Atlantis

Vårdal, Hege & Taeger, Andreas, 2011, The life of René Malaise: from the wild east to a sunken island, Zootaxa 3127, pp. 38-52 : 50-51

Atlantis

Malaise’s ideas about the sunken land Atlantis gave him massive media attention in the 1950s, also in the international press.

During the later years of his career Malaise developed a companionship with Nils Hjalmar Odhner, an expert on molluscs at the invertebrate department at the museum. Odhner proposed the constriction theory in 1934 ( Odhner 1934). This tries to explain how mountains and valleys are formed by vertical movements of the earth’s crust as a result of the high pressure caused by temperature variations between the core of the earth and the cold waters of the oceans. The theory states that the earth’s crust is made up of valves that expand or are constricted depending on temperatures, but that these valves do not move relative to each other, unlike the plates in the nowadays generally accepted theories of continental drift and plate tectonics. It probably did not make matters easier that the new head of the entomology department, Lars Brundin, was a pioneer of ideas on phylogenetic biogeography, in which continental drift is an important factor in explaining distribution patterns of organisms.

Malaise believed he could prove that parts of the mid-Atlantic ridge had been above sea level in the recent past and had subsequently sunk, thus verifying Plato’s myth of Atlantis . His evidence consists partly of composition of the sediments taken from both sides of the presently more or less submerged mid-Atlantic ridge. Sediments forming the northern parts of the ridge contain humus, which probably can only have been produced above water, whilst sediments from the southern Atlantic ridge contain remains of freshwater diatoms. In his PhD thesis, published in 1945 as a lengthy paper which is arguably Malaise’s most important single entomological publication, he explains the distribution of plant wasps by the existence of land bridges ( Malaise 1945). These ideas are further refined in the books “ Atlantis , en geologisk verklighet” and “ Atlantis : a verified myth” ( Malaise 1951, 1973). His interest in geology and biogeography was induced as he was contemplating the fact that a sawfly in Patagonia, Argentina, had its closest relative in Europe. Malaise believed that this was better explained by a land bridge between the continents than by continental drift. Apparently he did not consider that sawflies in southern Argentina and Chile have just as close, if not closer counterparts in North America.

Malaise’s books got a mixed reception, but Odhner’s and Malaise’s ideas about how the movements of the crust occurred were largely rejected by geologists and geophysicists who claimed that the temperatures found at the crust of the earth could not possibly cause such abrupt movements. It is however clear that areas that are now submerged have been above sea level in the recent past. An example is the Doggerland at the present Dogger Banks near the coast of the Netherlands and Belgium, where remains of forests, mammoth tusks and stone tools of hunters have been found in areas now submerged. Iceland and the Azores are parts of the mid-Atlantic ridge that are presently above sea level and therefore the idea of a larger mid-Atlantic island may not be entirely unlikely.