Subj: DREAM OF SACRIFICE FOR HUMANITY

Date: 01/13/1999 8:13:05 AM Central Standard Time

This portent is for 7 mountains linked together to all blow up at the same time.

There had been 14 scheduled to be linked to blow up all at once, but the Gods/spirits managed to get it down to seven so mankind didn't have to suffer quite as much.

Not all of the witnesses and sacrificial people who were going to clean up from the death and destruction had shown up yet.

If you are interested in reading the whole dream, I typed it up and uploaded it here:

DREAM OF SACRIFICE FOR HUMANITY

http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/avoreport.php?view=kaminfo

Volcano's Neighbors Watch "Bulge"

MSNBC

A bulge in the earth's crust has developed near Three Sisters, a trio of volcanoes at the center of the Cascade Range, 25 miles west of Bend, Ore. Geologists wonder whether the 4-inch-high bulge could presage a volcanic eruption.

"IT'S A BIG HOOPLA in town right now. Everybody's talking about it," said coffeehouse owner Jeannine Smith, who moved her family to this picturesque town of 850 people just to be closer to the majestic volcanic peaks that tower above it.

"It doesn't scare me," Smith said. But she added: "It is something to be considered."

About a dozen USGS scientists are considering it very carefully.

Because the radar satellite images that spotted the bulge can only be taken once a year, a team of scientists plans to fly to The Bulge in a helicopter next week to set out instruments to see if it is still growing.

"It is clearly not a crisis we are responding to, as if we were having swarms of shallow earthquakes or anything of that nature," said USGS geologist Dan Dzurisin, referring to the telltale signs of an impending eruption.

But even though it shows no danger signs, the bulge "is scientifically the most interesting target we have in the Cascades right now," Dzurisin said.

Ever since Mount St. Helens, far to the north near the Washington border, erupted on May 18, 1980, the general public has been sensitive to any rumblings in the Cascades, a string of volcanoes stretching from British Columbia to Northern California.

BOON OR BANE?

And given the city of Sisters' dependence on tourism for the local economy, one thing a lot of people are wondering about is whether The Bulge becomes boon or bane, drawing more visitors or sending them away.

At the Epicure Exchange, employee Karen Mills isn't concerned. She has loved these mountains all her life. But she figures there is little to worry about since The Bulge is about 20 miles away, on the other side of the mountain, and pointed down into the Willamette Valley.

"It's very cool, and it's going to spark a lot of interest," she predicted.

About 20 years ago, there was a lot of worry over the possibility that Carver Lake, formed by a dam of loose rock pushed up by a glacier on South Sister, might burst out and flood the town, recalled Jeff Perin, owner of The Flyfishers' Place.

"People have pretty much forgotten about that," he said.

When the USGS announcement of The Bulge hit the newspapers, Nate Turner, who works at The Flyfisher's Place, got a call from an East Coast flyfishing pal with a second home in Sisters who read about The Bulge on the train to New York and immediately called on his cell phone to see what was up.

"I told him I'd throw a sprinkler up on his roof if something was really going down," said Turner. "If The Bulge meant there would be better fishing, I might be interested in it."

EYE ON THE MOUNTAIN

Turner knows a little more about the local volcanic activity than most of his neighbors. In eighth grade he did a report on a USGS laser survey of South Sister to establish a network of benchmarks to monitor just this sort of thing.

The work was done by the USGS Cascade Volcano Observatory in 1985, shortly after it was established to keep a closer eye on the Cascades, said Dzurisin, who is leading the trip to set out the monitoring instruments.

When it was resurveyed in 1986, the bulge hadn't shown up yet. But when a new technology, radar satellite imagery, was trained on the South Sister, The Bulge came into startling view.

Volcanologists began using the European Space Agency's Interferometric Satellite Aperture Radar satellite, known as InSAR, in 1991 on Mount Etna in Italy, whose eruptions are so frequent an ice cream sundae was named for it.

Two months ago, USGS geophysicist Chuck Wicks was in his office in Menlo Park, Calif., going over some InSAR images of South Sister, when the bulge popped out at him in a bullseye ring of rainbow colors on his computer screen.

