Greenland's ice largely unmoved by melt water - By Alok Jha, science correspondent

Guardian News Service: Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought.

Receding ice sheets are of major concern to climate scientists because the melting water could lead to a rise in sea levels. In addition, the melting can encourage feedback mechanisms that amplify the warming effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: ice and snow reflect sunlight, so less of them means more heat is absorbed by the Earth. Observations have already shown that the speed at which glaciers at the edge of Greenland are moving into the sea has doubled in the past two decades.

Thousands of lakes form on top of Greenland's glaciers every summer due to the increased sunlight and warmer air. Satellite observations have shown that these lakes often disappear, often in as little as a day, but no one knew where the water was going or how quickly it moved.
When these lakes were first discovered in recent years, experts became concerned that the melting water might make its way to the base of the ice and lubricate the Greenland ice sheet's passage into the sea, which would contribute to a global sea-level rise. In a warming world, more lakes are expected to form on Greenland, raising the possibility that the entire ice sheet will melt more quickly than expected.

But the new research, published today (APRIL18) in the magazine Science, has cast doubt on that theory.

Sarah Das, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, led a study that monitored the evolution of two surface lakes on Greenland in the summers of 2006 and 2007. Using aerial surveys and satellite imagery, they monitored the lakes and tracked the progress of glaciers moving toward the coast.

She said the most impressive drainage event occurred in July 2006, when most of a 5.6 sq km lake holding 11.6bn gallons of water emptied in just 90 minutes. The scientists estimated the average flow rate to be more than that of Niagara Falls. Underneath the lake, the ice sheet was raised and began moving horizontally at twice the average daily rate.

But her team also found that, when considered over the whole year, the surface meltwater was responsible for only a few per cent of the movement of the glaciers that they monitored. Even at its peak, it appeared to contribute only 15%, and often less, to the annual movement of the outlet glaciers at the edge of Greenland.

"Considered together, the new findings indicate that while surface melt plays a substantial role in ice sheet dynamics, it may not produce large instabilities leading to sea level rise," says Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington. "There are still other mechanisms that are contributing to the current ice loss and likely will increase this loss as climate warms."

"To influence flow, you have to change the conditions underneath the ice sheet, because what's going on beneath the ice dictates how quickly the ice is flowing," said Das. "If the ice sheet is frozen to the bedrock or has very little water available, then it will flow much more slowly than if it has a lubricating and pressurised layer of water underneath to reduce friction ... It's hard to envision how a trickle or a pool of meltwater from the surface could cut through thick, cold ice all the way to the bed.

For that reason, there has been a debate in the scientific community as to whether such processes could exist, even though some theoretical work has hypothesised this for decades."

Glacial ice is second only to the oceans as the largest reservoir of wateron the planet, and 10% of the Earth's glacial ice is found in Greenland.

The west Antarctic ice sheet is also increasing the rate at which it is losing mass. In a recent interview with the London-based Guardian, leading Nasa climate scientist Jim Hansen said the ice sheets' increased shrinking meant that the world's targets for reduction of carbon emissions were not stringent enough. "If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century," he said.

Hansen said recently that the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02, already the most stringent in the world, should be cut to 350ppm if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed".

We've Been Changing the Climate for Eons, and That's Reason for Hope

Our epoch needs a new name. You're familiar with, say, the Jurassic? It started 200 million years ago and ended 55 million years later, give or take. For the past 12,000 years, we've been living in the Holocene. But in 2000, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen pitched a new name for our times: the Anthropocene, the epoch affected by people. He dated it to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s — in other words, when we started messing things up. William Ruddiman, a retired climatologist at the University of Virginia, likes the name Anthropocene, too. But he thinks it started much, much earlier — as far back as 6,000 BC, when human beings first discovered agriculture. That's when we started razing forests and burning lots of wood, pumping enough carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere to alter the world's climate.

What's the difference? Scientists still argue — though not as much as deniers would have you believe — about the extent to which climate change is the result of human activity. And they still argue — quite a lot, actually — about how quickly the climate shifts in response to new conditions. As I understand Ruddiman, we humans may have been screwing up the climate for far longer than anyone thought. But that's good — because if we could change things then, we should certainly be able to change them now.

The gist of Ruddiman's argument is that 8,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began their sharpest increase in 350,000 years — a CO2 spike that correlates with the origins of agriculture. Then, 5,000 years ago, methane levels jumped — at roughly the same moment humans started growing rice in paddies (organic matter decomposing in water emits methane). By 2,000 years ago, agriculture and forest-clearing had added as much as 140 billion tons of CO2 to the air, enough to stave off what would likely have been another ice age.

