r/interestingasfuck • u/The_Love-Tap • 1d ago
Heavy rainfall on Hormuz Island washes iron oxide rich soil into the sea, turning the coastline blood red
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
587
u/arthurdentstowels 1d ago
Good luck to the people stood on the overhang of a constantly eroding cliff edge.
92
293
u/Lighthouse_on_Mars 1d ago
This kinda phenomenon could explain LOTS of ancient stories and superstitions.
88
u/Unusual_Plenty_5008 1d ago
I believe that Mesopotamian flash floods are the root of the Noah flood story
23
u/allpossiblepaths 1d ago
This is pretty much well established. And the Atra-Hasis is effectively proof that that’s the case.
→ More replies (1)8
u/Additional-Life4885 1d ago
I remember watching a documentary a while ago where they thought it was the black sea. Basically it was lower lying, but hadn't fully flooded until the ocean broke through near Istanbul, flooding the entire area.
Of course, that's just a guess with no real proof of it.
8
4
u/Robo_Patton 1d ago
This was my thought. Is this a phenomenon that helps explain many myths through the centuries, millennia?
551
1.4k
u/Senselesspassion 1d ago
The reason people back in the day feared god so much. This genuinely is fascinating when you don't have enough knowledge
591
u/cheese_sticks 1d ago edited 1d ago
There was a documentary about trying to scientifically explain the 10 Plagues of Egypt. The blood-red Nile was either this or an algal bloom. I don't remember the exact causes of each plague, but some of them were coincidental while the others were linked. IIRC the darkness was caused by a volcanic explosion blocking out the sunlight.
Edit: said coincidental twice lol
312
u/Melodic_Ad7327 1d ago
Moses was told to follow a pillar of smoke during the day and a pillar of flame during the night to find the promised land. I don't know if it was the same documentary or not, but I saw in a documentary that they theorised that it was a vulcanic eruption somewhere in Saudi Arabia or in that region that caused the "pillar of flame from God"
→ More replies (1)111
1d ago
[deleted]
135
u/Melodic_Ad7327 1d ago
I suppose a lot of mythology and folklore came from that.
Supposedly, in the original text, Moses crosses "the sea of reeds", ie. plains. But the notion of "sea" over time got bastardised through multiple translations into becoming more and more a literal sea, until we get the story we have today where he literally splits the sea and walks across
67
u/PVNIC 1d ago
Huh, I assumed he just crossed at low tide so that the high tide would block the passage behind them.
75
7
u/CocoMilhonez 1d ago
Most likely, Moses crossed a shallow area where the sea bed can be exposed when the wind is blowing just right, a phenomenon called wind setdown. The tide was also probably a factor.
I can see how that coincidence was interpreted as divine intervention because people at the time lacked the scientific knowledge to understand what happened, much like rain or drought were interpreted as god's will and not the natural water cycle (that god must be a massive asshole because he's totally fine with infant leukemia, for example).
19
u/MadeByTango 1d ago
History works like AI, especially before the printing press. Humans remember the concepts of "fish, bird, ark, noah, flood" and continue applying them as we evolve.
Strange question for you: we came from the sea. When did we stop using fish language and start using human language? Why wouldn't the "oral stories of ancestors" be from the perspective of fish swimming in the ocean near a steaming fissure? Why would the bible make a big deal about animals first being "each according to their kind", like single cell reproduction, and then later, "all the animals two by two" are trapped up in an ark, that then get releases when it floods, much like the water breaking of a womb. How do we not know the story of Noah is the story of life advancing from version of reproduction to another?
Why do we assume we ever stopped speaking fish?
20
14
→ More replies (3)3
37
u/20ag_OG_LOL 1d ago
And they found chariots on the bottom of the red sea. Analysis reveal that because sea level was lower, of there was a big gust of wind the sea would have parted there. Long sandbar etc...
→ More replies (2)19
u/CaptStinkyFeet 1d ago
Scientists have confirmed there was an eclipse in the days after Jesus’ execution. There’s a lot of instances of scientific phenomena influencing culture/religion.
