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NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Cesare Emiliani.
Tompkins, Peter
Peter Tompkins (1919-2007) was an American journalist, WWII spy and perhaps best known as the author of the 1971 book, Secrets of the Great Pyramid[783] which included an extensive appendix by Livio Catullo Stecchini on the relationship of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid.
Tompkins also wrote Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids as well as over a score of other books on various ‘fringe’ subjects as well as his wartime exploits. He was interested in the mystery of Atlantis and to that end, he went to the Bahamas to study the ‘Bimini Road’ but concluded that it was only beach rock.
A later interview with Tompkins son, Ptolemy, revealed that his “dad was convinced that the Edgar Cayce readings about the rising of Atlantis were correct. He spent thousands and thousands of dollars photographing the limestone formations off Bimini – the so-called “Bimini Road.” My father loved the idea of Atlantis returning because he wanted the world to become a kind of new Eden. He was a true father of the New Age in this sense – he had the core New Age belief that the world once was, and would be again a better place. But not better in some mundane sense, but in the sense of being elevated back into a spiritualised condition that it had fallen away from. That’s what the Bimini stuff was all about” (a). Apparently, Tompkins left Bimini unconvinced that it had Atlantean credentials.
Tompkins wrote the foreword to the English translation of Otto Muck’s book, The Secret of Atlantis [0098] and was impressed by Muck’s hypothesis of Atlantis in the Atlantic being destroyed by an asteroid and considered the work of Cesare Emiliani important in support of this contention.
>In the Preface to John Anthony West’s Serpent in the Sky [452], Tompkins wrote that “interestingly, West develops de Lubicz‘ notion that the Egyptian cosmology and understanding of this universe was not endemic to Egypt but came from colonists or refugees from Plato’s sunken continent of Atlantis, which could also explain the similarities and identities with the cosmologies of Central America, presumably brought there by other refugees from Atlantis”!<
Kukal, Zdenek
Zdenek Kukal (1932-2021) was a respected geologist and oceanographer who worked at the Czech Geological Survey, Prague.
As a ten-year-old, he witnessed how in the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich “a lot had changed. We were stuck at home, never leaving anywhere. Patrols were walking by, sometimes we heard some distant shooting, and then they began with the night searches. From apartment to apartment, from house to house, one after another. Wehrmacht, police, Gestapo. It ended up well at our house – they found nobody.” (a)
He wrote a volume debunking the more extreme ideas regarding the Bermuda Triangle. In 1978, he published, in Czech, Atlantis in the Light of Modern Research, while a few years later Earth Science Reviews (Vol.. 21, 1984) devoted a special issue to a revised version, in English, translated by Cesare Emiliani. Kukal favoured Santorini as the ‘inspiration’ behind the Atlantis story but as he stated, in a paper delivered to the 2005 Atlantis Conference on Melos, the story is fundamentally ‘pure fiction’.
Ice Dams
Ice Dams were not uncommon following the ending of the last Ice Age. Glacial Lake Missoula in North West America has been estimated to have burst out every fifty years or so over a two-thousand-year period between 13,000 and 11,000 BC. These events are dealt with in detail by David Alt in his Glacial Lake Missoula[846]. Lake Agassiz was another enormous lake formed by glacial run-off after the last Ice Age and at its maximum extent was larger than any lake existing in the world today. There is evidence that Lake Agassiz like Missoula also breached ice dams from time to time, discharging into the Atlantic. Another large and frequent breaching of ice dams occurred in the Siberian Altai Mountains(d)(e). A USGS report listing the largest of these events is available online(b).
Recent reports(g)(h)(i) claim that around 6200 BC the bursting of an ice dam in Canada released the meltwater contents of Lake Agassiz and Lake Ojibway into the North Atlantic that resulting in Greenland being cooled by an average of 7.4ºC and Europe by about 1ºC and raising the global sea level by between one and three metres (3-10 feet).
Equally dramatic was the extent of the flooding in Eurasia following the collapse of north Asian ice dams. Ronnie Gallagher has an interesting article about this on Graham Hancock’s website(a). Gallagher favours a Eurasian location for Atlantis.
In a 1975 report, Cesare Emiliani and others at the University of Miami supported the idea that the flooding resulting from bursting ice dams at the end of the Last Ice Age may have been the reason for the ubiquity of ancient flood myths, such as the biblical Deluge(l)(m).
Even today the retreating glaciers in the Himalayas have created lakes that threaten a number of Nepalese villages. Similar conditions exist in Peru, where some years ago a flood from glacial Lake Palcacocha killed an estimated 5,000 people(j). In 2004, another ice dam attached to the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina also collapsed, watched by applauding tourists(k).
Professor Neil Glasser from Aberystwyth University is the lead author of a report published in 2016 in Scientific Reports, in which the breaching of an ice dam in South America, between 11,000 and 6,000 BC, was on such a scale that it altered the circulation of the Pacific Ocean. Glasser noted(f) that: “This was a massive lake. When it drained, it released around 1150km3 of freshwater from the melting glaciers into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans – equivalent to around 600 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. This had a considerable impact on the Pacific Ocean circulation and regional climate at the time.”
(a) https://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/GallagherR1.php
(d) https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2002/pdf/1110.pdf
(f) https://phys.org/news/2016-02-catastrophic-failure-ice-age-ocean.html
(g) Science – Dec. 22, 2000
(h) Proceedingsof the National Academyof Sciences – DOI:10.1073/pnas.0510095103]
(i) Quaternary Science Reviews –vol 25, p 63]
(j) National Geographic, December 2019, p.138
(l) https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/24/archives/surge-of-ice-sheets-water-into-mississippi-said-to-support-deluge.html (subscribers only) or see Archive 7185 | (atlantipedia.ie)*
Emiliani, Cesare
Cesare Emiliani (1922-1995) was b
orn in Bologna, Italy and is often referred to as the founder of paleoceanography. In 1975, at the University of Miami, Emiliani reported measuring deep-sea cores, taken from the Gulf of Mexico, that demonstrated a shockingly rapid rise of about 325 feet in the world’s sea level — a rate of metres per decade — around 11,600 years ago. He suggested that the rupturing of Ice Dams at the end of the last Ice Age and the resulting floods may have given rise to worldwide flood myths, such as the biblical Deluge(a).
When he also remarked casually that this was exactly the time Plato had given for the fall of Atlantis his offhand remark was met with severe comments from his peers.
In conversation with Peter Tompkins, he suggested that putative Atlantis sites such as the Azores, Spain and locations off the East Coast of the United States could all have been part of the Atlantean empire [802.193].
Emiliani was the translator of Zdenek Kukal’s book Atlantis in the Light of Modern Research (Earth Science Reviews Vol.21).
(a) Archive 7185 *