Prologue To Atlantis Found

 

By

 

Clive Cussler

 

 

 

Impact

6120 B.C.

 

 

    In what is now Hudson's Bay, Canada The intruder came from beyond. A nebulous celestial body as old as the universe itself, it had been born in a vast cloud of ice, rocks, dust and gas when the outer planets of the solar system were formed more than four and a half billion years ago. Soon after its scattered particles froze into a solid mass one mile in diameter, it began streaking silently through the emptiness of space on an orbital voyage that carried it around a distant sun and halfway to the nearest stars again, a journey lasting two million years from start to finish.

 

    The comet's core, or nucleus, was a conglomeration of frozen water, carbon monoxide, methane gas and jagged blocks of metallic rocks. It might accurately be described as a dirty snowball hurled through space by the hand of God. But as it whirled past the sun and swung around on its return path beyond the outer reaches of the solar system, the solar radiation reacted with its nucleus and a metamorphosis took place. The ugly duckling soon became a thing of beauty.

 

    As it began to absorb the sun's heat and ultraviolet light, a long coma formed that slowly grew into an enormous, luminous blue tail that curved and stretched out behind the nucleus for a distance of ninety million miles. A shorter, white dust tail more than one million miles wide also materialized and curled out on the sides of the larger tail like the fins of a fish.

 

    Each time the comet passed the sun, it lost more of its ice, and its nucleus diminished. Eventually, in another two hundred million years, it would lose all its ice and break up into a cloud of dust and become a series of small asteroids. This comet, however, would never orbit outside the solar system or pass around the sun again. It would not be allowed a slow, cold death far out in the blackness of space. Within a few short minutes, its life would be snuffed out. On this, its last orbit, the comet passed within nine hundred thousand miles of Jupiter, whose great gravitational force made it veer off on a collision course with the third planet from the sun, a planet its inhabitants called Earth.

 

    Plunging into the Earth's atmosphere at one hundred twenty thousand miles an hour on a forty-five-degree angle, its speed ever increasing with the gravitational pull, the comet created a brilliant luminescent bow shock as its two-billion-ton mass began to break into fragments due to friction from its great speed.

 

    Seven seconds later, the misshapen comet, having become a blinding fireball, smashed into an ocean with horrendous effect. The immediate result from the explosive release of kinetic energy upon impact was to gouge out a massive cavity the size of today's Hawaiian island of Maui as it vaporized and displaced a gigantic volume of water.

 

    The entire Earth staggered from the seismic shock of an 11.0 earthquake. Millions of tons of sediment from the ocean bottom burst upward, thrown through the hole in the atmosphere above the impact site and into the stratosphere along with a great spray of pulverized, fiery rock that was ejected into suborbital trajectories before raining back to earth as blazing meteorites. Firestorms destroyed forests throughout the world. Volcanoes that had been dormant for thousands of years suddenly erupted, sending oceans of molten lava spreading over millions of square miles, blanketing the ground a thousand or more feet deep.

 

    So much smoke and debris were hurled into the atmosphere and later blown into every corner of the land by terrible winds that the sun was blocked out for nearly a year, sending temperatures plunging below freezing and shrouding the earth in darkness. Climatic change in every corner of the world came with incredible suddenness. Temperatures at vast ice fields and northern glaciers rose until they reached between ninety and one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, causing a rapid meltdown.

 

    Animals accustomed to tropical and temperate zones became extinct overnight. Many, such as the woolly mammoths, turned to ice where they stood in the warmth of summer eating grasses and flowers still undigested in their stomachs. Trees along with their leaves and fruit were quick-frozen. For days, fish that had been hurled upward from the impact fell from the black skies.

 

    Waves thousands of feet in height were thrown against the continents, surging over shorelines with a destructive power that was awesome in magnitude.

 

    Water swept over low coastal plains and swept hundreds of miles inland, destroying everything in its path.

 

    Endless quantities of debris and sediment from the ocean floors were spread over low land masses. Only when the great surge smashed against the base of mountains did it curl under and begin a slow retreat, but not before changing the course of rivers, filling land basins with seas where none existed before and turned large lakes into deserts.

 

    The chain reaction seemed endless.

 

    With a low rumble that grew to the roar of continuous thunder, the mountains began to sway like palm trees under a light breeze as avalanches swept down their sides. Deserts and grassy plains undulated as the onslaught from the oceans reared up and struck inland again.

 

    The shock from the comet's impact had caused a sudden and massive displacement in the Earth's thin crust. The outer shell, less than forty miles thick, and the mantle that lay over the hot fluid core buckled and twisted, shifting crustal layers like the skin of a grapefruit that had been surgically removed and then neatly replaced so it could move around the core of fruit inside. As if controlled by an unseen hand, the entire crust then moved as a unit.

 

    Entire continents were shoved around to new locations. Hills were thrust up to become mountains. Islands throughout the Pacific Ocean vanished, while others emerged for the first time. Antarctica, once west of modern-day Chile, slid more than two thousand miles to the south, where it was quickly buried under growing mountains of ice. The vast ice pack that once floated in the Indian Ocean west of Australia now found itself in a temperate zone and rapidly began to melt. The same occurred with the former North Pole, which had spread throughout what is now northern Canada. The new pole soon began to produce a thick ice mass in the middle of what once had been open ocean.

 

    The destruction was relentless. The convulsions and holocaust went on as if they would never stop. The movement of the Earth's thin outer shell piled cataclysm on cataclysm. The abrupt melting of the former ice packs, combined with glaciers covering the continents having suddenly shifted into or near tropical zones, caused the seas to rise four hundred feet, drowning the already destroyed land that had been overwhelmed by tidal waves from the comet's impact.

