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An Article
In Issue Number 7 (Spring '96)
Atlantis
Rising
ATLANTIS
IN ANTARCTICA?
by
J. Douglas Kenyon
In
the not-too-distant future, Atlantis-seeking archeologists may have to
trade in their sun hats and scuba gear for snow goggles and parkas.
If a rapidly growing body of opinion proves correct, instead of the bottom
of the ocean, the next great arena of exploration for the fabled lost
continent could be the frozen wastelands at the bottom of the Earth. And
before scoffing too vigorously, backers of North Atlantic, Aegean and
other candidates would be well advised to give the new arguments for Atlantis
in Antarctica a fair hearing. Already enlisted in the ranks of those
who take the notion very seriously are such luminaries as John Anthony
West and Graham Hancock. Founded on a scientific theory developed by the
late Dr. Charles Hapgood in close interaction with no less a personage
than Albert Einstein, the idea appears robust enough to withstand the
most virulent of attacks expected from the guardians of scientific orthodoxy.
At any rate, it will not take a wholesale melting of the icecap to settle
the question. A few properly directed satellite pictures and the appropriate
seismic surveys could quickly make it clear if, indeed, advanced civilization
has ever flourished on the lands beneath the ice. Leading the charge
of those betting that such evidence will soon be forthcoming are Canadian
researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, the authors of When
the Sky Fell, just out in a new U.S. edition (St. Martin's
Press, New York). Previously published in Canada, the book contains the
couple's painstaking synthesis of Hapgood's theory of earth crust displacement
and their own ground-breaking discoveries. The result has already won
many converts. Graham Hancock believes the Flem-Aths have provided the
first truly satisfactory answer to the question of just what happened
to Plato's giant lost continent. Since devoting a chapter in his best-selling
Fingerprints of the Gods to the work of the Flem-Aths, Hancock continues
to opine in media appearances about the importance of their Antarctic
theories. John Anthony West provides an afterword to the new edition of
When the Sky Fell (Colin Wilson writes the introduction). Flem-Ath himself
discussed his ideas on the February NBC Special, The Mysterious Origins
of Man. To get to the bottom of all the excitement, if not the planet,
Atlantis Rising recently cornered Rand Flem-Ath at his home on Vancouver
Island in British Columbia. The author has not forgotten how his
own interest in Atlantis began. In the summer of 1966, while waiting for
an interview for a librarian's position in Victoria, British Columbia,
he was working on a screenplay involving marooned aliens hibernating in
ice on Earth for 10,000 years. Suddenly, on the radio, came pop singer
Donovan's hit Hail Atlantis. Hey, that's a good idea. he thought. I wanted
ice, so I thought, Now where can I have ice and an island continent? and
I thought of Antarctica. Later, researching the idea, he read everything
he could find on Atlantis, including Plato's famous account in Criteas
and Timeaus where Egyptian priests described Atlantis, its features, location,
history and demise to the Greek lawgiver Solon. At first the story didn't
work for Flem-Ath, but that changed later when he made a startling discovery,
unmistakable similarities between two obscure but remarkable maps.
A 1665 map by Jesuit scholar Athenasius Kircher, copied from much older
sources, seemed to have placed Atlantis in the north Atlantic but strangely,
had put north at the bottom of the page apparently forcing study upside
down. The 1513 Piri Ri'is map, also copied from much more ancient sources,
demonstrated that an ice age civilization had sufficient geographic knowledge
to accurately map Antarctica's coast as it existed beneath an ice cap
many millennia old (as pointed out by Charles Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient
Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age). What seemed
obvious to Flem-Ath was that both maps depicted the same land mass.
Suddenly Antarctic Atlantis stopped being a science fiction story. The
revelation had dawned that it might be something that could have been
real. Further study of Plato yielded even more clues. I noticed that the
description is from Atlantis, he recalls. Soon, armed with a U.S. Navy
map of the world, as seen from the South Pole, he discovered a new way
of understanding Plato's story and a new way of looking at Kircher's map.
Viewed from this southern perspective, all of the world's oceans appear
as parts of one great ocean, or, as what is described in Plato as the
real ocean and the lands beyond as a whole opposite continent. Sitting
in the middle of that great ocean, at the very navel of the world is Antarctica.