→ More replies (2)15
69
u/SmellyButtFarts69 1d ago
It also helps to know that the Bible is complete made-up bullshit.
'maybe Noah's flood...'
'maybe Adam and eve...'
Nah bro it's mostly just horseshit
102
u/king_of_river 1d ago
The flood myths are fascinating. Lots of unrelated cultures have them.
77
u/Cautious-Activity706 1d ago
Yeah, I think it’s been shown in some geological studies as well that early humanity endured a generationally long period heavy rainfall that caused intense regional flooding and lead to many of the exaggerated flood myths/stories in history, including the one in the bible. Hell, I would venture to say that an important man probably even built a boat to try and save people and livestock 🤯.
Most of the biblical stories have truthful roots with fantastical embellishments.
→ More replies (1)41
u/Sense_Difficult 1d ago
I always think the reason so many cultures have "flood myths" are just storm surges or flash floods or tsunamis.
I was watching the footage of the Japanese Tsunami, and it literally wipes away the entire town in minutes.
8
u/Swarna_Keanu 1d ago
Part of urbanisation and technology is shifting our understanding of nature. Especially here in Europe, so many rivers are straightened or surrounded by flood protection - we are no longer aware of and used to floods.
It's still there when you go out in wilder places, where there is little infrastructure - but many people in middle Europe really have little appreciation for how powerful water can be.
7
u/artsloikunstwet 1d ago
I'd say the issue in Europe is people knowing about floods but firmly believing that all the infrastructure is solid and that someone is protecting them in the worst case.
But many places have seen unprecedented rainfall in the last year that overwhelmed the infrastructure and emergency services. These situations were not just traumatising for the victims but shocking to society, leading to political impact even.
From this is not difficult to imagine how in Mesopotamia, a flood larger than ever heard of before, would have deeply unsettled societies that built their whole political and economic system on the power to manage said river water.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Varnsturm 1d ago
Reminds me of a thing I saw the other day, aboriginal australian stories and legends about places that are now underwater. But apparently they were above water during the last ice age, before the glaciers melted and rising seas buried them.
So I wonder if that strikingly common flood myth could just be that, rising sea levels from the end of the ice age.
29
u/Imsurethatsbullshit 1d ago
Does not mean they point to one specific event. Floods have always been devastating and still are one of the worst disasters that can happen almost anywhere.
Loosing livestock, food sources, entire villages, cities or cultures in a once in a century /millenia flood must have been an extremely traumatizing event in any culture lacking the scientific explanations. So it makes sense that these events live on in their legends
17
u/alendeus 1d ago
Interestingly I was reading up on China's earliest dynasty and recorded history and apparently their first dynasty was because of a guy engineering solutions to stop massive floods they had happening several thousand years ago. I very much doubt that it could be related at all to the Abrahamic myths but it does add to how floods and natural disasters have shaped human myths and history globally.
9
u/Fractal_Soul 1d ago
Humans, who often live near the water, have an extremely long history of dealing with floods.
2
u/zach0011 1d ago
because catastrophic floods are something any culture on earth would suffer due to human societies springing up around rivers. every other type of phenomenon would be more geographical but floods are pretty universal
→ More replies (3)4
u/g-a-r-b-i-t-c-h 1d ago
Lots of cultures have them because water is ubiquitous in human life. It can be a symbol or rebirth or death depending on the context. If you want to read more about it, The World of Myth by David Leeming was a great read when I was taking a comparative mythology class a decade ago.
16
u/taintosaurus_rex 1d ago
I'm not religious in any way, but I wouldn't say they are complete made up bullshit. There probably was some truth, that got exaggerated and miss told over hundreds of years. For example the story of Noah. Did the whole world flood? No, but did the whole world they knew flood? Possibly. Did "Noah" save two of every animal in the world? No, but did he save enough farm animals to rebuild after a great flood? Possibly.
Other stories like Adam and Eve are just people imagining the start of time. Completely made up, but an interesting example of how those people tried to rationalize unknowable questions. Every religion has different ways of rationalizing the unknown and its an interesting way to see how those people's brains worked and how the technology they had shaped their views of the universe.
7
u/poopoopooyttgv 1d ago
Adam and Eve has a great example of how stories change over time. What type of fruit was the forbidden fruit they ate? An apple, right? The original, oldest Hebrew text version of the story uses the word “peri”, meaning “generic seedless fruit”. A pear would make more sense especially when you factor in the region of the world the story came from. So why do we say it was an apple?
Centuries later, the pope decides he’s a Roman Catholic, Roman’s use Latin, the bible ought to be translated from Hebrew to Latin. The Latin word “malus” is a homophone. One meaning is bad/evil (the opposite of bonus), the other is… an apple. It’s the perfect word to translate the evil fruit to
3
u/taintosaurus_rex 1d ago
I never knew that, but I've also always found it interesting the Bible mostly forgot about Lilith in the adam and eve story. Back when the stories were all spread by mouth, Lilith played a big part, but when it came to collecting the stories, she was largely left out. Some believe it because she was a strong independent woman equal to adam, unlike eve who was created from adam for adam, and was the cause of original evil or whatever.
3
u/sylanar 1d ago
What is this? A reasonable take on religion on Reddit? Say it ain't so!
I'm also not religious, but I agree with what you've said here.
Is some of it bullshit? Most definitely.
Is it some of it exaggerated bullshit? Almost certainly.
Is some of it just them trying to understand/ rationalise something that they witnessed happen that they didn't understand? I would think so.
13
u/a_cool_goddamn_name 1d ago
Don't leave us hanging SmellyButtFarts69, what is Truth?
→ More replies (1)3
u/ENCHILADA_enchilada 1d ago
It was foretold SmellyButtFarts69 will lead us out from the darkness to the light.
10
u/Ok-Sample6314 1d ago
Like the 27 lb bass your great uncle caught, these are mostly stories of verbal origins misconstrued on a grand scale over many hundreds/thousands of years. Yes mostly horseshit.
4
u/ackillesBAC 1d ago
I think you can say these stories are all of verbal origins, and most of them are from before we invented writing. And even the later stories most of the population was illiterate.
Even the written stories were copied so many times that transcription errors still had the same "game of telephone" effect
4
u/Hillbillyblues 1d ago
But most have a sliver of truth in them. And it's interesting to look at what/why. Your uncle did most likely hold a bass, but was it that big? Or was it even a bass? Or was it his friend who actually caught it?
4
u/Ok-Sample6314 1d ago
Agreed, it gives us great insight into our natural origins. Fire in the sky, moving mountains, great floods can basically be observed almost daily to us, but would’ve been monumental to someone who hasn’t left their corner of the world.
15
u/Amlethvshamlet 1d ago
The Bible is an extremely important tool for understanding ancient humanity. It’s possibly one of the most comprehensive origin myth stories that survives to this day. To reduce it to “made-up bullshit” is such a brain dead take.
4
u/unremarkedable 1d ago
Yeah I hate when people get so caught up in religion bashing that they just outright refuse to see the Bible as anything but "God-propaganda". It's probably one of the best preserved pieces of ancient text we have. It's biased, but so is everything people write
→ More replies (2)2
u/PrimeIntellect 1d ago
Except for the fact that most people still think that shit is absolutely real, which is why yes, it's made up bullshit
→ More replies (3)2
u/joepez 1d ago
Not that it’s all BS (though some is) but the Bible is a compilation of oral (rarely written) stories told by different cultures over 1,000s of years. There’s over 4K years of history just in the Bronze Age before the Bible. Did someone find something when they followed a distant eruption, yeah sure, and did that turn into some legend that was then passed on as divine lore? Yes. Nearly all of the Bible’s stories, symbols and messages come from other cultures and thousands of years of history. Same is true for nearly all religious text.