Since then, the climate has wiggled back and forth between warm and cold. Around AD 800, things got weirdly hot; Antarctic ice cores show atmospheric CO2 peaking then at 285 parts per million. Around 1300, CO2 levels started dropping, and by 1600 that number had decreased to as low as 275 ppm. According to Ruddiman, humans caused that nosedive, too — by dying in large numbers: In the 14th century, about one-third of Europe's population died in the Black Plague, and around the same time, some 50 million Native Americans were being wiped out by European germs. The much-reduced surviving population burned less wood and coal, grew less food, and even allowed wooded areas to grow back.

Today things are heating up again. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been on the steep incline of an exponential growth curve since 1800. Today they're at roughly 380 ppm. How high will temperatures rise as a result of so much carbon? We don't know. But the more you mess up the climate, the more feedback effects there are and the more chaotic it gets, until eventually we reach tipping points, when various important climatic systems — Arctic summer sea ice, for example, or the Indian summer monsoon — suddenly disappear or change dramatically.

But I see hope in Ruddiman's conclusions. If humans have been changing the climate for eight millennia, that means we can keep right on doing it. We can steer the climate back on course. (I should add that Ruddiman's hypothesis is controversial, and he himself interprets his findings much more conservatively.)

So what do we do? You already know the drill: Make machines more energy efficient. Use less fossil fuel. Sequester CO2. Protect rain forests. Develop alternative energy sources like wind and solar power. Build more nuclear plants. Maybe even change the planet through geoengineering, the once far-out idea that the greenhouse effect can be reversed by, say, releasing fleets of mirrors or sulfur particles into the atmosphere. Ruddiman suggests we focus on reducing the concentrations of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, by trapping emissions from landfills and changing the fertilizer used by rice farmers.

The point is, exhorting corporations and governments to act now isn't just ringing a rhetorical bell: We can rescue the globe's climatic system as abruptly as we can push it over the edge. And no matter what we call our current epoch, it would be nice if we kept the planet healthy enough to let us live to see the next one.

Peter Schwartz (peter_schwartz@gbn.com) is a cofounder and chair of the Global Business Network.

Calling All Mad Scientists - to stop Global Warming...

To stop global warming we may need to start thinking outside the box

In the summer of 1858, a putrid odor of raw sewage arose from the River Thames in London and choked the city in its sickly grip. The Great Stink, as it came to be known, spurred Britain's lawmakers to rush a bill through Parliament to provide the money to build a modern sewer system -- one that would discharge sewage downstream from the river's drinking water intake. Construction of similar structures in the same era in a number of European and American cities, including Paris and Chicago, ended epidemics of typhoid and cholera, which victims contracted by drinking water contaminated with feces. If the Victorians could eliminate these diseases through careful disposal of human waste, why can't we counter climate change by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and burying it where it can do us no harm?

That radical proposal lies at the core of Fixing Climate, the latest in a spate of books on the seemingly intractable problem of global warming. While most writers stress the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the authors of Fixing Climate -- Columbia University earth scientist Wallace Broecker and the science writer Robert Kunzig -- suggest instead that we view carbon dioxide as a form of sewage: a pollutant with which we have carelessly contaminated the atmosphere, but one that we can remove with the right technology. Doing so is necessary, they argue, because the chance that we will succeed in paring back our carbon emissions with the speed required to avert disaster is quite small.

Broecker and Kunzig embrace a techno-fix that would require us to scrub our carbon dioxide waste from the atmosphere and sock it away in rocks. Their proposal is typically American: upbeat in its can-do spirit, yet pragmatic. The pair are not breast-beating penitents. In fact, they open their book with an eloquent ode to the beauty of the piston engine, acknowledging that fossil fuels have enabled the average American to live as well as a preindustrial king. Yet it's time to shovel away the scum. "We need to create the means for taking our carbon back out of the air and putting it underground, where it came from," they write.

If anyone should be taken seriously on the topic of climate change, it is Wallace Broecker, who has spent more than 50 years studying the climate of the past 200,000 years, and who was one of the first to warn, more than three decades ago, of the dangers of global warming. Born in 1931 ("the same year as Twinkies," the book points out), he arrived in 1952 at what is now Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. He has spent his entire career there, publishing more than 400 papers and winning numerous prizes, including the National Medal of Science. Over the years, Broecker has developed ways to calculate the rate of gas exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean -- in particular, oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide -- and devised what is known as Broecker's Conveyor Belt, a global scheme of ocean circulation that is thought to drive climate patterns the world over.

As background to their proposal, Broecker and Kunzig devote about a third of their book to explaining the complex history of climate change science; a laudable effort, though at times my eyelids did begin to droop. To their credit, they enliven the text with asides on the notable figures who first figured out the science at hand (among them the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, whose "ravishing young wife, Sophia" deserted him in 1894 after a year of marriage in the midst of his calculations on planet-warming carbon dioxide).

