by Colin Wilson
As time went by, the Critias goes on, the god-like element among the Atlanteans became diluted with human stock and they were no longer able ‘to carry their prosperity with moderation’. The meaning is quite clear: undisturbed prosperity makes human beings lazy, and those who are too aggressive to allow themselves to vegetate fly from boredom by using up their energies in a struggle for power and wealth (things have not changed all that much). Although the Atlanteans regarded themselves as fortunate and contented, the gods were fully aware of their corruption. So Zeus summoned all the gods to a meeting in his palace…
And at that point, the Critias breaks off. Plato never completed it, or went on to write the third dialogue of a projected trilogy, the Hermocrates. The likeliest explanation is that his plans were interrupted by illness and death – he died at the age of eighty.
The story of Atlantis continued to fascinate readers for more than 2,000 years. In the nineteenth century an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly wrote the first complete study of the legend, concluding that it is almost certainly a record of fact. Atlantis, The Antediluvian World,9 which has been in print ever since it was first published in 1882, is a work of extraordinary range that argues that the colonies of Atlantis included North and South America, as well as Egypt and Spain, and is inclined to believe that the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic, are the only part of the sunken island that remains visible. Donnelly came close to persuading the British prime minister Gladstone to send a naval vessel to look for Atlantean remains.
Donnelly – described as ‘the most erudite man ever to sit in Congress’ – seems to have been a remarkable man. He was the author of an influential book proposing that William Shakespeare was in fact Francis Bacon, while a sequel to his text on Atlantis, Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883),10 set out to explain the origins of the layer of sand, gravel and clay that covers most of our earth, arguing that it was left behind after a flood caused by the impact of some great comet which vaporised oceans and caused an age of darkness. This happened, Donnelly suggests, when man had already begun to establish civilisation, and the event is reflected in many myths of catastrophe. The area where the comet struck, he thinks, may have been the mid-Atlantic – in short, Atlantis.
It is an interesting speculation, for a cometary impact is as good an explanation as any for the destruction of Plato’s legendary civilisation. But Donnelly’s belief that Atlantis was located in the mid-Atlantic cannot be sustained. The explanation is summarised in a popular volume on mysteries published in 1961:
At first sight the configuration of the bed of the Atlantic between Bermuda and Spain appears to confirm the former existence of Atlantis. Depth sounders carried westwards from Spain disclose first a valley three thousand feet in depth, the sea bed then rising perpendicularly to the summits of the Azores which are in effect the tops of a high mountain range which runs under the sea north and south in the Atlantic. The ocean bed then drops to another valley two thousand feet deep and rises steeply again to the island of Bermuda, another mountain top. It appears, therefore, that the Azores represent the last remaining outposts of Atlantis. But geological surveys of the ocean bed have disclosed that, if any subsidences took place, they occurred at a date a hundred thousand years or more before the time of the supposed loss of Atlantis.11
This, then, would appear to rule out the existence of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean – at least, if it was the size of North Africa and the Middle East combined.
As Hapgood reread Plato’s account, he was struck by the fact that this sounded like a description of something that had actually happened. It seemed to him that the most interesting question was not so much where Atlantis was located, but what could have caused such a catastrophe. No volcanic eruption could be great enough to wreck a whole continent and extend its destructiveness as far as Greece.
A trivial domestic incident started a new train of thought. Hapgood had put a heavy rug, rolled into a bundle, into the washing machine, and when the drum had begun to spin, the machine shook until it tore the bolts out of the kitchen floor. At roughly the same time as this incident, a friend of Hapgood, Hugh Auchinloss Brown, an engineer, suggested his own theory of how an earth catastrophe could have taken place. The earth’s polar ice caps are huge, Antarctica’s alone being about twice as large as the United States; the northern ice cap is almost entirely floating ice, but Antarctica, on the other hand, is a vast continent covered with ice. Since the earth is continually spinning like a washing machine, its ice cap could act like the bunched-up rug, causing an uneven distribution of mass. Auchinloss Brown even went so far as to propose that the mass of ice at the poles can cause the earth to topple on to its side every 7,000 years, a view that was used by the science fiction writer Allan Eckert in a novel called The Hab Theory, ‘HAB’, being Auchinloss Brown’s initials.