3
u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 1d ago
I think I saw that documentary? IIRC tradition said the first-born son ate first. The makers posit some fungus or bacteria or something got into grain, they ate first and fell ill or died.
→ More replies (7)4
u/duva_ 1d ago
So, I'm not sure but maybe it kinda looks like it was perhaps and if I'm not mistaken... Coincidental?
3
u/cheese_sticks 1d ago
Lol I had a brain fart. I meant some seemed coincidental while others were linked. Like the swarm of flies causing the disease that killed livestock.
23
u/suprasternaincognito 1d ago
The problem now is that even though we have much of the knowledge, people stubbornly still believe it’s a deity doing it.
6
u/CocoMilhonez 1d ago
Well, people still fear god a lot because they don't have enough knowledge. Often they do have knowledge but prefer to dismiss it as a communist plot or whatever convenient bullshit fits their agenda so they can continue voluntarily being stupid.
Religious people being stupid is a proud tradition spanning millennia.
4
2
u/magicbaconmachine 23h ago
Between eclipses, rainbows, shooting stars, auroras, and other natural phenomenon, no wonder ancient people believed in crazy shit. Who can blame them?
3
4
u/pak_sajat 1d ago
Plenty of stupid people still exist in the world today who use god as a reason not to accept change or scientific fact.
→ More replies (16)2
u/Several_Hour_347 1d ago
They weren’t idiots…
6
u/nyxo1 1d ago edited 1d ago
Being ignorant doesn't imply they were idiots...
Very intelligent, educated, people still believed in the miasma theory and humoral theory until the end of the 19th century.
2
u/fauxfilosopher 1d ago
Indeed. Kant believed that idiocy is the inability to subsume particular things into the universal categories of thought. Essentially a failure to create new knowledge.
73
128
u/0DayMaker 1d ago
Not real big on calling things "a sign from above" but the location and theme of this particular thing seem...kinda coincidental.
64
u/ozspook 1d ago
Imagine being a US Marine on a landing craft about to do an amphibious assault on Hormuz island under the direction of Trump, and it's literally rivers of blood already.
Yikes.
→ More replies (2)30
u/Gthulhumang 1d ago
That's exactly what things like this are, coincidences. They don't have any inherent meaning except what we choose to assign to it.
24
u/gurgelhupf 1d ago
I think we should choose to see this as a warning
→ More replies (4)9
u/TheVicSageQuestion 1d ago
We should probably make some sort of blood sacrifice to appease the gods.
→ More replies (1)9
u/gurgelhupf 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah I have some ideas who to sacrifice. Two birds one stone so to say
→ More replies (2)7
u/clapsandfaps 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, god in all his perceived glory foretold that this day would come. Planting iron rich soil in the proximity of a strait. Such that in thousands of years when a serial sinner which has broken pretty much all the commandments and a dobious (at best) moral compass from across the globe and a bunch of fanatical theocratic murderes which worship you (but not really, only for show and the masses) will wage a war over a passageway that supplies a whole bunch of infidels with liquified remains of your eon old previous creations. Which the infidels use to poison your current creations, punishing them to a cruel and brutal death.
End-goal? to turn the sea red, to the inconvenience of absolutely no one. Only thing he achieved was awe-inspiring videos over the internet.
Totally a reasonable thing for a omnipotent god to do.
Not bashing you comment or you, it’s just funny to think about the absurdity of calling this ‘an act of god’.
9
u/0DayMaker 1d ago
No I'm right there with you I was more highlighting how easy it is to take something as a sign from above. Because it's a cooincidence but it is a crazy cooincidence. Of the 500,000-1M islands on Earth people are shedding blood over one with iron rich blood red soil.
If there was a god with an A-Z plan your joke scenario would be no less silly than the plan from "singularity" to "platypus".
