Atlantis, the Igloo Effect, and Mass Extinctions

The legend of Atlantis may have more truth to it than is generally believed. Because the existence of such an empire would go a long way towards explaining why ancient buildings and religious symbols all over the world are as similar as they are.

Places as far apart as Peru, Mexico, Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and Cambodia, all have ancient structures that are remarkably similar. They also have gods carrying handbags and displaying other symbols that are virtually identical in all these places.

At the very least, these places must have been connected by a network of trade and cooperation.

Not a new idea

The map shown below demonstrates that this is not a new idea. People have been speculating about Atlantis for a long time.

However, this particular map contains some errors.

If Atlantis existed some twelve thousand years ago, Scandinavia would have been under a thick layer of ice, and so would northern parts of North America. They cannot possibly have been part of the Atlantis empire.

Position and extent of Atlantis and its empire, postulated by Ignatius L. Donnelly in 1882

By Ignatius Donnelly; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 22:14, 28 September 2010 (UTC) – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b36915.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons: Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11626443

Remarkable accuracy

However, the most remarkable thing about this map is not its errors and omissions. Rather, it’s where the author put the island of Atlantis. He drew it in at a location that would in fact have been dry land at the time of its supposed existence.

The author of the map couldn’t have known this for sure. Because the map was drawn before ocean floors were properly mapped out.

At most, he was aware of the Acores, which are located in that area.

But the landmass isn’t drawn into the map because of the Acores. It’s there because that’s where Plato put it, more than two thousand years ago.

Strategic location

If a dominant civilization existed at the end of the great ice age, we can hardly imagine a better location for its center.

The island of Atlantis was large enough to sustain a civilization. It was near impossible to invade due to its surrounding seas, and its central position on the map would have made it a perfect spring board for imperial expansion.

So, it’s clear that this part of the legend has merit.

But could the island really have sunk into the ocean in as little as a night and a day, as claimed by Plato?

More than an earthquake

While it’s possible to imagine an island the size of England sinking into the ocean due to an earthquake, evidence suggests that this didn’t happen. Because if it did, the reconstructed map would show no land at the location of Atlantis.

So, for this part of the legend to be true, the oceans must have risen abruptly.

But conventional theory has it that the oceans have risen slowly and steadily over thousands of years due to a steady melting of the ice caps.

Doggerland and Sundaland

However, some catastrophes are likely to have happened. One being the flooding of Doggerland in the North Sea some ten to twelve thousand years ago, which appears to have happened in a series of abrupt stages.

Sundaland, in East Asia, is another area that is known to have sunk into the sea with rising sea levels.

Some have suggested that the legend of Atlantis is a reference to places such as Sundaland and Doggerland. But these places are not where Plato puts Atlantis. Nor is it a given that these areas disappeared catastrophically.

The consensus is that sea levels rose steadily over centuries, and that catastrophes were rare. Because great volumes of snow and ice don’t suddenly melt. It takes a lot of time to melt entire ice sheets.

Icesheet slippage

But if large amounts of land ice were to slide into the oceans, there would be catastrophic floodings without any exceptional melting going on, and this could happen very quickly.

For instance, if the current Greenland icesheet slid into the Atlantic ocean in the space of a few weeks, there would be a huge tsunami, followed by a permanent sea rise of up to 7.4 meters. So, if something like that happened in the past, we would have had a situation similar to the one described by Plato.

The strong earthquake that rocked Atlantis, according to Plato’s story, may have triggered an icesheet slippage relatively close by.

This would in turn have caused a tsunami big enough to wipe out most of the island. Shortly thereafter, there’d be a catastrophic flooding of Doggerland, followed by a global rise in sea levels, affecting low-lying lands everywhere, including Sunnaland.

Any survivors from Atlantis returning to where their island used to be would have found it permanently sunken into the sea. Instead of dry land, they would have found shallows and islands, like Plato said they did.

Rapid disappearance of icesheets

This scenario, if sufficiently large scale, or repeated several times, can in turn explain another mystery. Namely the rapid disappearance of the icesheets that covered our planet’s polar regions during the great ice age.

Icesheet slippage would have greatly accelerated the melting process. Because water is a lot more effective than air in melting snow and ice. Instead of air and sun melting the icesheets over tens of thousands of years, the icesheets would have disappeared within a few thousand years.

But by what mechanism can something as enormous as an icesheet suddenly slide into the ocean?

The igloo effect

A phenomenon rarely considered when it comes to truly enormous icesheets is what’s known as the igloo effect. Yet, this mechanism may be key to understanding why great ice ages tend to come to sudden and catastrophic ends. Why ice that has accumulated over tens of thousands of years disappear in a tiny fraction of this time span.

Key to understanding this is the fact that ice and snow are insulators. They prevent heat from escaping. For example, the inside of an igloo can be a great deal warmer than outside temperatures, even with a relatively small heat source at its center.

The same goes for icesheets where the temperatures close to the ground can be a great deal warmer than at their surface. Because Earth itself is a heat source. In fact, once an icesheet becomes sufficiently thick, temperatures at ground level may go permanently above freezing. Instead of being anchored to the ground through frost, the icesheet comes unglued.

Sitting on top of large pools of water, the icesheet becomes unstable and liable to slip. Because ice is virtually frictionless when pressed against a wet surface.

Planetary expansion

Once an icesheet looses its anchoring, a large chunk of it can break loose and slide into the ocean. All it takes is a sufficiently strong earthquake for disaster to ensue. It’s therefore interesting to note that there’s evidence to suggest that our planet is expanding, and that this happens in fits and starts that coincide with ice ages.

Furthermore, Earth’s expansion is lopsided, with the Pacific region expanding faster than the Atlantic. A consequence of this is that Greenland, Canada and Scandinavia have moved southwards from where they were located at the start of the last great ice age.

This explains why it was Canada and Scandinavia that together with Greenland held the bulk of ice on the northern hemisphere during the last great ice age, and why northern Russia was less affected. It also suggests to us that Canada and Scandinavia may have shed their icesheets, largely or in part, by slippage into surrounding waters.

Mass extinctions

There’s also an apparent relationship between the size of our planet and the maximum size of land animals. Not only were dinosaurs larger than the mammals that followed them. But ancient mammals were larger than mammals are today, and the same goes for birds.

Furthermore, mass extinctions happen periodically, and the last two episodes coincides with what was presumably the latest fits of Earth expansion some twelve and four thousand years ago.

Researchers, such as Stephen Hurrell, have pointed out that mass extinctions are likely due to an increase in gravity that correspond to an increase in the size of our planet.

So, it wasn’t climate change or human activity that killed off the Saber Tooth Tiger, the Giant Sloth and the Woolly Mammoths. Rather, it was an increase in gravity, coupled with an inability by these animals to respond sufficiently quickly with smaller offspring.

On the other hand, large animals that managed to produce smaller offspring have survived to this day. The African lion being an example of this.

This too fits well with the legend of Atlantis where Platon implies that animals at the time were larger and more voracious than they are today.

Conclusion

The legend of Atlantis dovetails well with a number of observations and theories related to the history of our planet. Every aspect of the story can be explained. Including the island’s sudden and dramatic demise.

But the only way to conclusively find out if the legend is true would be to survey its supposed location for human artifacts. Until that happens, we must treat this legend with the same skepticism that we treat any other legend or theory.