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Atlantis Seekers Given Thrill by Google Ocean

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.

321 comments

  1. The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 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! ;-)

    --
    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
    1. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by Hordeking · · Score: 1

      This sounds like a job for INDIANA JONES (and Sophia)!

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    2. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by troll8901 · · Score: 1

      Hi, I'm selling this fine leather jacket...

    3. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by davester666 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Finally, I'm no longer limited to just searching the continents for Waldo. Now, I can also search the oceans.

      I swear I'll find him, and when I do, he better look out!

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    4. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Plus there was the link to this on the article page. Talk about wetness!

    5. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by just_another_sean · · Score: 1

      Finally, I'm no longer limited to just searching the continents for Waldo. Now, I can also search the oceans.

      I swear I'll find him, and when I do, he better look out!

      Just like with the proverbial dog and car I think you need to ask yourself; "what will I do when I catch him"? You owe it to yourself to be honest when you answer.

      --
      Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
    6. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      The Patrick Duffy show thing was like, wtf, why did you even mention that?

    7. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by davester666 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oh, I've got a plan.

      In fact, I've got the one-size-fits-all latex suit, love swing (NSFW)http://www.stockroom.com/The-Love-Swing-P1361.aspx, handcuffs and broom handle ready for when I catch him!

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    8. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by Daniel+Weis · · Score: 2

      Actually, I did it for you:
      Waldo

    9. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by doti · · Score: 4, Funny

      Where's "-1, Sick" when we need it?

      --
      factor 966971: 966971
    10. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      not to mention page 3.

    11. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by conureman · · Score: 1

      You clicked that? The Davester was kind enough to warn us NSFW. I, for one, spared myself.

      --
      The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
    12. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Awesome is; the amazing power of the internet.

    13. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by reboot246 · · Score: 1

      Waldo is a small town in Alabama. I've been there, but nobody was wearing that awful shirt.

    14. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      The interview with "top philospher" Plato is proof positive that this time it's the real deal!

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    15. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Whats really funny is if you click the link the bottom of that page has the usual online store bit about "people who bought this item also bought...."

    16. Re:The SUN is always an entertaining read ... by doti · · Score: 1

      I did, and it was a rather interesting device.

      The "sick" was not for the content of the link, but the plan for Waldo itself.

      --
      factor 966971: 966971
  2. The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:The Sun? by Hordeking · · Score: 3, Funny

      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

      Don't knock the Sun. It's at least as good as the Weekly World News!

      --
      Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
    2. Re:The Sun? by ncc74656 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Numerous articles and you pick the sun?

      Could've been worse...he could've used the New York Times instead. :-P

      --
      20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
    3. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Where's the street view guy? That's what we really need.

    4. Re:The Sun? by demonlapin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Better, even. Ever seen boobs on page 3 of Weekly World News?

    5. Re:The Sun? by peacefinder · · Score: 5, Informative

      Most amusing how the Sun declined to show the scale of the map. For comparison, here's another city at the same scale.

      The similarity is not uncanny. :-)

      --
      With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
    6. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What? No Street view!?

    7. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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

      And here's the link for the much larger city that wiped out Atlantis.
      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=52.789476,-16.094971&spn=5.156964,10.217285&z=7

    8. Re:The Sun? by Hordeking · · Score: 3, Funny

      Better, even. Ever seen boobs on page 3 of Weekly World News?

      No. I was too busy looking at boobs in the line at the store.

      --
      Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
    9. Re:The Sun? by camperdave · · Score: 3, Funny

      Wow! Atlantis was flippin' HUGE!

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    10. Re:The Sun? by OakDragon · · Score: 1, Funny

      Where's the street view guy?

      They tried to drive their Google trucks there, but for some reason the engines flooded.

    11. Re:The Sun? by OakDragon · · Score: 1
      Very nice. If you scroll toward the right (or east), you can see other grid patterns, although not as striking. Perhaps it's an artifact (not the Indiana Jones kind of artifact) of the sonar, or maybe the data-gathering process.

      Now what's really fascinating are these gigantic letters spelling "(c) 2009 Google" on the ocean floor.

    12. Re:The Sun? by jmiyaku · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And look - Here's another Atlantis! Right off the coast of Ireland! http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=51.69299,-17.276001&spn=2.584487,7.141113&z=8 Now if I can just find Pee Wee Herman's face on Mars...

    13. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    14. Re:The Sun? by Hordeking · · Score: 1

      Very nice. If you scroll toward the right (or east), you can see other grid patterns, although not as striking. Perhaps it's an artifact (not the Indiana Jones kind of artifact) of the sonar, or maybe the data-gathering process.

      Now what's really fascinating are these gigantic letters spelling "(c) 2009 Google" on the ocean floor.

      The imaging artifacts are the mostly likely explanation. Or perhaps shadows caused by such things as varying refractive indices. The only oddity is that the features meet at 90-degree angles. That bugs me a bit.

      --
      Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
    15. Re:The Sun? by ArsonSmith · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hate 90 degree angles too. Maybe we should form a support group.

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
    16. Re:The Sun? by Hordeking · · Score: 2

      I hate 90 degree angles too. Maybe we should form a support group.

      Right-angles are Wrong! (A group to lobby Congress?)

      Or maybe Right-angles anonymous?

      --
      Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
    17. Re:The Sun? by DilbertLand · · Score: 1

      I'm beginning to lean towards the imaging artifact explanation also. If you go a little ways north you can see a large area with this grid pattern appearance. http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=31.480209,-24.120483&spn=2.988616,5.026245&t=h&z=8

    18. Re:The Sun? by NeverVotedBush · · Score: 1

      Maybe it could even be a disability?

      There are right angles everywhere and a good phobia of them could keep us in our parent's basements and unable to work.

      Maybe even a reason to go for lost wages?

    19. Re:The Sun? by Annymouse+Cowherd · · Score: 1

      From that it is so obvious that it is merely an imaging artifact. For Atlantis to be the size shown there, it would have to be about 3000 km^2 (about the size of Delaware).

    20. Re:The Sun? by Tacvek · · Score: 1

      Google's statement in TFA is:

      A spokeswoman said: âoeBathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor.

      âoeThe lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.

      âoeThe fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the worldâ(TM)s oceans.â

      TFA interpreted that last line in a way different that was probably intended.

      I interpret this as those lines indicate areas of higher definition data retrieved by boat-based sonar. The grid like nature of the lines seems consistent with a search pattern to me. So some boat or small fleet scanned this particular section of ocean with a coarse grid to see if they could spot anything. Google used this data to provide more accurate information along those lines, but reverted to the low resolution information they have for the space between the lines.

      Since a grid search is a grid, that would explain the 90 degree angles.

      --
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    21. Re:The Sun? by Teilo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, I was just going to say. That "anomaly" is around 126 miles, corner-to-corner, and the "streets" are something like 1.5 miles wide.

      I'm not sure what to call it, and suspect that it is actually just a processing glitch, but in any case, it's not exactly "city" material.

      --
      Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
    22. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's probably an artifact of the seafloor mapping process. If not... what's this? ->

      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=74.555037,38.71582&spn=5.620995,30.454102&z=5

    23. Re:The Sun? by johncadengo · · Score: 1

      Well, after this whole debacle I would've chosen the New York Post for this joke instead.

      --
      My page.
    24. Re:The Sun? by QRDeNameland · · Score: 1

      Now if I can just find Pee Wee Herman's face on Mars...

      I haven't seen Pee Wee Herman, but there are quite a few spots that look like Edward James Olmos' face.

      --
      Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
    25. Re:The Sun? by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      On the contrary, the size is PROOF we have found Atlantis!

      Read the exlusive interview with Plato in TFA, he clearly states he got the location from the Egyptians. This photo gives an indication of the size of Egyptian condo's one would expect to find in Atlantis. In fact the combined weight of that many Egypitian condo's is the very reason Atlantis sunk into the ocean!

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    26. Re:The Sun? by Lazyrust · · Score: 1

      No, but I have seen Bat Boy on the cover numerous times!

    27. Re:The Sun? by kylben · · Score: 1

      If you scroll toward the right (or east), you can see other grid patterns, although not as striking.

      Those are the suburbs within the Greater Atlantis Metropolitan Area: East Atlantis, Canary Heights, Waterville, and Pacific Vista. If you look closely at the picture, I think I see some broken faux Spanish tile and and old Yard Sale sign thats probably weeks old by now so don't bother stopping. I bet the whole "city disappearing into the ocean and civilization being relegated to the dim mythology of ancient history" thing had something to do with sub-prime mortgages.

      --
      Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
    28. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where's the street view guy?

      They tried to drive their Google trucks there, but for some reason the engines flooded.

      They should have used the Web 2.0 engines with social-networking overdrive.

    29. Re:The Sun? by capnkr · · Score: 1

      It is the "data gathering process". The lines are what has *actually* been mapped, the tracks of the ships who pinged the bottom - not just extrapolation of what might be down there (as most of it is).

      I believe in is in this TED talk that Robert Ballard says basically this same thing. We have actually only mapped a very, very small percentage of the ocean floor, and explored even less than that. A great talk, interesting and informative - well worth the time to watch it.

      --
      "...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
    30. Re:The Sun? by Ian+Alexander · · Score: 1

      According to the article Google says it's an artifact of the sonar process used to collect the data on the seafloor: apparently they're the path the boats took when imaging the area.

    31. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Depends on what kinda city, human.

        Oh, BTW: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

    32. Re:The Sun? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude, Cthulhu was one huge creature. You need really wide streets for Cthulhumobiles.

    33. Re:The Sun? by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      The feature is also in water a mile deep, lol.

    34. Re:The Sun? by RodgerDodger · · Score: 1

      At about 100 miles by 80 miles, it's a little big for a city where people walk as their primary transport (about 12% bigger than New York).

      So - definitive proof that Atlanteans had hovercrafts.

      --
      "Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
    35. Re:The Sun? by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      The more important issue is, it is just a wee bit too deep. For it to have sunk so deep, would have required some massive tectonic forces and generated massive tidal waves, of the mass extinction variety, just wee bit unrealistic.

      The best model I like for Atlantis is as an ice age civilisation. A timber based coastal civilisation spread around the periphery of the Atlantic ocean, mainly focused at river mouths, so evidence for them would be not deeper than 150 metres. So rising sea levels destroyed their civilisation and moving inland would have resulted in violet clashes with inland savages who also would have been suffering from the enormous floods from melting miles deep ice caps.

      The catch with finding evidence of their existence, the transition of the structures through the surf zone of rising seas, from above water to below water, the waves pounding any evidence into oblivion. Possible their docks and temples might have been crafted from stone and possibly have survived, just buried beneath 10,000 years of silt.

      It is a strange thing, but you must always remember we are at the high water mark and over the last couple of million years, the planet spends most of it's time with the seas more than a 120 metres shallower and shore line quite a few kilometres further out than the current shore line. So to look for Atlantis, first you have to find the buried river mouths, establish a grid and start analysing thousands of bore logs to see what you can find, perhaps sub-sea floor underwater sonar might help you find larger stone structures, if they are there.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    36. Re:The Sun? by WillKemp · · Score: 1

      Yeah, dead right. It's pretty much guaranteed that there were ice age settlements out below what's now the surface of the Atlantic.

