The Great Islands Under The Sea

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                              T H E   G R E A T   I S L A N D S   U N D E R   T H E   S E A



FROM:


ATLANTIS
The Eighth Continent

Charles Berlitz - 1984



Since the first photographs of the Earth were taken from the moon, we have become familiar with
Earth as a water planet, a beautiful green-blue globe in the darkness of space.

We are also familiar with the names of the world's oceans, seas, gulf, bays and large inland lakes.
But it has only been only within the last fifty years that we have been able really to ascertain the
depth of our oceans and to form an idea of what the ocean floor looks like - which parts of it are
mountains, flat plains, rising terraces, river canyons or plateaus, where precipices drop off into the
abyss. 

It is only comparatively recently that man has been able to form an approximate idea of the geo-
graphy of the ocean floor, of what is under the water that covers 71% of the planet.  This area, up
to modern times, was almost as unknown as the dark side of the moon.

The increasing knowledge of the physical nature of the seafloor has, paradoxically, been perfected
by research connected with warfare, as is the case with a number of other less commendable disco-
veries.



 
 

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The first extensive soundings of the Atlantic were made by warships of the British,
American, German and French Fleets in the latter half of the 19th century, using
basically the same means of establishing depth as those used since ancient times.

Throughout history, captains of vessels were more interested in how shallow, rather
than how deep, the waters were, in order to prevent their ships from striking rocks on
the sea bottom or being grounded on shoals. 

Until sonar was invented, depth was established by hurling loaded weights with
measured lines, and later wire, off the bow of a ship under sail and then, when the
ship caught up with the throw and line was vertical, hauling it up to measure.  This
was repeated at intervals.  If a vessel was stationary, a long line could be lowered
to the bottom to establish and approximate depth.  The composition of the bottom
was ascertained by coating the underside of the lead weight with wax or grease, so
that when it made contact with material on the bottom, it would stick to it and indi-
cate that the bottom was composed of sand, mud, marl, shell, or other material.

The accuracy of the measurements was limited, however, by the weather and the
state of the sea at the time of the soundings.

Such age-tested methods, while successful for shorelines because of the frequency
of the soundings, could give only an incomplete picture of the bottom of the open sea,
although an improved lead-line method was still employed with the first naval research
expeditions of the 19th century in the Central Atlantic, preparatory to the laying of the
transatlantic cables.

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At the time of the first large-scale controlled depth-finding operations in the deep
Atlantic, a recurrent wave of interest in Atlantis arose in the Western World.  A
number of people, apparently including some of the Naval Officers involved in the
operations, were curious as to the possibility of there being a sunken continent in
the center of the ocean, more or less where Plato said it once existed.

Although, certainly, the early scientifically-controlled soundings over what we now
call the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had nothing to do with the ancient legend, it still lingered
as a memory in the consciousness of some of the participants and of those who read
about the results.

Ignatius Connelly, who might be called the Plato of Modern Atlantology, interpreted
the results of the soundings taken of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1870s as a proof
that the site of Atlantis had been found.  His words from his book ATLANTIS  are
like a clarion call to further exploration:



"Suppose we were to find in mid-Atlantic, in front
of the Mediterranean, in the neighborhood of the
Azores, the remains of an immense island, sunk be-
neath the sea - one thousand miles in width, and two
or three thousand miles long - would it not go far to
confirm the statement of Plato that, "beyond the strait
where you place the Pillars of Hercules, there was an
island larger than Asia [Minor] and Libya combined"

.....And suppose we found that the Azores were the
mountain peaks of this drowned island, and were torn
and rent by tremendous volcanic convulsions; while
around them, descending into the sea, were found
great strata of lava; and the whole face of the sunken
land was covered for thousands of miles with volcanic
debris, would we not be obliged to confess that these
facts furnished strong corroborative proofs of the truth
of Plato's statement, that "in one day and one fatal
night there came mighty earthquakes and inundations
......and Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea; and then
that sea became inaccessible on account of the quantity
of mud which the engulfed island left in its place."

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And all these things recent investigation has proved conclusively.

Deep -sea soundings have been made by ships of different nations; the United
States ship DOLPHIN, the German frigate GAZELLE and the British ships HYDRA,
PORCUPINE and CHALLENGER have mapped out the bottom of the Atlantic, and
the result is the revelation of a great elevation, reaching from a point on the
coast of the British Islands southwardly to the coast of South Africa and then
southwardly to the coast of Africa, and then southwardly to Tristan d'Acunha.

The submerged land....rises about 9000 feet from the great depths around it and,
in the Azores, St. Paul's Rocks, Ascension and Tristan d'Acunha it reaches the
surface of the ocean.

Here, then, we have the backbone of the ancient continent which once occupied
the....Atlantic Ocean.

....The deepest parts of the ocean, 3500 fathoms deep, represent those portions
which sank first....the plains to the east and west of the central mountain range;
some of the loftiest peaks of this range - the Azores, St. Paul's, Ascension, Tristan
d'Acunha - are still above the ocean level, while the great body of Atlantis lies a
few hundred fathoms beneath the sea....

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When the barriers of Atlantis sank sufficiently to permit the natural expanSion
of the heated water of the tropics to the north, the ice and snow which cover-
ed Europe gradually disappeared: the Gulf Stream flowed around Atlantis and it
still retains the circular motion first imparted to it by the presence of that
island.

The officers of the CHALLENGER found the entire ridge of Atlantis covered with
volcanic deposits; these are the subsided mud which, as Plato tells us, rendered
the sea impassable after the destruction of the island.

The United States ship GETTYSBURG  has also made some remarkable discoveries
in a neighboring fiels.

'......The recently announced discovery by Commander Gorringe, of the United States
sloop GETTYSBURG, of a bank of soundings bearing 85 degrees W, and distant 130
miles from Cape St. Vincent, during the last voyage of the vessel across the Atlantic,
taken in connection with previous soundings obtained in the same region of the North
Atlantic, suggests the probable existence of a submarine ridge or plateau connecting
the island of madeira with the coast of PortugaL, and the probable subaerial connection
in prehistoric times of that island with the southwestern extremity of Europe......"

A member of the CHALLENGER staff, soon after the termination of the expediton, gave
it as his opinion that the great submarine plateau is the remains of

"........the lost Atlantis."

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While one might criticize the over-enthusiasm and certainty of his information,
with which Donnelly projected his theories - and oceanographers and geologists
have been doing so with considerable gusto ever since 1882 - it is nevertheless
noteworthy that the ships he refers to made a good general outline of the
ocean bottom before sonar was able to confirm their findings  more exactly.

Improved dredging operations during the present century have pulled up from
the Atlantic seafloor a sampling of rocks which indicates that certain extensive
portions of the bottom were above water until the end of the Ice Age, that
great volcanic explosions occurred at the time that a continent or a group of
large oceanic islands sank, and that several samples of rocks from the sunken
land in the Aves Ridge of the Caribbean and in the eastern mid-Atlantic could be
classified as being of continental origin because of the sial (continental) rock
 brought up from the depths.

An 1898 "Atlantean" discovery occurred by mistake.  As the transatlantic cable
was being laid, it suddenly snapped in two about 500 miles off the Azores.  By a
stroke of extreme good luck, dredging successfully retrieved the cable ends in a
difficult maneuver, since the bottom seemed to be composed of valleys, cliffs and
sharp peaks.

During the operation, several rocks were brought up which became the subject of a
controversy  initiated by Pierre Termier, a prominent French Atlantologist.  Termier
contended that the rocks, a lava known as tachylite, would dissolve in seawater
after 15,000 years and that their porous microcrystalline texture showed that they
had solidified in the open air, probably from a once sea level of volcano now under
the ocean.  While the area from which the rocks came is now known as Telegraph
Bank in remembrance of the cable incident, the Atlantean aspect of the discovery is
still being argued.

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In recent years a number of rock samples collected by expeditions in the
course of their normal research have added fuel to the Termier contro-
versy.  Dr. Maria Klenova, of the Soviet Academy of Science, after exa-
mination of rocks dredged up from a depth of 6600 feet on an expedition
in the same general area, north of the Azores, expressed her opinion that
the rocks had been formed at atmospheric pressure approximately 15,000
years ago.

Near the north coast of South America, granitic rocks were brought up by a
a Duke University expedition in 1969 by dredging along an underwater bridge
running from Venezuela to the Virgin Islands.  Dr. Bruce Heezen, a leading
U.S. Oceanographer, assessed the find:  "Up to now, geologists generally
believed that light granitic or acid igneous rocks are confined to the conti-
nents and that the crust of the Earth beneath the sea is composed of hea-
vier, dark-colored basaltic rock....Thus, the occurrence of light-colored gra-
nitic rocks may support an old theory that a continent formerly existed in the
region of the eastern Caribbean and that these rocks may represent the core
of a subsided lost continent."

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Sonar, the most important development for researching the topography of the
ocean, was in use experimentally before World War II and was brought to a
high degree of perfection during the period of naval action from the 1940s to
the 1960s.  It is now possible to sketch in considerable detail the bottom of
the ocean: its mountains, rifts, plains and rises are being defined with greater
accuracy on marine charts as their depths from the surface are established at
different points through repeated consecutive soundings.

Sonar is a sound wave bounced off the bottom and calculated for depth measu-
rement until an operational mistake enhanced its effectiveness.  This fortunate
oversight occurred in 1944 on a naval vessel in the central Pacific under the
overall command of Admiral Harry Hess.   Sonar beamed at the bottom was
checked every half hour or so as a general control for surface vessels, except
in emergencies, such as the presence of submarines.

The fact that a sonar technitian forgot to turn off the sonar resulted, for the
first time, in a running record of the bottom, a practice later adopted by hydro-
graphic vessels researching a specific area.

