Traditions of Atlantis in History and Scripture

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The Global Genesis Flood

Atlantis in History, Tradition, and Scripture

Astrophysics' Black Box: The New Shamanism:

Reconsidering Book of Mormon Geography

Problems with Radiometric and Genetic Dating

Chronology of the World

The Myth of Scientific Objectivity

The Religion of Science

Lost in Translation

David Stewart, Jr.

Book recommendation: Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995. All bracketed references [ ] come from this work.

Brief Summary

Flem-Ath’s Atlantis in Antarctica theory appears to satisfy Plato’s criteria better than any of the other models that have been proposed. With allowance for radiometric dating error, it also appears to closely fit scriptural accounts of the antediluvian land that arose in the midst of the sea but is not mentioned after the flood. However, the theory is still far from proven. It is possible for a theory to fit the available data points and still not be correct, although Lesser Antarctica’s unique combination of distinctive data points which closely fit Plato’s description is certainly intriguing. It is clear that a final resolution of the question of Atlantis is still many years away. Consideration of the possibility of ruins of Atlantis in the Ellsworth Land area may be warranted when more detailed exploration of the subglacial features of Lesser Antarctica occurs.

Introduction

Few legends have inspired as much imagination or interest over the past three thousand years as the story of the island continent of Atlantis and its lost civilization which perished in a cataclysmic flood. Support for the Atlantis story does not come from Plato’s Timaeus and Critias alone. As Rand Flem-Ath has documented, ancient literature from Japan, India, Iran, and Sumerian tablets refer to an island paradise with cities and mountains that was destroyed by being covered with a large sheet of ice. A medieval book by priest Athanaseus Kirchner purports to include a copy of an Egyptian map of Atlantis.

Origin of the Atlantis Story

The Greek statesman Solon (circa 638-558 BC) had visited Sais, Egypt, where the priest of Neith translated an account of Atlantis from hieroglyphs on the Temple of Neith. The origin of the Atlantis story must therefore be sought not in classical Greece, but at the very dawn of Egyptian history. Atlantis had already been lost beneath the waves at the time the hieroglyphs were inscribed. The Egyptian priests stated that the event occurred in remote antiquity and that they knew little about it themselves other than what was recorded at Neith.

Few remains have been found at Sais, yet this city is extensively referred to in early Egyptian sources. Sais was a very ancient city founded by the first Pharaoh of Egypt, called Aha in the Egyptian records and Menes by the historian Manetho. The construction of the Temple of Neith is also attributed to Pharaoh Aha. These hieroglyphs on the Temple of Neith would have been inscribed in the very earliest period of Egyptian history, under the first pharaoh or his immediate successor.

Pharaoh Aha was the daughter of Egyptus and grandson of Ham, one of Noah’s three sons aboard the ark (Abraham 1:23,25). Pharaoh Aha would have heard eyewitness stories of the antediluvian world from his grandfather Ham, and would have been in a unique position to have them recorded.

Recovered from Oblivion

The dating to the first epoch of Egyptian history, the location of the hieroglyphs on a temple built by the grandson of one of the survivors of the great deluge, the small world population in the years and decades following the great deluge, and the cataclysmic description of massive floods and earthquakes within the story itself all demonstrate that the story of Atlantis could only have referred to an antediluvian event.

The Egyptians noted that the record of Atlantis had been recovered from “oblivion,” reflecting catastrophe. The antediluvian dating of the Atlantis story is further suggested by the account of the Egyptians to Solon that the first Athenian society – or, the first inhabitants of Greece – had been destroyed at the same time as the civilization of Atlantis. While incomplete, this statement is consistent with the supposition that a worldwide deluge destroyed Atlantis at the same time that the rest of the world was submerged. The other continents were repopulated following the flood by the descendants of Noah, while Atlantis disappeared beneath the flood waters and became uninhabitable. In this sense, the continent of Atlantis was more “lost” than the rest of the world, which was resettled. The story of the lost glory of Atlantis therefore undoubtedly inspired great interest in the post-diluvian world.

Atlantis in Scripture?

The Book of Moses records an event in Enoch’s time, 600-1000 years before the great flood, in which a land arose out of the water that was located “afar off” from Enoch and his people:

There also came up a land out of the depth of the sea, and so great was the fear of the enemies of the people of God, that they fled and stood afar off and went upon the land which came up out of the depth of the sea. (Moses 7:14)

David Stewart, Sr. has pointed out that the land described in this scriptural event appears to correspond to legends of Atlantis. The passage corroborates the conclusion we have already arrived at from other sources that the Atlantean civilization was antediluvian. We hear no more of it in scripture after the great deluge.

