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Atlantis Seekers Given Thrill by Google Ocean 321

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the jump-to-conclusions-mat dept.
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.
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Atlantis Seekers Given Thrill by Google Ocean More

Atlantis Seekers Given Thrill by Google Ocean

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  • The SUN is always an entertaining read ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:48PM (#26934467) Homepage
    It's fun to read article in The Sun (ditto the National Enquirer). While there may be some validity in the findings (especially if you wear a tin foil hat), if you RTFM, it's a hilarious read complete with pictures of Patrick Duffy from the 1970's TV show "Man from Atlantis" along with an artists impression of the "lost metropolis" under water.

    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! ;-)

  • The Sun? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:49PM (#26934487)

    Numerous articles and you pick the sun?

    Anyway here it is on google map

    http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=31.480209,-24.120483&spn=2.988616,5.026245&t=h&z=8 [google.com]

  • While it would be neat to find Atlantis (recollect how Troy was mythical until the late 1800's?), I suspect this will turn out to be just an example of natural ditches that line up nicely.

    Or maybe it is Atlantis, and it turns out to be run by the same people who are responsible for that face at Cydonia [wikipedia.org] on Mars!

    • The Minoan Hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary&yahoo,com> on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:07PM (#26934757) Journal

      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.

      • Re:The Minoan Hypothesis (Score:4, Informative)

        by gnick ( 1211984 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:29PM (#26935021) Homepage

        The description fits, except for the location (Crete is in the Mediterranean, while Plato thought Atlantis was in the Atlantic.)

        According to TFA he said that it was in the "Real Sea". Apparently that's typically interpreted as being the Atlantic, but sometimes is assumed to be the Mediterranean.

        Of course, since I'm collecting this knowledge from a first-hand account from Plato reacting to a finding on Google Maps - My information may be a little faulty, but the almighty wikipedia [wikipedia.org] seems to back it up [wikipedia.org].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Creepy ( 93888 )

          Yeah, but it seems a little far out from what I remember - at least when I read the stories it seemed like it was very close to the Pillars of Hercules at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea (Straight of Gibraltar). If I remember correctly, they even found remnants of a city that was destroyed by earthquake there, however, the major problem with that hypothesis was that that particular city was attached to the Spanish peninsula and not an island. The other hypothesis I remember was that the island was Spar

        • Re:The Minoan Hypothesis (Score:5, Informative)

          by Petrushka ( 815171 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @10:00PM (#26938007)

          According to TFA he said that it was in the "Real Sea". Apparently that's typically interpreted as being the Atlantic, but sometimes is assumed to be the Mediterranean.

          Plato Timaios 24e:

          hê polis hymôn epausen pote dynamin hybrei poreuomenên hama epi pasan Eurôpên kai Asian, exôthen hormêtheisan ek tou Atlantikou pelagous.

          I hope that's clear enough even if you don't know Greek! The phrase "Atlantic sea" refers specifically to the body of water beyond Gibraltar (see e.g. Herodotos 1.202-203).

          The GPP's post is a little exaggerated. The Thera eruption may have been anywhere from simultaneous with, up to a century before, the end of the Minoan palatial period; while a causal connection has been hypothesised, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis (as yet, at least). Minoan culture continued to exist under Mycenaean control or hegemony up to the end of the Bronze Age (the "sub-Minoan period"), so saying it was "destroyed" is simply untrue.

          (Disclaimer: in my view Atlantis-hunting is silly and has no historical foundation whatsoever. I find the "humor" and "idle" tags on this story entirely appropriate.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mcvos ( 645701 )

        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.)

        The date is also off by a factor 10. Even so, I agree that this is the most likely origin of the myth.

      • And what Minoan Hypothesis post is complete without a pic of said Santorini, which could look like a destroyed concentric island ring?

        http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=santorini&sll=38.591114,14.999084&sspn=1.022926,2.114868&ie=UTF8&ll=36.403876,25.395927&spn=0.263337,0.528717&t=k&z=12 [google.com]

    • I say Google just gave away the position of an X-COM underwater base and the aquanauts are currently busy preparing for the inevitable goddamn base defense mission. If we get wiped out before we even have the Gauss Rifle, I'm going to blame Google.