The book's real focus, though, is a climate fix hatched by Klaus Lackner, now a physicist at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Lackner's company, Global Research Technologies, announced in the spring of 2007 that it had built a prototype "air-capture technology product" to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. When Broecker first heard Lackner talking about his ideas in 1999, he recalled thinking, "This guy is nuts." Lackner, then an associate director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, argued that we should attempt to accelerate the natural chemical breakdown of rocks. The plan: grind up billions of tons of magnesium- or calcium-rich rocks, chemically combine them with carbon dioxide to form another type of rock -- a harmless carbonate -- and then find a place to put the resulting mountains of the stuff. Later on, Broecker found Lackner's tendency to think big-and his willingness to attack a problem from first principles -- "more exciting than crazy," and lured him to Columbia.

In fact, there is nothing all that revolutionary about pulling carbon dioxide out of the air; it is done on every space shuttle and submarine to prevent crews from asphyxiating on their own exhaled breath. Lackner built his prototype on a budget of $5 million from the late Gary Comer, the founder of Lands' End. In this device, crushed rocks have been replaced by a plastic compound that reacts with CO2 to form sodium bicarbonate: essentially, baking soda. If Lackner's vision comes to fruition, 20-foot-tall carbon-sucking towers-each resembling an erect Tower of Pisa-could be arrayed all over the planet. The final step in this massive cleanup project would be to extract CO2 from the bicarbonate and inject it into the ground in liquid form.

Each tower would extract about one ton of carbon dioxide a day, so it would take an awful lot of towers to scrub the 80 million tons we emit daily. The sheer scale of the problem dwarfs any single solution, but in Broecker and Kunzig's view, Lackner's invention is "the only hope." Their reasoning is simple: the towers can be placed anywhere -- far easier and more practical than attaching a CO2 scrubber to every car and airplane on the planet. And because CO2 disperses quickly through the entire atmosphere, removing it in one spot helps the whole world.

By contrast, say Broecker and Kunzig, collecting CO2 from the flues of power plants would entail transporting the gas perhaps hundreds of miles to a dumping ground. Nevertheless, this too promises to be an important means for steering us from the path of doom, should we manage to make it happen. In January, the Department of Energy scrapped plans for FutureGen, a coal-fired plant that was to collect and dispose of its own CO2 emissions.

The Norwegian oil company Statoil currently captures CO2 from its drilling operations at the Sleipner natural gas field in the North Sea, and it then injects a million tons of the gas each year under the seabed. There are plenty of other places to put the heat-trapping gas. Iceland, for example, is made entirely of basalt, a volcanic rock rich in calcium silicates, which bind with CO2. This fall, Reykjavik Energy plans to begin pumping carbon dioxide half a mile deep into basalt deposits. Vast banks of basalt also exist elsewhere: in the United States, volcanic rock covers more than 60,000 square miles of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon.

Detractors will inevitably dub such schemes misguided or deluded. Tim Flannery, for one, argues in his 2005 book, The Weather Makers, that the volume of carbon dioxide we create is "so prodigious that it seems impossible for Earth to tuck it away without suffering fatal indigestion." The authors of Fixing Climate are not oblivious to the scale of the problem or the expense of the solution. If we choose Lackner's original proposal, then large mounds of carbonate must be piled or buried somewhere. That would transform the landscape, but so would covering hundreds of square miles with solar panels. "There is no free lunch in solving the CO2 problem," Broecker and Kunzig say.

As for Lackner's current proposal to array carbon-capturing towers across the globe, they admit that it sounds utopian. "If the amount [of CO2] the world produced in a single year were spread over Manhattan, it would rise three-quarters of the way up the Empire State Building. On the other hand, if all the wastewater produced in the United States alone were spread over Manhattan, even the radio antenna on top of the Empire State would be far beneath the waves. Yet somehow in the twentieth century we managed to get our sewage problem under control." With our own Great Stink now threatening to overpower the entire planet, we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to consider the merits of such ambitious technological fixes before we suffocate in our own stifling waste.

The Hollow Earth - Agharta, The Subterranean World

I dont recall exactly who sent this to me.. but still a wonderful article on Hollow Earth ( A follow through for my old post...)

By: Dr. R. W. Bernard, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. - Chapter 7.2:

The word "Agharta" is of Buddhist origin. It refers to the Subterranean World or Empire in whose existence all true Buddhists fervently believe. They also believe that this Subterranean World has millions of inhabitants and many cities, all under the supreme domination of the subterranean world capital, Shamballah, where dwells the Supreme Ruler of this Empire, known in the Orient as the King of the World. It is believed that he gave his orders to the Dalai Lama of Tibet, who was his terrestrial representative, his messages being transmitted through certain secret tunnels connecting the Subterranean World with Tibet.

