Atlantis & the Antediluvian World
We Live On the Uplands of Flooded Continents
We live on the uplands of the flooded continents of the last ice age. With the end of the last glaciation sea levels rose between 100-200 metres . Then as now the bulk of the global population dwelt close to the sea - on today's submerged continental shelves.
The increase in sea levels also led to a great deal of subsidence, but this occurred after the sinking of many regions. A key fact to consider is that the world tilted 20 degrees during the event, which precipitated the end of the last glaciation; see the ice distribution during the last glaciation and you will note the old ice caps are not centred on today's poles.
The Earth is not round, but oblate; the equator bulges 27 miles more in diameter than the polar diameter of the planet. Hence, anything close to the equator which was moved to, say, 20 degrees latitude would subside around an average of 10,000 feet (3 kilometres) - bearing in mind the other catastrophic damage to the crust attendant to such a disaster (the word 'disaster' means 'evil star', by the way).
Anything moved from 20 degrees to the equator would rise appreciably in relation to the datum (sea level) - hence the highlands that bear the salt water Lake Titicaca (which has been slowly evaporating for the last 13,600 years) and the massive irrigation works on the precipitate Andean plateau - where no rainwater falls - that must have supported a population of millions. Also witness the seaport ruins at almost 10,000 feet downstream from Titicaca, the plethora of overthrown monumental stones in the area and the tilting of the entire lake bed.
The tilting of the globe sank the continent of Atlantis overnight. Its mountains are present-day Cuba. A short Internet search will show that a team found the eight-kilometre square submerged city in question in 2002, off the Western tip of the island.
- R. Ayana
Atlantis In Cuban Depths or Anomaly?
Images of Massive Stones 2,000 Feet Below Surface Fuel Scientific Speculation
HAVANA -- The images appear slowly on the video screen, like ghosts from the ocean floor. The videotape, made by an unmanned submarine, shows massive stones in oddly symmetrical square and pyramid shapes in the deep-sea darkness.
Sonar images taken from a research ship 2,000 feet above are even more puzzling. They show that the smooth, white stones are laid out in a geometric pattern. The images look like fragments of a city, in a place where nothing man-made should exist, spanning nearly eight square miles of a deep-ocean plain off Cuba's western tip.
"What we have here is a mystery," said Paul Weinzweig, of Advanced Digital Communications (ADC), a Canadian company that is mapping the ocean bottom of Cuba's territorial waters under contract with the government of President Fidel Castro.
"Nature couldn't have built anything so symmetrical," Weinzweig said, running his finger over sonar printouts aboard his ship, tied up at a wharf in Havana harbor. "This isn't natural, but we don't know what it is."
The company's main mission is to hunt for shipwrecks filled with gold and jewels, and to locate potentially lucrative oil and natural gas reserves in deep water that Cuba does not have the means to explore.
Treasure hunting has become a growth industry in recent years as technology has improved, allowing more precise exploration and easier recovery from deeper ocean sites. Advanced Digital operates from the Ulises, a 260-foot trawler that was converted to a research vessel for Castro's government by the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
Since they began exploration three years ago with sophisticated side-scan sonar and computerized global-positioning equipment, Weinzweig said they have mapped several large oil and gas deposits and about 20 shipwrecks sitting beneath ancient shipping lanes where hundreds of old wrecks are believed to be resting. The most historically important so far has been the USS Maine, which exploded and sank in Havana harbor in 1898, an event that ignited the Spanish-American War.
In 1912, the ship was raised from the harbor floor by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and towed out into deeper water four miles from the Cuban shore, where it was scuttled. Strong currents carried the Maine away from the site, and its precise location remained unknown until Ulises's sonar spotted it two years ago.
Then, by sheer serendipity, on a summer day in 2000, as the Ulises was towing its sonar back and forth across the ocean like someone mowing a lawn, the unexpected rock formations appeared on the sonar readouts. That startled Weinzweig and his partner and wife, Paulina Zelitsky, a Russian-born engineer who has designed submarine bases for the Soviet military.
"We have looked at enormous amounts of ocean bottom, and we have never seen anything like this," Weinzweig said.
The discovery immediately sparked speculation about Atlantis, the fabled lost city first described by Plato in 360 B.C.. Weinzweig and Zelitsky were careful not to use the A word and said that much more study was needed before such a conclusion could be reached.
But that has not stopped a boomlet of speculation, most of it on the Internet. Atlantis-hunters have long argued their competing theories that the lost city was off Cuba, off the Greek island of Crete, off Gibraltar or elsewhere. Several Web sites have touted the ADC images as a possible first sighting.
Among those who suspect the site may be Atlantis is George Erikson, a California anthropologist who co-authored a book in which he predicted that the lost city would be found offshore in the tropical Americas.