  • The article explains it (Score:5, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:54PM (#26934561) Journal
    Basically, they found some lines on the ocean floor, and the lines are kind of square and straight. 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. So what we are seeing is manmade indeed, but not as some had hoped.....

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nizo ( 81281 ) *

      On a related note:

      But the internet giant said âoeblank spotsâ within the lines could not be explained.

      Unless of course after a few criss-crosses whoever was piloting the boat said, "yeah, maybe we shouldn't waste our time mapping out what appears to be a really big flat part of the ocean floor"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nizo ( 81281 ) *

        Oh, and three cheers for Microsoft "smart quotes" that I pasted from the original article....

    • Re:The article explains it (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:04PM (#26934715) Journal

      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.

      • Exactly. Those are the kinds of artifacts you get when you merge low quality data with high quality data... I'd bet that the low quality is showing the "lines" where the high-quality data doesn't scan, the high quality shows it at the slightly higher, flat areas. Perhaps just an offset problem with the high quality data.

    • Re:The article explains it (Score:4, Informative)

      by MozeeToby ( 1163751 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:20PM (#26934923)

      Especially the fact that some of the lines are up to 20 miles apart from one another and the whole formation is almost 100 miles long and 50 tall. We're supposed to believe that 12000 years ago there was a city on a lone island that covered an area of 500 square miles? It's easy to lose your sense of scale looking at satellite imagery, people who think this is Atlantis would do well to zoom out a bit and scroll to the East and Look at the cities in Africa and Europe for comparison.

    • Let's think critically here... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Khopesh ( 112447 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:44PM (#26935213) Homepage Journal

      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.

    • Pretty sure the track lines are the long roughly parallel lines surrounding it. The square in the picture doesn't look like them.

      Perhaps it is the result of a single boat in a grid pattern. I wonder if google still has any info on the boats that the data came from. It'd be interesting to know what it or they were doing when gathering the data. Maybe it was a treasure hunter.

  • Government-Sponsored Lies! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:03PM (#26934679)

    Oh please, we already know where Atlantis is! Dr. Beckett [wikipedia.org] parked it in San Francisco, next to the Golden Gate Bridge [wikipedia.org].

    This is just a government-sponsored lie to try to hide the fact that they already know about and have control of Atlantis. Anyone who watches TV knows the truth.

  • Proof that it's real (Score:5, Funny)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:03PM (#26934681)

    Google just got a DMCA takedown notice from Aquaman.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Google just got a DMCA takedown notice from Aquaman.

      Oh, that's nothing; just wait 'till Google catches a glimpse of Cthullu...there'll be a "takedown" notice issued, alright...;-)

      =Smidge=

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kenshin ( 43036 )

      What's he gonna due? Use dolphin lawyers to sue them? I'd love to see that courtroom.

  • Analysuis done about 10 years (Score:4, Informative)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {dnaltropnidad}> on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:04PM (#26934701) Homepage Journal

    ago showed a more reasonable interpetation of where Plato clains Atlantis is.

    If the person(s) copying Plato's work missed one little mark, the location would not be the Atlantic, but rather in the Aegean sea.
    The Greek authorities refuse to grant anyone permission to go looking becasue they area is littered with antiquities they wish to preserve.
    I'm NOT saying ti is there, or that there is a cover up. It's an interesting thing to think about.

    • If the person(s) copying Plato's work missed one little mark, the location would not be the Atlantic, but rather in the Aegean sea.

      Data corruption?? Have we learned nothing from Ma.gnolia?! Keep a backup!

    • Re:Analysuis done about 10 years (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anna Merikin ( 529843 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:21PM (#26934931) Journal

      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!

      • 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:

        I assume you speak of the Messinian Salinity Crisis [wikipedia.org]? It even speaks of Wells. Though the current belief is that he was off by over 5 million years....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JayBees ( 124568 )

        Can you explain B a little more? You're saying hypothetically the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea attained more advanced metal-making abilities than their neighbors because...why? Because before it was a seabed, the underlying land was rich in metals they could turn into gold and high-carbon-silicon steel?

