Antarctica & the Kircher Map

[HereForNow]

This relatively recent theory holds that Antarctica is Atlantis. Those who subscribe to this theory say that Antarctica wasn't always the ice-covered land at the bottom of the world, as it is today. The continent was once a tropical land situated on the Earth's equator, but was shifted to the South Pole due to a slippage of the planet's crust. This theory is described in great detail, with photos and maps, at Atlantis and the Earth's Shifting Crust. One of their main pieces of evidence is an alleged ancient Egyptian map of Atlantis, said to be published in a book by a German Jesuit priest in 1665. The map depicts "Atlantis" between the Americas and Africa (look at a globe from the bottom and Antarctica is indeed situated between South America and Africa). More intriguing, however, is the shape of Atlantis in this supposedly ancient map: it corresponds almost exactly to the shape of the land beneath all the ice of Antarctica - a shape that wasn't known until 20th century satellite imaging!
http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.flem%2Dath.com/del1.htm

[HereForNow]

The members of the Third Soviet Antarctic Expedition carried on to their destination, deposited a statue of Lenin with his arm outstretched, and turned it so that it was pointing to Moscow. When they returned, they named their discovery in honour of Grigoriy Gamburtsev, a highly respected Soviet seismologist who had died three years previously.

But how did the range get there? According to many scientists, the usual methods by which mountains form do not seem to apply in this case. So many are asking the question: can erosion from ice-sheets create mountains?

Mountains are most commonly formed when continental plates collide, pushing up high ridges of rock. However, while there are mountain ranges on the edge of Antarctica, such as the Transantarctic Mountains, that were caused by this kind of plate-convergence, there is no evidence of plate collision in the centre of the continent.

"There are no plate boundaries in the middle of Antarctica, and the shape of the Antarctic plate has barely changed over hundreds of millions of years," says Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist based at the University of Edinburgh, who uses ice-sheet models to simulate the evolution of the Antarctic continent.

One idea is that the mountains were created more than 250 million years ago by far-field compression. This occurs when tectonic plates collide and the stress is transmitted over long distances until it finds a weakness. There it forms a bulge. However, if the Gamburtsevs did form this way, they must have been there for long a period of time, many believe, for them to have survived. Surely, it is argued, the mountains would have been worn down by weather water, or ice.

Another theory is that the erosion caused by ice itself helped formed them. The Antarctic ice sheet has been in existence for the last 15 million years. At the early stages of ice-sheet growth, there would have been snow and ice forming on the central portion of the continent, which would have started to erode the area, thinning the crust, and potentially leading to a weak spot that could be pushed upwards by molten rock.

"Depending on the structure of the underlying lithosphere [the Earth's solid, rocky, outer layer], material may have flowed into the area underneath the Gamburtsevs," says Jamieson. "So from the ice, you have erosion on the high area in the centre of Antarctica, while under the lithosphere, hot rock may be surging into the area and pushing up the region. We know that glaciers can alter the shape of mountains, but if they have helped form the mountains in this way, that would be a new way for ranges to form.

"In order to prove this theory, that erosion from the ice sheet helped form the mountains, we first need to look for any evidence of local glaciation - of relatively small-scale features in the rock formed by smaller, earlier glaciers. These small features could include cirques, for example, which are small bowl-shaped valleys in mountainous areas. If we find these, it proves that the larger ice-sheet, that has covered the mountains for the past 15 million years, has not been eroding the Earth's crust. This would indicate that the mountains were not formed by the ice sheet thinning the earth's crust - and would mean that the Gamburtsevs are much more than 15 million years old."

A third suggestion is that the mountains were pushed up by a "hotspot" - a volcanic feature that punched its way through the earth's crust. Hotspots created the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific. But there have been no obvious hotspots under this part of Antarctica during the last 100 million years.

[HereForNow]

By studying the carcasses of the woolly mammoth and rhino found in the northern regions of Siberia and Canada one can see the land these animals gazed on was suddenly shoved into a much colder climate. Their stomachs reveal food found in warm climates where they grazed just prior to their deaths. This was found frozen along with them suddenly.

