Atlantis4
Welcome to Atlantis. Welcome Home...as close to Home
as you can get without a spaceship, anyway. It is
often said that no symbol is recognised in more parts
of the world than Mickey Mouse. While not meaning any
disrespect to those famous big ears, I submit that
even more of the people of the world have heard of
Atlantis. If we equate Atlantis with the idea of an
ancient source culture, by whatever name, the
recognition factor approaches 100%.(there is always
somebody who doesn't get it, you know). The academic
opinion on the real existance of such a place has
changed repeatedly, with a perhaps surprising number
of scholarly dissertations having been written on the
subject-surprising because it has not been an area of
study deemed eligble for much grant money. The theses
talk about diffusionism vs. independant discovery, but
the real subject underneath is always Atlantis. The
Third Option, the possibility that common cultural
elements did not walk out from an ancestral
centerpoint but were actively spread by a separate
distinct civilization to various other cultures either
by conquerors or refugees, tends to be avoided. It
opens up the whole concept of
history-as-we-know-it-is-completely-wrong, which
definitely attracts little grant money. In the popular
press, however, there have been countless books about
the history, the search, the theories and connections.
And fiction of all varieties. Clearly the idea of
Atlantis is deeply engrained in our psyches.
Obviously, I love anomalies, palimpsests, things that
don't "fit". Often therein lie clues to the truth.
There are lots of these intriguing oddities tangled
into the Atlantis story- and for once, I don't claim
to have all the answers,. Like, to the John Campbell
puzzle. No not Joseph Campbell ( the scholar)- the
other one, editor for many years of Astounding
Science Fiction magazine and the most influential and
respected figure in that field. If he wanted stories
about something, they were written. If he did not, the
subject would be virtually avoided by most writers. It
may seem strange that the most speculative type of
fiction would be subject to the orchestration of an
ayatollah , but the reality is that writers need a
market for their work. The taste of the editor
matters. Campbell actually discovered, nurtured and
published two entire generations of some of the
greatest writers of the 20th century, so he certainly
was not a negative influence. But he had a particular
bias when it came to Atlantis...he didn't want any
stories about it. Space Opera, fine. Aliens (slimy
squishy) and aliens (transcendental), OK. Time travel,
dinosaur hunters, and almost anything involving exotic
hardware or science were all welcome. But he announced
that there had been "far too many stories already"
(I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he made clear to
the writers in the field) about Man's origins, both
genetic and cultural, and the Atlantis "myth", so
don't bother submitting any. This was said in the
years following WW2, when there was in fact
extraordinary public interest in those topics, due
partly to the "Shaver Mystery", which is a subject
that has several websites devoted to it already, so I
will let you research that on your own. It is a
fascinating enigma. But don't leave just yet.
Many of the postwar era SF writers had Intelligence
backgrounds, which meant they had some awareness of
things not generally known to the general public.
Robert Anson Heinlein, Keith Laumer, Ian Fleming (not
exactly SF, I know, but what about that Q Branch
hardware?) and many others had such connections.
Nothing unusual about that, it's the same today. Back
then, even more SF writers were tapped as resources
by the Intelligence community think-tanks. It would
seem that something Very Strange needed imaginative
analysis. Perhaps it was the same something that is
the focus of this website...
Let's get back to Atlantis. It was certainly a
world-wide influence that left an imprint on all
subsequent civilizations. I can make a flat statement
like that, because hey, I've got pictures! And the
Homeland, the center of that civilization, is still
there. Well, it isn't where it used to be, but it is
still somewhat intact, more so than one might think,
and it is not underwater. And there have been people
who have known that all along. Annoying, isn't it?
One last bit of perspective: the Roman Empire
influenced most of Europe, and parts of Africa and
Asia, but it had a heart, a center, the Eternal City
itself, and when that fell to invaders, the Empire
fell apart. The same case can be made for other
empires of the past- by their very nature, empires
have a center of Authority and control, which must be
there. Governments are not concepts, they are regents.
