ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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I'm particularly proud of the post below. Take look at it and you'll see why.

Click on the title below to go to the thread and add a reply.


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Beneath Antarctica's Ice, Evidence of Lost Continents! Pt 4 <— link
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I LOVE the Pellucidar series, and I love the concept even more than the books themselves.

As wonderful as it is, however, it's just as impossible as my New Land Unknown idea. I won't even go into all the reasons for why it couldn't exist, but I love the fact that Burroughs didn't let logic get in the way of creating such a wonderful place, as well as giving it a miniature sun at the center of the empty area inside the Earth — and he even included a miniature MOON which hover a few miles above this incredible inside-out landscape!

Frank Frazetta's cover art for one of the Pellucidar novels illustrates this beautifully.





Like Burroughs, I had fun coming up with the semi-plausible ways in which the New Land Unknown was formed and managed to end up with prehistoric beast living there AFTER the hollow area was created by the receding water beneath the ice.

But the weakest part of my description was the suggestion that seeds embedded in the glacial ice were deposited along the rim of the ice sheet and then were somehow pulled downward for 500 feet until the emerged beneath the ice, in the valley below.

Damn, that was lame, guys. I apologize.

But today I realized that there was a much better method to get ancient frozen seeds down into the New Land Unknown so that plant life could populate the valley after the water receded and left the large lake where the hidden sea had been.

Suppose that the land above the ice sheet on one end of the hidden valley had a distinct downward slope for fifty miles or so, along with a depression which contained a modest-sized glacier.







The glacier would move downhill —





— until it was funneled into a crevasse in the bedrock that extended down under the 500 ft thick sheet of ice which covered the New Land Unknown — a literal "frozen river" which ran down into the ground, forced by gravity into a tunnel formed by the crevasse and the ice sheet which covered the hidden valley below.


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The crevasse would carry the glacier under the 500 ft sheet of ice, inching its way along through the gap in the bedrock until it came out into the New Land Unknown, high on the side of the sloping landscape at one end of the valley.





Once it emerged from the confines of the crevasse which was covered by the ice sheet, it would move slowly down the slope towards the lake.





As it neared the lake (warmed by geothermal energy) the increasingly warmer air would melt the ice, and a stream of fresh water would flow down from the glacier's terminus to the shore of the lake.

In the years after Antarctica froze and locked the seeds which remained from its previous tropic period inside the ice, some of those seeds would be carried down the long slope above the ice sheet which covered the New Land Unknown, and they would be pull into the crevasse as the glacier traveled under the frozen "ceiling" of this hidden world until they were finally deposited on the shore of the lake . . . and watered by the melting glacial ice.

The sprouting vegetation would flourish in the warm region along the shore the lake, and eventually it would spread all across the New Land Unknown!

I like this new theory quite a lot. If seems to be quite plausible.

PS: The Science Channel had an episode of Unearth tonight about Machu Picchu, and when I saw the opening images I suddenly realized why the Incas built a magnificent city on a remote mountain top when the only modes of transportation they had to get there were by traveling on foot and by riding lamas!

Suddenly I realized that Machu Picchu was a spaceport for the aliens who provided guidance to these primitive people, and they didn't want the rest of the population to see the spacecraft landing and taking off from the cities down at ground level!

In other words, Machu Picchu was high in the Andes and remotely located for the sake of aliens coming down from the sky!

I'll start a thread soon about this next "Lost World" I've discovered in a few days.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)