      The same goes for the North Sea, of course, which was almost entirely dry land during the last ice age - and almost certainly had settlements of some sort before the water levels rose. That seems likely to be the original homeland of the Saxons - who ended up being evenly distributed on both sides when the water level rose.

    37. Re:The Sun? by WillKemp · · Score: 1

      Chances are the ships that mapped those lines were looking for Atlantis - and that's why the lines appear where Atlantis was fabled to be. If they were, the search itself actually created what they were looking for!

    38. Re:The Sun? by Lazyrust · · Score: 1

      We could only lobby a part of Congress if we did that. Just the Leftists.

    39. Re:The Sun? by dangitman · · Score: 1

      I know the problem. Are you obtuse or acute? Make up your fucking mind!!!

      --
      ... and then they built the supercollider.
    40. Re:The Sun? by elrous0 · · Score: 1

      So say we all.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    41. Re:The Sun? by ArsonSmith · · Score: 1

      Especially if we were to try study the effects of right angles on global climate change. We could make millions of the silly lefties.

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  3. Things that make you think by Hordeking · · Score: 1

    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 on Mars!

    --
    Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
    1. Re:Things that make you think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Besides, isn't Atlantis supposed to have been a Ring City around a central harbour and volcano? Why would it have what looks like a modern city grid layout?

    2. Re:Things that make you think by Smidge207 · · Score: 1, Informative

      isn't Atlantis supposed to have been a Ring City around a central harbour and volcano?

      No, that was Santorini (Thera).

      =Smidge=

      --
      Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
    3. Re:Things that make you think by Hordeking · · Score: 1

      Besides, isn't Atlantis supposed to have been a Ring City around a central harbour and volcano? Why would it have what looks like a modern city grid layout?

      I'm not an expert (or lawyer, but I play one on TV), but an ancient city the size of Wales is probably pretty hard to sink.

      Plato was writing based on third-hand descriptions, so we can't really verify the veracity of his statements.

      --
      Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
    4. Re:Things that make you think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is an interesting anomaly that deserves a closer look. It doesn't matter if it's a glitch in the imagining software, a natural undersea formation, or a submerged man-made structure, it still deserves to be analyzed.

      As to all the rumors and stories about Atlantis, they are a bunch of B.S. .
      The ONLY record we have about Atlantis is the one Plato made, and that was said to be a retelling of something from an obelisk that still hasn't been found.
      Additionally, all that advanced civilization nonsense, well, they were advanced - by the reckoning of a bronze age (or earlier) society...

    5. Re:Things that make you think by Mr.+Firewall · · Score: 1

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

      Nah. The place is run by Cthulhu.

      --
      In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
    6. Re:Things that make you think by Jesus_666 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
    7. Re:Things that make you think by Goaway · · Score: 1

      It's not an anomaly and not really interesting. It's just sonar tracks. You can find them all over the map if you just zoom in and scroll around.

    8. Re:Things that make you think by Goaway · · Score: 1

      There's no need to speculate what it will turns out to be, because it's well known what it is: Tracks from sonar runs by ships. You can see them all over the map.

    9. Re:Things that make you think by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most likely the description was based on the famous circular harbor of Carthage.

      There's not the slightest reason to suppose Atlantis actually existed. The speakers in Plato's dramatic dialogs said whatever he wanted them to say in order to make some point. You should read his description of Atlantis to see what kind of point he was trying to make, not to find lost cities.

      Even in his fiction, the indirection was marvelous. I don't feel like dragging the book out, but IIRC it went something like:

      Plato wrote a (fictious) story about a conversation in which a guy tells about a drinking party he once attended, and a guy at that (doubly fictitious) drinking party told a (triply fictitious) story he had heard from an old man many years before...

      It's insane to see people trying so hard to find something with that kind of pedigree.

      Of course, the "find" it every couple of years, so maybe I'm too cynical.

  4. The article explains it by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.....

    --
    Qxe4
    1. Re:The article explains it by nizo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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"

    2. Re:The article explains it by nizo · · Score: 1

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

    3. Re:The article explains it by Thelasko · · Score: 3, 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. 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.

      --
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    4. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That, and /.'s utter lack of decent Unicode support.

    5. Re:The article explains it by PitaBred · · Score: 1

      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.

    6. Re:The article explains it by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:The article explains it by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    8. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

      That only explains the question of what the lines are. It doesn't explain the question of why only in that particular area, in a grid. You can see the occasional 'sonar line' in other places, but not in a grid. I think the most likely reason is somebody was looking for something in particular in this area.

    9. Re:The article explains it by CAIMLAS · · Score: 4, Funny

      C'mon man. Where's your critical thinking? The answer is obvious. The Atlantians were obviously GIANTS.

      --
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    10. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK, so where are all the other examples of lines like this on the ocean floor? This one particular bit of ocean was specially mapped this way, but nowhere else?

    11. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what I thought at first glance, but it looks like the trenches that have been dug out are over 2 miles wide... Is that due to the false shadowing logic?

    12. Re:The article explains it by ubergeek2009 · · Score: 1

      Im not saying Atlantis existed, but if we assume what we are looking at is Atlantis then those lines could have been canals used for transportation. They were supposed to be really advanced, so wouldn't a sophisticated water based transportation system fit the bill of really advanced for their time. I really don't think it is. If somehow a city dropped by a minimum of 3.5 miles then I think the layout of the structures would be changed tremendously.

    13. Re:The article explains it by jaavaaguru · · Score: 1

      That's no Atlantis. It's the Aliens and Predators we need to be watching for it we get much closer!

    14. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      C'mon man. Where's your critical thinking? The answer is obvious. The Atlantians were obviously GIANTS.

      They would have to be giants if they were 50 miles tall

    15. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      According to this, that particular location for "Atlantis" is pretty much right on the spot. There should be more interesting goodies, provided there is any truth to it and higher resolution scans become available.

      I always found the myth of Atlantis sort of peculiar though, why would an entire ocean be named after it? Also native peoples from South or Central America have similar sounding stories of a lost civilization with a remarkably similar sounding name. And this lore supposedly dates before the arrival of Spanish and Portugese influence in that part of the world. Perhaps there's something to it? It wasn't just the Mediterranean peoples talking of it, was it?

      Now just out of curiosity, I looked at some data of the square mile area of some supposed supervolcano sites... If you made an island covering the same area as the Yellowstone supervolcano, it would be a pretty good sized one. But now imagine that instead of blowing up, a caldera of that type somehow went cold and collapsed in upon itself. But I'm not a geologist, so no idea how plausible that could be.

    16. Re:The article explains it by adolf · · Score: 1

      Cthulhu. 'Nuff said.

    17. Re:The article explains it by mgblst · · Score: 1

      It is more likely that they were smaller than we are now, since the Universe has expanded quite a lot in the intervening years.

    18. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, I'm pretty sure they're called the Braves. The San Franciscans are the Giants.

    19. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      C'mon man. Where's your critical thinking? The answer is obvious. The Atlantians were obviously GIANTS.

      Maybe Goliath wasn't such a bad guy after all. He was just surly because his flood insurance wasn't paid up..

    20. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, I worked a tiny bit with Smith and Sandwell on the model and my organization worked with Google on this as well. What you are looking at is ship tracks where the depth was (probably incorrectly) measured as deeper than the model. What you have to realize is that a lot of the data comes from "ships of opportunity" that have old or outmoded equipment. Next question, were they using "true" depth (i.e. corrected for sound velocity) or were they using "nominal" depth (using a set sound speed of 4800 ft/sec or 1500 m/sec - no these aren't equal, another source of error).

    21. Re:The article explains it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is 7519 square miles, I just measured the anomaly.

    22. Re:The article explains it by blg42 · · Score: 1

      Hmmm, maybe Goliath wasn't really mean after all. He was just surely because his flood insurance wasn't paid up!

  5. Even if... how BIG it should be? by fasuin · · Score: 0

    Come on, that's about the size of half Europe!

    1. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by nycguy · · Score: 1

      No it's not. It's about 100 miles by 100 miles, if you check the scale. Still way too big to have been a city, but not even half the size of Portugal must less half the size of Europe.

    2. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by butalearner · · Score: 1

      I am getting about 90x60 mi or 150x100 km. You could fit the entire greater Phoenix area in there with room to spare in the corners.

      My question is, if those are sonar artifacts, why aren't they seen anywhere else near there? Why that nearly perfect rectangle (actually, that would be really freaky if the actual aspect ratio were the golden ratio).

    3. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

      Parent is correct. Who knows more about the size of Europe than a German?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by Aqualung812 · · Score: 1
      Zoom out and look to the east, there are similar lines, just not as many or as dense.

      It just looks like a ship was using side-scanning sonar in this area, trying to find something.

      --
      Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
    5. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They ARE seen near there! Scroll to the right and you start to see some other artifacts.

    6. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Europe? Don't you mean "Greater Germany"?

    7. Re:Even if... how BIG it should be? by jalefkowit · · Score: 0, Troll

      Who knows more about the size of Russia than a German?

      There, fixed that for you!

  6. Canals anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is anyone besides me seeing the parallel with the supposed canals on Mars?

  7. You mean where Atlantis used to be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Everybody knows it's in the Pegasus galaxy now.

    1. Re:You mean where Atlantis used to be... by m1ndrape · · Score: 0, Informative

      actually it's in Sans Fransisco Bay.

      --
      Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
      Suspected Terrorist
    2. Re:You mean where Atlantis used to be... by Sique · · Score: 1

      Sans Francisco bay? The Bay Without Francisco?

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  8. I wish by nnnich · · Score: 1

    I'm personally longing to find some billionair-head gullable enough to fund an expedition and pay me for months to cruise the oceans.

    the dialogue I imagine would run as follows:
    "hey guy, I found amelia earheart on mapquest"
    "here's ten million dollars and a barge"
    "sweet"

    --
    she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan
    1. Re:I wish by bruceslog · · Score: 1

      I'm personally longing to find some billionair-head gullable enough to fund an expedition and pay me for months to cruise the oceans. the dialogue I imagine would run as follows: "hey guy, I found amelia earheart on mapquest" "here's ten million dollars and a barge" "sweet"

      That thought crossed my mind as well.
      It wouldn't take much for somebody to post such an article in preparation of asking for funding to go check it out personally. The requirements would be a Research ship with hot tubs and an open bar, scuba suits, and a neat little mini sub for those deep, hard to reach places.

      This one wasn't me though.
      Too cold for my tastes.
      If I were to ask for funds to swim around and look for artifacts, I'd want to be funded to research the Caribbean for a long term, 15 year study.
      The water there is so much warmer :)

      --
      If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
  9. oops by magsol · · Score: 1

    Someone might want to inform Joseph Mallozzi of this finding.

