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The Case for Atlantis in Antarctica The for Case Atlantis in Antarctica After detailed analysis of ancient maps and Plato's writings, researcher Rand Flem-Ath concludes that Antarctica is the site of the fabled lost continent of Atlantis. e all know that the greater mass of an iceberg is hidden, unseen beneath the surface of the water. And likewise, underlying the search for Atlantis lie many deep prejudices. Some of these prejudices revolve around time. Our twentieth-century faith in progress propels us towards the future, leaving the past behind at a constantly accelerating rate. But here, at the Return to the Source Symposium, we are invited to face the past. This event is an opportunity to turn to the past for knowledge and perhaps even some wisdom. I believe that Plato's famous account of Atlantis is a holographic fragment, a sliver of a once common view of the world. In order to reconstruct that world-view we must revise our own assumptions about geography. Words like "Atlantic", "Libya" and "Asia" had a different meaning to the ancient Greeks than they do to us today. When we realise this, Plato's account of Atlantis can be read without distortion and we can follow his clues to their logical conclusion. But in order to understand this Atlantean world-view, we need to reconsider our own presuppositions about geography. Figure 1 shows a map of the Earth centred on North America, and although you may not have seen this particular projection before, the world is still recognisable; it doesn't challenge any of our current beliefs. North is "up" as it is always traditionally depicted. I should say here that this only a tradition—there is no such thing as "up" when the Earth is seen from outer space. Notice how the "north is up" perspective causes the oceans to appear as distinctive bodies of water. The Pacific and Atlantic seem to be entirely sepa- rate oceans. This "north is up" viewpoint also highlights the separateness of the conti- nents. Now, in figure 2, you see a map of the world showing south in the "up" position. Plato's account of Atlantis places the lost continent in what he calls the "real ocean", an we can see what he meant in this US Navy projection of the world as seen from Antarctica. Notice how all the "oceans" that we know today—the Atlantic, Indian an Pacific—are really one ocean. This is a geographic fact—as is recorded in Plato's account of Atlantis. Plato expands on this description to say that the Mediterranean Sea is merely a basin 0: the ocean, separated from it by a narrow channel. From this perspective it is certainly accurate to say that the Mediterranean Sea is really a part of the "World Ocean", separate: from it by a narrow entrance at the place we call the Strait of Gibraltar. Seen from Antarctica, the rest of the continents form a ring around the "real ocean". Plato talks about "the whole opposite continent"—a phrase that makes sense once we view the worl from Antarctica. This "whole opposite continent" has not been understood before. Most researchers into Atlantis treat it as gibberish or they imagine that it must refer to America. Plato acquired the record of Atlantis from his ancestor Solon. In Solon's time, the Earth-island was divided politically into Europe, Libya and Asia (see figure 3). "Libya" included all of North Africa. "Asia" was an area which covered what we would call "the Middle East". I will be returning to the size of Libya and Asia in a moment, but I want you to notice that surrounding this Earth-island was a vast ocean that the Greeks called "the Atlantic". This body of water circled the Earth-disc. Most researchers have mistaken "the Atlantic" to be the North Atlantic Ocean, but for the Greeks of Solon's time the Atlantic was a body of water that completely encircled the world. It lay to the west, yes, but it also lay to east, north and south. So in its true historic sense, the Atlantic was a much larger body of water than just the North Atlantic. At the westerly extreme of the ancient Greek world were the "Pillars of Heracles"— what we know today as the Strait of Gibraltar. It is a narrow entrance which separates the by Rand Flem-Ath Extracted and edited from a transcript of his lecture, "Atlantis and the Earth's Shifting Crust", presented at Return to the Source Symposium, held at the University of Delaware, USA, 28 September 1996 APRIL - MAY 1998 NEXUS - 43 by Rand Flem-Ath