Atlantis Beneath the Ice (2 page)

We follow the career of the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher as he skates across the fragile ice of a frozen river and watch as he survives that danger to rise to become the Einstein of his century. And we marvel at the lost Egyptian map of Atlantis that Kircher rediscovered.

You will be introduced to a new generation of international scientists who are challenging the fixations of their predecessors and independently studying the past with a fresh perspective.

Evidence is uncovered that demonstrates that intricate, advanced water-management systems were developed in the highlands of New Guinea immediately after the fall of Atlantis.

We reveal the existence of a shadowy cave where DNA samples taken from a young man’s remains point to the astonishing fact that he had traveled thousands of miles from the southern tip of South America to his death in Alaska. Nobody knows how or why.

And we celebrate a new generation of Latin American archaeologists who have come to the radical conclusion that South America was populated
before
North America.

Science is exploding, and the blast is providing more and more energy to drive the theory of earth crust displacement and the search for the lost continent.

A lot has changed since 1981, when we quit our jobs in Canada and packed up a trunk with all our worldly belongings, enough money to survive for three months, and enough naïveté to believe we could manage on love and luck and presented ourselves at that mecca for librarians everywhere, the Reading Room of London’s British Museum. Under its robin-egg-blue dome, shutting out the great city’s roar, we devoured book after book. Some of them, like Charles Lyell’s 1830
Principles of Geology
or James Hutton’s 1795
Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations,
could only be accessed from the Rare Book Room. Books that took months to receive back home were presented to us in the Reading Room within hours. We’re lucky enough to be able to say that even though, longing for the wilderness you can only find in this part of the world, we returned home five years later, our London adventure resulted in more rich experiences than we could have imagined and plenty of raw material for our own contributions to the library.

It’s no longer necessary for any writer to go to such lengths to find
the intellectual spring of his or her subject matter. The Internet delivers any text we want to our eager eyes within seconds. Has to be a good thing, right? You’d think so. And for most of us it probably is. But don’t hold your breath thinking it will result in any paradigm-busting breakthroughs in the places where ideas are supposed to rule. Yes, in the years since
When the Sky Fell
was published a lot has changed. But a lot hasn’t.

The Internet offers a potential gold mine of knowledge, bringing together more material than any individual could possibly explore in a lifetime. But it’s not well known that the search engines used to access this wealth of information direct researchers primarily to articles that espouse the conventional streams of current thought. Good enough, perhaps, to access the latest trend in scientific pronouncements but far less effective for challenging hallowed assumptions and developing alternative theories. In fact, contrary to expectations, between 1945 and 2005, as millions of scholarly articles went online, researchers increasingly began to cite fewer and fewer articles. Rather than expanding the parameters within their fields of research, online access has unexpectedly resulted in a troubling narrowing of science and scholarship.
¹

In contrast with how the Internet has narrowed the world of some researchers, it has also opened the door for Atlantis to shine again. Brushed up and polished to be presented to a new audience—whether skeptical or keen, inspired artist or naysayer, geographer or psychologist—Atlantis can step out and be judged in the light of a new age of information.

The remnants of the lost continent surface in intriguing places. In these pages we delve into the records of people from around the globe who fled the rising ocean and scrambled to safety in the mountains where, in a bid to survive, they began the sophisticated task of domesticating native plants. This sudden, global rise of the finely tuned art and science of agriculture in the highlands starts mysteriously at the precise time that Atlantis fell, suggesting a forgotten past unexplored by traditional archaeology.

The chronicle of Atlantis is properly called a legend, not a myth. A
legend tells of events that took place in the real world at a specific time involving human beings. A myth, in contrast, is enacted on a supernatural stage where events are controlled by all-powerful gods and goddesses. Plato, the source of the Atlantis legend, tells us that the island continent perished at a specific time, some 11,600 years ago. He says that the vast island was located in a “real ocean” and was destroyed by earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence. Gods don’t determine the unfolding events in this legend. Instead, it is the palpable forces of nature that prevail against Atlantis and end its rule. Atlantis is a legendary, but real, place that can be found.

For decades we have enthusiastically perused world mythology (which is implicitly denigrated by conventional scholars), examining its invaluable details about the lost continent’s tragedy and its possible location that have been passed down from generation to generation by oral tradition. Every corner of the globe has generated a lost island paradise myth. Again and again similar events transpire: An island home is destroyed by a geological catastrophe. Often, a dramatic deviation in the sun’s course immediately precedes a Great Flood. Each myth adds new particulars. In the Vedic literature the great destructive Flood is followed by a “dire winter” that encapsulates the island homeland in snow and ice. And the Cherokee story of a lost land talks of a place that experiences a climate opposite to that of North America, suggesting that their vanished paradise thrived in the Southern Hemisphere. But as much as mythology might enrich the legend of Atlantis, it is still Plato’s account that provides the fullest and most complete record.

What is often forgotten is that Plato’s account of Atlantis—passed to him from Solon,
the lawmaker of Athens,
who in turn had received it from one of the most learned of Egyptian priests—includes facts unknown to the ancient Greeks. It details the exact size, location, and fate of an actual island continent that lay in a vast body of water known as the real ocean, located beyond their known world. This description, as we show, is an accurate depiction of the world as a citizen of Atlantis would have seen it
from
the shores of Antarctica.

The word
Atlantis
has come to have many meanings. Some choose to interpret Plato’s depiction as an allegory used to elucidate moral lessons about human history. Others see it as the key to a spiritual quest that might unlock mysteries of the human soul. We’ve often been asked about the spiritual aspects of the Atlantis legend. It is our deep belief that such explorations are private affairs for each individual to address in his or her own lifetime. In an age of uncertainty and manic change, we’ve seen that many of those who blithely offer spiritual advice to strangers are enticing vulnerable people to enter the superficial company of a pseudoguru.