    --
    "I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
    1. Re:oops by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see what you did there.

  10. idleispants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was going to tag this idleispants until I realized it isn't an idle story, maybe slashdotispants is the right tag. Is there some site that captures what used good about slashdot?

    1. Re:idleispants by Red+Flayer · · Score: 1

      I was going to tag this idleispants until I realized it isn't an idle story, maybe slashdotispants is the right tag. Is there some site that captures what used good about slashdot?

      It's Friday.

      Lighten up, Nancy.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  11. Didn't the allready find Atlantis... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...off the coast of Spain, or something, quite some time ago?

    1. Re:Didn't the allready find Atlantis... by mcvos · · Score: 1

      They got around, those Atlanteans.

  12. This is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...why I get my news from The Onion, America's Finest News Source!

  13. Government-Sponsored Lies! by rsmith-mac · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    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.

    1. Re:Government-Sponsored Lies! by martas · · Score: 1

      Actually, you're wrong. Those marks were left from the time when the city was actually parked on the bottom of the Atlantic, before going back to the Pegasus. So the TV is right, but to is Google Maps.

      *sigh* Good thing I came up with that theory. Otherwise I'd have to think that one of my two Gods had betrayed me...

    2. Re:Government-Sponsored Lies! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't believe that it took this long for someone to mention this. Seriously, this was my first thought.

  14. Proof that it's real by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Funny

    Google just got a DMCA takedown notice from Aquaman.

    1. Re:Proof that it's real by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      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=

    2. Re:Proof that it's real by Kenshin · · Score: 1

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

      --

      Does it make you happy you're so strange?

    3. Re:Proof that it's real by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You must be new here... he'd obviously use sharks with frigging lasers

  15. Analysuis done about 10 years by geekoid · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    1. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by brian0918 · · Score: 1

      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!

    2. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by Anna+Merikin · · Score: 4, 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!

    3. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by againjj · · Score: 1

      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? It even speaks of Wells. Though the current belief is that he was off by over 5 million years....

    4. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by JayBees · · Score: 1

      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?

    5. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by Gen-GNU · · Score: 1

      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 Atlantis stuff much, but there has been at least some scientific research along the lines of what H.G. Wells was making up; Whether that theory has been confirmed or tossed out I really have no idea, but I wouldn't say that "scientific theories" don't cover this.

    6. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by Gen-GNU · · Score: 1

      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.

    7. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by FailedTheTuringTest · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by dAzED1 · · Score: 1

      the area was below sea level, which means there was likely plenty of streams, rivers, etc. A sea is dangerous; a river, much less so.

    9. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by Petrushka · · Score: 1

      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.

      (1) You indicate that Wells' story is set ten thousand years ago. Iron smelting wasn't a widespread technology around the Mediterranean until ca. 1300-1000 BCE.

      (2) Finds of iron around the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea and up major rivers such as the Danube are much more easily explained by trade than by an unsubstantiated hypothesis about sea level 7000 years earlier. It is independently known that sea- and river-trade were extremely extensive in the latter half of the Bronze Age. (See e.g. several of the maps reproduced in this lecture by the former excavator of Troy, esp. figures 46-51.) Iron was traded by sea and river even for a few centuries before smelting became really widespread.

      (3) It is hard to tell what neighbours you are referring to who only had bronze. If the neighbours you refer to dwelled at a distance from major sea/river trade routes, it wouldn't exactly be surprising if they didn't have access to a heavily traded technology. Lack of trade leads to lack of iron, not the other way round.

    10. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by Anna+Merikin · · Score: 1

      I have no opinion personally on this subject. I read Wells' (notice I corrected the spelling -- thankq!) some time ago and his speculation stayed with me. The idea behind the importance of gold and steel is not so much that they could not have developed independently -- they could -- it is they required ever-hotter fires, meaning the technology to refine gold and produce steel, immensely stronger than iron, from tiny amounts of added ash and sand required fires hotter than could be produced at the time by less-advanced cultures. I don't remember the source, but this line of thinking is common among natural science devotees. Although it is true that seas and rivers provided trading opportunities, the *technology* to produce armor-strength steel and gold would have been held closely secret, meaning though the use of the metals might be widespread, their production was more centralized.

      I guess an analogy would be with nuclear weapons; the USA is not likely to show its neighbors (Canada and Mexico) how to make them. Those that do have them developed them separately. Similarly, Damascus-steel blades are very much like Japanese traditional sword blades, and they were made the same way. This does not indicate it was the result of trade between the two countries at the time of development.

      Perhaps Wells was thinking that Atlantis had militarily conquered the surrounding areas and that allowed the technologies to spread.

      Sounds kinda outlandish to me, but then so does the article in the Sun.

      I'm sorry no one *got* the last line; I intended several double meanings there, but it should be understood as an American understanding London's "Sun" newspaper to be less believable than Fox News.

      And what about those undersea-cave paintings?

    11. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by Archimonde · · Score: 1

      I was on some symposium of archeology and I find out the commonly held fact that even in the ancient roman times, the price from transferring same amount of goods from two major dalmatian (croatia now) cities by road (that is something like 150km/93.2056788 miles to you americans;) was the same as transferring the same amount of goods from Gibraltar to Turkey. That is a staggering difference in price.

      As the sea was the main trade route it is not a small wonder why the majority of shipwrecks in the adriatic are from those times. And there were many pirates at the time as well;)

      --
      Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
    12. Re:Analysuis done about 10 years by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      And what about those undersea-cave paintings?

      What is the problem with them?

      It's pretty uncontroversial (i.e., you have to go out to the extremes where young-earth creationist lunatics cross-breed with gas-guzzlers to find claims of controversy, which is more due to some people's religious delusions than there actually being a controversy) that during the ice-age, global sea levels were relatively low for the good and sufficient reason that the ice which was on land used to be water that was in the ocean basins.
      BTW, I take it that you're referring to La Grotte Cosquer. As the link image indicates, the paintings themselves are above sea-level (they'd have been pretty unlikely to survive and remain recognisable if they were below sea-level!) ; it's the cave entrance which is below sea-level. As my fellow troglodytes (spelunkers, if you're a transpozzian) say, "the cave imposes it's own entrance restrictions". While the surveying isn't readily available (I bet I could get hold of a survey, through cave-diving contacts, but I'd have to use my influence as a well-established caver, as an ex-cave diver, and as a professional geologist with a long-standing interest in archaeology. But as a responsible geologist, I won't even seek the data ; what I don't have, I can't leak.), I bet that there is an upper entrance. Hydrologically, there's pretty-much got to be an upper entrance - though it could well be presently plugged with debris, or collapsed and hydrologically inactive. While finding such an entrance has obvious interest, I'd be very hard put to justify even looking such an entrance because of the risk of damage to the paintings if a non-diving entrance were discovered.

      Oh dear, I found more survey data than I really wanted. That was depressingly easy.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  16. Where else is this glitch? by eagee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    '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?

    1. Re:Where else is this glitch? by avg_joe_01 · · Score: 1

      I was kinda thinking the same thing, though not to conspiracy theory proportions, of course. There are things that are "road-like" all over the map though, so maybe those are related errors?

    2. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Absolutely, just go up a bit and look at the coast right off of Ireland. There is an absolutely massive bit, pretty square.

      Or go further up, just past Greenland, in the lighter Continental Shelf region just above Finland, and there are weird lines, like someone was scrawling giant runes.

      Found those in just a few minutes of looking. I've little doubt it is exactly what Google says it is. They have the data.

      Howard

    3. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Kamokazi · · Score: 1

      If you look to the east a bit, there are some more similar markings, though not as many.

      --
      As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
    4. Re:Where else is this glitch? by kprsa · · Score: 1

      Yep, there are some. See, e.g.: 31 15'15.53N 24 15'30.53W. It may be also depth related, however... I would like to cross the area once more with the sonar boat once again... Diagonally. Just in case. ;-)

    5. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Informative

      '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 - just to the east of the "original site."

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    6. Re:Where else is this glitch? by kprsa · · Score: 1

      Sorry, that was: 31 13' N and 19 29' W...

    7. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Marc_Hawke · · Score: 2, 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.

      --
      --Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
    8. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right, those are obviously the suburbs of the Greater Atlantis Metro Region.

    9. Re:Where else is this glitch? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Ah. It is a nice little search pattern, isn't it? Good observation!

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    10. Re:Where else is this glitch? by RegularFry · · Score: 1

      My guess is that it's part of a geological survey. The depth is boring, but it's on the edge of the area of effect of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There's probably some interesting stuff going on under the top-most layer of "bottom".

      --
      Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
    11. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Flaw in the sonar system? Not really. It's sort of the other way around.

      The global dataset is derived from satellite radar topography of the sea surface, the classic example being the work of Smith and Sandwill (1997). Properly processed, the topography of the sea surface correlates well with the underlying bathymetry. It's a good dataset, and comprehensive, but it is based on a model relationship between the sea surface and the ocean depth. It isn't perfect. Thus, ship-based soundings are still used as "ground truth" and are integrated with the global satellite bathymetry. Inevitably, the readings are slightly different, and, unfortunately, there are only a few places in the world where ship bathymetry is dense enough to completely replace the satellite bathymetry (e.g., areas of swath bathymetry). When the two datasets are merged together and gridded you end up with this kind of artifact, with the sonar-derived values slightly different. Unless you filter carefully you will see lines wherever the ship drove. This is why if you look around you'll also see tracks mysteriously converge on such ports as Bermuda and Hawaii.

      So, if there's a flaw, it's more likely in the satellite-derived bathymetry and the model used for it, although sometimes the ship bathymetry can be whacked out too.

      More details at:

      Smith and Sandwell 1997 summary

      ETOPO1 topography/bathymetry -- I think this is the dataset Google Earth is now using

      Global Topography

      The first one has a figure with a plot of the ship tracks.

      You'd have to be pretty unfamiliar with the way this sort of data is collected in order to suspect it had anything to do with Atlantis.

    12. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here's more. It's larger than the UK!!!

      I for one welcome our new undersea overlords.

    13. Re:Where else is this glitch? by dogzilla · · Score: 1

      '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?

      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=-71.635993,-152.62207&spn=4.467196,16.896973&z=6

      Took about 5 minutes of looking around.

      --
      The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
    14. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      500 square miles is tight?

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    15. Re:Where else is this glitch? by dogzilla · · Score: 1
      --
      The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
    16. Re:Where else is this glitch? by Exawatt · · Score: 1

      Zoomed out far, but obviously not natural. Don't know whether man-made or error-made :P.
      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=53.826597,-13.73291&spn=7.564472,22.675781&z=6

      Here's something off the coast of Virginia. Looks like it could very possibly be a "glitch." Or just the method of mapping.
      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=37.453057,-70.337219&spn=1.271132,2.834473&z=9

    17. Re:Where else is this glitch? by purpleque · · Score: 1

      just look north of russia for similar lines.