Similar mysterious tunnels honeycomb Brazil. Brazil in the West and Tibet in the East seem to be the two parts of the Earth where contact between the Subterranean World and the surface world may be most easily achieved, due to the existence of these tunnels.

The famous Russian artist, philosopher and explorer, Nicholas Roerich, who traveled extensively in the Far East, claimed that Lhasa, capital of Tibet, was connected by a tunnel with Shamballah, capital of the subterranean empire of Agharta. The entrance of this tunnel was guarded by lamas who were sworn to keep its actual whereabouts a secret from outsiders, by order of the Dalai Lama. A similar tunnel was believed to connect the secret chambers at the base of the Pyramid of Gizeh with the Subterranean World, by which the Pharaohs established contact with the gods or supermen of the underworld.

The various gigantic statues of early Egyptian gods and kings, as those of Buddha found throughout the Orient, represent subterranean supermen who came to the surface to help the human race. They are generally represented as sexless. They were emissaries of Agharta, the subterranean paradise which it is the goal of all true Buddhists to reach.

Buddhist traditions state that Agharta was first colonized many thousands of years ago when a holy man led a tribe which disappeared underground. The gypsies are supposed to come from Agharta, which explains their restlessness on the Earth's surface and their continual travels to regain their lost home. This reminds one of Noah, who was really an Atlantean, who saved a worthy group prior to the coming of the flood that submerged Atlantis. It is believed that he brought his group to the high plateau of Brazil where they settled in subterranean cities, connected with the surface by tunnels, in order to escape from poisoning by the radioactive fallout produced by the nuclear war the Atlanteans fought, which brought on the flood that submerged their continent.

The aubterranean civilization oi Agharta is believed to represent a continuation of Atlantean civilization, which, having learned the lesson of the futility of war, remained in a state of peace ever since, making stupendous scientific progress uninterrupted by the setbacks of recurrent wars, as our surface civilization has been. Their civilization is many thousands of years old (Atlantls sank about 11,500 years ago), while ours is very young, only a few centuries old.

Subterranean scientists are able to wield forces of nature we know nothing about, as demonstrated by their flying saucers, which are operated by a new, unknown source of energy, more subtle than atomic energy. Ossendowski claims that the Empire of Agharta consists of a network of subterranean cities connected with each other by tunnels through which vehicles pass at tremendous speed, both under land and under the ocean.

These people live under the benign reign of a government headed by the King of the World. They represent descendants of the lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, as well as the original perfect race of Hyperboreans, the race of gods.

During various epochs in history, the Aghartan supermen or gods came to the surface to teach the human race and save it from wars, catastrophies and destruction. The coming of the flying saucers soon after the first atomic explosion in Hiroshima represents another such visitation, but thls time the gods themselves did not appear among men, but they sent their emissaries.

The Indian epic, "Ramayana" describes Rama as such an emissary from Agharta coming on an aerial vehicle, which was probably a flying saucer. A Chinese tradition speaks of divine teachers coming on aerial vehicles. Similarly, the founder ot the Inca dynasty, Manco Copac, came the same way.

One of the greatest of Aghartan teachers in America was Quetzalcoatl, the great prophet of the Mayas and Aztecs and of the Indians of the Americas in general, both in South and North America. That he was a stranger among them, coming from a different race (Atlantean) is indicated by his being fair, while they were dark; his being tall, while they were short; his being bearded, while they were beardless. He was reverenced as a savior by the Indians of Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala long before the coming of the white man. The Aztecs called him "God of Abundance" and the "Morning Star." His name Quetzalcoatl means "Feathered Serpent," meaning a teacher of wisdom (symbolized by the serpent) who flies. He was given this name because he came on an aerial vehicle, which appears to have been a flying saucer. He probably came from the Subterranean World, because after he remained some time with the Indians, he mysteriously vanished the same way as he came; and was believed to have returned to the Subterranean World from which he came.

Quetzalcoatl is described as having been "a man of good appearance and grave countenance, with a white skin and beard, and dressed in a long flowing white garment. He was also called Huemac, because of his great goodness and continence. He taught the Indians the way of virtue and tried to save them from vice by giving them laws and counsel to restrain them from lust and to practice chastity. He taught pacifism and condemned violence in all forms. He instituted a vegetarian diet, with corn as a principal food, and taught fasting and body hygiene. According to the South American archeologist, Harold Wilkins, Quetzalcoatl was also the spiritual teacher of the ancient inhabitants of Brazil.

