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Authors: Ted Nield
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(mostly) invisible.
Wave of death
Facing Sri Lanka across Palk Bay is the tip of India. Once dubbed Cape Comorin, it is now known by its original name of Kanyakumari. In the 1950s it became the subject of a concerted political effort to ensure that it was incorporated into the emergent Tamil state, which took its present form under the Madras presidency in 1969. ‘Kumari’ is a powerful name in Tamil. It is the name of the mythical lost continent itself. It is also the name of one of its supposed mountains, and also of a major river that supposedly crossed it. Kanyakumari is the only surviving real place still to bear this heavily loaded name; a last bastion against the cruel sea that tore the Tamil homeland from its people in Katalakōl. It plays the role of ‘a vestige of the vanished’.
Just a few hundred metres offshore is a tiny islet on which the Vivekananda Memorial now stands. It is composed of a rock called charnockite, a rock first identified in the tombstone of the first governor of Calcutta, Job Charnock (d. 1693), which was formed deep in the Earth’s crust 550 million years ago as two continental masses fused together. Geology does not admit to having sacred sites, but if it did, this would be one of them. For reasons that we shall explore later, geologists refer to this island as ‘Gondwana Junction’.
Like many of the world’s sacred sites, the islet is sacred to more than one group. On 26 December 2004, at nine o’clock in the morning , about five hundred pilgrims, mostly Indian, crowded on to the rock to stand at the Vivekananda Memorial and see the sun rise. Although they would not number among them, before that day was out, over 200,000 people all around the Indian Ocean would be dead. Many had already died; waves of destruction and death were spreading outwards, triggered by the biggest earthquake for fifty years, caused by the very processes that are forming the next supercontinent.An event that has certainly happened before, and will just as certainly happen again, was about to overwhelm Tamilnadu.
Before Boxing Day 2004 the most recent Global Geophysical Event, which by definition affects (in some way) people on every continent , had been the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The Tsunami likewise had the effect of drawing the world together, but it also united Earth scientists in frustration that their knowledge had not been used to full effect, for example, to set up early-warning systems that had existed in the Pacific since the end of the Second World War. It also explained two things. It explained why Tamil people have an embedded myth of a dangerous and land-hungry sea that snatches life away in a catastrophic Katalakōl. And for me it explained why the seemingly abstruse subject of the Earth’s Supercontinent Cycle matters to everyone, everywhere.
But now is not the moment.
3
QUEENS OF MU
‘Some kind of legend from way back, which no one seriously believes in. Bit like Atlantis on Earth.’
DOUGLAS ADAMS, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Philip Sclater’s hypothetical lost supercontinent, invoked to explain the scattered distribution of lemurs, was haunted right from the outset. But of all the strange settlers Lemuria attracted, none was stranger (or had wider influence) than Helena Petrovna Hahn.
Hahn (1831–91) was born in the southern Ukrainian city now known as Dnipropetrovsk but which was then known as Ekaterinoslav; she was the daughter of Pyotr Alexeyevich von Hahn, an army colonel, and his novelist wife Elena Fadeev. Elena, who had earned herself the literary sobriquet of ‘the Russian George Sand’, died when her daughter was only eleven. Although the family had moved around considerably, as army families do, her father was unable to take little Helena with him after her mother’s death so Pyotr Alexeyevich farmed her out to her maternal grandmother, Elena Pavlovna de Fadeev, she was nobly born, a well-known botanist, and another formidable
Wave of death
Facing Sri Lanka across Palk Bay is the tip of India. Once dubbed Cape Comorin, it is now known by its original name of Kanyakumari. In the 1950s it became the subject of a concerted political effort to ensure that it was incorporated into the emergent Tamil state, which took its present form under the Madras presidency in 1969. ‘Kumari’ is a powerful name in Tamil. It is the name of the mythical lost continent itself. It is also the name of one of its supposed mountains, and also of a major river that supposedly crossed it. Kanyakumari is the only surviving real place still to bear this heavily loaded name; a last bastion against the cruel sea that tore the Tamil homeland from its people in Katalakōl. It plays the role of ‘a vestige of the vanished’.
Just a few hundred metres offshore is a tiny islet on which the Vivekananda Memorial now stands. It is composed of a rock called charnockite, a rock first identified in the tombstone of the first governor of Calcutta, Job Charnock (d. 1693), which was formed deep in the Earth’s crust 550 million years ago as two continental masses fused together. Geology does not admit to having sacred sites, but if it did, this would be one of them. For reasons that we shall explore later, geologists refer to this island as ‘Gondwana Junction’.
Like many of the world’s sacred sites, the islet is sacred to more than one group. On 26 December 2004, at nine o’clock in the morning , about five hundred pilgrims, mostly Indian, crowded on to the rock to stand at the Vivekananda Memorial and see the sun rise. Although they would not number among them, before that day was out, over 200,000 people all around the Indian Ocean would be dead. Many had already died; waves of destruction and death were spreading outwards, triggered by the biggest earthquake for fifty years, caused by the very processes that are forming the next supercontinent.An event that has certainly happened before, and will just as certainly happen again, was about to overwhelm Tamilnadu.
Before Boxing Day 2004 the most recent Global Geophysical Event, which by definition affects (in some way) people on every continent , had been the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The Tsunami likewise had the effect of drawing the world together, but it also united Earth scientists in frustration that their knowledge had not been used to full effect, for example, to set up early-warning systems that had existed in the Pacific since the end of the Second World War. It also explained two things. It explained why Tamil people have an embedded myth of a dangerous and land-hungry sea that snatches life away in a catastrophic Katalakōl. And for me it explained why the seemingly abstruse subject of the Earth’s Supercontinent Cycle matters to everyone, everywhere.
But now is not the moment.
3
QUEENS OF MU
‘Some kind of legend from way back, which no one seriously believes in. Bit like Atlantis on Earth.’
DOUGLAS ADAMS, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Philip Sclater’s hypothetical lost supercontinent, invoked to explain the scattered distribution of lemurs, was haunted right from the outset. But of all the strange settlers Lemuria attracted, none was stranger (or had wider influence) than Helena Petrovna Hahn.
Hahn (1831–91) was born in the southern Ukrainian city now known as Dnipropetrovsk but which was then known as Ekaterinoslav; she was the daughter of Pyotr Alexeyevich von Hahn, an army colonel, and his novelist wife Elena Fadeev. Elena, who had earned herself the literary sobriquet of ‘the Russian George Sand’, died when her daughter was only eleven. Although the family had moved around considerably, as army families do, her father was unable to take little Helena with him after her mother’s death so Pyotr Alexeyevich farmed her out to her maternal grandmother, Elena Pavlovna de Fadeev, she was nobly born, a well-known botanist, and another formidable
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