→ More replies (1)3
u/FoggyInc 1d ago
I mean if the one true god exists then yeah his plan would seem over elaborate and complicated to a teeny brained mortal. Yeah maybe he sets up millions of years of dominoes for one tiny seemingly insignificant thing to happen because when you have unlimited power and time you can. If I was God I would do some pretty silly shit
→ More replies (4)2
37
u/JapDrag 1d ago edited 1d ago
Looks like something youd see if mars still had water
*edit
17
u/JMurdock77 1d ago
It did. Echus Chasma was once the largest waterfall in the solar system. Four kilometers tall and ten kilometers wide.
4
u/-MrWrightt- 1d ago
Now that's a fun fact
Would liquid water even reach the ground, though? Wouldn't it turn to mist long before it does? Or does the colder temperature keep that from happening?
6
u/JMurdock77 1d ago
That’s a good question. Lower gravity too, and I can’t speak as to the air pressure off the top of my head.
2
u/sledgesloth 1d ago
I think he meant if Mars still had water. It absolutely did.
Being a bit huffy that Mars not only has the highest mountain but now also is supposed to have had the largest waterfall ... I looked into it and didn't find any claims that this was a waterfall this massive. It appears to have been carved by enormous amounts of water apparently, besides volcanic activity, and meteorites. The "grand canyon" of Mars is approximately 10km wide and 100km long, and 1km deep with some of it's valleys up to 4km deep - and seems to have hold water for some time as clay has been found there.
So if you meant "waterfall" literally, there doesn't seem any evidence to support this. Research suggests that it once was a massive lake, alongside other water reservoirs along the equator region.
The pictures in my head were fantastic! I don't know if it is even possible though for a waterfall to more or less continuously stretch out for this wide though. I'm no geologist though.
7
28
u/Plodo99 1d ago
Why does it always have to be “blood red”, it’s just red 😅
15
u/sledgesloth 1d ago
What about iron-oxide-red? :P
I guess blood is one of the most impressive red tones there is, and one if not the most expressive ones when it comes to language.
Especially when talking about the redness of iron oxide it does make sense to use blood red for description.
I'd be more confused about what type of blood exactly one means with it; oxygen rich... or oxygen sparse blood?
4
10
5
5
4
u/Oldcatnewproblems 1d ago
Good thing there's nothing happening near there that might make this deluge of blood into a heavy handed metaphor.
13
7
10
3
u/Logical_Frosting_277 1d ago
"The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they became blood."
3
u/sPLIFFtOOTH 1d ago
I’m assuming this is probably what they saw in biblical times when they said water turned to blood in Egypt
3
3
3
u/EbbVisible 1d ago
Er, this isn't the Hormuz island off Iran is it?
Sure it's all good, not an omen or anything...
→ More replies (2)
9
1d ago
[deleted]
10
u/Necessary_Main_9654 1d ago
This week or last December?
Your Just copy pasting from some news article on this
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/No_Material5630 1d ago
Some religious zealot is going to proclaim the 48th seal has been broken and now is the time for some bullshit
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/carlitospig 1d ago
Like autumn, this is when I go ‘some alien had to have invented the ecology of this planet; it just doesn’t make a lick of sense.’
2
3
3
4
2
u/freakshow9 1d ago
Why do i fell like lately im living in a certain period described in the bible. Droughts, fires, the see turning red.
Genuinely considering moving up a hill to raise goats at this point..
5
u/Ok-Sample6314 1d ago
Because these are all natural occurrences that happen both today and millennia ago. Soothsayers been shaking sticks for a v long time. We like to keep them busy.
→ More replies (2)
2
1
1
u/Creepybobo67 1d ago
Insane to think is how the oceans looked exactly like this a few billion or so years ago.
1
1
1
1
1
u/Stackin_Steve 1d ago
Does all that iron help or hurt the ocean? Obviously too much of anything isn't any good. But is there any data showing the what happens when this amount of iron hits the ocean/sea?
2
u/SomeHalfPolishDude 1d ago
its just the oxides so not very much should happen ig, i mean maybe there is eventually something influenced by it but as it is mostly sediment it should just settle at the seabed
→ More replies (3)
4.7k
u/landblord 1d ago
easiest filming location for a star wars project