Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor has put together a fascinating short compendium of such insights with Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, from dry quicksand and rains of frogs to burning lakes, paleoburrows, and Scandinavian "endless winters."

Mayor's work has long straddled multiple disciplines, but one of her specialities is best described as geomythology, a term coined in 1968 by Indiana University geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who was interested in classical legends about Atlantis and other civilizations that were lost due to natural disasters. Her interest resulted in Vitaliano's 1973 book Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins.

Mayor herself became interested in the field when she came across Greek and Roman descriptions of fossils, and that interest expanded over the years to incorporate other examples of "folk science" in cultures around the world. Her books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (2009), as well as Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs (2022), exploring the origins of biological and chemical warfare. Her 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explored ancient myths and folklore about creating automation, artificial life, and AI, connecting them to the robots and other ingenious mechanical devices actually designed and built during that era.

When her editor at Princeton University Press approached her about writing a book on geomythology, she opted for an encyclopedia format, which fit perfectly into an existing Princeton series of little encyclopedias about nature. "In this case, I wasn't going to be working with just Greek and Roman antiquity," Mayor told Ars. "I had collected very rich files on geomyths around the world. There are even a few modern geomyths in there. You can dip into whatever you're interested in and skip the rest. Or maybe later you'll read the ones that didn't seem like they would be of interest to you but they're absolutely fascinating."

Mythopedia is also a true family affair, in that illustrator Michelle Angel is Mayor's sister. "She does figures and maps for a lot of scholarly books, including mine," said Mayor. "She's very talented at making whimsical illustrations that are also very scientifically accurate. She really added information not only to the essays but to the illustrations for Mythopedia.

As she said, Mayor even includes a few modern geomyths in her compendium, as well as imagining in her preface what kind of geomyths might be told thousands of years from today about the origins of climate change for example, or the connection between earthquakes and fracking. "How will people try to explain the perplexing evidence that they'll find on the planet Earth and maybe on other planets?" she said. "How will those stories be told?"

Ars caught up with Mayor to learn more.

Credit: Princeton University Press

Ars Technica:  Tell us a little about the field of geomythology.

Adrienne Mayor: It's a relatively new field of study but it took off around 2000. Really, it's a storytelling that has existed since the first humans started talking to one another and investigating their landscape. I think geomyths are attempts to explain perplexing evidence in nature—on the Earth or in the sky. So geomyth is a bit of a misnomer since it can also cover celestial happenings. But people have been trying to explain bizarre things, or unnatural looking things, or inexplicable things in their landscape and their surroundings since they could first speak.

These kind of stories were probably first told around the first fires that human beings made as soon as they had language. So geomyths are attempts to explain, as I say, but they also contain memories that are preserved in oral traditions. These are cultures that are trying to understand earthshaking events like volcanoes or massive floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches—things that really change the landscape and have an impact on their culture. Geomyths are often expressed in metaphors and poetic, even supernatural language, and that's why they've been ignored for a long time because people thought they were just storytelling or fiction.

But the ones that are about nature,  about natural disasters, are based on very keen observations and repeated observations of the landscape. They also can contain details that are recognizable to scientists who study earthquakes or volcanoes. The scientists then realized that there had to be, in some cases, eyewitness accounts of these geomyths. Geomythology is actually enhancing our scientific understanding of the history of Earth over time. It can help people who study climate change figure out how far back certain climate changes have been happening. They can shed light on how and when great geological upheavals actually occurred and how humans responded to them.

Ars Technica: How long can an oral tradition about a natural disaster really persist? 

Adrienne Mayor: That was one of the provocative questions. Can it really persist over centuries, thousands of years, millennia? For a long time people thought that oral traditions could not persist for that long. But it turns out that with detailed studies of geomyths that can be related to datable events like volcanoes or earthquakes or tsunamis from geophysical evidence, we now know that the myths can last thousands of years.

For instance, the one that is told by the Klamath Indians about the creation of Crater Lake in Oregon that happened about 7,000 years ago—the details in their myth show that there were eyewitness accounts. Archaeologists have found a particular kind of woven sandal that was used by indigenous peoples 9,000 to 5,000 years ago. They found those sandals both above and below the ash from the volcano that exploded. So we have two ways of dating that. In Australia, people who study the geomyths of the Aborigines can relate their stories to events that happened 20,000 years ago.

