Atlantis Seekers Given Thrill by Google Ocean 321
RcK writes "Numerous articles are springing up regarding a feature found using the new Google Ocean, which some claim could be the location of Atlantis. While this is obviously early, and probably has the same credibility levels as previous claims of finding the mythical city, the detected anomaly is quite convincingly linear, is apparently the size of Wales and sits near where Plato hypothesized the city to be located." Google has stated that this is an issue with the way their ocean mapping software is working, but clearly that is a cover up while Google execs try to buy the real estate. I just hope they bring back Elvis next.
The SUN is always an entertaining read ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of nifty water shots, here's some cool pictures and time-lapse webcam images of the Antarctica Cruise Ship Ocean Nova [komar.org] which recently ran aground. Good news is everyone is safe, but they had to evacuate the passengers to another ship; guess they got quite an adventure!
Re:The article explains it (Score:4, Interesting)
What happened was the lines are where boats made measurements using sonar, and the blank spots between the lines are areas the boat didn't go.
It actually looks like results from side-scan sonar. [wikipedia.org] In which case the lines are a result of where the boat did go, as this type of sonar does not look directly beneath the boat.
Where else is this glitch? (Score:5, Interesting)
The real 'atlantis' (Score:5, Interesting)
"Beyond the Pillars of Hercules"
While Gibraltar, and the Atlas mountains is today called The Pillars of Hercules, in Greek times there were many. There were navigation pillars, or columns, that set up to be clearly visible as guides to the seafaring. They were commonly called "Pillars of Hercules" and so when Plato referred to this he may have been saying it about anywhere in the Meditarranean.
The '9000 years' is most likely a translation or transcription error for 900 years.
'900 years' before Plato's time there was a civilisation on an island that 'disappeared'. This was on Thera, today called Santorini, which was the largest volcanic erruption in the last few thousand years.
The Minoan Hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to live on Crete, Greece, and was amazed at the sophistication of ancient Minoan culture. By 2,000 BC, the Minoans had huge, multi-level palaces with running water and sewers. The Minoan civilization was wiped out when Santorini erupted. To the proto-Greeks of 2,000 BC, Minoan technology must have seemed almost magical.
I've read a theory that Plato's description of Atlantis is based on memories of the Minoans. The description fits, except for the location (Crete is in the Mediterranean, while Plato thought Atlantis was in the Atlantic.) Plato knew of Crete and the Minoans, though, but perhaps the stories were unclear or ambiguous.
Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. (Score:4, Interesting)
My sister hates me sending her articles from The Sun. It's roughly the equivelant of believing the old "Weekly World News". For those who aren't familiar with it, at least some stories had some tiny piece of truth, but that was about it. They'd make up wild stories, and people would believe it.
I've seen similar marks when looking at photos of the moon, mars, and desolate places on Earth that people don't dig trenches in (or even live close to). Now, are they artifacts from the way the images were created, or natural lines, I dunno.
I've looked at enough Atlantis stuff to be curious. What's missing from this is the essential shape of Atlantis. It was suppose to be concentric circles. The center was the main city/castle/etc. There was a ring of ocean, and then another ring of land. etc, etc, etc. There were one or two canals out of the city, likely to the North and South. The important part is .... ROUND, not square. :)
What we have there is obviously ... a giant space flyswatter! The martians used it to squish some giant space fly. Don't look under it, you won't like what you find. :)
Re:Analysuis done about 10 years (Score:5, Interesting)
H.G.Welles agreed with you. In his Outline of History, he posited that the area now covered by the Mediterranean Sea was dry until about ten thousand years ago, the Atlantic being held back at Gibraltar until its level rose above the isthmus and indundated the whole area.
There a couple of recent mysteries that are better explained by Welles' theory than the current "scientific" ones:
1. The below-Mediterranean Sea-level cave paintings off the coasts of Spain and France.
B. The presence of ancient gold-and high-carbon-silicon steel making in almost all the coastal Mediterranean nations while their neighbors could only attain bronze. Many of these gold-and-steel-producing cultures were far-removed from each other, the only apparent link being their coastal Mediterranean location NB: metallurgical tech has always been connected with high culture. Think armor and armaments as well as jewelry.
