Was Antarctica Atlantis?

The first email I received that was apparently due to these pages was from Rand Flem-Ath, coauthor of When The Sky Fell - In Search of Atlantis, a significant recent book. Although I don't agree with the idea that Antarctica was once Atlantis, the anomalous conventional assumptions (e.g., ice-free zones in the Arctic during the supposed Ice Ages) cited in the work of the Flem-Aths trouble any reasonable person who looks at prehistoric or allegedly prehistoric times, regardless of their view on Atlantis. Obviously the authors spent a lot of time and effort to research and write the book, and I have nothing but respect for them. Nevertheless, I feel the need to contribute something to the debate, and so have visited the Flem-Ath website for a second and more detailed look.

Atlantis Rising is a magazine published both in hardcopy and at least partially on the web. It has a discussion of When the Sky Fell. Here's a quote from that article:

"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."

This didn't make much sense to me, so it seemed wise to find out what the Flem-Aths wrote about it:

"Kircher believed that this ancient Egyptian map represented Atlantis as an island in the North Atlantic Ocean between Spain and Africa on our right and America on the left. But what if Kircher got it wrong? What if the limited geographic knowledge that he had at his disposal caused him to locate Atlantis in the wrong place? Let's imagine that we have just excavated this ancient Egyptian map from beneath the paws of the Sphinx. It our task to discover how it fits into our planet's geography. If we remove Kircher's labels and symbols we can see more clearly what he must have had at hand in 1665."

Conventional scholars think he got the whole thing wrong, but that's not the problem I have with this. The two dialogues of Plato are the most ancient written records we have of the Atlantis legend. To place Atlantis in Antarctica because Kircher and Plato may have got it wrong is no different than placing Atlantis on Santorin in the Aegean or in Anatolia, and downdating it 8,100 years. Plato quite clearly described the location as just outside the straits of Gibraltar, quite clearly referred to the Americas as encircling the Atlantean island, quite clearly described the lesser islands that lay between the island (not continent) of Atlantis and the encircling continent, and literally referred to the shifting of celestial bodies as being the cause of its rapid destruction as well as the worldwide catastrophes that blotted out almost all record of the events.

What this Kircher map suggests to me is that his Atlantean continent was in the northern Atlantic Ocean. He drew it this way because of what Plato wrote, and if indeed it was inspired by or derived from an ancient Egyptian map, it is not surprising that north is at the bottom. In ancient times the Egyptians lived in the Nile Basin. Even modern Egyptians for the most part still do. Upper Egypt was in the south, and if Egyptians truly made maps, the south would have been at the top.

By the time Kircher made his map, the Americas had been discovered, and Antarctica was known as a region filled with ice. Hunters out for seal and whale spent time in those waters and charted a few islands known today, and some which appear to have vanished (or more disturbing, may have been nothing but large chunks of floating dirty ice that appeared to be islands). The Kircher map puts Atlantis in the place as recorded by Plato, but puts the north pole elsewhere. If the Flem-Aths conclude that this makes Antarctica and Atlantis the same place, this is difficult to accept as a coherent hypothesis - an apparent shift in the axis (via the shift of the crust of the Earth over a supposedly stable mantle) wouldn't change the positions of the continents relative to each other.

While I have no a priori quarrel with the possibility that there may be the remains of very ancient human or hominid settlements in Antarctica (even Homo Erectus built structures and perhaps villages), the idea of an Antarctic location for Atlantis is to me indefensible. It's arbitrary to place it there, it isn't suggested in the ancient sources for the story, and even the medieval sources cited by the Flem-Aths don't put it there. The idea is entirely that of the Flem-Aths.

That said, if this idea or for that matter any other leads to digs on that continent, I'm all for it. A hypothetical culture that traversed the Earth and left enigmatic ruins both on dry land and on the continental shelf could have left its traces anywhere, but the best places to find them undisturbed are places that have no apparent record of human habitation. Humans strip stones from abandoned structures, even grand ones. Over a few centuries whole cities can disappear. Usually the best preserved ruins are those that get covered up by continuous human activity or by natural disaster.

Had Antarctica been ice-free 12,000 years ago, the ice would have to have been somewhere else, otherwise the oceans would have been higher. This is seemingly in the Flem-Aths' favor. Objections that isostatic rebound (actually the opposite) would put Antarctica at even higher altitudes must be mitigated by the possibility of a higher sealevel. If there had been a pole shift, the rise in sealevel would have been less, but not by much, since the western part of Antarctica would still not be particularly balmy even in the Flem-Aths' scenario.

But in the meantime, there would be a shift from landlocked ice to cold thaw runoff, until such time that the polar icecap was able to reaccumulate, so that the actual sealevel would be difficult to determine. The fact that during the glaciations the worldwide sealevels declined by hundreds of feet, makes it obvious that Antarctica's continental shelf would have been at least somewhat exposed. In the case of the Bering Strait in the Arctic, the sea floor is now covered by 800 feet of water. It's not unlikely that a peopling (or repeopling) of the Americas from Scandinavia, southern Africa, and Siberia took place at that time. All other things being equal, it's always warmer at lower altitudes. Watch for my page on glaciation for more discussion of this.