  17. The real 'atlantis' by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:The real 'atlantis' by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:The real 'atlantis' by tzot · · Score: 3, Informative

      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 faulty transcription and nobody bothered to spot the error?

      --
      I speak England very best
    3. Re:The real 'atlantis' by mschuyler · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
    4. Re:The real 'atlantis' by SoapBox17 · · Score: 1

      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.

    5. Re:The real 'atlantis' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep. You can make any story be true if you change it around enough.

    6. Re:The real 'atlantis' by Petrushka · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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 know of no instances whatsoever of a situation where it can be shown that a historically accurate number has been multiplied by a particular factor, whether 10 or 100 or anything else.

      In other words, unless you can actually demonstrate otherwise, I suspect you're just generalising from your own familiarity with Arabic numerals. I should be interested to be corrected.

    7. Re:The real 'atlantis' by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      I don't think the ancient Greeks had licensed those particular fonts.

  18. The Minoan Hypothesis by spun · · 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.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    1. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by gnick · · Score: 3, Informative

      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 seems to back it up.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    2. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Minoan culture was NOT destroyed by the eruption of Santorini. The Minoan-like Cycladic civilization (which was also influenced by Mycenaean culture) which lives on the islands between mainland Greece and Crete almost completely disappeared, but Minoan "Palace" culture continued to thrive for hundreds of years afterwards.The Minoans of 2000 BC were at the beginning of a very lengthy gradual process of centralization and growth that would eventually result in the massive palace structures.

      This is another perfect example of how a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    3. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by mcvos · · Score: 1

      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.

    4. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Creepy · · Score: 1

      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 Spartel, but that island sank much earlier than suggested (though it is in the right place).

      Then again, the Canary Islands and Azores were suggested as possible locations and those are a bit far out, as well. For all we know, tectonic shifts may have pushed it around, as well.

    5. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by White+Flame · · Score: 1

      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

    6. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Jorophose · · Score: 1

      I always thought it was old Mexico City, actually.

      It might be a bit too far for ancient Greeks, but wasn't it once a city with rings of water, and an advanced enough people, too? Or maybe I missed something big in the description of Atlantis...

    7. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Sique · · Score: 1

      ... which in fact it is? It's the remainings of a large volcano, and the islands in the center are the newly formed volcanos Nea Kameni (the large one) and Palaia Kameni (the smaller one).

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    8. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Petrushka · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.)

    9. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by joe_frisch · · Score: 1

      The Minoan stuff on Crete and Santorini is cool. But, it was similar tech level to (and there is considerable evidence for communication with) New Kingdom Egypt of about the same time. The eruption of Thera (Modern Santorini) destroyed the Minoan cities on Santorini, but the cities on Crete were re-built and lasted another couple of hundred years according to carbon dating.

    10. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by scipero · · Score: 1

      The Minoans were indeed impressive, though the multi-tiered complexes that you describe were from around 1400, not 2000. And they weren't wiped out by Santorini. They did just fine until the Mycenaean Greeks sailed down around 1250 and conquered them. If Greeks thought the Minoans magical, their reaction seems to have been, "Cool, magic! Let's kill 'em and take it!"

    11. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 1

      (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.)

      I believe they said the same of Troy at one time.

      While I have no doubt that the legend of Atlantis as it has been perpetuated is fictitious, many times oral traditions of that sort are based in fact. Consider the possibility of a reasonably sophisticated civilization (which may or may not have been Minoan) being wiped out by a natural disaster, then taking the facts of the story as reported by survivors, and retelling the story for 1000 years. Certainly the result is embellished, but it could be based in historical fact. Or it could be entirely fictitious - but typically completely fictitious stories tend to be to support religious myths.

    12. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by WillKemp · · Score: 1

      [......] in my view Atlantis-hunting is silly and has no historical foundation whatsoever.

      I'm quite sure the myth of Atlantis has got a historical basis. There's not much doubt that there would have been settlements of some sort that disappeared beneath the ocean when water levels rose after the last ice age.

      As the stories of these places got passed down from generation to generation they probably grew and took on mystical proportions until they developed into the stories that are kicking around today.

    13. Re:The Minoan Hypothesis by Petrushka · · Score: 1

      I believe they said the same of Troy at one time.

      It seems to be a common move to portray Troy and Atlantis as though there's some kind of similarity between them but there really isn't. Troy:

      1. was inhabited continuously right up to 950 BCE, or about two centuries before writing reappeared in the Hellenic world. There is at least a chance that historical data can be transmitted orally for that long; for longer periods, say around half a millennium, you're lucky if even tiny snippets of context-free information get preserved, and then because they're context-free they're historically useless.
      2. was an integral part of pan-Hellenic culture, that is to say, every state in the Hellenic world had stories about the Trojan War as an important part of their cultural heritage. This doesn't lend historical credibility, but a widespread phenomenon does strongly suggest a common cause. This cause could have been a historical event, or it could have been a myth that just became really really popular. Either way, you're looking at some kind of basis in earlier culture, myth, or history.
      3. isn't nearly as historical as you think it is. There are numerous problems that make it nigh-impossible to interpret the myths as containing much that is historical. For example, (a) if we assign the mythical Trojan War to the archaeological layer Troy VIh, then where are the Hittites? (b) if we assign it to Troy VIi (a.k.a VIIa), why is Miletos on the Trojan side? (c) there are a host of problems with the Carians as well but I'm already going on too long. So, while Troy the place is a reality, it's hard to assign much historicity to anything else. Some specific geographic locations and some specific artefacts are pretty much the only things in Homer for which corroboration can be found in the archaeological record. Probably about half of the people working in the field would be less sceptical than I am, but they are generally pretty conspicuously silent about the above problems.

      By contrast, Atlantis:

      1. is reported by Plato to have ceased to exist ca. 9400 BCE. (No, you can't just divide Plato's figure of 9000 years by ten because you feel like it. That's called "making up evidence to fit the hypothesis".)
      2. is mentioned only in a story told by characters in two of Plato's dialogues. It is known from Plato's writings that he frequently made up stories to illustrate philosophical points. Atlantis is not in any sense part of the Hellenic cultural, mythical, or historical heritage.
      3. has pretty damning inconsistencies with reality as we know it. Apart from anything else, Plato also reports that there was a war between Athens and Atlantis. This is in spite of the facts that Athens (a) didn't become a significant settlement until the late Bronze Age (ca. 1400-1300 BCE); (b) didn't "synoecise" (become a city-state, as opposed to a settlement) until the Iron Age (probably during the period of massive population growth of the 9th and 8th centuries BCE); (c) unlike Troy (and numerous other locations around the "Mycenaean" and Hittite regions), Athens doesn't show significant archaeological evidence of violent attack prior to the Archaic Period.
  19. 9600 BC called... by JayTech · · Score: 3, Funny

    They want their city back.

    1. Re:9600 BC called... by darkmayo · · Score: 1

      THATS OVER 9000!!!

      --
      "I am a kernel in the linux army"
  20. Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. by JWSmythe · · Score: 3, 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. :)

    --
    Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    1. Re:Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just use the right transformation and a square becomes a circle

    2. Re:Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. by Scrameustache · · Score: 2, Funny

      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!

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    3. Re:Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. by Clandestine_Blaze · · Score: 1

      How's the weather in South Wales? :P

    4. Re:Ahhh, The Weekly World News reborn. by Scrameustache · · Score: 1

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

      How's the weather in South Wales? :P

      A wee bit eldritch...

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

  21. huh? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2, Funny

    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?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  22. Missing geek details by bokmann · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      31Â24'16.68"N

      24Â22'40.83"W

    1. Re:Missing geek details by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
    2. Re:Missing geek details by A.+B3ttik · · Score: 4, Funny

      Great, now I can set the coordinates into my TomTom and drive my sub there.

    3. Re:Missing geek details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=31.404633,+-24.378008&sll=31.405096,24.378018&sspn=0.00837,0.019312&g=31.404633,+24.378008&ie=UTF8&ll=31.44741,-24.378662&spn=2.141519,4.943848&t=h&z=8&iwloc=addr

    4. Re:Missing geek details by witherstaff · · Score: 1

      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

    5. Re:Missing geek details by Scrameustache · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    6. Re:Missing geek details by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 1

      Sooo, we're not even bothering with a hyperlink then? When the hell did Slashdot become a luddite heaven?

      And why the hell does FF spelcheker not recognize the word luddite?

      Man, you wouldn't know it was 2009 if it wasn't printed on the calendars!

      --
      Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
    7. Re:Missing geek details by jaavaaguru · · Score: 1

      What causes that? I see it a lot here. With quites, trademark symbols, etc.

    8. Re:Missing geek details by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 1

      Complete and total lack of unicode support.

    9. Re:Missing geek details by dodobh · · Score: 1

      Be careful while in that area. Remember the submarine collision from last week?

      --
      I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
    10. Re:Missing geek details by Scrameustache · · Score: 1

      Sooo, we're not even bothering with a hyperlink then?

      Hyperlinks are for the weak!

      We are slashdoters! We take raw data and we google it ourselves! By Crom!

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    11. Re:Missing geek details by Scrameustache · · Score: 1

      What causes that? I see it a lot here. With quites, trademark symbols, etc.

      Character encoding error. The input is in a different format than the output, they need some kind of algorithm to check the input and translate it to their output format.

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    12. Re:Missing geek details by arstchnca · · Score: 1

      Props, I was indeed looking for coordinates both on slashdot and in the bad article. Thanks.

      --
      -- arstchnca
      --
    13. Re:Missing geek details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I only read polar coordinates you insensitive clod!

  23. other interesting lines close by by kcornia · · Score: 0

    To the right and up a bit there's some additional lines on the sea floor that are a bit too straight to be chance. Very interesting and I see a lot of treasure hunting headed that way very quickly.

  24. More of these lines by Drakin020 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

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

    --
    The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
    1. Re:More of these lines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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

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

      You found their suburbs!

      You are the MAN! (a fair assumption on slashdot)

    2. Re:More of these lines by alanwall · · Score: 1

      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

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

      that was/is the jail
      they did not want it in town
      the first nimbys'

      --
      Amigian and proud of it!
    3. Re:More of these lines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Much larger and more pronounced lines:

      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=51.964577,-16.732178&spn=3.899541,8.76709&z=7

        It's clearly an artifact, and they could have picked a much better site to start rumours from...

    4. Re:More of these lines by rts008 · · Score: 1

      Sorry no HTML skills

      Feel free(you and anyone else here) to go to my journal entry and do what I do: copy/paste, and modify. The journal should have public permissions, so the link should work.

      I clicked on the 'comment #'[example: your comment I am replying to is the link labled:'(#26934865)' to the right of your UID and the date on your comment/reply header] and then 'view page source' to get this template, then modified it to make the template- just copy/paste into your comment, edit between the quote marks, and done.