After remaining some time with the Indians, and seeing how little they cared to follow his teachings, except his recommendation to plant and eat corn as a basic food in place of meat, Quetzalcoatl departed, telling them that some day he would return. That this "visitor from Heaven" left the same way in which he came - on a flying saucer - is indicated by the following facts. When Cortez invaded Mexico, the emperor Montezuma believed that the predicted "return of Quetzalcoatl" had occurred, because a fireball then gyrated over Mexico City, making the people wail and scream, setting the temple of the war god on fire. This fireball was believed to have been the flying saucer on which Quetzalcoatl traveled.

Osiris was another such subterranean god. According to Donnelly, in his book, "Atlantis the Antediluvian World," the gods of the ancients were the rulers of Atlantis and members of a superhuman race which governed the human race. Before the destruction of their continent, which they foresaw, they traveled by flying saucer through the polar opening to the Subterranean World in the hollow interior of the earth, where they continued to live ever since.

"The Empire of Agharta," wrote Ossendowski in his book "Beasts, Men and Gods," "extends through subterranean tunnels to all parts of the world." In this book he speaks of a vast network of tunnels constructed by a prehistoric race of remotest antiquity, which passed under both oceans and continents, through which swift-moving vehicles traveled. The empire of which Ossendowski speaks and concerning which he learned about from lamas in the Far East, during his travels in Mongolia, obviously consists of subterranean cities inside the earth's crust, which should be differentiated from those existing in its hollow center. Thus there are two subterranean worlds, one more superficial and one in the center of the earth.

Huguenin, whose book on flying saucers and the subterranean world we previously mentioned, believes that there exist many subterranean cities at various depths, between the earth's crust and its hollow interior. Concerning the inhabitants of these subterranean cities, he writes:

"This other humanity has reached an elevated grade of civilization, economic and social organization and cultural and scientific progress, in comparison with which the humanity which lives on the earth's surface are a race of barbarians."

In his book, Huguenin shows a diagram of the earth's interior, showing various subterranean cities at various depths, connected with each other by tunnels. He describes these cities as existing in immense cavities in the earth. The city of Shamballah, the capital of the subterranean empire, he portrays as existing at the center of the earth, in its hollow interior, rather than inside its solid crust. Ossendowski writes:

"All the subterranean caverns of America are inhabited by an ancient people who disappeared from the world. These people and the subterranean regions where they dwell are under the supreme authority of the King of the World. Both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were once the home of vast continents which later became submerged; and their inhabitants found refuge in the Subterranean World. The profounder caverns are illuminated by a resplendent light which permits the growing of cereals and other vegetables, and gives the inhabitants a long life-span free from disease. In this world exists a large population and many tribes."

In his book, "The Coming Race," Bulwer Lytton describes a subterranean civilization far in advance of our own, which existed in a large cavity in the earth, connected with the surface by a tunnel. This immense cavity was illuminated by a strange light which did not require lamps to produce it, but appeared to result from an electrification of the atmosphere. This light supported plant life and enabled the subterranean people to grow their foods. The inhabitants of the Utopia, described by Lytton were vegetarians. They had certain apparatuses by which, instead of walking, they flew. They were free from disease and had a perfect social organization so that each received what he needed, without exploitation of one by another.

It is claimed that the earth's crust is honeycombed by a network of tunnels passing under the ocean from continent to continent and leading to subterranean cities in large cavities in the earth. These tunnels are especially abundant in South America, especially under Brazil, which was the chief center of Atlantean colonization; and we may believe they were constructed by the Atlanteans. Most famous of these tunnels is the "Roadway of the Incas" which stretches for several hundred miles south of Lima, Peru, and passes under Cuzco, Tiahuanaco and the Three Peaks, proceeding to the Atacambo Desert. Another branch opens in Arica, Chile, visited by Madame Blavatsky.

It is claimed that the Incas used these tunnels to escape from the Spanish conquerors and the Inquisition, when entire armies entered them, carrying with them their gold and treasures on the backs of llamas, which they did when the Spanish Conquerors first came. Their mysterious disappearance at this time, leaving only the race of Quechua Indians behind, is also explained by their entering these tunnels. It is claimed that when Atahualpa, the last of the Inca kings, who was brutally murdered by Pizarro, the gold that was being carried to his ransom on a train of 11,000 pack llamas, found refuge in these tunnels. It is claimed that these tunnels had a form of artificial lighting and were built by the race that had constructed Tiahuanco long before the first Inca appeared in Peru.

Since the Incas who entered these tunnels to escape from the Spaniards were never seen since and disappeared from the earth's surface, it is probable that they continued to live in illuminated subterranean cities to which these tunnels led.

