Sunken ruins near Cuba would fit hydroplate theory

Earlier this month, Archaeo News published a short article entitled "An ancient 'lost civilization' in Cuba?" discussing the discovery of what are alleged to be the ruins of large structures submerged in waters off the western end of Cuba.

The article references an earlier piece published in National Geographic in 2002 ("New Underwater Finds Raise Questions About Flood Myths," by Brian Handwerk). That article notes that the structures are located in waters at depths between 1,900 feet and 2,500 feet. It also cites a geologist who declares, "If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time" (in other words, he would find it difficult to come up with geological processes that could have created the structures, rather than the deliberate hand of man).

The National Geographic article leaves the impression that the end of the Ice Age and the rising seas that would result can explain sunken ruins, this explanation runs into some problems. Most importantly, unlike the man-made ruins located off the coast of Japan and India, these ruins are under thousands of feet of water. The melting of the Ice Age ice sheets would probably be able to account for no more than three hundred feet of sea level rise world-wide.

Another problem conventional explanations encounter is the fact that current theories of mankind's ancient history argue that man was a primitive hunter-gatherer during those distant millennia before the ice sheets melted, and only began to live in cities and have division of labor and the ability to construct sophisticated stone monuments much later.

Nevertheless, the National Geographic article confidently declares: "While images of catastrophic floods are popular, many scholars argue that the real rising sea level slowly invaded the Stone Age hunting territories for thousands of years, and the stories compress this event into overnight floods, storms, and destruction," apparently without realizing the contradiction of describing "Stone Age hunting territories" and submerged ruins built by a civilization that was clearly not a bunch of Stone Age hunters.

If these Cuban ruins are in fact genuine remnants of human civilization, they create big problems for conventional theories (perhaps this is why the academic community does not seem to be in any particular hurry to examine them more closely).

However, they would not pose a problem for the hydroplate theory of Walt Brown, discussed in previous posts. According to Dr. Brown's theory, the events surrounding a cataclysmic global flood led to continents being violently buckled like train cars in a train wreck, which thickened the continental plates and led to a period during which the continents were higher and the seas lower. Over time, the force of gravity caused the continents to sink and the sea floors to experience a corresponding rise, which raised the sea levels by thousands of feet.

The hydroplate theory explains many geological mysteries around the globe, but it has been largely ignored as an explanation for the many archaeological mysteries of mankind's ancient past. Alternative theorists have largely focused on theories such as a near miss from a planet or the crustal-displacement theory. The Mathisen Corollary discusses the possibility that the hydroplate theory could explain mankind's ancient past much better, and certainly better than the prevailing theories, which are full of contradictions, as we can see from this discussion of the undersea Cuban ruins.

Earth's big roll

In the previous post, we looked at Antarctica and some of the reasons why it is such an important source of clues about earth's ancient past. Specifically, there is evidence in the remains of animals and plants that Antarctica was once home to temperate species that could not possibly survive there in the climate of today.

Even if we assume that earth's climate was once much warmer than it is today, it is difficult to argue that regions well within the Antarctic Circle could have supported abundant plants and animals -- the low angle of the sunlight when it is present, and the complete absence of sunlight during the winter, would make such regions inhospitable even on a relatively warmer earth.

Similar fossils of plants and animals have also been found far to the north, well within the Arctic Circle, on islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago very close to Greenland. For decades, scientists have studied and written about the extensive remains of forests and animal life on Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island. This article from the Review of Paleobotany and Palynology describes the remains of "extensive forests in areas which today support only tundra."

The report describes evidence of several generations of pines and metasequoias, extensive forest floor leaf litter, flowering plants, ginkgo trees and two species of magnolias! Other reports have described the remains of crocodilian reptiles, apes, dinosaurs, and evidence of swamps.

The conventional explanation for all this evidence is that the earth has simply experienced lots of climate change over the eons, and was simply much warmer hundreds of millions of years ago. However, as noted previously, some of the wood from Antarctic regions is not even fossilized and still burns and floats -- if the earth has experienced slow climate change over millions of years, we would expect any non-fossilized wood to have rotted away long before the ice sheets arrived. It's not as though the climate supported trees one day and the next day turned to sub-zero temperatures and grew massive sheets of ice. Normal wood would decay during the transitional period of years.

Because the conventional paradigm refuses to entertain catastrophic explanations, it has been left to outsiders to try to connect the dots. Rand and Rose Flem-Ath have recognized the significant problems to conventional theory posed by the evidence in the Arctic and the Antarctic and have put forward an alternative theory first introduced by Professor Charles Hapgood (1904 - 1982). This theory, called the earth-crust displacement theory, proposes a mechanism whereby the crust of the earth could actually shift in response to powerful forces of physics, and this could have moved regions that were formerly outside of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles into those much colder regions.

In a fascinating interview on Red Ice Radio in August of 2009, Rand Flem-Ath explained this theory and how it would explain not only the mysteries of the Arctic fossils but also the legends found in cultures around the world of a lost island homeland, which the Flem-Aths believe could have been Antarctica and which could have been the origin of Plato's description of Atlantis. To hear the first hour of the interview as a podcast, look for the orange "RSS" button under the word "Subscribe" on the interview page (or go to the iTunes store and search for Red Ice Radio under the podcast section), or subscribe to Red Ice Creations to get access to both hours of the interview as well as all the archives of interviews for the past five years.

