Is this Atlantis?

[Breaking News Breaking News]

By VIRGINIA WHEELER
and RHODRI PHILLIPS

Published: Today
 
THIS is the amazing image which could show the fabled sunken city of Atlantis.

It shows a perfect rectangle the size of Wales lying on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean nearly 3½ miles down.

A host of criss-crossing lines, looking like a map of a vast metropolis, are enclosed by the boundary.

Location ... 620 miles off Africa

They seem too vast and organised to be caused naturally.

And last night the possibility of an extraordinary discovery had oceanographers and geophysicists captivated.

The site lies 620 miles off the west coast of Africa near the Canary Islands — a location for Atlantis seemingly suggested by the ancient philosopher Plato.

He believed it was an island civilisation sunk by an earthquake and floods around 9,700BC — nearly 12,000 years ago.

The “grid” showed up on Google Ocean, a Google Earth extension that uses a combination of satellite images and marine surveys.

Last night Dr Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at New York State University — and one of the world’s leading authorities on Atlantis — called it “fascinating”.

He said: “The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato. Even if it turns out to be geographical, this definitely deserves a closer look.”

The legend of Atlantis has captured the imagination of scholars for centuries.

And in the 1970s it spawned a hit TV series, Man From Atlantis, in which Patrick Duffy played a webbed hero who could live underwater.

Sea here ... location of grid on Google

Situated in an area called the Madeira Abyssal Plane, the grid was spotted by aeronautical engineer Bernie Bamford as he browsed through Google Ocean.

Sunken ... artist's impression of lost metropolis

Bernie, 38, of Chester, said: “It looks like an aerial map of Milton Keynes. It must be man-made.”

Photos and story here:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/new...255989.ece

[simple simon]

[size="3"]Yes, it probably is - part of the former Atlantis.

Simon[/size]

[Breaking News Breaking News]

Hopes dashed as Google Ocean image of 'lost city of Atlantis' proves to be nothing of the sort

By David Derbyshire and Niall Firth
Last updated at 3:47 PM on 20th February 2009

For a few tantalising hours researchers appeared to have solved one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world - the location of the mythical underwater city of Atlantis.

More than 600 miles off the coast of Africa and nearly 3.5 miles below the surface lay a mysterious grid of lines and markings that closely resembled the streets of a city.

The image - discovered on the internet mapping tool Google Earth - lay in an area of the Atlantic long thought to be a possible location for the fabled lost city.

There were just two problems.

First, the grid of streets, walls and ancient buildings turned out to be the size of Wales.

False hopes: Google said the grid-like markings, thought to reveal the location of mythical underwater city Atlantis, are an artifact of its map making process

Even given the supposedly advanced technology, that meant Altantis was 20 times the size of Greater London.

And second, the grid of lines doesn't actually exist on the sea floor.

According to Google, the pattern is an "artifact" of its map making process.

Details for the ocean maps on Google Earth come from sonar measurements of the sea floor  recorded by boats - and the area around the Canaries was mapped by boats travelling in a series of straight lines.

The admission was a blow to Atlantis hunters who are convinced the city still lies undiscovered below the waves.

The grid can be found by anyone using the latest version of Google Earth on their computer. It lies in the Canary Basin, 620 miles west of the Canary islands, and east of the Konstantinov Ridge.

'It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth - a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species, a fringing coral reef off the coast of Australia, and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa, to name just a few,' said a spokesman for Google.

The grid system was found in an area known as the Madeira Abyssal Plane off the coast of Morocco, not far from the Canary Islands
"In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea-floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea-floor.

'The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans."

The perfect rectangle was spotted by a British aeronautical engineer who claimed it looked like a 'man-made aerial map' of a city.

Atlantis experts said that the unexplained grid is located at one of the possible sites of the legendary island, which was first described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.

The earliest known records of this mythical land appear in Plato's 'dialogues', Critias and Timaios.

Sunken: The city of Atlantis was once a major civilization many thousands of years ago
Plato described it as an island 'larger than Libya and Asia put together'.

Dr Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at New York State University said that the site was 'one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis.'

'Even if it turns out to be geographical, it definitely deserves a closer look,' he told the Sun.

Bernie Bamford, 38, of Chester who spotted the unusual grid-like markings compared it to the plan of Milton Keynes, the Buckinghamshire town built on a grid design.

The lost city of Atlantis has captured the imagination of scholars for centuries.

According to Plato's account, written around 355 BC, Atlantis sank to the bottom of the ocean in around 9600BC.

Atlantis was an incredibly prosperous and beautiful city and the Atlanteans were an advanced civilization with hot and cold running water and a highly-developed social order.

Many people believe that Plato's story could be historically accurate but that he simply got his geographical facts wrong.

As a result, the search for the fabled city has spanned the globe.

Other experts believe that the story of Atlantis sinking into the ocean may reflect ancient Egyptian records of a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now known as Santorini) in about 1500BC which severely damaged the island of Crete.

Google Ocean is available for free by downloading the latest version of Google Earth from the Google homepage.

This latest version of Google Earth lets people plunge beneath the sea, swim around underwater volcanoes, hover above shipwrecks and navigate mountains on the sea bed.

The software also shows protected areas of the ocean and lets people follow the movement of sea animals tagged with satellite trackers.

Sites proposed for the location of Atlantis:

Black Sea - in 2000 a town was found under 300 ft of water off the north coast of Turkey. The area is thought to have been swamped by a Biblical style great flood around 5000BC.

Minoan civilisation on Crete - a massive volcano erupted on the island of Santorini around 1600 BC, devastating the island and the coastal Minoan towns on Crete.

Cyprus - in 2004 an American architect used sonar to reveal man-made walls resembling Atlantis a mile deep in the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Syria.

Cornwall -  in 1997, Russian scientists claimed to have found Atlantis 100 miles off Land's End on the Little Sole Bank.

Azores - Victorian Atlantis scholars proposed that the Azores - 900 miles west of Portugal - were the mountain tops of the fabled lost city.

Dogger Bank - Swedish researchers claimed the mythical city lay on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea which was submerged in the Bronze Age.

Photos and story here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnew...-sort.html#