Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (24 page)

Nothing I’d seen in Morocco had come close to matching Plato’s description of the enormous Atlantis plain. There simply wasn’t any fresh water. “Plato said that the most fertile part was the middle of the plain,” Hübner told me as we drove through a long series of tiny, dusty towns. It was the second day of Eid al-Adha, and the roads were still crowded with well-dressed people of all ages walking to and from mosque. Skinny boys in djellabas rode sidesaddle on scooters so that two or three might squeeze aboard. The farther we got from Agadir, the more head scarves we saw on women and bushy beards on men. An hour outside of town, women were wearing burqas. Twice, as we drove through dusty villages, young men in T-shirts and shorts spotted us coming and pushed their fully veiled sisters indoors, away from our eyes.

As we passed through yet another town, I was absentmindedly entertaining myself by guessing what the signs in Arabic might say when we suddenly slammed to a stop: A turn had left us unexpectedly blocked by a herd of donkeys. When our honking dispersed them, we faced a tall wall of bamboo stalks, the first green I had seen since we had passed the king’s compound near Agadir. We drove on slowly for a few minutes until we found a breach in the barrier. Beyond lay lush fields growing a variety of produce.

“It’s an elongated oasis,” Hübner said, pulling the Nissan over so we could absorb the incongruously lovely sight and smell of cultivation in the desert. The neat rows weren’t Plato’s canals, but they were the closest thing I’d yet seen to them. “Maybe this was like an
island inside an island. I think maybe this place and the annular structure meld together somehow with the caves at Cap Ghir.”

Hübner leaned on the steering wheel with both elbows and asked, “So do you think I have found Plato’s Atlantis?”

It certainly wasn’t Seven Sigma, but he made a compelling case. “Honestly,” I said, “at this point I’m not really sure what I think.”

The Sky Is Falling

Between the Moon and New York City

M
y urgent departure from Morocco attempting to beat Hurricane Sandy to New York was a bust. The storm’s grievous day and night of destruction left my family unscathed, but flights into New York were canceled for days. I was trapped in rainy Madrid for almost a week, waiting for my lost luggage to arrive from Casablanca and watching the weather-based drama unfold on the only English-language channel available at my hotel, CNBC. When one Wall Street analyst pointed out that the devastation, while tragic, was also a great opportunity to buy home-supply stocks, I clicked off the TV and turned to the backpack full of unread books I’d lugged up and down the Mediterranean while chasing Atlantis. One seemed particularly appropriate.

Trevor Palmer’s
Perilous Planet Earth
is a scholarly overview of catastrophism—the study of how natural disasters have influenced events over millions of years. It is also one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. Palmer is a professor emeritus of life sciences at England’s Nottingham Trent University. (He wrote a standard text on enzymes.) What makes his catastrophism book so scary is its very lack of drama; he slowly builds up details about the surprising regularity of
devastating volcanic explosions, earthquakes, floods, and extraterrestrial impacts (comets and asteroids striking the earth). Because of humans’ ever-shrinking attention spans, natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy—or the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—often seem like rare events, but they aren’t. As of this writing, hurricanes and tsunamis remain hot news topics because they’ve caused so much trouble in recent years. Nobody’s been talking much about volcanoes, because volcanoes have been relatively quiet of late. Historical data shows this peace won’t last. According to the volcanic explosivity index (VEI), Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted at VEI 5 in 1980, similar to the blast that buried Pompeii. Such events are estimated to happen about once per decade. Thera and Krakatoa were VEI 6 eruptions, several of which typically occur worldwide each century.
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“Although we may try to put it out of our minds, we know with near certainty of forthcoming events which could kill thousands, if not millions, of people,” Palmer explains calmly in
Perilous Planet Earth
’s conclusion. “The only question is, ‘When?’”

After reading consecutive chapters titled “Modern Views of Atlantis” and “Natural Catastrophes and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations,” I called Palmer in Scotland. I imagined him holed up in a waterproof concrete bunker, but he assured me that there was no point in worrying about perishing in an unforeseen natural disaster.
“I tend to take the view that I’m more likely to be struck down by a car the next time I try to cross the road,” he said. He then reminded me that Plato, in addition to his interest in watery cataclysms like the Deucalion flood and the sinking of Atlantis, also took seriously the inevitability of extraterrestrial events. In the
Timaeus
, the Egyptian priest tells Solon:

There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. Your own story of how Phaethon, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burnt up things on the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on the earth.

I didn’t really give this passage much thought until a few months later, when an undetected meteor suddenly burst into a fireball in the sky of eastern Russia, causing a retina-searing flash and a shock wave that shattered windows. Sixteen hours later an unrelated asteroid that astronomers
had
been expecting passed within 17,200 miles of Earth. Perhaps Plato knew something that we’ve forgotten.

