Barbiero hypothesis: Atlantis could be buried under the ice of Antarctica
Atlantis is the lost civilization par excellence, the "mother" of all civilizations according to some, and has been considered since ancient times one of the most impenetrable mysteries of archeology and for many centuries has seen generations of scholars engaged in the vain attempt to give a credible response to the problem of its location.
Unfortunately, despite the many hypotheses advanced about the mysterious lost continent, so far nothing has yet been found that could confirm its past existence. Neither unknown submerged archaeological remains, nor sunken continents.
Could it be then, some have wondered, that Atlantis did not end up under the sea, and that we cannot see it because it is hidden by something else?
This is the opinion of those who believe that in reality Antarctica was once ice-free and that the ancient lost civilization was located right here.
It all began in the mid-1950s with the observation of a scholar of ancient maps, American Captain Arlington H. Mallery, who had an epiphany while examining one discovered a few years earlier in Turkey. The map, made in 1513 by the Turkish admiral Piri Ibn Haci Mehmet, better known as Piri Re'is (“the Admiral Piri”), was drawn on a gazelle skin colored in watercolor and lost for over 400 years.
In 1929, during the transformation of the old Imperial Palace in Istanbul into the Topkapi archaeological museum, the map reappeared and caused surprise because it placed South America in the correct longitudinal position in relation to Africa: an unusual fact for maps of the 16th century.
What struck Mallery, however, was something else. He became convinced that the strip of land depicted at the extreme south of the map represented the ice-free coast of Antarctica. But what made this hypothesis explosive were the subsequent observations of the scholar Charles H. Hapgood, according to whom the precision of the longitude on the Piri Re'is map could not be explained on the basis of sixteenth-century science.
In particular, according to him, there was "a surprising concordance with the seismic profile of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica" detected only in 1954 through seismic surveys. He concluded that the map must be based on older maps made by travelers of an unknown but advanced civilization that existed before the Ice Age.
Those who hypothesized that this unknown civilization was Atlantis were not writers such as the Rand and Rose Flem-Ath spouses or Graham Hancock, who in the 1990s dedicated best-selling books to this idea, but rather an Italian engineer, Flavio Barbiero, who was the first to he spoke in 1974 in the book A Civilization under Ice.
Flavio Barbiero's hypothesis
Barbiero's theory starts from the hypothesis that about 12,000 years ago the Earth was tilted differently than it is today. It rotated perpendicularly on the plane of the ecliptic so the seasons coincided stably with the climatic bands.
Alaska and Siberia, as well as Antarctica, were ice-free, unlike Europe and northwestern America which were covered in eternal ice. In Antarctica, in particular, a very advanced maritime civilization flourished, where agriculture and metallurgy had been invented and where high-level architecture, technology, art and science flourished, while in the rest of the world man was in the Age of stone.
About 13 thousand years ago, after 2 thousand years of progress, this civilization called Atlantis suffered a devastating catastrophe that almost entirely annihilated it. A comet or asteroid, about ten kilometers in diameter, hit the Earth near Florida, causing a series of instantaneous global transformations.
The Earth's rotation axis changed, that is, the poles suddenly moved thousands of kilometers, assuming their current position. The impact raised such a cloud of dust that it triggered torrential rain, with the consequent drop in temperatures and the start of the Great Ice Age.
The cooling was so fast that it took the large mammoths that grazed in Siberia by surprise, as demonstrated by the fact that in the stomach of a specimen found there were still the remains of the last meal of herbs typical of temperate zones: it had frozen without have had time to decompose. But the most devastating effect was the cyclopean wave caused by the impact of the fireball: a wave that would have overwhelmed all lands, including Atlantis-Antarctica.
Only thanks to his fleets of imposing ships, part of the population managed to save themselves and reach America, Africa and Asia. On the mother island, meanwhile, it began to snow for weeks and perhaps months, until a frozen blanket, tens of meters thick, definitively buried Atlantis. The survivors, scattered around the world, began to interact with Paleolithic men, teaching them to cultivate the fields and giving a strong acceleration to the development of civilization, giving rise to the Neolithic Age.
Clues to support the theory
The theory is very suggestive, but one wonders: what is the evidence? First of all, Barbiero replies, the sudden disappearance of dozens of animal species that populated the northern hemisphere 13 thousand years ago : mastodons, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, ancient bison, horses, camels, saber-toothed tigers and so on.
Secondly, the important similarities between the stories of peoples all over the world, from the Bible to Mesopotamia, from the myth of the island of Mu in North America to that of Lemuria) where there is always a flood that overwhelms the world and then someone who comes from the sea and teaches how to cultivate the land.
Such legends would be proof that the memory of the phenomena following the change of the Earth's axis has remained deeply rooted in the memory of peoples. Other widespread legends may reveal that the celestial body that hit the Earth was probably a comet. Just think of that ancient superstition according to which comets are messengers or bearers of serious calamities.