These mysterious tunnels, an enigma to archeologists, exist in greatest number under Brazil, where they open on the surface in various places. The most famous is in the Roncador Mountains of northeast Matto Grosso to where Colonel Fawcett was heading when last seen. It is claimed that the Atlantean city for which he searched was not the ruins of a dead city on the surface but a subterranean city with still living Atlanteans as its inhabitants; and that he and his son Jack reached this city and are still living therein. This is the belief of Professor de Souza, Commander Strauss and O. C. Huguenin, whom we have mentioned before.

The Roncador tunnel opening is guarded by fierce Chavantes Indians who kill anyone who dares to enter uninvited and who might molest the subterranean dwellers whom they respect and reverence. The Murcego Indians also guard these secret tunnel openings leading to subterranean cities in the Roncador Mountain region of Matto Grosso. We quote a letter to the author from an American, named Carl Huni, who lived many years in Matto Grosso and made a special study of this subject:

"The entrance to the caverns is guarded by Murcego Indians, who are a dark-skinned, undersized race of great physical strength. Their sense of smell is more developed than that of the best bloodhounds. Even if they approve of you and let you enter the caverns, I am afraid that you will be lost to the present world, because they guard the secret very carefully and may not let those who enter leave. (This may have happened to Colonel Fawcett and his son Jack, who are believed to have entered a tunnel leading to a subterranean city in the Roncador Mountains, never to return.)

"The Murcego Indians live in caverns and go out at night into the surrounding jungles, but they have no contact with the subterranean dwellers below, inhabiting a subterranean city in which they form a seli-contained community and have a considerable population. It is believed that the subterranean cities they inhabit were first constructed by the Atlanteans. One thing is certain, that no radioactive fallout can reach them. No one knows whether those who live in these ancient Atlantean subterranean cities are Atlanteans themselves or others who settled there after their origlnal builders were gone.

"The name of the mountain range where these Atlantean subterranean cities exist is Roncador in northeast Matto Grosso. If you go in quest of these subterranean cities, take your life in your own hands as you may never be heard of again, like Colonel Fawcett.

"When I was in Brazil I heard a lot about the underground caverns and subterranean cities. They are, however, a long way from Cuiaba. They are near the Rio Araguaya, which empties into the Amazon. They are to the northeast of Cuiaba at the foot of the tremendously long mountain range named Roncador. I desisted to investigate further because I heard that the Murcego Indians jealously guard the entrance to the tunnels from people who are not sufficiently developed, because they do not want trouble. In the first place, they do not want anyone who is still enmeshed in commercialism and who has a desire for money.

"There are also caverns in Asia and Tibetan travelers mention them. But as far as I know, in Brazil are the biggest ones and they exist at three different levels. I am sure I would get permission if I wanted to join them and they would accept me as one of theirs. I know they use no money at all, and their society is organized on a strictly democratic basis. People do not become aged and live in everlasting harmony."

This subterranean Utopia mentioned by Mr Huni (now residing in New York) seems to resemble greatly the one described by Bulwer Lytton in his book, "The Coming Race." Lytton was a Rosicrucian and probably based his novel on occult information concerning existing subterranean cities.

The ruins of a number of Atlantean cities were found in northern Matto Grosso and the Amazon territory, indicating that Atlanteans once colonized this country. Some years ago an English schoolteacher, hearing rumors of a lost Atlantean city on a high plateau in this region went to find it. He did, but the hardships of the journey cost his life. Before he died he sent by carrier pigeon a note describing a magnificent city he discovered whose streets were lined by high gold statues.

If the Atlanteans once colonized Brazil and constructed cities in Matto Grosso on its surface, why did they build subterranean cities there? It could not have been to escape the deluge that submerged Atlantis and outlying areas, because Matto Grosso is a high plateau where floodwaters could not have reached. The South American archeologist, Harold Wilkins, offers another theory: that the subterranean cities were built to escape the radioactive fallout resulting from a nuclear war the Atlanteans fought. This seems to be a very reasonable explanation, or otherwise here would be no reason to undergo the great labor of excavating the earth and constructing subterranean cities when the Atlanteans already had magnificent cities on the earth's surface.

If and when we are endangered by a nuclear war, we, too, will have to find refuge inside the earth and dwell there in illuminated subterranean cities and produce our foods under this light. It would of course be much easier to join existing subterranean cities constructed by the Atlanteans thousands of years ago, who vastly surpassed us in engineering skill, than to construct our own. If friendly contact with subterranean dwellers could be established, when war came, or even before, when radioactive fallout increases beyond the danger point and menaces our survival, ft would be to our advantage to contact these subterranean cities and, if we are admitted, to establish residence in them.

There is no old age in Agharta and no death. It is a society in which everyone is young looking, even if many centuries or even thousands of years of age. This seems incredible to surface dwellers exposed to the harmful effects of solar radiation and the autointoxication of food poisoning from a wrong diet. The symptoms of old age are not the natural result of the passage of time nor an assumed aging process, but to adverse biological conditions and habits. Senility is a disease; and since Aghartans are free from disease, they do not grow old.