Suddenly, it was possible to understand Kircher's map, as drawn, with
north at the top, Africa and Madagascar to the left and the tip of South
America on the right. The term Atlantic Ocean, Flem-Ath soon realized,
had meant something quite different in Plato's time than it has since
the age of exploration. To the ancients, it included all of the world's
oceans. The idea becomes clearer, when one remembers from Greek mythology
that Atlas (a name closely related to Atlantis and Atlantic) held the
entire world on his shoulders. The whole opposite continent, which
surrounded the real ocean in Plato's account, consisted of South America,
North America, Africa, Europe and Asia fused together in the Atlantean
world view as though they were one continuous land mass. And in fact,
these five continents were at the time (9,600 B.C.) one landmass in the
geographic sense. Flem-Ath would render Plato's account to read:
Long ago the World Ocean was navigated beyond the Straits of Gibraltar
by sailors from an island larger than North Africa and the Middle East
combined. After leaving Antarctica you would encounter the Antarctic archipelago
(islands currently under ice) and from them you would reach the World
Continent which encircles the World Ocean. The Mediterranean Sea is very
small compared to the World Ocean and could even be called a bay. But
beyond the Mediterranean Sea is a World Ocean which is encircled by one
continuous landmass. A common mistake in most readings of Plato,
Flem-Ath believes, is the inappropriate attempt to interpret the ancient
account in the light of modern concepts. Another example, is the familiar
reference to the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which, Atlantis was said
to reside. While it is true that the term sometimes referred to the Straits
of Gibralter, another, equally valid interpretation is that it meant the
limits of the known world. For Flem-Ath, the world as seen from
Antarctica matched perfectly the ancient Egyptian's account of the world
as seen from Atlantis. The ancient geography was in fact far more advanced
than our own, which made sense if Atlantis was, as Plato argued, an advanced
civilization. Platonic theories notwithstanding, the most difficult
challenge, explaining how Atlantis might have become Antarctica, remained.
How could land, now covered with thousands of feet of ice, have once supported
any kind of human habitation, to say nothing of a great civilization on
the scale described by Plato? For the Flem-Aths, the answer, it turned
out, had already been worked out, thoroughly, convincingly and published
in the Yale Scientific Journal in the mid 1950s. In his theory of
earth crust displacement, Professor Charles Hapgood had, citing vast climatalogical,
paleontological, and anthropological evidence, argued that the entire
outer shell of the Earth, over its inner layers periodically shifts, bringing
about major climatic changes. The climatic zones (polar, temperate and
tropical) remain the same because the sun still shines from the same angle
in the sky, but as the outer shell shifts, it moves through those zones.
From the perspective of Earth's population, it seems as though the sky
is falling. In reality the earth's crust is shifting to another location.
Some lands move toward the tropics. Others shift, with the same movement,
toward the poles. While yet others escape great changes in latitude. The
consequences of such a movement is, of course, catastrophic. Throughout
the world, massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal waves
batter the continental shelves. As old ice caps forsake the polar zones,
they melt, raising sea levels higher and higher. Everywhere, and by whatever
means, people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval.