      Hope this helps...it sure helped me out. (sometimes you may want to link to a URL that won't pass /.'s lameness filter- this is can be a workaround to that)

      --
      Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
    5. Re:More of these lines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      /me wants Google Street View

  25. MOD PARENT UP! by kprsa · · Score: 0, Redundant

    My thoughts exactly. :-)

  26. People, seriously. by schmidt349 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:People, seriously. by sesshomaru · · Score: 4, Funny

      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!

      --
      "MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
    2. Re:People, seriously. by master_p · · Score: 1

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

    3. Re:People, seriously. by spun · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    4. Re:People, seriously. by radtea · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      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)

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    5. Re:People, seriously. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because the myth is more fun.
      Seriously.
      What other reason do you need?

    6. Re:People, seriously. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

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

      What story writer doesn't combine and re-invent legends, lore, and meme to make new and more bold fiction?

      We know the Mediterranean has encroached on northern Africa and swallowed up cities of antiquity. We probably know there was trade between the Egyptians and the Toltecs. So, a little here, a little there, pretty soon you have a story. Whether Plato made it up or it was a common story of the time I doubt we'll ever know.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    7. Re:People, seriously. by schmidt349 · · Score: 2, 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?

    8. Re:People, seriously. by nine-times · · Score: 1

      Plato created the fiction of Atlantis to make a point in one of his dialogues.

      Yeah, I'm always tempted to interject when people start talking about Atlantis. There's some kind of misunderstanding that pops up now and then where people think that Plato wrote historical texts or something. Now you can get into some nuanced arguments about exactly how much reality is in Plato's dialogs, but if you don't know any better, it's best to think of them like plays. Maybe think of Plato's account of Socrates to be something like Shakespeare's account of Julius Caesar-- it might be based on some realities, but it's essentially a work of fiction.

      Now on top of that, the speakers in Platonic dialogs aren't necessarily any more honest than characters in Shakespeare's plays. Just because Socrates says something doesn't mean it's true. In fact, he's a little bit of a trickster, so the fact that he says it might just as well be taken as an indication that it's not true.

      So the most you can really infer from Plato referencing Atlantis is that it might have been a common myth at the time-- but even that assumes that he didn't just make it up off of the top of his head. However, even if it were a myth at the time, that still doesn't mean that there's any factual reality to the myth. Talking about Atlantis then might have been like talking about Krypton now.

    9. Re:People, seriously. by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      I don't think it was necessarily fiction, any more than Troy was fiction. Remember, the Iliad described the Trojan War, with all kinds of fantastic stuff like various Greek Gods being involved, etc. Most people thought it was just fiction, until someone finally located the ruins of Troy (or at least a city that fits the description).

      Of course, the ruined city isn't quite as grand as what was described in the Iliad (or in the movie Troy): it's a lot smaller. So, it appears that the Greeks had a thing for taking real things, and using a lot of "literary license".

      Now refer to spun's reply where he explains how Plato's description fits pretty well with Crete and the Minoan civilization. It's the same pattern: to the primitive proto-Greeks, the Minoans must have seemed pretty amazing, so their descriptions turned into myth. Similarly, the Trojans with their little walled town probably seemed pretty amazing, so their stories about it evolved into a gigantic walled city.

      So, there's nothing wrong with believing in Atlantis, especially if you believe it's just an extremely embellished description of one of the real civilizations at that time.

    10. Re:People, seriously. by schmidt349 · · Score: 4, 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.

    11. Re:People, seriously. by khallow · · Score: 1

      Incidentally, are there any good translations of this writing that you could recommend? I think it might make a good addition to my science fiction library.

    12. Re:People, seriously. by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      No, it's just the idea that to every myth, there's a grain of truth. As you said, there was a huge body of myth relating to Troy and its war. For centuries, people thought it was just that: myth. Now, we now there's good evidence for a real place called Troy, and we have ruins to show for it. Are the myths all true? Certainly not, especially all the silliness in the Iliad about the gods being involved. But the myths didn't come out of nowhere; they grew out of a true story about a real city. What the real story is, we may never know, but the fact remains that that particular myth came from something real.

      Now, granted, the supporting material for Atlantis is much smaller. So it may very well be Plato was talking about someplace fictional. But there's also a possibility that he was talking about a real place (but with incorrect or exaggerated details), and there's a possibility he was just talking about Crete as the other poster said.

      This reminds me a lot about the alien astronaut theory (since you brought up aliens building the Pyramids), which for some strange reason is widely derided whenever it's brought up. I think it's a good theory. It's not very scientific, but then again most historical stuff isn't very scientific, since science after all relies on evidence, and with a lot of historical stuff, there just isn't very much that's survived. Anyway, the alien astronaut theory (or hypothesis, or whatever you want to call it) is also based on the "for every myth, there's a grain of truth" idea. So, for various religions, there might be some historical thing that caused people to come up with these ideas of various gods and their exploits. If we're going to talk about something as fantastical as gods, why not entertain the idea that maybe they were like on Stargate, aliens with fancy animal-looking helmets on, designed to scare the primitive humans and subjugate them into slavery or turn them into hosts for their symbionts or whatever? The alternative is to either ignore them, or actually treat these myths as real, which seems pretty silly to me. Then again, for some strange reason, people seem to have no problem believing there really are a bunch of different gods running around, one with the head of an elephant and another with 6 arms, but suggest only half-seriously that perhaps aliens caused humans to come up with these beliefs and people act like you're crazy. Yet there's 1 billion people that really believe there's a god running around with an elephant-head, and no one questions their sanity. Why is that? And then there's another billion that believe some guy walked on water, another large group (in addition to the last group) that believes there's a god that talks to people in the form of a burning bush, of all things. These beliefs are all somehow sacrosanct, even though they're even more ridiculous than the idea of alien visitations to ancient people.

    13. Re:People, seriously. by Petrushka · · Score: 1

      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.

      I completely support the sentiment of your remarks, and agree with everything you say about Atlantis. But as for Troy: I'd be even a bit more sceptical. There are really only three specific things in the Iliad that can be independently shown to be a genuine reminiscence of the 11th century or earlier, and not of something later: (1) the boar's tusk helmet (Il. 10.261ff.); (2) Aias' body shield; (3) Nestor's two-handled cup (Il. 11.632ff.). Everything else could be a reminiscence of something more recent. All those Bronze Age sites in the Catalogue of Ships that no longer existed in 730 BCE? -- well, they didn't suddenly vanish in 1200; they were still inhabited for much of the Dark Age. Even Troy (perhaps especially Troy) -- Troy VIIb3 didn't come to an end until ca. 950 BCE.

      It's very very likely that there are many more things that do genuinely go back to the Bronze Age than just the three I mentioned; it's just that those are the only ones that can be corroborated as definitely Bronze-Age-only.

    14. Re:People, seriously. by Dirtside · · Score: 1

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

      O R'Lyeh?

      --
      "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
    15. Re:People, seriously. by Dirtside · · Score: 1

      Now I know how the people over in Egyptology feel when someone says the aliens helped build the Pyramids.

      Wait a minute... what do you mean, "the aliens"? ;)

      --
      "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
    16. Re:People, seriously. by Alsee · · Score: 1

      I can just picture 2000+ years from now people arguing over the location of the lost city of Metropolis.

      -

      --
      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
    17. Re:People, seriously. by ForgottenUser · · Score: 1

      even before the German Indiana Jones looked at TROY the whole world of Scientists Historians and book-sellers(the people who knows everything) tought it was just ' a story ' with no stones anywere so about Crete the NICE thing is that many criticized this german digger (he wasn't even an archeologist, but more like an historical sites destroyer) and this man going on fantasy gave us pieces of history (not just written, but found) the more we go on the more we find artifacts underwater, and underwater archeology is something we know maybe only since 50 years (while we had the Colosseum up there since 2 thousend years, how can i NOT see it ?) look around all the univerisities of the world going undersea everywere in the world are finding nice artifacts (from Peru to Australia to Japan to Mediterranean area) we know a lot (or nothing) but we dont know a lot of the civilizations who lived between 9.000 to 4.000 (megalith era, biblical tsunami, new civilizations) the world changed, and everything restarted ( if not from 0, by 1 ) university studies (wherever u wanna look at) says that between scotland and norway (where the sea-ground level is higher than in the middle of the ocean) long time ago it could have been full of settlements if the world ends today, we have a lot to remember (knowledge and stuff) if the world ends when it's just starting to getting civilized, is like burning not even a grown and old forest, but just a garden with little grass, what do you expect to find ?) (probably who gave the inputs to Greeks, Etruscians, people living in Ireland-England, whatever) but they do surely had someone who gave them knowledge (now we can think it was the CAVE-MAN or maybe someone better) once they tought Americas people was just born there, now its asians moving from alaska, now again also europeans have been there (11-9k years ago) thru the ice-sheet) (check DNA coincidences and related studies) there is so much to know that i wouldnt just laugh at a discovery ( or glitch ) we even laugh about a pacific islander that 9000 years ago sailed from New Zealand to Easter Island (WHOAH HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE, with just a palm tree and some leeves! no way !) (its not about aliens, its about natural disasters and normal human evolution ) i we think we know everything about us, we put limitation to our intelligence, but at that point we would just stay at the monkey level (wich also is developing intelligence-and knowledge if you follow also that kind of studies, thanks to the interactions with the humans)

    18. Re:People, seriously. by ForgottenUser · · Score: 1

      and one more thing, WHY MEGALITH (gigantic greek walls, Crete, Italy, Sardinia, Malta) to defend from who ? 4 hairy monkeys ? (so the Pyramids why so giant 4-5-6k years ago) water level rose up, many people living where now you have meters of water are gone (so are their cities) check also Alexandria, all the submerged artifacts of the Nile the looking like NORDIC MAN sculpture made by the INCAS in PERU (this doesnt mean ET, but something we have no evicences for a (or many) world cataclysm IF there is a WorldWide Tsunami (with eventually Vocalnoes explosions and terrible eartquakes) - its not about Mars-Attack, but natural disasters) Ice-Sheet meltdown and whole world changing (even the connection between russia and america, or america and europe (all by ice) can't we think a LOT in this whole thing has been lost-forgotten ? (im not saying what and how much, but in such a planet change, we could have lost so much) (just think of what made Dinosaurs disappear) * and with Dinosaurs now i think how medieval-English stories talked about Dragons (dragons today are fantasy, but if they built a Castle in the Yorkshire, and underground have found a 20 meters remain of a Dino, there you get the DRAGON tales (like in chinese culture) stories always have something true behind

    19. Re:People, seriously. by ForgottenUser · · Score: 1

      and again the last TSUNAMI caused 200.000 deaths (+-) if the Island of SRI LANKA was situated 1000 km more EAST i guess all the SRILANKEANS would be dead (ALL, with their language, artifacts, facts, and gossips) 200k deads in a relatively unhabitated AREA. consider this in regions like Tigri-Eufrate(with their own myths), in the mediterraneum, Egyptians, nile, europe, greeks and WHEN the world doesnt have 6 billions ppl like today thats a massive wipe out (today we have technologies to save our history, yesterday they had PAPER OR WORDS, paper gets burned or melted in wet, WORDS can last 100-200-500 years (and with time can also be modified by myth, old stories) + ignorance factor (non-worldwide language, many people unable to speak and explain all do you see the missing link ?

