Peaceful Earth, mild climate, man had responded well to the beneficence of nature. He had learned to cultivate and harvest his crops. He had domesticated animals to help make his life easier. Various civilizations were beginning to blossom. Then a horrible catastrophe shook the earth!
The sky lit up with strange celestial display. Those who saw in this a portent of disaster fled for shelter. Those who watched and waited perished, as the sky grew dark and a fearful rain fell upon the earth. In many places the rain was like blood, in others it was like hailstones. And the sky rained fire too. Nothing escaped this global holocaust. Men and animals were engulfed. Forests were destroyed. Even those who reached the caves were not safe. Darkness gripped the earth and tremendous quakes convulsed the planet. Mountains were thrown up to the clouds and continents were sucked beneath the seas as the stricken Earth rolled and tilted. Hurricane winds lashed the planets wretched surface and tidal waves swept across vast stretched of land. Fearful explosions shook the world as molten lava spewed out from the broken crust, a terrible heat hung over the planet and in places even the sea boiled.
Some, miraculously, lived through this horrible turmoil. After many long days of darkness the mantle of gloom was lifted from the earth and the survivors slowly began rebuilding their lives. A catastrophe of such scale would account for the sinking of a huge continents such as Atlantis-- But did such an event ever take place?
If it did, we might expect to find evidence of it in the myths, legends and folklore of the people who survived. It is a remarkable fact that almost all races have a tradition, handed down through countless generations, of a catastrophe that nearly ended the world. Not only are these legends similar in essence, they are also sometimes similar in detail, to such an extent that terrifying even of global proportions.
The Babylonian Epic OF Gilgamesh, which is around 4025 Years old and records traditions of an even earlier age, tells, of a dark cloud that rushed at the earth, leaving the land shriveled by the heat of the flames: Desolation ...stretched to heaven; all that was bright was turned into darkness ...nor could a brother distinguish his brother...six days...The hurricane, deluge, the tempest continued sweeping the land...and all the human life back to its clay was returned.
From an ancient Hindu legend comes an account of the appearance in the sky of “A being shaped like a boar, white and exceedingly small, this being, in the space of an hour, grew to the size of an elephant of the largest size and remained in the air. After sometime the boar suddenly uttered a sound like the loudest thunder and the echo reverberated and shook all the quarters of the universe. This object then became a dreadful spectacle and descended from the region of the sky and plunged head foremost into the water. The whole body of water convulsed by the motion, and began to rise in waves, while for his omen and cry for mercy.
Hesiod, a Greek poet of the 8th century BC writes of a legend involving the earth and the heavens. The story centers around a fiery, serpent like creature, an aerial monster mightier then men and gods alike, that wreaks terrible havoc upon the earth harshly and that he thundered, and heavily and terribly the earth reechoed around and the broad heaven above and the sea and streams of ocean and the abyss of earth. But beneath immortal feet cast Olympus trembled, as the kind up rose and earth groaned beneath, and the heat from both caught the dark colored sea, both of the thunder and the lightning and fire from the monster the heat arising from the thunderstorm, winds and burning lightning. And all earth and heaven and sea were boiling...
From Iceland we have further evidence of a world wide catastrophe in the poetic edda, a collection of ancient Scandinavian legends poems of unknown antiquity:
"Mountains dash together,
Heroes go the way to hel
And heavens are rent in twain...
The sun grows dark,
The earth sinks into the sea,
The bright stars from heavens vanish;
Fire rages,
Heat Blazes
And high flames play
Giants heaven itself"
The legends of the Cashinaua, the aborigines of western Brazil tell of the time when the lightning flashed and the thunders roared terribly and all were afraid. Then the heaven burst and the fragments fell down and killed everybody. Heaven and Earth changed places. Nothing that had life was left upon this planet.
In North America, the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma have a tradition about the time when, "The earth was plunged in darkness for a long time, A bright light eventually appeared in the north but instead it was mountain high waves rapidly coming nearer".
