#military structures

[xtruss]

Alcatraz Island still draws tourists for its history as a federal penitentiary. But it also has a rich past as little-known military base, erected to guard against foreign invasion. Image Credit: Mbprojekt Maciej Bledowski, iStock

Ground-Penetrating Radar Reveals Military Structures Buried Beneath Alcatraz Penitentiary

Using non-invasive techniques, archaeologists have confirmed the presence of a coastal fortification beneath what was once the prison’s recreation yard.

— By Katherine J. Wu, Published March 4, 2019 | August 02, 2023

Alcatraz might be best known as a popular tourist destination, the site of the former high-security prison that once held Al Capone. But a team of archaeologists has now unveiled new evidence of this San Francisco Bay island’s often overlooked military history.

In the study, published last Thursday in the journal Near Surface Geophysics, researchers used non-invasive technologies to pull back the curtain on a stunningly well-preserved 19th century coastal fortification that lies beneath the ruins of this infamous federal penitentiary. The work confirms that while prison construction in the early 1900s destroyed much of the former military installation, several structures were buried more or less intact, enshrining a critical sliver of Alcatraz’s colorful past.

“This really changes the picture of things,” says study author Timothy de Smet, an archaeologist at Binghamton University. “These remains are so well preserved, and so close to the surface. They weren’t erased from the island—they’re right beneath your feet.”

Study author Timothy de Smet used non-invasive techniques to create a subsurface map of remains of Alcatraz Island's former military fortification. Image Credit: Timothy de Smet, Binghampton University

Prior to the mid-1800s, Alcatraz Island was a barren strip of land capable of supporting little more than a raucous population of seabirds. But in the wake of the California Gold Rush, the United States government looked to the rocky outcrop as a potential military base to protect the newly bustling city from foreign invasion. Over the next several decades, a stone- and brick-based fortification was erected, then rebuilt as earthen structures better equipped to handle erosion. But Alcatraz struggled to keep pace with the rapid changes in artillery during and after the Civil War era, and by the late 1800s, the island’s defenses were essentially obsolete. Military pursuits on Alcatraz were abandoned shortly thereafter.

When the island’s prison was erected around the turn of the 20th century, little physical evidence of its former architecture remained—or so many thought. The new study, led by de Smet, says otherwise. To look beneath the surface, the researchers deployed ground-penetrating radar, which pulses electromagnetic waves into the earth, returning signals that can visualize remains without excavation. The strategy uncovered a labyrinth of subterranean structures, including an earthwork traverse, a kind of defensive trench, running beneath the penitentiary’s former recreation yard.

“Below the Surface, Alcatraz is Still Full of Mysteries”

“This really reinforces what several historians and archaeologists had long suspected,” says study author and Alcatraz historian John Martini. “Up until this point, we had nothing to go on except for a few visible trace remains and maps—and a lot of suspicion.”

In a way, Martini says, the findings reflect just how limited real estate was on Alcatraz, which clocks in at less than 50 acres. “On a small island, there’s only so many places you can build,” he says. “And it’s unlikely they went to the trouble of demolishing all this stuff.”

A 15-inch Rodman cannon and its gun crew, 1869. These were the largest guns mounted on Alcatraz. Image Credit: National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

Because they’re both sensitive and non-destructive, techniques like ground-penetrating radar are crucial for these kinds of investigations, and can complement historical records that survived the era, says Jolene Babyak, an Alcatraz historian who was not involved in the study.

With these results in hand, de Smet and his colleagues plan to continue archaeological investigations under Alcatraz. Going forward, only time will tell what this rock will reveal, Martini says. “Below the surface, Alcatraz is still full of mysteries,” he says. “There’s still a whole lot to be learned.”

Soldiers posing in the island’s ordnance yard. A brick Citadel capped the summit of Alcatraz. 1869. Image Credit: National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

[ch4liz4rd-jpeg]

seeing all these israeli and jewish mikus thought id add mine to the mix. meet idf miku 🇮🇱

details/thought process:

both- she is a rank segen officer, meaning lieutenant, as seen by the two lines on the shoulder straps (the lines are called aronot, ארונות, which translates to closets, and the word for those straps in hebrew is כותפות, kotafot) this means she took a course to be an officer and has been an officer for over a year, and in the idf past the two years women usually have to serve. she is in her uniform bet (מדי ב) which are identical to eachother across all ranks and forces, uniform alef is different for officers, military police, air force and navy. also look at the pin on the collar!! thats a pin for people who did their officer course.

