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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 b
uildup 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.
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