The Bottom of the Atlantic
In the fall of 1949, Professor M. Ewing of Columbia University published a report on an expedition to the Atlantic Ocean. Explorations were carried on especially in the region about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the mountainous chain that runs from north to south, following the general outlines of the ocean. The Ridge, as well as the ocean bottom to the west and to the east, disclosed to the expedition a series of facts that amounts to “new scientific puzzles.” 1
“One was the discovery of prehistoric beach sand … brought up in one case from a depth of two and the other nearly three and one half miles, far from any place where beaches exist today.” One of these sand deposits was found twelve hundred miles from land. Sand is produced from rocks by the eroding action of sea waves pounding the coast, and by the action of rain and wind and the alternation of heat and cold. On the bottom of the ocean the temperature is constant; there are no currents; it is a region of motionless stillness. Mid-ocean bottoms are covered with ooze made up of silt so fine that its particles can be carried suspended in ocean water for a long time before they sink to the bottom, there to build sediment. The ooze contains skeletons of the minute animals, foraminifera, that live in the upper waters of the ocean in vast numbers. But there should be no coarse sand on the mid-ocean floor, because sand is native to land areas and to the continental shelf, the coastal rim of the ocean and its seas. These considerations presented Professor Ewing with a dilemma: “Either the land must have sunk two to three miles, or the sea once must have been two or three miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling. If the sea was once two miles lower, where could all the extra water have gone?”
It is regarded as an accepted truth in geology that the seas have not changed their beds with the exception of encroachment by shallow water on depressed continental areas. Thus it was difficult to accept the startling conclusion that the bottom of the ocean was at some time in the past dry land.
But there was another surprise in store for the expedition. The thickness of the sediment on the ocean bottom was measured by the well-developed method of sound echoes. An explosion is set off and the time it takes for the echo to return from the sediment on the floor of the ocean is compared with the time required for a second echo to return from the bottom of the sediment, or from the bedrock, basalt or granite. “These measurements clearly indicate thousands of feet of sediments on the foothills of the Ridge. Surprisingly, however, we have found that in the great flat basins on either side of the Ridge, this sediment appears to be less than 100 feet thick, a fact so startling …” Actually, the echoes arrived almost simultaneously, and the most that could be attributed in such circumstances to the sediment was less than one hundred feet of thickness, or the margin of error.
“Always it had been thought the sediment must be extremely thick, since it had been accumulating for countless ages. … But on the level basins that flank the Mid-Atlantic Ridge our signals reflected from the bottom mud and from bedrock came back too close together to measure the time between them. … They show the sediment in the basins is less than 100 feet thick.”
The absence of thick sediment on the level floor presents “another of many scientific riddles our expedition propounded.” It indicates that the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on both sides of the Ridge was only very recently formed. At the same time, on the flanks of the Ridge the layers of sediment in some places are “thousands of feet thick, as was expected.”
“These ocean-bottom sediments we measured are formed from the shells and skeletons of countless small sea creatures” and “from volcanic dust and wind-blown soil drifting out over the sea; and from the ashes of burned out meteorites and cosmic dust from outer space sifting constantly down upon the earth.”
Burned-out meteorites and cosmic dust elicited the question: If the meteoric dust in our age is so sparse that it is hardly detectable on the snow of high mountains, how could ashes of burned-out meteorites and cosmic dust make up a substantial part of the oceanic sediment? And how could it be that all other sources, including detritus carried by rivers, have created in all ages since the beginning a sediment of only very moderate thickness?
“We dredged up rocks of igneous, or ‘fire-made,’ type from the sides and tops of peaks on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which indicated that submarine volcanoes and lava flows have been active there. Probably the whole Ridge is highly volcanic, with perhaps thousands of lava outpourings and active and extinct cones scattered along its entire length.”
And not only the submarine Ridge is volcanic. “There are many peaks of volcanic origin scattered over the Atlantic Basin.” In the direction of the Azores the expedition found an uncharted submarine mountain, 8000 feet high, with “many layers of volcanic ash,” and farther on, a great hole dropping down 1809 fathoms (10,854 feet), “as if a volcano had caved in there at some time in the past.”
Lava flowed under the water of the ocean, and the water must have boiled; meteorites, ashes, and cosmic dust fell from the sky; land was submerged thousands of fathoms deep, and beaches sank over three miles into the depths.
