The ARE's Search For Atlantis - 2007 Summary Greg Little - August 3, 2007
The ARE's Search For Atlantis - 2007 Summary Greg Little - August 3, 2007
The wave that destroyed Atlantis- Was it a tsunami? BBC - April 21, 2007
This event parallels the fall of Atlantis
Red Sea Region Parting in Massive Split National Geographic - July 19, 2006
Secrets of ocean birth laid bare BBC - July 20, 2006
Satellite Captures Creation of New Continental Crust Scientific American - July 20, 2006
A new sea is forming in the desert of northeastern Ethiopia.
Millions of years from now, the pulling apart of the Arabian and Nubian
tectonic plates will allow waters to rush in and widen the Red Sea
.
Scientists: Earthquakes causing Red Sea to part MSNBC - July 19, 2006
Arabian tectonic plate and African plate are moving away from each other
Plate Tectonics Crystalinks
The Great Rift Valley Wikipedia
BBC - August 15, 2005
Spartel Island now lies 60m under the sea in the Straits of Gibraltar, but some think it once lay above water.
The finding adds weight to a hypothesis that the island could have inspired the legend recounted by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago.
Evidence comes from a seafloor survey published in the journal Geology.
Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, found a coarse-grained sedimentary deposit that is 50-120cm thick and could have been left behind after a tsunami.
Shaken sediments
Dr Gutscher said that the destruction described by Plato is consistent with a great earthquake and tsunami similar to the one that devastated the city of Lisbon in Portugal in 1755, generating waves with heights of up to 10m.
The thick "turbidite" deposit results from sediments that have been shaken up by underwater geological upheavals.
It was found to date to around 12,000 years ago - roughly the age indicated by Plato for the destruction of Atlantis, Dr Gutscher reports in Geology.
Spartel Island, in the Gulf of Cadiz, was proposed as a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis legend in 2001 by French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard.
It is "in front of the Pillars of Hercules", or the Straits of Gibraltar, as Plato described. The philosopher said the fabled island civilisation had been destroyed in a single day and night, disappearing below the sea.
Sedimentary records reveal that events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake occur every 1,500 to 2,000 years in the Gulf of Cadiz.
But the mapping of the island carried out by Dr Gutscher failed to turn up any manmade structures and also showed that the island was much smaller than previously believed.
This could make it less likely that the island was inhabited by a civilization.
Seafloor survey buoys Atlantis claim
Earthquake debris shores up evidence for lost city.
Nature - July 22, 2005
In a recent paper in Geology, Marc-Andre Gutscher of the European Institute for Marine Studies in Plouzane gives details of one candidate for the lost city: the submerged island of Spartel, west of the Straits of Gibraltar.
The top of this isle lies some 60 metres beneath the surface in the Gulf of Cadiz, having plunged beneath the waves at the end of the most recent ice age as melting glaciers caused the sea level to rise. Geological evidence has shown that a large earthquake and a tsunami hit this island some 12,000 years ago, at roughly the location and time indicated in Plato's writings.
Gutscher has surveyed this island in detail, using sound waves reflected off the sea floor to map its contours1. His results bring mixed news to Atlantis hunters.
At first, his conclusions seemed disappointing. At the time identified by Plato for the city's loss, the sea level would have been fairly high on the island's banks. With the information we have from the ancient text, it may never be found, if indeed it ever existed.
According to sea-level measurements alone, Gutscher estimates the island "would have been reduced to wave-swept rocky islets" and would have been less than 500 metres in diameter, making it impossibly small for a sophisticated city.
But there is a saving grace. Gutscher says the island might have sunk further since those times from seismic activity. Layers of turbidite, the sand and mud shaken up by underwater avalanches, suggest that eight earthquakes have happened in the area since Atlantis sank. Each earthquake could have resulted in a drop of the sea floor by several metres.
So 12,000 years ago, Spartel might have been 40 metres higher than expected, and could have measured five by two kilometres."This is an interesting contribution to the discussion," says Jacques Collina-Girard, a geologist at the University of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence, who suggested Spartel as a candidate for Atlantis a few years ago.