With respect to TFA -- although I'm AnnaMerikin, I know about the Sun. Feh!
Let's think critically here... (Score:4, Interesting)
A boat mapping the sea floor would presumably be mapping at even intervals rather than what we see in the image. At the end of the survey area, I'd expect to see more of a curve or ellipsis rather than hard right angles.
Also, the lines appear to go alongside the ridges the higher areas (and NEVER across them), which walls would do but boats floating overhead would probably not. In addition, there appears to be a main entryway to the center of the eastern wall, which makes the city idea more palatable.
Looking even farther to the east [google.com] (beyond the image provided by The Sun), we see something that looks more like the telltale grid such boats could create ... or, if you prefer, more potential city.
We can probably learn a lot more without going to the site and re-scanning; just ask the people who did the initial scans and get clarification; if it was made recently by scanning boats, the narrower areas would have been created by higher interest in those regions, either because they were looking at/for something, or because there was some other factor that limited the scanning area.
Another tact would be to figure out what the depth is currently, and then look at our current tectonic models to see if it could ever have been close to the surface. My (completely untrained) instinct says it's far too deep.
Re:People, seriously. (Score:4, Interesting)
Plato was translating from Egyptian, and mistook 'hundred' for 'thousand.' If we divide his measurements by ten, that puts Atlantis right around Crete, about the same size as Crete, right about the time Santorini blew up. The proto-Greeks had been paying tribute to the Minoan civilization (read the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur) for many years. The Minoans were an advanced civilization, with huge multi-level palaces, advanced agriculture & maritime technology, running water, sewers, and so on. Plato didn't make up the myth, he just got the numbers wrong. The myth of Atlantis was most likely describing the Minoans.
Re:The Sun? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Where else is this glitch? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder why it's so pronounced in that tight little square. Makes me think they were looking for something. Somebody was using their sonar in a grid there, either maping out a (flat, boring) piece of the ocean, or more likely looking for something. Maybe traces of a shipwreck, or lost nuclear sub or something.
Then, they gave their data to Google when they were done.
Re:People, seriously. (Score:3, Interesting)
You made three errors there:
1. Plato didn't speak Egyptian.
2. Plato said that Atlantis was "outside the Pillars of Heracles," which means west of Spain. Both he and the Egyptians knew very well where Crete and Thera was and wouldn't have made so obvious a mistake.
3. Why doesn't the ancient mythology about Crete (Minos, Theseus, etc.) mention the apocalyptic destruction of Thera?
Re:People, seriously. (Score:5, Interesting)
> Now refer to spun's reply where he explains how Plato's description fits pretty well with Crete and the Minoan civilization.
Except that there's a huge body of myth relating to Troy and the Trojan war that dates to at least the 8th century BCE and demonstrably includes material that had to have originated no later than the 11th century BCE. But Plato is the *only ancient source* for Atlantis, and anyone else who does mention it does so in reference to Plato. Atlantis is not mythological because it isn't in any of the myths. What's more, Plato explicitly says that Atlantis was way off in the Atlantic Ocean, which means that if he's right it was not in the Aegean, and certainly not Thera. You are cherry-picking the evidence to conform to an ideological view of the relative states of advancement of Bronze Age Greek-speakers and another poorly-understood Aegean island civilization about which we literally know almost nothing. Yes, it was way cool and had multi-story buildings and running water. But so did the Greeks of the classical age.
Please, take this from someone who knows. You've fallen prey to an overly enthusiastic hypothesis that involves a lot of hand-waving with nebulous claims of "literary license" and misrepresentations of the evidence based on an incomplete knowledge of Greek culture from the Bronze Age onward. I'm really happy that people are interested in my line of work but the idea that Plato preserves a historically authentic memory of the Thera eruption is just not supported by the evidence.
Now I know how the people over in Egyptology feel when someone says the aliens helped build the Pyramids.