Spiders Rain on Australia

While raining cats and dogs is only a metaphor, raining spiders is a reality in Australia. The latest arachnid shower took place last week in a town called Goulburn, in New South Wales, approximately 195 km south-west of Sydney, where millions of tiny spiders rained down from the sky and blanketed the countryside with their webs. Unlike the rare frog rains and fish rains, that’s not entirely understood, arachnid showers is a well documented phenomenon called “ballooning” which is used by spiders and some other invertebrates to migrate from one pace to another.

During a “ballooning” event, the spiders will climb up as high as they can, stand on raised legs with its abdomen pointed upwards and release several silk threads into the air. These strands form triangular shaped parachutes that allow them to be carried away by the wind hundreds of miles to a new territory. In windless conditions, the Earth's static electric field may also provide lift.


Spider webs cover the ground in the Australian town of Goulburn.

The vast majority of these spiders die during the journey, eaten by predators or killed by harsh weather conditions. But a small fraction survive to set up a new colony. Once they land, the spiders disappear into the ground and the threads, made of protein, disintegrate until there is no evidence that anything has happened.

According to Robb Bennett, a research associate in entomology at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, it's unclear what spurs these ballooning events, though it’s sometimes associated with heavy rainfall. The astonishing spectacle usually occurs in May or August in Australia, right after rainfall. It is rare because it requires an unusual weather pattern for this time of year, which is when spiders are hatching.

Such ballooning events, however, aren't unique to Australia. They also occur in the Northern Hemisphere where ballooning spiders have been spotted in the United States and Britain.













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Mystery of Puma Punku

Puma punku is the name of a large temple complex located near Tiwanaku, in Bolivia, and is part of a larger archaeological site known as Tiahuanacu. The temple’s origin is a mystery, but based on carbon dating of organic material found on site, archeologists believe the complex may have been built by the Tiwanaku empire - one of the most important civilization prior to the Inca Empire – that flourished between 300 and 1000 AD.

The most intriguing thing about Puma punku is the stonework. Puma punku was a terraced earthen mound originally faced with megalithic blocks, each weighing several tens of tons. The red sandstone and andesite stones were cut in such a precise way that they fit perfectly into and lock with each other without using mortar. The technical finesse and precision displayed in these stone blocks is astounding. Not even a razor blade can slide between the rocks. Some of these blocks are finished to 'machine' quality and the holes drilled to perfection. This is supposed to have been achieved by a civilization that had no writing system and was ignorant of the existence of the wheel. Something doesn’t add up.


Extraordinary craftsmanship is displayed in the stones. 

An article from Wikipedia describes the fantastic engineering involved in the temple’s construction.

In assembling the walls of Puma punku, each stone was finely cut to interlock with the surrounding stones and the blocks fit together like a puzzle, forming load-bearing joints without the use of mortar. One common engineering technique involves cutting the top of the lower stone at a certain angle, and placing another stone on top of it which was cut at the same angle. The precision with which these angles have been utilized to create flush joints is indicative of a highly sophisticated knowledge of stone-cutting and a thorough understanding of descriptive geometry. Many of the joints are so precise that not even a razor blade will fit between the stones. Much of the masonry is characterized by accurately cut rectilinear blocks of such uniformity that they could be interchanged for one another while maintaining a level surface and even joints. The blocks were so precisely cut as to suggest the possibility of prefabrication and mass production, technologies far in advance of the Tiwanaku’s Inca successors hundreds of years later.

…

Some of the stones are in an unfinished state, showing some of the techniques used to shape them. They were initially pounded by stone hammers—which can still be found in numbers on local andesite quarries—, creating depressions, and then slowly ground and polished with flat stones and sand

The stones are of mammoth proportion. The largest of these blocks is 25.6 feet long, 17 feet wide and 3.5 feet thick, and is estimated to weigh 131 metric tons. Due to their size, the method by which they were transported to Puma punku has been another topic of interest since the temple's discovery. Chemical analysis reveal the red sandstone blocks were transported up a steep incline from a quarry near Lake Titicaca roughly 10 kilometers away. The smaller andesite blocks that were used for stone facing and carvings came from quarries within the Copacabana Peninsula about 90 kilometers away from across Lake Titicaca.


An example of high-precision small holes.

Based on circumstantial evidences, it can be argued that Puma punku was never built by the Tiwanaku, but by a civilization that was more advanced. Perhaps the carbon dating results were wrong due to contamination of the samples, or that Puma punku was built by another civilization that came across the ocean, built the complex and left. Some believe that Puma punku couldn’t have been built without help from alien beings.

The complex is in complete ruins today with huge blocks of granite lying around on top of each other. The site appears to have been destroyed by an earthquake, perhaps accompanied by a tidal wave from Lake Titicaca.


This block seems to get the most attention, as there is a perfect groove with identically spaced precision-cut 6mm holes drilled along the cut.


More drill holes in what was once a lintel, with extraordinary detail that is just still visible.


Stone block with a set of blind holes of complex shape.




The numerous H-shaped blocks all match each other with extreme precision and fit into each other like Lego blocks.






The Plataforma Lítica, or stone platform on the east side has the largest blocks, the heaviest being 131 tons made from red sandstone and quarried 10 km away.




How Puma punku might have looked. 
Satellite picture of Puma punku





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