Separating Truth from Error

This background on the origin of the Atlantis story provides a helpful guide for separating the original facts of the Egyptian record from Plato’s embellishment. Plato was recounting what he knew from earlier sources, based on the manuscript of Solon, one of the wise men of ancient Greece. There is no evidence that the Greeks had any contact whatever with the Atlanteans: all of Plato’s core information came directly from Egyptian sources. Had there been any actual contact between the Athenians and the Atlanteans, there would have been no need for Solon to travel to Egypt to learn the Atlantis story about his own ancestors!

Plato would have been able to provide details from the original record describing the general geography of Atlantis – its size, characteristics, city details, and so forth. As there was no contact between Atlanteans and the Athenians, or any other post-diluvian civilization, as the record of Atlantis was remarkably “recovered from oblivion.” Recognizing that the Atlantis story was antediluvian and that there was no Atlanto-Athenian contact, we can conclude that Atlantis was not proximate, nor did Plato nor the Egyptians know how to get there beyond vague generalizations. However, the ancient record could have provided maps depicting the internal geography of Atlantis. In fact, two such ancient maps have been identified which appear to depict the ancient geography with relative precision.

Plato describes it as beyond the “Pillars of Heracles,” which specifically represented the Strait of Gibraltar’s opening into the Atlantic, but more generally to describe the “ends of the earth.” This is demonstrated by the legend that the titan Atlas held up the earth at the Pillars of Heracles. Atlantis’ description of lying “beyond the Pillars of Heracles” tells us only that it was far distant in the great world ocean that lay beyond the Mediterranean. The “Atlantic” ocean was understood as referring to the great world ocean that lay beyond the gates of the Mediterranean: only in the age of exploration was this term restricted to the ocean between the Americas and Europe.

The Atlantean War

Plato’s association of the people the Atlanteans fought with specifically with the Athenians is dubious, in view of the lack of any Greek memory of the Atlanteans at all, and the description of the event as being followed by a deluge in which all perished except for a few on the highest mountaintops. It is likely that the Atlanto-Athenian war was Plato’s literary invention to popularize the legend with his audience, and in attempting to bolster his nation’s claims to the glory of lost antiquity.

Yet it is likely that Plato can be credited here with a grain of truth. The Egyptian story and Enoch’s record both agree that the land in the sea existed in a time of war and conflict. Before the great deluge, “the earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11). It is likely that wars occurred between the Atlanteans and dwellers of the antediluvian Pangaea.

The Atlanteans perished in the floods, while Noah’s sons survived the great deluge and repopulated the earth. The Greeks were descendants of Javan, son of Japheth and grandson of Noah (see Origin of Nations). Plato is likely correct that a war was fought between the Atlanteans and the antediluvian ancestors of the Greeks (and of all remaining humanity, through Noah’s family). However, there were no Athenians at that time.

The Sumerian Ziudsudu tablet when correctly translated states that Noah was king before the flood. It is possible – even likely – that Noah himself may have been directly involved in the conflict with the Atlanteans. This would explain the detailed knowledge of Atlantis apparently possessed by his great-grandson Pharaoh Aha, and why memory of this event was transmitted to his children and is preserved in Sumerian, Egyptian, Hindi, Iranian, and Japanese records.

Further convergence is provided in the Zend-Avesta, Iran’s oldest sage:

Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant. The meeting is said to have taken place in the Airyana Vaejo, or Paradise of the Iranians. [67]

While it is unclear how much of this Iranian saga is correctly translated, here again we have a king (Noah) warned to gather animal and plant seeds to protect life from the impending destruction of flood and winter.

Clues to Atlantis

Rose and Rand Flem-Ath observe that Plato’s Timaeus and Critias dialogues document sixteen clues to Atlantis provided by the Egyptian priest [When the Sky Fell, pp.93-94]:

9560 BC
Change in the path of the sun
Worldwide earthquakes of extraordinary violence
Overwhelming worldwide floods
Island
Continent (larger than Libya and Asia) [i.e. North African and Asia Minor]: approximately the size of the continental United States
High above sea level
Numerous high mountains
Impressive cliffs rising sharply from the ocean
Other islands
Abundant mineral resources
Beyond the Pillars of Heracles (the known world or “ends of the earth”)
In a distant point in the “Atlantic” ocean
In the “real ocean”
The Mediterranean Sea is only a bay of the real ocean
The true continent completely surrounds the real ocean

Atlantean Culture

According to Plato, the Atlanteans constructed elaborate canals to irrigate immense areas for cultivation. [9] The architecture included repetitive circular themes – a circular master-planned capital with successive rings of land and water, circular archways, etc. The Atlanteans are described as being great mariners who were relatively advanced. There were ten regions ruled by ten princes. More detailed descriptions of Atlantean culture are found in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias.

