Global warming and the Eelam struggle

By Arular Arudpragasam

Introduction

(April 04, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) While the political calamity in Sri Lanka has raged for the last thirty years, new calamities like the issues of global warming and the recent financial crisis have besieged the world. Since much of the national focus in Sri Lanka is on the internal war, and the search for a political solution intensifies, it is becoming more and more imperative that these new factors of wider concern such as global warming and the financial crisis are factored into the current search for Sri Lanka’s political solution, that would lead to the achievement of a comprehensive and sustainable settlement.

My involvement with these global issues has been extensive, and I feel it would be vital to discuss them openly at this stage, so that especially the Tamil nationality considers these also, along with the current active debates in Sri Lanka and abroad.

Two issues prompted me to go deep into the issues of global warming and related natural calamities. Firstly, the projection of any economic development perspective for the shortly-to-be liberated Northeast needs the consideration of global warming and the potential natural calamities that may affect that region. For example, what are the possibilities that natural disasters like the 2004 Tsunami could be predicted, and their warning and damage-limitation capabilities established?

The other issue was that while I delved deep into the history of Sri Lanka for my now-well-known book, ‘The Missing Pages of Sri Lankan History – The Traditional Homeland of the Tamils’, I had to find answers to the often raised question by Sinhala patriotic historians, why the history of the Kingdom of Jaffna starts only in the 9th Century, and their consequent implication that there were no Sri Lankan Tamils before that period.

Though there are evidences, as found in Muthaliyar C Rasanayagam’s book, ‘The Kingdom of Jaffna’ --- of an earlier Kingdom of Jaffna whose capital was in Vallipuram, with the kings enjoying the title of Singai Aryan (whereas the kings of the later periods had the title of Arya Chakkrawarthy), yet there has been a considerable gap between the two, and the later Kingdom of Jaffna appears fresh, with the new settlement of Jaffna starting around the 8th century and emerging as a separate Kingdom by the 9th century. This also parallels the later rise of Cholas in Tamil country and their conquering of Sri Lanka. Till that time, the Jaffna peninsula was known (in the interim period) as a sandy plateau with no seeming vegetation.

One possible reason for the above is that the natural calamities which are referred to in Tamil literature as ‘Kadalkole’ (translated as ‘swallowing by the sea’) had washed off the earlier Ceylon Tamil civilisation. In this context, my reading of the Sinhalese chronicles soon led me to the following reference in Rajawaliya:

In these days the sea was seven leagues distance from Calany but on account of what had been done to the troonancy, the gods who were charged with the conservation of Ceylon became enraged, and caused the sea to deluge the land and as during the epoch called Duwapawarayaga, on account of wickedness of Ravana, the whole space from Mannar to Tutocoreen, in which space was contained, the fortress of Ravana, twenty five palaces, and 400,000 streets all were out flown by the sea – so now in the time of Tissa Rajah, king of Calany, 100 large towns of the description called patunagam, 970 fishers villages, and 400 villages inhabited by pearl fishers, making all together eleven twelfths of territory which belonged to Calany, were swallowed up by the sea. Many however escaped, and of the large towns Calpity Manampay escaped.

(Rajavaliya’s translation by Turner Ed Upham)

The above reference is more specific and also gives the possible periods whereas the Tamil references are poetical in character, and are less helpful. Other chronicles including Mahavamsa also corroborate the Rajawaliya reference. The period of the possible natural calamities is indicated to have happened in the period of Tissa, which was between 204 and 165 BC. These natural calamities have obviously taken place over a few years. Otherwise a specific year would have been given instead of the phrase, ‘in the time of Tissa Raja’.

The Riddle of the Old Maps of Sri Lanka

The geographical boundaries of Sri Lanka have had different shapes over a long period of history. The earlier maps show Sri Lanka to be square, or more precisely trapezium in shape. The Ptolemy Map (Map-1) is dated to the 2nd Century AD. And the map of the Portuguese, 14 centuries later, during the 16th century, too is square in nature (Map-2). The mango shape first appears during the Dutch period, and initially it was more like a pear rather than Mango-shaped as it is now. Even if one makes provision for the lack of geodesic skills (in such matters as showing number of islands in the Jaffna peninsula, instead of the seven islands which are there now), the possibility of any mistakes is extremely minimal.

The fact is that Jaffna had remained un-peopled for few centuries after the existence of a vibrant civilisation, which was a Hindu Buddhist civilisation as proved by the remains and legends. This disappearance of civilisation for few centuries, and the change in the geographical shape, only leaves one to look for the possibility of natural calamities of gigantic proportions sweeping Sri Lanka in the intermittent period, and it was not difficult for me to connect this up with the quotation from Rajawaliya.