Thousands of animals were found to be frozen in a brief moment of geological time. Ancient maps of Antarctica suggests that it too was 'frozen over' in a brief moment in time.

It has been suggested that approximately 12,000 years ago there was a displacement of the Earth's crust. The entire outer shell of the earth moved approximately 2,000 miles. When the Earth's crust shifted all of Antarctica was encapsulated by the polar zone. At the same time North American was released from the Arctic Circle and became temperate.

This is based on the theory of Continental Drift - the continents of the earth have been slowly drifting apart over millions of years. This is possible because the outer crust of the Earth floats upon a semi-liquid layer.



A pole shift theory is a hypothesis based on geologic evidence that the physical north and south poles of Earth have not always been at their present-day locations; in other words, the axis of rotation had shifted. Pole shift theory is almost always discussed in the context of Earth, but other solar system bodies may have experienced axial reorientation during their existences.

One early popular proponent of a pole shift theory was Charles Hapgood.

Charles H. Hapgood, (1904-1982) was an American academician, and one of the best known advocates of a Polar Shift Theory. Hapgood received a master's degree from Harvard University in 1932 in medieval and modern History. His Ph.D. work on the French Revolution was interrupted by the Great Depression. He taught for a year in Vermont, directed a community center in Provincetown, and served as the Executive Secretary of Franklin Roosevelt's Crafts Commission.

During World War II, Hapgood worked for the COI which later became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then for the Red Cross, and finally served as a liaison officer between the White House and the Office of the Secretary of the War.

After World War II, Hapgood taught history at Springfield College in New Hampshire. One of his students questioned the Lost Continent of Mu. This led to a class project to investigate Atlantis and possible ways that massive Earth changes could occur.

[HereForNow]

Einstein also wrote...

In a polar region there is a continual deposition of ice, which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole. The Earth's rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses [of ice], and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the Earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced in this way will, when it has reached a certain point, produce a movement of the Earth's crust over the rest of the Earth's body, and this will displace the polar regions toward the equator.
In The Earth's Shifting Crust, and two successive books, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) and The Path of the Pole (1970), Hapgood proposed the radical theory that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological history. The Earth's crust had undergone repeated displacements and that the geological concepts of continental drift, and sea-floor spreading, owed their secondary livelihoods to the primary nature of crustal shift. According to Hapgood, crustal shift was made possible by a layer of liquid rock situated about 100 miles beneath the surface of the planet.

A pole shift would thus displace the Earth's crust in around the inner mantle, resulting in crustal rock's being exposed to magnetic fields of a different direction. Hapgood created this theory by documenting three Earth crust displacements in the last 100,000 years. He believed that this cataclysmic shift is caused by imbalanced ice at the polar caps. Over time ice builds up at the poles reaching as much as two miles in thickness.

Hapgood revised key parts of his thinking because his calculations convinced him that the mass of the ice cap on Antartica could not destabilize the Earth's rotation. In The Path of the Pole he wrote:


Polar wandering is based on the idea that the outer shell of the Earth shifts about from time to time, moving some continents toward and other continents away from the poles. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually. A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. My book will present evidence that the last shift of the Earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the improvement in climate.
Hapgood goes on to mention two areas where he finds much of his evidence, in data derived from studies of geomagnetism and from carbon 14 dating. Although he argued that such global disruptions happened repeatedly, Hapgood was rejecting the idea that such disruptions could happen quickly.

[Nerc]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080407-plate-tectonics.html

mario dantos has a link to a site discussing how the sudden empty of a glacial lake in NA would have wildly set things off balance and that wasn't soo long ago.

cheers

[HereForNow]

Writing in Scientific American (August 1950: “Exploring the Ocean Floor”), Professor Pettersson spoke of evidence of “great catastrophes that have altered the face of the earth.”

