Sea Level Rise and Global Warming

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Could a sea level rise of 7 to 23 inches by the end of this century wipe out civilization as we know it? What about a rise of 420 feet over the last 18,000 years? If you do the math, you’ll discover that both scenarios work out to about the same average sea level rise of approximately one-quarter-inch per year. Obviously a lot of land has been claimed by the sea in 18,000 years, but wouldn’t any intelligent civilization simply have retreated up the beach as the water rose? Where’s the big catastrophe that resulted in the “lost civilizations” we’re all looking for? And if the rise has been more or less consistent since the end of the last ice age, what impact does global warming have?

A project funded by the National Science Foundation studied the Earth’s transition from ice age to greenhouse about 300 million years ago and concluded that early global warming resulted in wild swings in temperature as the rising levels of greenhouse gases transformed the earth. According to the team of researchers from five universities and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the effects on forests and vegetation were dramatic. During this ancient period, carbon dioxide rose from about 280 parts per million (ppm) to nearly 2,000 ppm. This is the same increase scientists expect to see by the end of this century as the planet’s remaining reserves of fossil fuel are burned!

So, while global warming is definitely a serious concern today, it appears that it may have caused radical changes in the climate – and in sea levels – throughout history. A sudden rise in sea levels would certainly have been a catastrophe for ancient maritime cultures living along the coastlines of our planet just as it will be a catastrophe for those living in the low-lying areas of our modern culture. It appears that history does repeat itself, even if we have to wait 300 million years to see it happen.

Global Warming – What’s the Big Deal?

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Everywhere you turn these days, somebody has a new statistic about global warming. Just today the top five Reuters headlines and four of the top five National Geographic News headlines were crying about global warming. Is it really that big of a deal?

YOU BET IT IS! And I apologize for using that headline to get you to read this post, but hey – I’m allowed a little literary license now and then.

Seriously, though, I hope there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that global warming is serious business. I also hope everyone realizes how much we humans are unnaturally affecting whatever natural warming and cooling cycles the earth experiences. A Reuters article by Gerard Wynn and Alister Doyle sites a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that projects sea level rises of 7 to 23 inches by the end of this century. Most experts agree that a rise of 23 inches will have a devastating effect on the low-lying areas of the world. In the United States, the hardest hit areas will be along the gulf coast region, from the Texas-Mexico border east to the central Florida panhandle. The next time you’re at the coast, have a friend stand in the surf and hold his or her hand 23 inches above the water. Now mentally extend this line inland until it touches the shore and you’ll get an appreciation for how much of your favorite beach will be under water in less than 100 years!

Now imagine your friend’s hand is 420 feet above the surface and extend that line back to the shore. This will give you an idea of how much of the world’s ancient beach-front property has been submerged in the 18,000 years since the peak of the last ice age. Is it any wonder that underwater archaeology is becoming a hot topic these days? Isn’t it possible – maybe even obvious – that hundreds of historically significant sites exist near the coastlines of the world, just waiting to be discovered? What’s hard to believe is that traditional archaeology has “invented” a history of the world based on a study of less than 30% of the planet. Maybe those who reject the possibility of ancient civilizations just don’t know where to look – or can’t swim!

Getting the Word Out

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The sub-title of this blog is “Information and speculation about MegaAmerica and the ancient maritime cultures of the Caribbean Basin” and I’d like to dedicate this entry to the information part of that subtitle.

I recently ordered two DVD videos produced by Dr. Gregory L. Little that relate directly to the focus of this blog and I recommend them to anyone interested in the subject. Both are available from Amazon.com. In The Yucatan Hall of Records, ARE researchers Drs. Greg and Lora Little take you to the ancient Mayan site of Piedras Negras, in western Guatemala, where they search for one of the three Halls of Records predicted by Edgar Cayce to contain the history of Atlantis and Mu. The video also documents trips to Cerritos Island, the site of a little-known Maya port off the northern coast of Yucatan, and to the Bahamas for a first-hand look at the Andros Platform, a three-tiered underwater platform. There are guest appearances by John Van Auken and Andrew Collins and the video demonstrates the size of the area touched by the ancient maritime culture that inhabited the Caribbean 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The second video is titled The Ancient Bimini Harbor: Uncovering the Great Bimini Hoax and is required viewing for anyone new to Bimini Road research. It documents a 2005 expedition to Bimini by the Littles, William M. (Bill) Donato and several other researchers. During this trip, the team discovered several ancient stone anchors and tiers of cut stone blocks – all evidence of intelligent inhabitants in the area. The true nature of Bimini “Road” is revealed and a detailed artist’s rendering of the ancient port is shown. Dr. Little also discusses, in some detail, why the Bimini site has been largely ignored by mainstream archaeology and academia.

