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Legendary islands of the Atlantic; a study in medieval geography

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Autolocus
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« Reply #30 on: July 19, 2009, 02:55:00 am »

EVIDENCE OF SUBMERGENCE

The great final catastrophe of Atlantis would surely write its
record on the rocks both of the sea bed and the continental land
masses. As to the ocean bottom it would be the natural repository
for vitreous and other rocky products of volcanic and seismic ac-
tion occurring above it. Termier relates what he considers very
significant indications at a point 500 miles north of the Azores at

15 L. F. Navarro: Nuevas consideraciones sobre el problema de la Atlantis,
Madrid, 1917, pp. 6 and 15 (extract from Rev. Real Acad. de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas
y Naiurales de Madrid, Vol. 15, 1917, pp. 537-552).



EVIDENCE OF SUBMERGENCE 23

a depth of 1 ,700 fathoms, where the grappling irons of a cable-
mending ship dragged for several days over a mountainous sur-
face of peaks and pinnacles, bringing up "little mineral splinters"
evidently "detached from a bare rock, an actual outcropping
sharp-edged and angular." These fragments were all of a non-
crystalline vitreous lava called tachylyte, which "could solidify
into this condition only under atmospheric pressure." He infers
that the territory in question was covered with lava flows while
it was still above water and subsequently descended to its present
depth; also from the general condition of the rock surface that
the caving in followed very closely on the emission of the lavas
and that this collapse was sudden. He thinks, therefore, "that
the entire region north of the Azores and perhaps the very region
of the Azores, of which they may be only the visible ruins, was
very recently submerged, probably during the epoch which the
geologists call the present." He believes also that like results
would follow a "detailed dredging to the south and the southwest
of these islands." 16

It will be observed that the whole of this very tempting edifice
is built on the declared impossibility of tachylyte forming on the
sea bottom under heavy water pressure. But Professor Schuchert
insists that: "It is not pressure so much as it is a quick loss of
temperature that brings about the vitreous structure in lava.
In other words, vitreous lava apparently can be formed as well
in the ocean depths as on the lands. What the cable layers got
was probably the superficial glassy crust of probable subter-
ranean lava flows." 17 If that be so, there is, of course, no need to
infer a descent of territory into the depths in that region of the
mid-Atlantic. This tachylyte matter seems enveloped in uncer-
tainty.

On the other hand, it is well known that volcanic outbursts
and earthquakes have been rather frequent and alarming even
in modern times among the islands of the eastern Atlantic archi-
pelagoes, especially the Canaries and the lowest and middle

18 Termier, pp. 226 and 227.

" Ceogr. Rev., Vol. 3, iQi?, p. 66.
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