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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.

27 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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
  2. 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 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.

  3. 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
  4. 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 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.

  5. 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?
  6. 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!

  7. 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 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

    2. 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...

  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. 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.
  11. 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
  12. 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. :-)

  13. 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
  14. 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

  15. 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.
  16. 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.

  17. The real story by bl968 · · Score: 4, Informative
    --
    "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
  18. 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.)

  19. 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.