The Flem-Aths corresponded with Hapgood from 1977 until his death in the
early '80s and though he differed with them about the location of Atlantis
(his candidate was the Rocks of Saint Peter and Saint Paul) he praised
their scientific efforts to buttress his theory. In the summer of 1995,
Flem-Ath was allowed to read Hapgood's voluminous correspondence (170
pages) with Albert Einstein and to discover a much more direct collaboration
between the two than has been previously supposed. Upon first hearing
of the research, in correspondence from Hapgood, Einstein responded very
impressive...have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. Subsequently
Einstein raised numerous questions which Hapgood answered with such thoroughness
that Einstein was eventually persuaded to write a glowing foreword for
Hapgood's book Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of
Earth Science (1958 by Pantheon Books, New York). Earth crust displacement
is not mutually exclusive with the now widely accepted theory of continental
drift. According to Flem-Ath they share one assumption, that the outer
crust is mobile in relation to the interior, but in plate tectonics the
movement is extremely slow. Earth crust displacement suggests that over
long periods of time, approximately 41,000 years, certain forces build
toward a breaking point. Among the factors at work: a massive buildup
of ice at the poles, distorting the weight of the crust; the tilt of the
Earth's axis which changes by over three degrees every 41,000 years (not
to be confused with the wobble which causes the precession of equinoxes);
and the proximity of the Earth to the Sun which also varies over thousands
of years. One of the common mistakes, says Flem-Ath, is to think
of the continents and the oceans as being separate, but really, the fact
that there's water on certain parts of the plates is irrelevant. What
we have in plate tectonics are a series of plates which are moving very
gradually in relationship to each other. But what we have in earth crust
displacement is all of the plates are considered as one single unit as
part of the outer shell of the earth which changes place relative to the
interior of the earth. The theory, says Flem-Ath, offers elegant
explanations for such phenomena as the rapid extinction of the Mammoths
in Siberia, the near universal presence of cataclysmic myths among primitive
people, and many geographic and geological anomalies left unexplained
by any other theory. Most of the evidence usually cited to support the
idea of ice ages serves earth crust displacement even better. Under the
latter, some parts of the planet are always in an ice age when others
are not. As lands change latitudes, they move either into or out of an
ice age. The same change that put western Antarctica in the ice box also
quick-froze Siberia but thawed out much of North America. While
many establishment geologists insist that the Antarctic ice cap is much
older that the 11,600 years indicated by Plato, Flem-Ath points out that
the core sampling on which most of the dating is based is taken from Greater
Antarctica which was indeed under ice, even during the time of Atlantis.
The suggestion here is that a movement of about 30 degrees or about 2,000
miles occurred within a relatively short span of time. Before such a movement,
the Palmer peninsula of Lesser Antarctica (the part closest to South America
whose sovereignty is presently disputed by Chile, Argentina and Great
Britain) would have projected an area the size of western Europe beyond
the Antarctic circle into temperate latitudes reaching as far as Mediterranean-like
climes. In the meantime Greater Antarctica would have remained under ice
in the Antarctic circle. An area such as that described by Plato,
says Flem-Ath would be the size of Pennsylvania, with a city comparable
to modern-day London. Not a bad target for satellite photography. Concentric
circles or other large geometric features should be easily discernible
through the ice. Flem-Ath believes that in most areas, Plato should
be taken at his word, though he does suspect that there may have been
some fabrications in the story. The war between the Atlanteans and the
Greeks, for example, he believes may have been cooked up to please the
local audience. In regard to the scale of Atlantean achievement, however,
he takes Plato quite seriously and is very impressed. The engineering
feats described, says Flem-Ath, would have required incredible skill,
moreso than even what we have today. As for the notion that Plato's numbers
should be scaled down by a factor of ten, a frequent argument used to
support claims that Atlantis was really the Minoan civilization in the
Aegean, he doesn't buy it. A factor of 10 error might be understandable
when you are using Arabic numbers, with a difference between 100 and 1000
of one decimal place, but in Egyptian numbering, the difference between
the two numbers is unmistakable. For him the argument is similar to the
one for a North Atlantic location, in which a modern concept has been
inappropriate-ly superimposed upon an ancient one. So far Flem-Ath's
ideas have been largely ignored by the scientific establishment, but he
believes that at least Hapgood's arguments may be getting close to some
kind of acceptance. Quite often new ideas take about 50 years to be absorbed,
he says, and we're getting close to the time. If, in fact, satellite
photography and seismic surveys produce the indications that Flem-Ath
expects, what next? The ice in the region that we are talking about is
relatively shallow, he says, less than half a kilometer and once we've
pinpointed the area, it should be relatively easy to sink a shaft and
find something. That something could be among the finest and most
dramatic artifacts ever discovered, quick-frozen and stored undisturbed
for almost 12,000 years. A prospect hot enough to melt the hearts
of even the most hardened skeptics? We shall see.
Atlantis
Rising
Atlantis Rising Copyright 1994-1996 - all rights reserved
P.O. Box 441, Livingston, Montana 59047
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