Friday, September 28, 2012

Tibetan Buddhists, Nazis, and Aliens - Oh my!


            In my head, I'm picturing Indiana Jones swooping down and stealing the subject of this post out from under the noses of the SS. Unfortunately, things don't work that way in real life, and on Wednesday, Nature magazine reported that a Buddhist statue taken by the Nazis in 1938-39 was actually carved out of a meteorite - specifically the Chinga meteorite.

TIBETAN BUDDHISTS
            The statue weighs in at 10 kg or around 22 pounds. It is 24 centimeters tall, and depicts the Buddhist god Vaisravana (also known as Kubera), the King of the North. This particular statue is known as the "Iron man." The exact origin of the statue is not known, but experts believe it to have been created by the indigenous Tibetan people, the Bon.

Picture from: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/buddhist-iron-man-found-by-nazis-is-from-space.html

NAZIS
            An expedition lead by Ernst Schäfer in 1938-39 into Tibet is believed to be the expedition during which the statue was found. The statue probably struck the Nazis' fancy due to the swastika found on it's abdomen. The original meaning of the swastika is far from the way the Nazis bastardized it. A swastika's literal meaning is "to be good". In Tibet specifically, it was a symbol known as "yung drung"and represents eternity. 

ALIENS
            No, not the little green men kind, but instead the giant, extraterrestrial rock kind. The image of the "iron man" as it is known, is carved into a large piece of extraterrestrial iron. The composition of the rock included an abnormally high content of nickel, and it was from this that it was determined to be a member of the rare ataxite meteorite class. It is believed that the meteorite fragment is a remnant of the Chinga meteorite that fell in the area that is now Russia, tens of thousands of years ago. According to Nature magazine, this is the only known figure of a human carved into a meteorite.


Original article from Nature magazine - here
Scientific American article - here
The journal abstract from Meteorites & Planetary Science can be found - here

Tell me again how science isn't awesome? 


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