In his book Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Mankind, Graham Hancock examines the evidence of underwater ruins that show strong signs of being man-made despite being submerged in the ocean.
In the book, he pays particular attention to the islands of Malta, which are home not only to megalithic temples but also to submerged ruins. He also discusses the theories of Dr. Anton Mifsud, an Italian researcher who lives in Malta and has spent a considerable amount of time studying its archaeology and history. Dr. Mifsud has published works suggesting that Malta may have been the site of the famous island kingdom of Atlantis related by Plato from a story allegedly preserved by the priests of Egypt.
Malta itself is composed of four islands, as shown in the NASA image above: the largest island, which is the island of Malta, another large island to the northwest called Gozo, which also contains megalithic ruins, the island of Comino in between Malta and Gozo, and a very small rocky islet called Filfla, which some have hypothesized to be the remaining tip of Atlantis.
In Underworld, Mr. Hancock relates:
Mifsud's proposal, as we've seen, is that the world-famous story of the destruction of Atlantis in a 'single dreadful day and night' that Plato recounted at the beginning of the fourth century BC is an echo, or folk memory, of massive destruction wrought on Malta in 2200 BC by a fault collapse along the submarine Pantalleria Rift. [. . .] He proposes the cataclysmic collapse of this hypothetical south-western extension 4200 years ago as the explanation for the mystery of the sudden and apparently overnight extinction of Malta's age-old temple-building culture at the same date. 443 - 444.Elsewhere, Dr. Mifsud has pointed out that when the Knights Hospitaller came to Malta in the 1500s, they removed many of the megalithic stones for use in their own fortifications. According to the reports of some of the knights, one of the temples they found on their arrival was half submerged by the waters of the sea when they found it (this temple is no longer evident).
The idea that relatively recent tectonic activity caused a major uplift or "tilt" in Malta (as described by Mifsud and Hancock) and led to the extinction of the temple-building culture and the submergence of many ruins has some problems, however.
First, as readers of this blog will know, the tectonic theory itself has major problems. There is a host of evidence from around the world which cannot be satisfactorily explained by the tectonic theory -- for a list of some of this evidence, with links to previous posts discussing each of them, see this previous post.
A bigger problem with the use of tectonic activity to explain Malta's submerged ruins (tectonic activity which is ongoing and which continues to further tilt Malta right up to the present day, according to its proponents) is the fact that the ruins of Malta retain their celestial alignments, which visitors to the islands can still observe. We have written about this fact in a previous post, which illustrates the solar alignments in the temple of Mnajdra.
The megalithic temples on Malta are often called the oldest megalithic structures in the world. They certainly predate the 2200 BC suggested by Dr. Mifsud as the date of the cataclysmic upheaval and subsidence that supposedly ended the temple-building culture. If such a tectonic cataclysm took place after the temples were built, would we still expect their solar and astronomical alignments to survive?
This same dilemma pertains for most of the other ancient monuments which have celestial or geodetic alignments. It is powerful evidence against the tectonic theory itself, along with all the other geological evidence which undermines the tectonic theory.
However, the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown has no such difficulty with the megalithic evidence from Malta and elsewhere around the world. According to his theory, there was a cataclysmic global flood, during which the sliding of plates did occur -- fairly rapidly and with violent consequences when they ground to a halt, causing uplifts, tilting, and volcanic activity primarily along their forward edges. When they buckled and thickened, the floodwaters flowed off of the thickened continents into the newly-opened ocean basins, but the sea levels were lower for many centuries than they are today. However, these heavier continents slowly sank down into the mantle, raising the ocean floors at the same time and with them the ocean levels.
This theory would explain the submergence of ruins around the world, as well as the fact that tectonic activity has not altered the alignments of ancient monuments, which were all built after the violent collisions and buckling that took place at the end of the flood event. It would also explain the evidence of very ancient maps, alluded to by both Mr. Hancock and Dr. Mifsud, showing Malta as a single large island (in which Gozo, Comino and Malta itself are connected). These ancient maps could have been made before the slow rise of the oceans had been completed, by a very ancient lost civilization, as Mr. Hancock observes (445).
It appears that the hydroplate theory provides a new perspective on the mysteries of Malta, and one which deserves more examination. The Mathisen Corollary is the first book to apply this geological theory to the mysteries of mankind's ancient past.