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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.
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!
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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
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
Google just got a DMCA takedown notice from Aquaman.
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
'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?
"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.
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
They want their city back.
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.
The article was missing perhaps the only thing this crowd would care about:
31Â24'16.68"N
24Â22'40.83"W
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.
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.
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
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."
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
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.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
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.
The geology of the Madeira Aplain further studies relevant to its suitability for radioactive waste disposal
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