17.2 A Hook to the Earth

Comparatively not so long ago our country as far as the Carpathians and the south Urals was covered with ice, as were also Canada and the north of the United States. This fact is beyond any shadow of doubt. About 12,000 years ago the ice melted: this is also an authentic fact. But why did it happen?

Ludwig Seidler, a Polish scientist, made a careful study of the circumstances of this event. The explanation he found is based mainly on what would seem to be a rather unimportant fact.

In north-eastern Siberia there are cemeteries of extinct animals where tens of thousands mammoths are buried in the permafrost layers. The flesh of these animals has been excellently preserved, because the animals lived under conditions of Arctic cold. But this is not so. Undigested remains of food were found in the stomachs of the dead mammoths, remains of cones and needles of spruce and larch, which do not grow in the north tundra.

This means that the ancient elephants lived in a moderate climate and they perished from the unexpected cold. It means that a great catastrophe fell on the planet 12,000 years ago. What was this catastrophe?

Ludwig Seidler thinks that the Earth collided with a very large cosmic body, which made it shudder and displace. The geographic poles quickly shifted 30 degrees in the direction of the action of the outer force. The North Pole moved out of Hudson Bay into its present position, and the “ice cap” shifted rapidly from Labrador to the mouth of the Yenisei, freezing a herd of mammoths. The equator changed its position accordingly. Previously it has passed through the highest peak in the world – Mount Everest. That is how some regions of our planet grew sharply colder, and others much warmer. That is how the climate changed unexpectedly.

Of course, this catastrophe made the waters of the World Ocean rush as a gigantic wave into the lowland regions of America and Europe, drowning the hypothetical Atlantica and tearing through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea. All this is mentioned in the works of the ancient Greek chronicler Plato. Perhaps this was the basis for the biblical legend of the “world flood”.

Some scientists think that in the past the geographical and magnetic poles coincided, but nowadays they do not because they have moved many hundreds of kilometres apart. But what if it is just that the magnetic axis has not yet caught up with the geographic axis, being closer as yet to their precatastrophic direction?

The Polish scientist even indicated the landing site of the supposed planetoid, which had landed such a hook on the Earth, as boxers would say. He considered this site to be not far from the Bahama Islands. A daring, almost fantastic conclusion, isn’t it?

17.3 Gold mines under the sea

Man is only just beginning to realize how much he must look to the sea. When we got to the bottom of the sea, we find things that no one dreamed existed until recently. Lands which were covered with water when the ice melted at the end of the Ice Age are rich in minerals. Off the South African coast, for example, is a place where there are five times the number of diamonds as in the mines on the land. One of these diamond mines on the sea of the bottom is near the mouth of the Orange River. Oil is brought from the bottom of the Caspian Sea near Baku. Sand with gold in it has been found off the Alaskan coast near Nome, and tin is mined off Thailand and Indonesia. But if man wants to continue gathering riches from the sea he is going to have to look after it. The effects of radio-activity, and even of household detergents are harmful to the creatures that live in the sea and can be harmful to the people who eat them. One recent discovery shows that there is now ten times more lead in the upper levels of the sea than there was forty years ago because lead from the high-octane petrol used in motor-cars goes into the atmosphere.