More Comments from Readers-Part III

Here are more comments and questions from readers of this blog:
Comment #1: “The canals you speak of in Peru were dated to 5400 BC...LONG before Nephi OR Mulek, the surviving son of Zedekiah. Get your facts straight or continue making the rest of your faith look foolish” D. Rave.

Top: An ancient canal being considered to be part of the current renewal of the ancient water system; Bottom Left: A canal still operating; Bottom Right: An ancient canal bringing water into a city

 

Response: First, around fifteen hundred years ago, a civilization called the Wari built a system of canals to bridge seasonal droughts in what is today’s Peruvian Andes. Rainwater diverted through the high-altitude canals percolated through the Andean rock and soil to reemerge weeks later in communities at lower elevations. As perhaps a recognition of the life-giving necessity of water, the canal networks are called ‘mamanteo,’ Spanish for ‘suckling.’
    To aid in the need for water today in Peru, researchers at the Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, with colleagues at the Regional Initiative for Hydrological Monitoring of Andean Ecosystems in Lima, tracked water through the stone canals. With dye tracers, the scientists mapped and timed the water’s slow progress from the mountain town of Huamantanga to rivers that feed Lima’s water supply.
    Peruvian water authorities have eyed the ancient system as a low-cost solution to water shortage in Lima. The state has even invested in revitalizing parts of it. Now for the first time, the plans have the backing of robust scientific evidence.
    Second, Peru's capital Lima is the second-largest desert city in the world. Although the region enjoys a surplus of water during the rainy season, keeping it is a problem. The excess often ends up back in the ocean, leaving Lima's nine million residents without a regular water supply during the dry winter months.

A stone canal, built 1500 years ago, one of many that criss-cross the Peruvian Andes that still function when used

However, a network of stone canals dating back to the first millennium AD is a solution to the city's water crisis. Other ancient canals were built before that time, and most situated in the Peruvian Andes, these canals were an effective method of storing water during the rainy season. As the bottom of the canals are porous, the water filters directly into the ground and runs into springs and natural reservoirs further down the mountain, maintaining river flow during the dry season.
    Second, when we post an article that is limited in size, its depth is also limited, and the best way to understand the underlying facts is to consider that the article is a top of the past eight years of articles on various, but often overlapping subjects. In this case, the dating of the Earth has been covered numerous times from various sources and views. We have shown from various scientific views that the Earth is approximately 13,000 years old as the Lord dictated to Moses who wrote in Genesis and the Book of Moses, the dates given him of the Patriarchs. The dating sequences used by science in general have been shown to be well in error, beginning with Carbon-14, which we have detailed here numerous times, including statements from it inventor, Willard F. Libby and his self-admitted results showing the Earth to be only about 10,000 years old, but adjusted his findings and clock to read differently to adjust to “everyone knows the Earth is millions of years old.” 
    We do not use Earth-dating systems here that have been proven time and again to be in error, except to show what is older and what is younger than one another. Before you start casting stones, you might want to know what it is that has been said on the matter you think you understand from one article regarding the number of more than 4000 articles here over the years. We appreciate you have a different view and that is fine, but at least appreciate the fact that we are not writing about things we know nothing about. In fact, we have spent more than 30 years studying the subjects written about here.
Comment #2: “The water in Lake Nicaragua is very brown and silty looking (I have flown over several times). If you were to look from the west shore, you would think it was an ocean because of its size. So, yes I agree that the west shore could be seen as the narrow neck of land separating the sea east from the sea west. The water exits Lake Nicaragua via the San Juan river on the east side and flows from Lake Nicaragua all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (over 100 kilometers). I can easily see how it would have been possible, during Book of Mormon times, that instead of a river it could have been a large gulf of water that gradually got filled in over a couple thousand years. This is true of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers in Iraq that during biblical times entered the Persian gulf as separate rivers, but now are joined together (about 100 miles upstream) and become one single river (the Euphrates) which enters in at the head of the Persian gulf. One hundred miles of what is now land used to be water (a hundred miles of the Persian Gulf got filled in with silt and became land). So, certainly it is possible for such silty water flowing from Lake Nicaragua could have filled in a much larger gulf that may have connected the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Nicaragua. Such a large gulf could have been considered impassable during BOM times. This would have made the narrow neck of land to be the only way to pass on dry land from the land South (we now know as Costa Rica) to the land North (current day Nicaragua).” Gringo Farmer SC

If the Rivas Isthmus was the narrow neck of land and the narrow passage that gave egress into the Land Northward (blue arrow), as you are suggesting, which of course could be cut off by the Nephite army, what would have kept the Lamanite from taking (red arrow) the eastern route on the other side of the lake, an area 110 miles wide and difficult for an army to protect to get into the Land Northward?

Response: First of all, the narrow neck of land takes a day and a half to cross according to Mormon (Alma 22:32), who lived in the area, fought battles there, built defenses there, and should have a pretty good idea of its width. This 12-mile-wide Rivas Isthmus between the Pacific and lake Nicaragua can be crossed in three or four hours without difficulty from sea to lake—how do you equate that to the scriptural account of a day and a half? Secondly, you may be able to see how something was done anciently, but the key is to know what the geologic record shows was done and it does not show that. You are speculating without support. Actually, geologists claim that lake Nicaragua and lake Managua to the northwest were once part of a huge gulf of the Pacific Ocean, thus eliminating the belt of land along the Pacific Ocean (your narrow neck of land) completely.
    The fact that these lakes are fresh water lakes would suggest that any closing of the gulf into a lake happened long before man. However, since the surface of the lake is 95-feet above sea level, we might question the fact that it was ever part of the Pacific Ocean since one or the other had to have changed height by nearly 100 feet between then and now.
    The part you indicate might have been underwater is now the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve through which Nicaragua is considering putting a $40-billion Gran Canal, which would be four times longer than the Panama Canal. In all these studies there is no indication this land, covered now with forested hills, was ever underwater. The San Juan River (El Desaguadero, meaning “the drain”) flows east out of Lake Nicaragua into the Caribbean Sea. It should also be understood that much of this area is volcanic rock (lake Nicaragua bottom is composition of volcanic rocks that form parts of the lake’s bed and shores), which does not create deltas like that of the sand-based earth of Mesopotamia and the Euphrates and Tigris deltas. And let’s be exact on this—we do not know that Costa Rica is the Land South, or that the Land of Promise is in Central America, certainly nothing in your comments suggest that it is.