From the abyss of the ocean, rocks marked with deep scratches were raised by the expedition. “In a depth of 3600 feet (600 fathoms) we found rocks that tell an interesting story about the past history of the Atlantic Ocean … granite and sedimentary rocks of types which originally must have been part of a continent. Most of the rocks that we dredged here were rounded and marked with deep scratches, or striations.” Such marks on rocks are regularly ascribed to the action of glaciers that held rocks in a firm grip and moved them over the surface of other rocks. “But we also found some loosely consolidated mud stones, so soft and weak they would not have held together in the iron grasp of a glacier. How they got out here is another riddle to be solved by further research.”
Finally, the very entrance to New York Harbor, the Hudson River, was found to have a canyon running into the ocean, not only for the width of the continental shelf, a hundred and twenty miles offshore, as has been known for some time, but also for another hundred miles in deeper water. “If all this valley was originally carved out by the river on dry land, as seems probable, it means either that the ocean floor of the Eastern seaboard of North America once must have stood about two miles above its present level and has since subsided, or else that the level of the sea was once about two miles lower than now.” 2 Each one of these possibilities indicates an upheaval.
All in all, the results of the expedition of the summer of 1949 strongly indicate that, at some time not so long ago, in numerous places where the Atlantic Ocean is today there were land and beaches, and that in revolutions on a great scale land became sea thousands of fathoms deep. The leader of the Atlantis expedition, whom we have quoted here, did not use the term “revolution,” but it is unavoidable in the face of the expedition’s finds. In order not to be regarded as the proponent of a heresy, Ewing made only a negative statement: “There is no reason to believe that this mighty underwater mass of mountains is connected in any way with the legendary lost Atlantis which Plato described as having sunk beneath the waves.”
The Floor of the Seas
In July 1947 a Swedish deep-sea expedition left Göteborg on the Albatross for a fifteen-month journey around the world to investigate the bottom of the seas on the seventeen thousand miles of the ship’s course with the help of a newly constructed vacuum core sampler. In the sediment that covers the rocky bottom of the oceans the expedition found, in the words of its leader, H.Pettersson, director of the Oceanographic Institute at Göteborg, “evidence of great catastrophes that have altered the face of the earth.” 3
“Climatic catastrophes, which piled thousands of feet of ice on the higher latitudes of the continents, also covered the oceans with icebergs and ice fields at lower latitudes and chilled the surface waters even down to the Equator. Volcanic catastrophes cast rains of ash over the sea.” This ash is preserved in the sedimentary bottom of the oceans. “Tectonic catastrophes raised or lowered the ocean bottom hundreds and even thousands of feet, spreading huge ‘tidal’ waves which destroyed plant and animal life on the coastal plains.”
At many places, such as the coast of Sweden, the bottom of the sea proved to consist of “a lava bed of geologically recent origin, covered only by a thin veneer of sediment. … The sediments of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which often bore particles of volcanic material, also testified to the importance of vulcanism in submarine geology. Some of our cores from the Mediterranean were marked with coarse-grained layers consisting largely of volcanic ash that had settled on the bottom after great volcanic explosions. These layers are an unrivalled record of the irregular volcanic activity of the past.”
The oceanic floor all around the globe bears witness that the oceans of the earth were the scenes of repeated violent catastrophes when flows of lava and volcanic ash covered the precipitously rising or falling bedrock and tidal waves raced against continents.
The bottom of the seas and oceans also contains evidence that the earth was showered with meteorites on a very large scale. In many places the bottom consists of red clay. Samples of the red clay from the central Pacific showed a “surprisingly high content of nickel,” and also a high content of radium, though the water of the ocean is almost completely free of these elements. 4 The red clay is red because it contains ferruginous (iron) compounds. Meteoric iron differs from iron of terrestrial origin in its admixture of nickel, and it is this characteristic that makes it possible to differentiate iron tools of early ages, for instance of the pyramid age in Egypt, and to decide whether iron pieces were smelted from ore or were worked meteorites. “Nickel is a very rare element in most terrestrial rocks and continental sediments, and it is almost absent from the ocean waters. On the other hand, it is one of the main components of meteorites.” 5
Thus it is assumed that the origin of the abysmal nickel was in meteoric dust or “the very heavy showers of meteors in the remote past. The principal difficulty of this explanation is that it requires a rate of accretion of meteoric dust several hundred times greater than that which astronomers, who base their estimates on visual and telescopic counts of meteors, are presently prepared to admit.” 6
In a later publication, a popularized account of the Albatross expedition, Pettersson writes: “Assuming the average nickel content of meteoric dust to be two per cent, an approximate value for the rate of accretion of cosmic dust to the whole Earth can be worked out from these data. The result is very high – about 10,000 tons per day, or over a thousand times higher than the value computed from counting the shooting stars and estimating their mass.” 7
In other words at some time or times there was such a fall of meteoric dust that, apportioned throughout the entire age of the ocean, it would increase a thousandfold the daily accumulation of meteoric dust since the birth of the ocean.