The only message we see in the legend of Atlantis is one that is obvious to many of us living in the twenty-first century. Its fate provides an abject lesson in the reality that our planet is fragile and its existence can be finite. It can be destroyed by natural forces and, increasingly, human greed. The suffocation of overpopulation, the source of virtually every environmental problem we face, and our profound disrespect for the land will bring an end long before the next earth crust displacement. The good news being that we don’t need to rely on gods or any other supernatural force to heal the earth. It’s up to us.

Over the years we have consistently maintained that the word
Atlantis
signifies nothing less, and nothing more, than the name of earth’s first advanced civilization. A civilization whose accomplishments even outshone those that followed thousands of years later, including those of Egypt, China, Mexico, or the ancient cultures of the Middle East. Plato’s account describes engineering feats that far exceed the spectacular pyramids of Egypt or Mexico. The Atlanteans amassed considerable astronomical data and through their imperial navy accurately mapped the entire globe before they were felled by a worldwide geological disaster. Yet it is a disaster not due to devastate us again anytime soon but one that swept human history back to square one and tore page after page from the record, leaving gaping holes in the archive that remain as tantalizing, unsolved mysteries that many of us continue to try and solve, convinced that the answers are just within our reach.

Our own quest for Atlantis has always focused on the hunt for a technologically advanced civilization hidden from view by the ravages of time. On the way we’ve learned invaluable lessons about prejudice, duplicity, and the dangers of “group think”—from whatever direction it comes. But we’ve also been privileged to meet readers who bring fresh eyes and the gift of curiosity to the adventure. Hand in hand with them are artists from around the world, working in all mediums, who have favored our work with their imaginations. It’s been a bumpy but fascinating ride. We invite you to jump in, fasten your seatbelts, and join us for the next leg of the journey.

ONE

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT

KEENE TEACHERS COLLEGE

KEENE, NEW HAMPSHIRE

To: President Dwight D. Eisenhower

From: Charles H. Hapgood,                                             August 3, 1960

Professor of History

Re:
THE PIRI REIS WORLD MAP OF 1513 AND THE LOST MAP OF
       
COLUMBUS

Memorandum

For several centuries scholars have been searching for the lost map of Christopher Columbus. The map is referred to by Columbus’ contemporaries and by the historian Las Cada, as one he used to navigate to the New World.

In 1929, a map was discovered in the former Imperial Palace (The Seraglio) in Constantinople, authored by a Turkish admiral of the sixteenth century, Piri Reis. In the inscriptions written on this map the author states that the western part, showing the American coasts, was copied from a map that had been in the possession of Christopher Columbus, but which had fallen into the hands of Piri Reis
with the booty seized from eight Spanish ships captured by him in a battle off the coast of Valencia in 1501 or 1508.

The Piri Reis map (a copy of which accompanies this memorandum) attracted the attention of President Kemal Ataturk, and of the American Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, who, in 1932, asked the Turkish Government for a color facsimile of the map, and for a search of Turkish archives and collections to see if the lost map of Columbus might not be found. The facsimile of the map now hangs in the Map Division of the Library of Congress, but the original Piri Reis worked from—Columbus own map (or a copy of it)—was never found.

We now have excellent reason to believe that the original map still exists, and in the Spanish archives! The reason that this map has remained so long undiscovered appears to be, simply, that it is very different from the other contemporary maps and is not at all what scholars would expect to find in a map of Columbus’. It is not a map Columbus himself made, but one he found in the Old World. It should resemble the western side of the Piri Reis map, if it can be found.

Evidence of its present whereabouts came to me through my old friend and scientific collaborator, James H. Campbell, who, together with his father, a professional geographer, actually saw this map in 1893. I am enclosing a separate account of this incident in Mr. Campbell’s own words. It seems that in 1893, at the time of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Spanish Government built and sent to America replicas of Columbus’ three ships. The caravels were sailed across the Atlantic and through the Great Lakes to Chicago. It was there that Mr. Campbell and his father were invited, as he describes in detail, to see Columbus’ own map in the chart room of the
Santa Maria.
In addition to the important purpose of clearing up many mysteries relating to the Discovery of America, we have another purpose in asking that a search be made for the map now. Studies of the map by various scholars have shown that it contains many details that were not known to the geographers in 1513. These indicate that the map must descend from maps made in very ancient times, and that navigators (possibly of Phoenician origin) discovered and explored the coasts of America, perhaps a millennium before the Christian era. This, of course, tends to give support to the tradition that Columbus brought a map from the Old World. It seems that Columbus left the Old World with quite a good map of America in his pocket!

The most remarkable detail of the Piri Reis map indicating its enormous age was pointed out by Captain Arlington Mallery some years ago. He stated that the lower part of the map showed the sub-glacial topography of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, and the Palmer Peninsula. After four years of study of the map we came to recognize that Captain Mallery’s statement was correct, but, desiring the most authoritative checking of our conclusions, we submitted the data to the cartographic staff of the Strategic Air Command. I attach a letter from Col. Harold Z. Ohlmeyer, Commander of the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron, SAC, in confirmation. Needless to say this is a matter of enormous importance for cartography and for history. The Antarctic ice cap is at present one mile thick over the areas shown on the Piri Reis Map. Consultations with geological specialists have indicated beyond question the truth that the data on the map is many thousands of years old. It seems that the Antarctic ice cap covered the Queen Maud Land coast not later than 6,000 years ago. The map information must have been obtained
earlier by the Phoenicians or by some earlier (and unknown) people.