“Climatic catastrophes, which piled thousands of feet of ice on the higher latitudes of the continents, also covered the oceans with icebergs and ice fields at lower latitudes and chilled the surface waters even down to the Equator. Volcanic catastrophes cast rains of ash over the sea.” Also, “tectonic catastrophes raised or lowered the ocean bottom hundreds and even thousands of feet, spreading huge ‘tidal’ waves which destroyed plant and animal life on the coastal plains.” Pettersson also found, in addition to the ash, a “lava bed of geologically recent origin covered only by a thin veneer of sediment.”

In the red clay on the bottom of the ocean Pettersson found “a surprisingly high content of nickel” (Pettersson, “Chronology of the Deep Ocean Bed,” Tellus 1, 1949). Nickel is not present in sea water and therefore could not have been deposited by water. “Nickel is a very rare element in most terrestrial rocks and continental sediments, and it is almost absent from the ocean waters. On the other hand, it is one of the main components of meteorites.” But the quantity of nickel in the clays in the bottom of the ocean was prodigious. Pettersson assumed very copious falls of meteorites in the geological past. He wrote in his account of the expedition, Westward Ho with the Albatross (1953), p. 150:

“Assuming the average nickel content of meteoric dust to be two percent, an approximate value for the rate of accretion of cosmic dust to the whole Earth can be worked out from these data. The result is very high — about 10,000 tons per day, or over a thousand times higher than the value computed from counting the shooting stars and estimating their mass.”

In other words, at some time or times there was such a fall of meteoric dust that, apportioned throughout the entire assumed age of the ocean, it would increase a thousandfold the daily accumulation of meteoric dust since the birth of the ocean based upon the estimated present potential rate of accretion; but since the shower of meteorites was most likely an event of short duration, measured in days or weeks only, the “thousandfold” must be changed to some astronomical figure — a figure also dependent upon ascertaining the correct age of the ocean.

In a subsequent publication (“Manganese and Nickel on the Ocean Floor” in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 1959, Vol. 17), Pettersson wrote: “Of all the elements found in deep-sea deposits few have a more puzzling distribution than the two ferrides, manganese and nickel.” Not only their high concentration, much higher than in continental rocks, but especially their vertical distribution appear “most enigmatic.” Pettersson concluded that “the former being largely due to sub-oceanic volcanic action, the latter [was] due to contributions from the cosmos.” It must have occurred by “an unusually heavy incidence from the cosmos.”

[HereForNow]

This account is based on an unpublished manuscript (ATLANTIS AT LAST!) which was registered with the Library of Congress on the 18th of August 1980.
If we compare Kircher's 1665 ancient Egyptian map of Atlantis with a modern map of ice-free Antarctica the similarity becomes astonishing!

Kircher did not have the benefit of seeing an ice free map of Antarctica. In his time the continent had not even been discovered, let alone explored. Kircher preserved the notion that for the Atlanteans South was at the top of a map. His compass on the map of Atlantis indicates that North is at the bottom of the page rather than the traditional and universally accepted way of representing maps. Because he did not possess a complete globe, Kircher was unable to compare the Egyptian map of Atlantis with a complete globe with South at the top.

The Latin inscription on the top left hand corner of the map of Atlantis translates: "Site of Atlantis now beneath the sea according to the believes of the Egyptians and the description of Plato." All attempts to trace the mystery of the lost continent of Atlantis must begin with the study of a few key sentences left to us by Plato. These sentences give us the first known reference to the location of Atlantis. The misinterpretation of these sentences has blinded hundreds of serious searchers to the true location of Atlantis, and sent the frustrated mumbling that it no more than a myth. But each of Plato's words become clear once we understand the Atlantean Worldview.

[HereForNow]

[Arcturus]

Nice work, Herefornow. I think it important to point out, though, that landmasses don't actually change positions when it comes to pole shifts.  Also, the Egyptian connection to the Kircher map is a bit tenuous at best.  Kircher was a man give to all sorts of flights of fancies.  Before the Rosetta Stone was unconvered, he even made up his own different meanings to what Egyptian hieroglyphics meant.

[Nerc]

that jogged my memory

"Conventional ice age theories are beset with numerous contradictions.

They cannot explain why ice ages took place when and where they did. They cannot explain why the ice was not centred on the pole, but over Canada. They cannot explain why Siberia froze at the end of an ice age, when ice melted very rapidly from a huge continental region that still has permafrost today. The inland ice sheets melted, yet the ice of Greenland, bordering the warm Atlantic, still remains.

They cannot explain why ice has shaped the landscape of the Sahara, without postulating a snowball earth, with ice sheets extending from the poles to cover most of the globe, yet oddly enough, there are no signs of the ice sweeping south.

They cannot explain why in an earlier ice age  there were alternate layers of tropical coral reef and glacial deposit following each other in quick succession.

We even have fossils of tropical forest and dinosaurs dated to times when conventional theories of continental drift and ice ages place them within the arctic circle!

What we do know is that tropical plants do not survive an arctic winter. We do know that crocodiles and turtles and tropical coral reefs do not survive in frozen seas.
We do know from the fossil record that coral reefs and crocodiles and turtles and a great many other species have survived through all the past ice ages. That tells us that there was no snowball earth!
We know that tropical plants and dinosaurs are unlikely to have lived close to the pole, and if their fossils have not been moved there by drifting continents, then the earth's crust must have moved a little more rapidly in relation to the poles.

A little exploration of continental drift theory confirms that the continents do drift, but reveals that there is no satisfactory explanation of why they drift.

Arguments rage over global warming, from whether the world really is warming, to what is causing it, to what we should be doing about it.
The arguments rage because there are no convincing arguments! None of the theories of global warming  are able to model why the ice ages started or ended. If they cannot model the climate changes we know took place over the past 20000 years, what chance that their predictions for the future are correct.

There is another theory that can explain both the ice ages and continental drift, and provides a simple solution to all the problems outlined above.
The solution was first proposed in part by Hapgood, but he was ridiculed, and under pressure of this ridicule - not through reasoned scientific discussion - support for these theories was suppressed.

It is important to make it clear that these theories are not replacing continental drift, or cycles in the suns activity, or the distance from the earth to the sun, or the angle of the poles to the sun. All these phenomena are real, but they are only a part of the picture.

The missing part of the equation of the ice ages and global warming is that very very occasionaly the whole crust of the earth can move as a unit. This shouldn't be unexpected when you remember that the crust is a thin semi-solid skin above a layer of molten magma. Small sections of the crust move on a regular basis during earthquakes, so that cannot be firmly glued in place by the layers beneath. What is more, earthquakes show us that such movement can be very rapid indeed.

At the height of the glaciation of the last Ice Age, the main ice sheets covered eastern North America, Greenland, and across the North Sea to Northern and Western Europe. The peak was only about 15000 years ago, and the ice was continuing to spread. By contrast it was ice free from Eastern Europe across Siberia and into Alaska, and Siberia was enjoying a temperate climate.

Suddenly all the ice melts in the huge ice cap of North America, Greenland doesn't melt at all and the European ice cap melts
slowly - indeed its remnants are still melting today.

Neither does Antarctica suddenly melt, but there is some evidence that the ice cap suddenly extends into new regions.

This is not the sequence that should happen! Ice requires a lot of energy in order to melt, and that energy has to be delivered to it. North America still has a very cold climate with short summers and long winters. It is still frozen for much of the year. You would not expect an ice cap in the middle of a continent to melt rapidly. By contrast Europe has a much warmer climate, with energy delivered by the Atlantic ocean, you might expect the ice to melt here first.

Siberia's temperate climate for much of the ice age is also wrong. There is no warm ocean currents to bring energy to it. At the distance it now is from the North Pole, it should have had a colder climate than now.

It doesn’t make sense to suggest that the icecaps were not centred on the poles. If the ice cap during the last glaciation was not centred round the present day pole, then the only conclusion is that the pole moved!

