vineri, 29 mai 2009

The Destruction of Atlantis - by Frank Joseph

The Destruction of Atlantis
by Frank Joseph

Although some Atlantologists concluded that the Great Flood was caused by a celestial event,
not until 1997 did the scientific community generally concede that a killer-comet was responsible for the demise of Bronze Age Civilization. During a three-day symposium in July, leading astronomers, geologists and climatologists met in Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, England, at an international conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. Speakers included such notables as astrophysicist Mark E. Bailey, Director of the Armagh Observatory, in Northern Ireland; Marie-Agnes Courty, a geologist from the French Center for Scientific Research; and Bas Van Geel, a paleo-ecologist at the University of Amsterdam. Many of the one hundred participants came from as far afield as Japan, North America and Australia.

Their consensus was that an abundance of physical and cultural evidence confirmed that periodic close encounters of a large comet from the 5th Millennium B.C. to the early 11th Century B.C. were responsible for several eras of wide-spread destruction on the Earth's surface, including the forced end of the Bronze Age. Swedish physicist, Lars Franzen (University of Goeteborg) and archaeologist Thomas B. Larsson (University of Umea) pointed out that general cooling, extreme precipitation, followed by catastrophic flooding before 1000 B.C. were earmarks of a celestial cataclysm. They concluded, "it is obvious that these events were sudden and occurred world-wide". They mentioned a particularly sharp change in climate, a steep drop in temperatures and simultaneous rise in wet conditions, noticeable in Europe, the Americas, the Near East, as far north as Alaska and south to the Antarctic, circa 1,200 B.C. Lake levels increased drastically, in some cases (Turkey's Lake Van) as much as 240 feet. Larsson said the abrupt rise in lake levels has been verified in Sweden (Federsee), Ireland (Loughnashade), the United States (Great Salt Lake), Canada (Wald sea Basin), Bolivia (Titicaca) and Argentina (Lago Cardiel). Franzen told how Swedish, English and Irish oak bog preserve a record of extreme and sudden rainfall around 1,000 B.C. At Steng Moss, in Northumberland, there was a six-fold increase in peat moss accumulation.

While such finds are generally unknown to the public, they have long been recognized by climatologists as leading conditions of the Plenard Period, from 1250 to 1000 B.C., when Earth's climate sharply deteriorated. World temperatures suddenly fell nearly two degrees Centigrade and rainfall was prodigious. British anthropologist, Richard Desborough, said of the Plenard Period, "the changes that came about were little short of fantastic. The craftsmen and artists seem to have vanished almost without a trace: there is little new stone construction of any sort, far less any massive edifices; the metal workers' techniques revert to primitive, and the potter, except in the early stages, loses his purpose and inspiration; and the art of writing is forgotten. But the outstanding feature is that by the end of the 12th Century B.C., the population appears to have dwindled to about one-tenth of what it had been little over a century before. This is no normal decline, and the circumstances and events obviously have a considerable bearing on the nature of the subsequent Dark ages, and must be in part at least a cause of its existence". Franzen and Larsson locate the focus of the Bronze Age catastrophe in the the vicinity of Atlantis itself. "We even suggest that relatively large asteroids or comets (c. 0.5 km diameter) hit somewhere in the eastern Atlantic, possibly at the shelf of the Atlantic west coast of Africa/Europe ... mainly affecting the Mediterranean parts of Africa and Europe, but also globally". As our planet turned on its axis, the proto-Encke Comet, Oljato, bombarded every region in a world-wide swath from above the Equator to below the Arctic Circle, according to the comet's inclining angle to the Earth. Passing over the Caribbean, it fired down an object one mile across. Moving a hundred times the velocity of a 9 m.m. bullet, the asteroid plunged through the water to explode on the sea floor with an explosive force equal to one million megatons of TNT, excavating a crater on the submarine bottom 900 feet deep. The resulting 1,000-foot wall of water swept inland as far as Alabama killing every living thing in its path and set off volcanoes from the Antilles to El Salvador.

