Pizzagano chart, 1424.
Map sleuth George Firman points out that the positions of Antilia and Satanaze on the 1424 and later charts lie extremely close to, if not exactly on top of, the huge subterranean mountain range, connected to the world’s tectonic system, that geologists today know as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.26 Proposing what is essentially an amplified version of the ‘forebulge effect’ described in chapter 3,27 Firman suggests that downward pressures on the continental landmasses of Northern Europe and North America during the Ice Age could, through isostatic compensation, have forced the mid-Atlantic Ridge upwards, perhaps far enough upwards to have elevated its highest peaks and plateaux above water for as long as 40,000 years before the ice-sheets went into meltdown.28 Conversely, with the removal of the downward pressure exerted on the continents by the ice-masses as the meltwaters poured back into the world ocean, the temporary uplift of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge would have ceased and subsidence pressures would have begun to build. As sea-levels rose, and as the isostatic rebound of the continents continued, it is then theoretically possible that the entire ridge, as Firman puts it, could have been plunged into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean ‘at the same approximate time’.29
Firman believes that such an event did occur ‘between the years 9500–8000 BC’,30 that the 1424 chart contains antediluvian information, and that in its portrayal of Antilia and Satanaze it provides us with:
the original location of the last two main islands of Atlantis. Both islands conform to the bottom topography of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and of the adjoining Azores Plateau … The largest island, to the south, is the main island on which the capital cities of the empire were located.31
It is true that Plato speaks of more than one island in the Atlantean empire.32 And I have come across some peculiar reports (mainly from Soviet oceanographic sources between the 1950s and 1980s) of deeply submerged underwater ruins – including such features as stone columns, buildings and stairways – on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the Azores.33 Since none of these reports ever seems to have been followed up, the possibility remains that Firman could yet be proved right and that the existence of sunken cities will one day be confirmed in the Mid-Atlantic. But the search area and the search depth are far too great for individual divers to be of any use. It will take a well-funded oceanographic institute with submersibles and a lot of time at its disposal to settle this matter.
Recent investigations indicate that there is ‘weird geology’ down there which may perhaps provide a simple explanation for the Soviet sightings of alleged ruins. On 13 July 2001, for example, ABC News in the United States released the following science story picked up from the 12 July issue of Nature:
More than 2000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote about a splendid city named Atlantis, with fertile soil and glorious temples, that ‘in a single day and night of misfortune … disappeared into the depths of the sea’.
Now researchers probing the ocean bottom have found 18-story-high towers of stone deep in the ocean near a section of volcanic fault ridges that extend for 6200 miles along the Atlantic floor [the Mid-Atlantic Ridge].
The majestic height of the two dozen stone structures and their location on a seafloor mountain named Atlantis Massif inspired the scientists to name the area ‘Lost City’ in honor of the fabled flooded city referred to by Plato.
The underwater stone spirals are unusual for their composition and location … ‘It was clear these were unlike anything we’d ever seen before,’ said Deborah Kelly, an oceanographer at the University of Washington … The Lost City is also strikingly bright – brighter than the usual conditions in which things can generally be seen using artificial light a half-mile below sea-level. Although other rock formations around volcanic ridges have appeared black, the newly discovered formations are gleaming white because they are made up of materials similar to those of pale concrete, such as carbonate minerals and silica.34
Could there be more to this story than meets the eye? Could this be a real lost city that is being mistaken for weird geology? Highly unlikely, I should say -but, honestly, who knows what’s really down there, seen and unseen?
Meanwhile, geological opinion, with good reason, remains solidly set against any involvement of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Atlantis mystery. Galanopoulos and Bacon sum up the consensus nicely:
There never was an Atlantic landbridge since the arrival of man in the world; there is no sunken landmass in the Atlantic; the Atlantic Ocean must have existed in its present form for at least a million years. In fact it is a geophysical impossibility for an Atlantis of Plato’s dimensions to have existed in the Atlantic.35
This statement is certainly correct – and doubly so if we are to envisage ‘Atlantis’ actually sinking into the ocean through some abrupt isostatic event (as opposed to being inundated by rising sea-levels). Yet while it is indeed impossible for a landmass ‘larger than Libya and Asia combined’ to have existed in the Atlantic, it is also only fair to point out that the ghost islands of Antilia and Satanaze depicted on the 1424 chart are in the range of just 500 kilometres long by 200 kilometres wide and thus come nowhere near Plato’s extraordinary dimensions for Atlantis. Moreover, inundation science reveals that three islands the size of Antilia and Satanaze -islands that are today completely submerged or that have survived only in the form of tiny remnants still above sea-level – did in fact exist in the Atlantic down to as late as 6000 years ago (although much nearer America than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge).36
One of these lost islands was formed by a large section of the Great Bahama Bank, which stood more than 120 metres above sea-level at the Last Glacial Maximum. Today all that is left of this imposing antediluvian landmass is the rugged island of Andros to the southeast and tiny Bimini to the north-west, facing the Gulf Stream and the Florida peninsula.