And if the videos aren’t enough to make you plan your next vacation in the Bahamas, I’ve also included links to two lengthy expedition reports below. The reports were written by Bill Donato for The Atlantis Organization (TAO) and date from 2002 and 2004. They are used with Mr. Donato’s permission. The PDF files are 67 and 47 pages long, respectively, and the files are quite large, so please be patient if you download them. With all due respect to Mr. Donato and/or other photographers involved, the quality of the pictures in my copies is pretty bad. I used a $6,000 Fujitsu scanner and a $1,000 image clean-up program from Kofax to get the best copies I could, but they still leave a lot to be desired. If the interest in these reports is high (as measured by your comments & email) maybe we can talk Mr. Donato into providing the original color photos!

2002 Report          2004 Report

‘Is It Real? Atlantis’ airs on NG Channel

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(Last updated 7/1/2007)

Ever since Plato first described the existence of an island paradise populated by an advanced civilization, the myth of Atlantis has captured the human imagination. Join NGC on a quest that traverses the globe in search of the ever elusive lost civilization of Atlantis. The special features, among others, Prescott anthropologist George Erikson. Erikson, co-author of Atlantis In America: Navigators of the Ancient World, presents evidence that Atlantis existed in the Yucatan and  in submerged lands off Costa Rica, and the Bahamian, and Cuban coasts 11,500 years ago when sea levels were up to 400 feet lower than today. Erikson presents Plato’s  argument that civilizations are periodically destroyed, often by the people who inhabit them, and only a few of the unlettered survive to eventually create new civilizations, unaware of the past. Erikson posits ancient mariners, not land bridge wanders, as the peoples who connected ancient civilizations.

http://www.AtlantisInAmerica.com

Wednesday, July 4, 2007, at 6PM PDT and 9PM PDT. Check listings for other time zones.

2006 – It Was a Very Good Year

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2006 has been an exciting year for me and I can’t wait to see what the new year brings. Will 2007 be the year that establishes, once and for all, that an ancient race of maritime travelers inhabited the Caribbean long before the Spaniards arrived? It will, if the work of Bill Donato, Greg & Lora Little and others continue at the current pace. With the Bimini Road myth debunked (we should really start calling it “Bimini Wall” or “Bimini Harbor”), the search is now on for other man-made structures below the surface of the Caribbean and interesting possibilities exist at Paradise Point, Proctor’s Road, the Andros Platform and other areas in the Bahamas.

When this year began, I only had a passing interest in archaeology and no idea that history-changing discoveries were being made less than 60 miles off the eastern coast of Florida. Initially my only interest was in the reported discovery of megalithic ruins off the northwest tip of Cubabecause I wanted to use the site as a location in a fiction novel I was (and still am) writing. My research led me to books and articles by Ivar Zapp & George Erikson, Greg Little and Bill Donato and suddenly I was hooked. Spurred on by Web sites like Satellite Discoveries (http://www.SateliteDiscoveries.com) and Google Earth and armed with hydrographic data from NOAA, (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov) all my free time has been occupied with “catching up” and there still hasn’t been enough time to assimilate it all. As my publisher will attest, my fiction writing has taken a back seat to my non-fiction learning!

So what about 2007? Well, I hope to meet in person some of the interesting folks I met through email during this past year. I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with Graham Hancock, Paulina Zelitsky, Paul Weinzweig, Manuel Iturralde, Angie Micol, David Hatcher Childress, George Erikson and Bill Donato, among others, and I’d love to meet every one of them! I also hope to participate, in some minor way, in one of the 2007 expeditions to Bimini.