The superior scientitic culture of the subterranean people, of which their flying saucers are an evident example, is the result of superior brain development and more energetic brains. This is due to the fact that their vital energies flow up to their brain, rather than being dissipated through the sexual channel as among so-called "civilized" surtace races. In fact, sex indulgence is completely out of their lives, because of their fruit diet, their endocrines are in a state of perfect balance and harmonious functioning, as in little children, and are not stimulated to abnormal activity by metabolic toxins, as produced by such foods as meat, fowl, fish and eggs and by such aphrodisiacs as salt, pepper, coffee, tobacco and alcohol. By keeping their blood-stream pure and free from toxins, the subterranean people are able to live in complete continence, conserving all vital energies and converting them into superior brain power. Their superior scientific achievements result from the fact that their brains are superior to ours in intellectual development.

Concerning Agharta, Professor Henrique J. de Souza, President of the Brazilian Theosophical Society and a leading authority on the Subterranean World, in his magazine, published an article he wrote, "Does Shangri-la Exist?" from which we quote:

"Among all races of mankind, back to the dawn of time, there existed a tradition concerning the existence of a Sacred Land or Terrestrial Paradise, where the highest ideals of humanity were living realities. This concept is found in the most ancient writings and traditions of the peoples of Europe, Asia Minor, China, India, Egypt and the Americas. This Sacred Land, it is said, can be known only to persons who are worthy, pure and innocent, for which reason it constitutes the central theme of the dreams of childhood.

"The road that leads to this Blessed Land, this Invisible World, this Esoteric and Occult Domain, constitutes the central quest and master key of all mystery teachings and systems of initiation in the past, present and future. This magic key is the `Open Sesame' that unlocks the door to a new and marvelous world. The old Rosicrucians designated it by the French word VITRIOL, which is a combination of the first letters of the sentence: `VISTA INTERIORA TERRAE RECTIFICANDO INYENES OMNIA LAPIDEM,' to indicate that `in the interior of the earth is hidden the true MYSTERY ' The path that leads to this Hidden World is the Way of Initiation.

"In ancient Greece, in the Mysteries of Delphos and Eleusis, this Heavenly Land was referred to as Mount Olympus and the Elysian Fields. Also in the earliest Vedic times, it was called by various names, such as Ratnasanu (peak of the precious stone), Hermadri (mountain of gold) and Mount Meru (home of the gods and Olympus of the Hindus). Symbolically, the peak of this sacred mountain is in the sky, its middle portion on the earth and its base in the Subterranean World.

"The Scandinavian Eddas also mention this celestial city, which was in the subterranean land of Asar of the peoples of Mesopotamia. It was the Land of Amenti of the Sacred Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians. It was the city of Seven Petals o! Vishnu, and the City of the Seven Kings of Edom or Eden of Judaic tradition. In other words, it was the Terrestrial Paradise.

"In all Asia Minor, not only in the past but also today, there exists a belief in the existence of a City of Mystery full of marvels, which is known as SHAMBALLAH (Shamb-Allah), where is the Temple of the Gods. It is also the Erdamf of the Tibetans and Mongols.

"The Persians call it Alberdi or Aryana, land of their ancestors. The Hebrews called it Canaan and the Mexicans Tula or Tolan, while the Aztecs called it Maya-Pan. The Spanish Conquerors who came to America believed in the existance of such a city and organized many expeditions to find it, calling it E1 Dorado, or City of Gold. They probably learned about it from the aborigines who called it by the name of Manoa or City Whose King Wears Clothing of Gold.

"By the Celts, this holy land was known as "Land of the Mysteries" - Duat or Dananda. A Chinese tradition speaks of Land of Chivin or the City of a Dozen Serpents. It is the Subterranean World, which lies at the roots of heaven. It is the Land of Calcas, Calcis or Kalki, the famous Colchida for which the Argonauts sought when they set out in search of the Golden Fleece.

"In the Middle Ages, it was referred to as the Isle of Avalon, where the Knights of the Round Table, under the leadership of King Arthur and under the guidance of the Magician Merlin, went in search of the Holy Grail, symbol of obedience, justice and immortality. When King Arthur was seriously wounded in a battle, he requested his companion Belvedere to depart on a boat to the confines of the earth, with the following words: `Farewell, my friend and companion Belvedere, and to the land where it never rains, where there fs no sickness and where nobody dies.' This is the Land of Immortality or Agharta, the Subterranean World.

This land is the Walhalla of the Germans, the Monte Salvat of the Knights of the Holy Grail, the Utopia of Thomas More, the City of the Sun of Campanella, the Shangri-la of Tibet and the Agharta of the Buddhist world."

