Kennedy, Donald Mark

Donald Mark Kennedy is the author of the californiaasanisland.org website. It is generally accepted that the portrayal of California as an island on early maps was the most famous cartographic error of the colonial period. However, Kennedy disagrees and contends that “The maps were copied from much older maps by people that had no idea what this area really looked like. They were just passing down copies of the very old maps for our benefit so that today we can see today just how recently the continental uplift and the ice age occurred.”

At the end of his lengthy essay about California, he turns to the subject of Atlantis, which he places in the Atlantic nearly 1000 miles due east from the Carolinas with Bermuda its only remnant today.^(a) I find Kennedy’s explanation for the demise of Atlantis is as quirky as his cartographic theories.

“So the lost continent of Atlantis is found. And why did it subside? The forty days of rain that started Noah’s flood were caused by the single continent Pangea breaking up along a fault line that we find at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, with a branch around Africa to India, pushing up the Himalayas. A complete new seafloor of hot lava raised the ocean temperature in that area and evaporated the seawater, which condensed and fell as torrential rain for forty days. The warm ocean floor continued to produce rain for several hundred years. Over the continents, the rain turned to snow, which powered the great ice age. Near the coasts, the warm oceans created temperate climates as far north as Siberia, where over six million Mammoths lived, then died when the oceans cooled and the lush vegetation died. The ice age lasted about 700 years after the flood. During this time the Atlantic ocean floor slowly cooled, became denser, and gradually sank, taking Atlantis and Kirchner’s island down with it. As the ocean floor sank, it also drew in water from the earth’s other oceans, lowering their water level by about 300 feet, and changing the coastlines of places like California.”

An interesting review of California’s cartographic history should be read along with Kennedy’s offering^(b).

^{(a) California As An Island}

^(b) https://exhibits.stanford.edu/california-as-an-island/feature/history