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"Impact"
7120 B.C.
What is now Hudson 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 4.6 BILLION YEARS AGO. SOON AFTER ITS SCATTERED PARTICLES HAD
FROZEN 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 MANY THOUSANDS OF 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 comma formed that
slowly grew into an enormous luminous blue tail that curved and stretched out behind the
nucleus for a distance of 90 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 200 million years, it would lose all its ice and break up into a
cloud of dust and become a series of small meteorites. 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. But on this, its latest orbit, the comet passed within 900,000 miles
of Jupiter, whose great gravitational force veered it off on a collision course with the
third planet from the sun, a planet its inhabitants called Earth.
Plunging into Earth's atmosphere at 130,000 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 ten-mile-wide, four-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 onto Earth's surface with horrendous effect.
The immediate result from the explosive release of kinetic energy upon impact was to gouge
out a massive cavity twice the size of the island of Hawaii as it vaporized and displaced
a gigantic volume of water and soil.
The entire earth staggered from the seismic shock of a 12.0 earthquake. Millions of tons
of water, sediment, and debris 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 they blocked out the sun for nearly a year,
sending temperatures plunging below freezing, and shrouding 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 a 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, grasses and flowers still undigested in their
stomachs. Trees, along with their leaves and fruit, were quick-frozen. For days, fish that
were hurled upward from the impact fell from the blackened skies.
Waves five to ten miles 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
landmasses. 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 turning 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
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 thoughout the Pacific Ocean vanished, while others emerged
for the first time. Antarctica, previously west of Chile, slid over two thousand miles to
the south, where it was quickly buried under growing sheets 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 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 upon cataclysm.
The abrupt melting of the former ice packs, combined with glaciers covering the continents
that had 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, connected to the rest
of the European continent by a dry plain, was now an island, while a desert that became
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
temporarily 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 landmass could not react as quickly.
Earthquakes went on for months.
Savage storms with brutal winds swirled around the 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 over 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 many other animals that weighed a 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,
over 85 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, stonemasons, 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 had stood only a few hours before 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, almost all 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
the Einsteins of their era had evaporated into nothingness, abruptly leaving the world to
be taken over by primitive nomadic hunters, a phenomenon similar to what happened to the
glory of Greece and Rome after it was 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. Realizing their civilization was lost, never to rise again, they
began a centuries-long quest to erect the mysterious megaliths and dolmens of huge upright
stones found across Europe, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and into the lower Americas. Long
after the memory of their shining legacy had dimmed and become little more than myth,
their monuments commemorating the frightful destruction and loss of life still acted as
warnings of the next cataclysm to future generations. But within a millennium, their
descendants slowly forgot the old ways and assimilated with 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 a small farm town in Iowa. The comet had wreaked its unholy
havoc, mercilessly, viciously. The earth had not been ravaged with such vehemence since a
meteor had struck 65 million years earlier in a catastrophe that had exterminated the
dinosaurs.
For thousands of years after the impact, comets were associated with superstitions of
catastrophic events and considered omens of future 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 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, and Africans all spoke of a cataclysm that decimated their
ancestors.
But the legend that was spawned and that flourished throughout the centuries, the one that
provoked the most mystery and intrigue, was that of the lost continent and civilization of
Atlantis.
Excerpted from ATLANTIS FOUND by Clive Cussler (c) Copyright 1999. Reprinted with
permission from the publisher, Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved.
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