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Atlantis and the Earth’s Shifting Crust
Lecture by Rand Flem-Ath
28 September 1996: University of Delaware
Text edited for the internet by Judith Knowlton

We all know that the greatest mass of an iceberg is hidden unseen beneath the surface of the water. And likewise, underlying the search for Atlantis lie many deep prejudices. Some of these prejudices revolve around time. Our 20th-century faith in progress propels us towards the future, leaving the past behind at a constantly accelerating rate. But here at the Return to the Source Symposium we are invited to face the past. This event is an opportunity to turn to the past for knowledge and perhaps even some wisdom.

I believe that Plato’s famous account of Atlantis is a holographic fragment, a sliver of a once common view of the world. In order to reconstruct that worldview we must revise our own assumptions about geography. Words like Atlantic, Libya and Asia had a different meaning to the ancient Greeks than they do to us today. When we realize this, Plato’s account of Atlantis can be read without distortion and we can follow his clues to their logical conclusion. But in order to understand this Atlantean worldview we need to reconsider our own presuppositions about geography.

Here’s a map of the Earth. It doesn’t challenge any of our current beliefs. North is up as it is always traditionally depicted. Notice how the north-is-up perspective causes the oceans to appear as distinctive bodies of water. The Pacific and Atlantic seem to be entirely separate oceans. This north-is-up viewpoint also highlights the separateness of the continents. Now I’d like to show you a map of the world showing south in the up position.

Plato’s account of Atlantis places the lost continent in what he calls the real ocean and we can see what he meant in this US Naval projection of the world as seen from Antarctica. Notice how all the oceans that we know today: the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific are really one ocean. This is a geographic fact: a fact recorded in Plato’s account of Atlantis. And Plato expands on this description to say that the Mediterranean Sea is merely a basin of the ocean, separated from it by a narrow channel.

From this perspective it is certainly accurate to say that the Mediterranean Sea is really a part of the World Ocean separated from it by a narrow entrance at the place we call the Strait of Gibraltar. Seen from Antarctica the rest of the continents form a ring around the real ocean.

Here’s Africa, Europe, western Asia, Australia, eastern Asia, which joins western North America (bottom right) and eastern North America (bottom left) and finally at the very bottom is South America pointing to Antarctica. Plato talks about “the whole opposite continent,” a phrase that makes sense once we view the world from Antarctica. This whole opposite continent has not been understood before. Most researchers into Atlantis treat it as gibberish or they imagine that it must refer to America. It actually refers to all the continents other than Antarctica.

Plato acquired the record of Atlantis from his ancestor Solon. As I said, the ancient Greeks used words that have different geographic meanings today.

In Solon’s time the earth-island was divided politically into: Europe, Libya and Asia. “Libya” included all of North Africa. “Asia” was an area which covered what we would call the Middle East. I will be returning to the size of Libya and Asia in a moment but I want you to notice that surrounding this earth-island was a vast ocean that the Greeks called “the Atlantic”. This body of water circled the earth-disk. Most researchers have mistaken the Atlantic to be the North Atlantic Ocean but for the Greeks of Solon’s time the Atlantic was a body of water that completely encircles the world. It lay to the west, yes, but it also lay to east, north and south. So in its true historic sense the Atlantic was a much larger body of water than just the North Atlantic.

At the westerly extreme of the ancient Greek world (see red dot) lay the “Pillars of Heracles”, what we know today as the Strait of Gibraltar. It is a narrow entrance which separates the Mediterranean Sea from the outer ocean. The Pillars of Heracles was the limit of the known world to the Greeks of Solon’s time. Land which lay outside this channel was unknown to the Greeks. To travel beyond the Pillars of Heracles was to travel beyong the known world. (This second meaning of the expression “the Pillars of Heracles” as the limit of the known world is ignored by all other theories of Atlantis).

Plato describes Atlantis as a mountainous, high altitude island larger than Libya and Asia combined. That would make it slightly larger than the lower 48 U.S. states.

Antarctica, like Libya and Asia, is slightly larger than the U.S. I have separated Lesser Antarctica from Greater Antarctica because I want to treat these areas separately in a moment. The mere fact that Plato tells us that the Earth contains a vast island continent the size of Antarctica is amazing in itself. He goes on to give us a most interesting clue. He says that the whole island continent is high above sea-level. And this is true about: Antarctica.