Over North America, the comet let loose a barrage that blasted a nuclear-like event in the Ohio Valley and triggered off a hellish series of volcanic outbursts in Washington, Oregon and Wyoming. Cosmic bomb-loads falling across the Pacific Ocean raised roaring walls of water to obliterate whole island populations. In the Hawaiian Islands of Lanai, Maui, Molokai and Oahu, deposits of unconsolidated coral were placed nearly a thousand feet above the coast by a monstrous wall of water. Tsunamis are gigantic waves set in motion by submarine earthquakes, but they never begin to approach the 1,000-foot high swell that was necessary to over-top the Hawaiian Islands. Only a wave caused by the plunge of a large meteorite or asteroid could have attained such enormous proportions.

Approaching Asia, Oljato conjured volcanic and seismic devastation throughout Japan and eastern Russia. The face of China was obscured by catastrophic storms of corrosive ash-fall, as nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere combined with nitric acid released by the relentless impacts of celestial debris thousands of miles away. India and the Middle East were tormented with geologic violence from the merciless onslaught high overhead. But Europe and the Near East, the cradle of Western Civilization, were the special targets of Comet Oljato. As it passed over Anatolia, the moment of "the Fire from Heaven" had arrived. A veritable deluge of flame descended in waves of thunder from out of the sky.

Hattusas, capital of the mighty Hittite Empire, erupted in a fiery holocaust. Hundreds of cities and towns with hundreds of thousands of their residents all across Asia Minor were abruptly incinerated. Burned in great flashes of flame were the commercial centers of Palestine and the Syrian fortresses. Unrelenting earthquakes smashed Pharaoh's monumental temples to smoking ruin, while the divine wrath threatened Lower Egypt with death by fire. Libya, her once-fertile neighbor, was seared into a barren desert.

Across the Aegean Sea, the people of Crete fled for their lives into the high mountains to escape the flaming, quaking doom of their cities and towns below. In mainland Greece, the light of civilization went out, replaced by a worse glow from the hundreds of her settlements, citadels, palaces and temples girdled in high flames. Coastal cities and harbors had their conflagrations quenched by over-powering floods scarcely less devastating. The same sea which nourished their inhabitants for a thousand years had become their murderer.

Several large rivers which converge in the Hungarian Plain, suddenly spilled over their banks to deluged this vast area of low-lying land. The entire region was inundated with the ferocious flood that wiped out a prosperous Bronze Age culture. It had come, in the words of Swedish archaeologist, Adolf Aberg, to "an unexpected end, after which the country is without any discoverable sign of occupation and seems deserted".

Europe's largest fire consumed the Black Forest down to the Swiss Alps. A counterpart to the ash-fall inundating China fell on Britain, killing the majority of all living things there. The worst was yet to come. Leaving the continent in flames, Comet Oljato dispatched a salvo of cosmic bombs hurtling at 20,000 miles per hour toward the ocean.

Breaking the sound-barrier each in turn, they filled the vast chambers of the sky with reverberating thunders. At least one meteorite hit the geologically sensitive Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It suddenly awoke like the enraged Midgaard Serpent of Norse myth. Sea-quakes rose in 500-foot tsunamis crashing 150 miles per hour across the face of the deep. Volcanos roared in furious choruses of streaming magma and piling cloud-banks of ash from Ascension and Candlemas in the South Atlantic to Hekla in Iceland. Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote in the Canaries exploded with flames to rival heaven's, as the nearby coast of North Africa writhed in seismic anguish. Stabbing like sharp pain through a raw nerve, geologic violence shot along the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and across the fault boundary separating the Eurasian from African plates to which it was connected and on which the island of Atlantis was situated.
A trembler moving close to the speed of sound struck the submarine foundations of Atlantis, detonating the sacred mountain. Unable to vent the sudden force of so much erupting magma, one wall of the volcano blasted out laterally. An inconceivable rush of sea rushed into the gaping wound, where the extremes of water and fire combined to implode the entire island. The opulent, powerful, corrupt capital, with most of its screaming inhabitants, sank to the bottom of the ocean it dominated for centuries --- the same ocean to which it had given its own name.

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--- Copies of "The Destruction of Atlantis" (264 pgs, color photograph section) are available for $18.00 from www.InnerTraditions.com and from Amazon.com

Copyright 2007 by Frank Joseph
All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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