Atlantis and the Silver City (22 page)

On reading the accounts of the 1755 quake, I was struck by the statement that Faro, the current Algarve capital situated in the center of the coast, was spared the worst of the tsunami, as it was protected to a degree by offshore sandbanks and Faro Island. A good deal of the impact was absorbed and dissipated. This sparked a train of thought. Perhaps those two huge embankments and wide water channels protecting ancient Silves were not designed just to keep people out, but also to break the surge of any tsunami cascading up the river. If Atlantis had been in existence for a few thousand years, the ruling elite would certainly have been aware of the danger and its frightening, destructive potential.

The access channel from the outer embankment by the harbor to the next inner ring of water could have been positioned where the river still runs today—that is, to the south, up against the surrounding ridge. The next channel into the inner ring of water could have then been considerably offset farther north, or even on the other side of the city altogether. This would have had the effect of forcing the surge of water to largely bypass the town to the south, pouring on around the high embankment and on up the river. The embankments themselves would have broken a lot of the impact, and the wide rings of water between each one would have helped dissipate it. Repeated tsunamis since then might also explain why only the parts of the embankments now remaining are those embedded in rock. If the rest had been artificially heaped up, using earth and rock cut out to form the deep channels for the rings of water, they would have been battered and devastated over the years.

Remember that, according to Plato, the area depended on a vast irrigation system. Without one, agriculture certainly would not have flourished.
The effect of the flooding would have been disastrous for such an elaborate scheme if any of it had survived above the sea. Salt water would have polluted it, and the complete emptying and flushing of what was left of the whole system would have been required before it could have served its purpose again. Some points would also have been breached by the earthquakes, and others blocked by the debris dumped by the receding sea. Its use for transport would have been nullified. Life for any lucky survivors would have been virtually impossible.

The capital itself may have been capable of supporting life, as it had an abundance of fresh water, not least from that flowing down the River Arade as well as springs within the city. If the ruling elite had not had forewarning of the looming disaster and not fled in advance, they could well have survived the quakes in their stone homes built in the ancient polygonal style to absorb the tremors. However, with most of their homeland now forming the seabed and what was left uninhabitable and unproductive, they would eventually have been forced to seek new pastures.

Apart from this local scenario, the possibility cannot be ignored that the destruction of Atlantis could have been linked to a global disaster. In his groundbreaking book
Fingerprints of the Gods
, originally published in 1995, Graham Hancock chronicles how there are accounts from many parts of the world of a truly immense disaster occurring around twelve thousand years ago. The legends invariably recount huge floods, often reaching mountaintops, and indescribable shaking of the land, with mountains collapsing and new ones thrust skyward. The sun took fright and disappeared behind darkened skies for long periods. Temperatures plummeted, crops would not grow, and livestock died.

Our school history books neglected to teach us about catastrophism, as the establishment had set its face firmly against it, embracing uniformitism instead. Big words for simple concepts. Uniformitism is the theory that the world has slowly developed in a uniform way and has not been affected by worldwide catastrophes that have stop-started or drastically changed the environment and the development of man. This dogma is ingrained, despite many scientists’ drawing attention to geological discoveries indicating a combination of the two. The discoveries last century in Alaska and Siberia of whole ice fields of frozen mud full of remains of thousands of
horses, bears, bison, mammoths, lions, and wolves are apt examples. In the 1940s, Dr. Frank C. Hibben, professor of archaeology at the University of New Mexico, dramatically recounted the unbelievable sight of bulldozers heaving around the remains. He described tusks and bones being rolled up in front of the blades “like shavings before a giant plane.”
⁶³
The carcasses were a terrible mangled sight, most of them pulled apart by what must have been a catastrophic but unexplainable disaster. Other remains, particularly mammoths, recovered from the permafrost in Siberia have undigested vegetation—such as buttercups, bluebells, and wild beans—in their mouths and stomachs.
⁶⁴
Clearly, they were not grazing in a cold climate at the time the catastrophe befell them, but, like those in Alaska, they were washed there by a huge flood of global and apocalyptic proportions. For further evidence, look at R. Cedric Leonard’s web site.
⁶⁵

That all sounds even more serious than the major quakes affecting southwest Iberia. Various explanatory scenarios have been suggested. One of the most plausible, prompted by accounts and legends of a fiery dragon traversing the sky and falling to earth, is an asteroid strike. Even a small asteroid of tens of meters in diameter can have disastrous results.

Exactly
how
dramatic can be gauged from the Tunguska incident that some readers may have heard of. It occurred at around 8
A.M.
on June 30, 1908.
⁶⁶
Tunguska is a remote, inhospitable, and fortunately uninhabited region of Siberia. Eyewitness reports from a long way away spoke of a kind of fire that produced an unbearable heat, then brief darkness, followed by an explosion that threw people to the ground. In northern Europe, the sky was illuminated for nine days. In England, people were able to play cricket and read the papers at midnight. The explosion has been estimated to have been the equivalent of a forty- to fifty-megaton bomb.

It was a full nineteen years before Russian scientists were finally able to visit, as the site was so remote. What they found was awesome. The area of the forest affected was between twenty-four and thirty-two kilometers in diameter. The landscape was badly scorched, and all the trees were flattened—but side by side, the tops facing outward, fanning out from the center. And, where they had expected to find a meteorite crater, there stood an area of denuded trees. The scientists concluded that an object had exploded in the air.

If this had happened over any large city, it would have been mostly flattened—and there would have been no survivors.

The object in question was almost certainly not large. If one of, say, a mile in diameter collided with the earth (there are plenty of those whirling around in the asteroid belt), it could be good-bye for all of us.

