Sands of Sarasvati

The visionary international climate fiction bestseller again available in English

Indian scientists discover mysterious underwater ruins at the West Coast of India. Have they found Atlantis, the fabled sunken continent?

Marine archeologist Amrita Desai and the Ukrainian submarine expert Sergei Savelnikov investigate the underwater ruins and discover a mysterious field of human skulls and skeletons. At the same time scientists realize that a huge meltwater lake has formed inside the Greenland ice sheet. Is the ice sheet about to slide into the ocean? Are our own cities in danger of becoming the New Atlantis?

The Sands of Sarasvati has been translated from Finnish to more than ten other languages. It was an influential bestseller in Germany when the country decided to start the global solar power revolution.

Indian scientists discover a vast stretch of underwater ruins at West Coast of India. Have they found Atlantis, the fabled sunken continent? Marine archeologist Amrita Desai and Ukrainian submarine expert Sergei Savelnikov investigate the underwater ruins and discover a mysterious field of human skulls and skeletons. At the same time scientists realize that a huge meltwater lake has formed inside the Greenland ice sheet. Is the ice sheet about to slide into the ocean? Are our own cities in danger of becoming the New Atlantis?

Sands of Sarasvati has been translated from Finnish to more than ten other languages. It was a bestseller in Germany at the time when the country was wondering whether it should start promoting solar energy via an extensive price guarantee system.
Sands of Sarasvati has inspired debates and votes in the European parliament, theatre plays, international TV series, a feature film project, a comic album, multimedia installations, other types of art installations including sculptures, paintings and glass art, music, a foundation, short radio plays, numerous climate fiction books and several serious research projects.

The novel contains a serious warning related to global warming and the polar ice sheets. According to Sands of Sarasvatimelting of ice sheets could, at some point, accelerate exponentially, if so much ice melts that the black dust particles buried inside the ice will be exposed. This would make the surface of the ice much darker, so it would suddenly absorb most of the solar radiation, instead of reflecting it back to space like pure snow.
This could lead to a vicious cycle, creating numerous meltwater lakes on top of the ice sheets. If the meltwater lakes become glacier wells or moulins, essentially high waterfalls through the ice sheet, meltwater can accumulate under ice sheets and act like a lubricant, accelerating the movement of glaciers so that more ice flow into the sea.
The melting of ice sheets can raise the sea level. Above all, ice sheets weigh so much that the crust under them has been depressed downwards, often by more than a kilometer. When the weight of the ice sheet is reduced by melting and by the increasing production of icebergs, the crust must rise up. If the weight is lifted within a century, a geological blink of an eye, the process will be extremely violent, creating huge earthquakes and large tsunamis hitting the shores of whole ocean basins as high walls of rapidly moving water.

Sands of Sarasvati is, above all, a thriller, but it is also a love story and a tribute for South Asian civilization.
Besides, the novel introduced a new theory of Atlantis, the sunken continent.

DID INDIAN MARINE SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THE RUINS OF ATLANTIS?

The story of Atlantis, the sunken continent, is one of the most well known legends on Earth, especially in the West. In one survey British journalists ranked the discovery of Atlantis as the fourth biggest possible news story, even before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
The legend is based on the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, who lived 427 – 348 BC.  According to Plato Egyptian priests told Athena’s former ruler, Solon, that there is a whole sunken continent in the West, called Atlantis. Atlantis had once been densely inhabited by people. There had been extensive fertile lowlands and two huge rivers flowing through them, providing water for complex irrigation systems. There was a large mountain range relatively close to the shore. Atlantis had had cities and shipyards, coconut trees and elephants. Then, roughly eight thousand years ago, Atlantis had been submerged under the sea.
Since then, Atlantis has been searched from the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Caribbean, but nothing has ever been found. This should not come as a surprise: in the Atlantic or in the Mediterranean or Caribbean there simply aren’t any places that match Plato’s description.