Off the north-west coast of Bimini, running parallel to the Gulf Stream, is what appears to be a huge submerged man-made structure – an impressive megalithic engineering work made of enormous blocks laid side-by-side to form an underwater ‘road’ more than 800 metres long. At its southern end the structure curves shoreward, giving it the shape, quite visible from the air, of a reversed letter ‘J’. Towards its northern end it divides into two parallel tracks separated by open sand. Closer to shore two additional smaller sections of ‘road’, each about 300 metres long, run parallel to each other at an angle to the main axis of the ‘J’.
Some people say the whole complex is a vestige of Atlantis. Others say it’s just three outcrops of natural blocky beachrock. But neither side has yet seriously considered the problem in the light of inundation science and what it has to tell us about sea-level changes and land-loss in this corner of the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the Ice Age.
The rise and fall of the Bimini Road
The ‘Bimini Road’ varies between 5 and 7 metres in depth. Situated in an area of generally calm blue water that reaches a temperature of 30 degrees centigrade in the summer months it therefore represents just about as unthreatening a dive as it is possible to experience in scuba gear. A kilometre to your south is Paradise Point on north Bimini island. A kilometre to your east is a beach of picturesque white sand. To your west, were you to follow it over a distance of 3 kilometres, you would find that the sea-bottom slopes down in gradual increments to a depth of about 100 metres before the abyssal drop-off into the Gulf Stream is reached.
This deepwater channel between Bimini and Florida was always there and filled with the ocean, even at the Last Glacial Maximum. But the submerged site of the Bimini Road and much of the sea-bed between it and the channel were above water then – and may have remained so until about 6000 years ago. Whether natural or man-made, therefore, the site would have enjoyed a spectacular and significant antediluvian location at the top of a long gentle slope overlooking the Gulf Stream.
The Road was discovered in 1968 by a team of volunteers, all of whom were connected with varying degrees of closeness to an organization called the Ass
ociation for Research and Enlightenment (ARE). A harmless, good-willed but dottily eccentric American cult with Christian and spiritualist values and an ageing membership, the ARE has its headquarters in the coastal resort of Virginia Beach, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and promotes the teachings of the healer and psychic Edgar Cayce (1877–1945). Cayce claimed to have lived a past life as an Atlantean more than 12,000 years previously and before his death he prophesied that the ruins of Atlantis would begin to emerge from the sea in 1968 or 1969. He was quite specific about where this would take place somewhere near Bimini. The apparent fulfilment of the prophecy with the 1968 discovery of the great rows of underwater megaliths off Bimini’s Paradise Point therefore made for sensational headlines.37
Initially, high hopes were raised that the irrefutable proof of Plato’s lost civilization had at last been found. Then there came a devastating scientific backlash which seemed to demonstrate coolly and professionally that the Bimini Road was not a man-made megalithic structure after all, but an entirely natural feature that could be explained simply by geology without any need to invoke psychic archaeology or the master masons of an imaginary lost civilization.
Mahlon Ball, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Florida, and John A. Gifford, University of Miami, writing in National Geographic Research Reports, vol. 12, 1980, pages 21–38
The rise of sea level from 15,000 BP to the present produced a succession of beaches that formed on the outer platform off the west coast of North Bimini as the shoreline transgressed eastward over the Great Bahama Bank. Along these transient beaches deposits of beachrock formed and subsequently were submerged as the water over them deepened … [After several thousand years] the shoreline migrated to a position approximately one kilometre north of the present Paradise Point. Here over a period of perhaps 700 years, three successive beaches were the site of the formation of three parallel, linear deposits of beachrock …38 The following observations were made during our initial field investigation:
The three features are unconnected at the southwest end; scattered blocks are present there, but do not form a well-defined linear feature connecting the seaward, middle, and shoreward features.
No evidence exists anywhere over the three features of two courses of blocks, or even a single block set squarely atop another.
Not enough blocks lie in the vicinity of the three features to have formed a new-destroyed second course of blocks.
Bedrock closely underlies the entire area of the three features, eliminating the possibility of excavations or channels between them.
No evidence was found of blocks being cut into or founded on the underlying bedrock surface.
No evidence was found of regular or symmetrical supports beneath any of the blocks.
We saw no evidence on any of the blocks of regular or repeated patterns of grooves or depressions that might be interpreted as tool marks.
[None of the features] is well founded or continuous enough to have served as some kind of thoroughfare.