Chronology and Dating

Skepticism is warranted about Plato’s date of 9560 BC. The Flem-Aths note an inconsistency in Plato’s dates between Timaeus and Critias. Plato’s date for Atlantis requires that we believe that after its destruction, an accurate memory of the date was kept for a period of nearly nine thousand years. There is no evidence of human literacy (nor, for that matter, are there written records of historic human habitation) before the fourth millennium B.C. Time is usually of the first elements to be confounded as history becomes legend and then myth. The Flem-Aths base much of their analysis on these dates and geological events presumed to occur in this period; however, geological and nuclear dating are subject to major potential confounding factors and are far from exact sciences. These dating methods rely on numerous assumptions which often fail real-world conditions, as noted in the nuclear dating article on this site. Flem-Ath uncritically accepts geologist’s dates of 9,600-10,000 BC, while I believe that there is evidence that these dates need to be reexamined. My analysis of problems with radiometric dating is found here.

If we consider the possibility that the land that rose up out of the sea in Enoch’s day (Moses 7:14) may have been Atlantis, scriptural chronology would suggest human habitation of this land between approximately 2800 BC and the flood in 2200 BC. The Pharaoh Aha’s Temple of Neith would have dated to approximately 2000 BC. This is old enough that in Solon and Plato’s time, its memory would have been a remote antiquity passed down from the survivors of the great deluge.

Evaluating Other Theories

Plato’s criteria rule out every location that has been proposed except for one. Proposed Mediterranean locations fail numerous points of Plato’s description of Atlantis:

- Beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the real ocean of which the Mediterranean is just a bay

- Larger than North Africa and Asia Minor combined

- High above sea level with numerous high cliffs rising sharply out of the ocean

- Abundant mineral resources.

Mediterranean theories contradict Plato’s account on almost all major points and have little to recommend them. They arise from a priori opinions that no travel could have occurred beyond the limits of the Mediterranean, and from placing too much emphasis on Plato’s audience-pleasing device of the Atlanto-Athenian war that is specifically stated to be antediluvian, predating apocalyptic catastrophes upon both nations, thus explaining his readers’ complete amnesia of the topic. As the Flem-Aths point out, such speculations of a Mediterranean location for Atlantis do not explain Plato, but rather explain him away. While I know of no evidence of antediluvian Greek civilization, there could indeed have been a war between the Atlanteans and the ancestors of the Athenians (and, for that matter, of all people who survived the flood through Noah).

Claims that Atlantis is Ireland, or North America, or in the center of the Atlantic Ocean, similarly suffer from incompatible inconsistencies. Eastern North America has little island geography and no high cliffs rising from the ocean, and little if any evidence has been identified of a maritime civilization in the Americas. Nor do the Americas seem to be adequately circumscribed by the world’s oceans, with their nearly endless coastline and the frozen arctic to the north. Ireland is far too small and lacks precipitous cliffs and mineral resources.

Whereas remains of sunken cities have been identified in both the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and there are a variety of evidences of ancient catastrophe in locations like Thera, none of these civilizations can be associated with Atlantis.

What of the Atlantic itself? Seismology has identified no evidence of the massive, continental-size irregularities in the Atlantic that would come close to fitting Plato’s description.

Where is Atlantis? From Plato’s description, it is not a needle in a haystack! An island continent as large as North America is not easily lost!

As expounded by the Flem-Aths, only one location fits Plato’s description of Atlantis. That location is in what we now call Antarctica. Further clues provide additional corroboration and help to narrow the location of Atlantis’ capital city more precisely.

Converging Legends

Flem-Ath notes that converging Hindi, Iranian, and other sagas of a lost antediluvian land share many polar features. Legends tell of it being a bright, white land near the “naval of the earth.” Researchers like Boston University Founder Dr. William Fairfield Warren recognized “how often the story of a falling sky and a great flood was to be found intertwined with accounts of a lost island paradise. He also realized that the lost land had many polar features.” [67] This led several twentieth-century scholars to look for Atlantis in the Arctic, although of course there is no Arctic land mass that would fit Plato’s description of Atlantis.

