Page 459 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

cartographers of a lost civilization to have mapped it?

Exhibit 10

The reverse side of the coin. If the lands presently inside the Antarctic
Circle were once temperate or tropical, what about lands inside the Arctic
Circle? Were they affected by the same dramatic climate changes,
suggesting that some common factor might have been at work?
• ‘On the island of Spitzbergen (Svalbard), palm leaves ten and twelve
feet long have been fossilized, along with fossilized marine
crustaceans of a type that could only inhabit tropical waters. This
suggests that at one time the temperatures of the Arctic Ocean were
similar to the contemporary temperatures of the Bay of Bengal or the
Caribbean Sea. Spitzbergen is half way between the northern tip of
Norway and the North Pole, at a latitude of 80 degrees N. Today, ships
can reach Spitzbergen through the ice only about two or at the most
three months during the year.’
14

• There is firm fossil evidence that stands of swamp cypress flourished
within 500 miles of the North Pole in the Miocene [between 20 million
and 6 million years ago], and that water-lillies flourished in Spitzbergen
in the same period: ‘The Miocene floras of Grinnell Land and
Greenland, and Spitzbergen, all required temperate climatic conditions
with plentiful moisture. The water lillies of Spitzbergen would have
required flowing water for the greater part of the year. In connection
with the flora of Spitzbergen it should be realized that the island is in
polar darkness for half the year. It lies on the Arctic Circle, as far north
of Labrador as Labrador is north of Bermuda.
15
• Some of the islands in the Arctic Ocean were never covered by ice
during the last Ice Age. On Baffin Island, for example, 900 miles from
the North Pole, alder and birch remains found in peat suggest a much
warmer climate than today less than 30,000 years ago. These
conditions prevailed until 17,000 years ago: ‘During the Wisconsin ice
age there was a temperate-climate refuge in the middle of the Arctic
Ocean for the flora and fauna that could not exist in Canada and the
United States.’
16

• Russian scientists have concluded that the Arctic Ocean was warm
during most of the last Ice Age. A report by academicians Saks, Belov
and Lapina covering many phases of their oceanographic work

The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, pp. 109-10.
14
15 Path of the Pole, p. 66.
16 Ibid., pp. 93, 96.

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