As you can see Antarctica is by far the highest altitude continent on our planet:

The Egyptian priest spoke to Solon about Atlantis in terms he could understand. He passed on the account as an Atlantean would who was describing his home from the shores of the lost continent before its destruction around 9,600 B.C. The ocean level is lower (as it was nearly 12,000 years ago) joining England to Europe and Japan to Asia. Lesser Antarctica is depicted in its former ice-free state. Notice the accompanying islands.

Here are Plato’s words:

[The island of Atlantis was] “…larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it there was passage for the seafarers of those times to reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For these regions that lie within the strait… seem to be but a bay having a narrow entrance; but the other ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it may with fullest truth and fitness be named a continent.” – Plato, Timaeus

I’ve spent a lot of time on Plato because I don’t believe his contribution to lost knowledge is fully appreciated, but he is not the only source that points to Antarctica as the location of Atlantis.

In 1665, the German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a massive book which included a reproduction of an ancient Egyptian map of Atlantis.

The map had been stolen from Egypt by the Romans, probably after the fall of Cleopatra. Now when this map came into Kircher’s hands he didn’t possess an accurate globe with which he might compare it. Let’s first look at the map as he saw it. The label in Latin translates:

“Site of Atlantis, now beneath the sea, according to the beliefs of the Egyptians and the description of Plato.”

The Egyptians believed that south, not north, was at the top of the world. This made sense to them because that was the direction from which the Nile flowed. And since the Nile was so important to them its source must be at the top of the world. Kircher’s map accepts the Egyptian concept that “south-is-up” as can be seen by his compass which points downwards. To re-establish our familiar “north-is-up” perspective we have to turn the map upside down.

Kircher believed that this ancient Egyptian map represented Atlantis as an island in the North Atlantic Ocean between Spain and Africa on our right and America on the left. But what if Kircher got it wrong? What if the limited geographic knowledge that he had at his disposal caused him to locate Atlantis in the wrong place? Let’s imagine that we have just excavated this ancient Egyptian map from beneath the paws of the Sphinx. It our task to discover how it fits into our planet’s geography. If we remove Kircher’s labels and symbols we can see more clearly what he must have had at hand in 1665.

Here’s what Kircher must have been working with. Now, if we search the globe for a place that might fit this configuration we find a near-perfect match in a place where south would naturally be up.

Here’s Kircher’s Egyptian map of Atlantis compared to a modern geophysical globe showing south in the up position. South America on the right. Madagascar and South Africa on the left.

The present shape of ice-free Antarctica as depicted in this modern view is based upon the current ocean level, not that of 9,600 B.C. Atlantis did not actually sink beneath the waves. Instead, as the old ice caps melted, the ocean level rose, covering some of the continent’s permutations.

Further distortions in our modern map, compared to Kircher’s, are a result of the weight of today’s Antarctic ice sheet. This immense blanket of snow and ice depressed parts of the continent, causing more and more land to fall below ocean level.

I believe that the Egyptian map of Atlantis represents in size, shape, scale and position an ice-free Antarctica.

Now what I’ve shown you so far is something that I understood for the first time twenty years ago. Plato’s account of Atlantis seemed like a true depiction of the world as seen from Antarctica. I knew I was onto something but as I followed the research I encountered:

The Antarctic Ice Cap! In 1976, the encyclopedias claimed confidently and absolutely that Antarctica had been under ice for 50 to 60 million years! Now it seemed to me that Plato’s account had been amazingly accurate when it came to geography so I decided to treat the question of the age of the Antarctic Ice Sheet as an open rather than a closed question. In 1990 I was rewarded when two geologists made a discovery that completely reopened the question of the age of the Ice Sheet. Working just 250 miles from the South Pole the geologists discovered the frozen remains of forest that was later dated to be between two and three million years old. So it turns out that the encyclopedias of 1976 were wrong by a much as 58 million years! The absolute ancient age of the Antarctic ice cap wasn’t so absolute afterall.

