The Heinrich layers record at least six separate discharges of ‘stupendous flotillas of ice-bergs’89 into the North Atlantic – discharges that are now known, obviously enough, as ‘Heinrich Events’ and that are thought to have unfolded in concentrated bursts of activity that may, in each case, have lasted less than a century.90 Because of the progressive thickening of the Heinrich layers towards the western side of the Atlantic and the continuation of this trend into the Labrador Sea in the direction of Hudson Bay, it is obvious to geologists that ‘much of the floating ice was sourced from the Laurentide ice-sheet’.91
However, other debris has been found intermingled in some Heinrich layers that ‘could only have come from separate ice-sheets covering not only Canada, but Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Scandinavia’.92 Likewise, research into southern hemisphere ice-caps in the Andes and New Zealand shows that these too ‘grew and then collapsed synchronously with the ice-rafting pulses recorded in the North Atlantic’.93 The implication, admits Professor R. C. L. Wilson of Britain’s Open University, is that some ‘global rather than regional forcing of climate change’ must have been at work.94
With this reminder of the interconnectedness of all the great ice-sheets of the last glaciation – and the broad similarities of all their biographies – let’s take a closer look at one of them. What happened to it also happened, to a very similar degree, to all of the others. Its apocalypse is therefore the end of the Ice Age in cameo.
Laurentide
Thomas Crowley and Gerald North, oceanographers at Texas A&M University, describe the melting of the great ice-sheets at the end of the last Ice Age as ‘one of the most rapid and extreme examples of climate change recorded in the geologic record’.95 As we have seen, most of the changes were concentrated into a period of just 7000 years between 15,000 and 8000 years ago. Like the other ice-sheets, the Laurentide did not really go into meltdown until after 15,000 years ago, and like the others it experienced three primary episodes of collapse correlating closely with Professor Shaw’s three global superfloods (at approximately 15,000, 11,000 and 8000 years ago).
It is known that an immense meltwater reservoir in the Laurentide ice-sheet was catastrophically released between 15,000 and 14,000 years ago:
The volume of water discharged produced regional-scale fields of drumlins, giant-flutings and extensive tracts of scoured bedrock. Such large amounts of meltwater could potentially destabilize ice sheets grounded below sea-level.96
The period between 13,000 years ago down to about 10,000 years ago saw recurrent outburst-flooding from a series of glacial lakes and lake complexes in the Laurentide – notably glacial Lake Agassiz which ‘periodically emptied into the Gulf of Mexico via the Minnesota spillway and the Mississippi drainage basin’.97 The reader will recall Emiliani’s evidence for a peak flooding event of Laurentide meltwater into the Gulf at around 11,600 years ago. Within a thousand years of that date glacial Lake Missoula (in Montana in the western United States) also underwent one of its periodic outbursts, sending what Crowley and North calculate to have been ‘a wall of water 600 metres high on to the Columbia plateau of eastern Washington’.98
Another series of large outburst floods occurred around 9400 years ago. According to Charles Fletcher and Clark Sherman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Hawaii, each event added an estimated 4000 cubic kilometres of water to the world ocean.99 By 8400 years ago yet more calamitous melting had allowed Lake Agassiz to merge with its formerly separate (and almost equally massive) eastern neighbour, Lake Ojibway. This confluence created a titanic inland sea, with a surface area of more than 700,000 square kilometres, poised behind an ice dam over Hudson Bay at elevations of between 450 and 600 metres above sea-level.100
At some point between 8400 and 8000 years ago the dam broke and the almost unimaginable mass of water burst through and emptied almost instantaneously into the North Atlantic:
The breakout occurred into the Hudson Bay lowland, lowering lake level by at least 250 metres and resulting in a total discharge of between 75,000 and 150,000 cubic kilometres, possibly the single largest flood of the Quaternary Period.101
This outburst may have single-handedly raised global sea-level by half a metre or so. But this is a good place to remind ourselves that the spiralling decay and collapse of the Laurentide ice-sheet was not an isolated event but was part of a global pattern and feedback system – and that floods of almost equal magnitude poured in tandem off the Fennoscandian ice-sheet on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This is why, at around the same time as the collapse of the Laurentide, the north-eastern side of Britain close to the Fennoscandian margins also experienced severe flooding. Here there was a very rapid rise in sea-level which
submerged an area in the North Sea the size of modern Britain … Most of this 100,000 square mile British ‘Atlantis’ [not to be confused with Koudriavtsev’s suggested site of Atlantis on the Celtic Shelf] was there in 8000 BC and gone by 6500 BC. By then only a 140 mile long, 5000 square mile island, where the Dogger Bank is now, survived.102
The separate meltwater floods originating in different ice-caps would, of course, have mingled in the world ocean and multiplied their effects by floating and breaking up grounded ice on the continental shelves. Stephen Oppenheimer calculates that the ice ‘flushed out through the Hudson Strait’ from what had once been the centre of the Laurentide ice-dome between 8400 and 8000 years ago may have been as much as ‘1.6 kilometres thick and a third the size of Canada’.103
Such statistics beggar the imagination and require common sense to rebel against what is still very much the establishment view – namely that the sea-level rises at the end of the last Ice Age – though large overall – were too small on a year-by-year basis to have caused cataclysmic flooding, and thus to have inspired global flood myths, or to be of any relevance at all to traditions of lost civilizations and antediluvian cities.
