Posted on 09/19/2001 9:10:00 PM PDT by blam
Sea level study reveals Atlantis candidate
19:00 19 September 01
Jon Copley
It sounds a familiar enough yarn - a lone researcher claiming to have pinpointed the lost land of Atlantis famously described by Plato. But this time there is no mention of "supercivilisations", UFOs or magic crystals. Instead, he has turned the clock back on ancient rises in sea level to reveal an island that matches Plato's story.
Plato's works Timaeus and Critias contain the first written descriptions of Atlantis and its watery fate, drawn from stories collected in Egypt. "These texts are the origin of a lot of speculation about Atlantis," says Jacques Collina-Girard of the University of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence.
"Curiously, nobody has really taken seriously the most obvious location," Collina-Girard adds. According to Plato, Atlantis lay just in front of the Pillars of Hercules - what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar - and disappeared around 9000 BC.
Collina-Girard was interested in patterns of human migration from Europe into North Africa at the height of the last ice age, 19,000 years ago. To see if Palaeolithic people could have crossed the strait, he made a map of what the western European coastline looked like at that time, when the sea level was 130 metres lower than it is now. His reconstruction of the area reveals an ancient archipelago, with an island at the spot where Plato described Atlantis.
Rising tide
"There was an island in front of the 'Pillars of Hercules'," says Collina-Girard. Named Spartel, it lay to the west of the Strait of Gibraltar just as Plato described. The Strait was longer and narrower than today, and enclosed a harbour-like inland sea that Plato mentions as the setting for Atlantis.
Just over 11,000 years ago, the slow rise of post-glacial sea levels accelerated briefly to more than two metres per century, according to records from coral reefs. This would have swamped the island, Collina-Girard suggests. "The archipelago was engulfed 9000 years before Plato," he says.
There are a few facts that don't match Plato's story, however. Plato describes Atlantis as larger than Libya and Asia put together, whereas Collina-Girard's island is 14 kilometres long by five kilometres wide. He argues that a mistake was made in converting Egyptian units of length into Greek units as the story was passed down.
Plato also reports that volcanic activity sank Atlantis, but this may have been a case of embellishment, says Collina-Girard. "The Greeks were familiar with volcanic eruptions," he notes. To them, such a fate might have been more dramatic and plausible than a change in sea level.
As for an advanced Atlantean civilisation, Collina-Girard points to Plato's own admission that he grafted these details onto the tale to present his ideas about a Utopian society.
Long yarn
The lower sea levels of 11,000 years ago would have exposed many islands, says Bill Ryan of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.(Ryan & Pittman are the guys that discovered the Black Sea Flood, Noah's Flood?)
Ryan has examined evidence for the Noah and Gilgamesh flood stories around the Black Sea. But he cautions that the story of Atlantis would have needed to survive down the generations for 9000 years in Egypt before being recorded by the Greeks. "The difficulty here is correct translation of nouns and adjectives passed down by the oral tradition as languages change and evolve," he says.
Collina-Girard suggests that the archipelago could have provided stepping stones for primitive sailors to cross between Europe and North Africa. "The coasts of Spain and Morocco were inhabited at the time, so certainly these islands were too," he says. A prehistoric culture spread rapidly in Morocco around 20,000 years ago. "Traditionally this came from the east, but why not from the north?" he asks.
Antarctica isn't underwater.
http://www.andrewcollins.net/page/secretloc/cubapoints.htm
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3b34ba6163f0.htm
Nice article, huh?
Stay safe in AL.
Imagine the Altiplano filled up with water, huh. What happend to the mountains in the middle? Islands huh?
I believe that Atlantis was a great continent with a great people that controlled many areas of the world spreading their culture very much like the British Empire. However, I think their continent is at the bottom of the sea like Plato and perhaps the bible says (the bible speaks of a great "Zidon"...Poseidon?...it may be the Sidon of the middle east but Tyre was greater) and I believe it's in the area of the Philipines. The Sphinx has a Philipine-like face. That's probably why the nose is knocked off. A Philipine nose (flat) does not resemble the nose of the race of the Pharoahs and so it was...ahem...removed (just a guess).
Plain
Oblong, 3000 stadia long, 1000 stadia wide (330 miles long and 110 miles wide)
Open to the sea on the south (where the canal exited to the sea)
Surrounded by mountains to the north
Ditch around the Plain
100 feet deep
1 stade wide
10,000 stade long (surrounding the whole plain) (1100 miles long)
Looks very regular (rectangular). The 110 foot deep, one third mile wide ditch is huge and should still be there if it ever existed in South America.
The Aymara people of the Bolivian highlands have long told stories of a lost underwater city: Wanaku, the Atlantis of South America. They have whispered tales of a mysterious island in Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake, with a hidden entrance to underground passageways built by the Inca. Now researchers have found the first concrete evidence that those legends may be true.
In August, divers with the Italian firm of Akakor Geographical Exploring conducted a series of 250 dives in Titicaca's murky waters. Led by a 2300-foot-long ancient road, now under water, they found the remains of a 660-foot-long and 160-foot-wide stone temple between 65 to 100 feet below the water's surface. The team also discovered a terrace, a 2600-foot-long containing wall, along with a stone anchor, vases, and bones from cameloid animals such as llama or alpaca that may have been killed in a ritual sacrifice.
The ruins lie in the waters between Bolivia's Copacabana Peninsula and Isla del Sol, home to the Temple of the Sun, where the Incan dynasty is said to have been born. They date to between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago, before the rise of the Incan Empire, when the Tiahuanaco people occupied the shores of Titicaca.
The submerged ruins may be the remains of the Aymara's legendary city, or could have been assimilated by the Inca Empire itself. "The underground passageways were reputed to link many parts of the Incan Empire with the capital at Cuzco," says head diver Stefano Castelli. "Somebody else said he removed a stone from the bottom of the lake, and saw water going down inside the hole."
"There are still a lot of secrets in this area."
An absolutely incredible find. The only scientific explaination for such a sealevel rise is the presence of SUVs over 9000 years ago. Simply incredible!
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