Page 455 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

spin).
Continental drift?
Earth-crust displacement?
Both?
Some other cause?
I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica
are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of
sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.
Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we
are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth
so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never
sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole,
remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path
around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).
Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where
temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees
centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60
degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there
are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of cold-
tolerant plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or
near-total darkness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists these plants
laconically: ‘Lichens, mosses and liverworts, moulds, yeasts, other fungi,
algae and bacteria ...’
2
In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out
antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless
polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year
‘historical’ period.
Was it always so?

Exhibit 1

Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17:
‘Some 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, deciduous trees
adapted to a warm climate grew in Antarctica. This is the conclusion
palaeobotanists are drawing from a stand of fossilized tree stumps
discovered at an altitude of 7000 feet on Mount Achernar in the
Transantarctic mountains. The site is at 84° 22’ south, some 500 miles
north of the South Pole.
‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest,
living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio
State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil
trees. “The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the
modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440.

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