Auchinloss Brown pointed out that there is a significant difference between the rotations of a washing machine and our planet. Because it spins on its axis, the earth is ‘fatter’ at the equator than at the poles, so in effect it is like an enormous flywheel whose spin stabilises itself. A flywheel would spin erratically if someone attached a weight to its edge, but the polar ice is not on the edge but, so to speak, at the centre of the wheel. Hapgood had to try to work out the mass of irregular ice that could cause the wheel to ‘judder’. He asked a colleague to calculate the centre of gravity of the Antarctic ice cap, which has an irregular shape. He learned that the centre of gravity of Antarctica was around 340 miles to the west of the
Pole itself, which meant that when the ice reached a certain thickness, Antarctica could, in theory, cause a bunched-up-rug effect. Then he had to work out whether this irregular sheet of ice, much of it 2 miles thick, could cause the flywheel to judder. The answer, when it came, was disappointing. The flywheel-stabilising effect was thousands of times greater than the weight of ice at the South Pole. Auchinloss Brown’s ‘Hab theory’ was also disproved.
At this low point, his friend James Hunter Campbell, an engineer and inventor and an associate of Thomas Edison’s, made a suggestion that completely changed the direction of the investigation. Surely, said Campbell, there was no need for the bunched-up-rug effect to make the whole earth wobble on its axis? The earth’s crust is a fairly thin layer of solid matter, between 20 and 40 miles thick, which floats on a sea of molten rock, so the mass of irregular ice would only have to make the earth’s crust slip on the liquid underneath.
This was Hapgood’s great breakthrough. Suddenly he had the makings of a plausible theory about what might have happened to Atlantis. Moreover, he had extremely powerful support in the theories of a German meteorologist named Alfred Lothar Wegener, who had taught at the University of Graz. Around 1910 Wegener had pointed out that we only have to look at a map of the world to see that the bulge on the coast of South America appears to fit very neatly into the hollow on the coast of Africa. Is it not possible that they were once part of the same continent, then drifted apart? Wegener labelled his hypothetical supercontinent Pangaea.
Wegener’s Hypothesis, as it was known, was presented to the academic world in 1915 in a book called The Origin of the Continents and Oceans.12 It encountered furious resistance, and was widely ridiculed. What, his colleagues wanted to know, had driven the continents apart? Why should they drift apart when the surface of the earth is obviously solid? Wegener’s reply was along the same lines as Sclater’s observations on Lemuria in the 1850s: there were similar rock strata and fossils in both Africa and South America. That, said his opponents, was coincidence.
Wegener struggled on, aware that he had lost the battle, and by 1930 his theory had been generally rejected. He went on a final expedition to Greenland, where he met his death from a heart attack induced by overexertion. His theory was promptly forgotten.
His critics were not entirely wrong. His theory was based on two presuppositions: that the sea bed is a smooth plane, so that continents can drift over it like immense rafts; and that it is soft and pl
astic. In fact the sea bed is not flat – it is often mountainous – and the rock of the sea bed is rigid. Yet Wegener’s basic intuition – that the continents were once a solid land mass that has since split apart – was correct, and was recognised as such within a few decades of his death. His name can now be found in every dictionary of science.
In 1952, Hapgood was in effect re-examining the Wegener Hypothesis – with one important difference. Unlike Wegener, Hapgood had a clear idea of what might cause ‘continental drift’: the mass of polar ice. He decided to try to enlist the support of the most famous living scientist, Albert Einstein. Hapgood had written to him before, with some questions about the nature of the expanding universe, and Einstein had replied. Hapgood wrote again, this time asking whether Einstein thought that radioactive elements such as radium might be built up in the earth’s crust from simpler elements because of the enormous pressures.