"I think I said, 'Wow, this is great,' something like that," said Wicks, who had hiked the Sisters Wilderness and thought the mountain would be a good candidate for InSAR. The last eruption was small and occurred about 1,500 years ago.

Wicks compared a digital image of the west side of the volcano taken in 1996 with one taken in 2000, and the computer revealed a rise of four inches spread over a 10-mile diameter in the headwaters of Separation Creek. The area is about three miles west of the peak of South Sister, near a formation known as The Husband, and actually extends under Highway 242 as it climbs up to McKenzie Pass.

It is too soon to tell exactly what is going on, but the best guess is that a relatively small amount of magma is moving about 12 miles beneath the surface, said Wicks.

In volcanic terms, small is still pretty big: The magma would probably fill a swimming pool measuring a half mile on each side and 50 feet deep.

SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT

Wicks is hoping that the InSAR satellite holds out long enough to give another image this summer, when the snow is gone. It has already lived beyond its design life, and all but one of its aiming gyroscopes are out of commission. A replacement satellite isn't due to be launched until fall.

In the meantime, scientists had to get a special permit from the U.S. Forest Service to fly into a wilderness area to install a very sensitive global positioning system monitor and a seismometer.

The GPS will detect changes in the elevation of the ground as small as a couple of millimeters, and the seismometer will detect any earthquakes, which are the most reliable predictor of an impending eruption, said Dzurisin.

Special efforts will be made to hide the instruments, which will be connected to the Internet by radio telemetry modems. Scientists will be able to read them daily in their offices.

If the bulge continues to grow, there will be more GPS monitors and seismometers, a new survey, and ground and air samples to check for volcanic gases.

"I suspect these kinds of ground swellings probably go on in the Cascades and at other volcanoes, and most of them - maybe even the vast majority - don't lead to eruptions," said Dzurisin. "If we had not had the radar technology, we might never have noticed. This is what volcanoes do."

InSAR has detected lots of bulges on volcanoes in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, and none of them has led to an eruption, said Dzurisin.

That would be fine with Jim Wills, who has a view of South Sister over his shoulder when he is setting out tubs of strawberries and blackberries at Richard's Produce stand.

"I remember Mount St. Helens," he said. "I don't want to see that around here."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Inch by inch, Cascades bulge getting bigger

10/24/01

MICHAEL MILSTEIN  and RICHARD L. HILL

Volcanic terrain in the central Oregon Cascades has quietly continued to swell over the past year, scientists say, and all signs point to an underground influx of molten rock just west of South Sister volcano near Bend.

There are no hints of an impending eruption of South Sister or of nearby vents that last spilled magma more than 1,200 years ago and lie in a region that has spewed more volcanic debris than any other in the Pacific Rim.

But federal researchers may seek U.S. Forest Service permission to install new seismic instruments in the remote wilderness area. That would allow them to detect earthquakes triggered if the subterranean magma -- now three to four miles deep -- surges toward the surface.

"The fact that it's still going on is scientifically very interesting, but it also has an element of public safety," said Daniel Dzurisin of the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash. "If it continues, it could eventually culminate in an eruption, and we need to be prepared for that."

Satellite images earlier this year revealed that a region nine to 12 miles across had risen about 4 inches from 1996 to 2000. Geologists said it was the most striking geological change in the Cascade Range since the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

At the time, there were no current satellite images to show whether the swelling was continuing. In September, however, a European satellite circling about 500 miles above Earth snapped a new picture that includes precise measurements of the surface topography. Comparing it with earlier images, researchers found that the area centered three miles west of South Sister had continued bulging upward at about the same rate: a little more than an inch a year.

That brings its total swelling to about 5 inches in five years -- racetrack speed in geologic terms.

If magma is driving the rugged region up, researchers do not know how long the magma might take to find its way to the surface. Similar satellite images have revealed other volcanoes swelling and shrinking without erupting, but in other cases, small surges of molten rock have triggered eruptions.

