Jumat, 09 November 2007

The Atlantis Enigma

One of the great mysteries and enigmas of our time is Atlantis. Despite the passage of thousands of years, nobody has been able to solve the riddle of Atlantis.

Plato was the person who started all of the difficulty with regard to Atlantis. In his Timaeus and Critias stories, he spoke of Atlantis in glowing terms. He identified this as an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Basically, we mean huge. Plato, it was claimed the size of North Africa! The people of Atlantis allegedly controlled much of the Mediterranean, but were defeated by the ancestors of the Greeks. The two companies were then destroyed as "a great flood."

With just these bits of information, we can assume Plato has taken some liberties in his writing. Then a strange thing happened. Archaeologists have discovered Egyptian records detailing Atlantis, its ruling family and a utopian vision of the kind of culture. There are many contradictions between the time the two stories, but the race to discover Atlantis has been since. We do, after all, like a good puzzle.

So, where is Atlantis? There is the problem. The descriptions are so vague that Atlantis could be just about anywhere. Heck, you could be sitting above the main town in what you read. At one time or another, the popular theory has suggested Atlantis is Antarctica, Turkey, North America, South America, Santorini, Crete, Indonesia and pure figment of the imagination of someone. After years of research, the theory of imagination seems the most credible.

Although theorists rage and back, there was an event in the life of Plato, which might have given rise to the base of the Atlantis story. A huge earthquake struck the city of Helike. Located on the shores of the Bay of Corinth, he literally sank into the sea Both then and now, you can take a boat on the city and despise the ruins of Helike. That does Helike the lost civilization of Atlantis? It is unlikely since Helike was a basic Greek city. Yet, it certainly would have formed the basis of the Atlantis story.

Selasa, 06 November 2007

Atlantis Located on Bermuda Triangle?

One of the rare Bermuda Triangle facts that can be confirmed is the Bermuda Triangle location. In fact, the location of the Bermuda Triangle is somewhat arbitrary as well. There are no official limits. However, the triangle is generally supposed to run from Bermuda to Puerto Rico to Miami and back to Bermuda.

A fact that is unexplained in the Bermuda Triangle is that electro-magnetic compasses that normally point to the magnetic north pole, the point to the true north pole inside the zone of the Bermuda Triangle. This happens in one place other than the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil's sea off the east coast of Asia.

Bermuda Triangle, the term is used for the first time Argosy Magazine in an article written by H. Vincent Gaddis in 1964. Since then, a number of "nicknames" were immersed for the Bermuda Triangle-Limbo of the Lost, Hoodoo Sea, and even Devil's Triangle-some forged in the literature.

One thing is undeniable about the Bermuda Triangle. There have been a number of strange and sometimes unexplained disappearances in the Triangle. The tale of Flight 19-a group of five Navy torpedo bombers and a search plane disappeared in the region of the Bermuda Triangle (perhaps!) - Is the most notorious of these.

However, there have been some strange events observed in the area of the Bermuda Triangle, as well. Even as far back as the 1492 Atlantic crossing by Columbus, it was recorded. Columbus documented in his diaries strange events with his compass in the field which we now consider the Bermuda Triangle.

Another fact about the Bermuda Triangle that is undeniable is that the region has claimed over 1,000 lives in the past 100 years. Some of them are the result of "human error" sailing in the area. However, there are always suspicious or unexplained disappearances going on in the Bermuda Triangle.

There is a wide range of legends surround the existence of the Bermuda Triangle. Some of this stems from the idea that with - in the Bermuda Triangle is the lost city of Atlantis in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Large off the coast of Bimini, there is a package of measures submarine believed to be part of this civilization. Few exploration can be done because the Bermuda Triangle includes some of the deepest trenches in the Atlantic Ocean, far too deep to explore.

Today, thousands of trips are made through the Bermuda Triangle each year. Almost all Caribbean cruise from the east coast of North America pass under the Bermuda Triangle. Modern aircraft to the Caribbean hot spots and the southern United States to Europe through the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe the next time you travel through the Bermuda Triangle by air or sea, you think of the lost civilization of Atlantis and its power?

Minggu, 04 November 2007

Atlantis through Science

ICE AGES: - The impact of the ice ages and inter-glacial effects on the rise and fall of ocean levels and the earth readjustments to the departure of the ice cap cannot be over-looked in the human historical picture. Research in the area is far greater than in the recent past and we can learn what might have happened to earlier civilizations on earth. Atlantis is a given name for a civilization that inhabited many islands and coastal regions, in my mind. The idea of one central location makes little sense when one considers such things as Ice Ages and changes in the flow of the Gulf Stream and climate that resulted. Because it lasted for from 30,000 to 100,000 years and may have co-existed with other civilizations rising and falling it is most inauspicious to debate one specific time when it was in Tara or Crete or the Azores or Bimini or even Finias. That seems to be the usual debate among the over 25,000 books written about just this one lost civilization. As long as people don't integrate all facts they inevitably just come up with theories to fit pet or prevailing concepts. In Gateway to Atlantis, 'The Search for the source of a lost Civilization' we see a far better scholar who is doing the right kind of investigation. Mapping of the ocean bottoms and geological understandings as well as studying glacial deposits and tree rings gives a better picture of history than history books.

