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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. harles Hapgood showed that the 1513 Piri Re'is map contained at least 24 points that were accurate within a half a degree of longitude. European explorers did not match this level of accuracy until the 1770s during Captain Cook's famous voyages. The southern portion of the map seems to depict the subglacial fea- tures of Antarctica. This discovery was made by Captain Arlington Mallery, but Hapgood took up the map and made many more discoveries about it. Incidentally, Hapgood believed that this map included Atlantis. Figure 14 shows where Hapgood placed the lost continent. Hapgood believed that Plato's "whole opposite continent" was a reference to America, and this island (Rocks of St Peter and St Paul), now beneath the Atlantic Ocean, seemed to him to be a place that matched Plato's words. But these Rocks of St Peter and St Paul can in no way be compared to a land mass high above sea-level and larger than Libya and Asia combined. Nevertheless, Hapgood's Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings remains the classic work on ancient cartography. The second book that I read by Hapgood was his Path of the Pole, which provided a mechanism to resolve all the questions that were haunting me. Here was a theory that could explain a temperate Lesser Antarctica around Plato's date of 9,600 BC, and at the same time move me towards an understanding of a host of other scientific puzzles. With [my wife] Rose's help, I wrote a paper incorporating my ideas and sent it to Charles Hapgood. (This letter is on our website, courtesy of Laura Lee.) Hapgood enthu- siastically responded to our letter and told us that our work was "the first truly scientific exploration" of his work that had ever been done. Of course we were delighted, but also astonished. Why had scientists ignored Hapgood's work? After all, Albert Einstein had written a glowing foreword to the first edition of Hapgood's book, Earth's Shifting Crust. My amazement led me to read about the history, sociology and philosophy of science, and I soon discovered that what was happening to Hapgood wasn't unusual at all. There is a vast difference between the sociology and logic of science. Logically, Hapgood's theory of Earth crust displacement should not have been ignored, but that's not the way science works. So let's consider his idea now. Figure 15 shows the inside of the Earth: the core, the mantle and the crust. Figure 16 shows a blow-up of the area of the Earth near the surface and we have exaggerated the dimensions so that you can see the crust which rests upon a mobile layer, the asthenos- phere, which in turn rests upon the solid mantle. An Earth crust displacement is a move- ment of the entire crust, including the ocean basins, over the asthenosphere. Now, keep in mind that the Earth's axis does not change. We still have the same tilt and the same sea- sons, but the relationship of the crust to the climatic zones is changed. In other words, the climatic zones are stable; it is the crust that moves. To understand the ecological upheaval created by the Earth's shifting crust, we need to compare its position to the climatic zones both before and after the displacement. In figure 17, we have North America's position relative to the polar zone. The top cir- cle represents today's Arctic Circle. The bottom circle shows the Arctic Circle before the Earth's crust shifted. You'll notice that these two circles overlap on Greenland. That explains why Greenland has most of the glaciation in the northern hemisphere: the ice never got a chance to melt! The crust that used to be in the Arctic Circle includes the Great Lakes as well as Lake Winnipeg, Great Slave Lake and hundreds of thousands of other, smaller lakes. North America is a water-rich continent because it used to be by Rand Flem-Ath © 1996 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 JUNE - JULY 1998 NEXUS - 55 by Rand Flem-Ath © 1996