Looking for the exact possible natural cause, large scale Tsunami was one plausible answer. Looking further, at the Sri Lankan coastline, the evidences were extensive.
Studying tsunamis and ground evidences, it was not difficult for me to conclude that the natural calamities that hit Sri Lanka and shaped her coastlines are in fact large scale tsunamis which had also played an important part in washing out the earlier civilisation of the Jaffna peninsula, leaving no soul behind. But that calamity was not limited to Jaffna. It had affected the entire Sri Lanka, and washed out other kingdoms as well, and transformed Sri Lanka from its trapezium shape to mango shape.

This is the reason why there is no mountain now in Keerimalai, and no island in Mullaitheevu. They had disappeared.

Map-1: Ptolemy’s Map of Sri Lanka, circa 150 AD


Map 3 : Dutch map of Sri Lanka, 1750 AD

It was not difficult for me to also conclude that the Batticoloa lagoon was dug by the outgoing tsunami, which had dumped the soil on the other side of lagoon, on the strip of land known as Eluvankarai on which much of habitation is now based. To prove this deduction to be true, my inquiries in Batticoloa confirmed that when wells are dug on this thin strip of land, the seabed with remains of sea creatures can be found at around twenty to thirty feet below the superficial earth.

Though the later day chroniclers has the habit of attributing the destruction of past civilisations which are claimed to be ancient Sinhalese, to invading Tamils, the real destroyer has been these natural calamities. The habit of claiming areas to be Sinhalese, by twisting ancient Tamil names, is unfortunate, as many of the original places mentioned in the chronicles have really gone under the sea.

As I was convinced that large tsunamis could wash out the Northeast again, I got really concerned, and started to question the wisdom of the separate Eelam project. But I could not scientifically substantiate anything, then. I needed further, urgent research. So, in 1997, immediately after publishing my book, ‘The Missing Pages of Sri Lankan History: The Traditional Homeland of the Tamils’ (where I took care to moderate the whole issue of separation), instead of writing my second volume as earlier planned, I switched my focus to research, and went on to open the Institute of Sustainable Development in Trincomalee. That programme, among other things, had ambitious hopes of monitoring and creating awareness of natural calamities such as floods, cyclones and tsunamis, while developing capacities for forecasting them well in time, to take remedial action to limit their possible damage.

My Prediction of the 2004 Tsunami

Rajawaliya speaks of two such calamities. One way of predicting any future calamity is to find out the gap between the last two calamities or Sagahtes.
(From: Sweeping Atmospheric, Geophysical and Hydrological Transformation of the Earth --- SAGAHTE ---which name I have given to the phenomena.).

Past tsunamis have left behind sand dunes, and in those sand dunes are trapped the shells and some of the sea creatures of the earlier period. In the sand dunes of Chatti on the island of Kayts, sea snails can be found intact, with closed lids and the dried organic matter inside. Similarly the sand dunes of Vallipuram also form an important source. Even Batticaloa has the sea creatures trapped underneath. And carbon dating of these sea creatures was one way of solving the problem, I concluded.

And by 2002, the world was turning its attention to Global warming and sustainable development issues. My work in the UK had expanded the Institute of Sustainable Development into the programme called Global Sustainability Initiative (GSI). After my return from UK in 2002, the GSI programme was launched in Trincomalee, and the first thing was to establish the dates of the last two tsunamis, to be able to predict the third one. I went and discussed the project with my old colleagues from the Geography and Physics Departments at the University of Jaffna, describing to them my intentions. It was necessary to collect seashells trapped inside the sand dunes of Chatti and Vallipuram, to sharpen my forecasts. But there was lack of seriousness, and it was impossible to interest them on ‘remote’ issues like tsunamis, at that time in Jaffna. Furthermore there were security concerns. And that was where my attempts to predict the next tsunami stood. Then, the real tsunami of 2004 suddenly showed up!

The problem was, in the sort of atmosphere that prevails in today’s Sri Lanka, no one could be interested in the sort of project I was pursuing. There was no possibility of getting any funds for a project, since funds are committed to immediate relief and rehabilitation, and war, by both sides. Expatriate funding was also not possible for me. Any serious research from there, for establishing the GSI programme in Trincomalee was also an impracticable task.

Two weeks before the 2004 Tsunami struck, I published a press statement telling people there, of possible serious disturbances from the sea, advising people living along the coast to move to higher grounds. It was a feeling of restlessness that I had, within me. I showed the press release to my friends from PLOTE who opined that I had put myself in personal danger, through that well-meant, honest, true, prediction.

However, compared to the tsunamis of the past, and the tsunami I was expecting, the tsunami that came was only a mild warning. Yet, to me, it gave me a revelation that it was time to seal my separate Eelam project for good. I felt, from scientific point of view, it was not only undesirable, but even suicidal. The old unitary state became a lookable thing again. But there was no way of telling that to any one, as it would be considered treason, especially after I had been on the forefront of the Eelam struggle for many years.

