Hi Herring:)

As I had transcribed these portions elsewhere, as related to a global warming discussion, well it dawned I should locate that transcription for your perusal. So hereyago.

The Rediscovery of Lost America(the story of the Pre-Columbian Iron Age in America) much to my delight, jumped out at me. This copy was published in 1979 but was a reprint, containing a couple of additional chapters by the other original researcher(Mary Roberts Harrison), of Arlington Mallery's 1951 publication, Lost America.

Anyhow, Chapters,

16) Pre-Columbain Charts and Maps of the New World 17) The Long-Lost Gunnbiorn's Skerries

contain some of the following information regarding the geography of Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and other areas of the Arctic and Maritimes region.

16, pg 151: The catastrophe that struck Iceland, devastating the ReykJames Peninsula(marked 2 on the map) and sinking the maritime provinces, which were the first areas of Iceland to be settled (marked 4 on the map) is described in the annals of Bishop Gisle Oddson for the year A.D. 1342 as follows:

"Mt. Hekla began to erupt with a horrible roaring for the sixth time ....other mountains erupted at the same time. The discharge from Mt. Trolledynja flowed all the way to the sea in the maritime provinces which were called Selfogur. The Reykjames Peninsula was reduced more than half by the consuming fires. Traces of it and the high cliffs at that time called Eldeyjar ... can even now be seen in the open sea. The Geirfugle Skerries ... were destroyed. In southern Iceland, Sidujokul and many other mountains erupted. Whole provinces were devastated. More than half of the Reykjanes Peninsula disappeared, and the Island Eldey, forty miles west of the present Reykjanes, blew up. The maritime provinces of Selvoge, which had endured unchanged for thousands of years, gradually sank into the Atlantic. -They were completely submerged before 1607. #4- and now lie fifty fathoms or more below the sea level. The presentday shoals call Eldeyjarbodi and the fishing backs Eldeyjar Banks mark the spot where Eldey once stood, and the Iceland fishermen still keep alive the memory of the lost provinces of Selvoge as they set their trawl lines on Selvoge Bank. #5"

The other ancient map of Iceland(the smaller one) shows the outline of the island as it may have been some time before the visit of the Greek astronomer Pytheas in 330B.C. On this map, as on the larger map, heavy lines are the outline of the original map; the unshaded portion gives the present-day outline of the island, and the dotted lines mark the present 100-fathom lilne. Submerged areas are indicated on this map by stippling.

The evidence in these two maps that Iceland has been sinking for thousands of years has been corroborated by the modern explorations of the Norwegian Noth Polar Expedition under Frithiof Nansen. #6 Nansen concluded that the Faroes and Iceland were once connected by the basaltic plateau emerging above sea level at a period when the shore lline stood on an average 500 meters lower than it does now. The Faroe-Icelandic ridge now extends beyond Iceland to Greenland, and the southern end of Greenland is also sinking. #7

The Celts and the Scandinavians were among the users and the preservers of the navigation aids which mapped the New World long before Columbus. It is obvious that the people who made them possessed knowledge of astronomy and celestial navigation far in advance of that of the fifteenth-century Europeans. There is some evidence that some of these charts and maps must have been drawn at least one thousands years before the invention of a practical chronometer in the eighteenth century enabled modern European navigators to compute longitude. The longitude of a thousand or more points on the coasts and in the interior of North America, Europe, and Asia is platted on them with an accuracy not attained by European cartographers until the eighteenth century.

#4, Gerard Mercator, Map of Iceland 1607. #5, Gisle Oddsson, Annalium in Islandia Farrago, Isledica(1917), Vol 10, p. 2. #6, Frithiof Nansen, Bathymetrical Features of the North Pole Seas, NorwegianNorth Pole Polar Expedition Report,Vol 4, p. 173. #7, Artic Geography and Ethnology, Royal Geographic Society(1874) pp. 50ff.

17, pg 156:

Sometime after Greenland was settled by the Norse, the advancing Greenland icecap covered the central and southern Skerries. Sinking under the weight of the glacier, the southern Skerries finally became submerged in Denmark Strait, where they still form a plateau underseas. The original outline of the southern Skerries, ... can be made out from the soundings recorded on the latest U.S. Hydrographic Office and British Admiralty maps. #2

For an interval last centuries, beginning about nine thousand years ago according to geologists, #3 the Arctic region had a warm climate. Known as Climatic Optimum, this warm era as a result of the pressure of the weight of glaciers in the north part of the North Temperate Zone. Being depressed in this area, the earth took the shape of an oblate spheroid flattened at the poles, and the bottom of the Arctic Ocean sank almost 2,000 feet at the pole. Into this depressed area, the Japan Current and the Gulf Stream poured the warm waters from the tropics through both Bering Strait and Davis Strait. This influx of warm air raised the temperature of the Arctic region so high that the forest line of North America advanced 500 miles north of its present position.