michve alon miku had a grey sroch which means shes part of the education corp/ministry, the black kumta is for the armor corp meaning tanks, and she has an m16. why is she in the armour corps? ill be fr, in my training at this base all my commanders had a black beret, and i took inspo from my מ״מ for this miku so shes the same rank and position as her. sooo shes a platoon commander (מפקדת מחלקת)

edit: black berets also show up in education corp thats why they had black berets in my basic traininh, my bad (thanks @springstarfangirl for that info)

artillery corp miku has a black and green sroch, which means she is a commander in a course to be a commander, which also makes her a commander. idk why i picked this one i saw officers from the artillery had them often in pics so i went for it. she had a blue beret be artillery and the artillery pin in that beret. i wanted to have this one so she dyed her hair to be a natural colour and u can see her actual natural color pop out at the roots bc i saw a lot where ppl did the opposite for their israeli mikus but in the military she can have bright teal hair so00000 yeah. no weapon this time tho i imagine shes got a pistol back there or smth :)) anyways thsts it i love talking abt the idf one of my fave things is looking st soldiers and being able to notice these things that say a lot abt their service and position.

idf miku

look at reblogs if u wanna see some notes abt each one bc i love talking abt the idf's structure

[detectiveneve]

governor ivenci being almost comedically written to be the unlikable slimy politician who doesn't like the Super Cool Rogue Team that is constantly undermining the system that it actually kind of operates and functions as basically a group/mafia that rules by fear but, like, in a cool way. and ivenci has zero redeeming qualities from the writing and we the player are meant to see them as ineffectual and without merit. because the game thinks the crows are super cool and so therefore we think the crows are super cool. without question. no nuance. close enough welcome back mass effect ambassador udina.

[tempesttamers]

Communication is so important to Javi, like Storm PAR jokingly calls him a helicopter dad because he has this almost-constant need to know where every person is at every moment in time (and maybe because he dabbled with helicopters in the military). Like every truck and most other pieces of their equipment have their own trackers connected to an app on their phones. And then before they separate for the night they have a brief meeting to go over the game plan for the next day, and then he’ll send a follow up text before going to bed that summarizes that discussion.

Javi also made sure that every member of his crew had wireless ear pieces to ensure that they stayed in constant communication with one another. It didn’t matter if you were in the same vehicle as someone else, it was a rule that every person must have their own in case anyone was separated. This meant when they inevitably leave the confines of their vehicles to deploy the radar equipment (or to seek shelter) they could still communicate.

[shitpostingkats]

For anyone curious, Sora and Yuri were Obelisk Blues (high ranking soldiers and special ops), Dennis was Ra Yellow (intel and espionage), and Celina was Slifer Red (basic units and grunts). I know this because I made it up.

[decepti-geek]

tbh an important part of my take on the 'don't be like Sentinel' question is that hours earlier D16 had very decidedly assumed leadership of the High Guard, after which any attempt at resolving his very understandable personal trauma via murder was also, on a wider affects-everyone/your-new-power-means-something scale, inherently going to count as a military coup.

yknow. the thing Sentinel did to assume power/hand it over to the quintessons in the first place

[voluptuarian]

I love trying to do historical research, you want an answer to a simple question like "could Jews serve in the British army in the 1880s" and you get back

Jews in the American Revolution

Jews in the American Civil War

Jews in World War I

Jews who fought for Nazi Germany

Thanks, that absolutely covers the time period and country I specifically asked for, couldn't have done it without you

[langernameohnebedeutung]

.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Hey, Star Trek Writers... -taps the glass-

[officialfoxsquadron]

since we know luke was lonely & bullied on tatooine, here are some important things i think luke skywalker experienced for the first time while living on rebel base

sitting with his friends on a too-small bunk, knee to knee and sharing food

getting ready with the gworls (gn). i genuinely think he didn't realize how much of a process getting ready is

crying of laughter way too late at night, not being able to sleep because everything is funny

he often asks his roommates deep questions at 3 am and gets told to shut up

the idea of platonic intimacy in general

[stirringwinds]

Man, just thinking of the dynamic between Kiku and Yao, the politics of men’s haircuts from the Opium Wars onwards, and how two nations who have known each other for so long see things. When Kiku first cuts his hair short in the western style upon the dawn of the Meiji-era, it’s naturally a tad strange and unnerving. But it’s a transition he’s able to make, especially because the western world is simultaneously unfamiliar but also familiar through his longtime relationship with the Netherlands and rangaku (Dutch studies). Short hair marks him as severing his ties with the old Sinocentric order, and what feels incredibly alienating eventually symbolises power, adaptability and recognition, in the aftermath of his victory in the first Sino-Japanese war.

But of course, it is the opposite for Yao. It symbolises defeat, it is the admission of failure, that he is well and truly no longer the standard bearer of civilisational prestige. I think one moment where it really sinks in for Kiku that the old order is truly upside down isn’t just the moment he wins—but seeing Yao himself later at the peace conference, tense and weary, but now with his own hair neatly cropped short, in drab western clothes so different from the more colourful silk garb of a Qing official—as the ink dries on the Treaty of Shimonoseki. A mourner at his own funeral, a pale shadow of the forceful, proud and towering empire whose presence used to fill the room effortlessly, in whose shadow Kiku used to walk.