As the curtain drops on 2006, I can’t help thinking about another end that’s fast approaching – the end of the 13th B’ak’tun of the current Maya calendar – the end of one 5,125 year period and, hopefully, the beginning of another. Sure, it’s still almost six years away, but if it’s anything like the Maya predicted, it’s not too soon to start preparing!

Have a very happy and safe New Year’s Eve and please visit The Mega Blog frequently during 2007.

The World According to National Geographic

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The title of a recent National Geographic News article caught my attention because it appeared to address the subject of early human migration. The sub-title screams, “Humans first moved out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, but 30,000 years later some of them moved back.”

Apparently a group of scientists from the University of Pavia, in Italy, released this “revelation” in the December 15, 2006, issue of Science and National Geographic takes several opportunities to link these “findings” to their Genographic Project and the accompanying Atlas of the Human Journey. A quick review of the Atlas reminds you why you have to be careful when you read “news” articles published by National Geographic – they reflect and promote the theories of mainstream academia, even when data from many sources seems to prove these theories wrong.

Specifically, the Atlas claims to show the human migration routes as they evolved over time – from 200,000 B.C. through about 5,000 B.C. If you open the Atlas in a browser and click the box on the far right of the timeline, you’ll see that NG shows all migration to North and South America occurring via Beringia, the land bridge that once connected North America to Asia before it sank into the Bering Sea. However, numerous experts have presented evidence that this northern migration may not have reached any further south than the American Southwest. Most of Central and South America was probably populated by ancient mariners who sailed east across the Pacific from Micronesia.

According to academia, the Beringia migration occurred no more than 12,000 years ago and brought primitive, nomadic peoples from Asia to “the new world.” How, then, could the ancient Inca city of Tiahuanacuhave been built by a presumably civilized people 12,000 years ago? And who buried the mummies in the desert of northern Chile that have been found in vaults carbon dated to be at least 9,000 years old? Did some of the Asian nomads, who never really evolved out of the nomadic stage in North America, somehow find their way to South America, become “civilized” and develop a science of mummification more sophisticated than that used in Egypt? For many more examples of the discrepancies between the accepted theories and actual discoveries, I highly recommend the book Atlantis in America (see below) by Ivar Zapp and George Erikson.

I’m not suggesting that you cancel your lifetime subscription to National Geographic, but you should be aware that their articles, and probably the research they fund, represent a specific point of view – one that is, in my opinion, incorrect. So if you’re waiting for them to finally write that big check to fund Paulina Zelitsky’s return to MEGA (the “lost city of Cuba”) you can forget it – MEGA doesn’t fit NG’s version of world history!

Bibliography:

National Geographic News, December 14, 2006, “Humans Migrated Out of Africa, Then Some Went Back, Study Says.”

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061214-humans-africa.html?source=rss

NationalGeographic.com, (undated), Atlas of the Human Journey.

Archaeology in the Bahamas

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In recent weeks I’ve become active on several Internet forums, including ThothWeb.com and the Google Earth Community. As I’ve browsed the topics relating to archaeology, the Caribbean and other related topics, I’ve discovered that a lot of folks haven’t heard about the discoveries being made in the Bahamas, especially those relating to the “Bimini Road” feature.

Anthropologist William (Bill) Donato just returned from another expedition to the area and he told me, “Expedition went VERY WELL. May FINALLY have evidence of ancient man — ” but until he has time to document his most recent work you might want to catch up on what’s been going on in the Bahamas. I’ve compiled a bibliography of online articles published by Donato and by Dr. Greg Little, another active Bahams researcher and I just made this list available for download from this post. Click HERE to download. The list is separated by author and organized in reverse chronological order, so you’ll want to read from the bottom up.

Many of Little’s articles delve into the “conspiracy” relating to the 1968 Bimini Road discovery and how it was swept under the rug for more than 20 years by the archaeological “establishment” because it didn’t fit their theories!

As time permits, I’ll post other downloadable files in the new section, so check back frequently and see what’s new.

Underwater Archaeology – Getting There is Half the Fun!