An underground infusion of about 30 million cubic yards of molten rock could have caused the swelling, but that's less than one-tenth as much as Mount St. Helens ejected in 1980. Although that would be a small eruption as eruptions go, geologists said the incoming magma also could be adding to a larger reservoir of molten rock that has been sitting silently beneath the Cascades for centuries.

"We know from other places that there can be magma bodies present for some time, where a small increase causes the original body to erupt," Dzurisin said. "If the process were to continue, it would be like stretching a rubber band. Eventually it's going to break. It may take five years or it may take 10 or 20; it all depends on whether the process continues to that point."

Researchers have used other methods to confirm and build on the satellite findings. They installed a global positioning system receiver to keep continuous track of the elevation at sites near South Sister. They also surveyed geological benchmarks to detect any change in the topography.

The results verified the satellite results and suggested that the swelling had started about 1996, when the satellites first picked it up, Dzurisin said.

The new image, taken Sept. 2 by the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite, indicates that the bulge grew about 1.2 to 1.5 inches in the past year.

"It's in the same spot as it has been," said Chuck Wicks, a geophysicist with the Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. "And it's about the same amount of material added to it as the previous year. It just continued to go up."

William E. Scott, scientist-in-charge of the Cascades Volcano Observatory, emphasized that more research would help unravel details of the uplift. "The suspicion is that there has been ongoing deformation for some time, but the issue is the rate," Scott said. "It would be good to know if things are accelerating, slowing down or about the same."

Scientists detected the bulge with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, which compares satellite images of the same 60-by-60-mile area over months or years to detect ground movements as small as four-tenths of an inch. The radar sees through clouds and darkness but not dense vegetation, ice or snow.

Injection of magma deep below the surface causes deformation -- bulging -- that can trigger earthquakes, although the area has been quiet. A new seismic-monitoring station was installed in April on The Husband, a peak west of South Sister. Only one small earthquake -- a magnitude 1.9 on Aug. 21 -- has been detected in the area.

"Except for the one event, the puzzling thing is that the seismicity is absolutely dead," Scott said. "When there's a certain amount of deformation, then you start getting adjustments within the crust and earthquakes are generated. Maybe we just haven't reached the point where that's been triggered."

If quakes start, he said, researchers could quickly deploy more seismic stations to gauge the depth and location of the tremors.

Scott said a permanent GPS station will be installed at Mount Bachelor to better track ground shifts. The implication of the satellite research is that many volcanoes may occasionally inflate with magma, without any outward signs.

In addition to monitoring ground movement, researchers have sampled springs in the area for volcanic gases that would be a signature of an underground magma reservoir. Those gases act as the driving force of eruptions.

Stephen E. Ingebritsen, a hydrologist with the Geological Survey, said carbon and helium isotopes in samples collected this summer "showed pretty conclusively" that magma is present.

A small amount of carbon dioxide also has been detected in the atmosphere above the region, which is consistent with the idea that magma is responsible for the uplift.

South Sister, the youngest of the three 10,000-foot volcanoes that make up the Three Sisters, erupted twice about 2,000 years ago. Subsequent eruptions occurred decades to centuries later from vents on or near the volcano's flanks.

You can reach Michael Milstein at 503-294-7689 or by e-mail at michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com. You can reach Richard L. Hill at richardhill@news.oregonian.com or 503-221-8238.

Wed Aug 8,2001 -- The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was a volcanic sneeze compared to what scientists say America will experience one day. And a mysterious four-inch-high bulge in the ground of central Oregon is, so far, little more than a conversation piece. Sooner or later, geologists warn, a "super volcano" will strike.

The eruption of pent-up energy will cover half the United States in ash, in some places up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep. Earth will be plunged into a perpetual winter that would last years. Some plant and animal species will disappear forever. Even humans could be pushed to the edge of extinction. Anthropologists suggest it won't be the first time.

But well before such a calamity, warning flags will likely show up on the computers of geologists around the world who monitor an increasingly useful stream of satellite data. A host of U.S. and European satellites have been trained to see "hot spots," where underground molten rock is pushing its way to the surface. The new view is giving researchers an unprecedented peek into how volcanoes work. What they see is often illuminating. Sometimes it is just plain frightening.