In fact the only attributes of the three linear features that suggest a human origin are the regular shapes of the blocks. These are also attributes of natural beachrock deposits.39
W. Harrison, Environmental Research Associates Inc., writing in Nature, vol. 230, 2 April 1971, pages 287–9
The blocks are believed to have originated as follows. A shell-hash gravel was deposited in shallow water as relative sea-level fell during the most recent emergence of the Bahama Banks, and later brought into the fresh water environment. The materials were cemented and joints formed in the material as is usually the case with limestones. After two sets of practically right angle joints had developed, submergence of the area brought the jointed coquina limestone first into the breaking zone of waves and then the offshore zones. Wave action probably caused much of the initial separation into blocks, but when the formation was further offshore the destructive activity of marine life would have become dominant.
The overall result is a field of blocks that at first sight appear to have been fitted together, and this has led to statements such as ‘some human agency must have been involved’. The blocky remains of the limestone outcrop are, however, no more enigmatic than other subaerial or subaqueous outcrops of jointed limestone found in various stages of fracture and decay in the north-western Bahamas.40
Marshall McKusik, University of Iowa, and Eugene Shinn, US Geological Survey, writing in Nature, vol. 287, 4 September 1980, pages 11–12
Amateur enthusiasts have claimed that the Bimini blocks were quarried by ancient Atlanteans and laid out in an ancient ‘Cylopean, megalithic roadway’… However, the limestone structures observed off Bimini in 15 feet [5 metres] of sea have all the features of natural beachrock. The limestone is in a narrow band and extends for a considerable distance along a former shoreline … The tabular fractures are natural and the original slope to the sea is present. A sample of 17 oriented cores obtained by Shinn and Tomkins has been examined with X-radiographs. Two areas of the formation were studied, and both show slope and uniform particle size, bedding planes and constant dip direction from one block to the next. If the stones had been quarried and relaid there is no reason to suppose bedding planes would carry stratigraphically from block to block. The sedimentary laminations clearly show that these were not randomly laid stones but a natural, relatively undisturbed formation.
Although under 15 feet of water, the beachrock is of recent geological origin. One C-14 date on shell has already been published as 2200 plus or minus 150 years BP. Jerry J. Stipp (Radiocarbon dating lab, University of Miami) has run seven bulk samples from cores as a class project and gives slightly older dates for the Bimini submerged beachrock [varying from 2745–3510 BP].41
The road to nowhere
The last point cited above, the carbon-dating of organic materials in the stone of the Bimini Road, is potentially the most devastating of all the evidence presented by science against the claimed ‘Atlantean’ origin for the site. Plato put the submergence of Atlantis sometime close to 11,600 years ago and the ARE prophet Edgar Cayce proposed 12,500 years ago. Either way, the C-14 dating of the Road to between 2200 years ago and 3500 years ago seems, at a stroke, to rule out any Atlantean or indeed any very ancient connection.
Despite the apparently overwhelming and self-evident case for a natural and recent origin of the site, there were fightbacks and rebuttals by some of the original discoverers of the Road, including the oceanographer Dimitri Rebikoff and Dr J. Manson Valentine of the Miami Museum of Science. A Ph.D. from Yale University (in zoology, palaeontology and geology), and latterly Research Fellow in entomology at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, Dr Valentine was a polymath who emerged as the unlikely spokesman for the pro-Atlantean group. Writing in the Explorers Journal in December 1976, he acknowledged the hostile response of other academics (mainly marine geologists) but argued that the sceptics had so far fallen ‘far short of explaining’:
why the stones of the Bimini complex are of flint-hard micrite (unlike soft beachrock, it rings when struck with a sledge and will not cleave under the same treatment);
why the three short courses of closely fitted stone are so straight-sided, mutually parallel and terminate in corner stones;
why the long avenue lies at a slight angle to the others and is composed of a double series of small blocks interrupted by two expansions containing very large, flat stones propped up at their corners by vertical members (like the dolmens of western Europe);
why the southern end of this great, wide track swings into a beautifully curved corner; and, finally,
how to account for all the rectangular shapes, right angles and rectilinear configurations associated with this complicated site as seen from the air.42
Likewise, in 1978 Dr David Zink, another pro-Atlantean with academic credentials, presented evidence questioning the uniformity at the microscopic level of adjacent beachrock blocks at Bimini (suggesting deposition in an entirely natural way) that had b
een alleged in the scientific reports:
The cementing of the sections – composed of marine life forms and crystalline forms of calcium carbonate – was not alike. One sample was dominated by aragonite crystals, another by sparry calcite. This implied that adjacent stones were formed in different chemical environments.43
Together with Terry Mahlman, David Zink also presented a paper at a conference on underwater archaeology held at the University of Pennsylvania in January 1982. The paper raised a number of serious reservations about anomalies in the sequence of very young carbon-dates that had been published in Nature and elsewhere. The authors pointed out that these dates, between 2200 and 3500 years ago in the case of Nature, and between 3200 and 6000 years ago in the case of another study, do not square with solid information now in the hands of marine geologists concerning Atlantic sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age: