Biggles of 266
1st Level Red Feather
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2001
- Messages
- 1,126
- Points
- 36
Hey Jim, I know I said I had to go to work and stuff, but I saw this story on the net and couldn't resist letting you know about it.
Rumours about the lost city have surfaced after a chance discovery off Cuba, writes Kevin Sullivan in 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 600 metres 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 eight square kilometres of a deep-ocean plain off Cuba's western tip.
"What we have here is a mystery," said Paul Weinzweig, of Advanced Digital Communications, a Canadian company that is mapping the ocean bottom of Cuba's territorial waters under contract to the Government.
"Nature couldn't have built anything so symmetrical," Mr Weinzweig said, running his finger over sonar printouts aboard his ship, tied up at a wharf in Havana harbour. "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 oil and gas reserves in deep water that Cuba lacks the means to explore.
Advanced Digital operates from the Ulises, an 80-metre trawler that was converted to a research vessel for the Cuban Government by the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
Since they began exploration three years ago with sophisticated side-scan sonar and computerised global-positioning equipment, Mr Weinzweig said, they had 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 USS Maine, which exploded and sank in Havana harbour in 1898, an event that ignited the Spanish-American War.
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 Mr Weinzweig and his partner and wife, Paulina Zelitsky, a Russian-born engineer.
"We have looked at enormous amounts of ocean bottom, and we have never seen anything like this," Mr Weinzweig said.
The discovery immediately sparked speculation about Atlantis, the fabled lost city first described by Plato in 360 BC. Mr Weinzweig and Ms 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 rash 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 websites have touted the Advanced Digital images as a possible first sighting.
Among those who suspect the site may be Atlantis is George Erikson, a California anthropologist who co-wrote 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 Mr Erikson, who said he had been shunned by many scientists since publishing his book about Atlantis. He said the story had too many historical roots to be dismissed as sheer fantasy and that if the Cuban site proved to be Atlantis, he hoped to be the first to say "I told you so".
Manuel Iturralde, a Cuban geologist, said it was too soon to know what the images proved.
"It's strange, it's weird; we've never seen something like this before, and we don't have an explanation for it."
The Washington Post
Rumours about the lost city have surfaced after a chance discovery off Cuba, writes Kevin Sullivan in 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 600 metres 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 eight square kilometres of a deep-ocean plain off Cuba's western tip.
"What we have here is a mystery," said Paul Weinzweig, of Advanced Digital Communications, a Canadian company that is mapping the ocean bottom of Cuba's territorial waters under contract to the Government.
"Nature couldn't have built anything so symmetrical," Mr Weinzweig said, running his finger over sonar printouts aboard his ship, tied up at a wharf in Havana harbour. "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 oil and gas reserves in deep water that Cuba lacks the means to explore.
Advanced Digital operates from the Ulises, an 80-metre trawler that was converted to a research vessel for the Cuban Government by the late French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
Since they began exploration three years ago with sophisticated side-scan sonar and computerised global-positioning equipment, Mr Weinzweig said, they had 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 USS Maine, which exploded and sank in Havana harbour in 1898, an event that ignited the Spanish-American War.
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 Mr Weinzweig and his partner and wife, Paulina Zelitsky, a Russian-born engineer.
"We have looked at enormous amounts of ocean bottom, and we have never seen anything like this," Mr Weinzweig said.
The discovery immediately sparked speculation about Atlantis, the fabled lost city first described by Plato in 360 BC. Mr Weinzweig and Ms 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 rash 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 websites have touted the Advanced Digital images as a possible first sighting.
Among those who suspect the site may be Atlantis is George Erikson, a California anthropologist who co-wrote 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 Mr Erikson, who said he had been shunned by many scientists since publishing his book about Atlantis. He said the story had too many historical roots to be dismissed as sheer fantasy and that if the Cuban site proved to be Atlantis, he hoped to be the first to say "I told you so".
Manuel Iturralde, a Cuban geologist, said it was too soon to know what the images proved.
"It's strange, it's weird; we've never seen something like this before, and we don't have an explanation for it."
The Washington Post
