First Exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
The longest mountain system on Earth--the mysterious Mid-Atlantic Ridge, extends nearly 10,000 miles from Iceland almost to the Antarctic Circle. It is roughly 300-600 miles wide, separating the Atlantic Ocean into eastern and western basins about three miles deep. The range is probably continuous except for a narrow break at the Equator called the Romanche Trench. From its base on the ocean floor, at a depth of about 3 miles, the Ridge rears its rugged crest to an average height of 10,000 feet or about a mile below the surface. A few of its peaks actually emerge as islands of the Azores, St. Paul Rocks, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Gough and Bouvet. Dr. Maurice Ewing, former Professor of Geology, Columbia University was the leader of an expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) sponsored jointly by the National Geographic Society, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Columbia University. The MAR was first discovered 75 years before this first expedition which set sail in a research vessel (ironically named the Atlantis) on July 16, 1947. Dr Ewing wrote of his journey and discoveries over the MAR in two articles for National Geographic Magazine.2,3
Dr. Ewing examines a 60-million
year old rock retrieved from the
foot of a cliff on the flank of the
Mid-Atlantic ridge.
Copyright National Geographic.
One of the first areas investigated by Ewing’s group was a seamount northeast of Bermuda on their way out to the Ridge. They decided to take their first core sample from the center of the mount, about a mile below the surface. When the core was examined later at Columbia University they were surprised to find that after 8 inches of typical deep-sea sediment called "globigerina ooze" the sample became much whiter and graded into finer grained chalk containing foraminifera of Eocene Age. As Dr. Ewing explained,
This meant that an interval of 60 million years had gone by between the deposition of chalk in the bottom of the core and the top 8 inches of ooze and added greatly to the mystery of the origin and history of the seamount. Our discovery of open-ocean sediments of Eocene Age on a seamount near Bermuda, far to the west of the MAR, is hard to reconcile with the Wegener Theory of the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. According to that theory, advanced by the late German scientist Alfred Wegener, the Atlantic Basin was formed by the "drifting apart" of the continents upon the molten interior of the Earth, and the Atlantic Ocean in Eocene times was only a very narrow rift in the vicinity of the Ridge. Our core showed that this western part of the Atlantic was ocean even that long ago.4
This would seem to preclude using the continental drift theory as a reason for Atlantis not existing. In other words, there was room for Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as 60 million years ago.
