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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

spin).<br />

Continental drift?<br />

Earth-crust displacement?<br />

Both?<br />

Some other cause?<br />

I honestly don’t know. Nevertheless, the simple facts about Antarctica<br />

are really strange and difficult to explain without invoking some notion of<br />

sudden, catastrophic and geologically recent change.<br />

Before reviewing a few of these facts, let us remind ourselves that we<br />

are referring to a landmass today oriented by the curvature of the earth<br />

so that the sun never rises on it during the six winter months and never<br />

sets during the six summer months (but rather, as viewed from the Pole,<br />

remains low above the horizon, appearing to transcribe a circular path<br />

around the sky during each twenty-four hours of daylight).<br />

Antarctica is also by far the world’s coldest continent, where<br />

temperatures on the polar plain can fall as low as minus 89.2 degrees<br />

centigrade. Although the coastal areas are slightly warmer (minus 60<br />

degrees centigrade) and shelter huge numbers of seabird rookeries, there<br />

are no native land mammals and there is only a small community of coldtolerant<br />

plants capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or<br />

near-total darkness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists these plants<br />

laconically: ‘Lichens, mosses and liverworts, moulds, yeasts, other fungi,<br />

algae and bacteria ...’ 2<br />

In other words, although magnificent to behold in the long-drawn-out<br />

antipodean dawn, Antarctica is a freezing, unforgiving, almost lifeless<br />

polar desert, as it has been throughout mankind’s entire 5000-year<br />

‘historical’ period.<br />

Was it always so?<br />

Exhibit 1<br />

Discover The World Of Science Magazine, February 1993, page 17:<br />

‘Some 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, deciduous trees<br />

adapted to a warm climate grew in Antarctica. This is the conclusion<br />

palaeobotanists are drawing from a stand of fossilized tree stumps<br />

discovered at an altitude of 7000 feet on Mount Achernar in the<br />

Transantarctic mountains. The site is at 84° 22’ south, some 500 miles<br />

north of the South Pole.<br />

‘ “The interesting thing about this find is that it’s really the only forest,<br />

living or fossil, that’s been found at 80 or 85 degrees latitude,” says Ohio<br />

State University palaeobotanist Edith Taylor, who has studied the fossil<br />

trees. “The first thing we palaeobotanists do is look for something in the<br />

modern records that is comparable, and there are no forests growing at<br />

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 1:440.<br />

453

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