Atlantis is seen by many as the lost civilization par excellence, the “mother” of all civilizations. It is a pity that, despite much searching of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean for the mysterious island described by Plato, nothing convincing has ever been found. Neither unknown submerged archaeological remains nor sunken continents have been unearthed. Could it not be, some have wondered, that Atlantis did not end up under the sea at all but still exists somewhere else? And maybe we cannot see it because it is hidden in plain sight? This is the opinion of those who believe that Antarctica was in fact once free of ice and is where the ancient lost civilization can be found.
Something Strange
It all began in the mid-1950s with the observation of a scholar of ancient maps, Captain Arlington H. Mallery. Mallery had a revelation upon examining a map discovered a few years earlier in Turkey. The map, created in 1513 CE by the Turkish Admiral Piri Ibn Haci Mehmet, better known as Piri Re’is, was drawn on a gazelle skin treated and colored in watercolor. It was also lost for over 400 years. In 1929, during the transformation of the old Istanbul Imperial Palace into today’s Topkapi Archaeological Museum, the map reappeared. It caused surprise, because it placed South America in the correct longitudinal position in relation to Africa—an unusual feature for sixteenth-century maps.
What struck Mallery, however, was something else. In fact, he was convinced that the strip of land depicted in the extreme south of the map represented the coast of Antarctica free from ice. Subsequently, scholar Charles H. Hapgood hypothesized that the accuracy of the longitude on the Piri Re’is map could not be explained on the basis of the sixteenth-century science of navigation. In particular, Hapgood claimed, there was “a surprising concordance with the seismic profile of the Earth of Queen Maud in Antarctica” detected only in 1954 through seismic surveys (Hapgood 1966). It followed that the map had to be based on older maps made by travelers of an unknown but advanced civilization that existed before the Ice Age.
Although noted writers such as Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and Graham Hancock wrote bestsellers in the 1990s hypothesizing that this unknown civilization was Atlantis, an Italian engineer beat them to the punch. Flavio Barbiero first mentioned the hypothesis in 1974 in his book A Civilization under Ice.
Universal Cataclysm
Barbiero’s theory starts from the hypothesis that about 12,000 years ago, Earth was tilted differently from how it is today. It rotated perpendicular to the ecliptic plane, so the seasons stably coincided with the climatic bands. Alaska and Siberia, as well as Antarctica, were ice-free, and their climate was mild. This contrasted with Europe and Northwest America, which were covered by polar ice.
Barbiero’s theory continues that in Antarctica in particular, a very advanced marine civilization flourished, in which metallurgy had been invented and architecture, technology, art, and high-level science flourished. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world man was still in the Stone Age. Ten thousand years ago, after about 2,000 years of progress, this civilization called Atlantis suffered a devastating catastrophe that almost completely annihilated it. A comet or asteroid about six miles in diameter struck near Florida, causing a series of almost instantaneous global transformations.
The Earth’s axis of rotation changed; the poles suddenly moved thousands of miles to where they are today. The impact raised a cloud of dust that triggered torrential rains, with the consequent lowering of temperatures and the start of the great glaciation. The cooling was so fast that it took the great mammoths grazing around Siberia by surprise, as evidenced by the fact that in the stomach of a specimen found there were still the remains of the last meal of vegetation from the temperate zones. It had frozen without having had time to decompose. But the most devastating effect was the cyclopean wave caused by the impact of the fireball. This wave would have engulfed all lands, including Atlantis-Antarctica.
Barbiero hypothesized that thanks to its fleets of massive ships, part of the population of Atlantis managed to escape and reach America, Africa, and Asia. Meanwhile, on the mother island, it began to snow for weeks or perhaps even months, until a frozen blanket, many meters thick, finally buried Atlantis along with all those who had not managed to escape to safety. The survivors, scattered around the world, began to interact with the Paleolithic locals, teaching them to cultivate the fields and accelerating the development of civilization, thus suddenly originating the Neolithic age.
The Evidence
The theory is very fanciful and elaborate, so one wonders: Where is the evidence? First, Barbiero contends as proof the sudden disappearance of dozens of animal species that populated the northern hemisphere 12,000 years ago: mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos, reindeer, ancient bison, horses, camels, saber-toothed tigers, and so on. What other than a sudden glaciation, which came within a few days after the sudden shift of the north pole, could have caused such a massacre?
As more proof, Barbiero offers the great similarities between myths and legends of peoples around the world, from the Bible to Mesopotamia, from the myth of the island of Mu in North America to the Incan myth of Viracocha. Each contains a flood that overwhelms the world and then someone who comes from the sea and teaches how to cultivate the land. These legends could be clear proof that the memory of the phenomena following the change of Earth’s axis has remained deeply rooted in the memory of the peoples. Other legends spread everywhere could tell us that the celestial body that hit Earth was probably a comet. Just think of ancient superstitions of comets as messengers or carriers of serious calamities and the atavistic fear that still takes hold of us whenever some unusual astronomical event occurs.
As for his belief that Atlantis can only correspond to Antarctica, Barbiero acknowledges that “nowhere archaeological remains have been found. A civilization of that size, in Europe for example, would have left ample traces” (Barbiero 1974). Then he reasons that because Atlantis was such a huge civilization, and we have not found any traces of it (he admits there should have been traces somewhere), then those traces must be hidden somewhere. Where? “Obviously” under the ice of Antarctica! Also, in his view Antarctica is the only continent that reflects Plato’s description: an island with an area of millions of square kilometers, surrounded by an ocean in turn surrounded by a continuous strip of continents, rich in metals and favored (before the flood) by a mild climate. As further proof of this, Barbiero maintains that “all the planispheres prior to the discovery of America are actually manipulated maps of Antarctica: all ancient peoples conceived the world as a large, almost circular island, surrounded by the ocean, and this in turn from distant, unreachable and mysterious lands” (Barbiero 1974). For example, looking at the planisphere taken from the “Grandes Croniques” of Saint Denis (1364–1372), Barbiero recognizes “the Ross Sea on the top right, the Mackenzie Bay on the left and the Weddell Sea below” as well as the “thick network of channels similar to that described by Plato” (Barbiero 1974). Not to mention the Piri Re’is map, which would reproduce the profile of Antarctica without its ice cover. According to Barbiero, it is clear that all these medieval maps derive from older maps, perhaps from the library of Alexandria before it was destroyed.
It is all very suggestive, in theory, but where are the facts? Just a single brick or item from Atlantis would be enough, but does it exist? This is what we shall see in the second part of this series.
References
- Barbiero, Flavio. 1974. Una Civiltà Cotto Ghiaccio (A Civilization under Ice). Editrice Nord.
- Hapgood, Charles. 1966. Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. Adventures Unlimited Press.