Atlantis Beneath the Ice

by Rand Flem-Ath

  Hours later, stiff and blue and bruised and bleeding, Kircher struggled up to the door of the college. To the joy of his companions, who had been praying for the repose of his soul, he told how his ice-flow had been jammed among others down stream, permitting him to clamber along toward the further shore. He had had to swim a wide gap before he finally reached dry land.20

  Kircher’s legend was already being forged. He resumed his studies with even greater enthusiasm. Astronomy fascinated him, and through the concentrated use of a telescope, he announced the rather startling idea, at the time, that the sun was made of the same material as the earth. He was the first to propose that the sun was an evolving star.

  In 1628, Kircher was ordained as a priest. Soon a new interest began to draw his attention—archaeology. One day, while browsing in a Jesuit library, he came upon illustrations of Egyptian obelisks. The hieroglyphic inscriptions fascinated him. Later, he was appointed by successive popes to study and restore the obelisks. Egypt’s intimate connection with the Bible made the deciphering of these figures of critical interest to the church, and the popes had chosen a man more than well qualified for the task.

  Kircher’s other pursuits followed not only the explosive macroworlds of astronomy and geology but also the silent microworld beneath the lens of a microscope. From these early explorations he introduced the then-revolutionary idea that microbes were the cause of disease. A true Renaissance man, he sought knowledge wherever it led him. After an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, he went so far as to lower himself into the steaming crater to view its violent upheavals firsthand. He also taught physics, mathematics, and Oriental languages at the prestigious College of Rome. In 1643, Kircher resigned his post to devote himself fully to the study of his true love, archaeology.

  By 1665, he had produced the first volume of his encyclopedic work, Mundus Subterraneus. It was a massive book, brimming with ideas, illustrations, and the results of his intricate research into the mysteries of alchemy.

  For a brief time, we owned one of the few copies of this marvelous book.

  After selling the contents of our apartment in British Columbia, we’d arrived in London with one trunk and enough money to live out our dream of exploring the city while we studied at the British Museum library. The first catch in our impetuous plan was that the money was only enough to last for three months. The second catch was that in the first flush of excitement, we’d spent a big chunk of that cash on Mundus Subterraneus. (Perhaps this was understandable for a couple of writer/librarian characters, but it was more than risky for writer/librarians unemployed in a foreign country!)

  We had tracked our prize to a narrow alley near Trafalgar Square that disappeared into some nether land of the city. The location was so far off the beaten track that we were convinced there would be less chance of anyone finding us if anything were to go awry than if we vanished in the transcendent wilds of Canada. As we neared our destination the sounds of London trailed away behind us, and the soot of centuries brushed against our coats. A set of steps built for a dwarf led us into a dank basement. The sound of a cheerful bell belied the mold crawling up the wall as we pushed open a door that begged for a coat of fresh paint.

  Inside was a scene worthy of Dickens. Patches of a grubby Persian carpet could be glimpsed between the hundreds of books tilting from floor to ceiling, blocking most of the light from the narrow window—a bounty to delight any bibliophile. Hunched over a cluttered desk in the center of his empire was a man of indeterminate age who obviously didn’t have a style or hair salon high on his list of priorities. One look and he probably figured we didn’t either. His welcome and firm handshake indicated that if we’d made the effort to get there, not to mention actually find the place, we must be worth helping.

  He shuffled into a hobbit-sized cupboard and left us to gaze at his treasures: the writer in us anxious to reach for a book, the librarian in us wondering what mystical cataloguing system he used.

  Our host reappeared smoothing the cover of a massive volume. Never was the phrase “you can’t judge a book by its cover” more appropriate. Its ugly milky-colored cover stretched across its bulk like a cheap coat two sizes too small. It was curling at the edges like the skin of a Californian too fond of the sun, and despite the bookseller’s tender ministrations, there was a tinge of the odor of neglect about it.

  Inside lay the magic: page after rustling page of Athanasius Kircher’s words, the illustrations delicately detailed, a man’s life work beneath our hands.

  Juggling it on our laps on the tube trip home wasn’t easy. And perhaps it was only our naïveté about the true extent of the treasure we held that kept us laughing as we balanced the Mundus Subterraneus between us and congratulated ourselves on our find. It stayed on the table in our bedsit for many months. The map of Atlantis was boldly drawn in Kircher’s hand, the symbol of the journey we had made.

  But even the pleasures of the Mundus Subterraneus had to give way to material necessity if we wanted to stay in London and continue our quest. We ran out of money. And so we carried our treasure to the slick venue of Sotheby’s and sat on the uncomfortable chairs and watched as a man with a voice like, well, like an auctioneer, raised his gavel and barked Kircher’s book away to an anonymous phone bidder. Within weeks we both had jobs and our three-month sojourn in London turned into five years of fine memories.

  HOW NORTH BECAME DOWN

  In Mundus Subterraneus Kircher claimed that the remains of Atlantis lay beneath the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. He also revealed the mysterious map of Atlantis that he claimed had been stolen from Egypt by the early Roman invaders (see figure 7.3 on page 120). The inscription on the map translates as, “Site of the island of Atlantis, now beneath the sea, according to the beliefs of the Egyptians and the description of Plato.”