For the ice to be centred round the pole for last main glaciation period the north pole of rotation must have been in the region between North America and Greenland. (shown blue on the map, present day pole shown red) Click on map for a higher resolution version.

map of carolina bays This makes sense of the extent of the glaciation over Europe, which was then much closer to the pole. It makes sense of the climate in Siberia, which then was in temperate latitudes – see how far it was from the pole, and it also makes sense of the build up of ice in Antarctica.

At the moment, Antarctica is a cold desert. There is very little movement of water vapour into the interior from the coast, yet in the past there must have been weather patterns that moved vast amounts of water to fall as snow on the ice caps. If the South pole of rotation was offset from its present position for much of the last ice age, then the weather patterns would have blown into the interior, rather than round the continents edges, which is what is required to produce the snowfall.

But why should the poles move?

The earth is an almost liquid sphere spinning with huge rotational energy. Like a spinning top, its axis will stay the same. It cannot suddenly flip!

However it will always rotate around its centre of mass. It cannot rotate with any imbalance. If there is any change in the distribution of mass of the earth, the axis of rotation must change in exact synchronisation.

The build up of ice caps is unlikely to cause a change in mass because of the plasticity of the crust. As ice builds up, slowly over tens of thousands of years, the ground surface sinks beneath it. Basic hydrostatic forces will ensure that there is no change in mass distribution. The axis of rotation stays the same.

But we know that when the ice melted, it melted very much faster than the hydrostatic forces and plasticity could react to. The regions that were glaciated are still recovering from the weight that has been removed today. Because this demonstrates that the centre of mass is not in equilibrium, it proves that the axis of rotation has also moved.

The melting of the ice is very peculiar

Conventional glaciology agrees that the melting of the ice cap has been very anomalous, with the huge North American ice cap melting suddenly. Not an even melting all round the axis of rotation. Because this melting was far to fast for the earths crust to recover its position, it has to result in movement of the axis of rotation. Because the axis of rotation has to be round the centre of mass, the change in the axis of rotation will be to move the North pole of rotation directly away from the region that has suddenly lost its mass.

This is exactly what we observe. The North pole of rotation moves to where it is now, Europe has been moved from arctic to temperate and Siberia moves from temperate to arctic. Antarctica moves from off centre at the south pole to more centred and becomes a dry polar desert. Note that nothing physically has moved. It is the axis of spin that has been forced to move by redistribution of mass.

This movement of the crust over the axis of rotation by about 30 degrees solves most of the problems with the ice age climate, but it still leaves too many. The loess soils of China are in the wrong place in relation to their source - the winds were not blowing in their expected directions, and the Sahara should have been a desert, when we know it was temperate to sub tropical grasslands.

Once the crust starts to move as a whole there is very little friction to hold it back, and it will continue to slide like a pendulum swinging, until it slows at the end os a swing and friction locks it in place again. If the Canadian north pole was originally the South pole, and the the crust slid by 150 degrees, then not only do the temperature zones fall into place, but the wind directions are also now correct fot the ice age climate that we can measure in ice cores. Winds in the ice age sweep moistture laden air into Antarctica to build the huge ice sheets, and carry salt inland showing us the shore that faced the prevailing winds.
The loess soils now end up where we find them in China, and warm temperate winds sweep in to Siberia. Moist  winds sweep in to the Sahara from the Atlantic."

http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/ice-ages/Ice_age_theories.html

[HereForNow]

Well, one thing I would like to bring to the table is that Atlantis is an Egyptian legend.
Our best account of this was given to us by Plato who received the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian preist. Another source of this story was written on the Pillars of Neith.

Now we have a map of an island continent that shows North pointing down-ward.
Without any knowledge of what the continent of Antarctica even looked like without ice, we have a surprisingly good ressemblence from this Egyptian map and modern ground penetraiting satellite images.