The legendary Aztec homeland of Aztlan, which existed prior to a deluge survived only by a man and his wife, is described as “a bright land of shining light and whiteness which contained seven cities surrounding a sacred mountain” [65]. – following a deluge. Flem-Ath suggests that the shining light may have represented the “white nights” or southern lights of Lesser Antarctica before it moved into the Arctic circle.

Moses 7:14-15 implies that this land was peopled, at least in part, by antediluvian giants. Okanagan legends tell of an “an island far off in the middle of the ocean” that it was peopled by a race of giants whose civilization ended in cataclysmal flooding following a violent war. [22]

Atlantis in Antarctica

Rand and Rose Flem-Ath’s argument that Atlantis is in Antarctica is detailed in their book, When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995). A short overview is provided in Rand Flem-Ath’s online articles here:

Atlantis and the Earth's Shifting Crust

http://www.flem-ath.com/del1.htm

http://www.flem-ath.com/aa1.htm

The idea of Atlantis in Antarctica sounds odd, as Antarctica is not currently habitable. Yet, neither is Atlantis, and millennia of interest have not resulted in its location. Rand Flem-Ath draws upon Charles Hapgood’s crustal displacement theory to demonstrate that the poles were once in a slightly different location, and that the region of Lesser Antarctica would have once been in a temperate zone. Plato transmitted that Atlantis was destroyed in a great deluge when there was a change in the path of the sun, or more precisely, crustal displacement in the earth and migration of the poles.

Charles Hapgood demonstrated that an early polar shift which he labels as 55,000-50,000 B.P. would have caused Lesser Antarctica to have become habitable, and likely for land to “rise out of the depths of the sea” as previously submerged subglacial plains to rise with the melting of the ice cap. The most recent major displacement of the South Pole was oriented directly towards lesser Antarctica (the arrow in the image below labeled (17,000-12,000 B.P.). I have addressed problems with radiometric dating here. The reader can appreciate that this polar displacement would have caused Lesser Antarctica to have transitioned from a temperate and even subtropical climate to one of frigid cold and ice, displacing the coastal plains beneath the sea and fulfilling the cataclysmic requirements of the Atlantis story.

Image from Hapgood, Charles. The Path of the Pole. Adventures Unlimited: Kempton, IL. 1958, 1970, 1999. p. 107.

Plato described the local geography of Atlantis:

“From it there was passage for the sea-farers of those times to reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For these regions that lie within the strait we were talking about seem to be but a bay having a narrow entrance; but the other ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it may with fullest truth and fitness be named a continent." Plato

Globe with south at the top:

An Atlantean view of the world. South was up on ancient maps: Antarctica was literally the “island at the top of the world.” (Note also the convenient hole in Antarctica that comes with every globe for the benefit of “hollow earth” proponents. Err—maybe not.)

According to Plato, Atlantis was “a continent” surrounded by ocean and distinct from the world’s other land masses. Atlantis was completely surrounded by the world’s oceans. All of the rest of the world’s lands are referred to by Plato as the “whole opposite continent,” i.e. ancient Pangaea. Lesser Antarctica is the size of Western Europe. Greater Antarctica is the size of the continental United States.

Enoch’s account noted that individuals stood “afar off” and went to this land that came out of the sea. It was remote and was distinctly divided from the antediluvian Pangaea.

Antipodes and Polar Shift

The longstanding scientific concept of “antipodes” is that for any given location on the globe, the region directly opposite this (if we were to draw an imaginary line through the center of the earth) is expected to have a similar climate and temperature, taking local elevation and water bodies into account. We would also expect to find similar types of wildlife and vegetation (different species, perhaps, but creatures suited to the similar clime).

The antipode of Lesser Antarctica – where Flem-Ath suggests Atlantis was located – is in Northern Siberia, in and around the New Siberian Islands:

Today, this region is desolate. What of the past?