  Figure 7.3. In 1665, Athanasius Kircher published this Egyptian map of Atlantis showing north as “down.” For generations, researchers have misguidedly turned this map upside down so that America appears on the left and Spain on the right. There is, however, an alternate orientation.

  At first glance, the map seems odd to modern eyes because north, as indicated by the downward-pointing compass, is at the bottom of the page. But the ancient Egyptians believed that the most important direction was south, toward the headwaters of the sacred Nile. Therefore south must be “up.” Kircher reproduced this belief.

  The map appears much more familiar to us if we look at it upside down. What looks like America then appears on the left, with Spain and North Africa on the right—where we are accustomed to seeing them in twentieth-century maps. However, if we lift a modern globe off its hinges and roll it about like a beach ball so that the South Pole faces us, placing South America on our right and South Africa and Madagascar on our left, we can immediately see that the Egyptian map of Atlantis represents an ice-free Antarctica in size, shape, scale, and position (see figure 7.4).

  Figure 7.4. If we compare Kircher’s Egyptian map of Atlantis with a modern geophysical globe using the South Pole as “up,” our perspective changes. With this Southern Hemisphere perspective the segments of the map that Kircher labeled as Hispania (Spain) are actually seen as southern Africa. Africa becomes Madagascar, and America is South America. Atlantis is shown to be Antarctica. Kircher’s map was published almost three centuries before we knew the true, ice-free shape of Antarctica, with its offshore islands.

  The present shape of Antarctica as depicted is based on the current ocean level, not that of 11,600 years ago. Atlantis did not actually sink beneath the waves. Instead, as the old ice caps melted, the ocean level rose, covering some of the continent’s permutations. Further distortions in our modern map, compared with Kircher’s, are a result of the weight of today’s Antarctic ice sheet. This immense blanket of snow and ice depressed parts of the continent, causing more and more land to fall below the ocean level. Nevertheless, the shadow of Atlantis can still be seen in the modern map of Antarctica.

  If the horror of an ear
th crust displacement were to be visited on today’s interdependent world culture, the progress of thousands of years of civilization would be torn away from our planet like a fine cobweb. Those who live near high mountains might escape the global tidal waves, but they would be forced to leave behind, in the lowlands, the slowly constructed fruits of civilization. Only among the merchant marines and navies of the world might some evidence of civilization remain. The rusting hulls of ships and submarines would eventually perish. But the valuable maps they carried would be saved by survivors for hundreds, even thousands, of years, until once again they could be used to guide seamen across the world ocean to rediscover lost lands.

  EIGHT

  EMBERS OF HUMANKIND

  Numbed with fear, the few shocked and terrified survivors of Atlantis floated lost and confused amongst the debris left in the wake of the earth’s nightmare. But the nightmare did not dissipate with the coming of the welcome dawn. There was to be no waking from this dream for many centuries. Instead it was left to those blessed by favorable winds and tides, which carried them to hospitable shores, to bind together and rebuild after the devastation. Only embers of humankind—those who had fled to the mountains—survived.

  It is a tribute to the survivor’s sheer courage and overwhelming will to live that, adrift, fighting the elements, they somehow began to piece together the tattered remnants of their world. But perhaps the future could offer only hope to their battered hearts. No horror of tomorrow could compete with the devastation they had left behind, buried under the falling snow that was now smothering their island home. But their solitude was not total as they believed, tossed and tormented in their ships, so tiny in the ocean’s vastness.

  Equally shocked as the Atlanteans were the survivors in the highlands that had escaped the tidal waves. Shivering in their mountain-top shelters were the remaining hunters and gatherers of the earth. Clinging to the comfort of ways that had stood them well for hundreds of thousands of years, little did they suspect that those ancient routines would be overturned in a peaceful revolution brought by strangers from the sea.

  The hunters and gatherers were strong, uncoddled people, secure in the proven ways of their ancestors who had carved a living from the bounties of nature wherever they found them. They had fought the ravages of nature before: the droughts, the storms, the famines, and the thousands of dangers of chance. But nothing in their memory had been like this. Nothing had prepared them for the day the earth’s crust shifted, carrying them forever away from their familiar existence. And so, shivering in their mountain retreats, they began to eke out a new life in the land, until they were joined by strangers from the sea. They shared nothing with these strangers but a vivid memory of the past that had been swept away by the earth’s anger and a mutual fear of the future.

  We can only imagine the conflict that raged within Atlantean and non-Atlantean alike at the joy of finding other living souls. Aliens to each other they truly were: but aliens bound together by a mutual need to conquer the circumstances that threatened to destroy them all.

  The first task was to secure the future with a stock of food. Maps of the globe would become invaluable in the future, but the survivors of the flood were facing a critical problem—the need to feed themselves. They had to reboot agriculture. The earliest experiments with agriculture began in the same century that Atlantis fell. The chances of such a coincidence are astronomical.

  Plato, who preserved the legend of Atlantis from ancient Egyptian sources, wrote about those first desperate days after the ocean broke across its boundaries.

  ATHENIAN: Do you consider that there is any truth in the ancient tales?