Ars Technica: You mentioned that your interest in geomythology grew out of Greek and Roman interpretations of certain fossils that they found.

Adrienne Mayor: That really did trigger it, because it occurred to me that oral traditions and legends—rather than myths about gods and heroes—the ones that are about nature seem to have kernels of truth because it could be reaffirmed and confirmed and supported by evidence that people see over generations. I was in Greece and saw some fossils that had been plowed up by farmers on the island of Samos, thigh-bones from a mastodon or a mammoth or a giant rhinoceros. The museum curator said, "Yes, farmers bring us these all the time." And I thought, why hasn't it occurred to anyone that they were doing this in antiquity as well?

I read through about 30 different Greek and Roman authors from the time of Homer up through Augustine, and found more than a hundred incidents of finding remarkable bones of strange shape, gigantic bones that were inexplicable. How did they try to explain them? That's really what got me going. These stories had all been dismissed as travelers' tales or superstition. But I talked with paleontologists and found that if I superimposed a map of all the Greek and Roman finds of remarkable remains of giants or monsters, it actually matched the paleontological map of deposits of megafauna—not dinosaurs, but megafauna like mastodons and mammoths.

Also, I grew up in South Dakota where there were a lot of fossils, so I had always wondered what Native Americans had thought about dinosaur fossils. It turns out no one had asked them either. So my second book was Fossil Legends of the First Americans. In that case, I knew the geography of all the deposits of dinosaur fossils. I just had to drive about 6,000 miles around to reservations, talking to storytellers and elders and ordinary people to try and excavate the folklore. So I sometimes would read a scientific report in the media and think, "here's got to be oral traditions about this," and then I find them. And sometimes I find the myth and seek the historical or scientific kernels embedded in it.

Ars Technica:  What were your criteria for narrowing your list down to just 53 myths?

Adrienne Mayor:  I had to do something for every letter; that was a challenge. A few other authors in the series actually skipped the hard letters. I started out with the hard letters like Q, W, X, Z, Y. My husband says I almost got mugged by the letter Q because I got so obsessed with quicksand. I started talking about writing a book about quicksand because I was so obsessed with sand. There are singing sand dunes.

Ars Technica: There's been a lot of research on the physics of singing sand dunes.

Adrienne Mayor:  Yes. Isn't that amazing? There are even some humorous stories. One of my favorites is that Muslim pilgrims in the medieval period would travel to special singing sand dunes between Afghanistan and Iran. When pilgrims would feel the need to relieve themselves, they would try to find some privacy, yet urinating and defecating on the sand dune caused a very loud drum roll sound.

Ars Technica: Your work necessarily spans multiple disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities. Has that been a challenge? 

Adrienne Mayor: I've built my career since my first book in 2000 on trying to write not only to other disciplines, but to ordinary educated readers. Some people think it feels like walking a tight rope, but not to me because I don't have a canonical academic career. I'm an autodidact, I'm not really an academic. So I have absolutely no problem trespassing in all kinds of disciplines. And I depend on the generosity of all these experts.

Some are from the classics and humanities, but an awful lot of them are from scientific disciplines. I think there's a big tendency to want to collaborate. It's just that in academia it's been difficult because people are siloed. So I feel like I have worked as a bridge between the two. Scientists seem very excited to find out that there are epic poems discussing exactly what they're studying. Paleontologists were thrilled to discover that people were noticing fossils more than 2000 years ago. So the impulse and the desire to collaborate is there.

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In September 2025, a Widerøe Airlines flight was trying to land in Vardø, Norway, which sits in the country’s far eastern arm, some 40 miles from the Russian coast. The cloud deck was low, and so was visibility. In such gray situations, pilots use GPS technology to help them land on a runway and not the side of a mountain.

But on this day, GPS systems weren’t working correctly, the airwaves jammed with signals that prevented airplanes from accessing navigation information. The Widerøe flight had taken off during one of Russia’s frequent wargames, in which the country’s military simulates conflict as a preparation exercise. This one involved an imaginary war with a country. It was nicknamed Zapad-2025—translating to “West-2025”—and was happening just across the fjord from Vardø. According to European officials, GPS interference was frequent in the runup to the exercise. Russian forces, they suspected, were using GPS-signal-smashing technology, a tactic used in non-pretend conflict, too. (Russia has denied some allegations of GPS interference in the past.)