 

    In the time span of a single day, Britain, once connected to the rest of the European continent by a dry plain, was now an island, while a desert that would become known as the Persian Gulf was abruptly inundated. The Nile River, having flowed into a vast fertile valley and then on toward the great ocean to the west, now ended at what had suddenly become the Mediterranean Sea.

 

    The last great ice age had ended in the geological blink of an eye.

 

    The dramatic change in the oceans and their circulation around the world also caused the poles to shift, drastically disturbing the Earth's rotational balance.

 

    Earth's axis was thrown off by two degrees as the north and south poles were displaced to new geographical locations, altering the centrifugal acceleration around the outer surface of the sphere. Because they were fluid, the seas adapted before the Earth made another three revolutions. But the land mass could not react as quickly.

 

    Earthquakes went on for months.

 

    Savage storms with brutal winds swirled around Earth, shredding and disintegrating everything that stood on the ground for the next eighteen years, before the poles stopped wobbling and settled into their new rotational axis. In time, sea levels stabilized, permitting new shorelines to form as bizarre climatic conditions continued to moderate. Changes became permanent. The time sequence between night and day changed as the number of days in a year decreased by two. The earth's magnetic field was also affected and moved northwest by more than a hundred miles.

 

    Hundreds, perhaps thousands of different species of animals and fish became instantly extinct. In the Americas, the one-humped camel, the mammoth, an ice age horse and the giant sloth all disappeared.

 

    Gone also were the saber-toothed tiger, huge birds with twenty-five-foot wingspans and most other animals that weighed one hundred or more pounds, most dying by asphyxiation from the smoke and volcanic gases.

 

    Nor did the vegetation on land escape the apocalypse. Plant life not turned to ashes by the holocaust died for lack of sunlight along with the algae in the seas. In the end, more than eighty-five percent of all life on Earth would die from floods, fires, storms, avalanches poison from the atmosphere and eventual starvation.

 

    Human societies, many quite advanced, and a myriad of emerging cultures on the threshold of a progressive golden age were annihilated in a single horrendous day and night. Millions of Earth's men, women and children died horribly. All vestiges of emerging civilizations were gone, and the few pathetic survivors were left with nothing but dim memories of the past. The coffin had been closed on the greatest uninterrupted advance of mankind, a ten-thousand-year journey from the simple Cro-magnon man to kings, architects, stone masons, artists and warriors. Their works and their mortal remains were buried deep beneath new seas, leaving few physical examples and fragments of an ancient advanced culture. Entire nations and cities that stood only a few hours before had vanished without a trace. The cataclysm of such magnitude left almost no evidence of any prior transcendent civilizations.

 

    Of the shockingly low number of humans who survived, most lived in the higher altitudes of mountain ranges and were able to hide in caves to escape the furies of the turbulence. Unlike the more advanced Bronze Age peoples who tended to cluster and build on low-lying plains near rivers and ocean shorelines, the inhabitants of the mountains were Stone Age nomads. It was as though the cream of the crop, the Leonardo da Vincis, the Picassos and Einsteins of their era had evaporated into nothingness, abruptly leaving the world to be taken over by itinerant hunters and backwoods trappers, a phenomenon similar to the glory of Greece and Rome cast aside in favor of centuries of ignorance - and creative lethargy. A neolithic dark age shrouded the grave of the highly cultured civilizations that once existed in the world, a dark age that would last for two thousand years. Slowly, very slowly, did mankind finally walk from the dark and begin building and creating cities and civilizations again in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

 

    Pitifully few of the gifted builders and creative thinkers of the lost cultures survived to reach high ground. They had erected mysterious magaliths and dolmens of huge upright stones across Europe, Asia, the Pacific Islands and into the lower Americas. Their only visible legacy consisted of these monuments commemorating the frightful destruction and loss of life, which also acted as warnings to future generations of the next cataclysm. Within two hundred years, they had been assimilated into the nomadic tribes and ceased to exist as a race of advanced people.

 

    For hundreds of years after the convulsion, humans were afraid to venture down from the mountains and reinhabit the lower lands and coastal shorelines. The technically superior seafaring nations were but vague thoughts of a distant past. Ship construction and sailing techniques were lost and had to be reinvented by later generations whose more accomplished ancestors were revered simply as gods.

 

    All this death and devastation was caused by a hunk of dirty ice no larger than an average shopping mall.

 

    The comet had wreaked its unholy havoc, mercilessly, viciously. The Earth had not been ravaged with such vehemence since a meteor had struck sixty-five million years earlier in a catastrophe that exterminated the dinosaurs.

 

    For thousands of years after the impact, comets were associated with catastrophic events and thought to be portents of tragedies. They were blamed for everything from wars and pestilence to death and destruction. Not until recent history were comets considered nature's wonders, like the splendor of a rainbow or clouds painted gold by a setting sun.

 

    The biblical flood and a host of other calamity legends all had their ties to this one tragedy. The ancient civilizations of Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs of Central America had many traditions relating to an ancient cataclysmic event. The Indian tribes throughout the United States passed down stories of waters flooding over their lands. The Chinese, the Polynesians ana the Africans all spoke of a cataclysm that decimated their ancestors.

 

    But the legend that was spawned and flourished throughout the centuries, the one that provoked the most mystery and intrigue, was that of the lost continent and civilization of Atlantis.