    20. Re:People, seriously. by ForgottenUser · · Score: 1

      and i want to end this serie of posts with : you cant explain Atlantis with 1 link to google map, and a laugh Atlantis probably wasn't even 1 place, but many places that sunk (and after such cataclysm, wanted or NOT wanted, you lose lives-knowledge-stories-history) if you look at Santorini, Crete, Etruscians, (all before Romans, Greeks, Egyptians) and you know how many wonderful things they made, you might think: what happened to who let those civs reach that point ? you may say: they grew up themselves and made themselves so wonderful (in Santorini ? a spit in the middle of the Aegean Sea?, in Crete only? - the greeks were still sheep breeders and invaders, the romans were not even an idea of civs.) cheers

    21. Re:People, seriously. by jwhitener · · Score: 1

      I really have no idea how you were modded +5 insightful. I suppose I can chalk that up to most people's history lessons only going as far back as the Greeks.

      "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?"

      This point is confusing. Which war, exactly, are you referring to? Are you referring to a time period in which the Athenians were Athenians (in which case, large city states existed)... or are you referring to a point in time in which they were perhaps pre-Athenians? As if, prior to the Greek Athenians, their ancestors fought a war?

      At any rate, I suppose that what you are getting at, is that prior to the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians, no civilizations existed? That is absurdly false. There is STRONG evidence of large city states all over Asia and Europe going back well beyond what most people are taught in history/pre-history courses.

      Check out Catal Huyuk as one example. 9,000 B.C, Turkey, population 10,000 http://www.smm.org/catal/introduction/

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

      There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.
      a) The Egyptians were extremely self-centered. Very little of their translated writings talk about external cultures. Some yes, but the vast majority no.
      b) The Egyptian priesthood kept most of their knowledge secret. What little was written down, was often, for lack of a better word, encrypted symbolically.
      c) There were no libraries, knowledge was orally transmitted or symbolically encoding. If you wished to learn it, you needed to become a priest. Knowledge was not stored in an accessible format. The single counter-example to this is the Libraries of Alexander, which were destroyed.

      "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...""

      Learn a bit about the world pre-Greek. Learning, civilization, and knowledge did not begin with the Greeks.

      here is one example of knowledge persisting through vast amounts of time:

      The single most common myth across all cultures is of a great deluge (and by common, I mean over 2,000 tales of a flood, all across the world). Good, solid, scientific evidence, is now emerging that several floods (most likely caused by comet impacts) occurred in the last 10,000 years or so.

      As today, past civilizations most likely lived on coastal encampments. Given that the most common myth in the world is of a flood (and therefore supposing that massive flooding really did occur), guess what probably happened to most of the civilized world? It was destroyed.

      I suspect that as our sonar/mapping/etc.. gets better, we will discover that civilized, modern man, has existed for a lot longer than we know believe.

      If you want to learn/read about some interesting discoveries of very old civilizations that are now under water, I would start by exploring archaeology in India. There have been some really great discoveries there lately.

    22. Re:People, seriously. by schmidt349 · · Score: 1

      > Check out Catal Huyuk as one example. 9,000 B.C, Turkey, population 10,000 http://www.smm.org/catal/introduction/

      Catal Huyuk is generally thought to be one of the first human settlements in Anatolia. Also, real archaeologists date its habitation no earlier than 6500 BCE, and give its population as probably no more than 6,000 (by the way, your "for children" website agrees with me). So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars or sinking any continents off the coast of Spain. Oh, did they have ships?

      Humans didn't practice agriculture (meaning no towns, no villages, no nothing) until ca. 12,000 BCE, and they didn't live in communities with complex economies involving more than grain, livestock, and women until perhaps 7,000 BCE. Period.

      > There are probably a dozen ways to answer this, but I'll just mention a few.

      Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard.

      I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back thousands of years before the First Dynasty. In the West, it was the Greeks and Romans who built free-access libraries and made knowledge collaborative. You might almost think of it as the first open-source movement. As a result we have at least some idea of most of the major events in the Mediterranean starting from about 500 BCE down to the present day.

      One last point: the Library of Alexandria contained mostly Greek books. It was kept by Greek scholars, of whom the most famous are Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius (author of the Argonautica) and Zenodotus (one of the first editors of the Iliad). By its time Egypt was run by Macedonian kings using Greek administrators and soldiers.

      > floods, etc.

      Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect the two using more than just correlation/causation, for instance some unusual feature of the disaster that is also mentioned in *all* of the ancient sources. If you made these claims in a paper it would never be published and even if it were it would destroy your academic reputation. We demand more proof than what your imagination can provide.

      You can start fuming about how evil academics are now.

    23. Re:People, seriously. by jwhitener · · Score: 1

      >"So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars"

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare

      There is evidence of wars 7,000 years ago. And I am fully aware that Catal is land-locked:) I was attempting to show that large cities did in fact exist pre-greek, pre-egyptian, and more likely than not, we are probably missing quite a few large cities due to the rise in the ocean over time.

      >"Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any >Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard."

      Huh? Plato referred to a "source", not himself. Most likely, his source, was traders bringing mythology up from Egypt. People that.. you know, most probably spoke several languages. Your sentence,
      >"It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."

      That is what I was explaining: its not mentioned in any archives (if you can call them that) in Egypt because of the reasons I previously listed (in a nutshell, secrecy and self-centered culture).

      >"I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of >nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back >thousands of years before the First Dynasty.

      I did no such thing. I just said that they were secretive and symbolic, and that could be a reason why there is no records in Egypt of Plato's Atlantis. It is also just as likely that a trader or merchant that told Plato the story, said "the egyptians told me this story" and he was wrong about its origin.

      >"Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric >period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect >the two using more than just correlation/causation,"

      Someone already is doing that, and is making great headway right now. I just watched a history channel show on it. He looked at all the flood myths, plotted their density and relative levels of how bad the flood was in their eyes, and pinpointed a likely comet impact area off the coast of Madagascar. In addition, there were comet/crater impact scientists (forgot their names, google around, you'll find them) how have been looking at ocean sea floor cores from the area and discovered fairly good evidence for an impact.

      http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

      Lots of similar myths, and hard physical evidence. Like most of science, it is 100% yet (or ever:), but getting there. At any rate, all I wanted to show was an example of most likely real knowledge persisting through vasts amounts of time.

      >"You can start fuming about how evil academics are now."

      My degree is in Anthropology, and I'm not a 'nutty atlantis believer' if that is what you think. I just have an interest in Near Eastern pre-history.

  27. NAH... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

    That's New Orleans.

  28. Wish I had mod points for you by djconrad · · Score: 1

    I wish I had mod points for you. Considering the subsequent Mycenaean collapse, it's amazing any memory of the Minoans made it to Plato.

    1. Re:Wish I had mod points for you by scipero · · Score: 1

      > ...it's amazing any memory of the Minoans made it to Plato.

      None did. The myth of Atlantis is unrelated to the Minoans, and the legends of Theseus that persist in classical Greece were generated by later Greeks viewing Minoan ruins, not from an oral memory of their living culture.

      Those who search for Atlantis based on Plato's didactic myth-making should compare the myth of Er at the end of the Republic. It's no more or less real than the two myths of Atlantis, but no one would ever claim that it's historical.

    2. Re:Wish I had mod points for you by djconrad · · Score: 1

      I know historicizing myth isn't popular, considering that Homer does preserve details of Mycenaean life he couldn't possibly have known, and that Thucydides, in his Archeology, says that Minos created the first navy and that allowed states on the coast to flourish, rejecting out of hand the possibility that some memory of the Minoans survives seems rash. As for Plato's myths, you have to wonder to what extent he's inventing myths, and to what extent he's reporting myths. There's probably a philological method for sorting that out; I don't know it.

    3. Re:Wish I had mod points for you by scipero · · Score: 1

      > There's probably a philological method for sorting that out; I don't know it.

      I do. The bronze age survivals in the Iliad and Odyssey are metrical, and generally restricted to details like place names and personal epithets, the Catalog of Ships in Iliad 2 being the canonical example. Current scholarly consensus is that the society imagined in the Iliad and Odyssey is in large scale no more than 2 generations old. For a quick and well considered overview, see Raaflaub's chapter in the recent Cambridge companion.

      Thucydides knew even less about bronze age Crete than we do. A great historian, to be sure, but one best used as a source for the 8th century and later.

      As for Plato, there's little cause for wonder. He's making the myths up himself to serve his literary and philosophical purposes. It isn't underhanded; it was a natural part of his rhetorical technique and would have been well understood as such by his audience. Later readers with different expectations misconstrue the text. Regardless, Plato could not be reporting a myth from Egypt accurately because the Greeks knew very little about true Egyptian culture. Their depictions of Egypt are not reliable.

      Drop by the local Uni and ask your friendly neighborhood classicist or Mediterranean archaeologist. No one who understands the sources believes in Atlantis.

  29. experimental arifacts by fermion · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. Then of course there is carving of the face on mars. 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.

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  30. OMG i found another, even bigger city !! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OMG i found another, even bigger city !!

    http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=74.752746,39.880371&spn=5.105844,33.837891&z=6

  31. Same kind of stuff off the NC coast.. by ivan_w · · Score: 1

    Obviously something to do with how sonar mapping is done..

    (30 miles S-E of Cape Lookout).

    --Ivan

  32. Not to worry the truth is out there. by arthurpaliden · · Score: 0

    The mystery behind this picture like the Face on Mars will soon be resolved once more detail is acquired.

  33. Theseus and the Minotaur by spun · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some memories were preserved in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. To the primitive Greeks of the time, the palace of Knossos must have seemed like a maze. The Minoans also demanded tariffs on all shipping in the Mediterranean, and as we know, the ancient Greeks loved to dramatize trade disputes, thus the legend of having to send virgins to slake the hunger of the Minotaur.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    1. Re:Theseus and the Minotaur by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...the ancient Greeks loved to dramatize trade disputes, thus the legend of having to send virgins to slake the hunger of the Minotaur.

      Now that sounds like normal tabloid behaviour!

      Some things never change...

      *For those of you not from the UK, tabloid is a size of newspaper which is typically used for the more opinionated and sensationalist publications, such as The Sun.

    2. Re:Theseus and the Minotaur by jaavaaguru · · Score: 1

      They should have just pointed the Minotaur at slashdot.org

    3. Re:Theseus and the Minotaur by scipero · · Score: 1

      Tariffs? How does this stuff get started? We know nearly nothing of Minoan culture because there are no written records that we can read. Yes, they were clearly a seafaring people; yes, they felt secure enough that they didn't wall in their buildings. But trade tariffs? On *all* shipping in the Mediterannean? On what evidence can someone make this remarkable claim?

  34. Scale is Wrong by pz · · Score: 1

    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.

