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Atlantis: Discovered at Last?
Henry G. writes "The BBC is reporting that recent satellite pictures may show the location of the fabled city of Atlantis, as described by Plato. It is in Southern Spain, though, and not on an island as is commonly believed. Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area." This story has gotten a lot of submissions; it's worth noting that it's also shown up off Cyprus, or near Cuba, or is Crete, or... It is worth noting that that Ubar was found this way.
...who can't see any rings in that photo?
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Of course, it certainly would be cool if it was the real deal!
It's probably just pareidolia. They know what they are looking for, so they see it in highly ambiguous data. Sure it might be Atlantis, but I remain skeptical until they can produce much more unequivocal evidence.
Or is anyone else having Heraldo and the vaults of Capone flashbacks?
(we found it! we found it! Oh, crap...)
-Goran
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It might be important to note that the sory of Atlantis could and is most likly just that a story. Plato like Homer was a great story teller, he was also had an great impact on many Academic Disciplines.
While Homers story of The Illiad was based on the real war that happened in Troy, we have no conclusive prof that an island of Atlantis existed. This discovery may provide evidence of the fabled city, but I won't hold my breath just yet.
-Ghost
how do they confirm it is atlantis?
will they find a stone fragment with the words "downtown atlantis, exit 43" in ancient greek?
no seriously: how does a mythical city of unknown location be "proven" to be this old city versus that old city?
why can't their find of this ancient city stand on its own as exciting and important? why link it to a dubious unprovable myth?
it seems to me that there is no way to say either this city or that one is atlantis itself, or am i missing something
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It strikes me that there will be many cities lost to flooding throughout history. Just because they've found one sunken city doesn't mean that it's the same city Plato was talking about, surely?
IIRC, the Greeks attributed their stories of Atlantis to a travelling Egyptian. So even the Greeks got the information second hand, and probably wouldn't have been able to uniquely identify Atlantis.
"This is the only place that seems to fit [Plato's] description," he told BBC News Online.
Except for its not being an island and all the other bits we ignored to make the data fit the model.
KFG
If you're looking for something spesific, it's easy to find it.. our mind is good at recognisong patterns, even when they arn't there. Off course, this is what leads people to see cities om Mars, Lenin in their shower curtain and, in this cause, traces of Atlantis. It's called pareidolia, and it's more common than you might think.
PS: I urge everyone to visit the link and explore the site - it's a good read and quite interesting as well as funny.
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The Mediterranean Sea is still a connected sea - the Straits of Gibraltar aren't THAT narrow - so it can hardly fill from the surrounding water sources (sealevel rises aside).
Q.
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The neatest thing about this, IMHO... would be if we discovered a very old, very advanced civilization that threw historians a curveball
Actually, that's EXACTLY what Atlantis was: a VERY old, VERY advanced civilization. They supposedly weren't as advanced as we are today, but they were FAR more advanced than the rest of the world was back in the day... and they existed 9000 years before Plato's time.
what if some ancient civilization was just as advanced as us but nuked themselves out of existence?
I've pondered this many times and I keep coming to the same conclusion: If this was true, we would have found SOME evidence of their existence by now. I highly doubt that any really technologically advanced civilization that could create an atomic bomb wouldn't expand their culture beyond a handful of cities. We should have found towers on mountains by now, no? I don't think it very likely that when they wiped themselves out, they destroyed every miniscule building they had ever created.
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I see your point, but seeing as they had to sail their ships between the pillars to get to any ocean other than the Mediterranean, it could still be construed as any ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules.
What's interesting to note though is that this pretty much means that Atlantis isn't in the Med.
(I'm not criticizing you here...)
So how long would you last in your field if you made a huge claim with only the weakest, unsubstantiated data? This Atlantis claim is based solely on one poorly defined image and absolutely NO physical evidence from the ground. The whole story of Atlantis is based on the assumed infallibility of Plato, as if Plato were incapable of being mistaken or believing a bogus folktale.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
No it isn't. Many aspects of archaeology are non-repeatable. Excavation is the obvious example.
Excavation is not about digging dirt, the main part, and the one that matters is to not destroy anything that matters and rigorusly documenting every aspect of it.
That way you can "repeat the study" later by other archeologs, and based on new theories and/or information, possibly reach a totally different conclusion.
Secondly, although archaeology uses many scientific techniques, it is fundamentally subjective. Once you've excavated a site, got dates from objects and contexts one is still left with the subjective opinions of the primary excavator.
Exacty, and archeology is *exactly* like other sciences in that matter. Physics, for example is not *truth*, but merely a collection of our best efforts to describe the universe we live in.
A new *truth* can be found tomorrow and change the way we think about reality. Take the size and shape of the universe as an example, there are more than one theory about that one.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Also the resevoir effect can throw dates off. Of course, many of the error situations are obvious, and thus won't throw you off. For example, you simply don't carbon date deep sea creatures (recycled carbon from oceanic conveyors), or plants that lived on the rim of an active volcano (carbon from deep in the earth), without expecting your results to be way off. There are lots of ways you can "catch" unexpected causes of carbon being off when they were expected to be correct, but in general, the results of carbon are dating quite accurate because the cases that can really throw carbon dating off are clearly exceptions, not the rule.
Calibration amounts are generally relatively small, so it's not a big deal. Creationists like to pretend that they're huge (they're not), or that all dating mechanisms are calibrated (most aren't; carbon dating is unusual). The most reliable dating methods, BTW, are methods like isochron and concordia/discordia methods, which have built-in error checking.
Probably the best indicator of the reliability of carbon dating in the general case is its correspondance to other dating methods, particularly (as was mentioned) dendrochronology. Different fossilized tree records, while showing somewhat varying levels of the different carbon isotopes in the atmosphere, show, to a good degree of accuracy, the *same* varying levels.
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