Yellowstone's other hibernating danger - Geologists have long known that the 10,000 hot springs and geysers in Yellowstone National Park are evidence of magma, hot molten rock below the surface. And they know that long ago the Yellowstone region experienced colossal eruptions on a scale never seen in recorded history. Researchers believe Yellowstone's volcanism is dying, but they also believe it has at least one last gasp in store. The new geologic evidence adds to satellite data showing that the treasured park straddling Idaho, Montana and Wyoming is destined to obliterate its own beauty. Not to mention that of a few surrounding states.

Chuck Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey uses a relatively new satellite technique called satellite radar interferometry to watch the ground rise, fall and morph around volcanoes and other volcanically active areas. In 1997, Wicks and his colleagues used the technique to document uplifts at Yellowstone, which means the lava below was pushing its way to the surface.

"Yellowstone is alive and very active," Wicks said.

But no one can say if or when it might become dangerously active. If a volcano is like a hibernating bear, however, then it may well be volcanic springtime in Yellowstone.

It is one of the super volcanoes. "Super explosions, about 1,000 times more material erupted than Mt. St. Helens in 1980, happen about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone," Wicks says. "And it's been about 620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption there."

More recently, in May of this year, Wicks saw an alarming batch of data while studying a region of Oregon called Three Sisters. A trio of ancient volcanic peaks dominates the landscape. Wicks spotted a bulls-eye pattern in his topography data that showed the ground had risen as much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) over an area more than 9 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter sometime between August 1996 and October 2000. He said the uplift, forced from below by rising magma, surprised him because the last eruption in the area was 1,500 years ago and there has been no earthquake activity that might hint at moving magma.

Wicks told SPACE.com there are 2 possible outcomes for the Three Sisters uplift: It will die out as other uplift phenomena have been known to do; or it will continue, eventually generate earthquakes, and then lava wIll erupt through to the surface. Whichever scenario unfolds, geologists will be watching.

"InSAR tells people living around a dormant volcano that they need to keep a wary eye," Wicks said. But volcano forecasting has proved notoriously difficult.

And people die, even in modern times. Mt. St. Helens killed 57 people in 1980. In 1991, after 600 years of dormancy, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines rumbled for days before erupting and killing about 750 people, including journalists who had been stationed at a supposedly safe distance.

15-Aug-2001

Mount Etna smouldering

Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines is getting ready to explode, dumping tons of water on villages below. The latest eruption of Mt. Etna in Sicily produced dramatic nighttime images of hot rolling lava and explosive fireworks. But these volcanoes are small compared to what scientists say America will experience one day. Sooner or later, they warn, a "super volcano" will strike right here in the U.S.A.

The eruption of pent-up energy will cover half the United States in ash, in some places up to 3 feet deep. Earth will be plunged into a perpetual winter that lasts years. Some plant and animal species will disappear forever. Even humans could be pushed to the edge of extinction - it's happened before.

Geologists have long known that the 10,000 hot springs and geysers in Yellowstone National Park are evidence of magma, hot molten rock below the surface. And they know that long ago the region experienced colossal eruptions on a scale never seen in recorded history. Is Yellowstone dying or just hibernating? Geologists think it has at least one last gasp in store. New geologic evidence shows that Yellowstone National Park will eventually obliterate its own beauty, and may take parts of surrounding states with it.

In the July 2001 issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, University of Wisconsin geologists Ilya Bindeman and John Valley reported new evidence indicating "a high probability of a future catastrophic eruption sometime within the next million years, and possibly within the next hundred thousand years."

Crystals of zircon and quartz serve as veritable time capsules of geologic events. Analyzing these minerals, Bindeman and Valley have found evidence suggesting Yellowstone goes nuts every few hundred thousand years. Hot magma welling up from below melts surface rock, forming giant chambers of lava that build up over long periods. Eventually, the chambers burst and release their fury.

Today's Yellowstone landscape represents the last in a sequence of calderas - the broad crater-like basins created when volcanoes explode and their characteristic cones collapse - that formed in regular progression over the past 2 million years. The near-clockwork timing of eruptions there - 2 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 600,000 years ago - suggests a pattern that may foreshadow an eruption of catastrophic proportions.