Palmer had explained that one reason catastrophism has been so slow to catch on with mainstream scientists—beyond the religious taint it still carried from affiliation with stories like Noah’s flood—was that catastrophist studies had been hindered by, as he politely put it, “theories put forward that have proved untenable.” He might have been describing Atlantology. In at least one sense, he was. In 1883, the year after Ignatius Donnelly launched the modern search
for Plato’s lost island with
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
, he published a sequel. In
Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
, Donnelly purported to explain how the disappearance of the sophisticated civilization of Atlantis had been caused by the impact of a comet. Donnelly believed the memory of this impact had been encoded in the fiery wipeout of the Phaethon myth.

The bombastic
Ragnarok
was a critical and commercial dud, and in the century that followed the slow-and-steady school of uniformitarianism exemplified by Darwin’s theory of evolution became even more entrenched as catastrophism was nudged ever further toward the fringes. Plate tectonics and continental drift, initially ridiculed by geologists a hundred years ago when proposed by the nonspecialist Alfred Wegener, and not taken seriously for another fifty years, are now core uniformitarian principles of the earth sciences.

Perhaps the greatest reason for scientific resistance to catastrophism can be summed up in one name: Immanuel Velikovsky. After studying psychoanalysis under one of Sigmund Freud’s disciples, Velikovsky came to New York City prior to World War II and conducted an exhaustive comparative study of ancient myths, legends, and folklore from around the world, which resulted in his hugely popular 1950 book
Worlds in Collision
(a number one bestseller) and its sequel two years later,
Ages in Chaos
. His main argument was that events related in stories such as the Atlantis tale were, in fact, chronicles of ancient natural disasters. Velikovsky’s speculations combined aspects of Donnelly’s
Ragnarok
, the World Ice Theory beloved by the Nazis, and a spirited game of interstellar croquet: Around 1500 BC, he proposed, the planet Jupiter ejected a mass that took the form of a comet, which zoomed past the earth twice at close range. One loop skimmed near enough to cause intense heat and enormous tides, triggering the general environmental mayhem recorded in the Ten Plagues of Egypt and the Great Flood myths, including that
of Atlantis. The hypothetical comet finally collided with Mars and settled into orbit as the planet Venus.

The
very
Freudian analysis Velikovsky gave of the situation was that humankind suffered from a collective amnesia regarding these terrifying events, resulting from repressed memories of ancient trauma. A prime example was the priest at Saïs explaining to Solon that “when, after the usual interval of years, like a plague, the flood from heaven comes sweeping down afresh upon your people, it leaves none of you but the unlettered and the uncultured, so that you become young as ever, with no knowledge of all that happened in old times in this land or in your own.”

This calamitous revision of history infuriated scholars in almost every discipline imaginable. (Carl Sagan, among the grooviest and most open-minded of astrophysicists, practically choked on his turtleneck whenever given the chance to denounce Velikovsky’s theories.) When the respected German scientist Otto Muck’s well-researched but somewhat fanciful book
The Secret of Atlantis
was published posthumously in English in 1978, experts had a good laugh at his cartoonish catastrophist ideas, one of them straight out of the Ignatius Donnelly playbook: that Atlantis had been sunk by a wave that resulted when a six-mile-wide asteroid crashed into the Earth.

The general distrust of giant killer missiles from space was still dominant in 1980, when a team led by Luis and Walter Alvarez—a Nobel Prize–winning physicist father and his geologist son working at the University of California, Berkeley—published a paper that, in synopsis, sounded almost as crazy as Velikovsky’s cometary collisions. Why, the two men wondered, did global geologic samples taken at the layer of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (a thin band of clay that dates to around 65 million years ago) show extremely high levels of iridium, an element typically scarce in the earth’s crust but plentiful in meteorites and comets? The Alvarezes formulated a radically simple
solution: The end of the Cretaceous period—and the extinction of dinosaurs and two-thirds of other animal species—had resulted when a six-mile-wide asteroid crashed into the earth.

•   •   •

The Alvarezes proved one thing almost immediately—that even a Nobel Prize wasn’t sufficient to quell doubts from geologists and paleontologists about asteroid-impact theories. But new iridium samples continued to trickle in from around the world, supporting their hypothesis, and a decade later, it was matched with a massive 110-mile-wide crater that oil-company geologists had located beneath several hundred feet of debris on the Yucatán Peninsula. Such an impact would have had a force equivalent to a billion Hiroshima atomic bombs and could have unleashed enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to block sunlight (and life-giving photosynthesis) for months. With this new evidence fresh in their minds, astrophysicists watched in awe through their telescopes in July 1994 as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet split apart and crashed into Jupiter at more than one hundred thousand miles per hour. One fragment’s impact raised a debris cloud seven thousand miles across. Twenty years later, the collision is still roiling weather on Jupiter.