        And if that's the case, is the modern seabed also rich in these metals? What's the evidence against Welles' theory?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gen-GNU ( 36980 )

          I could be wrong, but I believe the logic goes that if the entire area was land, the cities in the area were allied with each other and this allowed for the sharing of technology between them. When the sea rushed in, it destroyed all but the few cities left at the edge of the new sea, leaving us with the "mystery" of how these few cities connected by only the sea could all have independently developed this tech, when no one else did.

          • Re:Analysuis done about 10 years (Score:5, Informative)

            by FailedTheTuringTest ( 937776 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @07:45PM (#26937169)

            In the ancient world, travel by water was easier and faster than travel by land. That's why most cities are located on the shores of lakes, seas, or rivers. It wasn't until the Roman Empire built long-distance roads that land travel was even close to competitive with sea travel.

            So the argument given is incorrect. If the Mediterranean had been dry, travel would have been hard and we would expect the cities of the region to have had limited contact with each other. If the Mediterranean was a water body, we would expect the cities around it to have had quite a lot of contact and to have exchanged technology to a significant degree. The latter is indeed what we see in real life.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gen-GNU ( 36980 )

        I read an interesting paper about 10 or 15 years ago positing that during the last ice age the levels of the oceans were reduced to the point that the Mediterranean Sea was either much smaller or non existent. Unfortunately the people at that time didn't get the warning about climate change coming.. as the global ice caps shrunk back to "normal" levels, the Mediterranean was formed. (In reality, this was aprox 20k years ago, not the 10 to 12k spoken of in regards to Atlantis.)

        I don't really follow Atlanti

  • Where else is this glitch? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eagee ( 1308589 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:06PM (#26934737)
    'Just wondering if anyone has seen links to other examples of this glitch? I mean, I imagine if it's a flaw in their sonar system that it would've shown up somewhere else, right?
    • If you look to the east a bit, there are some more similar markings, though not as many.

    • Re:Where else is this glitch? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:49PM (#26935293)

      'Just wondering if anyone has seen links to other examples of this glitch? I mean, I imagine if it's a flaw in their sonar system that it would've shown up somewhere else, right?

      Here's some more [google.com] - just to the east of the "original site."

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Marc_Hawke ( 130338 )

      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.

  • The real 'atlantis' (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:07PM (#26934747)

    "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 Dardanelles and the Bosphorus would be likely places for such navigational aids. The Aegean Sea or Sea of Marmara would then be candidates. Santorini is commonly considered an Aegean island, although as is often the case the distinction between one sea (the Mediterranean) and the other (the Aegean) is blurry and the smaller could be called just a part of the other.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tzot ( 834456 )

      Just FYI: fire up a python interpreter (slashdot is unicode-challenged) in a unicode environment with a nice Unicode font like DejaVu Sans.

      >>> print u'\u0375\u0398'
      This is what 9000 looks like in Ancient Greek: GREEK LOWER NUMERAL SIGN, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER THETA

      >>> print u'\u03e1\u0374'
      And this is what 900 looks like in Ancient Greek: GREEK SMALL LETTER SAMPI, GREEK NUMERAL SIGN

      Quite different. So, obviously, you mean that quite recently, somebody with knowledge of arabic digits did a fau

      • GP is dumb.... But, it is common in ancient (especially greek for some reason) to run in to a lot of "10s". Everything in ancient greek stories takes "10 years" and "100 years" and it is easy to imagine, based on this pattern, that 900 could easily be embellished to 9000.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Petrushka ( 815171 )

          But, it is common in ancient (especially greek for some reason) to run in to a lot of "10s". Everything in ancient greek stories takes "10 years" and "100 years" and it is easy to imagine, based on this pattern, that 900 could easily be embellished to 9000.

          I'm not sure where you get this generalisation from. I just can't think of anything to back it up. Though if you can cite three to five examples from pre-Hellenistic sources, I'd be happy to change my mind.

          Much more common are groups of 20 years (periods of a single person's life) or 30 years (common estimate of the years between two generations), or sometimes another number within a specific text (e.g. periods of 6 or 9 days in the Homeric Odyssey, or groups of 50 sons or daughters in a few myths).

          But I kn

    • And here's where it is:

      36*24'31" N
      25*24'09" E

      Given other recorded incidents of refugees arriving to Crete and Egypt about this time, this very likely is the source of the legend.