A hot spot deep beneath Yellowstone acts like a burner. "It's a constant source of heat that acts on the upper crust and forms magma chambers that contain tens of thousands of cubic kilometers" of molten rock, says Bindeman. And one of the massive plates that helps make up the crust of the Earth, the North American plate, is slowly moving over the hot spot. "The plate has been moving across the heat source which makes it seem like the volcanoes are moving across the continent. Moreover, we have a progression of explosive eruptions which seem to have some periodicity."

But well before such a calamity, warning flags will show up on the computers of geologists around the world who monitor an increasingly useful stream of satellite data. U.S. and European satellites have been trained to see "hot spots," where underground molten rock is pushing its way to the surface. This is giving researchers an unprecedented peek into how volcanoes work. Sometimes what they see is frightening.

Chuck Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey uses the relatively new satellite technique called satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) to watch the ground rise, fall and morph around volcanoes and other volcanically active areas. While the Global Positioning System can also show ground movement, it does so only for locations where a monitor is in place on the ground. But with radar interferometry, geologists can map the topography of an entire region, then watch it change over time.

On one early application of InSAR, large-scale ground movements caused by the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, were studied by comparing an image made more than a year before the earthquake with another produced just after.

In 1997, Wicks and his colleagues used the technique to document uplifts at Yellowstone, meaning that the lava below was pushing its way to the surface. "Yellowstone is alive and very active," Wicks says. But no one can say if or when it might become dangerous. According to Wicks, "Super explosions, about 1,000 times more material erupted than Mt. St. Helens in 1980, happen about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone. And it's been about 620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption there."

More recently, in May, Wicks saw an alarming batch of data while studying a region of Oregon called Three Sisters, where a trio of ancient volcanic peaks dominates the landscape. He spotted a bulls-eye pattern in his topography data that showed the ground had risen as much as 4 inches over an area more than 9 miles in diameter sometime between August 1996 and October 2000.

The uplift, forced from below by rising magma, surprised him because the last eruption in the area was 1,500 years ago and there has been no earthquake activity that might hint at moving magma. He believes there are two possible outcomes for the Three Sisters uplift: It will die out as other uplift phenomena have been known to do or it will continue, eventually generate earthquakes, and then lava well erupt through to the surface.

The InSAR system cannot monitor all volcanic regions around the world all the time. But because of the early warning it provided, a seismometer has been set up on the Three Sisters uplift to sense any possible earthquakes, and a GPS receiver now provides continuous monitoring of ground movement. "InSAR tells people living around a dormant volcano that they need to keep a wary eye," Wicks says.

To spot ground deformation over time, a radar interferometer measures the same location of the Earth's surface on subsequent satellite orbits. But sometimes the radar is bounced off trees, instead of the ground. And researchers realized they sometimes accidentally measured the slight movement of a leaf on a tree, blowing in the wind. "If the leaf is in a different position by a few centimeters, that's enough to mess it up," says Tom Farr, a geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Researchers at JPL are now working to create animations of lava flows by imaging a volcano with each satellite pass (every 24 hours with some systems).

Volcano forecasting has proved notoriously difficult. And people die, even in modern times. Mt. St. Helens killed 57 people in 1980. In 1991, after 600 years of dormancy, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines rumbled for days before erupting and killing about 750 people, including journalists who had been stationed at a supposedly safe distance, and it's threatening to erupt again.

Mount Etna, Europe's highest and most active volcano, has been pouring out rivers of lava for two weeks. Active since at least the beginning of the 16th century, Mount Etna was responsible for one of the world's worst volcanic eruptions in 1969. It lasted 4 months and killed 20,000 people.

The recent eruption has already swallowed up several farmhouses, a restaurant, stretches of road, and a ski-lift station. It also has been threatening the village of Nicolosi, a community of about 5,000 people. Although the two main fronts oozing down the slopes have shown signs of abating in the last 48 hours, officials said that the state of emergency is not over. "It is a situation of relative calm, it is too early to crow over victory," says Franco Barberi, of Italy's Department of Civil Protection and a professor of volcanology at the University of Pisa.

