Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
 |
| Cocoa Beach Thursday Photo by James F. |
James F. sent me the following email along with the photos of Cocoa Beach.
Well, Cocoa Beach is an absolute mess after "re-nourishment" for metal detecting. Along with the tons and tons of sand come thousands and thousands of fragments of iron fragments from the dredging pipes. These are anywhere from a 1/8th-inch to 1/4 inch deeply rusted and highly conductive bits of Fe strewn, as my grandfather used to say, from Hell to breakfast, up the beach for literally miles.
What was once a very nice semi-productive beach is now a disaster for the next few years. The beach is nice from a tourists standpoint, but all but sterile from mine.
I've attached a couple of pictures I took yesterday, including a few iron fragments that now plague the beach here.
 |
| Rusty Iron Chip Like Those That Litter The Newly Renourished Beach. Photo by James F. |
A few days ago I commented on the shiny pieces of metal that look like aluminum or titanium that I often get questions about. One thing that I get just as many questiions about are small cob-sized iron flakes or chips like the one shown above. You'll find iron flakes like this on many beaches, and the thing is that sometimes they turn black and can look very much like cobs.
Many metal detectors will pass them over and many will easily identify them as being iron, but if you have any question, as many people do, a quick way to tell is with a magnet. If a chip like this sticks to a magnet, it is not a reale.
As James suggested, they are common after beach renourishment projects. They come off of the large rusty pipes and other equipment. Other beaches have similar iron flakes that come from older sources such as old erosion control structures, and some even come from various other rusting items. On one treasure beach it was thought that a lot of these came from an old barge that was once used as a salvage vessel.
---
Conference presentations were dotted with colorful stories. Consider that of the covert Jewish Conquistador Alonso de Avila. He first enlists in the army of Hernando Cortes -- as a bookkeeper. In appreciation for accounting services rendered, he is then made the first mayor of the newly created city of Veracruz. But the glory is fleeting. He is arrested as a relapsed Jew by the Mexican Inquisition, accused of keeping a crucifix under his writing table and stepping on it -- a common but spurious charge, said Dr. Eva Alexandra Uchmany of the Universidad Nacional in Mexico, who told the story...
Below is a link for an article about the little known history of Jewish explorers in the New World.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/29/science/jewish-voyagers-to-the-new-world-emerging-from-history-s-mists.html
---
The Americas are a big place, but the Native American group that first settled it was small — just about 250 people, according to a new genetic study.
These people, known as a founding group because they "founded" the first population, migrated from Siberia to the Americas by about 15,000 years ago, said study co-lead researcher Nelson Fagundes, a professor in the Department of Genetics at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil...
By some theories the native or indigenous Americans may have been immigrants too. Here is a link to the rest of the article about some of the first peoples of the New World.
https://www.livescience.com/62531-native-american-founder-population.html
---
An 80-foot wave recently set a record as the most massive wave of the southern hemisphere.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/05/11/massive-wave-sets-southern-hemisphere-record-scientists-say.html
---
The first tropical depression of the 2018 season could be developing right now as Invest 90E.
https://www.aol.com/article/weather/2018/05/11/tropical-depression-could-be-first-of-2018-hurricane-season/23431627/
But locally we can't expect any more than a two or three foot surf for several days.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
