The Urantia Book

Settings

Reading
Theme
Text size
Line spacing

Typeface

Width
Alignment
Show
Listening

Kept in this browser only.

Read through

Iceland

10 paragraphs · about 4 minutes

Every paragraph the index cites under Iceland, once, in the order of the book. Beside each stand the entries that cite it.

61:1.12Dur­ing the lat­ter part of this epoch most of Eu­rope was sub­merged. Fol­low­ing a slight land rise the con­ti­nent was cov­ered by lakes and bays. The Arc­tic Ocean, through the Ural de­pres­sion, ran south to con­nect with the Med­i­ter­ra­nean Sea as it was then ex­panded north­ward, the high­lands of the Alps, Carpathi­ans, Apen­nines, and Pyre­nees be­ing up above the wa­ter as is­lands of the sea. The Isth­mus of Panama was up; the At­lantic and Pa­cific Oceans were sep­a­rated. North Amer­ica was con­nected with Asia by the Bering Strait land bridge and with Eu­rope by way of Green­land and Ice­land. The earth cir­cuit of land in north­ern lat­i­tudes was bro­ken only by the Ural Straits, which con­nected the arc­tic seas with the en­larged Med­i­ter­ra­nean.

61:2.335,000,000 years ago marks the be­gin­ning of the age of pla­cen­tal-mam­malian world dom­i­na­tion. The south­ern land bridge was ex­ten­sive, re­con­nect­ing the then enor­mous Antarc­tic con­ti­nent with South Amer­ica, South Africa, and Aus­tralia. In spite of the mass­ing of land in high lat­i­tudes, the world cli­mate re­mained rel­a­tively mild be­cause of the enor­mous in­crease in the size of the tropic seas, nor was the land el­e­vated suf­fi­ciently to pro­duce glaciers. Ex­ten­sive lava flows oc­curred in Green­land and Ice­land, some coal be­ing de­posited be­tween these lay­ers.

61:3.9The Ice­land land bridge sub­merged, and the arc­tic wa­ters com­min­gled with those of the At­lantic Ocean. The At­lantic coast of North Amer­ica rapidly cooled, but the Pa­cific coast re­mained warmer than at pres­ent. The great ocean cur­rents were in func­tion and af­fected cli­mate much as they do to­day.

61:4.6The cli­mate was grad­u­ally get­ting cooler; the land plants were slowly mov­ing south­ward. At first it was the in­creas­ing cold in the north that stopped an­i­mal mi­gra­tions over the north­ern isth­muses; sub­se­quently these North Amer­i­can land bridges went down. Soon af­ter­wards the land con­nec­tion be­tween Africa and South Amer­ica fi­nally sub­merged, and the West­ern Hemi­sphere was iso­lated much as it is to­day. From this time for­ward dis­tinct types of life be­gan to de­velop in the East­ern and West­ern Hemi­spheres.

61:5.4The north­ern re­gions of this world have ex­pe­ri­enced six sep­a­rate and dis­tinct ice in­va­sions, al­though there were scores of ad­vances and re­ces­sions as­so­ci­ated with the ac­tiv­ity of each in­di­vid­ual ice sheet. The ice in North Amer­ica col­lected in two and, later, three cen­ters. Green­land was cov­ered, and Ice­land was com­pletely buried be­neath the ice flow. In Eu­rope the ice at var­i­ous times cov­ered the British Isles ex­cept­ing the coast of south­ern Eng­land, and it over­spread west­ern Eu­rope down to France.

64:7.16As the San­gik mi­gra­tions draw to a close, the green and or­ange races are gone, the red man holds North Amer­ica, the yel­low man east­ern Asia, the blue man Eu­rope, and the in­digo race has grav­i­tated to Africa. In­dia har­bors a blend of the sec­ondary San­gik races, and the brown man, a blend of the red and yel­low, holds the is­lands off the Asi­atic coast. An amal­ga­mated race of rather su­pe­rior po­ten­tial oc­cu­pies the high­lands of South Amer­ica. The purer An­don­ites live in the ex­treme north­ern re­gions of Eu­rope and in Ice­land, Green­land, and north­east­ern North Amer­ica.

64:7.17Dur­ing the pe­ri­ods of far­thest glacial ad­vance the west­ern­most of the An­don tribes came very near be­ing driven into the sea. They lived for years on a nar­row south­ern strip of the pres­ent is­land of Eng­land. And it was the tra­di­tion of these re­peated glacial ad­vances that drove them to take to the sea when the sixth and last glacier fi­nally ap­peared. They were the first ma­rine ad­ven­tur­ers. They built boats and started in search of new lands which they hoped might be free from the ter­ri­fy­ing ice in­va­sions. And some of them reached Ice­land, oth­ers Green­land, but the vast ma­jor­ity per­ished from hunger and thirst on the open sea.

64:7.18A lit­tle more than eighty thou­sand years ago, shortly af­ter the red man en­tered north­west­ern North Amer­ica, the freez­ing over of the north seas and the ad­vance of lo­cal ice fields on Green­land drove these Es­kimo de­scen­dants of the Uran­tia abo­rig­ines to seek a bet­ter land, a new home; and they were suc­cess­ful, safely cross­ing the nar­row straits which then sep­a­rated Green­land from the north­east­ern land masses of North Amer­ica. They reached the con­ti­nent about twenty-one hun­dred years af­ter the red man ar­rived in Alaska. Sub­se­quently some of the mixed stock of the blue man jour­neyed west­ward and amal­ga­mated with the later-day Es­ki­mos, and this union was slightly ben­e­fi­cial to the Es­kimo tribes.

78:1.53. The An­don­ites main­tained five or six fairly rep­re­sen­ta­tive set­tle­ments to the north and east of the Adam­son head­quar­ters. They were also scat­tered through­out Tur­kes­tan, while iso­lated is­lands of them per­sisted through­out Eura­sia, es­pe­cially in moun­tain­ous re­gions. These abo­rig­ines still held the north­lands of the Eurasian con­ti­nent, to­gether with Ice­land and Green­land, but they had long since been driven from the plains of Eu­rope by the blue man and from the river val­leys of far­ther Asia by the ex­pand­ing yel­low race.

93:7.2The de­scen­dants of Adam­son, clus­tered about the shores of the lake of Van, were will­ing lis­ten­ers to the Hit­tite teach­ers of the Salem cult. From this one­time And­ite cen­ter, teach­ers were dis­patched to the re­mote re­gions of both Eu­rope and Asia. Salem mis­sion­ar­ies pen­e­trated all Eu­rope, even to the British Isles. One group went by way of the Faroes to the An­don­ites of Ice­land, while an­other tra­versed China and reached the Japanese of the east­ern is­lands. The lives and ex­pe­ri­ences of the men and women who ven­tured forth from Salem, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Lake Van to en­lighten the tribes of the East­ern Hemi­sphere pre­sent a heroic chap­ter in the an­nals of the hu­man race.

Onward

Cited alongside: Greenland, Andonites, land bridges, South America, British Isles, Europe, red race, volcanoes