I want you to notice that most of the ice (nearly two and half miles thick) lies on what we know as Greater Antarctica (on right in map above). Darker colors here represent thicker ice sheets. On Lesser Antarctica (on the left), the side facing South America and the area corresponding to the island on the Kircher map, the ice sheet is quite shallow. I thought perhaps this curious phenomenon could be accounted for by a greater snowfall on Greater Antarctica. But when I turned to the snowfall patterns this is what I found:

It’s snowing like heck on Lesser Antarctica, the black areas, while over here on Greater Antarctica (on the right and the area which holds nearly 90 per cent of the world’s fresh water) there is virtually no annual snowfall. Greater Antarctica is a polar desert. There is a dramatic anomaly here: the area of the greatest ice has the least snowfall while the area of least ice receives the most snowfall. Current snowfall patterns could not produce the ice sheet that we see today. In this case, the present is certainly not the key to the past.

When I looked through the scientific literature trying to find an explanation for this anomaly I found only silence. There was nothing to be found. Nobody seemed even curious about the fact that the greatest ice sheet in the world does not have snow falling on it! And when I looked at the northern hemisphere I found a whole host of anomalies.

To anyone who has ever visited a museum in North America, this is a familiar map depicting the Ice Age. This is what the continent looked like 12,000 years ago (the time of Atlantis I might add). We are told that the native people who first arrived in America came across a land bridge some 12,000 years ago and crossed into a largely ice-free Alaska. From there they made their way through an ice-free corridor that existed between two massive ice sheets. Notice that the Queen Charlotte Islands were ice free at this time. This is the homeland of the Haida whose story of a lost city I will be telling later.

There are several problems with the tradition model for the peopling of America. New archeological sites have been discovered in Chile, Brazil, Pennsylvania and New Mexico which are much older than 10,000 B.C. Archeologists have been slow to accept the implication of these sites: the people of America have been on this continent long before 10,000 B.C. Clearly the traditional version of how and when the people first arrived in America needs also to be re-opened.

Another problem is, why is this ice-free corridor right smack dab between two massive ice sheets? And why are the ice sheets here at all? Why don’t they extend to cover Siberia, Beringia and most of Alaska? Now I had a lot of questions and I wasn’t finding a lot of satisfactory answers in the scientific literature. But then I read Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by Charles Hapgood and learned that Kircher’s map was not alone. There were other ancient maps showing Antarctica without ice, including the famous Piri Re’is Map.

Hapgood showed that the 1513 Piri Re’is map contained at least 24 points that were accurate within a half a degree of longitude. European explorers did not match this level of accuracy until the 1770s during Captain Cook’s famous voyages. The southern portion of the map seems to depict the subglacial features of Antarctica. This discovery was made by Captain Arlington Mallery but Hapgood took up the map and made many more discoveries about it. Incidentally, Hapgood believed that this map included Atlantis. Here’s where Charles placed the lost continent:

Hapgood believed that Plato’s whole opposite continent was a reference to America and this island (Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul) now beneath the Atlantic Ocean, seemed to him to be a place that matched Plato’s words. But these Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul can in no way be compared to a land mass high above sea level and larger than Libya and Asia combined. Nevertheless, Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings remains the classic work on ancient cartography.

The second book that I read by Hapgood was his Path of the Pole which provided a mechanism to resolve all the questions that were haunting me. Here was a theory that could explain a temperate Lesser Antarctica around Plato’s date of 9600 B.C. and at the same time move me towards an understanding of a host of other scientific puzzles.

With Rose’s help I wrote a paper incorporating my ideas and sent it to Charles Hapgood. Hapgood enthusiastically responded to our letter and told us that our work was the first truly scientific exploration of his work that had ever been done. (See Hapgood’s first letter to the Flem-Aths.) Of course we were delighted but also astonished. Why had scientists ignored Hapgood’s work? Afterall, Albert Einstein had written a glowing foreword to the first edition of his book. So my amazement led me to read about the history, sociology and philosophy of science and I soon discovered that what was happening to Hapgood wasn’t unusual at all. There is a vast difference between the sociology and logic of science. Logically, Hapgood’s theory of earth crust displacement should not have been ignored but that’s not the way science works. So let’s consider his idea now.

Here’s the inside of the Earth: the core, the mantle and the crust.

This is a blow-up of the area of the Earth near the surface and we have exaggerated the dimensions so that you can see the crust, which rests upon a mobile layer, the asthenosphere which in turn rests upon the solid mantle. An earth crust displacement is a movement of the entire crust (including the ocean basins) over the asthenosphere. Now keep in mind that the Earth’s axis does not change. We still have the same tilt and the same seasons but the relationship of the crust to the climatic zones is changed. In other words, the climatic zones are stable: the crust moves.