    --

    Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    1. Re:Scale is Wrong by wurble · · Score: 1

      While I agree ancient cities were not so large, modern cities can be larger.

      Los Angeles, California is 469 square miles (of land)
      Houston, Texas is 579 square miles (of land)

      Mind you these cities are defined by borders. From above, there are areas that appear to be extremely large contiguous cities which are actually numerous cities with rather arbitrary borders. Such areas are frequently referred to as megalopolises. Some example of megalopolises are BosWash and ChiPitt.

    2. Re:Scale is Wrong by David+Gould · · Score: 1

      GP said 100 miles square, not 100 square miles. "X miles square" means "a square X miles on a side". 100 miles square = 10,000 square miles. Houston being 579 square miles comes to ~24 miles square. That's a BIG difference. But true, a "megalopolis" region, or what back then would have been a city-state, can be much bigger than a single city.

      --
      David Gould
      main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
    3. Re:Scale is Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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.

      However, the lines might as well be the results of the irrigation system mentioned in the old scrolls of Atlantis. The stories are quite detailed and are usually interpreted as a landmass the size of Britain. There have even been almost convincing (for their time) theories about Atlantis actually being today's Sweden, Uppsala being the mentioned city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaus_Rudbeck).

      Point being that it's not the size that rules this Atlantis site out. The depth of roughly 6km seems like a bigger obstacle here. :)

    4. Re:Scale is Wrong by ForgottenUser · · Score: 1

      it doesnt have to be all houses it can be megalith defensive walls (like it was used a lot by the most old Mediterranean Civilizations) and walls can be long and long (we know later on in England by Romans 'Adrian's wall, to the chinese wall - older but still product of human kind, not ET = fantasy )

  35. Martian face all over again.... by macraig · · Score: 2, Informative

    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. :-)

    1. Re:Martian face all over again.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Come on - bad science is fun!
      At least we know how Atlantis sank now - those lines are roads on which anceint Atlantean SUVs drove on. Those SUVs caused global warming, which rose water levels sinking Atlantis.

    2. Re:Martian face all over again.... by josteos · · Score: 1

      HOLY POLISHED SHILLELAGH! You mean the Atlanteans had a second city by Ireland ?

      --
      Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
    3. Re:Martian face all over again.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, uh... why was this particular area so interesting? And how about a link to the same kind of formation near Ireland?

    4. Re:Martian face all over again.... by macraig · · Score: 1

      Trust me... you can find it! It's nearly as big as Ireland itself.

  36. Atlantean Leg Bones Found!! by SpiderCyde · · Score: 1

    They somehow resembled Patrick Duffy...

  37. Sorry Atlantis was ROUND by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Atlantis is described by Plato's writing as ROUND,
    a series of concentric circles... not square.
    It was located on a "smooth and rectangular plain", not that is -was- rectangular. It was surrounded by the 3 concentric circular canals...
    the idea of the circles was that it was build on the ancients idea of "As above, so below".. in other words, much like the sacred geometry, Atlantis was built in a model congruent to the universe or cosmos, which they thought was shaped as a series of concentric circles.

  38. Let's think critically here... by Khopesh · · Score: 3, 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 (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.

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    Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
    1. Re:Let's think critically here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "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. "

      Not necessarily. For example, during Ocean Drilling Program and the earlier Deep Sea Drilling Program, ships would survey in patterns that coincided with where they planned to drill holes into the sea floor. Generally speaking this yields some kind of geometric pattern, but not necessarily evenly-spaced.

      Here's an example of ship-track data in the central Atlantic.

      Get a clue, people: the grid-like patterns here and all over the world are ship tracks, as are the ones that radiate from major ports.

  39. Let me google that for you. by zizzo · · Score: 1

    Atlantis is right here.

  40. Edgar Cayce by hemp · · Score: 0

    Edgar Cayce predicted that Atlantis would be found:

    http://www.edgarcayce.org/ancient_mysteries/atlantis_mysteries.html/

    --
    Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
  41. Please Wear Before Reading by senorpoco · · Score: 1

    http://zapatopi.net/afdb/build.html Dare not venture into the shadow realm until you have donned one of these bad boys

  42. Right Angles? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    We all know the Ancients liked more snowflake inspired shapes.

    Oh, and and large ring shaped objects.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  43. The Sun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anyone who posts articles from the Sun should be taken out and shot.

  44. It beware the Geologist's hammer... by Drache+Kubisuro · · Score: 1

    I'm no geologist (yet) and I have only looked superficially at this but the feature reminds me of what can be seen with columnar jointing. Nature can be amazingly precise and geometric sometimes. Normally it's basalt, and the ocean is pretty much basalt at the top-most levels of the ophiolite. If the basalt cools from the exterior, this can happen. I don't know if this can occur in the ocean as we tend to get pillow lavas as the basalt cools INCREDIBLY FAST and kinda oozes out. Also, with the extent of this feature, this would have to have been some sort of flood of basalt.

    It's a pretty neat feature, real or unreal. Although I have to wonder what these people think about the very long linear feature called the Ninetyeast Ridge in the Indian ocean. Anyhow, got to love the masters of pattern: humans. Never fail to see things where there's really nothing.

    Example and description:

    --
    -Drache Kubisuro
    1. Re:It beware the Geologist's hammer... by goodmanj · · Score: 1

      Keep studying, grasshopper. Nature can be amazingly precise and geometric, but she doesn't make basalt columns 200 km across.

      This is a mapmaking artifact, the grid pattern is the track of the ship collecting the data.

  45. Mr Wiggles Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Comin' to you from #1 Bimini Road, in beautiful downtown Atlantis, where you might see the jellyfish jammin' with the salmon.

    Don't step on my funk! Let's go wiggle 'em out, sucka!

  46. Its an incredible find whatever it is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Where's the street view guy? That's what we really need."

    While you are joking, the fact it looks like roads is incredible. Although being there at all is really the big news. That is deep water, (at least now) so whenever it was constructed, the ocean must have been a lot lower than it is now, so that points towards an Ice Age road network. Thats awesome! ... its a road network thousands of years earlier than other civilizations.

    Unless its a fake? (e.g. drawn into google?) ... because look at the google link and then look at the units!?! ... That thing is about 60 miles by about 45 miles in size! ... So if that is roads, its one hell of a big road network in size! ... So if its real, its totally awesome!

    1. Re:Its an incredible find whatever it is... by pe1rxq · · Score: 1

      During which ice age did the sea level drop 5 kilometers?

      The human mind is great in making stuff up.... A line on a seabed image made with sonar (a technique which sometimes produces artifacts like lines) becomes a street just as easy as a jezus appears on sandwiches.

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    2. Re:Its an incredible find whatever it is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "The human mind is great in making stuff up" ... Thats very condescending. So according to you, only you have clarity of thought and all others who disagree with you must be wrong and misguided. It seems some people's "human mind" want to be closed before even wanting to send survey subs into the area to look for more evidence.

      Also I did say, "Ice Age". For a start, the sea level is lower during an ice age. Also Ice closes in from the poles. Now add it the depth of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is higher than this road (like) network area, whatever it is. This would mean this area in the worse of the ice age would be surrounded on three sides by Ice. So you end up with a very large Ice dam (yes they do exist now and have existed in the past).

      So its at least possible that the area was low land at some point, especially before an earthquake and especially as its area would likely be the only band of the planet during an ice age, to get any amount of good warming heat, which over *centuries* could have lowered the remaining trapped water even more ... that is until an earthquake would shatter any ice dams towards the end of an ice age. Then it would suffer a huge Tsunami.

      There are too many cultures for too long that have suggested a city existed somewhere there. Its nothing special, its nothing magical. Its simply a very good place to build a city during an Ice Age ... that is, until the ice Age Ends. Then its a very dangerous place to live.

      So lets send subs and survey teams there and keep an open mind. With something that big it, would take some effort to find artifacts, but the prize is huge if anything can be found there.

    3. Re:Its an incredible find whatever it is... by Tycho · · Score: 2, Informative

      Okay, here is Minneapolis/St. Paul area, at the same scale, it is also has a bit lower population density than some US metropolitan areas.

      http://maps.google.com/?q=Minneapolis,+MN&sll=31.480209,-24.120483&sspn=2.988616,5.026245&ie=UTF8&ll=45.069641,-93.262939&spn=2.863094,5.564575&t=h&z=8

      Compare features in a modern city to those in the "Atlantis" photos:
      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=31.480209,-24.120483&spn=2.988616,5.026245&t=h&z=8

      The major "Atlantis" features are larger than the road networks in a modern day metropolitan area. Also, the features (or sensor artifacts) of "Atlantis" would be half the width of the entire state of Minnesota. Save your money and look for a more reasonable explanation, first. The closest you will get to an an event that would cause an ocean basin to empty is this:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis

      That was the basin of the Mediterranean Sea (New Tethys Ocean) and it was caused by closure of its inlets. It isn't even plausible for the Atlantic Ocean to have emptied at any point in the last 25,000 years, and especially implausible for glaciers to have locked enough water up for that to happen.

      --
      Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
    4. Re:Its an incredible find whatever it is... by bruceslog · · Score: 1
      --
      If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
  47. Google Ocean topo data is awful. by goodmanj · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 -- 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.

  48. All Over the Place by immcintosh · · Score: 1

    Here's Another One

    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.

  49. I found another Atlantis! by The+Famous+Druid · · Score: 1
    Here 'tis..

    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!

    --
    Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
  50. The real story by bl968 · · Score: 4, Informative
    --
    "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
  51. Re:Look due west of Ireland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You mean Ireland, Africa?

  52. Spelling and the Old Ones by GrifterCC · · Score: 1

    Whenever something cthonic comes up on /., I always see the same tag: "Cthulu." Folks, it's "Cthulhu." A cursory Google search tells you this.

    Now, of course, when Cthulhu does wake from his ancient slumber in R'lyeh, we're all going to go stark raving mad. But I, for one, plan to be spared the worst agony by presenting myself as a harmless copy editor in the service of His great Following, and then being eaten.

  53. The REAL Atlantis! by shicaca · · Score: 0

    ... I hope there's no Wraith :-(

  54. Neptune was using his trident as a rake by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 1

    Neptune had to clean up the debris after Atlantis submerged and all the debris spread all over.

  55. Other links by Jabbrwokk · · Score: 1

    It's an interesting theory, and could tie in to Middle Eastern flood stories. There has been some scientific research done suggesting that the Black Sea at one time was dry, until the swelling Mediterranean burst through the Bosphorus and wiped out the settlements in the valley and creating the coastlines that would one day become the playgrounds of Russian communists on holidays.

    Meanwhile, an old dude in a boat was bobbing around aimlessly, and after he landed one of the first things he did was get really, really drunk.

    1. Re:Other links by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      There has been some scientific research done suggesting that the Black Sea at one time was dry,

      I don't recall having seen Ryan and Pittman (if I've recalled their names correctly) claiming that the Black Sea went dry. Mostly, they point to considerable shrinkage in area by losing the top couple of hundred metres of the water column. But basinal dessication? Don't recall them ever claiming that.