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Earlier this week, my wife and I had the opportunity to see a unique water craft first-hand and meet with its inventor, Thomas “Doc” Rowe. Doc and his assistant, Ben Morson, had previously invited us to visit their Noland Corporation research and development facility in northern California and as we drove away Thursday afternoon my wife and I looked at each other and said, “Wow!”

The working prototype we were shown is known as the Bionic Dolphin and is in a class of watercraft known as variable attitude submersible hydrofoil (VASH). Basically a surface vehicle, the Bionic Dolphin is able to submerge thanks to small, controllable “fins” on either side of the sleek, dolphin-shaped fuselage. The model we saw was a two-seater powered by a marine-grade Corvette engine capable of pushing the Dolphin across the surface at an astounding 55 mph! Because the occupants are fully enclosed in a jet-fighter looking cockpit, the craft can execute 360-degree rolls and short periods of complete submergence with ease. This makes the Bionic Dolphin an excellent craft for use in rough waters and larger versions of the Dolphin are already being considered for use as rescue craft in the North Atlantic.

When running on auxiliary electrical power, the Dolphin can descend to a depth of fifty feet and run almost silently, making it an excellent vehicle for marine biologists and other underwater explorers. And, due to its unique hull design, the Bionic Dolphin is one of the safest watercraft ever conceived. Naturally buoyant, even with a full crew aboard, the Dolphin submerges through the use of its own forward motion and the afore-mentioned fins. In the case of an engine failure, the craft simply glides back to the surface!

Rowe is a life-long surfer and his unique design for the Bionic Dolphin is the result of studying real dolphins and other marine creatures for years. This study, along with Doc’s talent as an engineer and fabricator, has produced a water craft that is truly amazing. For more information, visit http://www.bionicdolphin.com and look for the Dolphin when it goes on tour next summer.

See the Bionic Dolphin in Action

An Expedition to the Ancient Coastline

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One of our readers recently posted an article about an upcoming expedition to search for Native American sites in the Gulf of Mexico, south of the Texas-Louisiana border. The project will make use of both manned and unmanned subs (a subject I’ve become interested in lately as the story line for the third novel in my Seeds of Civilization series develops) and the vessels will be broadcasting live video back to the researchers, to universities and to 60 Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs.

The article doesn’t provide much background information on Robert D. Ballard except to mention that he’s 64 years old and that he “ located the sunken wrecks of the Titanic, PT-109 and ancient Phoenician ships …” so I decided to check him out. Ballard is one of National Geographic’s Explorers-in-Residence and they have his biography posted online at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/council/eir/bio_ballard.html. He’s also the author of at least eight books and information about them can be found on his personal Web site at http://literati.net/Ballard/.

Also mentioned in the article is Kevin McBride (the anthropologist, not the boxer) and his research interests include the prehistory and ethnohistory of eastern North America, the historic archaeology of Euro-Americans, settlement systems and paleoethnobotnay. More information about McBride can be found at http://www.pequotmuseum.org and clicking on General Information and then on Staff Biographies.

I mentioned that my fiction series had generated an interest in subs and ROVs and next week I’m hoping to visit the “home” of the Bionic Dolphin, a really unique, two-person submersible water craft. Check it out at http://www.bionicdolphin.com! And you can find more information about my novels and the Seeds of Civilization series at http://www.SeedsOfCivilization.com.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

National Geographic Special about Atlantis

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UPDATE – The show will air again at 3pm PST (6pm EST) on 12/30/2006!

If you missed the premiere of Is It Real?: Atlantis it’s scheduled for a repeat on Monday, October 9, 2006 in the United States on the National Geographic Channel at 7pm EST and and on Tuesday, October 10 at 2am EST. On the west coast it will air at 4pm and 11pm. If you have Comcast’s Western US digital service tune in to channel 273. If you have another cable service, the dates, times and channels may vary, so please check your local listings or www.nationalgeographic.com.  Air dates are not yet available for the international markets. Is It Real?: Atlantis will feature, among others, the work of Prescott, AZ anthropologist, author and tour leader George Erikson. George’s book (with Ivar Zapp) Atlantis in America is a must read for those interested in ancient archaeology. ISBN 0-932813-52-6.