"I have always disagreed with all the archaeologists who dismiss myth," said Erikson, who said he had been shunned by many scientists since publishing his book about Atlantis. He said the story has too many historical roots to be dismissed as sheer fantasy and that if the Cuban site proves to be Atlantis, he hopes "to be the first to say, 'I told you so.' "
Manuel Iturralde, one of Cuba's leading geologists, said it was too soon to know what the images prove. He has examined the evidence and concluded that, "It's strange, it's weird; we've never seen something like this before, and we don't have an explanation for it."
Iturralde said volcanic rocks recovered at the site strongly suggest that the undersea plain was once above water, despite its extreme depth. He said the existence of those rocks was difficult to explain, especially because there are no volcanoes in Cuba.
He also said that if the symmetrical stones are determined to be the ruins of buildings, it could have taken 50,000 years or more for tectonic shifting to carry them so deep into the ocean. The ancient Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is only about 5,000 years old, which means the Cuba site "wouldn't fit with what we know about human architectural evolution," he said.
"It's an amazing question that we would like to solve," he said.
But Iturralde stressed that the evidence is inconclusive. He said that no first-hand exploration in a mini-submarine had been conducted, which would provide a much more comprehensive assessment. He said a remote-operated video camera provides only a limited perspective, like someone looking at a close-up image of an elephant's toe and trying to describe the whole animal.
The National Geographic Society has expressed interest and is considering an expedition in manned submarines next summer, according to Sylvia Earl, a famed American oceanographer and explorer-in-residence at the society.
"It's intriguing," Earl said in an interview from her Oakland, Calif., home. "It is so compelling that I think we need to go check it out."
Earl said a planned expedition this past summer was canceled because of funding problems. But she said National Geographic hopes to explore the site next summer as part of its Sustainable Seas research program.
Earl has visited Cuba and described the preliminary evidence as "fantastic" and "extraordinary." But she stressed that as a "skeptical scientist," she would assume that the unusual stones were formed naturally until scientific evidence proved otherwise.
"There is so much speculation about ancient civilizations," she said. "I'm in tune with the reality and the science, not the myths or stories or fantasies."
As they search for answers, Weinzweig and Zelitsky have suddenly become involved in a new mystery -- the discovery of a potential blockbuster shipwreck. They said that on Aug. 15, their remotely operated vehicle came across what appears to be a 500-year-old Spanish galleon that they had been searching for.
They declined to name the ship, fearful of other treasure hunters, but they said it carried a priceless cargo of emeralds, diamonds and ancient artifacts. By contract, they said they can keep 40 percent of the value of whatever they recover. They said the value of findings at the newly discovered wreck could far exceed the nearly $4 million that their private backers have so far invested in their operations.
Weinzweig said a closer examination is needed to prove the ship's identity. He said that in treasure hunting, as in the search for Atlantis, there is no substitute for science.
"One thing is legend," he said, sitting on Ulises's bridge. "Another is the hard evidence you find on the ocean floor."
- by KEVIN SULLIVAN / Washington Post 10oct02
Researchers come across mysterious shapes on the sea bottom just west of Cuba. Patterns suggest an ancient civilization.
[Courtesy of ADC Corp.]
The shapes appear to be arranged in patterns, the scientists say. The images, made with sophisticated sonar, show an area about 100 by 200 meters.
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Paulina Zelitsky remembers the hot July day two summers ago and the sudden, unpleasant feeling that she had stumbled into a place she was not supposed to be.
The research vessel Ulises sailed in the Yucatan Channel just off the west coast of Cuba that day, hired by the Castro government to look for undersea oil and gas -- old treasure ships, too, if they could be found.
More than 2,000 feet beneath the surface, in total blackness, the vessel towed a boombox-sized sonar on an electronic tether. Pulsing sound waves, the sonar sketched a picture of the sea bottom on a computer screen aboard Ulises far above.
As Zelitsky and her husband, Paul Weinzweig, watched the screen, the empty plain of sea bed suddenly gave way to images of massive geometric shapes, apparently cut from stone. As more shapes came into view, some appeared to be arranged in patterns over a large area about 20-kilometers square.
Some stone appeared to be cut into blocks, and some blocks seemed perfectly aligned. They appeared to form corridors and the outlines of rooms, the two scientists said. There were round stones and pyramid-shaped ones, too.
The sea bottom in that area is an undulating sand plain, Zelitsky said. What they were seeing should not have been there.
"We were shocked, and frankly we were a little frightened," said Zelitsky. "It was as though we should not be seeing what we were seeing. Our first thought was maybe we found some kind of secret military installation."