And Atlantis must correspond to Antarctica because, says Barbiero, «nowhere else have archaeological remains been found. A civilization of this kind, in Europe for example, would necessarily have left them." Furthermore, it is the only one that reflects the description given by Plato: an island with a surface area of millions of square kilometres, surrounded by an ocean which in turn is surrounded by a continuous band of continents, rich in metals and favored (before the flood ) from a mild climate.
As further proof of this, Barbiero claims that «all the planispheres prior to the discovery of America are actually manipulated maps of Antarctica: all ancient peoples conceived the world as a large, almost circular island, surrounded by the ocean, and this in turn from unattainable and mysterious lands."
Observing for example the planisphere taken from the Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis (1364-1372) Barbiero recognizes «the Ross Sea at the top right, the Mackenzie Bay on the left and the Weddell Sea at the bottom» in addition to the «dense network of channels similar to that described by Plato". Not to mention the Piri Re'is map which would reproduce the profile of Antarctica discovered by ice. According to Barbiero, all these medieval maps derive from older maps, perhaps coming from the library of Alexandria before it was destroyed.
Barbiero recognizes that all of these, at most, can be considered clues, and only the discovery of archaeological traces of Atlantis could transform them into evidence. "It would be enough to find even a single brick to demonstrate its existence and revolutionize all of ancient history and geology."
However, the “building block” of Atlantis is still missing. Not only have no traces of prehistoric life ever been found on Antarctica, but there are none even in the places where the Atlanteans would have repaired after the flood. If these highly evolved men really brought civilization to America, Africa and Asia 10,000 years ago, there are no traces of it.
According to classical archaeology, the first signs of superior civilization are much more recent and date back to 3, 4 thousand years before Christ, with some rare exceptions. Barbiero's answer is that the Atlanteans, being sailors, settled mainly on the coasts of various countries: coasts which, following the melting of the ice, ended up submerged at a depth of 130 metres. Likewise, the remains of Atlantean cities created when the Sahara was fertile would have ended up under the desert sand.
The spread of agriculture
Before the advent of radiocarbon 14 dating, every question relating to the origin and characteristics of any ancient culture was resolved on the basis of the diffusionist scenario, which in its most essential formulation was the following: agriculture developed for the first time in the Middle East, in that strip of land called the Fertile Crescent; the first Neolithic cultures arose here and, subsequently, between the fifth and fourth millennium BC, the first higher civilizations, which then spread throughout the rest of the world.
An obligatory field of research was then the comparative study of civilisations, their mythologies, traditions, habits and customs, scientific and technological knowledge, which provided ample support to the diffusionist theory, showing a substantial identity from one end of the planet to the other. After the introduction of radiocarbon 14 dating, the diffusionist theory collapsed.
It has been discovered, in fact, that agriculture was born simultaneously in at least six areas of the world without any apparent relationship between them: Central and South America, the Fertile Crescent, Central Africa, Eastern China and South East Asia. Most of the temporal relationships between different civilizations, established on the basis of the assumptions of diffusionist theory, have also disappeared. In the Mediterranean, for example, the megalithic civilizations of Malta and northwestern Europe were found to be older than their supposed Mesopotamian and Egyptian models.
As a reaction to diffusionism, a diametrically opposite scenario has been consolidated in the scientific world, according to which ancient cultures were born and developed simultaneously in several parts of the world, without mutual contact and influence. In this scenario, obviously, the comparative examination of civilizations has become anathema. In both scenarios, sub-scenarios are inserted, which attempt to overcome the difficulties of the former with more or less orthodox hypotheses.
For example, in the pre-carbon 14 scenario, the hypothesis of Atlantis as a bridge for the spread of civilization from Eurasia to America was given credence. In the post-carbon 14 scenario, however, Atlantis no longer finds its own defined space, but a whole series of elements emerge which would prove the existence of a very advanced civilization in prehistoric times. Naturally these elements are denied and "fought" by official science, because they destabilize the general picture, without offering acceptable alternative scenarios in exchange.
Recurring geological cataclysms
In fact, no archaeologist or ancient historian has ever been able to imagine a scenario capable of resolving the countless contradictions and simplifications to which the official scenarios give rise. It must be said that this inability is not the fault of historians and archaeologists, but rather of scientific branches such as geology and climatology, which to date are not able to give a satisfactory answer to one of the fundamental problems of the geological history of the Earth and the living species that developed there.
This history is characterized by very long periods of stability, interspersed with very short and violent crises, during which on the one hand there are massive volcanic eruptions, orogenies, climate changes, magnetic field inversions, variations in sea level, etc.; on the other, mass extinctions, emergence of new species, radical changes in ecological balances. In the history of the Earth there are five major animal extinctions, on a planetary level, and countless other minor ones, or even total ones but at a more or less local level.
Geology is not yet able to provide an explanation for these recurring crises. In recent years the hypothesis has been gaining ground that they are due to catastrophic impacts with comets or asteroids, because for some of them, such as that of the Upper Cretaceous, which saw the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and prepared the advent of mammals, it was possible to ascertain the coincidence with the fall of an asteroid; which suggests that a cause and effect relationship exists between the two phenomena.