"In 1960 a scientific paper by Wallace S. Broecker and his colleagues Maurice Ewing and Bruce C. Heezen, of Lamont Geological Observatory at Columbia University, Palisades, New York, appeared in the 'American Journal of Science'. Entitled 'Evidence for an Abrupt Change in Climate close to 11,000 years ago', it advanced the theory that a 'number of geographically isolated systems suggested that the warming of world-wide climate which occurred at the close of Wisconsin glacial times was extremely abrupt. (3)

By examining sediment cores taken from various deep-sea locations, Broecker and his team were able to demonstrate that around c. 9000 BC. the surface water temperature of the Atlantic Ocean increased by between six and ten degrees centigrade, (4) enough to alter its entire ecosystem. More significantly, it was found that the bottom waters of the Cariaco Trench in the Caribbean Sea, off Venezuela, suddenly stagnated, {The Gulf Stream being sent back south from hitting the land around the Azores when the water level was lower suddenly started warming the Iceland and British Isles regions, again.} showing that an abrupt change in water circulation had taken place coincident to the warming of the oceans. (5) Additionally, the silt deposits washing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi Valley abruptly halted and were retained in the delta and valleys, as the waters from the glacier-bound Great Lakes switched direction and began draining through the previously frozen northern outlets. (6) With extreme rapidity, the water levels of these lakes shrank from maximum volume, down to the much lower level they occupy today. (7)

Among the data drawn on by Broecker and his team to make their findings was the work conducted in 1957 by Cesare Emiliani of the Department of Geology at the University of Miami. He found that deep-sea cores displayed clear evidence of an abrupt temperature turn around in 9000 BC. was responsible for the other changes set out by Broecker et al. (8) However, since other cores examined by Emiliani had not shown the same rapid transition, he decided that the anomalous cores lacked vital sediment layers covering a period of several thousand years of ecological history, and so dismissed them as unreliable. (9) Yet Broecker and his colleagues disputed Emiliani's interpretation of the results. They could find no reason to suppose that key sediment layers could have been lost in the manner suggested. As a consequence, they reinstated Emiliani's controversial findings as crucial evidence of a major shift in oceanic temperatures around 11,000 years ago. (10)

Although Broecker et al seemed keen to promote a date of c. 9000 BC for the rapid transition from glacial to post-glacial ages, there are indications that this event did not occur until a slightly later period. At least three lake sites in the Great Basin region revealed carbon-14 dates around 8000 BC for a maximum water level shortly 'before' they experienced a sudden desiccation after the withdrawal of the ice sheets. (11) In addition to this, marine shells from the St. Lawrence Valley, which provided evidence of an invasion of seawater coincident to a rapid ice retreat, frequently produced dates 'post' 9000 BC. (12)

Broecker and his colleagues accepted the presence of these much lower dates and suggested that the whole matter was complicated by the fact that there had been an estimated 200-year resurgence of glacial conditions, known as the Valders re-advance, around the mid-ninth millenium BC. They therefore acknowledged that their own findings might in fact relate to the recession of the ice fields after this time, bringing the dates of their suggested 'major fluctuation in climate' and the 'sharp change in oceanic conditions' down to well below c. 9000 BC. (13)

THE EVIDENCE OF POLLEN SPECTRA

Further evidence that dramatic changes accompanied the transition from glacial to post-glacial ages came from the work of Herbert E. Wright Jnr, of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (14) and J Gordon Ogden III of the Department of Botany and Bacteriology at the Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware. (15) Both examined the pollen spectra range from sediment cores taken from various lake sites in the Great Lakes area and found they provided clear evidence of an abrupt shift in flora at the end of glaciation. The spruce forests that had thrived in the cold harsh climate for many thousands of years were supplanted swiftly, first by pine and then by mixed hardwood forests, such as birch and oak. Deciduous trees, as we know, only thrive in a warmer climate.

The significance of these findings is the acceleration at which this transition took place. In an article for the journal 'Quaternary Paleoecology' in 1967, Ogden pointed out that some pollen spectra samples showed a 50 per cent replacement from spruce to pine occurring in just 10 centimetres of sediment. (16) In one sample taken from a site named Glacial Lake Aitken in Minnesota, the transition from 55 per cent to 18 per cent spruce pollen occurred in only 7.6 centimetres of sediment, re- presenting a deposition corresponding to just 170 years. (17) The problem here is that conventional geologists and paleoecologists consider that the transition from glacial to post-glacial ages occurred over several 'thousand' years, not just a few hundred {The time it takes for one or two trees to live and die.} years.

These findings so baffled Ogden that he was led to comment: 'The only mechanism sufficient to produce a change of the kind described here would therefore appear to be a rapid and dramatic change in temperature and/or precipitation approximately 10,000 years ago.’ (18)

What kind of climatic 'event' might have been responsible for this 'rapid and dramatic change in temperature’ {Could this relate to the buttercups found frozen and undigested in Mammoth mouths of the Arctic?} in the American Midwest, sometime around c. 8000 BC? Had it been a consequence of the proposed cometary impact that devastated the western hemisphere during this same epoch?

The knowledge that some 65 million years ago the Cretaceous period had been abruptly brought to a close by just such an impact has softened the most stubborn of minds concerning such a possibility. Broecker himself, in an article written for 'Scientific American' in 1983, now accepted that asteroid or comet impacts might be responsible for the instigation and termination of glacial ages. (19)

This is indeed what Emilio Spedicato has suggested as the mechanism behind the revolution in climate and ocean temperature experienced during this period…” (20)

We will return to implications related to this and the work of Mr. Collins throughout this encyclopedia as we develop real history from actual facts rather than the Bible Narrative. It should be evident that these climate changes had significant impacts on society and created a loss of culture and technology in certain areas of the world. There were probably people who took advantage of these spiritual and other perceptions that resulted as well.

Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com