Whether benign or tyrannical, they supercede local
opinion. When they "go away", for whatever reason,
that cultural commonality quickly mutates in different
directions in different localities. Just like language
dialects are wont to do. When the Emperor of China
decided, 2700 years ago (!) that the rest of the world
held nothing of interest, the Chinese, who had sailed
around the world (read the Fu Shan accounts, for
descriptions of the American Southwest ), stopped
building the ships and stayed home. When the Romans
destroyed the fleets of the Carthaginians in the Punic
Wars, those descendants of Greek civilization could no
longer travel across to America as they had for
generations, and were quickly forgotten by the locals.
But did contact really completely cease? There are
Roman shipwrecks off the coast of Brasil. A particular
red dye for wool used.by medieval English milliners
is made from the bark of a South American tree.
Herbalist texts from medieval Ireland and Germany list
(with pictures) a plant called "Black Henbane", which
is the appropriate taxonomy for tobacco, which is what
the illustrations show. Carvings of maize on a
medieval church , and traces of nicotine and
cocaine in the tissues of Egyptian mummies, these are
not so much evidences of Atlantis as indications that
contact between diverse parts of the globe never
stopped. It just periodically lost official sanction.
Whenever any secret society, Church, or government
thought it could keep knowledge away from the
public, it did. Give the sheep short horizons, and
they are easier to control. Things don't change much,
do they?
OK, where the heck is Atlantis today, and what was
that remark about it not being where it used to be?
Drumroll, please: It is where we now call Antarctica.
At some point in the past- and not millions of years
ago, either- something happened . I can think of three
possibilities, but they are all interrelated, so it is
more like two-and-a-half:
First, the "Hapgood" scenario : the Earth's crust
shifted on the mantle, displacing everything to
another latitude all at once, like the loosened skin
of an orange sliding over the pulp. Some areas would
end up in much different climate zones, some not. The
water on the surface, not being attached, would slosh
all over everywhere below the treeline, basically.
Most survivors would be the residents of mountainous
regions and whoever was on a boat at the time (and
lucky). Most population centers are, and have always
been, relatively near large bodies of water, so
civilization would for all practical purposes, be
gone. No more antediluvian e-mail tying cultures
together. "Does anybody here know how to make a
campfire?" The shift most probably would happen over
a span of months, with a sudden shift of hundreds
of miles within a single day, followed by a period of
tremors and shivers, then another smaller shift, and
so on, as the crust bunched and stretched and settled
down. Or, it could have been one smooth slide. In
either event, people in some places would feel the
motion far more than those in others- remember, the
Earth is spinning already, so the effective motion
would be cancelled somewhat in one spot and amplified
in another.
The triggering mechanism could have been a buildup of
ice at the poles causing an instability (like an out
of balance tire), or the catastrophic impact of an
asteroid, or the gravitational influence of some
near-passing free-range planet.
It could also have been the result of a
"hyperdimensional" effect, caused by changes in the
Sun and/or a loss of symmetry in the Solar System
that generated great gravitational stresses throughout
the system. Unless the crust is held in place by some
magnetic matrix effect....Think of iron filings lined
up on a piece of paper by the lines of force of a
nearby magnet, and now imagine the core of the Earth
as the magnet. If that is the case, then a magnetic
pole reversal (which happens periodically) would
allow, during the "null" transition phase, the crust
to move around in response to relatively minor
imbalances of mass while not "locked in place".
The Earth might have actually shifted to a new axis.
Same kind of displacement, but no crustal shift. This
option would generate huge seismic stress, because the
Earth isn't round- it bulges quite a bit at the
equator, and is somewhat pear-shaped as well, so this
type of change would be very catastrophic, with
long-term reverberations as the Earth literally
reformed around the new axis. The most plausible (and
survivable) cause for this would be as a side effect
of the planet moving into a different orbit. Axial
tilt can change, we know this-look at Uranus, with an
axis parallel to the plane of the ecliptic rather than
perpendicular like "everybody else". While the physics
behind these alignments is pretty fuzzy, it does not
seem likely that Uranus started out tht way. And Mars,
of course, shows clear indications of two polar
positions prior to the present one. We do know that
axial position is one vector in the dynamic
equilibrium of a planet's orbit, so if the orbit
changed (that is, its distance from the Sun), an axial
shift could occur "under tension", rather than by
freely tumbling around. A non-technical analogy,
which I am sure will have any scientists reading this
cringing, is the banking of a high-speed racetrack
that prevents the cars from sliding off the edge on
the turns. The track provides an extra influence in
the interplay between gravity and inertia. That might
help the non-geek a little in visualizing all of this.