Ancient remains of numerous creatures that live only in temperate and even sub-tropical climes that have been found in northern Siberia, Alaska, and other areas that are currently very cold. Flem-Ath records:

The New Siberian Islands, in the Arctic Ocean [north of the Arctic Circle], gave up the desolate graves of thousands of large animals. This find created confusion among scientists. Howe could these huge creatures, requiring vast amounts of vegetation to fuel their daily existence, thrive in such large herds on barren dunes of ice? And what incredible force had destroyed them? [35]

Charles Hapgood observed of finds on the New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Circle:

There the remains of mammoths and other animals are most numerous of all. There Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found the remains of a sabertooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been ninety feet tall when it was standing. [82]

With finds on the New Siberian Islands of the remains of vast numbers of saiga antelope [82], mammoths, and other large animals requiring temperate climes, the antipode principle demands that the climate in Lesser Antarctica must once have been habitable to a similar diversity of temperate species – and humans!

Nor have such finds been confined to Siberia and the New Siberian Islands. Similar finds from Arctic regions corroborate that the climate in these regions was once much warmer than it is now. In 1993, Norwegian scholars found ancient polar bear bones and the remains of wolves, field mice, and tree pollen 250 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in Arctic Norway. [77-78] Noting that wolf require large prey like reindeer to survive, and that reindeer subsist by grazing upon bare ground, they recognized that the area could not have been under an icecap as ice age theory predicted. [78]

In Alaska – the antipode to which lies just east of Lesser Antarctica – similarly striking finds have contradicted ice age theory. Flem-Ath quotes Dr. R. Dale Guthrie of the Institute of Arctic Biology:

When learning of this exotic mixture of hyenas, mammoths, sabertooth cats, camels, horses, rhinos, asses, deer with gigantic antlers, lions, ferrets, saiga and other Pleistocene species, one cannot help wondering about the world in which they lived. This great diversity of species, so different from that encountered today, raises the most obvious question: is it not likely that the rest of the environment was also different? [78-79]

The fact that the poles were not always in their current positions can be seen from ancient animal and plant life found in regions far outside the current ranges of comparable modern species. As Peter Bros has documented (see “The Case for the Flood” in Forbidden History), the so-called “ice age” is merely an invention of agnostic scholars to provide an alternative, counter-scriptural explanation for the vast evidence of a worldwide flood. Yet even an assumed frigid episode in earth history cannot account for vast numbers of temperate and subtropical animal and plant remains found in sub-arctic regions. Only a shift of polar alignment can account for these find, as Charles Hapgood documented at length in The Path of the Poles.

Warm Ages in Antarctica

In his book The Path of the Pole, professor Charles Hapgood produces fascinating evidence for historical shifts in polar alignment due to displacement of the earth’s crust. The forward to Hapgood’s book is written by Albert Einstein, who spoke favorably of Hapgood’s work. In the process of documenting polar shift, Hapgood introduces evidence of “longs period of temperate climate in Antarctica.”[1] He notes evidence including natural structures requiring ice-free geology to form (p. 61), coal beds discovered by Sir Earnest Shackleton within 200 miles of the South Pole (p.62) [coal is a fossil fuel formed from plant carbons], abundant fossil finds discovered by the Byrd expedition in 1935 on the sides of Mount Weaver of the Queen Maud range of Antarctica, and evidence of limestone with ancient archaeocyathidae (a subtropical reef-building marine creature) across most of Antarctica, tropical flora found by Soviet scientists in Graham land, and more. He quotes Priestly: “There can be no doubt from what this expedition and other expeditions have found that several times at least during past ages the Antarctic has possessed a climate much more genial than that of England at the present day.”

Flem-Ath also documents the discovery of an ancient forest near the South Pole:

In 1976, the encyclopedias claimed confidently and absolutely that Antarctica had 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 a closed question. In 1990 I was rewarded when two geologists 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 encyclopedias of 1976 were wrong by a much as fifty-eight million years! The absolute ancient age of the Antarctic ice cap wasn’t so absolute afterall.

Even the two million year figure will certainly prove to be far too early due to issues of dating error discussed here. Yet Flem-Ath documents that the Antarctic ice cap is far more recent than scholars have claimed. Until several thousand years ago, Lesser Antarctica was in a temperate zone. See Flem-Ath’s map of polar shift at http://www.flem-ath.com/del12.htm

Little exploration has been made of Lesser Antarctica. Yet the weight of evidence of past warm ages uncovered so far is remarkable.