At a conference of Atlantis researchers in Greece this month, he became convinced that the sophisticated city described by some could not have existed this long ago. "If inhabited, it would have probably been simple fishermen and not a Bronze Age culture as described by Plato," he says.
The Bronze Age is usually described as beginning just 5,000 years ago. Gutscher adds that his sound reflection data revealed no unusual geometric structures that could suggest an extinct civilization.He says that the Egyptians who told Plato the Atlantis story may have used a different definition of 'years', meaning the destruction of Atlantis happened more recently than thought.
The conference in Greece came to no firm conclusions about the city's existence. But researchers managed to agree on 24 criteria that a geographical area must satisfy in order to qualify as a site where Atlantis could have existed. The place must have accommodated such oddities as hot springs, northerly winds, elephants, enough people for an army of 10,000 chariots, and a ritual of bull sacrifice.
At present there are half a dozen candidates for Atlantis's location, each one with its own shortcomings. Some say that settling on a final answer may prove impossible."The geophysics is well done, the geology excellent," says geologist Floyd McCoy of the University of Hawaii, Kaneohe, of Gutscher's study. "But most of Plato's description of Atlantis is so ambiguous and open to interpretation. With the information we have from the ancient text, it may never be found, if indeed it ever existed."
Do satellite images show Atlantis?
June 6, 2004 - BBC
A scientist says he may have found remains of the lost city of Atlantis.
Dr Rainer Kuehne thinks the "island" of Atlantis simply referred to a region of the southern Spanish coast destroyed by a flood between 800 BC and 500 BC.
The research has been reported as an ongoing project in the online edition of the journal Antiquity.
Satellite photos of a salt marsh region known as Marisma de Hinojos near the city of Cadiz show two rectangular structures in the mud and parts of concentric rings that may once have surrounded them.
"Plato wrote of an island of five stades (925m) diameter that was surrounded by several circular structures - concentric rings - some consisting of Earth and the others of water. We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described," Dr Kuehne told BBC News Online.
Dr Kuehne believes the rectangular features could be the remains of a "silver" temple devoted to the sea god Poseidon and a "golden" temple devoted to Cleito and Poseidon - all described in Plato's dialogue Critias.
Temples of the sea god
The identification of the site with Atlantis was first proposed by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who spotted the rectangles and concentric rings by studying photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato.
The sizes of the "island" and its rings in the satellite image are slightly larger than those described by Plato. There are two possible explanations for this, says Dr Kuehne.
First, Plato may have underplayed the size of Atlantis. Secondly, the ancient unit of measurement used by Plato - the stade - may have been 20% larger than traditionally assumed.
If the latter is true, one of the rectangular features on the "island" matches almost exactly the dimensions given by Plato for the temple of Poseidon.
Mr Wickboldt explained: "This is the only place that seems to fit [Plato's] description."
He added that the Greeks might have confused an Egyptian word referring to a coastline with one meaning "island" during transmission of the Atlantis story.
Commenting on the satellite image showing the two "temples", Tony Wilkinson, an expert in the use of remote sensing in archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, told BBC News Online: "A lot of the problems come with interpretations. I can see something there and I could imagine that one could interpret it in various ways. But you've got several leaps of faith here.
Metal trading
"We use the imagery to recognise certain types of imprint on the ground and then do [in the field] verification on them. Based on what we see on the ground we make an interpretation.
"What we need here is a date range. Otherwise, you're just dealing with morphology. But the [features] are interesting."
The fabled utopia of Atlantis has captured the imagination of scholars for centuries. The earliest known records of this mythical land appear in Plato's dialogues Critias and Timaios.
His depiction of a land of fabulous wealth, advanced civilisation and natural beauty has spurred many adventurers to seek out its location.
One recent theory equates Atlantis with Spartel Island, a mud shoal in the straits of Gibraltar that sank into the sea 11,000 years ago.
Plato described Atlantis as having a "plain". Dr Kuehne said this might be the plain that extends today from Spain's southern coast up to the city of Seville. The high mountains described by the Greek scholar could be the Sierra Morena and Sierra Nevada.