  CLINIAS: What tales?

  ATHENIAN: That the world of men has often been destroyed by floods, plagues, and many other things, in such a way that only a small portion of the human race survived.

  CLINIAS: Everyone would regard such accounts as perfectly credible.

  ATHENIAN: Come now, let us picture to ourselves one of the many catastrophes—namely, that which occurred once upon a time through the Deluge.

  CLINIAS: And what are we to imagine about it?

  ATHENIAN: That the men who then escaped destruction must have been mostly herdsmen of the hills, scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere on the mountain-tops.

  CLINIAS: Evidently . . .

  ATHENIAN: Shall we assume that the cities situated in the plains and near the sea were totally destroyed at the time?

  CLINIAS: Let us assume it . . .

  ATHENIAN: Shall we, then, state that, at the time when the destruction took place, human affairs were in this position: there was fearful and widespread desolation over a vast tract of land; most of the animals were destroyed; and the few herds of oxen and flocks of goats that happened to survive afforded at the first but scanty sustenance to the herdsmen?1

  Plato’s account represents the earliest rational explanation for the appearance of domesticated animals. His theory postulates the emergence of agriculture, beginning with the domestication of animals, as a reappearance of a skill learned long before in Atlantis. As we shall see, the dating of the earliest experiments with agriculture appears to match the century of Atlantis’s fall. In the highlands of Turkey two of the worlds’ most important crops—wheat and barley—were shaped to humans’ design between eleven thousand and twelve thousand years ago,2 at the time that Plato tells us Atlantis perished.

  Plato’s vision is also remarkable for the fact that it presents a physical rather than a mythological cause of agriculture. Before his time, all explanations relied upon the intervention of gods and goddesses to account for the beginning of agriculture. In contrast to these mythological origins of agriculture, Plato presents a very different picture. In his view, agriculture re-emerges after the destruction of a great and advanced civilization by earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence. There are no gods or goddesses to suddenly intervene in the affairs of humankind. Instead, Plato sees the emergence of agriculture as a long, slow battle to recover the foundations of a lost civilization. His is a vision of human beings struggling against the vastly transformed physical conditions brought in the wake of the Great Flood.

  We’ve traveled eons in our methods of farming since those first desperate days. In the process we have become dependant on a few key crops and domesticated animals. In North America, the great “breadbasket of the world,” only a small fraction of the population toils to harvest the crops. The efforts of these few, with their highly specialized equipment, have transformed the landscape. To create ever more fertile plants, we intervene in the reproductive process of many crops such as wheat, rice, and corn—crops that would soon be swallowed by wild grasses if left to fend for themselves.

  Mile after mile of domestic grains, bent to humankind’s design, have replaced prairie grasses. From the transformed American prairie to the African savanna and Brazilian jungle, wild vegetation has submitted to the demands of the plow. Squeezed by overpopulation, we continuously strip away the natural garment of the earth and cover it with a cloth of our own weave. Our reliance on agriculture is complete. We can’t turn back.

  The search to explain the profound mystery of the sudden rise of agriculture on different continents following the climatic changes of 9600 BCE has been one of archaeology’s most persistent quests.

  THE MODERN SEARCH FOR AGRICULTURAL ORIGINS

  In 1886, Alphonse de Candolle took a botanical approach to the problem of the origins of agriculture. He wrote, “One of the most direct means of discovering the geographic origin of a cultivated species is to seek in what country it grows spontaneously, and without the help of man.”3

  A dedicated, and ultimately doomed, Soviet botanist, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), saw the possibilities in de Candolle’s approach. For two decades, Vavilov patiently gathered a collection of over fifty thousand wild plants. He chose plants that are genetically linked to the domesticated variety we rely on today. Vavilov discovered “eight independent c
enters of origin of the most important cultivated plants.” They were located on the earth’s highest mountain ranges. He wrote, “It is clear that the zone of initial development of the most important cultivated plants lies in the strip between 20° and 45° north latitude, near the high mountain ranges, the Himalayas, the Hindu Kish, those of the Near East, the Balkans, and the Appennines. In the Old World this strip follows the latitudes while in the New World it runs longitudinally. In both cases conforming to the general direction of the great mountain ranges.”4 Although he was unaware of it, Vavilov’s meticulously measured results support Plato’s claim that mountain elevations were crucial to the reemergence of agriculture (see figure 8.1).

  Figure 8.1. When we place Antarctica at the center of a world map, we can see (a) the sites where agriculture originated according to the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Most domesticated plants were originally domesticated in (b) sites at 1,500 meters (4,920 feet) above sea level.

  In the cruellest of ironies Nikolai Vavilov was targeted by Josef Stalin as a scapegoat for the horrendous famine that the dictator’s wild policies had inflicted on the Russian people and died of starvation in a prison cell in January 1943.

  We aren’t the first world culture to become ensnared in a dependency on sophisticated agricultural techniques. The Atlanteans also were accomplished farmers. They constructed elaborate canals to irrigate immense areas for cultivation. But when the end came, only a few possessed the skill to select the wild plants in the new lands that would sustain them. Those few would be enough.