Or it might confuse some people even more.
Related concepts involve the idea that the Earth once
was in fact not tilted at all, or lay with the axis
parallel to the plane of the ecliptic like Uranus.
This would mean that Antarctica would have been as
warm and clement as anywhere else. The untilted planet
would have had no seasons, and the climate would have
been relatively consistent worldwide. If you add a
cloud cover like Venus, which, though not likely, is
mentioned in some ancient myths, then the temperatures
might have been quite uniform everywhere. A cloud
cover might have been enough to make Antarctica almost
livable even without the other factors. These are all
speculations, by various and sundry speculators.
There are a couple of problems that affect any of the
above, in my view. First is the very real possibility
that any given myth or ancient account might not refer
to the Earth at all. Since we didn't start here,
there is no reason why our myths and legends would
have to be based solely on Terran events. So even
though folklore and oral tradition can be extremely
accurate, given some clue to its context, place names
may have been transposed. and time frames shifted.
This reduces the evidence value of much of that
information. The other thought is specific to the
notion of crustal or axial shift, and has to do with
astronomy. There are fairly well-dated inscribed
antler fragments at least twenty thousand years old,
and cave paintings even older, that show
constellations and lunar phases that are consistent
with our own sky- when precessed back to that time. I
would expect to find an ancient temple somewhere with
an alignment to an empty point in the heavens, if its
(relative) position on the Earth's surface had in fact
changed by hundreds or even thousands of miles since
it was constructed. Instead we marvel at how well the
ancient astronomers targeted the same stars we see, in
the same (adjusted) spots. You would have to travel
halfway to Alpha Centauri to see any significant
change in most of the constellations, but if the
ground under your feet were to move a considerable
distance, you would have to re-aim your telescope.
Duh. And the only reference to this I've seen is a
South American myth of the "stars shifting in the
heavens and the Earth moving (translates to about) 700
miles in a single day". That's pretty specific, and
maybe I'm being too literal in my requirements for
evidence, but I still wonder why there are not more
such accounts. Maybe the fact that the ancestors of
the Maya were the culture least disrupted by the Earth
changes and the Fall has something to do with it.
Let's visit the gallery now. First up are some
pictures taken by Dr. Malin on a vacation to
Antarctica while he was at the U. of Arizona, and
clearly already "in the loop". He kindly has posted
these on his website, though exactly why he did that
is hard to figure, until you clean them up. It is a
Grand Tour of one of the major sites, and the location
particulars of this "ice free area" are on his website
in the "other projects" section. Also there,
complicated explanations about his video camera and
the steps taken to process and transmit home the
images., If you buy those, I have some excellent
bargains available in "ice free condos" for you.
Anyway, if you cannot see the similarities to Mars,
you haven't been paying attention so far. Obviously,
it isn't just the weather that sends all those Mars
Mission training expeditions down there.
Next are pictures from the Lake Vostok/Dunes area. I
can't find any damn lake, but there sure is a
remarkable city there. There is an American base on
one side, and a Russian base on the other, and it
appears that portions of a coverdome are still intact
enough to shelter the area rather well and make work a
lot easier. There might be a geothermal vent that
heats the area. Along with echoes of Egypt,
Tiahuanaco, India, and Australia (aboriginal), there
is lots of Martian influence to be seen, as well as
hardware galore. It's an archaeologist's paradise. Or
would be...
Next are a couple of images from another site
referenced by Dr. Malin, though he didn't provide any
pictures for us. I had to go dig up the satellite
images myself. Grumble. Then come some pictures from a
completely different city I found while I was doing
the digging. It looks at least as interesting as the
Vostok/Dunes region, and nobody seems to have been
there much, if at all. Looks quite undisturbed. The
fact that there are domes over everywhere, just like
Mars, is intriguing. Could that mean that when the
Maartians moved there originally it was already Polar?
Or did they "cover up" after the shift? Or return
much later to an area they had once inhabited that was
now inhospitable, but safely hidden away? Remember
that Superman's Fortress of Solitude is down there.
And expect an article about that, if I can catch up on
my comic reading.
I'll add more any time I run into something
interesting.. There is a whole continent of stuff, and
apparently a lot more areas not covered with ice and
snow than they have led us to believe.
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