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G9 The Book of Mormon describes the Jaredites as leaving Babylonia after the fall of the Tower of Babel, traveling northward, and thereafter almost certainly heading eastward. Ether 1:40/1:16 In this journey, described also by Ixtlilxochitl, they were required to cross "many waters" and "seas" until they came to the "great sea." ... The seas they crossed were undoubtedly land-locked Asian remnants of the waters of the Flood. Such large inland bodies of water also remained in the Valley of Mexico, in the Great Basin of the American West, and in the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest. Parts of the Great Plains remained swampy for a long period also.
G10 One such inland lake that remained from the Flood covered the vast area of northern Africa that now holds the Sahara Desert. This lake or sea has been called both Triton and Triconis. According the legends of the Berbers and Tuaregs of Morocco and Algeria, this great freshwater lake was cataclysmically drained into the Atlantic Ocean in historical times. These peoples relate that the southwestern part of the Atlas Mountains, which once extended to include the Canary Islands and more, "went down in one day and night of horror, with the torches of two hundred cities burning and the volcanoes belching forth fire."* This submergence of the western rim of Triton Lake allowed its waters to escape. What remained for many years were swamplands, grasslands, and woodlands, which supported wildlife such as crocodiles and large grazing animals. Pictures of these creatures, drawn by the human inhabitants of that era, are now found in the midst of one of the world's hottest, driest deserts. ...
G11 There is a large amount of historical, mythological, and geographical evidence which says that the Mediterranean Sea was once much shallower than at present. In fact, much of the area now covered by water was once inhabited, dry land. The remains of sunken cities have been found off the coasts of both Greece and Italy. "[The island of] Samos, and indeed the entire Aegean [Sea], was once rolling, heavily wooded terrain..."**
   There is a remnant of the history of this era in Plato. He records that Athens was once the greatest power in the Mediterranean, but "in a single day and night of misfortune all [its] warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea." What was thereafter left of Attica, the area of Greece containing Athens, was but a "remnant." Timaeus, 25: Critias, 110
G12 The Book of Jasher provides a glimpse of history from about 1650 BC that clearly shows the shallowness of the Mediterranean Sea even at that relatively late date. ...
   Although modern geologists agree that the Mediterranean Sea was once much shallower that at present, the dates they invariably give for this period run into many millions of years ago.
   [...to be cont.]

   * L. Taylor Hansen, THE ANCIENT ATLANTIC; Amherst, WI: Amherst, 1969: 33.
   ** Rick Gore, "The Mediterranean": National Geographic, Vol. 162:6 (Dec. 1982): 705.

G23 That the oceans and seas of the world have seen sudden, dramatic drops and rises in their water levels has long been known. Velikovsky and Hansen both review the large amount of scientific evidence for this. Much of the evidence falls into two categories: old beaches, both far above and far below present sea level, and ancient undersea river canyons in all the oceans, and in seas such as the Mediterranean and Baltic. These canyons, some of which reach depths of 10,000+ feet below sea level, were clearly cut by rivers through ground which was above sea level at the time. The absence of intermediate surf lines attest that all of these changes occurred cataclysmically, not gradually. ...
G25 Science's uniformitarian doctrine, upon which foundation Darwin built, declares that mountain-building by and large takes place slowly and gradually. But field geologists know differently, and they are backed by the testimony of history. A prime example is the case of the Atlantis-era Andean culture, whose cities and terraced farms were suddenly and dramatically elevated by many thousands of feet: so high, in fact, that the great city of Tiahuanacu [q.v.] had to be abandoned. Elsewhere, the great mountains of Atlantis, as well as a large part of the great Atlas range of North Africa, sank into the Atlantic Ocean to depths of more than 10,000 feet.
G26 L. Taylor Hansen has gleaned ancient legends from Native American sachems that tell of "the old red land" (Atlantis) in the "east sea" (Atlantic) that "went down in the great destruction." ...
   The Amerind memory of swamps and shallows to the west of Atlantis mirror similar tales from Africa and Europe of a much shallower eastern Atlantic
Basin than now exists. Modern science agrees in some part by admitting that both the eastern and western basins of the Atlantic must be of recent origin, since they have very little sediment on their bottoms. [q.v.] What, then, was the agent and the mechanism that caused not just Atlantis, but the entire Atlantic, to precipitously sink in historical times?
G27 Velikovsky provides two related answers to this question. The precipitator of "the great destruction," he shows in WORLDS IN COLLISION, was the planet Venus, whose then-erratic orbit brought it close to Earth around 1500 BC. ...
   In sum, the results of these two forces, gravitational and torque, caused the crustal plates of the Earth to rise and sink and slam into one another. Mountain ranges were dramatically thrust up here while sinking there, and the oceans and seas swamped Atlantis and many of the coastlands of the planet. In Egypt, high winds and an ebb tide drained the waters of the sea to allow a passage for the Israelites; then the sea flowed back and drowned the pursuing Egyptians. In the Mediterranean, the island volcano Santorin/Thera blew up in a massive explosion, destroying civilization in Crete and Greece and elsewhere in the region. The Aegean Valley became the Aegean Sea. Another treed valley became the North Sea; likewise for all or parts of what became the Baltic, Adriatic, and Tyrrhenian Seas. ...
   At the end of the Fourth World, as at the end of the earlier three Worlds, God stepped in to decisively reroute the plumbing on Earth. The end of the Fifth World, according to the "Aztec" Calendar Stone and Meso-American tradition, will see similar geological changes on a day 4 Earthquake. See A4.