*******

Hollow Earth - A Myth or Reality ???

Is the earth hollow? Is there a sun 600 miles in diameter at the center of the hollow earth? Is the inside of the shell of the hollow earth covered with mountains larger than the ones we see on the outside? Is there a hole in the shell of the hollow earth through which flying saucers from Venus and space ships from other galaxies fly to get to their bases inside the hollow earth? Are there secret passages from the bases of the Great Pyramid and other locations around the earth that connect the outside to the inside of the earth? Is the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb really caused when the bomb pokes a hole through the shell and the gasses inside the earth rush through to escape?

Some people claim to believe all of this, and they even give us detailed maps of what is inside the earth. See, for example, the extravagant map above, drawn by Max Fyfield and available on scores of pages on the World Wide Web. [Fy] Imagine my surprise when I found apparently reputable sources that said that Euler also endorsed a hollow earth theory, and that Fyfield’s map was based on Euler’s theories. This, of course, piqued my curiosity, so I decided to look into the question of Euler and the Hollow Earth.

Here are a few excerpts from some websites I found that credit Euler with a hollow earth theory.

Leonhard Euler

Later theorists came up with variations to Halley’s [sic] model. In the seventeenth century, Leonhard Euler proposed a single-shell hollow Earth with a small sun (1.000 km across) at the centre, providing light and warmth for an inner-Earth civilisation. Others proposed two inner suns, and even named them: Pluto and Proserpine.
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/03/01/85-inside-the-hollow-earth/


Leonhard Euler

In the eighteen century A Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler took the multiple spheres theory and replaced it with a single hollow sphere that contained a sun 600 miles wide. He said the sun maintained heat and light for an advanced civilization that he said lived there. A Scottish mathematician Sir John Leslie suggested that there was not one sun but in fact two he named
these Pluto and Proserpine.
http://tinwiki.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth


Leonard Euler

Leonard Euler (1707-1783), noted mathematician and one of the founders of higher mathematics. He stated that "mathematically the Earth has to be hollow". He also believed there was a center sun inside the Earth's interior, which provided daylight to a splendid subterranean civilization.
http://www.xenophilia.com/zb0008d.htm








The Expanding Earth idea has been around for a long time, but science has not considered it worthy of genuine investigation because a driving force was missing. This is where the Hollow Earth theory comes in. A new understanding of Gravity gives rise to an expanding, hollow Earth and once and for all neatly solves the drifting continent phenomenon.

This website sets out to prove that the Hollow Earth Theory and the Expanding Earth theory have credible scientific merit and should not be ignored. There is a wealth of evidence surfacing today that throws our current beliefs regarding the structure of our planet into serious doubt. Our goal is to accumulate as much of this information as possible and provide it in one easy-to-access place for all.

Throughout the pages of this website new ideas and discoveries are presented from wide-ranging areas of science. Our investigation has delved into many subjects and disciplines including geology and plate tectonics, paleontology and evolution, genetics and biology, gravity, astronomy and others. Each of these topics has their own exciting story to tell and together they will build a new picture of the Earth that is sure to surprise.

Various theories of Hollow Earth
http://www.hollowearththeory.com/articles/hollowEarthHistory.asp

It is time look at the information before us with fresh eyes and open minds and to seek out the truth for ourselves.

Astronomers find first habitable planet outside solar system

Astronomers find first habitable planet outside solar systemThe first habitable planet similar in size and conditions to Earth has been located in a distant solar system, once again raising the possibility of life on other planets, scientists said on Wednesday.

The as-yet unnamed planet is only about one-and-a-half times the size of Earth and five times more massive, a team of European astronomers announced at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany."We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between zero and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid," said Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory. "Models predict that the planet should be either rocky like our Earth or covered with oceans."The planet is located around a star known as the Gliese 581, about 20.5 light years from Earth's solar system and one of the 100 closest stars to the Sun.

Though the planet is much closer to its star than earth is to the Sun, conditions are similar because the Gliese 581, known as a red dwarf, is smaller and colder. One year lasts only 13 days on the planet."Red dwarfs are ideal targets for the search for such planets because they emit less light, and the habitable zone is thus much closer to them than it is around the Sun," said Xavier Bonfils of Lisbon University.More than 200 so-called exoplanets - planets outside of the Sun's solar system - have been discovered in the past 12 years since the first one was found. Most are massive bowls of gas similar to Jupiter.The same team of astronauts discovered another planet around the same red dwarf two years ago - a Neptune-sized planet about 15 times as massive as Earth. An extensive analysis of the latest find is to be revealed in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France said the newfound planet could inhabit life and will definitely be a target of future space missions to find extra-terrestrial beings."Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," he said. "On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."