Maps of Atlantis

In 1665, the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus; which included a reproduction of an ancient Egyptian map of Atlantis. This was before Antarctica had been discovered by Westerners. The map has frequently been misinterpreted by contemporary scholars because of their inability to escape the modern assumption that north must be at the top of the map. On ancient maps, south was up and north was down. Taking this into consideration, Flem-Ath believes that Kircher's Egyptian map of Atlantis represents in size, shape, scale and position an ancient ice-free Antarctica.

http://www.flem-ath.com/aa7.htm

http://www.flem-ath.com/aa8htm

http://www.flem-ath.com/aa9htm

Just as intriguing is the Piri Reis map, the map of a 16^th century Byzantine admiral, which U.S. Navy officers have independently identified as accurately depicting at least twenty-four points on an ice-free Antarctic coast to within a half degree of accuracy. The Piri Reis map is believed to represent a portion of a map of the world, presumably copies from much more ancient sources in the Constantinople library, in turn copied or salvaged from the ancient Egyptian libraries of Alexandria.

This presents problems for traditional ice age theories. This area is believed to have been covered with an ice cap for thousands of years. Yet Antarctica was not recognized as a continent by European explorers until the eighteenth century, and the actual contours of the Antarctic coastline underneath the polar icecap were identified only in the late twentieth century.

http://www.flem-ath.com/del10.htm

Magellan passed the Tierra del Fuego in 1519, roughly contemporary with the Piri Reis map (see Antarctic timeline). However, the precise geography of the Piri Reis map exceeds anything produced by the Magellan expedition, as well as extending considerably beyond their course. It was not until the 1735 that the British developed technology to accurately measure not only latitude, but longitude. The area shown was also under ice in Magellan’s day. Magellan’s expedition (1519) can be ruled out as a potential source. To the contrary, eyewitness accounts report that that Magellan himself had access to ancient maps that allowed him to plan his circumnavigation of the world via Tierra del Fuego [Flem-Ath 125-127].

The other objection is that a note is allegedly scribbled in the margin stating that Portuguese explorers were attacked by naked savages along part of the coastline. Of course, there are no naked savages in Antarctica. The map does appear to include part of the South American coastline, and the precise localization of this event remains unclear. It seems natural that Piri Reis may have copied and attempted to update ancient maps with contemporary findings, recognizing that mapping longitude was still uncertain in Magellan’s day and that the quality of communication with the Portuguese was unclear. Piri Reis acknowledged the map itself to be from older sources, and had never traveled to the regions depicted himself, and so some imprecision in the localization of contemporary events is to be expected.

The subglacial coastline was not even known until the past 120 years. The presence of these maps confirms that this area was not under ice anciently, and that the area was known to highly skilled ancient mariners. Why would they have mapped it if it were not of significance? We have no such ancient maritime maps of, for instance, Indonesia.

Modern subglacial geography of Antarctica. Image courtesy of National Science Foundation. Before the ice cap, Lesser Antarctica would indeed have been a land of many islands.

Capital City of Atlantis

Flem-Ath reports that Plato observed that the capital of Atlantis (also called Atlantis) “lay mid-way on the main island facing towards the outer islands. And he tells us that the city is completely surrounded by mountains.” He observes:

This can only be true if the islands that are off the mainland are themselves mountainous. And this is in fact the case for this area of Antarctica. So when we combine these clues we find a subglacial plain that is the size of Pennsylvania.

He presents maps here depicting the subglacial features of Antarctica and localizing the capital city of Atlantis the plain region that he mentions. This would put the capital in the part of Lesser Antarctica that is now called Ellsworth Land. The capital would have been cradled in an island plain to the north of the Sentinel Range of Antarctica’s Ellsworth Mountains (see map), not far north or northwest of the Vinson Massif – the highest mountain in Antarctica (16,066 feet), discovered only in 1957. I suspect that this may be the “Holy Mountain” repeatedly referenced in the Atlantis story and in legends across many cultures of a lost island paradise. Next to these high mountains are sea trenches as deep as 8200 feet below sea level!

The question as to whether a volcanic event could have been involved in the destruction of Atlantis, along with massive flooding, earthquakes, and crustal displacement, deserves further investigation.

There has been little exploration of Lesser Antarctica: most expeditions have focused on Greater Antarctica because of interest in the South Pole. Antarctic is currently under an ice cap measuring more than 1500 feet thick in much of Lesser Antarctica, and over a mile thick in much of Greater Antarctica in winter. Due to the thickness of the ice cap, focused effort would be required to adequately explore this region.