Without that guidance from space, and with the cloudy weather, the Widerøe plane had to abort its landing and continue down the coast away from Russia, to Båtsfjord, a fishing village.

The part of Norway in which this interruption occurred is called Finnmark. GPS disruption there is near-constant; problems linked to Russian interference have increased since the invasion of Ukraine.

Military and Pokemon players?

It’s one of the starkest geographic examples of how vulnerable GPS technology is. But such disturbances happen at a lower level all over the globe. The world’s militaries (including that of the United States) are big culprits, breaking out devices that can confuse or disrupt drones, missiles, and aircraft. But the equipment required to interfere with GPS at a less-than-military level is cheap and accessible and affects other aspects of life: Truck drivers, for instance, use it to look like they’ve delivered cargo on time. Players use it to fool augmented-reality games.

Given all this disruption, more U.S. institutions, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Transportation to the Federal Aviation Administration, are making moves toward alternatives and complements for GPS, though perhaps imperfectly. And the existing system has been undergoing a huge modernization program, introducing better-encrypted signals for military users, more varieties of signals for civilians, and higher-power signals for both to the tune of at least $22 billion. The military’s 2025 budget additionally requested $1.5 billion for more resilient “position, navigation, and timing” programs. Other departments have invested smaller amounts. In October 2025, for instance, the Department of Transportation awarded $5 million total to five companies to develop and demonstrate technologies complementary to GPS.

The update’s goals are to make the system more accurate, and harder to mess with. But as threats increase in frequency and sophistication, more work is necessary. “Sooner or later, we're gonna see bad things happening here,” said John Langer, a GPS expert at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. “So we need to armor up for it before it happens.”

GPS is the invisible spine of society, in more ways than most people realize. It became central quickly after the satellite system, built in the 1970s for the military, was optimized for civilians. “Part of what makes GPS so successful is that it's ubiquitous and it's inexpensive,” said Langer.

Losing GPS would mean losing a lot more than Google Maps. The technology is integrated into everything from lights that turn on at sunset to dating apps that match users nearby. Its signals also undergird the electrical grid, cell networks, banking, defense technology, and the movements of robots used in industries like agriculture.

The U.S. government currently has 31 GPS satellites in orbit around Earth, and three other governments have their own systems: Russia made one called GLONASS, China created BeiDou, and the European Union built Galileo; all four systems’ data is available to the international community.

Finding your place

GPS works in a deceptively simple way: Each satellite carries an atomic clock aboard. It broadcasts that clock’s time toward Earth. That signal alone is what’s useful to energy infrastructure and financial transactions. But to get position information, a receiver—in a phone or other device—simply has to pick up signals from at least four satellites. It knows what time those signals were sent, where the satellites were when they sent them, and how long it took the signals to arrive. Through fancy triangulation, the phone (or guided missile) then computes its own location.

Or at least that’s the idea. GPS can be jammed, meaning that someone broadcasts a signal much stronger than that of GPS (which has had to travel across thousands of miles of space, and grows weaker with every meter), drowning the real signal in noise. It can also be spoofed, meaning someone sends out a fake signal that looks just like a GPS blip but indicates an incorrect location or time.

Three satellites are needed to pinpoint a location on Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Threats like these were always a possibility—and those who built GPS knew about that problem from the beginning, said Todd Walter, director of the Stanford GPS Lab. “Around 2000 is when people got a little more serious about it,” he said. Hardware and software became cheaper, lowering the barrier to swamping or faking signals.

Problems ticked up when the augmented reality game Pokémon GO came online, in 2016. The game required people to travel to places in real life to win. Turns out, not all of them actually wanted to. “All of a sudden, everyone was interested in spoofing,” said Walter.

Pokémon GO cheaters used low-power devices close to the ground, and so didn’t affect cruising aircraft like Widerøe’s. The game made cheating high-tech and furthered methods and technology for signal scrambling, making it available to non-experts, Walter said. At the same time, spoofing arose in conflict zones, where drone and missile attacks are often guided by GPS. Don’t want to get hit by one? Fool its navigation system. “So now people say, ‘Well, we need to protect ourselves from that,’” said Walter. “And so then you see a huge increase in very powerful jamming and spoofing.”