The Samoan aborigines of the South Pacific have a legend that says " Then arose smell...the smell became smoke, which again became clouds...The sea too arose, and in a stupendous catastrophe of nature the land sank into the sea...The new earth arose out of the womb of the last earth"
The Bible too, contains numerous passages that refer to terrible catastrophe. Psalms 18:7-15 is one example “Then the earth shook and trembled and the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken...The lord also thundered in the heavens and the highest gave his voice; hail stones and coals of fire....Then the channels of water were seen and the foundations of the world were discovered..."
These are but a few of the vast number of legends dealing with great cosmic events records of Egypt, India, China the mythology of Greece and Rome, The legends of the Mayas and the Aztecs, the Biblical accounts and those of Norway, Finland, Persia and Babylon, all tell the same story, so, too do the people of widely separated countries such as the Celts of Britain and the Maoris of the New Zealand.
What on earth, or in heaven, could have caused such seemingly world wide catastrophe? The accounts quoted above are taken from two masterly works on the subject, both of which offer the same explanation. One is Ignatius Donnelly's Ragnarok : The Age Of Fire and Gravel, published in 1883, whose title is drawn from the legends of Ragnarok contained in the Scandinavian poetic Edda. The other is worlds in Collision, which appeared in the 1950 and is the most famous of several books by Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russo Israeli physicist whose theories have made him as controversial character as Donnelly before him. Both men suggest that a comet which came into close apx with the earth caused the terrible events remembered by the ancient peoples of the world. They agree on many points of evidence such as the myths and legends and the sinking of Atlantis features in both works. But they take different stands in their search for scientific proof of their theories.
Donnelly's Theory :
Donnelly devotes a large part of his book to a discussion of the drift of till...a cast deposit of sand gravel and clay that lies above the stratified rocks of the earth’s surface. The origin of the till puzzled many geologists, and Donnelly's explanation was that it had rained down from the heavens as the earth passed through a comet’s trail. He urged that the comets trail would have been moving at close to the speed of light when the earth passed through it. So only half the planet would have been covered by the till, and he sought to produce evidence to confirm his theory.
Immanuel Velikovsky :
Velikovsky, though agreeing that a close earth comet encounter lay behind the ancient catastrophe legends, has no use for the till theory - which was a foundation stone of Donnelly's treatise - and he says : "Donnelly...Tried in his book Ragnarok to explain the presence of till and gravel on the rock substratum in America and Europe by hypothesizing an encounter with a comet, which rained till on the terrestrial hemisphere facing it at the moment...His assumption that there is till only in one half of the earth as arbitrary and wrong."
Neither Donnelly nor Velikovsky was the first to argue that a comet had caused havoc on this planet. The English scientist William Whiston, who succeeded Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge, wrote a book in 1696. New Theory Of The Earth, which attempted a belief, at the time of Aristotle in the 4th century BC that a comet had joined the solar system as a planet. But Velikovsky has pieced together a far more startling picture of cosmic activity. It began, he believes, when a planetary collision caused Jupiter to eject a comet, which went into an eccentric orbit, this brought it close to the earth in about 1500 BC causing global catastrophes the comet returned 52 years later and did further damage to the earth, Its approach even caused the planet to stop and then rotate in the opposite earths orbit. The hydrocarbon gases of the comets tail showered down on the earth in a rain of gravel and fire that formed the petroleum deposits we now use to power our automobiles and airplanes.
The comet, having left much of its tail behind, then had a close encounter with Mars causing that planet to loose its orbit and, in turn to come dangerously close to the earth in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Meanwhile the comet joined the solar system as a planet-The one we now call Venus.
When this theory was first published in 1950 it caused a sensation. Since then Velikovsky has become something of a cult figure, particularly among the young people, though the scientific community has largely dismissed his ideas as nonsense.