As the Arctic became warm, the glaciers disappeared, the weight of the ice was removed, and the shell of the earth began gradually to resume its former spherical shape. The land of the Arctic regions rose and the bulge in the equatorial region, which had been produced concurrently with the sinking of northern areas, began to disappear. As the land rose, Bering Strait and Davis Strait became so shallow that eventually the two warm currents no longer flowed through them. The climate of the Arctic gradually became cold again.

As this internal movement of the earth was taking place, gigantic cracks developed along the North Atlantic coast and through Denmark Strait into the Atlantic Ocean.

Just when the different stages in these geological and climatic changes took place is not known. Ice was reported seen in Iceland only twice in the eleventh century and three times in the twelfth century. After 1200, however, winters became more severe and increasing quantities of ice floated down into the fiords of the island. By 1274 ice approaced so near the shores that polar bears were landing there, and the next year twenty-seven bears were caught on drift ice. In another four years it was possible to travel with horses many miles from shore on the ice, and the sea remained frozen for the first time until late summer.#4

...

The temperature of the sea waters and of Greenland and Iceland decllined as the rising land along the Arctic coast cut down the warm currents flowing north through Bering Strait and Davis Strait. Although grain had been grown in northern Iceland until the end of the twelfth century, by the end of the fourteenth century it could no longer be grown in the southern part of the island.$6

The north end of Greenland was rising,#7 and the south end was sinking.#8 Earthquake after earthquake accompanied by violent submarine explosions and many volcanic eruptions rocked Iceland in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries.#9 In 1340 came the series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. (See the preceding chapter for the account of the devastation ....) Great tidal waves swept the shores of the North Sea as the southern Skerries slid into the widening abyss created by a gigantic submarine crack or fault in the surface of the earth along a line passing northeast and southwest through Denmark Strait.#10

By 1456, most of the main island of the Skerries had disappeared.#11 ...

It may be assumed, however, that corroboration of my theory regarding the existence of the one-time Gunnbiorn's Skerries under the icecap of Greenland has come in more recent times-- as late as 1951, in fact. For on October 26 of that year, an Associated Press news dispatch announced that a French expedition reported that Greenland is really three islands bridged by an ocean.

Several months before this announcement, I had published my findings in Lost America. (See Chapter 22 for an account of the findings of the French Polar Expedition under Paul-Emile Victor.)

#1, Ivar Bardasson, Description of Greenland, Hakluyt Society(1873), Vol. 50, pp. 17ff. #2, U.S. Hydrographic Office, Chart H.O. 5773. #3, R.B. Flint, Glacial Geology (1947), pp. 487ff. #4, Lauge Koch, East Greenland Ice(1945), pp. 121ff. #5, Bardasson, op. cit. #6, Poul Norlund, viking Settlers(1924), p. 141; Paul DuChaillu, viking Age(1889), Vol. 2, p. 346; G.W. /dasent, Iceland(1861), p cx. #7, R.G. Daly, Changing World of the Ice Age(1934), p. 142. #8, Arctic Geography and Ethnology, Royal Geographic society(1874), pp. 52ff.; Aage rousselle, Farms and Churches in the Mediaeval Norse Settlements of Greenland (1941), p. 15. #9, T. Thoroddsen, Oversigt Over de Islendski Vulkaners Historie (1882). #10, Cornelius Wolford, Floods and Inundations, Statistical society of London (1874-79). #11, Johann Ruysch, Map of the World, Ptolemy 1507. #12, Olaus Magnus, Di Pygmaeis Gruntland(1658), p. Iccii; Magnus, Marine Map (1539). #13, Jan Van Keulen, Pascaert van Groenlandt (1700) #14, U.S. Hydrographic Ofice, Chart H.O. 5784. #15, T. Thoroddsen, op. cit.; Wolford, op. cit. #16, Yves Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec, "Relation of a Voyage to the North Sea" in Pinkerton's voyages (1808), Vol. 1, pp. 754ff. Italics added.

I hope that was of some interest.