Atlantis? It is hidden in plain sight, under the thick ice of Antarctica! This claim was made popular in the 1990s by pseudoarcheological theories in many popular books. But the original idea was born in Italy in 1974, when engineer Flavio Barbiero first mentioned it in his book A Civilization under Ice.

The premise is intriguing: About 10,000 years ago, Earth was hit by a comet or asteroid, causing a series of almost instantaneous global transformations. The axis of rotation changed, the poles suddenly moved thousands of kilometers, and the impact raised a cloud of dust that triggered torrential rains, with the consequent lowering of temperatures and the start of the great glaciation. People of Atlantis—an advanced marine civilization that flourished on the continent of Antarctica—were forced to flee, when the change in temperatures caused snow to fall for weeks (and perhaps months), until a frozen blanket, tens of meters thick, finally buried Atlantis with all those who had not managed to escape. 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.

Where Is Everyone?

Barbiero recognizes that all these claims can at best be considered suggestive and that only the discovery of archaeological traces of Atlantis would be considered evidence. “It would be enough to find even a single brick to prove its existence and revolutionize all ancient history and geology from its foundations.”

However, the “brick” of Atlantis is still missing. Not only have no traces of prehistoric human life ever been found on Antarctica, but there are none in the places where the Atlanteans would have repaired after the flood. If indeed these highly evolved people brought civilization to America, Africa, and Asia 10,000 years ago, there is no trace of them. The first signs of higher civilization are much more recent, dating back to 4000 BCE with some rare exceptions. Barbiero’s answer is that the Atlanteans, being sailors, settled mainly on the coasts of the various countries, and the coasts, following the melting of the ice, ended up submerged at a depth of 130 meters. Likewise, the remains of the Atlantean cities created when the Sahara was fertile would have ended up in the desert sand. Indeed, these Atlanteans seem very unfortunate.

“This is a fascinating but very mechanistic hypothesis, which is based on assumptions, in the current state of our knowledge, which cannot be demonstrated,” archaeologist and best-selling writer Valerio Massimo Manfredi (2012) told me.

In fact, too many factors are assumed (the impact of a comet; the shifting of poles; the sudden glaciation; the fact that the Atlanteans were sailors with huge ships and therefore ready to save themselves; the lack of archaeological evidence because it was all hidden by water, ice, or sand; etc.) to try to prove something not known to have even happened. When Plato wrote for the first time of Atlantis, he did so in two philosophical dialogues in which he imagined a perfect society that ended in ruin for its pride. It’s an imaginative hypothesis that Barbiero takes literally.

The Extinction of Mammoths

According to Giorgio G. Bardelli, zoologist at the Civic Museum of Natural History of Milan:

The fact is that no evidence has ever been found in Antarctica (fossils, archaeological remains, artifacts, etc.) of the existence, on that continent, of a human civilization. On the contrary, the numerous cores performed in the Antarctic ice, often a few thousand meters, have made it possible to reconstruct the climatic history of the earth over a period of several hundreds of thousands of years, during which Antarctica has always been covered by ice and characterized by conditions, similar to the current ones, completely incompatible with the existence of a human civilization. (Bardelli 2012)

Not even geoscience leaves room for misunderstandings. Says Francesco Paolo Sassi of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Padua:

In the popular imagination, climatic variations are often associated with a “pole shift,” but the geological evidence shows that climatic variations are normally due to other causes—astronomical, geological—of the climate system. Paleoclimatology is able to document the climatic variations of the last 10 million years. In particular, in the last 10,000 years there have been no sudden and traumatic changes in temperature, except for an event lasting a few centuries around 8,200 years ago (of maximum hemispheric scope) and a modest change in the distribution of solar radiation due to astronomical causes. Orbital but very significant hydrological consequences in the intertropical belt were produced in several stages but culminated around 4–5 thousand years ago, which led to the desertification of the Sahara. In conclusion, there is no geological evidence of an impact around 10,000 years ago that produced climate cooling. (Sassi 2012)

But if there was no instant Ice Age, how could that mammoth freeze with the herbs that grow in temperate zones still in its stomach? Bardelli has the answer:

