Atlantis Found with Google Ocean?

[HuskyCaucasian]

Via the Telegraph:

The network of criss-cross lines is 620 miles off the coast of north west Africa near the Canary Islands on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

 

The perfect rectangle – which is around the size of Wales – was noticed on the search giant's underwater exploration tool by an aeronautical engineer who claims it looks like an "aerial map" of a city.

 

The underwater image can be found at the co-ordinates 31 15'15.53N 24 15'30.53W.

 

Last night Atlantis experts said that the unexplained grid is located at one of the possible sites of the legendary island, which was described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.

 

According to his account, the city sank beneath the ocean after its residents made a failed effort to conquer Athens around 9000 BC.

 

Dr Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at New York State University told The Sun that the find was fascinating and warranted further inspection.

 

"The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato," the Atlantis expert said. "Even if it turns out to be geographical, it definitely deserves a closer look."

 

Bernie Bamford, 38, of Chester who spotted the "city", compared it to the plan of Milton Keynes, the Buckinghamshire town built on a grid design. "It must be man made," he said.

 

Google Ocean, an extension of Google Earth, allows web users to virtually explore the ocean with thousands of images of underwater landscapes.

 

Launched earlier this month, it lets users swim around underwater volcanoes, watch videos about exotic marine life, read about nearby shipwrecks, contribute photos and watch unseen footage of historic ocean expeditions.

 

The legend of Atlantis has excited the public imagination for centuries. In recent years "evidence" of the lost kingdom has been found off the coast of Cyprus and in southern Spain.

 

Plato described it as an island "larger than Libya and Asia put together" in front of the Pillars of Hercules - the Straits of Gibraltar. He said Atlantis was a land of fabulous wealth, advanced civilisation and natural beauty destroyed by earthquakes and floods 9,000 years earlier.

 

[HuskyCaucasian]

A second grid? Located 220 miles from the first.

 

The second is far less interesting than the first.

[Steve9347]

Pretty cool.

[HuskyCaucasian]

DRAT!!! False alarm...

 

But when it comes to Atlantis, Google totally had to rain on everyone's parade. "It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an ancient Roman villa," a statement from Google read. "In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data."

[southsider2k5]

DRAT!!! False alarm...

 

That's what the government wants us to believe...

[Milkman delivers]

Is there a link to that story about the Roman Villa in Mozambique? I find that incredibly interesting to hear.

[Soxbadger]

Id love for Atlantis to be found, but I think that the island of Santorini is most likely what Plato was referring to.

 

 

[HuskyCaucasian]

Id love for Atlantis to be found, but I think that the island of Santorini is most likely what Plato was referring to.

agreed. I think a lot of the Atlantis stuff is way over blown and Edger Casey didnt help any.

[Soxbadger]

Cayce is really an interesting figure. The finding of the Bimini Road really made people look at his predictions again.

[southsider2k5]

Id love for Atlantis to be found, but I think that the island of Santorini is most likely what Plato was referring to.

 

Its always the thing that made the most sense to me when combined with legends.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Cayce is really an interesting figure. The finding of the Bimini Road really made people look at his predictions again.

and it ended up that the Bimini Road was nothing more than an ancient dock that is in no way related to Atlantis.

 

I do like Cayce. I think he's fascinating, but his predictions arent standing the test of science any more.

[Texsox]

That's what the government wants us to believe...

 

[SouthsideDon48]

Wow, that was an interesting article, I've always been fascinated by Atlantis, too bad it wasn't the real thing.

 

Am I the only person that think it's possible that Atlantis is now completely under ice and is currently what we now know as Antarctica?

 

I've always suspected that Atlantis was shifted because of the tectonic plates and ended up at the south pole.

[Balta1701]

Wow, that was an interesting article, I've always been fascinated by Atlantis, too bad it wasn't the real thing.

 

Am I the only person that think it's possible that Atlantis is now completely under ice and is currently what we now know as Antarctica?

 

I've always suspected that Atlantis was shifted because of the tectonic plates and ended up at the south pole.

Unfortunately, things don't work that fast. Antarctica has been glaciated in nearly its present volume for at least the last couple million years, and has possibly been glaciated in some fashion for several tens of millions of years. The continents move at most at a few centimeters per year, basically at roughly the rate your fingernails grow at. Humanity has been around and building civilizations for only 10k years or less.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

Unfortunately, things don't work that fast. Antarctica has been glaciated in nearly its present volume for at least the last couple million years, and has possibly been glaciated in some fashion for several tens of millions of years. The continents move at most at a few centimeters per year, basically at roughly the rate your fingernails grow at. Humanity has been around and building civilizations for only 10k years or less.

 

 

Well Charles Hapgood, author of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (which i read when doing research for a paper on pre-Columbian Atlantic voyages...fascinating topic actually) once laid out an argument for Atlantis in Antarctica. The basis dealt with the perception that the Piri Reis map shows an un-glaciated Antartic coastline, thus providing evidence of an ancient civilization that was around to originally draw it. Reis then made his copy from existing mappamundi blah blah blah. I dont buy it, at all, but there are some who believe the Atlantis in Antarctica argument is possible.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Well Charles Hapgood, author of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (which i read when doing research for a paper on pre-Columbian Atlantic voyages...fascinating topic actually) once laid out an argument for Atlantis in Antarctica. The basis dealt with the perception that the Piri Reis map shows an un-glaciated Antartic coastline, thus providing evidence of an ancient civilization that was around to originally draw it. Reis then made his copy from existing mappamundi blah blah blah. I dont buy it, at all, but there are some who believe the Atlantis in Antarctica argument is possible.

It's been a while since I read up on this, but there is a belief among some scientists that there was a massive "tectonic shift" in which the entire crust "shifted" as one. Moving a then tropical Antarctica to the south poll.

 

I havent seen much scientific proof of this though.

[Balta1701]

It's been a while since I read up on this, but there is a belief among some scientists that there was a massive "tectonic shift" in which the entire crust "shifted" as one. Moving a then tropical Antarctica to the south poll.

 

I havent seen much scientific proof of this though.

This is something called an inertial interchange event. It happens because the Earth is not a perfect sphere. Because it spins fairly fast around its axis, it actually bulges out slightly at the equator (you need a satellite to actually measure this). Because of this bulge, it is gravitationally unstable to have a positive density anomaly sitting at the pole. If you generate a positive density anomaly in the mantle and have it rise up near the pole, if it's large enough, it will cause the earth to rotate some number of degrees to bring that anomaly closer to the equator and bring the planet back in to gravitational balance.

 

The rotation might actually be quite fast, on hte order of hundreds to thousands of years, and catastrophic at that, but there's a problem with trying to use one of those to explain atlantis. The earth's magnetic field is controlled by the liquid outer core. The outer core is actually disconnected from the solid mantle, meaning if there's an inertial interchange event, the mantle spins, but the core doesn't. The core keeps doing what it's doing; generating a magnetic field. If there is an IIE, the earth's magnetic field would jump significantly. Because rocks being deposited on the earth and especially rocks forming at the bottom of the ocean record the direction of the magnetic field at the time, we can safely rule out an IIE within the last several hundred million years. It's possible that they happened in the Cambrian/late Neoproterozoic, some 500-1000 million years ago, but in terms of moving around a civilization, unless the city was built by trilobites, there's simply no means for the planet to move something to the poles from a more reasonable climate that quickly.