The researchers actually managed to record the increase in the intensity of the underground radio telephone immediately before the earthquakes.
But A.A. Vorobyov to submit the results of this important work to a scientific journal - "Reports of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR" - encountered resistance from opponents from the Institute of Physics of the Earth of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Having smashed Vorobyov's idea to smithereens, they themselves conducted similar experiments, and after a couple of years articles on similar topics began to appear regularly in Doklady, of course, without references to their predecessor.
Then A.A. Vorobyov and his co-workers tested another idea: ordinary lightning generates a lot of ozone, which means that before an underground earthquake, free ozone should come out of the ground. This idea has also been confirmed by practical experiments. But, unfortunately, the early death of Professor A.A. Vorobyova actually put an end to his work.
Interesting experimental data were obtained at the Institute of Physics. Kurchatov under the leadership of Leonid Urutskoyev. The “Urutskoyev effect” is an incomprehensible phenomenon of a plasma object, similar to ball lightning, which appears when wires are exploded in distilled water. Researchers faced this phenomenon while simulating an underwater electrical explosion. It is possible that during tectonic movements in the layers of the earth's crust, electrical energy accumulates, forming similar electrical explosions.
Shortly before the earthquake, "strange changes" occur in the earth, causing strong electrical emissions, according to Tom Blair, a satellite communications engineer and Quake Finder project associate. “These emissions are enormous, about 100,000 amperes in a 6.0 magnitude earthquake and on the order of a million amperes in a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. It's like lightning, only underground, ”Blair said. To measure these emissions, Blair and his team spent millions of dollars placing magnetometers along geologic fault lines in California, Peru, Taiwan and Greece. This equipment is sensitive enough to record magnetic pulses from electrical discharges at a distance of up to 16 kilometers. On a typical day at the San Andreas Fault in California, you can detect up to 10 impulses per day. The rift is constantly moving, changing. Before the earthquake, Blair said background levels of static electricity would rise sharply. He claims that this is what he saw shortly before the six earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 and 6.0, which he was able to observe. “The number of pulses increases to 150-200 per day,” Blair said. He added that the ripple begins to build up about 2 weeks before the quake and then abruptly returns to baseline just before the shift.
Conclusion.
The formation of stone balls by underground ball lightning is a hypothesis, at first glance, very extravagant. Plasmoids, practically weightless and floating freely in the Earth's gravitational field, and heavy stone balls in the thickness of the earth's crust seem to be incompatible with each other. The hypothesis is very strange, but only at first glance. Not so long ago, claims that the earth was round also seemed ridiculous. Christian Catholics burned Giordano Bruno alive at the stake for claiming that the stars are distant suns.
However, if we take as a basis the hypothesis of a superdense state of matter in the earth's core, measure the flow of electrons from the earth's interior to the surface, measure the potential difference on the “plates” of the natural earth's capacitor, carefully listen to the sounds from the “underworld” and sounds from the depths of the ocean (Quakers), then the hypothesis of the formation of stone balls by ball lightning in the earth's firmament does not seem so extravagant.
One thing is clear, stone balls are not the work of human hands and these are not the works of aliens. It is necessary to study their morphology, mineralogical and chemical composition, the nature of the host rocks, confinement to tectonic faults, volcanoes, to determine the absolute age, remanent magnetization. I hope there will be young researchers who are not yet burdened with the burden of generally accepted theories, courageous enough to contradict their official leaders and opponents, ready to resist the devastating reviews of the reviewers of leading journals. I believe that there are still young scientists for whom the truth is dearer than the recognition of their contemporaries. I would like to wish such researchers success and receiving recognition at least at the end of life, but if recognition is not at the end of life, then at least posthumously.
Based on materials A.V. Galanina. 2013.
Electronic media "Interesting World". 02.11.2013
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In the 40s of the twentieth century, an interesting discovery was made in the tropical thickets of Costa Rica. The workers, who were cutting down the dense thickets of the tropical jungle for banana plantations, unexpectedly stumbled upon giant stone statues of the correct spherical shape. The largest ones reached three meters in diameter and weighed about 16 tons. And the smallest were no more than a children's ball, having only ten centimeters in diameter. The balls were arranged singly and in groups of three to fifty pieces, sometimes forming geometric shapes.
