Nexus - 0503 - New Times Magazine-pages

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result of the weight of today's Antarctic ice-sheet. This immense blanket of snow and _ ice depressed parts of the continent, caus- ing more and more land to fall below ocean level. I believe that the Egyptian map of Atlantis represents in size, shape, scale and position, an ice- free Antarctica. Fig. 12 Now what I've shown you so far is something that I ha understood for the first time 20 years ago. Plato's account of Atlantis seemed like a crude depic- tion of the world as seen from Antarc- tica. I knew I was onto something, but as I followed the research I encountered the Antarctic ice-cap! In 1976, the encyclopaedias claimed confidently and absolutely that Antarctica has been under ice for 50 to 60 million years! Now it seemed to me that Plato's account had been amazingly accurate when it came to geography, so I decided to treat the question of the age of the Antarctic ice-sheet as an open rather than closed question. In 1990 I was rewarded when two geolo- gists made a discovery that completely reopened the question of the age of the ice-sheet. Working just 250 miles from the South Pole, the geologists discovered the frozen remains of forest that was later dated to be between two and three million years old. So it turns out that the encyclopaedias of 1976 were wrong by as much as 58 million years! The absolute, ancient age of the Antarctic ice-cap wasn't so absolute after all. Most of the ice (nearly two-and-a-half miles thick) lies on what we know as "Greater Antarctica". Darker tones here (see figure 11) represent thicker ice-sheets. On "Lesser Antarctica", the side facing South America and the area corresponding to the island on the Kircher map, the ice-sheet is quite shallow. I thought perhaps this curious phenomenon could be accounted for by a greater snowfall on Greater Antarctica, but when I turned to the snowfall patterns this is what I found. It's snowing like heck on Lesser Antarctica, the black areas (see figure 12), while over on Greater Antarctica, the area which holds nearly 90 per cent of the world's fresh water, there is virtually no annual snow- fall. Greater Antarctica is a polar desert! There is a dramatic anomaly here. The area of the greatest ice has the least snowfall, while the area of least ice receives the most snowfall. Current snowfall patterns could not produce the ice- sheet that we see today. In this case, the present is certainly not the key to the past. When I looked through the scientific literature trying to find an explanation for this anomaly, I found only silence. There was nothing to be found. Nobody seemed even curious about the fact that the greatest ice-sheet in the world does not have snow falling on it! Fig. 13 nd when I looked at the northern hemisphere I found a whole host of anomalies. To anyone who has ever visited a muse- um in North America, this is a familiar map depicting the Ice Age (see figure 13). This is what the continent looked like 12,000 years ago—the time of Atlantis, I might add. We are told that the native people who first arrived in America came across a land-bridge some 12,000 years ago into a largely ice-free Alaska. From there they made their way through an ice- free corridor that existed between two massive ice-sheets. Notice that the Queen Charlotte Islands were ice-free at this time. This is the homeland of the Haida whose story of a lost city I will be telling later. There are several problems with the traditional model for the peopling of America. New archaeological sites have been discov- ered in Chile, Brazil, Pennsylvania and New Mexico which are much older than 10,000 BC. Archaeologists have been slow to accept the implication of these sites: that the people of America have been on this continent long before 10,000 BC. Clearly, the traditional version of how and when people first arrived in America also needs to be re-opened. Another problem is: why is this ice-free corridor right smack- dab between two massive ice-sheets? And why are the ice-sheets here at all? Why don't they extend to cover Siberia, Beringia and most of Alaska? Thad a lot of questions and I wasn't finding a lot of satisfactory answers in the scientific literature. Then I read Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by Charles Hapgood and learned that Kircher's map was not alone. There were other ancient maps, including the famous Piri Re'is map, showing Antarctica without ice. About the Speaker: Rand Flem-Ath is co-author (with Rose Flem-Ath) of When The Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, published in 1995 by Stoddart Publishing (Ontario), Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London) and St Martin's Press (New York). (See review in NEXUS 3/01.) Continued in the next issue of NEX' . 46 - NEXUS APRIL - MAY 1998