[redbean-nom]

the whole death watch/true mandalorians civil war is so weird in context because its like if a bunch of "good old days" religious conservatives got in a fistfight with 13th century crusade reenactors in the middle of an iowa cornfield

[wordsandrobots]

*sits down to Explain McGillis Fareed*

6000 words later, following the interrogation of a fictional biography, an interlude questioning to what extent the Gundam franchise has ever actually addressed the functioning of capitalism, a rant about the British upper classes, and a hypothetical history of Gjallarhorn:

Guys, I think this man might be a little fucked up.

[americankimchi]

tcw is so good at introducing us to characters and bite-sized stories that capture our attention and so, SO bad at following even a modicum of logic when it comes to the consequences of actions under military law

[maeamian]

When I was a young excited physics student I went down to my advisor and asked for a job in a lab. Those of you who are in the sciences may recognize this as exceedingly common, most schools with science departments will hire undergrads for their labs both to give the undergrads experience and to have someone comparatively cheap to do the least skilled labor in those labs.

For me, the lab I was sent to was one doing cool photonics projects and I was assigned to a guy who was doing the theoretical modeling for them and I got put on a side project for them to develop a method to double check their results using Monte Carlo simulations.

Put bluntly, I toiled away in the little cubicle they had me in for about half a year before I transferred to a different school without ever having produced anything of any particular value other than a Monte Carlo simulation whose temperature readings were not taking into account the existence of a heat sink and therefore got overwhelmed by thermal photons in a completely inaccurate and unhelpful way.

Ultimately, many tasks, farmed out like this in a speculative way to undergrads, fail, certainly it's not exceptional that mine did and I learned a lot about the process in the process, so it wasn't wasted time for me, but it produced absolutely nothing the lab could use to further its results.

This is where it turns from a little anecdote about my work history into a morality tale, because what I have thus far deliberately failed to tell you is that the lab I was assigned to is a provider of radar services to the US Military. Had I produced anything of any value whatsoever the work I did would have been used by the US military to help with its capacity to deliver bombs. This is, unfortunately, as those of you who are in the sciences may recognize, also exceedingly common. Luckily, and through no foresight or moral thinking of my own, simply the inexperience of youth, I produced nothing of value but view the path they tried to set me down as a grim warning of what might have been.

I'm not asking for forgiveness, the harm I might have done was not done by me, although I'm also sure was done without my help. They didn't need it to be me they just needed someone with basic calculus knowledge who wouldn't think too hard about the connection between the work and the world, and they were happy enough that particular warm body was me.

So this is my plea, if you're young and getting involved in the sciences because you're passionate about knowledge and understanding our place in the universe. When you go to get that job in that lab that's such a good stepping stone to the next thing you want to do, take a second and look into where that lab's funding is coming from. If it turns out it's the military, maybe then take another second and really deeply consider what kind of thing your work can be used to do and if you would like some of the most bloodthirsty people on the planet to be able to do that thing because of your help.

I got lucky that I didn't help, but I'm hoping that with this warning you might be able to not help on purpose which is a greater moral good than what I managed.

[terrence-silver]

How would Terry in all eras teach his sons to respect their mother (beloved)

Look, whenever in doubt, I tend to go for Terry Silver approaching things through the lenses of a (toxic?) military structure, or in this case;

Mother (beloved) is the flag in the middle of the base camp. If someone captures it, disrespects it, steals it, tramples upon it or even touches it --- looks at it for too long --- means the collective has lost and losing is unacceptable through Terry Silver's viewpoint of things. If your flag is captured, the battle is over. And is that acceptable? No. I don't think it is. The group moral is gone, squashed, destroyed and that fact demands strict and immediate retaliation. Revenge. Such are the rules of life and warfare and such are the rules his figurative sons defend what's theirs with --- in this case, their mom. Each other. Their family. Their dojo. Their ambitions. Their schemes. You name it! Beloved's the flag fluttering on a pole, metaphorically speaking, in the middle of basecamp and if you allow someone to take what's yours from your own territory and from underneath your own nose without putting up a fight, you'll be losing every day of your life, always and forever, because how's anyone ever going to esteem or fear you for losing? How are you going to be able to esteem yourself? So, guess what? Best never lose. And if you do, you better go out there and vanquish, cheat, lie, deceive, do whatever it takes to defend your flag and fix things back to the way they're supposed to be by any means necessary. No mercy. In fact, I can envision Terry holding a speech somewhat like this to his sons, word for word. You can even very much read this tirade in his voice.

So, it's safe to say he'd not only teach them to respect their mother.

He'd teach them to kill for their mother.