But first of all it is not at all clear how relatively tiny bodies, such as comets and asteroids, can trigger geological phenomena and mass extinctions on a planetary level; secondly, the contemporaneity of an impact has only been ascertained in a limited number of geological and environmental crises. To this day, therefore, no one is able to say what the real cause is and what actually happens in their brief development. That is to say, modern science is still unable to understand one of the fundamental processes of the evolution of living species.
The traumatic transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene
This also occurs in the history of man. In fact, it is characterized by at least one completely similar crisis, which occurred between 12 and 14 thousand years ago. It was precisely in this period that the great Paleolithic cultures, which had thrived for more than thirty millennia, suddenly disappeared, leaving room for a new humanity. We don't know why or how it happened.
The only certain thing is that this transition occurred in coincidence with one of the usual unexplained crises, so serious as to constitute the watershed between two geological eras, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. The Pleistocene era comes to an end, marked by a massive revival of volcanic activity, by frightening earthquakes, evidenced by the collapse of vaults in most of the world's caves, and by immense floods, which overwhelm millions of animals. All over the world there are testimonies of chilling massacres.
The magnetic field also goes through a period of strong perturbations which almost lead to its inversion. Not to mention the Earth's climate regime, which is precisely then undergoing a rapid and radical change. Dozens of species disappear. It is not possible to understand what happened to man during this crisis and the events immediately following it, if we cannot find out what really happened on that occasion. Let's see, in a nutshell, what the situation was in the world before that fateful date.
Between 50 and 12 thousand years ago, an enormous ice sheet, over three kilometers thick, had radiated from the Hudson area in eastern Canada until it reached the current latitude of New York to the south and the glaciers that covered it to the west. They came down from the Rocky Mountains in Alaska. In the same period, Northern Europe was covered by ice caps which, at the height of their expansion, reached the latitudes of London and Berlin. The amount of frozen water on land was so great that sea levels had dropped by more than 100 meters compared to today.
Current theories, numerous and often conflicting with each other, try to explain the existence of these ice masses, eccentric compared to today's poles, with the fact that the climate was then much colder across the entire Earth. The hypothesis, however, is contradicted by the absence of ice caps in Siberia, which indeed was populated even in its northernmost regions, well into the Arctic Sea, by one of the most impressive zoological communities that have ever existed on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs.
40 million mammoths roamed the plains of Siberia and Alaska, and among them there were reindeer, rhinoceros, horses, hippos, bears, lions, leopards, beavers, giant sloths, big-horned deer, camels, tigers saber teeth and many more.
Proof that the Siberian climate was then far milder and more constant than it is now. By contrast, in the other hemisphere the climate was colder in Australia and New Zealand, then covered by large glaciers. But there is evidence that Antarctica, today entirely covered by a thick blanket of ice, was partially free of it, at least on the Atlantic side.
Pole Shift
There is only one hypothesis capable of coherently explaining this situation, and that is that the geographical poles were then in a different position from their current one and that the inclination of the Earth's axis was lower. Between 12 and 14 thousand years ago the Earth's axis suddenly tilted and the poles moved to their current position. This is not a fanciful hypothesis. No one any longer doubts the fact that the poles have often changed their position on the earth's surface over the course of past geological eras.
The marks left by the ice sheets in Africa and India, the residual magnetism in the rocks, the distribution of ancient coral reefs and coal deposits, and so on, together constitute absolute proof that the poles have wandered from the equator to the position current. What are not at all clear, however, are the mechanisms and methods of the pole shift.
A hypothesis put forward since the last century by the great astronomer Giovanni Schiapparelli attributes these movements to surface movements of large quantities of materials, due to the processes of erosion and sedimentation, which would be capable of producing very slow movements of the equatorial bulges; a few centimeters per year at most, but which in millions of years can become thousands of kilometres.
Schiapparelli, however, was unaware of the existence of an enormous quantity of geological evidence, which instead seems to indicate that the poles move by practically instantaneous "jumps", at least on the geological time scale. It was the American scholar Charles Hapgood who highlighted them, but the mechanism he proposed to explain the phenomenon, the "sliding" of the earth's crust, in addition to encountering insurmountable geological difficulties, is not able to explain precisely the speed with which it seems that the pole shift has occurred: judging by the very rapid freezing process of the mammoths, preserved intact with still undigested food in the stomach, it would even take days.
This possibility, however, is decisively rejected for a reason entirely similar to that which led to the initial rejection of Wegener's theory on continental drift: a mechanism capable of causing such a phenomenon is not known.
The hypothesis that the inclination of the Earth's axis with respect to the ecliptic and that the position of the poles with respect to the Earth can vary rapidly has been taken into consideration since the last century by scientists of the caliber of JC Maxwell, but was discarded on the basis of energy calculations about the stabilizing effect of the Earth's equatorial bulges. Only a “planetary collision” would be able to produce such an effect.