"Plato also wrote that Atlantis is rich in copper and other metals. Copper is found in abundance in the mines of the Sierra Morena," Dr Kuehne explained.
Dr Kuehne noticed that the war between Atlantis and the eastern Mediterranean described in Plato's writings closely resembled attacks on Egypt, Cyprus and the Levant during the 12th Century BC by mysterious raiders known as the Sea People.
As a result, he proposes that the Atlanteans and the Sea People were in fact one and the same.
This dating would equate the city and society of Atlantis with either the Iron Age Tartessos culture of southern Spain or another, unknown, Bronze Age culture. A link between Atlantis and Tartessos was first proposed in the early 20th Century.
Dr Kuehne said he hoped to attract interest from archaeologists to excavate the site. But this may be tricky. The features in the satellite photo are located within Spain's Donana national park.
October 29, 2003 - Reuters
Atlantis was in Cyprus and ancient philosopher Plato is about to be vindicated, according to Robert Sarmast.
"The island of Cyprus was, or is, part of Atlantis - a mountaintop," Sarmast said from his home in Los Angeles. "This region is at the heart of the ancient world."
Drawn from accounts by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Solon, Plato's description of a powerful civilization destroyed by the wrath of God has fired the dreams of explorers for centuries.
Of late, it has inspired fantasies of webbed-limbed people living in glass bubbles on the sea bed; of old, it was thought by some to be the Garden of Eden, where mankind fell from God's grace.
Geologists say the land mass of Cyprus's central mountain range once formed the ocean floor. Sarmast says the mountainous island was the tip of the civilization submerged in a devastating earthquake and flood thousands of years ago.
Using deep-sea imagery, simulations of the sea bed, and following some 50 clues found in Plato's Critias and Timaeus Dialogues, Sarmast said he has discovered a sunken rectangular land mass stretching northeast from Cyprus, toward Syria.
"Everything matches the descriptions in the dialogues of Atlantis to an uncanny degree," said Sarmast.
Using scientific data collected a decade ago, Sarmast said he came up with detailed three-dimensional maps and simulated models of the eastern Mediterranean basin.
"We lowered the sea level by 1,600 meters (5,250 feet) and an island popped up," he said.
Having written a book about his discovery, Sarmast now hopes to organize an expedition to the region for further research.
Scholars Skeptical
His theory has been challenged by archeologists, who say the Atlantis story is a myth.
Sarmast, however, says the sheer volume of detail found in the dialogues is proof enough that something is lurking in the watery deep. The dialogues read like a treasure map," he said.
Although theories on where Atlantis was are many and varied, most believers agree the ancient city was probably destroyed in the biblical flood, which has its parallel in the history of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians and South Americans.
Plato describes a series of worldwide floods culminating in the deluge of the Deucalion, dated by Greek historians to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC.
According to those ancient texts, Atlantis was a powerful nation whose residents became so corrupted by greed and power that Zeus, the king of the gods, destroyed it.
December 6, 2001 - Reuters
Explorers using a miniature submarine to probe the sea floor off the coast of Cuba said on Thursday they had confirmed the discovery of stone structures deep below the ocean surface that may have been built by an unknown human civilization thousands of years ago.
Researchers with a Canadian exploration company said they filmed over the summer ruins of a possible submerged ``lost city'' off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on the Caribbean island's western tip. The researchers cautioned that they did not fully understand the nature of their find and planned to return in January for further analysis, the expedition leader said on Thursday.
The explorers said they believed the mysterious structures, discovered at the astounding depth of around 2,100 feet and laid out like an urban area, could have been built at least 6,000 years ago. That would be about 1,500 years earlier than the great Giza pyramids of Egypt.
``It's a really wonderful structure which looks like it could have been a large urban center,'' said Soviet-born Canadian ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, from British Columbia-based Advanced Digital Communications (ADC).
Zelitsky said the structures may have been built by unknown people when the current sea-floor actually was above the surface. She said volcanic activity may explain how the site ended up at great depths below the Caribbean Sea.