Another strong suspect for a worldwide disaster is a significant, sudden movement of the earth’s crust. It has been argued that Antarctica once occupied latitudes much farther north, in a more temperate climate zone— and that it was Atlantis. Its swift movement south, together with simultaneous shifting of the earth’s crust elsewhere, gave rise to the disaster story.
⁶⁷

I briefly dealt with the Atlantis part of this theory in Chapter Three, excluding Antarctica as a possibility based on Plato’s clues. That does not, however, preclude an event such as described here having happened in Antarctica or elsewhere. The effects would have been truly worldwide, and few would have survived such a trauma.

In another more recent epic book, published in 2002 and titled
Underworld … Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age
,
⁶⁸
Graham Hancock details the tremendous forces at work during the melting of the great glaciers. He pulls together the work of many scientists and academics to demonstrate that the thaw was not at a slow, more or less uniform rate—as has generally been believed—but that three massively accelerated events took place around fifteen thousand, eleven or twelve thousand, and seven or eight thousand years ago. Each resulted in the flooding and rapid submergence of huge coastal areas all around the globe. One cause for these events was the catastrophic breaking of ice dams that had been holding back immense reserves of melted water built up during the thaw. The breaking of these dams released massive floods cascading and descending over the ice, sweeping in front of it other substantial lakes and, eventually, assuming gigantic proportions by the time it was ejected into the sea.

Another cause was immense sheets of ice that had been destabilized, also plunging into the sea. At one stage, this happened to a sheet a third of the size of Canada. Another significant factor was that the incredible weight of the ice caps was enough to force the earth’s crust beneath them into huge, basinlike depressions. Conversely, the weight of less water in the oceans (the water being locked up in glaciers) decreased the pressure
on the seabed, causing it to rise. The opposite happened when the glaciers melted: the fall in the level of the seabed from the beginning of the melt to its end has been estimated to have been around fifty meters.

Geologists have long suggested that these gigantic swings in pressure on the earth’s crust, particularly in the area of serious fault lines like the one in front of southwest Iberia, could also trigger monumental seismic upheavals.

It is clear from the various sources marshaled so well by Graham Hancock that “a devastating global flood occurred around 11,600 years ago … and was accompanied by enormous earthquakes.”

This again supports Plato in that he had his basic facts correct, as that is exactly the date he gave for the destruction of Atlantis. It also highlights the pointlessness of perpetuating the suggestion that Santorini, with its Minoan civilization, inspired the Atlantis legend.

Perhaps it was a combination of events that actually overwhelmed Atlantis. The sudden accelerated melting of the ice caps around 11,600 years ago, apart from causing huge tsunamis and the subsequent drowning of the immediate, sodden coastal areas by rising sea levels, also triggered the dramatic seismic event and tsunami that the seabed research indicated happened around the same time in front of southwest Iberia. The result was a substantial lowering of the land combined with a rapid rise in the sea levels, resulting in its being swallowed by the sea.

Some researchers have postulated that Atlantis did not sink in just one episode, but that remnants lingered and were destroyed in subsequent disasters. The frequency of the seismic events recorded by the geological research off southwest Iberia certainly makes this a possibility, but I know of no direct evidence to support this hypothesis—apart from the fact that there are what would appear to be three distinct levels of the seabed in front of the current coastline.

Subsequent to the major Atlantis disaster of around 9600
B.C.
, further quakes could each have resulted in more subsidence of the seabed. This would explain the many chronicled claims (detailed in Chapter Eight) that around 2,000 to 2,500 years ago, the sea immediately outside the Straits of Gibraltar and off the southwest coast was still not navigable in parts because of the low depths and mud. The ancient accounts of these difficulties, mostly written more than nine thousand years after Atlantis sank, and
the fact that sea trade continued from the Mediterranean with southwest Iberia during the last millennium
B.C.
, indicate that the blockage was not necessarily universal. Only some areas had more recently sunk prior to the accounts; others probably remained as islands or sandbanks.

Each event stirred up the mud anew and submerged other areas. More recent quakes could have caused the seabed to have dropped sufficiently to improve the clearance to current levels.

Unless some ancient records are discovered, we will never know precisely what happened. We do, however, now understand that the extraordinary destructive power embedded in the fault running in front of southwest Iberia is more than capable of causing the type of disaster detailed by Plato. If it could have happened anywhere in the world, it was here.

There is a general misconception of how the Richter scale used to express the strength of earthquakes actually works: 2.0 on the scale represents
ten
times 1.0, not just twice, which is what many people think. Then 3.0 is ten times 2.0, and so on, so an earthquake of 7.0 is 100 times the strength of 5.0. Most quakes that cause widespread damage are in the region of 6.5 to 7.0. The Algarve’s 1755 quake has been estimated to have been at least 8.9 or 9.0. That means it was at least a hundred times as strong as the one that devastated Haiti in 2010. Frightening, isn’t it?

But what exactly sank—and what was left? Did all of that great plain, the one Plato was so keen on, sink? If you accept the hypothesis of this book, certainly a major part of it is now underwater, but enough remains to give a flavor of what it would have been like. You can visit it, stroll through the citrus groves, and admire the orderly rows of the vineyards and, in the spring, discover the best show of wild orchids in Europe.

The current Algarve coastline, west from Faro, still echoes Plato’s description of Atlantis being “lofty and precipitous.” Beautiful, high, honey-colored sandstone cliffs, mostly backing golden beaches, make this one of the most stunning and memorable stretches of coast in the world. These cliffs have been sculpted and weathered into fascinating shapes by wind, rain, and sea. An undulating plain runs behind the entire coast, punctuated by pretty villages and ports, where rivers flow—or used to—out to sea. In places it is relatively narrow, only a few kilometers wide, but elsewhere it’s as much as fifteen kilometers north to south.