Finding a military installation on the bottom of the sea might unnerve anybody, and for the next six months the two researchers stayed busy with their work for the Cuban government and said little about their discovery. "But I tried to identify what we had seen," Zelitsky said. "Then one day, in our office, I looked up and saw pictures of ancient Mexican ruins on a calendar, and I made a mental connection."
Zelitsky and Weinzweig, officers in a Havana-based Canadian company called Advanced Digital Communication (ADC), believe they might have found the remnants of a lost civilization perhaps 6,000 years old.
This site, perhaps built by a culture that far pre-dates the famous Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, might have been the victim of a vast, mysterious cataclysm that somehow dropped it 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea.
"Nothing is known for certain now," Weinzweig said, "but oral tradition in early Mexico speaks of an advanced civilization of tall white people who came from the East, and of an island that sank in a great natural disaster." In the ancient language of some early Central American Indians, he said, "the word Atlanticu means 'our good father,' or, 'the place where our good father rests.' "
Then again, maybe not.
Maybe the intriguing shapes found by the sonar are just that -- intriguing shapes, carved over the centuries by whimsical Mother Nature.
Zelitsky and Weinzweig don't think so, though, and plan to visit the site again with a manned submersible equipped with cameras and powerful lights -- when they have the money.
Others have interest in such a project, but haven't committed to it.
"They are interesting anomalies, but that's as much as anyone can say right now," said John Echave, senior editor of National Geographic Magazine, who traveled to Cuba to study the sonar images.
"But I'm no expert on sonar," he said, "and until we are able to actually go down there and see, it will difficult to characterize them."
Echave pointed out that hard-to-explain undersea geologic formations have cropped up elsewhere in the world, too, in places such as Japan and nearby in the Bahamas.
In the Bahamas, pilots and divers wondered for years about the so-called "Atlantis Road,' a long row of seemingly connected stone blocks in about 15 feet of water. Gene Shinn of the St. Petersburg office of the U.S. Geological Survey became fascinated by the story and investigated in 1978. His conclusion: The blocks are natural, caused by a combination of sea level rise and erosion.
Nevertheless, Echave said, "we are talking to Advanced Digital and we have an interest in their project. We have to get the protocols in motion, but at this point we have not dotted the i's and crossed the t's." Echave said since any project undertaken would be scientific, he did not expect problems with the Cuban or U.S. governments.
Dr. Robert Ballard is explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society and is founder and president of the Institute For Exploration at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn. He is best known, however, for the 1985 discovery of the passenger liner Titanic deep in the North Atlantic.
Ballard said he has heard of the formations in the Yucatan Channel but is not convinced they are the work of humans.
"That's too deep," he said of the 2,000-foot site. "I'd be surprised if it was human. You have to ask yourself, how did it get there?
"I've looked at a lot of sonar images in my life," Ballard said, "and it can be sort of like looking at an an ink blot -- people can sometimes see what they want to see. I'll just wait for a bit more data."
Zelitsky and Weinzweig say that's what they want, too: more data.
In July 2001, the summer after the discovery, they returned to the site with geologist Manuel Iturralde, senior researcher of Cuba's Natural History Museum. They sent down a Remotely Operated Vehicle to examine and videotape the structures. Images sent back by the ROV confirmed the presence of large blocks of stone -- about 8 feet by 10 feet -- some circular, some rectangular, some in the shape of pyramids. Some blocks appeared deliberately stacked atop one another, others appeared isolated from the rest.
"Large structures in the middle of a desert," Zelitsky called them.
Because of their white appearance underwater, Zelitsky said the structures appear to be granite -- a good building stone but one foreign to that part of the world.
"There is no granite in Cuba or the Yucatan," Zelitsky said. "That area features limestone." Granite is found in Central Mexico, however, and was used by ancient people such as the Maya and an older civilization, the Olmec, in their construction of cities and buildings.
The second visit to the underwater site proved only marginally revealing, however. Currents in the area are strong, Weinzweig said, and heavy sediment in the water made videotaping difficult.
"We've done about as much as we can do with the technology we have," Weinzweig said. "The next step will be to go down there with a manned submersible, so we can move from place to place without a tether holding us back."
The new submersible will need powerful lights and better cameras, he said, and a drill to bore into the stone to confirm they are made of granite.
Large stone pieces used by ancient civilizations in construction are called megaliths. With this in mind, Zelitsky and Weinzweig have dubbed their discovery "Mega."
Predictably, as word got around, others quickly gave it another name: The Lost City of Atlantis.
A land bridge from Mexico to Cuba?
The Lost City of Atlantis has warmed romantic hearts for thousands of years.
The Greek philosopher Plato, who died in 347 B.C., called it a utopia destroyed by an earthquake, and people have been trying to find it since.