Antarctica is not fully submerged: some claim that this argues against the Atlantis in Antarctica theory. Yet the habitable lowland plains, such as that where the capital city of Atlantis was, are indeed wholly underwater, while the highlands are covered in ice and uninhabitable. Since the migration of the poles and the expansion of the Antarctic ice cap, previously habitable land has been pushed beneath sea level. Indeed, were it not for the ice, vast regions of Lesser Antarctic would again rise out of the depths of the sea! Virtual Antarctica notes of the Antarctic icecap:

This icecap contains over 7 million cubic miles (30 million cubic km ) of ice -- about 90 per cent of all ice existing in the world and 68 per cent of the world's fresh water. The weight of the Antarctic ice is so great that in many areas it actually pushes the land below sea-level. This process of the earth's crust being deformed is known as isostasy. Without its ice cover Antarctica would eventually rise up another 1500 feet (450 m) above sea-level.

The Encyclopedia Britannica concurs that the weight of the vast Antarctic ice cap has also pushed some of the land underwater: “Areas that are now called ‘lands,’ including most of Ellsworth Land and Marie Byrd Land, would be beneath the sea.”

Now we have a plausible mechanism for the origin of the land that we suspect to be Atlantis described in Moses 7:14: “There also came up a land out of the depth of the sea.” An ancient change in the path of the poles may have melted considerable Antarctic ice, causing habitable land to arise from the depths of the sea. Later, a change in the path of the sun (i.e. motion of the poles) would have resulted in the land being lost beneath the depths of the sea in a cataclysm of flood and icy winter, fitting the descriptions of Plato and other ancient traditions in every particular.

At some time in the future, the ruins of a highly advanced antediluvian maritime civilization may be found buried beneath the ice sheets of what is now Lesser Antarctica in the region localized by Rand Flem-Ath.

Criticisms of the Atlantis in Antarctica Theory

Charles Hapgood and Flem-Ath’s writings are currently minority theories. However, the criticisms leveled against the “Atlantis in Antarctica” theory are largely nonsensical. For instance, Andrew Collins states that “the biggest argument against Antarctica being Atlantis is the sheer fact that no reliable evidence of human occupation has ever come to light, even though the continent really does appear on pre-discovery maps.” One wonders – why would the land have been mapped in its ice-free state if it was not significant? He makes no consideration of the fact that Lesser Antarctica is covered under an ice cap a third of the mile thick, that much of the ancient plains are submerged under the water by the weight of the ice cap, and that there has been no meaningful attempt at subglacial exploration of Lesser Antarctica. Simply the fact that no evidence of human habitation has yet been found – despite the major barriers to finding it, and the extreme unlikelihood that such evidence would be identified without great effort – is enough for Collins and others to wave their hands dismissively and claim that the “Atlantis in Antarctica” theory does not work. Another criticism is that Atlantis is not “opposite the Pillars of Hercules” in the Atlantic Ocean, yet such criticisms ignore the fact that ancient Greeks used the term “Pillars of Hercules” to refer to the limits of the known world, and that the Atlantic Ocean to the ancient Greeks was the great world ocean – not the ocean between Europe and the Americas alone. Ironically, these same critics go on to champion theories (like “Atlantis in Cuba”) that do not fit Plato’s description of the continent at all, and then claim for themselves the weight of logical argument!

Antarctica Links

Subglacial Lakes and Rivers in Antarctica

With a more temperate clime, Antarctica would have been a fertile land of lakes and islands.

Antarctic Subglacial Lakes Plumbed by Satellite

Quote from site:

“We didn't realize that the water under these ice streams was moving in such large quantities, and on such short time scales,” said Helen Fricker of the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lead author of the study. “We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months. The detected motions are astonishing in magnitude, dynamic nature and spatial extent.”

Subglacial Lakes, Antarctica (NASA)

Study of underground lakes in Antarctica could be critical, prof says

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“We believe that these lakes are part of an interconnected system that spans the entire Antarctic continent,” he adds. “These bodies of water are several miles beneath the ice sheet which took millions of years to form, meaning these lakes have been undisturbed and disconnected from our atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. It is highly likely that unique microbial communities that we never knew existed are lake residents.”

As previously noted, the temperate flora and fauna found in Antarctica’s antipodes (northern Siberia, Alaska, Arctic Norway) disproves traditionalist notions about a static pole and existence of the current Antarctic ice sheet for “millions of years.” It is likely that study of Antarctica will yield far more than “unique microbial communities.” Antarctica continues to be a land of surprises!