L.Sprague de Camp probably expresses the opinion of most orthodox scientists and scholars in his succinct and damning appraisal of Velikovsky's mad theory. He writes in Lost Continents, “Despite the impressive build up...Velikovsky neither establishes a case nor accounts for the success of the Copernicus-Newton-Einstien picture of the cosmos which undertook to supersede. Some of his mythological references are incorrect the rest merely demonstrate once again that the corpus of recorded myth is so cast that you can find mythological allusions to back up any cosmological speculations you please. The Babylonians left clear records of observations of Venus 5000 years ago; behaving just as it does now...moreover the theory is ridiculous from the point of view of physics and mechanics. Comets are not planets and do not evolve into planets; instead they are loose aggregations of meteors with total masses less than a millionth that of the earth. Such a mass --about that of an ordinary mountain -- could perhaps devastate several countries or a small state if struck, but could not appreciably affect the earths orbit, rotation, inclination or other components of movement ...and the gas of which the comets tail is composed is so attenuated that if the tail of a good sized comet were compressed to the density of iron. I could put the whole thing in my briefcase!
So that disposes of Velikovsky --or does it? Seven years after his book was published, man made his first tentative steps into space. Since then earthlings have landed on the moon, and space vehicles have probed our nearest planetary neighbors. So far, these explorations appear to have confirmed some of Velikovsky's predictions about our planetary system. He had stated that, because Venus is a newcomer to the system it is still giving off heat this was thought to be nonsense at that time, and the temperature of Venus was around 65 F. Radio astronomy and the arrival of space vehicles in the vicinity of the planet have proved Velikovsky right. Mariner II, when it passed Venus in December 1962, detected a temperature of over 800 F and subsequent investigations have revealed a temperature of apx 990 F
the results of Mariner probe the first to provide reliable information about the planet showed that just as Velikovsky had maintained Venus is enclosed in an envelope of hydro carbon gases and dust it was also revealed that Venus rotated retrograde, a sign that either it had been disturbed or it had evolved in a different way from other planets. A Russian probe that soft landed on the planet in October 1975 was able to relay information for 53 minutes before the extremely high pressure of the atmosphere caused it to stop transmitting. But it was enough for the Russian scientists to declare that Venus is a young planet and is still alive.
Interviewed about these results by British newspaper commented that they confirmed his theory. His book contained many other predictions about Mars, Jupiter, and the Earth along with moon and about 30 of them have since been proved right he claimed if subsequent probes confirm other details of his theory, it would not be the first time that science has had to change its thinking about the history of the earth and its partners in the solar system.
The destruction Of Atlantis :
Velikovsky weaves the destruction of Atlantis in his theory by suggesting that the continent sank as a result of the first approach of the Venus comet, though in order to make this idea fit his scheme he has to alter Plato's dating of the Atlantis catastrophe. There is one zero too many in Plato’s date says Velikovsky. Atlantis sank not 9000 years before Solons trip to Egypt but 900 years Solon in about 1500 BC.
This idea that a comet destroyed Atlantis was not a new one. It had previously been put forward in 1785 by the Italian scholar Gian Rinaldo Carli although he dated the catastrophe at 4000 BC and was taken up again in the 1920s by a German writer called Karl Eorge Zschaetzch whose main aim was to prove the racial superiority of the Aryans by providing them with a pedigree that went all the way back to Atlantis.
Another theory to account for the Atlantis destruction came from Hanns Horbiger, an Austrian inventor and engineer Horbiger maintained that the universe is filled with cosmic building stuff consisting of hot metallic stars and cosmic ice, The collision between a hot star and a block of cosmic ice generates a tremendous explosion, throwing pieces of star toward the sun causing another explosion which covers the Milky Way to consist of Ice particles and maintained that Venus to Horbigers Theory , The Earth had possessed several moons before the present one, each of these moons caused violent earthquakes and floods on the earth at the time of its capture by our planet and finally shattered showering its fragments onto the earths surface these events gave rise to the catastrophe myths and it was the capture of our present moon that caused both Atlantis and Lemuria to sink, Horbiger predicted that the eventual breakup and fall of our present moon would probably wipe out life on earth.