The fact is that mammoths populated tundra environments, such as the one found today in the northernmost regions of Eurasia or Canada. It was therefore not a question of temperate environments. They were not temperate environments; neither they were covered with ice. They were generally plains rich in lichens, mosses, herbaceous plants but also trees typical of cold climates such as birches and conifers. The short Arctic summer, with the thawing of the superficial portion of the frozen ground, the so-called permafrost, transforms a part of these environments into marshy areas, in which mammoths and other large animals could get trapped and die, and then be preserved entirely due to the frost. It must also be said that mammoths did not go extinct everywhere at the same time, as should have happened following a sudden and short-lived catastrophe. The last specimens even survived up to the Holocene, that is, up to less than 4,000 years ago, on the island of Wrangel in the Arctic Ocean. (Bardelli 2012)

And all the other animal species that suddenly went extinct 10,000 years ago? Bardelli also has the answer for that:

The extinction of the great Pleistocene fauna did not occur simultaneously throughout the world. For example, in America it occurred about 12–13,000 years ago, in Australia about 50,000 years ago. Some scholars think that man may have played a role in the disappearance of many species, given that the dates roughly coincide with the colonization of those lands by our species, but the question is controversial. In any case, as for all other biological crises, even that of the megafauna of the Pleistocene is probably due to complex of causes, which did not happen simultaneously and in the same way on all continents. It is widely believed among most scholars that the climate changes that repeatedly occurred during the Quaternary were the most important cause. (Bardelli 2012)

Philosophers and Cartographers

Finally, what about the cartographic evidence? As for the Piri Re’is map, it has now been established that it does not depict Antarctica but is rather the folded continuation of Brazil. According to scholar and art historian Diego Cuoghi:

The representation is deformed, bent to the right, most likely to adapt to the particular shape of the parchment. Let us remember that the longitude would have been calculated in a precise way only in the following century, so considerable approximations were used in the maps. Although deformed, some details such as the Gulf of San Matias and the Valdes peninsula can be recognized, and the end could be Tierra del Fuego. If we look closely at the lower right end, the one that should represent Antarctica, we see the drawing of a snake, and in the note by Piri Reis we read: “This land is uninhabited. Everything is in ruins and it is said that large snakes have been found. For this reason the Portuguese infidels have not landed in these lands which are said to be very hot.” Certainly such a description has nothing to do with Antarctica. (Cuoghi 2012)

As for the other medieval maps, the round one would be a shape with precise meanings. Says Cuoghi:

Those representations were composed according to the tripartite scheme: Asia (top) Europe (bottom left) and Africa (bottom right). The world, at the center of which is Jerusalem, is surrounded by the ocean, beyond which the twelve winds are depicted. There are also many fortified cities (Rome, Athens, Constantinople …) and various regions (Spain, England, Greece …), all with their names clearly visible. In almost all those cited by Barbiero, the Earthly Paradise is also depicted. This type of globe did not take into account geographic knowledge but was intended as an ideal and philosophical representation and was based on the O-T scheme, derived from the manuscripts of Isidore of Seville. (Cuoghi 2012)

The Last ‘Hope’

Despite extensive evidence against his idea and scant evidence for it, Barbiero was so convinced that he went so far as to organize an expedition crossing the Strait of Magellan in a rubber dinghy, risking his life just to land in Antarctica and prove the validity of his hypothesis. And today he would be ready to do it again. He has said:

I pinpointed the exact spot via satellite. If I had the money to organize an expedition, I would go without fail. This is the place where the Mount of Poseidon is, meter plus meter minus. I would also have the tools to do a survey and to have a confirmation. (Stella 2001)

But maybe it won’t even be necessary. If climatic trends continue, Antarctica will soon be largely ice-free, and nature will undertake to confirm or debunk a theory that is certainly ingenious but decidedly false.

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References

• Barbiero, Flavio. 1974. Una civiltà sotto ghiaccio (A Civilization under Ice), Editrice Nord.
• Bardelli, Biorgio. 2012. Personal communication with the author.
• Cuoghi, Diego. 2012. Personal communication with the author.
• Manfredi, Valerio Massimo. 2012. Personal communication with the author.
• Sassi, Francesco Paolo. 2012. Personal communication with the author.
• Stella, F. 2001. Sui ghiacci di Atlantide. Nexus 33.