I won't go as far to say that Atlantis is Antarctica. I just want to bring a fresher theory to the table for discussion so that we can have more to shoot at to fill in the blanks later on.
One of the things really no one is doing is looking at is land masses that have been submerged in huge floods that may have resurfaced. Nor do we take into account that electromagnetic feilds could change because of external forces like coronal mass ejections from the sun, sudden Continental shifts, and volcanism causing severe and sudden weather changes. Think about super volcanos and how global weather changes can happen just from those kinds of events.

[Aristotle]

I don't know if you have ever seen any bathemetric maps of the coastlines, circa 10,000 bc, Herefornow, but lower the coastlines by 100 feet (as they were back then), and there is still no actual sunken landmass of the size that Plato makes Atlantis.  There is more land that emerges, though, and that is why some Atlantis theorists favor Indonesia so much - it greatly expands in size.  However, it is certainly in the wrong positon on the map to be considered Atlantis.

I agree with Arcturus, shifting landmasses are a bit of an impossibility - geologically speaking, they don't move quickly, but take millions of years.

[HereForNow]

According to Cayce, Atlantis—located from the Gulf of Mexico to Gibraltar—was destroyed in a final catastrophic event circa 10,000 B.C. The focus of A.R.E. efforts has been in the Bimini area, however, other related locations have also been investigated. Research on the so-called Bimini Road has been hampered as researchers are split on the origin of the structure: some believe it is a manmade road or foundation while others assert it is natural beach rock, which fractured in place. However, a seldom-discussed fact is that a portion of the Bimini Road was removed after a hurricane in 1926.

Before the end of the last Ice Age (12,000-years ago) the ocean levels were at least 300 feet below their current levels. A vast “island” was in the area in those remote times rather than chains of islands. Edgar Cayce referred to Bimini as one of the mountaintops of ancient Atlantis. While few would consider the island a mountain, 12,000-years ago it was one of the highest points on the vast land formation in the region. Bimini and Andros Island, lying about 100 miles to the east of Bimini, were a part of the same island in 10,000 B.C.—called "Poseidia" by Cayce. Cayce related that a Hall of Records containing the records of Atlantis was constructed somewhere in the region. The Hall of Records was in a temple which sunk in 10,000 B.C. and is, according to Cayce, covered by "the slime of ages." This record hall is identical to the one in Egypt under the Sphinx.

Archaeologists have countered that the remains of civilization in the region only go back 7,000 years—or perhaps even less. They have asserted that if a major civilization existed in the area, some of its remains would be found on current land. That assertion has a fundamental flaw. Ancient maritime civilizations typically built their cities and ports on the ocean shores. As related in prior issues of Ancient Mysteries, archaeologists working in South America, the Pacific coast of North America, India, and elsewhere in the world have been discovering the remains of underwater ruins. These ancient maritime civilizations built their cities and ports on coastlines—all of which have been covered by the rising oceans. Given the recent changes in North and South American archaeology—taking the history of habitation in the Americas to 50,000-years ago—it seems likely that ruins would lie in the shallow waters around Bimini.



Is this what you are reffering to Aristotle?

[HereForNow]

I don't know if you have ever seen any bathemetric maps of the coastlines, circa 10,000 bc, Herefornow, but lower the coastlines by 100 feet (as they were back then), and there is still no actual sunken landmass of the size that Plato makes Atlantis.  There is more land that emerges, though, and that is why some Atlantis theorists favor Indonesia so much - it greatly expands in size.  However, it is certainly in the wrong positon on the map to be considered Atlantis.

I agree with Arcturus, shifting landmasses are a bit of an impossibility - geologically speaking, they don't move quickly, but take millions of years.

It is just one of the theories that I beleived should be brought to the table.

[Gwen Parker]

About the 10,000 bc thing, maybe other people here can refresh my memory, but I don't think we have ever got enough evidence to answer the question:  did the ocean levels raise quickly at the end of the Würm glaciation or was it gradually? Because, I would think a quick sea level rise would be evidence of some ancient catastrophe striking the oceans!

Gwen