Verifying Atlantis Theories from Santa Barbara (I): Lake Titicaca

Mr John Clevenger, a former music teacher from Santa Barbara in Trump's USA runs 'Genesis Quest' which represents itself as 'an international team of investigators, scientists, and engineers dedicated to solving the world's greatest ancient enigmas'. Mr Clevenger reckons he can rewrite the history of the Earth and human civilization. This is even though he is not himself a geologist or particularly knowledgeable in the earth sciences (or anything much it appears). He believes in giants, aliens, conehead gnomes, tunnels under the Giza Plateau, Atlantis and much else besides. He considers that if somebbody gave him enough of their money, he single-handedly can overturn the principle of Uniformitarianism on which the interpretation of the geological (and indeed archaeological) record is based. If he could only get the money, he intends to replace established methodology with a Catastrophic Geology and modern stratigraphy with what he believes is a 'New Archaeology' built on narratives deriving from his 'research' (I use the term loosely) in the scribblings of 'nearly 200 "alternative" researchers around the globe'. He seems to implicitly believe almost anything one of these 'alternative researchers' say is 'unexplained' by current scholarship, so has constructed a hotchpotch and cherry-picked worldview based on anecdotes, none of which he seems to have verified against actual fact and checking out whether they can in any way be accommodated by twenty-first century science.

A key point in his argument seems to be occupied by Tiwanaku, a pre-Inca site 270 km from the Bolivian coast and at an altitude of some 3860 metres above sea level. Mr Clevenger says:  

I believe the argumentation I've assembled on that convincingly establishes that it was at sea level when built, and its purpose was the processing of tin ore. 

Well, the fact that the site did not even exist when he postulated that it was a key emporium trading in Bronze Age tin, that's pretty bold. Also tin was not used in bronze making in the Andes region until much later. 

Anyhow, it's pretty easy to check out Mr Clevenger's story. Almost by accident, I came across a work in the University library that really Mr Clevenger and his financial supporters should look at. It's C. Dejoux and A. Iltis (eds) 'Lake Titicaca: A Synthesis of Limnological Knowledge' published by Springer. This is a pretty exhaustive compendium of knowledge about the lake and its development. Nowhere is there any mention of anything that suggests that in the last two million years the lake was a marine environment - connected to the sea.

Pretty easily one can find online another interesting article that the Clevenger gang would have to explain away: Oliver Kroll, Robert Hershler, Christian Albrecht, Edmundo M Terrazas, Roberto Apaza, Carmen Fuentealba, Christian Wolff, and Thomas Wilke, 'The endemic gastropod fauna of Lake Titicaca: correlation between molecular evolution and hydrographic history'  Ecol Evol. 2012 Jul; 2(7): 1517–1530. Once again, very detailed coverage of the development of the lake's fauna without any mention of any marine episode in the recent past.

There has been a Lake Titicaca drilling project that has produced a core of lake sediments 136m long that allows continuous record of lake sedimentation and paleoenvironmental conditions for Lake Titicaca to be recovered going back to about 370,000 BP. Again, no evidence of marine conditions (would-be Genesis Quest sponsors could look this up online to check out the organization's claims, with a summary here, or here).

The prehistoric bird population (see here) also show freshwater and not coastal species. The evidence, recovered by speciliasts in different natural science fields seems irrefutable.

And I do not think anyone could claim that geologists or geneticists have any qualms about reporting evidence of a marine phase in Titicaca's past if the evidence under their noses suggests that was the case. I rather think the fact that they do not report it really can only be construed as meaning it simply is not there.