  • 9600 BC called... (Score:3, Funny)

    by JayTech ( 935793 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:08PM (#26934769)
    They want their city back.

  • Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) * <jwsmythe@@@jwsmythe...com> on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:09PM (#26934775) Homepage Journal

        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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Scrameustache ( 459504 )

      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. :)

      Ia! Ia! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

  • huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:13PM (#26934817)

    I just hope they bring back Elvis next.

    I don't get it - what did ScuttleMonkey mean by that? Did something happen to Elvis recently?

  • Missing geek details (Score:4, Informative)

    by bokmann ( 323771 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:14PM (#26934821) Homepage

    The article was missing perhaps the only thing this crowd would care about:

      31Â24'16.68"N

      24Â22'40.83"W

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Captain Splendid ( 673276 )

      The article was missing perhaps the only thing this crowd would care about:

      31Â24'16.68"N

      24Â22'40.83"W

      Well, maybe back in 1999...but this is now. You'd get more points handing out the Google Maps link instead.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Scrameustache ( 459504 )

        The article was missing perhaps the only thing this crowd would care about:

          31Â24'16.68"N

          24Â22'40.83"W

        Well, maybe back in 1999...but this is now. You'd get more points handing out the Google Maps link instead.

        Well, if his degrees weren't garbled up by the gorram slashdot posting process, you could just input them in google maps.

    • Re:Missing geek details (Score:5, Funny)

      by A. B3ttik ( 1344591 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:25PM (#26934975)
      Great, now I can set the coordinates into my TomTom and drive my sub there.
      • Google Maps does some interesting things. I got driving directions from Michigan, USA to Australia. The 170 step process sent me west to hit the Pacific it told me to get in a kayak and go to japan, via a tour of Hawaii. From there it gave me directions through various Japanese routes until it told me to then row south to Australia. Total travel time was 55 days. Fun stuff

  • More of these lines (Score:5, Informative)

    by Drakin020 ( 980931 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:17PM (#26934865)

    Seriously if you look at it.

    http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=31+15'15.53N+24+15'30.53W&sll=39.679105,-105.128672&sspn=0.011015,0.019312&ie=UTF8&ll=31.25977,-24.257812&spn=3.131698,4.943848&t=h&z=8 [google.com]

    Scroll just a tad to the right. You will see more of those lines in the water. /Sorry no HTML skills

  • People, seriously. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schmidt349 ( 690948 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:20PM (#26934919)

    Why, for the love of God, do you people think that there was a civilization called Atlantis just because it's in one of Plato's dialogues? Plato isn't even the one who says it; it's a character in one of his dialogues, who claims to have got the information from the Egyptians. He also says that there was an apocalyptic war six thousand years before his own time between Atlantis and Athens, a city we know on the basis of archaeology hasn't been inhabited for much more than 3,500 years.

    Ask yourselves three questions:

    1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?

    2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.

    3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.

    Plato created the fiction of Atlantis to make a point in one of his dialogues. Give it up already. If you believe in Atlantis you may as well believe it was destroyed by Captain Nemo with the help of a plucky fifteen year-old French engineer and a lion cub.

    • Re:People, seriously. (Score:5, Funny)

      by sesshomaru ( 173381 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:34PM (#26935093) Journal

      Yes, the truly enlightened know it was a veiled reference to R'Lyeh.

      Plato was just protecting his audience from the inevitable madness that seethes from that name!

    • It may not be Atlantis, but what if it is indeed an ancient city of some kind?

    • Re:People, seriously. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary&yahoo,com> on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:51PM (#26935317) Journal

      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by schmidt349 ( 690948 )

        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, Funny)

      by radtea ( 464814 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @05:07PM (#26935505)

      For your own safety, please read to the end of this comment before replying.

      1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?

      Because all good archaeology might be wrong, and temple-based civilization, with the possibilities of undiscovered cities, may be 11,000 years old. [smithsonianmag.com]

      2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.

      Err... we have a very small fraction of material from ancient Egypt, thanks to the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Hell, we know things about PLATO that are only attested to in secondary sources. There's no reason Atlantis couldn't be the same.

      3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.