Although very few historians are presently taking any interest, the geological and oceanographic evidence has begun to turn against this ‘gradualist’ and ‘uniformitarian’ view of the meltdown, and there are more and more reasons to suspect that ‘the world of men’, as Plato’s Athenian comments in the passage from the Laws quoted at the beginning of this chapter, might indeed have often been ‘destroyed by floods … in such a way that only a small portion of the human race survived’.
Entering the realm of the unknown
At any of the three nodes of peak flooding around 15,000, 11,000 and 8000 years ago the convergence of evidence suggests very fast global sea-level hikes of the order of 5–10 metres – and sometimes far more – in each case complicated and exacerbated by induced ice-sheet break-up and other factors. In particular, as we have seen, experts believe that there may have been several temporary rises in sea-level during these periods – caused by the sudden floating of vast masses of ice – that far exceeded the margins recorded in the oceanographic record.104
Moreover, rising sea-levels – bringing floods from sea to land – are only part of the story of the end of the last Ice Age. Of at least equal, perhaps greater, importance are the terrible walls of water hundreds of metres high that again and again rolled out from the monstrous ice-domes – and thence over low-lying land, and from land to sea – when ice dams ruptured and glacial lakes spilled, or when pressurized subglacial meltwater burst from under the ice-sheet.
We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet break-ups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up ‘mountain-topping superwaves’ in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.105 Other than Oppenheimer’s own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the ef
fects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms – floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – all occurring at the same time.
We are entering the realm of the unknown here – because science has only recently begun to consider the end of the last Ice Age as a cataclysm at all and the evidence is still coming in about just how devastating and extensive that cataclysm might have been. Nevertheless, some observations that I believe deserve special attention have been made by the researcher Paul LaViolette in his 1997 book Earth Under Fire:
(1) At peak moments of the meltdown any hypothetical civilizations living around the edges of partially enclosed seas that served as drainage areas for the great ice-sheets could have suffered disproportionately large and rapid changes in sea-level. In a sophisticated and original argument, LaViolette draws particular attention to the Mediterranean:
Glacial meltwater [from the nearby European ice-sheets] would have entered the Mediterranean much more rapidly than it could escape through the Straits of Gibraltar, and, as a result, the temporary rise in Mediterranean sea-level would have been much greater than in the surrounding oceans … [Such meltwater surges] could have temporarily raised the Mediterranean by some 60 meters, flooding all coastal civilizations.106
(2) Mega-avalanches of rock and ice must have repeatedly thundered into the world’s oceans during the epoch of the meltdown because of the effects of isostacy on continental margins and the breakaway collapse of the gigantic ice-sheets. From an example in recent history we know how severe avalanche-induced floods can be. In July 1958 in Alaska’s Lituya Bay ‘ 40 million cubic metres of ice and rock weighing 90 million tons, avalanched from the glaciated slopes of the Fairweather Range and fell 900 metres into one of the bay’s inlets.’ The resulting wave roared inland up the bay’s steep opposite shore for a distance of more than a kilometre at a speed of 200 kilometres per hour and ‘destroyed ten square kilometres of forests to a height of 540 metres’.107
Glacier wave sweeps down side of ice-sheet, growing in height as it descends. Based on LaViolette (1997).
What then would have been the effects of the fall into the North Atlantic of a sheet of ice a third of the size of Canada?