In the meantime, note that the actual significance is that during the most recent glaciation -- which coincides with the era given for Atlantis by Plato -- plenty of other land was available that is now submerged, and we don't need to rely on an unattested pole shift to account for it. Just what caused the glaciation will be discussed on that future page.

Attempts to put unique catastrophes into nice, neat, predictable, periodic intervals is just more uniformitarianism. The pole shift hypothesis is really a crust shift hypothesis - i.e., every time the ice caps get a certain size their weight makes the globe wobble. To relieve this problem the crust gets dragged along with the overburden of ice to a position nearer to the equator, the ice then melts, and areas that may have been warm and populated get dragged to the polar regions. Over time the new poles accumulate icecaps until this shift occurs again. Other than that, the life of the Earth has been steady and uniform.

Neither the pole shift hypothesis, much less the Atlantis-in-Antarctica idea, has credibility to the uniformitarian, because the Antarctic ice sheet is believed to be at least two million years old. But catastrophes are not in fact uniform. Uniformity in geological processes is just a doctrine. It is on the way out, and can't save this pole shift idea. One difficulty for conventional scholars is in the existence of centuries-old maps of Antarctica, older than its presumed discovery. In the view of the current writer, this is a limitation of the low opinion of the navigational abilities of precolumbian and other ancient cultures.

There is an online paper, On The Possibility of Very Rapid Shifts of the Poles by Flavio Barbiero. The agency given for the hypothetical shift is a meteoritic impact, although the inspiration for the paper was the work of Charles Hapgood, so pole shift advocates should find this to be of great interest. Worldwide catastrophes have extraterrestrial causes, because only extraterrestrial causes have sufficient energy and worldwide coverage. "It was Hapgood himself who underlined the enormous amount of evidence proving the high speed at which the shift of the poles appears to have happened; speed which the mechanism he proposes is unable to explain." Of course, the Earth's apparent pole shift would have been simpler before it had a Moon.

The magnetic pole shifts, supposedly over long periods, but until recently no efforts were made to study it closely. The first of the next two links is probably long gone, the other came from another online buddy and is recent (as of Friday, June 7, 2002).

Researchers Find Evidence of Polar Waffling

[U]nder certain circumstances the planet's magnetic field can become so deranged that it moves as much as 6 degrees per day, wobbling around for a week or so before stabilizing, scientists report in the April 20 issue of Nature. Such drastic changes are beyond the limits of conventional geological opinion. But R.S. Coe of the University of California at Santa Cruz and colleagues from the University of Montpelier in France contend they took place 16.2 million years ago, during one of Earth's occasional field reversals in which magnetic north becomes south, and vice versa. No one knows why, just as no one understands exactly what produces the field in the first place.

North Magnetic Pole could be leaving Canada
by Richard Stenger
wandering magnetic pole image

The magnetic pole, which has steadily drifted for decades, has picked up its pace in recent years and could exit Canadian territory as soon as 2004, said Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada. If the pole follows its present course, it will pass north of Alaska and arrive in Siberia in a half century, but Newitt cautioned that such predictions could prove wrong. The erratic pole can jump around considerably each day, but migrates on average about 10 kilometers to 40 kilometers each year. Friend of navigators for centuries, beckoning compass needles from virtually every point on the planet, the North Magnetic Pole is distinct from the North Terrestrial Pole, the fixed point that marks the axis of the turning planet. The magnetic pole is currently 966 kilometers (600 miles) from the geographic one. Because the magnetic pole lies in the Arctic Ocean, scientists attempting to pinpoint its precise location must visit during a brief window in the spring. The North Magnetic Pole historically is resurveyed about once every decade. But Newitt and colleagues, who last studied the site in 2001, might attempt another trek in 2003 to investigate further its accelerated migration.

There is no known relationship between the magnetic pole and the rotational axis. There's no consensus model for the cause of the Earth's magnetic field. There's good evidence that the magnetic field has increased in intensity and basically reversed during the past 3,000 years, and the idea that the Earth's core is solid iron has recently been questioned. In any case, this magnetic pole shift has nothing to do with the Flem-Aths' scenario.

The Flem-Ath thesis was a valiant effort but ultimately a failure. The complete lack of ancient maps is one big problem. The possible lack of an ice cover on the Antarctica shown in the old maps cited by Hapgood and the Flem-Aths could mean that the ice sheet is not two million years old, or it could mean that the rough outline shown corresponds to the rough coastline created by the ice and mapped during eras in which worldwide navigation is not yet recognized by scholarly consensus.

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National Geographic map of Antarctica

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Earth Crust Displacement (from the Athens Atrium webring)

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