Despite the new satellite technology, sensors stuck on the mountainside are still the best way to predict an imminent eruption. Gene Ulmer, a geology professor at Temple University, was in the village of Nicolosi, on the flanks of Mt. Etna, on June 18. He and 20 other geologists had just visited the mountain and were eating dinner at a restaurant.

In came a team of researchers, Italians and other Europeans. They announced that Etna, which had been relatively quiet for months, would erupt the following afternoon at 1:30. More than a half-dozen ground observation devices fed a computer model that gave them this information.

The next day, Ulmer and the other visiting geologists waited at a spot three miles from the volcano, recommended as safe but with a clear view. "At 1:33 p.m., the mountaintop blew out," Ulmer says. "Within 10 minutes the summit was completely obscured in a cloud of dust and black plumes rising as much as 10,000 feet into the air. There was a tremendous noise."

Heavy ash fell to the ground. Within a couple of hours, finer ash began to settle back to the surface. The air, choked with the tiny particles, looked like milk, Ulmer recalls. "As it came down, it was like someone was painting every ravine with white paint." What he witnessed was the start of what has developed into a major set of eruptions that are still continuing.

But what Ulmer marveled at most was the accuracy of the prediction. "All of us in volcanology are excited that maybe we have finally found out the right monitoring instruments to put into the mountain so we can make some life-saving predictions about possible eruptions," he says.

One of those instruments comes from the Apollo mission. Reflecting devices similar to those left on the Moon are stationed at various points on the mountain. From miles away, researchers bounce lasers off the mirrors. If they have moved, the laser beam shifts. Other devices on the mountain sense changes in temperature and the output of telltale gases.

Ulmer was forced to leave Italy earlier than he had planned. He is now home in Philadelphia, where he is recovering from a volcano-induced staph infection. No matter how good a volcanologist's boots are, they fill with volcanic ash that he describes as having the consistency of flour. But the ash is made up of small glass shards that, once inside his boots, ground into his skin. His feet blistered and then became infected. He had a first aid kit with antibacterial ointment and pills, but the kit had not been updated in three years, and the medicines were not effective.

It turns out that Mount Etna contains a rare type of lava that is setting off alarm bells among scientists monitoring the eruption of Sicily's infamous volcano. "The lavas flowing at the heights of 6,890 and 8,360 feet contain amphiboles, crystals which incorporate water and had not been present in the lava for 15,000 years," says Sonia Calvari of Catania's Institute of Volcanology. "This magma is ascending from great depths. Instead, the lava river flowing at the height of 8,860 feet is amphibole-free, thus more superficial."

"If it is true that these new lavas contain amphibole, it would be very disturbing. It would show that the lavas have been derived from a much different type of magma supply area than previously and thus have much greater potential for explosive activity - because of the increased water content," says American volcanologist John Lockwood.

While it is encouraging that only gas and ash are coming out of Etna at the moment, experts worry that the amphibole lava flowing at 6,890 feet might form underground tunnels filled with magma. "Amphibole is a more explosive lava type," says Steve Anderson of Black Hills State University, South Dakota, who has been working on the lava flows at Etna for the past 3 years. "The intense fountaining at Etna suggests that this magma is arriving at the surface with a lot of water still present. This indicates that the magma is either rising very quickly from the magma chamber through the conduit, or that the conduit is not very permeable to gas flow, or a combination of both."

74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba erupted with a force estimated to have been 10,000 times that of Mt. St. Helens. The sky darkened around the globe as ash blocked out the Sun. Temperatures plummeted by as much as 21 degrees at higher latitudes around the planet, says Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University. He estimates that three-quarters of the plants in the Northern Hemisphere may have died.

Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution, a phenomenon observed by other researchers who study DNA - The blueprints of life for all humans are remarkably similar given an evolutionary timeline known to stretch back more than 2 million years.

Ambrose thinks that early humans, struggling as always against the elements, were pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption. Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot of evolution occurs in 74,000 years.