This record of the rises and falls of the bottom in a fairly straight line revealed
the submarine presence of a series of flat-topped mountains, never before
noted as such, later referred to as guyots or seamounts.  Many of these sea-
mounts in the Atlantic lie fairly close to the surface, as though they had once
been islands in an earlier and somewhat shallower ocean.

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In recent years sonar has become so perfected that, through side-scan
sonar, a wider spread of the sea bottom can be examined with the same
sonar impulse. 

Another intriguing mystery has been clarified - that of the DRL (deep-
rising layer), which appeared on sonar as a false bottom that moved up
and down according to the time of day.  It was later established that
this movable bottom was composed of a mass of squid feasting on plank-
ton; the squid coming up at night to feed and descending back into the
depths during the day. 

At present, sonar can distinguish whales, schools of small fish, ships on
the surface or lying on the bottom or prowling submarines.  Sonar can
also pick out unusual formations on the bottom, sometimes man-made
and, through sonar photography, depict their reflected form. 

Sonar photography was employed on a search for the monster in Loch
Ness, in waters so murky, that vison could not penetrate.

Although the monster was not captured on sonar, prehistoric stone ruins
built at a time before the sea rose along with the water level of the enti-
re planet, were clearly indicated on the side-scan.

Because of its obvious use in mapping the sea bottom, it is evident that
high -technology sonar can be employed for locating the reamains of man-
made constructions such as cities, walls or pyramids on the ocean floor,
without the use of cameras with artificial lighting.

Except for some privately financed expeditions prospecting for such remains
in fairly shallow water, discoveries of architectural remains have been made
by chance and, generally, have not been followed up.

A notable case of this was pictures taken from a camera lowered from the
ANTON BRUNN research vessel for the purpose of photographing bottom fish
in the Nazca Trench off Peru, in 1965.  A chance photograph showed massive
stone columns and walls on the mud bottom, at a depth of one and a half
mile.

A further example was the experience of the French submersible ARCHIMEDE
which, in a dive off the continental shelf of the Bahamas, as it descended to-
waard the sea bottom, repeatedly bumped against a flight of giant cut-stone
steps, at the depth of 1400 feet.

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The great submerged islands of the Atlantic have been recognized by sonar
soundings as consisting of a series of plateaus, often connected by under-
water isthmuses and marked by present-day islands still above the level of
the ocean.

The sonar picture of the submerged islands, as indicated on depth maps,
shows several great land masses and suggests the presence of large bays,
numerous lakes and river systems, indicated by underwater canyons.

In the Western Atlantic, the Bahama Island group, if the sea level were dropp-
ed even one hundred meters, would form a single land mass as big as Florida.

It would have a very large bay, the present one-mile-deep area between
Andros and the Exuma chain called the Tongue of the Ocean.

It is on the present Bahama seafloor that more than fifty archaeological sites
have been located as evidence of a stone-building culture far beyond the
capabilities of the cannibal Carib Indians found there by the early explorers.   

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Under-water limestone caves in the Bahamas - the famous Blue Holes - contain
stalagmites and stalactites and usually connect through caves to deep water -
a cogent proof that they were formed above sea level. 

An additional indication of cataclysmic events having occurred in the area is the
position of some of these formations - not straight, but tilted and broken, as
though they had descended not gradually, but precipitously, into the sea.

An examination of the oceanic depth contours off Yucatan and the islands of the
South Caribbean suggests that another extensive land area existed north of Vene-
zuela and East of present Central America.

It is from Yucatan and Belize that ancient Mayan roads continue out from the
coast to destinations now under the sea.  North of Venezuela, an undersea wall
extending for at least one hundred miles, was judged not to have been man-made
because it was "too long".

It was also in this general vicinity that a Duke University expedition found conti-
nental rock, along the Aves Ridge.

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[DDDnD3D]

   ***Bianca***    85°W  130 miles from Cape St. Vincent does not exist in my ATLAS please clarify ! ! !   D****3D

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DDDnD3D:



FROM:

ATLANTIS
The Eighth Continent

By Charles Berlitz

Paperback Edition: Page 170

".......a bank of soundings bearing  [ 85 Degrees W ] (I don't have degree symbol on my keyboard)
        and distant 130 miles...........


Sorry, that's what is in the book.


Love and peace,
B

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The sunken islands or continent most closely identified with Atlantis include
the Azores, the Canary Islands and Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands and,
possibly the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks and Bermuda.

A number of seamounts both east and west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge would
have been small islands.

All of these islands, when the now scientifically documented changes are
taken into account, were double or triple their present size.  This would explain
Plato's description of the islands from which one might pass to "the whole of the
opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean." 

It was on the Ampere Seamount north of Madeira that a Russian expedition re-

ported in 1977 that underwater photographs showed pictures of walls, pave-

ments and steps.  (See RUSSIAN Section in Atlantis in Atlantic Ocean -

Atlantis OnLine).