Did Google Earth find Atlantis?

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Special thanks to Networker – David Breeland for sending this  link…

Google is officially denying widespread Internet rumors that its Google Earth software located the mythical sunken city of Atlantis off the coast of Africa. Either that, or Google is totally trying to hide something. Since I always appreciate a nice juicy conspiracy theory, I’m going to go with the latter.

From what it sounds like, a British aeronautical engineer was playing around with the new Google Earth 5.0, which includes undersea data, and noticed something funny off the coast of Africa, about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands, that resembled a pattern of a street grid. According to the United Kingdom’s Press Association, the pattern of streets equated to an area the size of Wales.

In case you’ve had more important things to read about for the past few thousand years, Atlantis was a legendary island city first mentioned by Plato, allegedly a hard-core naval power located somewhere near North Africa that disappeared when it sank into the ocean. Guess global warming was a problem back then, too.

Anyway, most people think that Plato made it up, kind of like how those guys in Georgia made up the story about shooting Bigfoot, but others just won’t stop believin’.

So this guy is trawling the ocean floor with Google Earth–ah, if only we had that kind of free time on our hands–and was quick to announce his discovery. It looks like The Telegraph reported the story first, adding that the exact coordinates are 31 15’15.53N, 24 15’30.53W.

Recently, Google’s mapping products have revealed everything from a creepy dude walking around with a sniper rifle to what appear to be U.S. drones in Pakistan.

But when it comes to Atlantis, Google totally had to rain on everyone’s parade. “It’s true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth, including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an ancient Roman villa,” a statement from Google read. “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.”

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. 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.

news.cnet.com

 

 

Posted by Wendy King on Feb 20 2009. Filed under International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry