Monsters and Myths

It was reported in the media last month that the lost civilisation of Atlantis had been discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco, just where Plato said it should be, beyond “the Pillars of Hercules”.

The image was discovered on Google Ocean by Bernie Banford, of Chester, and it showed a rectangular area roughly the size of Wales that appears to have roadways, man-made area divisions and a city-like grid design.

It was quickly discounted in some quarters, but whether the discovery is valid or not – other much-vaunted locations for Atlantis over the years have included Cyprus, the Azores, and even Antarctica – it has been postulated that Atlantis was the “mother culture” of the Egyptian, Native American, Mayan and other ancient civilisations around the world.

I think it’s more valid to treat Atlantis as a metaphor for an early advanced race which spread its knowledge around the world, and which was largely destroyed in some global catastrophe, rather than as one particular place.

Of course, the “A” word is not mentioned in academic circles without a smirk and a raised eyebrow. But the concept, that legend recounts as being destroyed by a great flood, has grasped the imaginations of generations of researchers and historians.

One author who has spent 20 years travelling, researching and scuba-diving to find evidence of this lost civilisation is Graham Hancock, of Bath, who has written three books on the subject – the runaway best-seller Fingerprint of the Gods, most notably, Heavens Mirror and Underworld.

Although Graham never discovered the actual location of Atlantis, and rarely mentioned the “A” word, his research has helped to shift the view that advanced societies could not possibly go back in to prehistory. He believes we are a species with amnesia, which has completely forgotten its remarkable past but, fortunately, our ancestors left clues in great stone monuments all around the planet that seem to be triggering a cultural memory recall.

Graham will be discussing his latest research into lost civilisations – and will talk about how our current civilisation, with climate change and rising sea levels, could become the next Atlantis – at the annual Megalithomania conference at Glastonbury on May 23 and 24 where he will be the keynote speaker on the Saturday evening, a role he has fulfilled previously at the conference, to great acclaim.

Almost every week a major archaeological discovery is made that pushes back the date of advanced cultures. Edmund Marriage, of Milborne Port, Dorset, who has been researching the Biblical area of the Garden of Eden, in the area once known as Sumeria and the Lebanon, points to the discovery, again with the help of Google Maps, of great canal systems and megalithic construction.

Edmund, who runs a research organisation called the Golden Age Project, will be outlining these new discoveries in the context of other megalithic sites in the area at the conference on the Sunday.

Megalithomania resides in a persuasive and growing minority that seriously challenges the current, outdated view of history, specifically from the Neolithic era going back to 10,000BC, the era of the legendary Atlantis.
thisisbristol.co.uk/wdp/mysteriouswest/Atlantis-key-lost-golden-age/article-768622-detail/article.html

The bizarre markings spotted using Google Earth’s new underwater search tool last week unleashed a tsunami of theories and speculation across the Web about the origins of the gridlike pattern.

The most popular theory was that the markings were signs of the lost city of Atlantis. But Bits readers also wondered if the maze of lines could be anything from the mystical island featured on the television show “Lost” to an underwater lair inhabited by former Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to Google, it’s time to shelve those tinfoil hats.

In an interview, Steve Miller, product manager for Ocean in Google Earth, firmly debunked rumors that the crisscross markings were anything other than artificial data remnants left by sonar-equipped boats collecting data from the ocean floor.

While sound waves are considered to be more effective than satellites for mapping strips of the ocean floor, they’re often more expensive and time-consuming to use. “The boats have to go slowly. Otherwise, they make a lot of noise and can wash out the readings,” said Mr. Miller. As a result, boats are used less frequently, leaving fewer gridlike sonar patterns visible on Google Earth’s map of the ocean.

For the patch of ocean that drew so much attention last week, there was a discrepancy in the readings collected from satellites and the higher-resolution echosounding data collected by boats at water level. That caused exaggerated traces to show up on the map. Typically, when data collected by satellites and sonar surveys are blended, the result is much smoother, Mr. Miller said. But here, the “batches of imagery didn’t overlap properly.”

Mr. Miller compared it to the blurry stripes that are occasionally visible in Google Earth’s land maps. “Those patches are from cameras and instruments using different resolutions,” he said. Over time, those uneven patches smooth out as Google puts more images and data into the system.

As for the speculation that the markings off the western coast of Africa were located near one of the possible sites of the fabled sunken city of Atlantis, Mr. Miller said it was a coincidence. “To my knowledge, the researchers weren’t looking for Atlantis. They conducted this survey many years ago.” They very likely sent out a boat to comb for additional readings in this particular area, he said.

Mr. Miller also highlighted several other findings in Google Earth’s new Ocean feature, including a newly formed volcanic island close to Hawaii and an underwater mountain range in the Atlantic Ocean where two tectonic plates are visibly shifting away from one another.

Was the whole “Atlantis” uproar a well-orchestrated publicity stunt for Google’s new ocean maps, which were introduced earlier this month?

Mr. Miller said no. But the reports certainly drew a lot of armchair explorers eager to view the waterlogged pattern. Searches for “google ocean” and “atlantis google ocean” spiked over the last several days.
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/google-explains-watery-mystery-of-atlantis