I had great scepticism about the current assumption that tsunamis are caused by the earthquakes and they are generated by events along the fault lines. This I disagreed. As subsequent events have proved, tsunamis are not caused by earthquakes but by the collapse of the continental shelf or submarine land slides.The other causes can be a meteorite impact or underwater volcanic eruption. An earthquake cannot generate sort of kinetic energy involved with tsunami. This is the reason why there have been so many earthquakes since the last tsunami but no tsunami. There is no direct link between the two. But however, if earthquakes lead to collapse of the continental shelf and earthquake will be a cause of tsunami. But the collapse of the continental shelf can be caused by many other factors including global warming and bulging of the crust. Minor earth tremors felt in Sri Lanka like those felt at Wellawatte and Chilaw in recent times are caused when large boulders collapse and roll down the continental shelf.

Changing the Subject

I tried to change my focus as well as that of Sri Lanka. As the GSI imperative is a comprehensive programme for global and sustainable existence, that also included financial and political issues, I went on to write my book, ‘Monetary Exploitation’ so that we could look into the common problems of interest for Sri Lankans, with the rest of the world.

In a review and launch of my book Monetary Exploitation, in Jaffna, an Economics Professor from the Jaffna University, having come there without even reading the book, raised the question why I was writing books like this (instead books on Eelam). This, after the Vice Chancellor, who released the book in Trincomalee, had recommended that the book should be made a textbook in universities. That only made me more resolved to go ahead with my new and latest research interest.

Towards a Comprehensive Theory on Global Warming

The current changes and transformations observed in the world are a continuous process, and a period of intense changes has begun. A comprehensive theory or hypothesis is needed to explain all the issues, and I left to Cambridge to delve deep into these issues.

The current global warming models are woefully inadequate, and do not explain either what is recorded in history, or the prevailing situation. One reason for this is lack of will and commitment, and sometimes a rather dishonest engagement. The theories are solely limited to global warming and CO2, showing a near linear increase of global temperature, and some are even happy about global warming as this will lead to growing bananas and sunbathing locally, even in the west.

The meaning of sustainable development has been twisted as sustained development making the whole ideal irrelevant. This is more so in the USA where the whole issue is looked upon as an un-American programme. Sustainability concerns demand a radical change in lifestyles and consumption patterns, and there is sheer lack of will, especially in the case of USA, to go down a path of rolling back.

Though there is substantial concern about global warming, and it has become overwhelmingly undeniable, this is coming only after substantial procrastination and considerable damage. The proof had to come in the way of considerable damage. One way of avoiding facing up to the consequences has been to ask for the proof. As western scientific traditions are based on empirical data, proof and repeatability, and not on scientific intuition and experience as in the eastern traditions, comprehending the causes of anomalies has taken a longer time. This encourages and supports certain irresponsible behaviour, as many of these issues are quite complex issues linked to nature, and it takes years to obtain funds and set up experiments.

The current models only speak of global warming and potential changes in nature, and dangers of raising sea level, and do not explain the cataclysmic changes of Sagathe. Further research led me to the conclusion that substantial heat coming into the system is unaccounted for. The heat in the current models is limited to the heat coming from the sun, and as green house gases trap them, the incremental addition gives to rise to the near linear graph to which are attributed the melting of the ice caps and all other currently observed changes.

However the real changes are taking place in an exponentially compounded manner and the causes of many changes are unaccounted for. This led me to look for the source of heat elsewhere, for the unaccounted heat. And I came to the firm conclusion that the unaccounted heat is coming from inside the earth. It is only after that, things started falling into place, leading to a Comprehensive Theory of Sagahte (CTS), and I began to look deep into the happenings in the interior of the earth.

Furthermore, there is also cooling taking place, and the model should be cyclical in character. To understand this, a layman could imagine an old time loudspeaker with a curved cone. Taking the outer line, we draw a cyclical graph inside the expanding cone. Now we bend the axis also like the outer line. On this bent line sits the cyclic graph. An upper line and a lower line exist, providing for the static transformation limits. The moment the graph hits the upper limit, world will plunge into a state of static transformation, and the chain reactions which will keep the world hot, will lead to massive changes before it starts to cool again.

The Earth’s Core [Courtesy: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]

My current conclusions are: The heat from inside the earth is the major cause of keeping the earth warm, and that is getting trapped inside the earth as a result of green house gases which normally would have escaped into the atmosphere. But the heating itself is not very much dependent on the Green house gases. The main source of heat is the light nuclear fission within the earth and there have been little studies on this. The heat inside the earth increases exponentially. To this expo-nential change, green house gases contribute by trapping the heat from escaping to the outer atmosphere.

This exponential increase of heat will heat up the crust, which is the outer shell, and its thickness varies from 10 to 50 km. As the heat increases, the outer crust will expand, increasing activities around the tectonic plates, leading to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Eventually the increased heat will lead the world into a state of static transformation, setting the earth’s surface on fire, followed by darkness and rain for many years. Over the plastic crust lot of changes will take place. Maintains will raise and land will sink. Continental plates will go apart and water will flood in.

As the molten core increases in diameter due to the trapped heat, the pressure at the solid core at the centre increases, and more heavy metals descend to the core and get compressed, ending in big-bang nuclear explosion, through a process similar to those found in atomic bombs. The jolt will be big enough shake all the buildings on the surface of the earth like an earthquake, and the heat will soon reach the surface crust making it plastic and bulgy. The collapse of the continental shelf would generate large-scale tsunamis, and the impact would be catastrophic. Cities like Colombo, standing on the edge of the continental shelf, would easily slip into the sea submerging the balance of one twelfth of what the last Sagahte left behind according to Rajawaliya.

The Predicted Final Rupture

Eventually there will be the rupture of the earth’s surface, pumping out unprecedented amounts of molten material, poisonous gases and ash into the atmosphere, heating the earth’s surface and sending up steam, vaporising the oceans. The rupture will make the earth’s crust, which has been expanding hitherto, to shrink, inundating and submerging many lands again leading to Kadalkol, swallowing by the sea, as seen in Tamil literature. As the heat escapes to the atmosphere, the wound of the rupture would close, and cooling will start, leaving behind considerable changes to the earth’s surface.

If the rupture has accompanied the two Sagahtes taken place earlier, this would have left behind its surgical wound, and going by the records of Rajavaliya and other Tamil sources, this should not be far from Sri Lanka. Looking at satellite maps in the Indian Ocean area, there are two such locations that remarkably resemble surgical wounds. These are, of course, the Andaman Archipelago and the Maldives Archipelago.

Though Sagahte will lead to increased volcanic activity and almost all volcanoes in the world would erupt, the rupture may not take place along the tectonic boundary. The rupture will occur where the earth’s crust is thinner and in the direction of the heat as it travels to the surface from the interior after the blast. But it will take place somewhere near the equator, as the crust along this belt would become plastic more than the outer hemispheres. Though old rupture wounds open up easily and are possible candidates, new rupture wounds are always a possibility.

From the evidence of current seismic activities, the future ruptures may occur anywhere between the Andaman Archipelago and Indonesian Archipelago

The Maldivian rupture footprint of Sagathe I

The dating of the last two sagahtes is possible, as they have left behind considerable footprint on the earth’s surface. The powerful volcanic eruptions in Italy that have been dated accurately, which submerged the Pompi and other cities, are dated at 76 AD, and the other large scale eruption two thousand years earlier, which are also corroborated by historical evidences, have occurred at the same time as those recorded in Rajavaliya. All these go to show, we are not a far away from the third.

As the eruptions are accompanied by massive pumping of ashes and poisonous gases, these will deposit in neighbouring countries, and the poisonous gases and darkness can kill off nearly all the people. This explains the sudden collapse of many civilisations in the region, including that of Rajarata civilisation in the interior and left the earlier Buddhist civilisation in ruins. Through the core drilling of ancient tank beds, not only the volcanic ash could be found, but the dates can also be established.

Conclusion & Political Advice to Sri Lanka

Though I have not discussed the entire comprehensive theory, I have explained the events of our chronicles and literature, as well as biblical events like Novas deluge, geographical evidences, and the current changes in nature. The heating of the oceans, the melting of the ice caps, the melting of the permafrost, the rising of sea level and the changes in ocean currents and weather and the death of corals and so many other changes are attributed to the heat coming from inside the earth and not heat coming from the sun.

It is time a global effort is put in, to monitor the heat coming from the interior of the earth, as well as the happenings in the interior of the earth, and its impacts on the surface. Vulnerable countries in the SAARC region and Indian Ocean should get together to seriously engage in research to monitor the onset of Sagahte III. Large-scale migration towards the northern hemisphere will become inevitable.

These findings make Sri Lanka’s war for separation, a waste for both sides. The situation that existed both nationally and internationally has considerably changed during the last thirty years. It is time the Sinhalese give up their fight for the revival of their exclusive Sinhala Buddhist state and Tamil people give up separation.

If any benefit this war has brought to the Tamil people it may only be the outward migration of Tamils to countries like Canada and Europe. Canada is a good country for the Sri Lankans to migrate. It is time this war is brought to an end, and we come together to face the more real and pressing economic, environmental and ecological problems that affect all of us.

Trincomalee can become an international city where scientists from all over the world can participate in a programme like Global Sustainability Initiative, where the urgent research needed to monitor and interpret the ongoing happenings, so essential for humanity’s survival, can be carried out in peace.

The author is the Director General of the programme Global Sustainability Initiative, Trincomalee and can be reached by email at: globsustain@hotmail.com

-Sri Lanka Guardian