To understand the ecological upheaval created by the Earth’s shifting crust we need to compare its position to the climatic zones both before and after the displacement.

Here we have North America’s position relative to the polar zone. The top circle represent today’s Arctic Circle. The bottom circle shows the Arctic Circle before the earth’s crust shifted. You’ll notice that these two circles overlap on Greenland. That explains why Greenland has most of the glaciation in the northern hemisphere. The ice never got a chance to melt.

The crust that used to be in the Arctic Circle includes the Great Lakes as well as Lake Winnipeg, Great Slave Lake and hundreds of thousands of other, smaller, lakes. North America is a water-rich continent because it used to be trapped in the polar zone.

The highlighted areas in the present Arctic Circle mark lands which were once temperate. In When the Sky Fell we show how Arctic Norway, northern Alaska, Beringia and Siberia were much warmer before 9,600 B.C. than they are today. They exhibit temperate conditions in a land that is now much too cold to support such animals as hyenas, sabertooth tigers, antelope and the whole menagerie of species that we associated with East African terrain.

Now before I take you to the southern hemisphere I want to take you on a quick trip to Mars.

In December 1985 I read an article in Scientific American which explained a series of mysteries about the surface of Mars by assuming that the planet’s whole crust had once undergone an abrupt displacement. You can imagine how excited I was. I only wished Hapgood had live to see his ideas being applied to another planet. To support the idea of a crustal displacement on Mars, Dr. Peter Schultz of Brown University examined the planet’s craters. Asteroids or comets that impact within the polar zones exhibit characteristic crater signatures because they land on thick deposits of dust and ice that accumulate only at the poles. Schultz scanned Mars in search of craters exhibiting these polar features outside the polar zones. He found two such areas and wrote:

“These zones are antipodal: they are on the opposite faces of the planet. The deposits show many of the processes and characteristics of today’s poles, but they lie near the present-day equator.”

Now if the antipodal argument is offered as evidence of crustal displacement on Mars then we should at least consider it here on Earth. So let’s look at the former position of the Earth’s crust in the southern hemisphere.

Here we see the southern areas which are opposite or antipodal to those in the north. The area in the southern Indian Ocean is antipodal to the lakes that occupy most of Canada. In this area lies the still ice-covered Heard Island. The ice sheet on Heard Island cannot be explained by current snowfall patterns. Heard Island is antipodal to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan which was under ice 12,000 years ago. Both areas exhibit polar features (ice or melted ice in the form of lakes) in a temperate zone. This fits the antipodal criteria used as evidence for a crustal shift on Mars.

Greater Antarctica has so much ice because it remained inside the Antarctic Circle both before and after the earth’s crust shifted. And the area of thickest ice on Greater Antarctica is opposite to the ice sheet on central Greenland. Lesser Antarctica is antipodal to the areas in the north which were teeming with temperate adapted creatures such as those in Arctic Norway, Alaska, Siberia and Beringia.

I spoke a moment ago about the difference between the logic and sociology of science and I can think of no better place to demonstrate this disparity than in Beringia. Every archeologist is perfectly willing to accept there was once a sub-continent which lay between Siberia and Alaska 12,000 years ago that was teeming with wildlife but which is now dead beneath the ocean. But anyone who entertains the idea that the same thing might have occurred on the exact opposite side of the Earth is breaking a taboo. To speak of a lost continent in the north yet to deny one in the south defies logic!

The lost animals of Beringia also need explanation. These animals died off because there were in a land that experienced a dramatic change in latitude. We can see this through what we call in When the Sky Fell, the “ring of death.”

The ring of death depicted here shows the areas of globe that experienced the greatest latitude change. (North and South America, Antarctica and Siberia). It also happens that these areas experience a massive loss of animal life. The continents further away from the ring suffered fewer extinctions.

And this pattern is consistent around the world: large mammals like mammoths and saber-toothed tigers became extinct in Alaska but in Africa huge mammals such as elephants and lions survive.

I’d like to return you to Ice Age America for a moment to see the world as it was before the last Earth crust displacement.