However, in 2001 Indian marine scientists found, from the West Coast of India, something that looked like underwater ruins. Side-scan sonar images taken at the Gulf of Khambhat by the rseearch vessel M/s Sagar Paschimi, of India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), portrayed squares, rectangles and long, straight lines. Some of the forms were very similar in shape to the 9,000-year-old buildings dug up in Pakistan’s Mehrgarh. They were rectangles divided into smaller segments by five longitudinal and one crosswise wall. The largest individual structure on the seabed was a 200-metre-long and 45-metre-wide rectangle, lying on a hill that could be at least partly artificial.

According to the theory presented in Sands of Sarasvati, the underwater ruins discovered by Indian marine archeologists are remnants of cities that also gave birth to the legend of Atlantis.

But how could this be?  Plato said, explicitly, that Atlantis was in the West, meaning either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. What if Egyptian priests had heard, from South Asians, that there was sunken continent in the West?  What if Egyptian priests had then repeated the story, as such, to Solon, without understanding that what lies West from India might no longer be West when looked from Egypt or Greece?
Sands of Sarasvati points out, that the only place on the planet that would fit Plato’s description 10,000 years ago was the West Coast of India. At that time there were still two great rivers flowing through the coastal plain: the Indus and the Sarasvati. Since that time River Sarasvati has dried, completely, because it got its waters from an ice sheet that formed on the Himalayas during the Ice Age, and then melted.
Today, only the Indus remains. The only thing that reminds us of the Mighty Sarasvati is Saurashtra, or the Kathiawar Peninsula, shaped like an elephant’s ear. Kathiawar, home of Mahatma Gandhi, is the ancient delta of the River Sarasvati.
In Indian mythology Sarasvati – or Vidya – is also the Goddess of wisdom, learning, literature and science.
The symbol of Sarasvati is a the white swan, which is also the sacred bird of many northern peoples.

Indian marine archeologists probably found, even in the real world, Plato’s Atlantis in May, 2001.
Pasi Malmi, Ranajit Pal and Tommaso Iorco have since then developed the theory further in their book Atlas and Herakles, in which Risto Isomäki is also mentioned, as the father of the hypothesis, and as an honorary writer.

THE CRADLE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION?

According to Plato, Atlantis was, before it was submerged under the waves, the most advanced civilization on Earth.
It is possible, that Plato’s description was only meant as a symbolic ,moral story. However, the civilization that existed in present-day India, Pakistan and Iran 9,000 years ago and perhaps even earlier might really have been the cradle of human civilization.
In India there is a legend about the God Manu and Saptarishi, the group of seven sages accompanying him.  Numerous words meaning “man” or “human” in the various Indo-European languages have been derived from Manu’s name. He is also a sort of Hindu Noah. According to Veda Books, Manu and Saptarishi preserved the seeds of civilization after Deluge, the Biblical Great Flood.
Interestingly, ancient Sumerians, the first major civilization of Mesopotamia, had a legend of Oannes and the Seven Sages accompanying him. According to the legend Oannes and his companions brought the seeds of agriculture, architecture and construction, as well as many other skills to Mesopotamia. A similar legend exists in Egypt.
The first civilization of Mesopotamia – the one that constructed Eridu and Uruk and invented writing and numerous other things – was probably established by people who spoke unknown ptoto-Dravidian languages, related to Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. What if the story about Manu or Oannes has something to do with reality? What if Eridu and Uruk were founded by immigrants from the area that now belongs to Pakistan, India and Iran?
The oldest ruins in Pakistan and India, including ruins at the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat – as well as the ruins of Eridu and Uruk in present-day Iraq – all bear a middle-class signature. They reflect the signature of a relatively equal society, with no palaces and no slums, with almost everybody living in roughly similar houses. Today, when the world is becoming polarized and torn by growing inequality, it is inspiring and encouraging to know that the oldest South Asia was, equality-wise, a bit like Iceland or Norway during our own time.

The Sands of Sarasvati has inspired debates and votes in the European parliament, theatre plays, feature films and TV series, a comic album, multi-media installations, sculptures, paintings, glass art, classical, pop and rock music, a foundation, radio plays, climate fiction books and numerous serious research projects.

“The Sands of Sarasvati could be the most important book published in the world during this year.” – Kansan Uutiset newspaper

“Isomäki proves himself as one of the world’s top writers in this field.” – Warkauden lehti newspaper