While I believe that the earth-crust displacement theory is better than the conventional assertion that the climate in the past was simply warm enough to support lush forests, swamps, and wildlife within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles where it is dark half the year, I also believe that the earth-crust displacement theory suffers from many problems. Most fundamentally, as Mr. Flem-Ath admits in the interview above, the catalyst which would cause such crustal shifting is still unknown, and only speculative theories have been proposed so far. However, the basic concept of the explanation -- that there was a catastrophic event which resulted in a shift in the location of points on the earth, resulting in land that was once at lower latitudes being rotated up into Arctic latitudes and down into Antarctic latitudes -- may be quite correct.

The hydroplate theory of Walt Brown explains how such a shift could have been initiated by the events surrounding a catastrophic global flood. Dr. Brown's theory, which can be seen in its entirety on line, explains these events here in some detail. If you continue down that long page, you will find a section entitled "Earth Roll" about three-quarters of the way down, under the section describing the "Recovery Phase" of the catastrophe. His theory explains the forces that would have led to a roll of the entire earth (rather than just the crust), roughly along longitude 85^o west -- which would mean that Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island experienced the most roll.

Interestingly, Mr. Flem-Ath (who apparently has not heard of Brown's hydroplate theory, since in the interview he states that the earth-crust displacement theory is the only alternative theory he knows which addresses the Arctic fossil problem) comes up with the same general longitude of the shift and mentions it in the above interview, along with the very helpful analogy of describing the earth as a basketball held between your two hands: if you rotate it by simply turning your wrists, the area under your palms won't change latitude very much at all, but the area on the line that moves upwards towards your nose will change latitude quite a lot. That line was around the line we call 85^o west longitude today.

We have also seen that Dr. Brown's theory explains numerous geological features found today on earth that other theories cannot, such as the gravity anomalies of deep ocean trenches. His book describes hundreds of others in detail. Dr. Brown's theory would also explain many unsolved mysteries found in human archaeology, such as submerged ruins found beneath hundreds of feet of seawater.

I wholeheartedly commend the Flem-Aths for their advocacy of the theories of the late Professor Hapgood, whose extensive work I also greatly respect, and for their tremendous and ongoing contribution to the discussion about mankind's ancient past and the connection between human history and geology. Even though I don't agree that the crustal-displacement theory is the best solution, their argument about a possible connection between Plato's Atlantis and the island continent of Antarctica is fascinating and plausible, and I very much hope to meet them someday in person.

Review of Graham Hancock's Underworld

The following is a review I wrote of Graham Hancock's 2002 book, Underworld: the Mysterious Origins of Civilization

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Although Graham Hancock's Underworld has been criticized as being "lengthy" or "disorganized," the sites he examines are unified by their contributions to his theory of a more ancient date for civilization than conventionally accepted. Further, the areas of inquiry in this book are essential for any student of mankind's ancient history. Perhaps each could have been a book of its own, but none of them can be ignored: the evidence of man-made ruins at depths of over 75 feet, the mysterious megalithic temples of Malta, the subject of the portolan maps and charts, and the ancient Jomon culture of Japan.

While I believe that the series of events posited in Walt Brown's hydroplate theory better explains both the mechanism of the rise of sea levels and the reason why sites such as Mnajdra on Malta continue to maintain precise alignments with the solstice sunrise after at least 5,000 years, Mr. Hancock has done every student of alternative historical explanation a service by covering these less well-known archaeological treasures as well as the breaking story of the underwater ruins. If critics would like a book that delves into them in a different manner, they should write their own -- Mr. Hancock has certainly provided an excellent jumping-off point and one that belongs in the library of any student of the mystery of mankind's ancient past.

As noted, I believe that the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown provides a more rigorous explanation for the phenomenon of a rising ocean level, some centuries after the cataclysmic global flood.

As Dr. Brown explains in greater detail in his book, immediately after the flood, the sea levels were significantly lower than they are today, but eventually rose due to the sinking of the continents. I also discuss this mechanism in conjunction with the discovery of underwater ruins in the Mathisen Corollary.

Nevertheless, while disagreeing on the precise details, I am in agreement with Mr. Hancock that the evidence he provides in Underworld clearly indicates a rise in ocean levels within human memory. His analysis of early maps and navigational charts, as well as of the contours of the undersea terrain off the coast of India, the Maldives, Malta, and elsewhere provides powerful confirmation of this important but little-known fact of human history.

Furthermore, his discussion of the megalithic temples of Malta, of aspects of ancient Hindu culture, and his examination of the mysterious Jomon of ancient Japan are all important and lesser-known clues in the search for the truth of mankind's ancient past.

Mr. Hancock is an engaging writer, an expansive intellect, and a courageous promoter of theories that he knows will invite critics and personal attacks. He is not afraid to go in a variety of directions and to correct his previous hypotheses when he uncovers new evidence that cause him to reconsider or revise his conclusions. Because of his many gifts and his ceaseless inquiring, he has become one of the most well-known voices for the idea that mankind's past is dramatically different than previously believed.

While different people examining this broad subject will arrive at different conclusions and will surely have intellectual disagreements over various points, Mr. Hancock should be viewed as a strong ally and in many ways a true pioneer in the cause of bringing mankind closer to the truth of our distant past.