We’re looking at what we now call the West Coast of North America, as it was 12,000 years ago when the crust was in a different position. The coast we see here could then be called the South Coast. Let’s imagine that we are on the Queen Charlotte Islands, the home of the Haida. From their perspective, what today is east was then north. For the Haida the Hudson Bay was to the north, Alaska and Beringia lay to the west and California lay to the east. The sun appeared to rise from California and set in Alaska. Under these conditions a movement from what we call the Old World of Siberia to the New World of America is simply a journey from west to east. And that makes it a lot easier for the people of America to arrive thousands of years before what archeologists are considering today. And they didn’t need the ice-free corridor to bring them to America. This ice-free corridor simply mirrors the arc of the sun’s former path: the area which received the most sunshine. Its existence is to be expected.

But the ice-free corridor isn’t the key to the peopling of America. The stories the first people tell of their arrival in America are quite different.

This is Mount Shasta in California. The Shasta believe that this mountain was a refuge for their ancestors at the time of a great flood. The ancestors climbed the mountain to escape the rising ocean. And this is not the only mountain which saved humanity from the flood in native American mythology. We have two types of stories, one in which the people are already in America when the flood comes (stories like that of the Shasta) and also stories that tell of their arrival in ships that land on mountain tops.

The Okanagan of British Columbia and Washington state tell us that their ancestors fled from a sinking island in the middle of the ocean. And the Haida relate how long ago their ancestors lived in the world’s largest village. Life was carefree until the chief of the heavens decided to destroy humankind by changing the sky and bringing a worldwide flood. Survivors escaped in large canoes that took them to a new land where they landed on a mountain top. We believe that the sky did appear to change dramatically before the flood and that’s why we called our book When the Sky Fell. And we take perfectly seriously the Haida’s loss of a great city at the time of the flood. Perhaps archeologists should listen with a little respect to the so-called “stories” of the first people.

In 681 A.D., the Japanese Emperor Temnu ordered the Guild of Narrators to record the most ancient myths. The resulting book, the Ko-ji-ki told of a time when the earth was very young and the first land called Onogorojima lay near either the North or South Pole. I believe that Onogorojima and Atlantis are different names for Antarctica. Now I realize that these are bold claims but I think that I presented evidence for the reality of an earth crust displacement in my 1981 article in the Anthropological Journal of Canada. (A copy appears in the appendix of When the Sky Fell.)

The problem archeologists face is that the fine art of agriculture suddenly appears on different continents at approximately the same time, around 9,600 B.C. That is, at the time of the destruction of Atlantis and the opening of the ice-free corridor, and the so-called sinking of Beringia. Now I saw the hand of the Atlanteans in this development but I couldn’t use the “A-word” if I wanted to be published in a scientific journal in 1981. And it’s no different now. The idea that Antarctica might have experienced the same fate as Beringia is just not considered scientific by the powers that control scientific publishing. But I’m proud to be associated with Atlantis. I think the taboo against the word should be broken. In fact, we are all collectively participating in a taboo by even attending this symposium. I just hope we don’t get arrested by the Paradigm Police.

In this crescent or horn beneath Japan we find the earliest known civilizations in the world and the most important sites for agricultural origins in what is called the Old World. I call this crescent (as defined by the current and former path of the Tropic of Cancer) the Horn of Plenty for it was the most favoured land after the last Earth crust displacement. There were also favourable places in the tropics which I will discuss later but I want you to appreciate how much happened in this particular area.

I call this whole area the Horn of Plenty because it was such an important area for the domestication of both plants and animals. The highlighted area of China is the widest in the Horn of Plenty and not surprisingly China domesticated the greatest number of crops. The Chinese have lost much of their heritage. I believe that there are many archeological treasures yet to be excavated from ancient China.

India domesticated the second largest number of crops. Recent investigations by David Frawley and his associates have lifted the veil over ancient India. We are beginning to see that India is much older than most of us have suspected.

The person who first attempted to push back the clock for India was called the Beloved Leader of the People, Bal Gangadhar Tilak was jailed by the British in 1897 for seditious writings. While in prison, Tilak read deeply in all the Vedic literature and when he was released wrote a book called The Arctic Home in the Vedas. Tilak summarized a key passage from the Zend Avesta:

“Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant.”

Yima escapes from Airyan Vaejo (the island paradise now at the pole) in a ship which, like Noah’s Ark, survives the Flood.

Now I believe that Tilak was right about the ice-covered island at the pole but I think it was Antarctica not in the Arctic.

