The Great Islands Under The Sea

THE GREAT ISLANDS UNDER THE SEA                                                                continued



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.