In July 2000, ADC researchers using sophisticated side-scan sonar equipment identified a large underwater plateau with clear images of symmetrically organized stone structures that looked like an urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resembled pyramids, roads and buildings, they said.
This past July, ADC researchers, along with the firm's Cuban partner and experts from the Cuban Academy of Sciences, returned to the site in their ship ``Ulises.'' They said they sent a miniature, unmanned submarine called a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) down to film parts of the 7.7-square-mile area.
Those images confirmed the presence of huge, smooth, cut granite-like blocks in perpendicular and circular formations, some in pyramid shapes, the researchers said. Most of the blocks, measuring between about 6.5 and 16 feet in length, were exposed, some stacked one on another, the researchers said.
Others were covered in sediment and the fine, white sand that characterizes the area, the researchers said.
The intriguing discovery provided evidence that Cuba at one time was joined to mainland Latin America via a strip of land from the Yucatan Peninsula, the researchers said.
``There are many new hypotheses about land movement and colonialization, and what we are seeing here should provide very interesting new information,'' Zelitsky said.
ADC's deep-water equipment includes a satellite-integrated ocean bottom positioning system, high-precision side-scan double-frequency sonar, and the ROV. The company currently is commissioning what it calls the world's first custom-designed ocean excavator for marine archeology to begin work both at the Guanahacabibes site and at ship wrecks.
ADC is the deepest operator among four foreign firms working in joint venture with President Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s government to explore Cuban waters containing hundreds of treasure-laden ships from the colonial era.
The Canadian company already has discovered several historic sunken Spanish ships.
In an earlier high-profile find, ADC was testing equipment in late 2000 off Havana Bay when it spotted the century-old wreck of the American battleship USS Maine. The ship had not been located since it blew up mysteriously in 1898, killing 260 American sailors and igniting the Spanish-American War.
The rush of interest in Cuba's seas in recent years is due in part to the Castro government's recognition that it does not have the money or technology to carry out systematic exploration by itself, although it does have excellent divers.
September 14, 2000 - Associated Press
Researchers say ancient pine tree stumps found in a Swedish peat bog may hold a record of the great volcanic blast that some historians link with the end of the fabled Atlantis.
Using radiocarbon dating, a team of researchers determined that the trees had been alive between 1695 B.C. and 1496 B.C., and a study of their growth rings showed a four-year period of severely depressed growth about 1636 B.C.
Major volcanic eruptions have been known to blast enough dust into the atmosphere to cause frosts and limit crop growth, and one of the most powerful such blasts occurred when the Greek island of Santorini blew up in the mid-1600s B.C.
That disaster destroyed a culturally developed island and some historians believe it gave rise to the legend of the lost continent Atlantis.
"Our dating and the severe magnitude of this phenomenon suggest that it can be ascribed to the 1628-27 B.C. event, hence providing new evidence of a wider, more northerly area of influence," the team of Swedish scientists reports in the Sept. 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
While the team led by Hakan Grudd of the Climate Impacts Research Center in Kiruna, Sweden, dated the Santorini blast to 1628, other scholars use different dates, though all are within a few years.
The Swedish team said their tree ring dating had a margin of error of plus or minus 65 years.
Other scientists studying tree rings have found periods of frost damage and slow growth in the mid-1600s B.C. affecting Irish, English, and German oaks, pine trees in California and trees in Turkey.
This is the northernmost evidence of an effect from the volcanic blast, the researchers said of the new Swedish find.
"The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis of a major Northern Hemisphere volcanic eruption in 1628 B.C., which may have been Santorini in the Aegean Sea," they concluded.
The climate impact of volcanoes has long been a topic of discussion, going back at least to Benjamin Franklin. The eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora was blamed for a worldwide cooling in 1816 - known as the "year without a summer" in New England, where snow fell in June.
Today Santorini is a popular tourist spot, where visitors can see the great caldera formed when the ancient volcanic island blew up and view excavations uncovering the remains of the ancient town.
The first mention of Atlantis occurs in Plato, who discusses an ancient island or continent destroyed by earthquakes and sunk into the sea.
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