The ash and lava on the bottom of the oceans indicate catastrophic occurrences in the past. Iron and nickel point to celestial showers of meteorites, and thus possibly also to the cause of the tectonic ruptures, of the collapse of the ocean floor and of the outbursts of lava under the surface of great oceanic spaces.
Evidence of great upheavals has been brought forth from the islands of the Arctic Ocean and the tundras of Siberia; from the soil of Alaska; from Spitsbergen and Greenland; from the caves of England, the forest-bed of Norfolk, and the rock fissures of Wales and Cornwall; from the rocks of France, the Alps and Juras, and from Gibraltar and Sicily; from the Sahara and the Rift of Africa; from Arabia and its harras, the Kashmir slopes of the Himalayas, and the Siwalik Hills; from the Irrawaddy in Burma and from the Tientsin and Choukoutien deposits in China; from the Andes and the Altiplano; from the asphalt pits of California; from the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia Plateau; from the Cumberland cave in Maryland and Agate Spring Quarry in Nebraska; from the hills of Michigan and Vermont with skeletons of whales on them; from the Carolina coast; from the submerged coasts and the bottom of the Atlantic with its Ridge, and the lava bottom of the Pacific.
References
- M. Ewing: New Discoveries on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XCVI, No. 5 (November 1949).
- Ibid.
- Pettersson, in advance of the detailed report of the expedition, gave a popular account in an article entitled Exploring the Ocean Floor, Scientific American, August 1950.
- Pettersson: Chronology of the Deep Ocean Bed, Tellus (Quarterly Journal of Geophysics), I, 1949.
- Pettersson: Westward Ho with the Albatross (1953), pp. 149–50.
- Pettersson: Scientific American, August 1950.
- Pettersson: Westward Ho with the Albatross, p. 150.
“Jutting out of the canyon wall, almost immediately overhead, was the forward portion of a large and very ancient vessel. A curved stem head swept up from its prow. Along both sides of the vessel were clearly discernible circular marks in the wood, quite possibly left by shields which at one time had been attached to the vessel. Mrs. Botts is not sure what kind of an ancient ship she and her husband, and an old prospector, saw in the desert canyon. It could have been
Phoenician, or it could have been Roman, but she feels that it was Viking.”
“When, therefore, the earth, covered with mud from the recent flood, became heated up by the hot and genial rays of the sun, she brought forth innumerable forms of life, in part of ancient shapes, and – in part creatures new and strange.” – Ovid, Metamorphoses
“The end of Bretton Woods allowed for an unprecedented ability to manage systemic shocks, including those potentially arising from geomagnetic and planetary cycles. While this connection remains speculative, the timing of the dollar’s decoupling and the NMDP’s acceleration suggests a deeper interrelation between human systems and Earth’s dynamic processes. Could this flexibility be a necessary adaptation for navigating a period of intensified geophysical upheaval?”
“It is accepted that the geomagnetic field resembles that of a dipole (or bar magnet) located at the earth’s center. This theoretical representation accounts for about 90% of the geomagnetic field and provides geophysicists with the familiar diagram showing magnetic lines of force exiting one polar region and entering the other. This neat portrait of the geomagnetic field is marred in practice by several important anomalies that cast doubt upon the almost universally accepted view that the geomagnetic field is a product of dynamo action.”
“When the fated day of deluge comes, after what fashion will the earth for the most part be over whelmed by the waves? Will it be by the strength of Ocean and the rise of the outer sea against us? Or will the rain descend uninterruptedly, and will summer be cut out of the year while persistent winter bursts its clouds and pours down endless masses of water? Or will earth herself open new reservoirs and shed forth rivers more abundantly? Or will a single cause be insufficient to produce such a catastrophe, and all the methods conspire together, the rains descending and the river floods rising, and the seas hurrying in hot haste from their place all agencies in concert bent upon the one aim, the destruction of the human race? The last is the truth.” – Seneca (65 AD)
“Could erosion have swept whole continents clean? And where did all these sediments go? Mainstream science believes that its armory of fossil succession, radiometric dating, and episodic erosion and sedimentation, caused by changing sea levels and the rising and subsiding of land are more than sufficent. It is a matter of opinion whether these accepted processes can cope with the sheer number and magnitudes of the gaps in the Stratigraphic Record.”
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