In Norway, officials have noted that GPS disruptions, while most commonly affecting flights thousands of feet in the air, can also cause issues for police cars, ambulances, and ships. According to Espen Slette, director of the spectrum department at the Norwegian Communications Authority (known as Nkom), the agency has detected GPS jammers near hospitals, which could force life-saving helicopters to redirect to a more distant facility. Nkom has also clocked disruptions that affect agriculture and construction operations, while emergency responders have warned about how problems might home in on emergency beacon devices, like the satellite SOS buttons many people carry in the backcountry or aboard boats. The police’s chief of staff in Finnmark encouraged anyone venturing out to, old-school, carry a map and compass.

“It’s hard to grasp the full effect this has on society,” Slette wrote in an email.

Such widespread disruptions are not isolated to the Russia-adjacent Arctic. There are hotspots in Myanmar, most likely associated with drone warfare in the area; on the Black Sea, publicly associated with Russia, which has denied some cases of GPS interference; and in southern Texas, potentially from drug cartels near the border. A report from OpsGroup, a membership organization for international aviation personnel, found a marked increase in spoofing in 2024. “By January 2024, an average of 300 flights a day were being spoofed,” the report said. “By August 2024, this had grown to around 1500 flights per day.” From July 15 to Aug. 15, 2024, 41,000 flights total experienced spoofing. (While in the U.S., it’s generally illegal for civilians to jam or spoof signals, military-led disruptions during conflict are considered a legitimate and legal use-case.)

No going back

The uptick indicates that there’s no going back to a world without disruption hotspots. And that, combined with humans’ dependence on GPS, is why scientists and engineers are working on ways to shore up the system—and develop backchannels so a single-point failure doesn’t come to bite anyone, in conflict or in peacetime.

“There are many ways to mitigate GPS disruptions,” Slette wrote in an email. He suggests setting up devices to use signals from all four international constellations, and to install better receivers and antennas. That’s easier for militaries or infrastructure companies, and hard for people who are just buying the latest model of cell phone and have no control over its innards. But existing backups can tell a given device that something fishy may be up. Planes have inertial navigation systems, which mostly use motion-sensing devices to get an independent measurement; phones do too, and they can also check their data against cell towers, to see if something is off in their GPS signal.

But the U.S. government is worried enough about GPS issues that, across civilian and military agencies, research and development for more robust and resilient systems is ramping up. In March, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission launched a proceeding on GPS alternatives, exploring tools that could be used in addition to or instead of traditional GPS.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the Defense Innovation Unit, meanwhile, are investigating how quantum sensors might help with position, timing, and navigation. The United States’ military branches are also working on their alternative position, navigation, and timing capabilities, and their innovation arms like the Space Force’s SpaceWerx organization are running challenges to support alternative technologies. The Department of Defense acknowledges challenges to GPS and the consequent need to diversify the ways it gets position, navigation, and timing information, noting that it is pursuing the integration of alternative capabilities, according to a statement that public affairs officer Chelsea Dietlin requested be attributed to a Pentagon spokesperson. It is also looking toward working with commercial companies.

Even the Department of Transportation has a strategic plan that includes promoting technologies complementary to GPS. (Undark reached out multiple times to the Department of Transportation to request comment but did not receive a response.) A statement that FAA media relations specialist Cassandra Nolan requested be attributed to an agency spokesperson noted that the FAA is working on a system to detect GPS interference, and that it is working with the Department of Defense on navigation signals and antennas that are more resilient. In addition, the statement noted, the FAA already has “a layered aircraft tracking system that incorporates multiple technologies to guard against threats to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).”

But the newer efforts across government may not be as connected as they could be, according to Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group that largely comprises companies working in the GPS-problem space. For one, he said, efforts to bolster military and civilian systems have a fairly strict line between them. And neither has been as effective as he’d advocate: On the military side, plentiful programs exist, but they may not be working together. “It’s not clear if there is any coordination or synergies between the projects or how much senior leader support there is for comprehensive solution sets,” Goward wrote in an email.

On the civil side, Congress mandated in 2018 that a backup to GPS be established, but only experimental systems exist so far. There also have been efforts to repeal the law, with the disputed rationale that funding a single system isn’t feasible and there are better paths toward resilience. Goward contended that the government has hoped the private sector will come up with a usable solution, saving the government from creating one itself.

