Date: Mon, 06 Sep 1999 15:18:49 -0400
From: Roger Nelson 
Subject: Atlantis

Hello All!

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. 
>Continued next message

Regards,

Roger 


Hello All!

>Continued from previous message
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 Copyright 1994-1996 - all rights reserved 
P.O. Box 441, Livingston, Montana 59047 
>END

Regards,

Roger