The so-called Fertile Crescent where wheat, barley, goats, pigs and sheep were first domesticated is a sub-section of the large Horn of Plenty. Here we must mention the lost island paradise of Dilmun which was recorded by the ancient Sumerians. The myth of this lost land bears an uncanny resemblance to the mythology of the Haida of British Columbia. The ancient Sumerians tell of a time long ago, when their ancestors lived on the island of Dilmun. Like the great village of the Haida, life on this land was carefree until the sky-god and the flood-god decided to destroy humankind by changing the sky and bringing a worldwide flood. Survivors escaped in a large ship which took them to a new land where they landed upon a mountain top. Russian scientists have suggested a possible linguistic link between the Haida and the ancient Sumerians.

And now we come to Egypt. I remember the first conversation I had with John West. He asked me where I thought the Egyptians might have been during the Flood. I replied that I thought that they might have been in the highlands of Ethiopia.

The highlands of Ethiopia were midway between the current and former path of the equator. This tropical oasis was a place of refuge from the rising ocean and it contained a fresh water lake: Lake Tana. From Lake Tana survivors of the crustal displacement could follow the Blue Nile downstream to an area near present-day Sudan. Here the Blue and White Nile tributaries merge to form the Nile River. And here, near present-day Khartoum there emerged a culture known as the Nubia where agriculture began around 10,000 B.C., the very date that Plato’s Egyptian priest says that Atlantis was destroyed. Now there is another highland tropical oasis in Thailand.

At Spirit Cave we find the earliest known experiments with the domestication of rice. And no doubt, we will eventually find other archeological sites near here. On the opposite side of the globe lies Lake Titicaca. Like Lake Tana, it was a high-altitude freshwater lake that ultimately came to rest at the same distance from the equator after the displacement as it was before, creating ideal conditions for survival. This area was the site of the origin of the domestication of potatoes.

Here’s Lake Titicaca:

On this high-altitude freshwater lake are the remains of Tiahuanaco. Arthur Posnansky linked Tiahuanaco with Aztlan, the mythical white island homeland of the Aztecs.

On the shores of Lake Titicaca live the Aymara. One Sunday morning when we were living in London I read an article in the Times about the Aymara language which really woke me up. Let me quote the relevant passage:

“Aymara is rigorous and simple – which means that its syntactial rules always apply, and can be written out concisely in the sort of algebraic shorthand that computers understand. Indeed, such is its purity that some historians think it did not just evolve, like other languages, but was actually constructed from scratch.”

An artificial language found in an area of the world that had always intrigued me because of my research into the origins of agriculture. An area that I knew would be ideal for Atlantean survivors. It would be hard to imagine how or why the Aymara would find time to invent a language. Such developments are much more likely the product of an advanced civilization like that of Atlantis. I am convinced that the Aymara language is another holographic fragment from a lost world. This artificial language, which doesn’t evolve but remains pure, may just be a key to both our past and the future.

Our belief in progress locks us into a linear notion of time. We see ourselves progressing towards the future: leaving the past behind. But this is only a modern fixation, a deep assumption, about how to view time. The Aymara people of Lake Titicaca look at time another way. They treat the future as behind them. They consider it a hidden place that they can’t see, a place at which they will inevitably arrive but need not focus on. Psychologically the Aymara face the past.

And for us this Return to the Source Symposium offers us the opportunity to face our past without prejudice.

Plato has left us a detailed map to the greatest treasure of all. We can follow his clues to find the capital city of Atlantis.

His account tells us that the city lay mid-way on the main island facing towards the outer islands. That narrows down the search considerably.

And he tells us that the city is completely surrounded by mountains. This can only be true if the islands that are off the mainland are themselves mountainous. And this is in fact the case for this area of Antarctica.

So when we combine these clues we find a subglacial plain that is the size of Pennsylvania. Perhaps we might, in our lifetime, excavate the remains of an advanced civilization beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Who knows what we might find in the Atlantean libraries? Who knows what we will think of their art and their science? Is there after all, wisdom to be mined from there? Whatever we discover, I am convinced that it will change the way we view ourselves and revolutionize the way we see time. The present need not be the only key to understanding time. It is not too late for us to listen to the wisdom of the ancients. The past can enrich and even guide our present. And the past might even turn out to be the key to our future.