(3) The phenomenon of outburst floods from catastrophically released glacial lakes, already understood to have had apocalyptic regional-scale effects, may have been far more severe that previously thought:
Ponds and lakes on a glacier’s surface, as well as natural caverns within the glacier, are known to store large quantities of glacial meltwater. From time to time the contents of such reservoirs can discharge suddenly to create potentially destructive floods called glacier bursts or glacier floods …
During periods of intense climatic warning, the Earth’s ice-sheets were melting extremely rapidly, with most of the melting taking place on their upper surfaces. Consequently large quantities of meltwater would have collected on the ice-sheet surface to form numerous supraglacial lakes perched at elevations of up to 3.5 kilometres. In cases where the impounded waters were restrained by ice jams and where mounting pressures caused these jams to give way, large floods of glacial meltwater would have poured out over the ice-sheet surface. As one such glacier burst swept forward, gradually descending the ice-sheet’s surface, it would have incorporated any ponded meltwater that lay in its path, triggering these supraglacial lakes to discharge their contents and add to its size. Through this snowballing effect a single initial glacier burst would have progressively grown in size and kinetic energy during the course of its downhill journey, eventually becoming of mountainous proportions. This so called continental glacier wave would have produced catastrophic floods unlike anything seen on our planet today …
Waves of greater height travel faster. Accordingly, as a glacier wave proceeded across an ice-sheet to lower altitudes, gaining in height and kinetic energy, it would have accelerated to higher speeds. By the time it had journeyed thousands of kilometres to the edge of the ice-sheet, it could have attained heights of 600 metres or more, a cross-sectional breadth of as much as 40 kilometres, and a forward speed of several hundred kilometres per hour. Such a wave could have extended thousands of kilometres along the ice-sheet … Glacier waves issuing from the surface of ice-sheets in North America, Europe, Siberia and South America would have had sufficient kinetic energy to travel thousands of kilometres over land to devastate regions far removed from the ice-sheet’s boundary. Upon entering the ocean, the wave would have continued forward as a tsunami to cause considerable damage on the shores of distant continents. Because of its immense energy, a glacier-wave tsunami would be far more destructive than any tidal wave observed in modern times.108
Yesterday …
There is much that we do not know about what happened to the earth, and to mankind, between 17,000 and 7000 years ago. And though science has made great strides towards a fuller understanding of that epoch, there is much that we may never know. Yet it is to this precise period of unrecorded prehistoric darkness set amidst epic climatic and environmental turmoil that archaeologists trace the origins of civilization: the first settlements, the first signs of structured hierarchical communities, the domestication of plants, the invention of agriculture, building with bricks and stone, etc. – in other words the whole suite of economic and social attributes that set mankind on the road to science and reason and the technological achievements of the modern world.
Proper ‘history’ doesn’t begin until after 5000 years ago when we have written records to go on and thus the basis to build up a reasonably accurate picture of past events – although even then there are huge gaps. Before 5000 years ago, in the absence of written records, all we have to light up our collective yesterdays are the conjectures of archaeologists based upon their interpretations of extremely scanty material evidence elevated from tiny areas of archaeological sites that become more and more scarce the further we go back in time. And almost all of these sites, of course, are on land. Thus far the contribution of marine archaeology to the debate has been risible. So this is the flimsy, hopelessly incomplete, and wholly inadequate basis on which we rest our understanding of the unwritten past and passively accept, as though we are drugged or senseless, that there is no mystery in it.
PART TWO
India (1)
4 / Forgotten Cities, Ancient Texts and an Indian Atlantis
The lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither material culture nor a superior physique, but a more excellent language and the mentality it generated … At the same time the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type was almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists; the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicles of a superior language.
Vere Gordon Childe, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh, 1926
In the end there is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed of a coherent or well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features.
Gregory Possehl, Professor of Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania, 1999
The word ‘city’ is etymologically linked to the word ‘civilization’. It is therefore of interest that mankind’s first cities have been traced by historians to the following regions and dates: (1) Mesopotamia, late fourth and early third millennia BC; (2) Egypt, late fourth and early third millennia BC; (3) India, late fourth and early third millennia BC; (4) China, mid-second millennium BC; (5) Central and South America, mid-second millennium BC.
In four of the five regions – Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the Americas-nothing remains of these ancient civilizations except their extraordinary stone monuments together with
more or less incomplete collections of their inscriptions, legends and traditions. These, by good fortune, have come down to us and have proved amenable to translation. But the cultures that created the monuments and the scriptures are long gone and thus inaccessible to study-except through inference and deduction from the material remains they left behind.
In the fifth region, the Indian subcontinent, matters are very different. Here the oldest cities are ascribed to the ‘Indus Valley civilization’. It was forgotten by history and unknown to archaeologists until the 1920s, when the first two sites to be discovered – Harappa and Mohenjodaro on the Indus river in what is now Pakistan – were excavated and found to be about 5000 years old. It is because of the location of these two ‘type sites’ that the name ‘Indus Valley civilization’ was coined – while at the same time the characteristic ‘Bronze Age’ archaeological assemblage of this civilization was referred to as ‘Harappan’ – since Harappa was the first site to be explored. Subsequent excavations, continuing today, have led to the realization that the majority of the approximately 2600 ‘Harappan’ sites so far discovered in fact lie outside the Indus valley, particularly to the east along the course of the ancient Sarasvati, a river that has been dry for almost 4000 years. This wide distribution of sites has been recognized by scholars, many of whom now prefer to speak of the ‘Indus-Sarasvati civilization’ – the term that I shall generally use here, since it more accurately describes the very large geographical catchment area in which this mysterious culture flourished.