In 1967, an engineer and lover of history and archeology working in a silver mine in Mexico told American scientists that he had found the same balls, but much larger, in the mines. After some time, an archaeological expedition found hundreds of stone balls near the village of Guadalajara.
Similar stone balls were also found in Mexico, Costa Rica, the USA, on the coast of New Zealand, Egypt, Romania, Germany, Brazil, Kashkadarya region. Kazakhstan and Franz Josef Land.
Some geologists attributed their appearance to volcanic activity. An ideal ball can be formed if the crystallization of volcanic magma occurs uniformly in all directions. According to Elena Matveyeva, a leading researcher at the Central Research Institute of Geology of Rare-Earth and Non-Ferrous Metals, the balls could come to the surface as a result of the so-called exofolization - weathering, which works in areas with large daily drops. Where the temperature is more stable, they find similar balls, but already underground.
However, no matter how convincing these assumptions sound, there is no definitive solution to the phenomenon to this day. First of all, they are unable to explain the occurrence of granite balls. In addition, the ancient volcanoes could not correctly arrange many balls in the form of figures, which, moreover, have traces of grinding! And although a significant part of these balls do seem to be of a purely natural origin, some specimens, such as Costa Rican balls, do not fit into the framework of this theory in any way, since they have obvious traces of alignment and grinding. 
Unlike geologists, archaeologists acknowledge the artificial origin of Costa Rican balls.
Almost all of the balls are made of hard lava rock, the outcrops of which are located in the foothills of the Talamanca suburbs. There are several examples made of hard material, like limestone, which is formed from shells and sand in coastal sediments.
According to archaeologists, the balls were made by processing round boulders to a spherical shape in several stages. In the first stage, the boulders were subjected to alternately strong heating and cooling, as a result of which the upper part of the boulders peeled off like the leaves of a bulb. Granodiorite has been shown to still show traces of extreme temperature fluctuations. When they approached the shape of a sphere, they were further processed with stone tools made of a material of the same hardness. In the final stage, the balls were placed on the base and polished to a high shine.
Today, a significant portion of the balls are used as decoration for lawns. It is possible that at least some of the balls were also once used for similar purposes.
The time of making the balls also remains unknown.
Since there are no reliable methods for dating stone products now, archaeologists are forced to rely only on stratigraphic studies and determine the date of manufacture of balls from cultural remains found in the same deposits. Found during excavations, such remains are now dated by archaeologists in the range from 200 BC. until even 1500 A.D. But even such a wide range cannot be considered final. Stratigraphic analysis always leaves a lot of doubts about the dating of such artifacts. If only because if now the balls are moving from place to place, then nothing can exclude the possibility of such a movement of the balls and at the very time that stratigraphy gives. Consequently, the balls may well turn out to be much more ancient.
In particular, the version that the balls are more than 12 thousand years old is absolutely not excluded. For all the skepticism of archaeologists in relation to such a date, it is by no means groundless. In particular, John Hopes mentions the balls in the Isla del Caco, which are underwater off the coast. If these balls were not moved there at a later time and were there initially, then they could be placed there only when the sea level was significantly lower than the current one. And this gives them an age of at least 10 thousand years ...
The method of transporting balls or blanks for them also remains a mystery - from their location to the places of the alleged origin of the material for their manufacture, tens of kilometers, a significant part of which falls on swamps and dense thickets of tropical forests ...
Archaeologist Doris Z. Stone ended the very first report on the study of Costa Rican balls with the words: "We must classify the perfect spheres of Costa Rica as incomprehensible megalithic mysteries" and it is impossible to disagree with him ... 
Stone balls are actually found not only in Costa Rica. There were reports that sailors of the Murmansk Shipping Company found such balloons on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And this is a shot of balls on the coast of one of the islands of New Zealand. 