Although his reply has been lost, Einstein seems to have shown interest, for, on 15 November 1952, two weeks after his first letter, Hapgood was sending him a lengthy memorandum about the forces exerted by the earth’s crust. He made one comment that would be central to his whole theory. Noting the size of the last great American ice sheet, known as the Wisconsin, Hapgood pointed out that if it had extended as far north as the present North Pole, its weight would have been so great that it would have pulled the globe sideways.
(Hapgood used the term ‘careened’.) The answer, Hapgood thought, was that the North Pole was not then in its present position, but further south in Hudson Bay.
Einstein immediately grasped the essence of the rather diffuse memorandum; he replied nine days later (24 November 1952),13 remarking that he had once read a popular article suggesting that an irregular mass of ice at the poles could cause the earth’s crust to slip. And he advised Hapgood that, in his opinion, ‘a careful study of this hypothesis is really desirable’.
That was exactly what Hapgood wanted – encouragement from the world’s most famous scientist to go ahead and develop his theory of the earth’s shifting crust. His reaction was to begin to write a book about his theory.
It was six months before he wrote to Einstein again, when he enclosed the typescript of ‘The Ice Age’, the first chapter of his book. A mere century ago, Hapgood pointed out, people were simply unable to accept that the earth had once been covered with vast sheets of ice, but finally, the evidence became too powerful to ignore. Not only the extreme northern and southern regions had been covered with ice, but India and Africa too. In fact, we now know that in the Pre-Cambrian Era, about 800 million years ago, the whole earth remained frozen solid almost as far as the equator, and that this ice age lasted for another 300 million years. Nothing as extreme has happened since, but the earth has passed through a succession of ice ages whose cause is still a mystery.
If ice ages occurred at regular intervals, an obvious explanation would be that the solar system passes periodically through some giant cloud of cosmic dust, but they have no perceptible pattern of frequency, so other theories must be considered.
In 1872, a Scotsman named James Croll produced a book called Climate and Time, arguing that the key to the ice ages lies in the tilt of the earth’s axis, which causes our winter and summer; at present it is 23.4 degrees. If there were no tilt, there would be no seasons. It follows that if the tilt were increased, winter and summer would be more extreme. In fact, the tilt does increase, as far as 24.4 degrees, and this, Croll suggested, can produce ice ages.
In 1920 a Serbian scientist named Milutin Milankovich developed this idea further. He contended that the movement of the earth around the sun varies in three ways: the tilt of the earth’s axis, which varies slightly over 41,000 years; the point when its orbit comes closest to the sun (called the perihelion), which varies every 22,000 years; and the slight changes in the orbit (known as eccentricity), which vary over a period of 100,000 years. Milankovich suggested that if these three factors coincide, they cause an ice age. For the next twenty years, Milankovich continued to produce charts and graphs, and cli-matologists were deeply impressed. Milankovich was only concerned with the Pleistocene, the most recent geological epoch, which ended a mere 10,000 years ago, but his graph of the Pleistocene – ‘the Milankovich curve’ – showed the climatic changes of the Pleistocene in remarkable detail.
The problem with the Milankovich theory is that, while it can explain small fluctuations in the earth’s climate, it cannot answer the question of why vast ice sheets extended beyond the tropics. The 300-million-year-long ice age of the Pre-Cambrian seems to require something more than three orbital variations occurring at the same time.
Another interesting theory was put forward by the meteorologist Sir George Simpson in the 1950s. His notions sound totally paradoxical: that ice ages are caused by an increase in heat from the sun. Simpson pointed out that an increase in the sun’s heat would cause heavier rainfall, as the sun would evaporate more water from the sea (that is why the tropics have monsoons). In the polar regions, precipitation falls as snow, and if more snow falls in winter than can evaporate in summer, the ice caps will grow larger and larger, and the result will be an ice age. But if increased solar radiation caused the ice ages, it should also have warmed the seas, until most of the ice-free ocean was as warm as the Mediterranean. A study of shell deposits on the sea bottom, carried out by Cesare Emiliani of the University of Chicago, shows no such rise in temperature, so Simpson’s theory also has to be abandoned.