Horbiger theory published in 1913 attracted millions of followers and made him as much of a cult figure as Velikovsky is today. But whereas space exploration and our increased knowledge of the universe have disproved most of Horbiger assertions many of Velikovsky ideas are still living up to the expectations of his followers who foresee them becoming the accepted scientific thinking of a future era. Unless and until that day comes however we need to examine the catastrophe legends and the theories of the lost continents in the light of current scientific belief. The picture then becomes far less promising.
The Orthodox Approach :
Orthodox scientists dismiss the idea of a global catastrophe of the kind described by Velikovsky and others. How then do they explain the legends? The answer is that, universal though the disaster legends may seem they are descriptions of separate events that occurred at different time and were fairly localized. They concern tremendous earthquakes, great volcanic eruptions, massive flooding of river valleys and inundation of areas below sea level. These events spanning many centuries and not linked in anyway gave rise to the legends which were doubtless to the next
Take Noah's flood for e.g. According to the Bible this great deluge drowned every living thing on earth, Apart from the few survivors in the ark. It is now considered likely that this story was based on a real flood that submerged something like 40,000 square miles of the Euphrates valley some time between 5400 and 420 Bc China and the lowlands of Bengal have seen similar great floods and these too could have giver rise to deluge legends. Many geologists believe that the Mediterranean was once fertile valley below sea level, which was flooded long ago by the Atlantic in one terrible rush. The flooding of the former Zuider Zee in the Netherlands is a more recent example of this kind of catastrophe. A storm in 1282 broke the natural dykes that protected this area of sub sea level land, and let in the North Sea, which submerged it in a single day
The only other possibility would seem to be that the earths crust is capable of opening up and swallowing areas of land small islands have been submerged in living memory and others have suddenly appeared, Could the same forces have been responsible for wiping Atlantis from the face of our planet? To answer this question we need to look at the present opinion on the way the world has developed, and at the processes by which continents take shape.
According to current geological theory, the earth is encased in a crust of rock that becomes hotter and hotter as we go down towards the center of the planet. Some 50 to 1000 miles beneath the surface the rock has become white hot. From that point down the earth consists of a hot, glass like substance called magma which surrounds the nickel and iron core of the earth, a sphere about 40000 miles in diameter. The cool exterior rocks consist in general of two types Dense, Heavy , Magnesium bearing rocks called Sima, which form most of the ocean floors and light aluminum bearing rocks called sial, which form most of the land areas. Geologists see the continents as beds of Sial Floating on a crust of Sima. The continental blocks descend deeply into the sima, showing a comparatively small amount above the surface, just as icebergs do in water.
Over a century ago, it became apparent to some geologists that the face of our globe has not always been as it now appears. The evidence for this assumption was the same that led many biologists of the time to consider the possibility of a lost continent namely the existence of fossils of similar fauna and flora on continent thousands of miles apart.
Geologists who accepted fossil evidence of ancient land connections between the continents put forward the idea of a former gigantic land mass, which they called Gondwanaland, comprising present day South America, Africa, India Australia and Antarctica. A second landmass consisting of North America and Europe was also suggested and given the name Laurasia. However, the proponents of this theory were unable to offer any convincing evidence as to how these two super continents might have broken up, and their idea attracted little support among fellow scientists.
Nevertheless, in the early years of the 20 the century, a number of scientists began thinking along similar lines, and in 1915 the German astronomer, Geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener published the modern theory of continental drift Wegener argued that if the continents float like icebergs on the Sima crust, why should they not also drift like icebergs across the face of the earth? He suggested that all the modern continents drifted apart, and the drift is continuing; millions of years from now, the face of our planet will look very different from the way it does today.