      My guess it that you're conflating the well-established ice-age global fall in sea levels with the equally well-established local dessication of the Mediterranean basin in the Messinian Salinity Crisis (just Google it) at approximately 5 million years ago (before the present cycle of ice ages really got going properly).

      For what it's worth - I spent most of last December drilling through a kilometer of Messinian-age salt deposits. It's very definitely non-trivial. If I'd been allowed to keep my notes (or if I'd been interested, to be honest), I'd be able to describe it in nauseating detail.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  56. Let me just put it out there... by Bryansix · · Score: 1

    That Elvis was a no talent ass clown who couldn't sing and never wrote a song for himself in his whole life.

    1. Re:Let me just put it out there... by conureman · · Score: 1

      Why?

      --
      The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
    2. Re:Let me just put it out there... by B5_geek · · Score: 1

      American Pie.

      Buddy Holly is the real King.

      --
      "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
  57. Anonymous Coward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's an ELF (extra low frequency) transmission grid for communicating with submarines.

  58. Its sonar scanning artifacts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's a even bigger patch off the coast of Ireland.

    http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=54.046489,-13.557129&spn=7.524823,19.775391&t=h&z=6

    Sheesh.

  59. If atlantis was ANY sh@t like in the legends, by unity100 · · Score: 1

    there are probably many forces which will stop you in your tracks before you get to it. and they may not be your own government, or even your own people.

  60. grid by mcarp · · Score: 1

    Its a recording artifact, get over it.

  61. Re:You know you're on Slashdot when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No shit sherlock. Did you ever see what happened when the wannabe uber133t h4x0r chick who called herself "Raven" posted?

    Every single one was modded up. It was bullshit. One of the /. eds was trying to lay her so he used to mod down the posts which called her on her bullshit.

  62. Re:You know you're on Slashdot when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Say the poster's name aloud and then tell me she's a chick for sure.

    Some people don't have a grasp of the obvious....

  63. Gentle repose by Valdrax · · Score: 1

    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?

    Not to mention that the lines are all somehow preserved on the bottom of the ocean in an undisturbed fashion despite the notion that the island that was under the city some how went missing?

    What, did the land just ever so gently lower the city to the bottom in the process of flatting out underneath it?

    --
    If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
    1. Re:Gentle repose by KlomDark · · Score: 1

      Yes, the giant sea turtle it was built on swam away...

  64. Re:You know you're on Slashdot when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dumb ass! The OP's point is that desperate sex starved /.ers see what they think is a chick posting and reflexively mod it up.

  65. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  66. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  67. Not too deep... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Your instincts are wrong. If you remember your history during ice age there was a lot of ice. That's why they call it that. So Atlantians were not above ocean, but below it since it was frozen and it was too cold above. The trenches are obviously whats left of their mega metropolises that spanned for 100s of miles. I wouldn't be surprised of that large depressions is their attempt to dig into the earth crust, closer to the core where it's still warm. That's pretty much common sense. Once ice age ended tunnels collapsed under weight of water and are now visible as trenches on the ocean floor.

    1. Re:Not too deep... by Khopesh · · Score: 1

      Not sure about that ... specifically, the fact that the area is not at all surrounded by deeper areas, which means it was not an island. If it were above water at any point in time, it would have been another part of the African continent, and not even near the shoreline with what remained of the Atlantic ocean to the distant west.

      It's also deeper than the nearby shelf areas which would certainly have been above sea level during the ice age, so I'm still sticking with my intuitions. Feel free to actually cite something and prove me wrong, but it looks like you're merely contending my point with your own instincts.

      --
      Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
  68. Burn the Heretic!!!-view as 'tried humour here' by rts008 · · Score: 1

    Dude!

    You are trying to simultaneously squash Hollywood, the 'Fantasy' genre, and American Idol/Survivor conditioned minds here!

    Why do you hate freedom, and are against the USA? Are you a terrorist?

    [paraphrase from Rush:2112 Overture]
    Forget about your silly whims, it doesn't fit the plan!

    P.S. Want some Freedom Fries with that? :-)

    *apply sarcasm as needed

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  69. Onset of teeth-gnashing.... by rts008 · · Score: 1

    Now I know how the people over in Egyptology feel when someone says the aliens helped build the Pyramids.{emphasis mine]

    Well, they obviously got that wrong. The Goa'uld would have just supervised, not dirtied their hands with actual manual labor!

    *imbibe with large dose of sarcasm, for best results

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  70. Staragte Atlantis? by omnomnomnom · · Score: 1

    All this time I thought that show was canceled :p

  71. Check the link!...It's Bigfoot!!! by rts008 · · Score: 1

    Well no wonder we can't find Sasquatch on Earth....He's on Mars!!!

    Probably still waiting for that 'Earth-shattering Kaboom!' since the paparazzi made life miserable for him on Earth.

    RETURN THE BIGFOOTS TO EARTH! Where's Nessie?...we need to wrap this up soon.

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  72. No sense of humour==ignore this post!! by rts008 · · Score: 1

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

    So...your saying the Martians that built the Mars Canals hacked Google Ocean? ...little green men...
    So John Carter was overestimating the green horde being 10-12 feet tall, with 4 arms?...Blasphemy and Heresy, I say to you, good sir!

    Do try to stop reality from interfering with /. wankery.

    P.S. This does look like a mashup of SONAR readings that were not 'quite' compatible, but maybe it will get checked out further.?...or not.

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  73. Huge grid west of Ireland by NewIntellectual · · Score: 0
    1. Re:Huge grid west of Ireland by NewIntellectual · · Score: 0

      Sorry, link of parent is wrong, not sure how to get the *currently in view* location URL (Link creates a link to the original location). But just look west of Ireland.

  74. ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn by Medievalist · · Score: 1

    In drowned R'lyeh dead Cthulu lies dreaming...

    DON'T WAKE HIM UP...

    This public service message brought to you by the Campus Crusade for Cthulu.
    Cthulu has a plan for this world
    you can be a part of it
    as a hors d'oeuvre

  75. Fool you will never find Atlantis! by SupremoMan · · Score: 1

    I have hidden it in another galaxy! MAUHAAHHAAHAH

    Ok so I have Karma to burn tonight, leave me alone

  76. Bathymetry maps and the noise attenuation problem by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 1

    Here is a paper describing what appears to be essentially the same problem: "Interpolation of bathymetry data from the Sea of Galilee: A noise attenuation problem"

    It can be downloaded from http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/antoine/Research/GEO/GuittonClaerbout.pdf

    The paper contains several images similar to the Google bathymetry map, with rectangluar noise. However, thanks to software cleaning they managed to remove most of that noise.

    The purpose? Ironically, "The ultimate goal is to produce a good map of the depth to bottom and images useful for identifying archaeological, geological, and geophysical details of the sea bottom. In particular, we hope to identify some ancient shorelines around the lake and meaningful geological features inside the lake. The ancient shorelines could unravel early settlements of archeological interest or old
    fishing ports".

    I give these guys a better chance of finding something relevant, as they analyzed 10-meter scale data, rather than playing around with,Google Earth... :)

  77. Miscalibrated Sensor? by Heshler · · Score: 1

    I used to do terrain and geophysical data processing: to me it looks like a particular ship that was scanning one day had a miscalibrated sensor, resulting in all the data along the path it scanned that day stand out. This can be corrected for with a process called leveling, where sections are scanned in a criss-cross grid, but evidently this data scanning was not so systematic.

  78. Multiple Atlanti! by dmitrybrant · · Score: 1

    A 2-minute search for other anomalies like this one turned up the following:

    http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=54.09806,-15.974121&spn=7.515507,15.46875&z=6

    It's just west of Ireland, and it's about the size of the entire UK. That's one hell of a big city!

    1. Re:Multiple Atlanti! by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      A 2-minute search for other anomalies like this one turned up the following:
      http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=54.09806,-15.974121&spn=7.515507,15.46875&z=6
      It's just west of Ireland, and it's about the size of the entire UK. That's one hell of a big city!

      Great minds think alike - I found exactly the same artifact in approximately the same time of searching. I did know before-hand that there has been extensive seismic work in this Porcupine Basin - I read up on it for some work a couple of years ago in the Slyne and Erris basins. So, to pick an area that I don't know ... lessee ... Great Australian Bight? Oh, how does this look - 5013'5.57"S 114 2'57.42"E ; zoom to about 70km altitude ; two adjoining Atlantises (Atlantii?) ; see your Plato and raise you a DreamTime!

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  79. The Actual Location of Altantis Also using Google by 1mck · · Score: 1

    Past the Straits of Gibraltar is a continent, in the centre along the longest side, high in the mountains by the sea is a rectangular level plain...this is the Bolivian Altiplano. http://www.atlantisbolivia.org/atlantisboliviapart1.htm [atlantisbolivia.org]

  80. It is over 100 miles across by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that is a fscking huge city!

  81. Also by arstchnca · · Score: 1

    Or, there's the explanation that sustaining a city's worth of persons requires more than a city's worth of land. Logistically, how could a city exist occupying the entirety of the island on which it was built?

    Personally, I'm of the opinion that the grid effect is some kind of artifact from the methodology of the mapping. Even so, I don't really think that a size argument is sufficient to refute that the image we see today may somehow represent ancient ruins or something.

    Seriously - what did they do? Eat only fish? Boat in food from western africa everyday?

    --
    -- arstchnca
    --
  82. Simple Physics by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 1
    I seriously doubt that a geological conflageration that drops a surface city 3 miles underwater is going to leave the city grid intact and easily identifiable.

    QED

    --
    Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  83. Heretic !!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everyone "knows" that ancient civilisation didn't exist !!!
    1) The antikhedra mechanism is the only one remaining, thanks to its nice European (white?) origins ..
    2) The Baghdad batteries are no longer in one piece
    3) The mesopotamian cities of the 3rd mill. BC are being taken care of by the US military
    4) The Ram Bridge (near Shri Lankha) is being turned in a sea passage ...

    Finally, widespread book-burning in Asia & Europe in the 5th century was a convenient way to get rid of the past (thankfully, the Arab people saved some of the greek literature for Europeans to plunder a few centuries afterwards) !!!

    What *proofs* do you have that Minoans ever had a developed civilization ?

  84. have you seen the randomness ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Taken as a whole, mankind's movements are indistinguishable from those of a colony of ants ...

    Does this mean that we do not think ?

    Ireland and Acores ... thousands of random natural peaks could be a proof that it's only randomness at work, but NOT ONLY TWO !!!

    Btw, thousands of *legends* throughout human history tell of sunken cities, strange monsters, epic battles ... some have been seriously investigated, and found to have sound scientific grounds, while most sleep undisturbed as "fairy tales" !!!

    1. Re:have you seen the randomness ? by macraig · · Score: 1

      Just because SOME "fairy tales" have been demonstrated to contain some degree of historical fact doesn't mean that ALL such stories must therefore also be factual. You're indulging a logical fallacy or two there.