Monday, 12 November 2018

Verifying Atlantis Theories from Santa Barbara (II): Evidence is Against a "Genesis Quest Atlantis"


Genesis Quest are trying to raise money to send its members on hare-brained expeditions to find gnomes, giants, pyramids in the Urals, but before somebody forks out to finance these jaunts, perhaps they need to look at the science. The Group postulate that Atlantis really existed and that its a big lump of the ocean floor (now the Mid-Atlantic ridge). The map over to the right is from their website.  The bit of the midatlantic ridge that they show as above water is composed of bits of the edges of four tectonic plates (N. American, S.American - on which Tiwanaku stands, African and Eurasian). Clevinger suggests that these parts of the edges of all four plates catastrophically dipped downwards at the same time and 'Atlantis' vanished (all except the Azores). Well, normally we'd be inclined to say that Clevenger simply does not understand plate tectonics, but we are warned that he - being cleverer than the rest of the world sees any arguments based in uniformitarianism as 'laughably wrong'. OK, so we'll skip the bit about the Mid-Atlantic  Ridge being where two plates are moving apart - so the bits allegedly above water are magma... because Mr Cleverer does not want to believe that.

So if this is land, why have none of the cores that have been taken here of sediments revealed buried soild below the marine sediments? Why is the terrigeneous material in those sediments well-sorted as if by transporttthere by water rather than formed in situ? The only deposits reported in the online texts are marine and contain fossil material from such an environment (here for example, or here). I am not going to go into it in any detail, it's not my field, I'm just concerned to show that Genesis Quest, without spending a dollar of somebody else's money can go straight to source material and test their what-if-story, going to the most obvious place to prove this had been dry land a few thousand years ago.

Another place they could check this out without any real footwork (or spending other people's money) is also obvious. They are postulating a large landmass the size of Spain and Portugal, France and Italy put together suddenly slumped, splash, into the sea. Now believe in uniformitarianism or not, but we all know what would happen if obese Auntie Ada getting in the bath slipped and fell on her flabby bottom into the water. Mega splash. Look at the Genesis Quest map, just 2000 km or so from the northern coast of "Atlantis" is gaping open the funnel-shaped mouth of the Bristol Channel. A mega- splash tsunami would slam into that and ... I am thinking about the Somerset levels. Any massive tsunami occurring at 1200 BC (a date Mr Clevenger suggested as when his "Atlantis" sank) would come at the beginning of the Pennard phase and flood those well-investigated Levels. And the archaeological evidence of this is... (so far) zero.  There are traces of a Neolithic tsunami in the Orkneys, but not in the Middle Bronze Age. I think I have heard that another Atlantis-cult bunch are claiming a Bronze Age tsunami in Spain, but have not seen a proper presentation of this so one can see what evidence they actually have for it.

The notion that this group of American amateurs has 'solved' any ancient mystery is laughable. They clearly have not the faintest idea of how to go about it.  Back to music school.

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