Wegeners theory has rocked the geological establishment and its revolutionary effect on the geological sciences has been compared to the effect of Darwings theory of evolution on biological sciences a century ago. But for several decades after its publication the majority of scientists continued to reject the idea of continental drift, mainly because they it hard to envisage forces strong enough to move the continents around , After all even the smallest continent, Australia, weighs around 500 million million million kilograms in due course however, a plausible explanation, involving convection currents driven by radioactive heat from within the earth, was put forward to account for the continental movements and a mass of impressive evidence began piling up in support of Wegeners theory so that most scientists now accept the reality of continental drift.
In the late 1960s computer were used to show how the continental jigsaw pieces might fit together to form the original gigantic landmass. This was not an easy task, Because the shape of the continents has altered over the ages, Some minor parts of the jigsaw are missing some have been added and the true edges of the continents generally lie far below the sea level and have not yet been plotted in detail. Nevertheless, the computer pictures showed an extremely good fit between South America and the western coast of Africa and between Antarctica, Australia and India. The fit of these last three continents against south and eastern Africa was less satisfactory and some adjustment was needed to improve the fit across the North Atlantic linking Britain and the rest of the Europe with N America.
In their book continental drift, leading British geophysicist DP Tarling and his technical journalist wife MO Tarling write " By studying the size and composition of particles in old sedimentary rocks it is possible to work out the direction and type of land from which they were derived . In Britain we find that the source of many Caledonian Mountain sediments was a very extensive landmass which must have lain to the north and west where there is now the deep Atlantic Oceanic N America, the sources of many Appalachian rocks lay to the south and east. To explain this before the acceptance of continental drift geologists supposed that a continent Atlantis must have occupied the present position of the Atlantic. This continent was thought to have sunked beneath the Atlantic waves. But there can be no question of the existence of a sunken continent in the Atlantic. By reconstruction the jigsaw we not only fit together the Caledonian Mountain Chain, but also explain the sources of the sediments which formed it.
Most scientists agree that as we push the continents back to their original places we effectively squeeze Atlantis off the map so could Atlantis have been North America, which having drifted away was thought to have been submerged in the Atlantic? No. The continents are moving apart at the rate of between one and sic inches a year, hardly enough tot give rise Plato’s account of the submergence of Atlantis in a day and a night, what is more, the original landmass is thought to have broken up before the Mesozoic Era some 200 millions years ago, and the continents probably reached apx their present positions by the beginning of the Cenozoic Era around 70 Millions years ago, Long before man appeared on the face of the earth,
Could Atlantis been in Pacific, where Mu was said to have sunk or in the Indian Ocean, where the early Lemuria enthusiasts places yet another lost continent? Out present knowledge of the earth seems to rule out hese possibilities, too. Bearing in mind the geologist’s belief that the ocean floors are mostly formed of Sima and the landmass of Sial, a sunken continent should be easy to detect because its rocks would be different from surrounding rocks in the deep ocean. However geological investigation has so far revealed that the greatest areas of deep sima are in the central pacific the southern Indian Ocean and the Arctic Ocean making these the least likely sites on earth for a vanished continent.
Not surprisingly, believers in Atlantis hotly contest the findings of modern science that seek to dismiss the existence of the lost continent. In considering the theory of continental drift they point to gaps and seeming misfits in the linking of continents across the Atlantis that might still leave room for Atlantis. Nor are they impressed by the failure of oceanographer to find evidence of a sunken civilization beneath the Atlantic. In his book The Mystery Of Atlantis , Charles Berlitz points out that even the underwater cities of the Mediterranean have been discovered only comparatively recently and in relatively shallow water. How much more difficult, then to discover the ruins of Atlantis beneath the far larger Atlantic, where they would be smothered by sedimentation and mud accumulated over thousands of years ago.
If a once derided theory such as continental drift can eventually earn the backing of the respectable scientific community the Atlantis’s argue, might not other theories, now regarded as nonsensical, one day gain the same acceptance ? Perhaps man existed long before the scientist’s estimates. Perhaps there was some extraordinary global catastrophe of a nature quite outside the bounds of cautions scientific conjecture, Perhaps Atlantis did exists after all!

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