Starting over

And companies are coming to cash in on that desire, offering their solutions to both government agencies and other industries. “Our founding hypothesis was ‘let's take 50 years of lessons learned but throw out the rulebook and do a clean-sheet design of a new GPS system incorporating a couple of fundamentals,’” said Patrick Shannon, CEO of one such company, called TrustPoint. The company, which has hired scientific and engineering experts in signal processing and space, aims to have a fleet of small satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than the current GPS constellation, and transmitting at a higher frequency.

TrustPoint’s satellites, a few of which have already gone to orbit, also send out an encrypted signal—something harder to spoof. With traditional GPS, only the military gets encrypted signals.

Many Russian jamming systems, he said, work tens of kilometers from their ground zero (their ground zero usually being a truck with a generator aboard). But with TrustPoint’s higher-frequency signals, the effectiveness of the jammer goes down by three times, and the circle of influence becomes 10 times smaller, shrinking even more if the receivers use a special kind of antenna that the U.S. government recently approved.

Messing with signals becomes less feasible, given those changes. “They would need exorbitant numbers of systems, exorbitant numbers of people, and a ton of cash to pull that off,” said Shannon.

So far, TrustPoint has launched three spacecraft, and has gotten five federal contracts in 2024 and 2025, totaling around $8.3 million, with organizations like the Air Force, Space Force, and the Navy.

Another company, called Xona Space Systems, is also putting satellites in low-Earth orbit, and has worked with both the Canadian and U.S. governments. The company plans to broadcast signals 100 times stronger than GPS, giving users two-centimeter precision, and making jamming more difficult. The signal also includes a watermark—a kind of authentication that, at least for now, protects against spoofing. They have launched one satellite that’s being tested by people in industries like agriculture, construction, and mining.

TrustPoint’s technology may offer novel defense against the dark GPS arts, but Xona, whose founders met while students at the Stanford GPS Lab, may have an edge anyway: Its signals are compatible with current infrastructure, so no one has to buy a new device. They just have to update their software. “We are not building receivers ourselves,” said Max Eunice, head of marketing and communications. Instead, they’re relying on the billions of earthly devices that already themselves rely on GPS.

Reliable GPS has become essential for a huge range of industries. Credit: Thomas Barwick

Other solutions, like one called SuperGPS, stay closer to the ground. They use radio transmitters on Earth to do the same things GPS satellites do in space. The setup, as demonstrated by scientists at the Delft University of Technology and VU University in the Netherlands, involves scattering radio transmitters around an area or using those already in place. Each transmitter is synchronized to an atomic clock, which sends the time to transmitters via fiber optic cable, which may already be in a place due to existing communications infrastructure. Receivers can collect signals scattered across a wide range of radio frequencies, making it more difficult to jam or spoof them. The team published a proof of concept in a 2022 Nature paper and is working on a second iteration called SuperGPS2.

Tom Powell, another GPS expert at the Aerospace Corporation, said that looking at alternatives and augmentations like these is important—even though GPS recently underwent the 25-year modernization effort, making its own signals more robust to vulnerabilities. “Now that we have delivered, or nearly completely delivered, this modernization, is there a better way to do it in face of the current realities?” he said. He and other GPS experts don’t have answers yet. “We're just asking questions right now.”

Walter, the director of the Stanford GPS Lab, thinks that whatever a better path looks like, it will likely still include the old-school, original system. “There's nothing that really does replace GPS,” he said. “I see articles saying ‘post-GPS World’ and so forth. But really, GPS, I think, will always be there.”

People will, and should, strengthen it, Walter added, but that bolstering is going to be piecemeal—efforts may work in a particular region, or they cover some of GPS’s roles (such as providing accurate time) but not others, or they may back up navigation but not be as accurate. They may also cost money. “GPS is free, so that makes it almost impossible to compete with,” he said.

GPS is also straightforward, said Powell. “As satellites go, they're pretty simple,” he said. They point at Earth, and they transmit signals that tell what time it is. From that, humans get to live in an interconnected, chronologically propriocepted world. Figuring out how to keep it that way, though, is proving a little more complicated.

 

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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