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The Destruction of Atlantis
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It is possible to identify Cuba as the largest island of Plato's Atlantean
empire, and indeed the site of Atlantis' great plain and conceptualised
city. What is more, it can also be shown that the sunken portions of the
Atlantean realm are the low-lying regions of the Bahamas, as well the
great plain today beneath Cuba's Batabanó Bay, drowned by a rapid rise
in sea-level at the end of the last Ice Age, c. 8000 BC. In the Bahaman
waters is evidence for the existence of a
prehistoric culture comparable to the neolithic farming communities which
sprang up in the Near East around this same time. By the time of his death in 1994 underwater explorer J. Manson Valentine had compiled a dossier on no less than 60 sites of possible archaeological interest on the Great Bahama Bank alone. Many of these were grouped together in the south-west corner of the former landmass facing out towards nearby Cuba, implying a connection between the prehistoric culture of the Bahamas and that of Cuba during late Pleistocene, early Holocene times. If just one of these sites does prove to be of artificial construction, then there exists evidence for a former Atlantean race that once occupied the Caribbean and Bahamas, including Cuba and the Great Bahama Bank.
Yet the destruction of Atlantis, and its 'other islands', identified as the island chains of the Bahamas and Caribbean, would appear to have begun around 500 years earlier. Sometime around 8600-8500 BC there came out of the north-eastern sky a brilliant object - a comet perhaps 100,000 times greater than the one which detonated above the tundra forests of Tunguska, Siberia, in June 1908. It passed low overhead the United States before disintegrating into millions of tiny fragments like some unimaginable millennial firework.
The air shock-waves caused by the detonation and impact of these tiny pieces of comet nucleus peppered the coastal plain, causing an estimated 500,000 elliptical craters, ranging in size from just a few hundred metres to 11 kilometres in length. Known as the Carolina Bays they extend across at least six states including North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Each blast was like a mini nuclear explosion which caused tundra forests to be laid flat in great fan-like patterns. Two larger fragments of the comet struck the Atlantic Ocean north of Puerto Rico and east of Florida. The immense tsunami waves created by this event drowned the Bahamas and Caribbean, all but destroying its primitive culture and wiping out megafauna such as the giant sloth. Those who did survive reached the American mainland carrying with them a memory of this great cataclysm.
It can be demonstrated that the Carolina Bays comet brought about abrupt climatic changes at the end of the glacial age. In turn, this caused a rapid melting of the ice-sheets which had covered most of North America for anything between 25,000 and 40,000 years. The great thaw resulted in a sudden rise in sea-level which submerged, more permanently, the low-lying regions of the Bahaman landmass, as well as other regions of the Caribbean. Much later migrations between the American mainland and the Greater Antilles, Cuba in particular, helped confuse the original source of these stories. Yet preserved in this knowledge was a firm belief in the sudden inundation of a great landmass and the fact that Cuba was the original homeland of the North and Central American peoples. This homeland was known by a number of different names such as Aztlan, Tulan and Tlapallan. Here was to be found the mythical place of emergence of the human race, a site known as the Seven Caves, or Seven Cities. Eventually, Phoenician and Carthaginian sea-traders from Spain and North Africa (perhaps carrying Lixitae (i.e. Berber) pilots and crew) made landfall on Cuba en route to the Gulf coast of Mexico and learnt of these catastrophe accounts, which were then introduced to the ancient world. Eventually these stories and rumours of island landmasses, island groups and great catastrophes came to the attention of the philosophical schools in which Plato moved. Using key elements from these stories, Plato introduced them to his Atlantis dialogues. The great dates alluded to by Plato in his works (including The Laws), although set in the correct time-frame of the Carolina bays cometary event, were in fact derived from Egyptian king-lists which contained mythical chronologies spanning tens of thousands of years. These legends of an Atlantic Island on which was a seven-fold place of emergence remained strong in the memories of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the former Spanish and North African territories of the Phoenicians and later Carthaginians. The same stories resurfaced in the popular imagination when they were re-introduced by the Moors of North Africa, following the conquest of Spain and Portugal in the eighth century. Here they remained as hidden maritime wisdom until they finally resurfaced in late medieval times as the legend of Antilia, an Atlantic isle on which were located Septe cidades, the Seven Cities. Antilia has been identified by key geographers as Cuba, and it was the continual search for this legendary place, particular by the Portuguese, that led in 1492 to the discovery of the New World. 
For more information on the Carolina Bays. For more information about comet impacts, visit the Nasa website: The Earth orbits the Sun in a sort of cosmic shooting gallery, subject to impacts from comets and asteroids. It is only fairly recently that we have come to appreciate that these impacts by asteroids and comets (often called Near Earth Objects, or NEOs) pose a significant hazard to life and property. Although the annual probability of the Earth being struck by a large asteroid or comet is extremely small, the consequences of such a collision are so catastrophic that it is prudent to assess the nature of the threat and prepare to deal with it. Studies have shown that the risk from cosmic impact increases with the size of the projectile. The greatest risk is associated with objects large enough to perturb the Earth's climate on a global scale by injecting large quantities of dust into the stratosphere. Such an event could depress temperatures around the globe, leading to massive loss of food crops and possible breakdown of society. Such global catastrophes are qualitatively different from other more common hazards that we face (excepting nuclear war), because of their potential effect on the entire planet and its population. Various studies have suggested that the minimum mass impacting body to produce such global consequences is several tens of billions of tons, resulting in a groundburst explosion with energy in the vicinity of a million megatons of TNT. The corresponding threshold diameter for NEOs is between 1 and 2 km. Smaller objects (down to tens of meters diameter) can cause severe local damage but pose no global threat.... |