      It is far easier for me to find out about the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years War than it is to find out about what happened in my hometown 100 years ago. Obviously a huge apocalyptic war is going to leave far more footprints in history than anything that happened in the Greek Dark Age, which was after all pretty goddamned black, to the extent that writing itself was lost.

      Ok, if you've got this far I'll give you the REAL reason why we should take Plato seriously on Atlantis: Plato ALSO tells us that originally human beings had two halves and were four-legged, joined at the back. They split in two to create the humans we have today, and the natural sexual affinities that are observed in humans are the result of us seeking our other half. Those of us who should have been joined to another of different sex are heterosexuals, and those who should have been joined to another of the same sex are homosexuals.

      Since this is obviously true, the story of Atlantis must be true as well. I mean, Plato wouldn't just make stuff up for the sake of a good story, would he?

      Oh, yeah: "The Iliad." (ducks)

  • That's New Orleans.

  • experimental arifacts (Score:5, Informative)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:22PM (#26934945) Homepage Journal
    While this is funny, it is another example of how artifacts of an experiment can lead to misinterpretation of otherwise valid results. The last big example of this was the man from mars. The most recent is clear and indisputable picture of this humanoid walking across mars [sciencenewsblog.com]. Then of course there is carving of the face on mars [aimvotal.com]. All this comes from the mistaken assumption that somehow a photograph captures the complete reality of a situation. Even without the processing of such photographs, there is always a chance of injecting an artifact.

  • Having a look through Google Maps of the spot, the scale is wrong to be a city. It's about 100 miles (160 km) on a side! Not a city, and most certainly not an ancient city, as they were even smaller. Could well be an artifact.

  • Martian face all over again.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by macraig ( 621737 ) <mark.a.craig@gmCOMMAail.com minus punct> on Friday February 20, 2009 @04:32PM (#26935053)

    Yep, here we go again: people executing "bad science" by seeing what they want to see, rather than what is actually there. Those "lines" would actually be depressions, not walls, according to the topography as shown in GE, and they are interrupted by natural peaks and other features in a way that doesn't make much sense, were that actually Atlantis. What's more, there's an even more outstanding example of that same sort of artifacts off the southwest coast of Ireland, below its continental shelf; that area makes it pretty obvious that the cause is exactly as Google claimed: a side effect of the way the region was scanned with sonar.

    These folks should go back to staring at the face on Mars and dreaming of meeting little green men. :-)

  • We all know the Ancients liked more snowflake inspired shapes.

    Oh, and and large ring shaped objects.

  • Google Ocean topo data is awful. (Score:5, Informative)

    by goodmanj ( 234846 ) on Friday February 20, 2009 @05:29PM (#26935753)

    I spent a lot of time in grad school looking at seafloor topography maps, and let me tell you, the Google Ocean stuff is just *TERRIBLE*.

    Much of the data comes from the GEBCO maps [gebco.net] -- General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans. These were hand-drawn topo maps from the early- and mid-20th century. Beginning in the '90s, these were scanned in and digitized, but whoever did it did a lousy job.

    The topo contours on the drawings weren't smoothed out on the digital map, so in many places the sea floor has a "terraced" or "layered" look which is not at all accurate. The original map data was supplemented with modern digital hydrographic data taken by shipboard sonars, but this data is only available along the path of the ship. No real effort was made to sensibly combine the old data with the new, so the new data forms straight lines cutting across the older data.

    Which is what this "Atlantis" is. Some ship did a detailed survey of that area, following a grid search pattern. The data in between is older, less accurate, and mismatched.

    If our land surface data was this bad, Google Earth would be mocked constantly. But since it's the ocean, nobody cares or notices.

  • Here's Another One [google.com]

    It may be interesting, but just moving the map around a little bit, there are grid-like anomalies like this all over the place. (Can I even call them anomalies when there's so many?) Also, try zooming out and looking at the size of the thing; it's a third the size of Portugal. What sort of man-made grid like that from the ancient world could possibly be so large?

    Whatever this is, I think it's probably safe to say it's not atlantis.

  • Here 'tis.. [google.com]

    Now we know what happened to Atlantis, two rival claimants, one in the frozen North, the other in the tropical South, both proclaiming "There can be only one".

    Oh the humanity!

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