They have looked from the Aegean to Antarctica, from Europe to the Bahamas, without success.
In his book Gateway to Atlantis, Andrew Collins speculated the Caribbean might turn out to be the site of Atlantis and proposed that it might have been destroyed by a comet impact that devastated the eastern coastline with mammoth tsunamis or tidal waves.
Zelitsky and Weinzweig dismiss the Atlantis talk.
The story is myth, said Zelitsky, a Russian-trained engineer. "What we have found is more likely remnants of a local culture," once located on a 100-mile "land bridge" that joined Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula with Cuba.
This local culture, however, might be every bit as remarkable as Atlantis.
The Maya, for example, developed a magnificent civilization on the Yucatan Peninsula beginning about A.D. 250 and peaking about A.D. 900. Spain finally completed its conquest of the Maya about 1500.
The Maya produced advanced architecture, painting, pottery and sculpture, and their grasp of mathematics and astronomy was remarkable for its time. They might have developed the first calendar, and were among the first to make paper and books of tree bark. They cut large stone blocks and made buildings, courtyards and pyramids, many for worship of numerous gods.
But Zelitsky thinks the Mega site pre-dates even the ancient Maya -- by a lot.
Recently excavated sculptures by the Olmec and Totonec peoples, also of the Yucatan and Central America, are about 4,500 to 6,000 years old, she said.
"The Mayan nation came to the Yucatan at much later times and learned the arts and sciences of civilization from earlier nations." We know little of these nations, she said, "thanks to the Spanish church, who burned all archives."
Today Mexico and Cuba are separated only by the 100-mile width of the Yucatan Channel, and geologists have speculated for years that a "land bridge" once joined the two. According to this theory, underwater faults eventually parted and destroyed the bridge, swallowing the land above.
But 2,000 feet? If the megaliths are indeed ruins, how did they get so deep?
Zelitsky answers that large-scale underground movement of Earth's tectonic plates is usually accompanied by volcanos and earthquakes.
"It's a very powerful event,' she said, and the sinking of an island "could have happened very quickly." While some megaliths on the sea bottom appear organized, she said, others do not. "Over about 20 square kilometers there are a large number of structures that appear jumbled, disorganized," she said.
Cuban geologist Iturralde, she said, "has clearly identified on the ocean bottom the coastal structures of a separated island." Also, she said, the sea bottom at the site is covered with volcanic glass "which could be generated only on the oxygenated surface."
Everyone should keep an open mind, said geologist Iturralde.
"These are extremely peculiar structures, and they have captured our imagination," he said. "If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time."
But, he added, just because no natural explanation for the so-called ruins is immediately apparent, it doesn't mean there isn't one. "Nature is able to create some really unimaginable structures," he said.
He also raised a third possibility. The megaliths might be natural structures, he said, "but transformed or adapted by intelligent beings for dwelling or religious purposes."
What next? For now, nothing
ADC operates from the Ulises, a 260-foot trawler that was converted to a research vessel for the Cuban government by the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
The company made headlines a year ago with its discovery in nearby waters of the U.S. Navy battleship Maine, which was sunk under mysterious circumstances in 1898, touching off the Spanish-American War. (The ship had been sunk in Havana Harbor. In 1911 it was taken offshore and sunk again, honorably, with a U.S. flag flying from its bow. Its exact location was unknown until it was found by Weinzweig and Zelitsky.)
In finding the Maine and the Mega site, Advanced Digital has made use of two major improvements in underwater exploration. One is side-scan sonar, which allows a wider sweep of ocean bottom than earlier sonar equipment, and the other is the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS.
GPS allows a surface vessel to fix its position to within a few feet and then to follow a precise, reliable search trackline. Connected by cable to the vessel, side-scanning sonar sweeps the ocean floor with pulses of sound, providing a strikingly clear picture of objects on the bottom.
When a promising object is detected, an ROV can be dispatched to investigate. Searches can be performed in 20,000 feet of water.
For now, though, Weinzweig and Zelitsky say they have their hands full keeping up with the terms of the contract with the Cuban government.
"We have signed a long-term exclusive contract with the Cuban government for the natural resources of the Cuban Gulf of Mexico," Weinzweig said. "Our money is private and comes from family and friends who have purchased shares in our offshore company. We have spent $4-million over the last three years and we will require an additional $8-million or $9-million.
"This kind of work is very expensive and we require investment financing. However, our ownership in the final product, whether oil or treasure, would more than handsomely reward the investment required for conduct of deep and ultra deep work on the ocean bottom.
"For now we are busy with our other work," Zelitsky said. "As soon as we have done enough to help finance an archaeological expedition (to the Mega site) then maybe we can do that. But right now it's oil and gas."
By DAVID BALLINGRUD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 17, 2002
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