There is one more likely possibility: that ice ages are caused by volcanic dust in the earth’s atmosphere. During the first part of the twentieth century, there was a lessening of volcanic activity, resulting in the long, hot summers that can be remembered by those born before 1950. An increase in volcanic eruptions has brought an increased variability in the weather – rainy summers, warm winters. What causes this rise in volcanic activity? One theory suggests that the earth may have been struck by large meteors or small asteroids, but there have been no such major strikes since the great Tunguska explosion which devastated hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest in 1908.
We still have no firm ideas about the causes of the ice ages, but Hapgood went on to raise an even more baffling question: why are the records of ice ages not distributed across locations where you would expect them to be found, namely showing ice spreading from the poles and working towards the equator? How can we explain the recent ice ages that left Siberia and Alaska untouched, yet froze Europe almost as far south as London and Berlin? And what about the ice sheet that covered India and moved northwards in the Carboniferous Period? One explanation might be that around 300 million years ago this part of India was much higher – and therefore colder – than today, but there were also vast ice sheets at sea level in Asia, Africa and Australia, and ice sheets in Africa and Madagascar also spread ‘the wrong way’, from the equator.
You might also expect that an ice age would affect the northern and southern hemispheres at the same time. Not so; there is evidence to show that there have been ice sheets in the southern hemisphere but not at the same time in the north, and vice versa.
If you assume that the earth’s crust cannot move, and that the land that is now at the North and South Poles has always been located at the same places, these facts cannot be supported. Instead assume that the earth’s crust can move around, and all is explained: the ice that almost reached the latitude of London while Siberia remained unfrozen, the ice sheet over India, and other irregularities.
Hapgood was lucky to have a friend in the zoologist Ivan Sanderson, who was interested in what are now called ‘anomalies’, meaning strange and unexplained phenomena. It was Sanderson who brought to his attention the Russian scientist Immanuel Velikovsky’s investigations of the Beresovka mammoth, found frozen in Siberia around 1901 in a half-standing position with buttercups in its mouth. Obviously, for such flora to have been growing, the climate had changed very suddenly, but how could even an earth crust slippage have caused the temperature t
o drop so rapidly? Hapgood had himself been in Canada one Indian summer; it had been hot enough for him to bathe in a lake and then dry out in the sun, until suddenly the wind had changed to north-west and the temperature had dropped so that the lake was frozen over within hours. He imagined the Beresovka mammoth chewing buttercups in a warm meadow when a storm had blown up, with a wind of 150 miles an hour. (One of the consequences of volcanic dust in the air is an increase in the temperature difference between poles and equator and more powerful winds.)
But why were other mammoths not affected? The answer is that they were – in their thousands. Twenty thousand mammoth tusks were exported from Siberia in the last decades of the nineteenth century and thousands more must have remained buried. Ivory is unusable unless it comes from freshly killed animals, or can be frozen very quickly. Many of the frozen mammoths were perfectly edible, indicating that they had been frozen to temperatures well below zero and kept like that for thousands of years. If meat is merely kept at or around freezing point, ice crystals form and ‘spoil’ it by disrupting the cells. Evidently, some huge catastrophe plunged Siberia from a warm day into sub-zero temperatures that lasted 15,000 years.
Hapgood then discussed the mastodon bones found in New York State around 1880, which at the time were assumed to prove that mastodons survived the Ice Age. Subsequent geological studies have proved that, like the Siberian mammoths, they were caught by a sudden drop in temperature, then in the ice sheet that subsequently formed, so the mastodons of North America – as well as bears, horses, giant beavers, deer, caribou, elk and bison – were also overtaken by catastrophe. The basic difference was that Siberia became freezing cold. Why? Because it had moved north.