Did Seafarers Map The WorldRivers -- even short, glacier-fed rivers -- in Antarctica? Geologists maintain that during the last ice age, ending about 10,000 B.C., Antarctic ice extended north to cover Patagonia, and then contracted to its present continental dimensions. So Piri Re'is's ice-free coasts and islands and Oronteus Finaeus' rivers had to be imaginary. Yet as Hapgood was to learn, cores taken in 1949 from the bottom of the Ross Sea, across Antarctica from Queen Maud Land, consisted, at depths laid down over many millennia ending by about 4000 B.C., of the fine-grained sediment washed down by rivers in temperate lands.
Long Before Columbus?
by Ormonde deKay Jr
and Richard Cravens
"Mysteries of the Past", p 185
In Renaissance maps of northern regions Hapgood found other puzzling features: an ice-free Greenland; the British Isles with glaciers covering their centers; a partly glaciated Sweden; the Aegean Sea dotted with numerous extra islands that had since been drowned, presumably, by the melting of ice further north; and the precisely drawn Pacific Coast of North America still connected by a land bridge to Asia.
Iridium-rich layers and catastrophismKyte et al have discovered a 2.3-million year-old sedimentary layer under the Antarctic Ocean that contains iridium and gold concentrations comparable to those in the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The noble metals are mostly contained in millimeter-sized grains that resemble ablation debris from a large extraterrestrial object. Unlike the Cretaceous-Tertiary episode, however, the newly found layer is not accompanied by evidence of mass biological extinctions.
William R. Corliss
Science Frontiers
No. 18: Nov-Dec 1981When Antarctica Was GreenPeter Webb and his coworkers have found pollen and the remains of roots and stems of plants in an area stretching some 1300 kilometers along the Transantarctic Mountains. The Antarctic wood is so recent that it floats and burns with ease. Webb's group postulates that a shrub-like forest grew in Antarctica as recently as 3 million years ago... Nevertheless, these deposits of fresh-looking wood do suggest that trees recently grew only 400 miles from the South Pole. Also of interest is the fact that the sedimentary layers containing the wood have been displaced as much as 3000 meters by faults, indicating recent large-scale geological changes.
William R. Corliss
Science Frontiers
No. 45: May-Jun 1986An Antarctic Bone BedW. Zinsmeister was accustomed to scoff at the idea that the Age of Dinosaurs ended violently with the impact of a giant asteroid some 65 million years ago. He always asked: "Where's the layer of burnt and twisted dinosaur bones?" His certainty was shaken, however, when he began mapping fossil deposits on Seymour Island, Antarctica. He didn't find the dinosaur bones but rather a giant bed of fish bones at least 50 square kilometers in area. Some sort of catastrophe must have annihilated untold millions of fish. And guess what? This great bone bed was deposited directly on top of that layer of extraterrestrial iridium that marks the 65-million-year-old Cretaceous Tertiary boundary at many sites around the world.
William R. Corliss
Science Frontiers
No. 104: Mar-Apr 1996
Not easy to spot, doesn't understand why it happens, but this help explains irregular intervals. Uh-huh, yeah, right.Earth's Changing Orbit Explains Ice Ages[V]ariations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun could explain why ice ages, which occur about every 100,000 years, have not been more regular... Jose Rial, a professor of geophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill... looked at isotopes, or variants, of oxygen found by drilling into the sea floor. Such "heavy" oxygen is found more commonly when it is cold. Rial found evidence of both the 100,000 and 413,000 year cycles, but said they were not so easy to spot because the two "interfered" with each other in much the same way that interfering with radio waves -- a process known as modulation -- allows broadcasters to send information in the form of sound. He said the pattern looked like an FM (frequency modulated) radio wave. He does not know the physical mechanism behind this but says it helps explain why the ice ages seemed to occur at irregular intervals.
7.49 a.m. ET (1149 GMT) July 23, 1999