Among the eclectic list of papers presented at Stavros Papamarinopoulos’s first Atlantis conference, one in particular stood out because of the unique scientific credentials of its authors. Members of the Holocene Impact Working Group (HIWG), a loosely affiliated team of scientists working at some of the world’s most reputable institutions, had submitted a paper inferring that a fragment of a comet had plummeted into the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar around five thousand years ago, producing a “Shoemaker-Levy type impact” that formed an eighteen-mile-wide depression in the seafloor. The HIWG team named the hypothetical impact site the Burckle Crater.
One member had drawn a plausible link between this catastrophe and the world’s flood myths, including that of Atlantis.

The paper had been presented by Dallas Abbott, an expert in marine geophysics at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. After locating the possible crater (and finding nickel deposits that suggested an extraterrestrial origin), she began to look for physical evidence of an impact’s aftermath. “Basically, when I found Burckle I realized that if I was right about it, there ought to be something really big in Madagascar,” she told me. When Google Earth was introduced in 2005, Abbott almost immediately spotted telltale V shapes in the dunes along Madagascar’s eastern edge. Such maritime sand wedges, called chevrons, can be evidence of tsunamis. She visited the island in 2006 to take sediment samples and found deep-ocean marine microfossils more than six hundred feet above sea level, far higher than could have been deposited by a wave of seismic or volcanic origin. If the chevrons were the fingerprints of a postimpact tsunami, their source had been a wave twenty times as tall as the one that demolished Fukushima and powerful enough to produce “megatsunamis in many parts of the world.” Abbott suggested that if I wanted to hear about the even more devastating—and Atlantis-like—effects of a deep-water impact, I should speak with her HIWG colleague W. Bruce Masse, who had the original idea to search for a crater in the Indian Ocean.

Masse had recently retired from his day job as an archaeologist and environmental compliance professional at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his duties had included keeping tabs on the hundreds of ancient sites on the institution’s grounds. I’d seen him on TV describing one of his theories; he was big and goateed and with the sound turned down could have passed for a high school football coach gleefully describing a touchdown against a crosstown rival, rather than a catastrophic event that might have decimated ancient
civilization. He may have spent more time pondering the intersection of myth and natural disasters than any person since Velikovsky.

To truly understand the relationship between myth and catastrophe, Masse explained, “you have to be a
classical
classical scholar,” someone like Plato or Aristotle, who “knew every natural science there ever was and everything in it.” Masse had been trained to trust in the hard evidence of material culture and to doubt the importance of any information transmitted through astronomy, mythology, and, especially, oral tradition. “Basically, as archaeologists and cultural anthropologists we are taught that each generation leaves more potential for loss of information,” he said. Masse fell in line with his training completely until the early 1980s, when an elderly oral historian in the Palau archipelago described to him distant villages abandoned during undocumented battles centuries earlier. Masse examined the archaeological record and found evidence of defensive fortifications and shrinking food stocks. “That was my first inkling that something was wrong with my training,” he said.

Later, in Hawaii, Masse studied local myths about the volcano goddess Pele. He noticed that battles she’d reputedly fought with real Hawaiian chiefs could be roughly matched to carbon-dated debris from lava flows—an indication that orally transmitted Pele myths contained real historical truths. Masse found that in many cases “accurate details of celestial events” recorded in Hawaiian myths, such as comets, meteor storms, and supernovae, could be “exactly matched with the historic record in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.”

Masse’s widening investigations into traditional astronomy and the geological origins of myths inevitably led him to the one “catastrophic event that has universal distribution in virtually all cultures”: the Great Flood. He assembled and analyzed 175 different flood myths from around the world and compiled their recurring themes: torrential rains; tsunamis; extended periods of darkness;
hurricane-force winds; and the appearance of elongated celestial creatures such as serpents or fish, likely descriptors of comets. In the ancient Hindu story of Manu, a fish-god instructs the first man to prepare a ship—in one version, he lassoes the fish’s prominent horn (likely the comet’s tail)—to survive a coming cataclysm that arrives in the form of worldwide fire, apocalyptic rain, and floods. Masse noticed that many of the deluge stories roughly coincided with the transition from the middle to the late Holocene, around 2800 BC, a period when the Earth’s climate became somewhat cooler and wetter. Societal convulsions resulted: Populations shrank; major language groups migrated to new lands; other new languages and dialects appeared suddenly. Around the same time, catastrophic events were chronicled in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Masse concluded that a single cataclysm—a comet impact similar to the Shoemaker-Levy collision with Jupiter—had occurred. Such a disaster may have wiped out a quarter of the world’s human inhabitants. References to a conjunction of planets in the watery constellation Aquarius and a partial lunar eclipse even allowed him to propose a precise date for the world-changing event: May 10, 2807 BC.